Contents 1 Overview 1.1 What is a Critical Hit? 1.2 How Critical Percentages Work 1.3 Advantages 1.4 Disadvantages 2 Suggested Skills 3 Suggested Attributes 4 Suggested Gear 5 Calculating DPS 6 Ranged Attack Speed 7 Tips

Overview

A Critical Ranger is a Ranger that combines fast attack speeds with bonuses to critical hit chance to deal out high amounts of Ranged damage. Also known as a Crit Ranger, the Critical Ranger is a useful build for farming most of the bosses in the game.

What is a Critical Hit?

First off, a successful critical hit will result in double damage. That is to say, if your average damage was 100, your average critical hit damage would be 200.

Second and probably most importantly, Don't Miss!
The operative word in the term is 'hit'. It doesn't matter how high a critical percentage you have, doubling 0 damage still gives you 0 damage. If you are constantly missing, you need to fix that first and foremost by increasing your Attack Rating by either adding more Agility or wearing more +Attack Rating gear until you are consistently hitting your targets.

Thirdly, assuming you do hit, you have to successfully roll a critical hit. The chances of successfully rolling a critical hit on any given attack are determined by your actual critical hit percentage, which will be discussed in the next section.

(See Also: Critical Hit)

How Critical Percentages Work

A common misconception among new players is that when an item says +50% Critical Hit Chance it means that you have a 50% chance to land a critical hit. This is not true. When an item says +X% Critical Hit Chance, it means that you are adding that X% to your base critical hit chance, which is 3%. Here is an example calculation to better explain how it works:

Suppose you equip an item with +50% Critical Hit Chance. Your base chance to land a critical hit is 3%, so your final critical hit chance is 3 * (50/100) + 3 = 4.5%. Your critical hit chance is now 4.5%

At first glance it may seem to you that basing a character around this relatively low critical hit chance is a bad idea. But you must first consider attack speed. A high level Critical Ranger can attain +500% Critical Hit Chance from items, for a total chance of 18%. That doesn't seem like much, but the attack speed of a Critical Ranger could be around 0.30 attacks/second.

So this Critical Ranger averages 3.33 shots/second and 18% critical hit chance. Not accounting for misses, that means that a Critical Ranger could could strike a critical shot every 1.67 seconds!

(See Also: Attack Speed & Critical Hits)

Advantages

• High damage per second to single targets (which is great for boss farming).
• Range advantage. It is easy to do quite a bit of damage to a mob before they ever reach you.
• Doesn't rely heavily on skills, so missing shots is not as much of an issue.

Disadvantages

• Hard to calculate damage per second because Attack Rating doesn't give a clear picture of hit percentages.
• Optimizing the build is labor intensive. Players using the build are constantly doing damage per second calculations to compare equipment.
• Critical Rangers don't have effective AoE skills, so killing off large groups is a little more troublesome.
• The effectiveness of the build is level-dependent and item-dependent. At low levels it is hard to achieve a high enough critical hit chance, and the items required are not easy to come by.

Suggested Skills

Trigger Happy	Monster Bait	Gaseous Blast
Trigger Finger Frenzy	Extra Crispy Monster Bait	All Wards and/or Resistances
Spirit of the Hare	Average BMI
Acidic Blight	Gym Freak

For the Critical Ranger, only the fist two skills (in bold) are necessary. However, you may find some or all of the other listed skills to be quite useful. One of the reasons to include wards and/or resistances is that in order to achieve a high damage output and critical hit chance, you often have to compromise on your Resistance ratings (this is mainly due to the items commonly used, see below). For insight on the usefulness of the other skills, see the Tips section.

Suggested Attributes

Since the Critical Ranger build relies entirely on Ranged Damage, Agility (AGI) is the most important attribute. Increasing your character's AGI will increase both damage and Attack Rating (AR). Mana is not very important to the build at all, so you won't need to put any points into Intellect (INT). Rely on INT bonuses from your equipment to supply you with a large enough Mana pool. As for HP, it comes down to your style of play. It is best to try to raise your Endurance (END) through items rather than invest base points, but this may not always be possible.

When determining how much END you need, consider these tips:

• Do a few test runs with your Ranger to determine about how much HP you need.
• Always try to minimize END and maximize AGI, raise your END just enough to reach your target HP, no more.
• Consider your options when deciding what items to use; always try to optimize your Attribute levels.

Here is an example of optimizing your Attribute Levels: Suppose you have two rings, one with +105 AGI and another with +50 AGI and +50 END and you only need 40 more END to reach your target HP level. Equipping the ring with +50 END and +50 AGI will increase your damage output and AR and allow you to reach your target HP, but it isn't the most effective option. Instead, respec your character and take 40 base points out of AGI and put them into END. Now equip the ring with +105 AGI. This way you reach your target HP and that 15 points that would have been wasted in END is now in AGI.

Suggested Gear

The Critical Ranger build is based on high AGI and high bonuses to critical hit chance. You will need gear that gives you bonuses to both of these areas. Look for unique or rare items that have stats such as:

• +X Agility
• +X% Ranged Critical Hit Chance
• +X Damage per second to Piercing/Slashing Damage (depending on your bow/gun of choice)
• +X% To all Piercing/Slashing Damage (depending on your bow/gun of choice)
• +X% Ranged Attack Speed
• +X% Ranged Attack Rating

They key to the build is finding the right balance between Attack Rating, Attack Speed, and Critical Hit Chance. I will speak more about that later. First, here is a list of some of the more popular Mythic (rainbow) items that a Critical Ranger uses; at their highest levels, these items alone can give +500% Ranted Critical Hit Chance or more:

• Plate Piercer (The crossbow of choice for most Critical Rangers)
• x + agilty
• x + total health
• x% melee damage reflection
• x% ranged critical hit chance
• x + dmage to piercing attacks

• Buffalo Bill's Outfit
• x + agility
• x + endurance
• x% movement speed
• x + attack rating
• x + ranged damage per second
• x% ranged critical hit chance

• Jackalope's Visage
• x + agility
• x + mana
• x% movement speed
• x% ranged attack speed
• x% ranged crtical hit chance
• x + damage per second to posion attacks

• Lethal Paws
• x + agility
• x% movement speed
• x + mana
• x% ranged attack speed
• x% ranged critical hit chance
• x + damage per second to piercing attacks.

• Ultramarine Sneaks
• x + agility
• x + endurance
• x% movement speed
• x + mana
• x% ranged critical hit chance
• x + damage to piercing attacks

• Skinners Only Jacket
• x + agility
• x% movement speed
• x + mana
• x% critical hit chance
• x + damage per second to wepon attack

Calculating DPS

Having a Critical Ranger with just the gear listed above (or equivalent) will still do quite well for farming bosses. You don't really need to constantly worry about optimal gear because you will be able to kill bosses either way. Some people just like to optimize as much as they can, and strive for a faster time per run, even if it is just a few seconds. If you are one of those people, then read on. If number crunching to determine slight advantages is not your cup of tea, then the rest of this section probably won't be important to you.

Anybody attempting to make and optimize a Critical Ranger needs to be aware of the Additional Speed versus Additional Critical Chance issue. Sometimes you can increase your damage per second by opting to use an item with a high bonus to ranged speed rather than an item with a high bonus to critical hit chance. It is not always clear which item is better just from looking at the player window. For example, I found a pair of boots with +8% Ranged Attack Speed. When I equipped the boots my attack speed went from 0.30 to 0.29 (a seemingly insignificant change) and my min/max damage values actually decreased. But when I crunched the numbers, the boots with +8% attack speed allowed me to do 78 more damage per second on average, even though my min and max damage was lower.

Before calculating your DPS, be aware that items which add elemental (poison, ice, fire, divine, shadow) damage to weapon attack need to be accounted for. This added elemental damage is separate from the ranged damage and will not double when you get a critical strike, so you will need to subtract the damage out of your max and min before doing the calculations.

Use the following calculations when determining DPS:

• Calculate your percent critical chance and divide by 100. Find your Max and Min damage from the character sheet.
• Use the following formula to calculate Avg DPS: [(max + min)/2]*(1 + crit)/(atk speed)
• Unfortunately there is no known way to calculate your chance to hit a monster based on Attack Rating. Normally you would multiply the value from the last step by this percentage to give your actual Avg DPS. *Unconfirmed* The maximum chance to hit is 95%.

Here is an example calculation: Min Damage: 2,000 Max Damage: 4,000 Attack Speed: 0.29 Critical Hit Chance: 18%

• (2000+4000)/2 = 3000
• 3000*(1+0.18)= 3540
• 3540/0.29 = 12,206 = Damage per Second, not considering misses

(See Also: Damage per Second)

Ranged Attack Speed

At first you may find an item which gives 1% ranged attack speed but upon equiping the item it seems that it doesn't changes your ranged attack speed. At this point 1% is very minimal and like critical hit will eventually build up enough to make that of a significant difference.

Also you may notice that when you use your Trigger Finger Frenzy that it seems to have increased by a significant amount and that is only after equiping the item with 1% ranged attack speed. So even with only about 3% ranged attack speed, when using TFF it will increase the speed by alot more.

• All gear with even 1% ranged attack speed is worth equipting as it will make a difference eventually.

• Always keep TFF in your skill tray and make sure it is maxed out, as the boost doesn't last long, but will add loads of speed. This is good for PvE as it allows you to kill mobs alot faster therefore faster experience. The recharge time is only 45 second and Trigger Finger Frenzy lasts for 15 second. So every fight you can use Trigger Finger Frenzy once or twice, kill the group and move on.

Tips

• Use Acidic Blight to lower your target's defence, thus increasing your chance to hit (useful mainly for bosses if you feel you are missing too much).

• Determine the element used by your target boss and its minions and equip the necessary wards before fighting. This will save you some potions.

• Use Monster Bait to draw the attention of monsters. This is particularly useful in the Horrific Dungeon of Legend (HDoL). Instead of engaging a mob head on, cast Monster Bait just next to the mob and then hold shift+attack to bombard the mob with arrows while they kill the bait. This will kill off some of the fodder monsters and weaken the champions and/or heroes.

• Use Spirit of the Hare to move around mobs and bosses, forcing them to move around instead of hitting you. This is not particularly useful for high level bosses but some people choose to employ this strategy.

• Always try to use faster ranged weapons but always look at the +critical rate they give, as some purples may be better then any given Rainbow for this build.