Good morning,

After looking up many templates for Rangers, I have noticed that no one has specced in Pathfinding. Is there a reason for this? Whilst leveling my Ranger, Pathfinding only seemed to have help in PvE.

Reading the Autotraining post, I just want to make sure that I understand correctly. If you Autotrain your bow and respec at 20/40, you will not lose your Autotrain skill.. is that right?

What is the benefit of Celtic Dual spec for a Ranger? Would it not be better to put points into Pierce and use those other points into Pathfinding? Or is it better to dual spec into Pierce/CD?

Thanks for the advice.

In a template, a + Pathfinding bonus makes no noticeable difference in your buffs, if any at all. As to the CD question, a ranger that has specced for high PF (in my case, 48 for red D/Q, AF and DA buffs, only Str being yellow) profits more from a high-ish CD than pierce (because the damage add will be applied to both weapons and the swing speed increases with a successful dual hit), since CD spec increases the chance of your off-hand weapon striking the target.

The details of your spec depend on how you want to play your ranger. A pure sniper ranger will likely not have very much CD, where one that relies on melee combat to finish off his enemies will want it as high as possible.

Edit: Forgot about the Autotrain question. It is as follows - starting at level 8, you will gain a point in your autotrain spec line (in this case, recurve bows) every 4 levels for as long as you DO NOT spec any additional points into that line. This means that at level 48, you will have a spec of 12 in bows, meaning you have 77 "free" spec points (2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 = 77). I personally AT'ed until the end, went through all the battlegrounds and PvE as a melee ranger (basically a wannabe-BM with stealth and selfbuffs).

I'm a bit confused as to what you are asking for here OneReturned. Nobody puts + to Pathfinding in there templates because it has zero effect. If you were referring to speccing in Pathfinding then I would say most rangers spec at least 36 in Path for the yellow dmg add, most spec 40 for all yellow self buffs, and alot spec 48 for high end d/q, af, and dmg add. It is a huge benefit in PvE and RvR. I would never reccommend a spec with lower then 36 path.

What you say is somewhat right about respec'ing with Auto Train, but some of what you said is wrong. What people do is that when you get to say lvl 35 and you are getting ready to go into Braemar for some BG action, they will respec and put those points back into bow or whatever. BEFORE you hit lvl 36 though, you will need to respec back and take any point you have put into bow back out so you can continue your auto training. Then you can repeat the process for Wilton and Thid, but this is only easily doable if you have access to alot of RA stones.

The benefits of Path are listed above. The benefits of raising CD is you slighly raise your chance of hitting with your offhand and you will increase the + dmg when performing CD styles. Also, the styles in CD are far superior to the styles in the pierce line when you compare end usage to effect/dmg modifiers. For CD the big styles are at 18 (Ice Storm for 4 sec side stun), 29 (Tempest- Followup for side stun w/ nice bleed), and 50 for Supernova which is the followup for tempest and does big dmg. Unless your full mele 50 cd will not happen. The benefit to raising pierce is it will make dmg variences per swing alot less. So instead of hitting from 50-110 on main hand you will be hitting for 75-110. Those #'s were just made up to show what I'm talking about. In other words, it wont really increase your max dmg to much, but instead will just make it so your dmg varience wont be all over the place and you will hit for more consistant dmg.

Some prefer going high pierce and low CD, some prefer high CD and low pierce, I prefer a mix. I like to keep my pierce at compostie (inlcuding +'s for item's) 50-51 and I want my CD to be at least spec'd 29 for the followup to the side stun. For my styles I use squall (CD anytimer style), diamondback (pierce evade style 5 sec stun), icestorm (CD side stun), tempest (CD followup to icestorm), and the rear snare style (snow shower i think) from the CD style. So as you can see, I use 4 CD styles and only 1 pierce style.

Zack,

I just respecced the Ranger at level 47 because I lag specced one to many points in CD. I noticed that I had 12 points in bow. Is this supposed to happen? I was under the understanding, if you specced in bow at all and did not totally auto-train it, you lose those points. Not that I'm complaining!

Yah, there is a thread in the forums about this from another ranger that talks about how auto training is supposed to work. Down the road in the game (long after our patch settings) they made a change to auto training and allowed even people that didnt auto train to train. Unfortuantely for us we have the old system that punishes you to a degree for not auto training. They introduced auto training so people couldnt purposely "gimp" their class. The problem is that at this patch level even if you didnt auto train the game still forced you to put 12 points into bow. If you did auto train that is not a big deal. If you didnt auto train then you are still forced to spend 77 points into bow.

This thread will explain it a bit better then I can: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=21068&hilit=hunter+auto+train

Thank you for the replies, but I do want to verify that if I have Autotrained from 8-40 in bow and use the /respec all at 40, I will not have "forced" points into bow, and I would infact keep those numbers in there. Is that correct? I have read other posts that state people that did NOT Autotrain into bow were forced to put points into it whether they wanted to or not. It seems every post is different and I would like to make sure of this before I respec, as I have Autotrained my bow skill thus far.

Thanks,
OneReturned

If you have autotrained from 8 to 40, you will have a total of 54 "free" points in that line (meaning your end value will be 10). However, those points cannot be removed from that line and, should you spend MORE points in the line later on, you will not be able to remove the first 77 (spec of 12) from level 48 onwards, meaning you CAN still spend 23 of your spec points in that line later on.