Question about Melee Ranger enhancements.

[Nayus]

I never played a Ranger before and decided to roll one yesterday on an Iconic. I should say I was quite confused or maybe unimpressed by the enhancement trees.

Tempest Tier 5 looks pretty bad. A Thousand Cuts is a powerful +90 Doublestrike but it only lasts six seconds with a 2 minute cooldown? I can't find any reason to spend 6 AP in Dance of Death and it so looks to me that Evasive Dance is an excuse to having bad Reflex.

I thought about this short-term abilities intensive Tempest build, running between 1000 Cuts, Parry and Growing Storm but Elaborate Parry clearly has its problems and Growing Storm isn't powerful enough to justify the 2 minute cooldown.

So, my question is: How are you spending your APs? I see so many pure rangers around but Tempest honestly doesn't seem worth it past Haste and for Deepwood I would be willing to go as far as Exposing Strike/Shot goes, maybe going 20 for Killer and Leg Shot.

The way I see it you would spread all your APs between Tempest, DWS and AA and gimp your melee DPS in favor or getting a stronger "manyshot" than other builds.

[ValariusK]

I never played a Ranger before and decided to roll one yesterday on an Iconic. I should say I was quite confused or maybe unimpressed by the enhancement trees.

Tempest Tier 5 looks pretty bad. A Thousand Cuts is a powerful +90 Doublestrike but it only lasts six seconds with a 2 minute cooldown? I can't find any reason to spend 6 AP in Dance of Death and it so looks to me that Evasive Dance is an excuse to having bad Reflex.

I thought about this short-term abilities intensive Tempest build, running between 1000 Cuts, Parry and Growing Storm but Elaborate Parry clearly has its problems and Growing Storm isn't powerful enough to justify the 2 minute cooldown.

So, my question is: How are you spending your APs? I see so many pure rangers around but Tempest honestly doesn't seem worth it past Haste and for Deepwood I would be willing to go as far as Exposing Strike/Shot goes, maybe going 20 for Killer and Leg Shot.

The way I see it you would spread all your APs between Tempest, DWS and AA and gimp your melee DPS in favor or getting a stronger "manyshot" than other builds.

Ranger has 11 good levels, 12 if you're a melee ranger (level 12 tempest core). AA and DWS have some decent tier 5 abilities. But I generally only did around 24 or so in tempest during my ranger lives. DWS has quite a bit of good stuff in it, and whatever you're multiclassing with probably does down low also. Tempest doesn't really have good tier 5s.
One really fun ranger build I had was ranger-12/cleric-7/rogue-1 --- a tempest warpriest with full service trapping and UMD. Warpriest line has excellent synergy with tempest.

[Monkey_Archer]

While leveling through heroic quests, I really loved Dance of death + Thousand cuts. With haste/hasteboost its basically like spamming 20 cleaves in a row. Allows you to gather and clear huge waves of mobs faster then a cleave spamming barb.
Now that I'm currently in epic levels, I dropped both in favor of elaborate parry (only 23 points required) Its extremely useful to have up to +30% dodge for 20 seconds every minute. My particular build also has improved uncanny dodge so I can use both to get over 100%. If I was running a dedicated melee/blitz build I would definitely keep all the tier 5 abilities... Having an easy 50% dodge + cleave spam for 6 seconds is extremely strong for a build like that.