Dragon’s Prophet Ranger Guide

Dragon’s Prophet Ranger Guide by Mirai

• The Basics
  • Intro
  • Equipment
• Skills (Mastery Skills not included)
• Attributes and their effect on you
• Masteries
  • Tier 1
  • Tier 2
  • Tier 3
  • Tier 4
  • Tier 5
  • Tier 6
• Dragons and their Skills
  • Dragon Soul Skills
  • Dragon Skills
• Dragon Shards
• Crafting?
• Tiny bit of Grouping
• Summary/TLDR

The Basics

Introduction

The Ranger in Dragon’s Prophet is, unlike what you may think, not an archer as you know them from previous MMORPGs. The Ranger is more like a hybrid between a light armour wearing agile damage dealer and some kind of a tank with some ranged abilities. This all depends on how you want to play the Ranger and how you specialize.

Sounds weird doesn’t it? Well, I hope after you’ve read this little guide, you won’t find it quite as weird as after reading the introduction

Equipment

Ranger can wear Light Armour and Cloth Armour. Generally speaking, light armour is the better choice no matter what specialization you choose. Since we can only level up to 60, we don’t really know if it could be smart to have a cloth set for a tanking build when you face a lot of magic damage. Cloth has a lot more magic defence than light armour so that could be the only occasion where I can see cloth to be more viable.

While the above is usually true, as a pure damage class you shouldn’t get hit, thus if you find cloth armour with better stats than your light, by all means, use it.

When it comes to weapons we have the kinda generic Bow and something interesting; a Gunblade. While the Bow is better when it comes to raw damage, the gunblade has the additional benefit of being a one-handed weapon and thus you can wield a shield in your off-hand. Needless to say, if you want to be tanky, you want a gunblade and a shield. As of now, it is not possible to dual wield gun blades.

Skills (Talent skills not included)

I’ll mostly pay attention to the most useful and the least useful ones here. Also it is worth mentioning that all of our skills deal mostly Physical Damage with only a small portion being Elemental Damage (based on our Focus stat) and some with Dragon Spell Damage. But more on that, in the attributes part.

Let’s start with:

Head Shot: The first stage of our right mouse button charged combo. The longer you hold down the button, the more powerful this shot gets. (2-3 stages). While in theory this skill is quite good, the huge movement debuff while charging stage 1 and 2 is a big drawback and renders it mostly useless. The only time I use it sometimes is when starting a fight, but you can pretty much just skip using this and go for better options like Dragon Breath.

Now as an experienced ranger you may yell at the screen and tell me to jump while charging to get rid of the movement reduction, but even then, a simple Dragon Bite combo (Mastery) does just as much damage and is a lot faster.

Dodge: This skill sounds good at first, but considering it’s high Action Point cost, there’s a lot better alternatives like the Griffin Rake combo, or the Lightning Strike Combo. In an emergency, this skill still has its uses, but when you know what will happen in a fight and have enough time, chose the alternatives. I haven’t even used this skill once in Survival, because the attacks I dodge, I have to get away to the sides, not backwards. Dodge however only moves you backwards.

Griffin Rake: As a player that prefers to stay at range this skill seems not as useful at first. I use this skill for its other effects though. Not the charge is what makes this skill useful to me, it’s the fact that you’ll knock up a bunch of mobs, DoT them and then at the last step of the combo, you can dodge in any direction you like.

Lightning Strike: In my opinion, the way better choice than Dodge when you need to get away. Not only do you leap backwards stunning the enemies for a short time (can be talented to roughly 1.5sec) you also remove Movement Restriction on yourself and open up the second step of the combo, Instant Flash, which lets you dodge away even further.

Dragon Raid: One of our, in my opinion, strongest skills to start an even stronger combo. It deals a lot of damage and you can control up to 20 mobs quite well with this skill. You knock them on the ground, in the air and hit them hard. The only drawback is that you have to be in melee range and the controlling abilities start only with the third move in the combo. So if you need to control enemies fast, Griffin Rake or Lightning Strike is the faster option, but they both deal a lot less damage.

As a bow ranger doing Hard and Survival mode, I never use this skill. I’m so used to survival and the dangers of going into melee, that I rather charge in with Griffin Rake if I need to shortly disable the enemy. It’s awesome until you get Dragon Stab to replace it as an AE damage skill.

Dragon Breath: A good skill with good damage. The drawback is that it has a long cast animation which makes it less useful when fighting groups of enemies. However, this skill is ideal to start a fight at range and or when used after some disables. Keep in mind, if aimed correctly at a mob, it can deal damage multiple times making it one of our strongest attacks.

Spreading Shot: Useless skill, right? Depends. I tend to use this skill only when I fight big mobs or when a mob stands right in front of me. That way all five arrows the skill shoots will hit the target. If you have the Mastery that makes your arrows heal you when using Spreading Shot (once every 12sec) This skill gets pretty damn good actually. So if you want to tank, take a good look at this. Fully talented with no healing improvement stats, each of the five arrows healed me for roughly 360hp. That’s a free 1800hp heal every 12sec that also deals a moderate amount of damage.

Attributes and their effect on you

Strength: 1 Strength increases your Physical Damage by +2 and your Physical Defence by +1

Constitution: 1 Point of Constitution increases your Health by +12, your HP Regeneration by +0.25 and your in-combat HP Regeneration by +0.01

Ferocity: 1 Point of Ferocity increases your Critical Hit Rate by +2 and your Critical Hit Power by +1. Ferocity also increases our Dragon Spell Damage part many of our skills.

Intelligence: 1 Point of Intelligence increases your Magic Damage by +2 and your Magic Defence by +1

Focus: 1 Point of Focus increases your Physical Defence by +5.42 and your Armour Penetration by +2. In addition to that, Focus increases the Elemental Damage part of many of our skills.

Charisma: Charisma increases the uptime of your dragons, their attributes and it makes it easier to capture dragons.

Dragon Affinity: 1 Point of Dragon Affinity increases your Magic Defence by +5 and your Magic Penetration by +2

• Now if you put all of your 177 Attribute points into Strength you’ll gain a mere 354 extra physical damage (177 physical defence)
• If you put all of your 177 Attribute points into Constitution, you’ll gain 2212hp, which more than doubles your base Health. (You also get an additional 44.25 HP Regen (71.01hp/sec in total) and an additional 2.21 incombat hp regen (3.55hp/sec in total).
• If you put all of your 177 Attribute points into Focus, you’ll double your armour penetration (goes up to 11%) and add 885 additional physical defence (6% physical damage reduction).
• If you put all of your 177 Attribute points into Ferocity, you’ll gain a total of 9% crit and 9% crit damage.
• With all your points into Charisma, you can reach 326 Charisma without talents and/or Food/Potion, which is a respectable amount that makes capturing dragons a lot easier.

As you can see, there’s not a single stat that’s completely useless in this game. Now you may ask, but dude, int and DA ARE useless! That’s not completely true though. They definitely have not as much of a use as something like Ferocity, Strength, Focus, Constitution and Charisma, but since every weapon in this game deals physical AND magical damage, an accidentally put point into a stat you did not want, is not a big deal.

I personally recommend going full Ferocity if you fancy the bow. The reason is that with my 2.5k physical damage, the 354 strength would add roughly 14% extra physical damage or roughly 9.5% more damage overall. Ferocity on the other hand adds 9% crit and crit damage in addition to increasing the damage of your main skill. Dragon Bite and its follow up.

As a tank with gunblade and shield, I recommend Constitution. While the physical defence part of focus is nice on paper, the extra damage reduction is in my opinion worth less than the extra health. Ferocity would also increase some of your damage skills.

Why do I not recommend Charisma? That’s simple, charisma may be the best choice if you hunt dragons and/or if you rely a lot on your dragons with their awesome skills, but in Hard and Survival mode the dragons are a lot less useful for the simple fact that they die. Especially in survival mode. They get oneshot just like you. On hardmode I can keep a dragon alive if I use my heals non stop. So as a little summary, if you’re not interested in survival for some reason, charisma can still be useful, as soon as you want to do survival mode, it’s completely useless though.

Masteries

Please not that all the damage numbers you’ll see on these skills are base damage. I had absolutely nothing on but a white merchant bought bow or gunblade/shield. I’ll gladly show you some comparisons of my main skill in a second post since we’re limited on pictures

Tier 1

Armour Padding and Master of Survival

10% less damage taken or 500HP+10%HP for a mere 575 Talent Points (at 5/5)? Even with my tanky gunblade/shield spec I’ve chosen Master of Survival. At level 60 the amount of HP you get from Master of Survival seems to be by far the better choice here. Neither is needed to stay alive if you decide to play as a ranged Ranger, but if you want one, take Master of Survival.

Backhand Air Blade

Decent Gunblades Skill(s). Taking this Mastery will unlock a two skill combo with a decent amount of damage. Getting the Skill to more than 1/5 will increase it’s damage by a maximum of 25%.

Draconic Empathy (formerly known as Connection)

This gives you 21 charisma and 8.4% extra charisma at 5/5 for a total of 575 Talentpoints. Free charisma to capture the Ancients, very useful if you consider capturing them or when you don’t want to spend any points into Charisma. If you don’t want to play with a dragon, or capture Ancients, don’t bother with this skill.

Dual-Charged

My empowered shot with a merchant bought 1.2k physical damage bow deals about 2.9k damage noncrit on the second stage. On stage three it’s about 4k that’s at 5/5. The problem is that you move incredibly slow while charging making this skill useful pretty much only at the start of a fight. On any other occasion it’s in my opinion better to just use your other skills. The damage gain for a mere 575 Talentpoints would be good though.

Note that once you charge to the third stage, you start moving at a normal speed again. Investing more than one point into this Mastery will further increase the damage by up to 25% damage.

Agility

Increase your movement speed by 10%, 13%, 16%, 19%, 22%. I spent 115 talent points to get the 10% speed boost and skipped the rest.

Tier 2

Electrical Energy Charge

The tooltip makes it hard to tell, but this skill actually increases the stun effect of the skill Lightning Strike by 0.3 seconds per level. So at 5/5 this add 1.5 seconds to the stun. While this skill makes Lightning Strike good to build up a lot of distance, other than for a tanky build, I don’t see 875 talent points spent well for a 1.5 second stun in addition to the knockdown you get anyway.

Crushing Blow (formerly known as Heavy Blow)

Not much to say, 875 talent points to increase your Critical Hit Chance by 5%, sounds good to me.

Gale

A simple snare. Since this skill only works on one target I found it to be almost useless. I usually fight groups of mobs, but this skill won’t help on that scenario. Also when doing Survival mode, with the skill being at 2/5 it’s completely worthless, you’re better off attacking than being rooted in place to cast this spell. The strength of the snare goes from 30% movement speed reduction up to 54% and lasts 8 seconds with a cooldown of 10 seconds. Maybe this skill has its uses in PvP, but since I have no experience when it comes to this games PvP, I can’t really comment on that… yet.

Empowered Excersise

Not much to say, I ranted enough at the Headshot skill. This skill increases the damage of Empowered Shot and Release by up to 25% at 5/5. Considering the limited use of the Headshot Combo, you can safely skip this talent. If you for some reason use the Headshot Combo a lot, then this skill is almost a must have.

Dexterity

Quite simple, 5-25% extra Ferocity and Movement Speed for a penalty of 50% less regeneration. So regenerating your AP will take twice as long. The AP you get from your Left/Right Mouse Combo stays exactly the same. Note that you can only click away the buff effect, but not the debuff. For me with my Ferocity build, this skill is a must have.

Hunting Stance

Can’t tell you how much extra damage you get at 5/5, I ran out of points unfortunately. At 2/5 you get 3.6% extra damage. So I’d guess approximately 7.5% extra damage and you take 10% more damage, not thank you.

The tooltip of the debuff is bugged at the moment. It says that you take 10% less damage, since my HP and Defence isn’t high enough, I didn’t have many chances to test if it’s only a display bug or not, but as soon as I turned this skill on, the level 65 Ancient suddenly was able to oneshot me. This however isn’t really reliable since he definitely has more than one attack.

Tier 3

Arcane Prison

A low damage bow skill that roots the target in place. A quarter of the skills damage is Elemental Damage, based on your Focus. But seriously, go into melee range with a bow to use a three skill combo (with the 2 following talents) to barely deal more damage than your auto attacks. The skill gets up to 25% stronger at 5/5, but still, skip it.

Magic Arrow

This skill adds 270 Elemental Damage to your Power Shot, the third skill of your left mouse button combo. Skilling further into this Mastery will increase the Elemental Damage by an additional 25%. This skills usefulness depends strongly on how often you use the left mouse combo. I personally have it at 1/5 since I use the combo a lot to refill my AP during bossfights.

Arcane Spell

This one is quite confusing on the description. What it actually does is reduce your physical damage by 15%! For a bonus of a mere 70 Dragon Spell Damage. The usefulness of this skill is beyond me at the moment. Since I deal less damage with this active (judging by the tooltip of a skill that actually uses Dragon Spell Damage) I recommend skipping it.

I did some more tests with this mastery and I definitely changed my mind. At level 60 getting it to 5/5 it increased my Dragon Spell Damage from 168 to 658! while reducing my Physical Damage by 600pts. Sounds like a bad trade-off, but you do A LOT more damage with the Dragon Bite combo with those 490 extra Dragon Spell Damage. See the little comparison on my second post.

Stabilize

At 5/5 this skill is a strong heal if all 5 arrows hit the target. Each arrow healed me for roughly 360hp making it a 1800hp heal if all 5 arrows hit the target. If you want to tank, get this.

Draconic Convergence (formerly known as Concentration)

At level 60, the difference on armour penetration and damage isn’t as big as I expected. At a future max level, when we can get a lot more stats, the percent based bonus may make or break this skill. At the moment I’d only get it if you exclusively or mainly use skills that are based on Focus.

Tier 4

Arcane Thunder

Considering that the prerequisite isn’t a skill I’d ever recommend, don’t bother. The skills damage is increased by up to 25% when skilled to 5/5.

Jet Blade

Decent Gunblade skill and prerequisite for Jet Combo, which is a high damage Gunblade skill. If you like using gunblades, I’d take this one. I think this skill is even better than the Backhand Air Blade skill and also deals more damage. Focus has a high impact on this skill and it’s followup.

Thorny Trap

The area root effect of the trap is way too small to make it even remotely useful when fighting multiple targets. At 5/5 the root effect lasts for a whole 6 seconds though, still I recommend skipping it.

Annihilation Sphere (formerly known as Dragon Bite)

You like the bow? You don’t want to get close to your targets when AEing? Get. This. Skill. This skill deals a good amount of damage and pierces through targets making it a good AE damage skills for people like me that don’t want to get close to the enemies. T skill actually uses Ferocity to increase its Dragon Spell Damage part. Adding pure Dragon Spell Damage to your gear will mainly increase the first part of your skill and only slightly the additional damage when mobs are below 35%. Ferocity will increase both parts.

Aesthetics of Violence

Not much to say, up to 25% extra damage on your critical. Pretty good.

Tier 5

Dragon Kiss

While you can spam this skill it’s damage didn’t convince me at all. Focus has a moderate impact on this skills Elemental Damage. As usual, maxing it adds 25% to its damage.

Jet Combo

Getting this gives you access to two high damage skills. The skills are used in close range. If you have to make a choice between maxing this skill and it’s prerequisite Jet Blade, max this one. This skill is based on Focus

Fiery Trap

Not only is the area effect of this skill WAY too small, it’s damage is moderate at best. In addition to that putting more than one point into this skill is a waste. The damage barely increased.

Desolation Sphere (formerly known as Dragon Stab)

Most about this skill I said on its prerequisite, Dragon Bite. Definitely get it if you want a ranged AE 

Bow Mastery (formerly known as Hunting Bow)

What should I say? You must see the benefits of a flat 10% physical damage increase. The price of 1825 Talent Points is pretty damn high though.

This is now only 8.4% extra physical damage for the same cost as before (1825 Talent Points). Since with my spec, Dragon Bite/Stab is my main attack, putting those points in the two Dragon Bite masteries seems to increase my damage by more.

Gunblade Mastery

Now this is more like it, 20% extra damage for 1825 Talent Points, if you use gunblades and skip this, you must be mad 

Apparently this was changed, at 5/5 it now only gives an additional 12.8% damage, making it a little bit less awesome, considering the huge price.

Arcane Bow Mastery (formerly known as Dexterity Bow)

Considering that we mostly deal Physical Damage, putting 1825 Talent Points into 10% extra magic damage when you can get 8.4% extra Physical Damage, you’d have to be mad. To clarify, I deal 2.5k Physical Damage and 1.2k Magical Damage at the moment with my blue bow.

Tier 6

Please note, this is a first impression on the tier 6 masteries. My opinion on those may change greatly after I’ve been using them for a while. This is meant to make it easier for people without 4 mastery pages to decide what to take.

Magic Claw

Increases your Natural- and Elemental Damage by up to 500pts for 17 seconds after a successful Griffin Rake attack.

Pretty awesome skill, if you rely on using a lot of attacks that deal Natural and/or Elemental damage. I personally skip this one, since the only skill I use regularly that benefits from this, is Dragon Breath.

Dazzling Light

Such a weird skill, considering it’s based on magical damage. We’re a physical damage class…

At 1/5 the stun lasts for 1 second, at 5/5 it’s a 3 second stun. This skill may find some uses in PvP, but for PvE I don’t see a reason why you should spend points in this skill.

Draconic Heritage

There’s really not much to say about this one. 250 extra Dragon Soul Points. Capturing fabled dragons will be even easier.

Apocalypse Sphere

Nice damage, significantly more than the other two. But the animation of the spell is so long, you’re easily interrupted. For that reason I’d advise to skip it and max Annihilation Sphere (Dragon Bite) and Desolation Sphere (Dragon Stab) instead.

Hide

A very short duration stealth, that increases your damage by up to 25% (5% at 1/5). It also removes movement restriction effects. Together with the additional damage, this skill is simply awesome. At 5/5 you get, as mentioned, 25% extra damage for 9 seconds. Almost an additional Blood Pumping on a 40 seconds cooldown.

At 5/5 the stealth effect lasts 5 seconds, at 1/5 it lasts 1 second.

This skill does absolutely nothing. When using bloodpumping, I can clearly see my damage increase since every single shot does significantly more damage. (Bloodpumping is 30%). With this skill at 5/5 I see absolutely no difference at all, even though it should increase my damage by 25%. Such a large damage increase should definitely be noticeable.

The stealth aspect of the skill also doesn’t work at all. Not even as a PvE skill to get rid of aggro in a group.

Dragons and their Skills:

Dragon Soul Skills:

I’ll focus on the skills I personally deem the most useful for the chosen specialisation. So if you’re looking for a comprehensive list of all Dragon Soul Skills, you’re at the wrong place here. In addition I slightly compare buffs, since in my opinion they’re not even remotely balanced between each other.

• Healing Light

Recovers your own and pet’s Health by 288 and your Action Points by 5 per second. The skill lasts for 7 seconds and has a cooldown of 12 seconds.

For me, this is one of the best single heals there is. Mainly because it doesn’t just heal your HP, it also regenerates your AP in addition, it also heals your pet. That’s why I prefer this skill over Life Calling, which does more or less the same thing, but does NOT heal your pet.

• Life Calling

Heals yourself for 460 Health. You regenerate 149 Health and 5 Action Points per second for the next 5 seconds.

Almost as good as Healing Light, but as mentioned above, this skill does not heal your pet. For that reason and the fact that it heals for less Health and AP in total, I consider this heal less valuable than Healing Light. However, if you don’t want to farm Dragons to get Healing Light, this skill is a decent alternative.

• Lightwell

Release a spring of recovery, recovering friendly targets within range with 265 Health Points and 5 Action Points.

One of my favourite Soul Skills there is. It ticks 13/14 times healing for a good amount of Health and AP. Its only drawback is that the well is placed at your feet and stays at the place you casted it. So if you have to run out of range for any reason, it may feel wasted.

• Angel’s Embrace

Releases a circle of healing over time, recovering 230 Health Points each time.

Heals for a lot less than Lightwell and does not heal AP. It ticks 7 times, but unlike Lightwell, this skill is bound to you and moves around with you.

But enough with the healing skills, let’s talk utility!

• Blood Pumping

Burns dragon blood to increase Physical Damage 30% of the Character and their Pet for 15 seconds.

So, you get 30% extra Physical Damage for 15 seconds with no penalties. With a cooldown of only 28 seconds? If you want to deal damage and don’t get this skill, you’re doing it wrong!

• Howl of Anger

The Character’s Pet releases a Roar which increases the Pet and Character’s Attack Speed 5% and Movement Speed 10%, but reduces the Character and Pet’s Physical Defense 10%.

Basically, you’ll get 5% Attack Speed and 10% faster Movement Speed and take 10% extra (Physical) Damage for 15 seconds. The skill also has a 15 second cooldown, so you can spam it. I personally haven’t noticed a difference in my attack speed, so while this sounds good in theory, without good testing this seems not worth it. Also it’s useless in survival since you need to have the pet out. But a pet that dies in a second can’t howl in anger, more like whimper in pain and agony.

• Battle Cry

Increases the Character’s Physical Damage 20 points and increase the Character, Pet and Group Member’s Physical Damage 1%.

Lasts for 10min, if it would last longer I’d bother, but 20 (+1%) Physical Damage is nothing. Roughly 40 extra damage, which is funny considering the next skill I’ll mention.

• Dragon Strength

Increases the Character’s Strenght 20 points and increase the Character, Pet and Group Member’s Strength 1%.

As with Battle Cry, if the buff would last longer, I’d consider it, but with just 10mins it gets tedious. This skill however if far superior to Battle Cry since the 20 Str alone is 40 extra Physical Damage, so you’ll actually get more Physical Damage by having this buff over Battle Cry. The two buffs also do not stack.

• Dragon Soul Agility

Increases the Character’s Ferocity 20 points and increase the Character, Pet and Group Member’s Ferocity 1%.

I personally am using this one since I’m built all around Ferocity. Not a big increase and it does NOT stack with the above two buffs.

• Shell Protection

While Dragon Shell Protection is active, the number of monsters attacking the Character is decreased by 60% Damage in 5 seconds.

Doesn’t make much sense, but what the skill actually does is reduce the damage you take by 45% for 5 seconds, cooldown is 15 seconds. Now at first this may sound incredible, but keep in mind that it’s not a flat 45%. You get 45% to what you already have, so let’s say you have 20% physical and magical defence. This skill will only add 9%, That’s completely worthless.

• Great Dragon Blood

Increase the Character’s Health 100 points and increases the Character, Pet and Group Member’s Health 1%.

As with Battle Cry and Dragon Strength, this skill is worse than the flat attribute bonus (constitution). As a tank this sounds good, but there’s other good tank skills and since we can only have 5 Soul Skills, this might as well be skipped.

• Dragon Constitution

Increase the Character’s Constitution 20 points and increases the Character, Pet and Group Member’s Constitution 1%.

The Constitution bonus alone gives you more than double the HP bonus of the Great Dragon Blood buff. So if you chose one of the two, it should be quite obvious which one to take 

• Squama Protection

Increases Physical Defense 15% and Magic Defense 15%.

This skill lasts a mere 5min, WAY too short for what it actually does. Recasting it is only tedious, nothing more, nothing less. In addition, as with Shell Protection, this skill doesn’t add a flat 15%. So to stick with my previous example, with 20% physical and magical defence, this skill adds 3%.

• Dragon Blood

Increases Health 30% in 20 seconds.

This skill increases you MAX Health by 30% for 20 seconds with a cooldown of 22 seconds. Only increasing you maximum health makes this skill less useful, it’s however still a good skill for tanking, when timed right in regards of the 2 seconds you don’t have the 30% extra HP.

• Total Defense

When activated, this ability wards off an attack for 15 seconds.

Decent skill when you know a big attack is directed at you. This skill will aborb the attack no matter how hard the mob or person hits. Not really needed once you figured out the bosses attack patterns.

• Taunt

Taunts target, provoking it into attacking the player.

Sounds like a must have for every tank. It’s not. Every time I’ve used the skill to get the aggro of a mob, the mob simply ignored me. So until this is fixed, do it as the mobs and simply ignore the skill.

• Frost Aura

Triggers an aura effect when the master’s Dragon Soul is below 60%, inflicting attack speed delay effect on targets.

Slowing the attack speed of your enemies whenever you drop below 60% Dragon Soul sounds pretty good. When just DPSing I rarely find myself dropping that low unless a boss uses an attack to drain me. In survival when I drop below 60% on bosses spamming Blood Pumping, this skill wouldn’t make a difference.

So to deal damage, I recommend the following skills: Blood Pumping, Lightwell and Healing Light for sure. I’ll leave you with your imagination for the other two skills. Howl of Anger is definitely useful and maybe Total Defence.

Feel tanky? I recommend Dragon Blood, Shell Protection, Squama Protection, Lightwell and Healing Light. Why get Shell Protection and Squama Protection even though I said they suck? Find me a better alternative

Dragon Skills

There’s a lot of good skills. To combine them all on a single dragon you either have to be incredibly patient, or pay a lot of money. But I’ve listed some decent to awesome skills. This list is nowhere near complete. You’ll find many with a good synergy. I recommend to simply pay good attention to what kind of damage your dragons deal. Physical or Magical.

With my list of skills, it’s a good idea to go for a dragon with intelligence as its main attribute.

• Cyclone Assault

Launches a surprise attack, inflicting 563 continuous physical attack. Has a high chance of critical hit.

This skill deals massive damage at 1/10 to multiple targets, I’ve never seen it not crit and it also ministuns the mobs in range. One of my favourites for its damage and stun effect. 20s cooldown.

• Paralyzing Current

Unleashes the power of the wind to launch an electrical strike, inflicting 1447 magic damage and causing Paralysis for 3002478EffectTime.

I like this skill ‘cause I like to keep the mobs at distance, this skills stun helps with that, that’s the reason I recommend this skill. 26s cooldown.

• Glacier Strike

Dragon’s attacks have a chance to freeze the target. As this effect is finished, it can be activated after 10 seconds.

Simply amazing skill. In just about every fight my dragon gets lucky enough to freeze multiple targets. This stuns them for a moderate amount of time. Works on bosses.

• Life Reflux

Dragon or prophet gains the healing effect with Health 188 points continuously for 20 seconds. (at 4/10)

Decent heal. Your dragon will automatically use this on you or itself whenever your (or its) health drops too low. 30s cooldown.

• Healing Wind

Heals the master with natural power, recovering 2051 HP.

The dragon uses that skill whenever your health drops too far. The 2051hp is at 1/10, so I recommend this skill for any tank spec. 15s cooldown.

• Dragon Battle Cry

When summoned, it will increase its owner’s Physical Damage +2%

At 10/10 this is a 6% damage bonus. The dragon will have this buff active on you as long as you have it out. Must have to deal damage.

• Shattering Strike

Increases your pet’s Strike Reduces the target’s physical defense by -2%.

At 7/10 it’s already 7%. Another free damage boost, this time only against one target though.

• Dragon Spell Strike

Increases your pet’s Strike Recovers the master’s Dragon Soul 10 points.

Wonderfully worded, in short you’ll get more Dragon Soul Points as your pet attacks and thus you can use your Soul Skills even more, sounds useful to me. You’ll notice a lot of orange +10s popping up on the boss.

• Life Sharing

When summoned, it will increase its owner’s Health +2%.

Haven’t leveled this skill yet, I guess that it’s around 6-10% at 10/10. Considering this is completely free, any tank spec should have this on their dragon.

• Roar

Make all enemies stop attacking prophet but turn to you for 2 seconds.

Not much to say, all mobs will attack your pet for 2 seconds. Unlike our own Taunt, this actually works perfectly.

• Intimidating Impact

Increases your pet’s Impact The target is forced to attack your pet for 3 seconds.

Just like Roar, but only on one target.

• Bloodlust Sweep

Increases your pet’s Sweep Have a 40% chance of Vampire effect, turning 20% of damage into healing effect.

Helps your pet staying alive, not a must have, but a decent skill.

• Elemental Sweep

Changes the pet’s Sweeping Attack from physical damage to magic damage.

Quite simple, if your pet is intelligence based and deals more magical damage, this skill is good.

• Monster Clash

The pet’s Sweeping Attack will deal an additional 2% damage to each target within range, up to a maximum of 20%

More AE Damage to a maximum of 10 targets, pretty good.

Dragon Shards

The easy answer is to choose shards that help you wherever your attributes lack. So if you go full Constitution, going for all Health shards might be less useful depending on what you want to do. Obviously it’s worth considering if you want to tank.

But in general I recommend Dragon Spell Power and Physical Damage for Bow users. Tanky Gunblade rangers should consider what I mentioned above. If you lack Physical Defense, go for that, not enough HP? Get +Health, etc.

Crafting

Why do I mention crafting in a class guide? Because it’s useful! You can have every craft so potions and food will increase your damage and crafting your own equip will make getting your gear easier since it’s incredibly luck based what kind of stats you’ll get. In addition to that, you can make a lot of money with crafting.

While Cooking and Alchemy is useful for both of the specialisations I mentioned, Weaponsmithing is probably the better choice for you if you focus on dealing damage and Armoursmithing if you want to tank. So if you don’t want to craft a lot, take either cooking or alchemy in addition to either Armour- or Weaponsmithing.

If you have the time and/or patience to level them all, get ‘em all. Tinkering might be worth mentioning if you want to make your dragon even stronger.

In short:

• Weaponsmithing makes weapons. Bows and Gunblades for us.
• Armoursmithing makes our armour and shields.
• Tinkering makes the armour for our dragon in addition to jewellery.
• Cooking makes us buff food
• Alchemy makes us health and AP potions in addition to buff potions (attributes and resistances)

Grouping

This is a small section I didn’t have at first, but I thought it might be useful for some people. After doing tons of Hard mode and especially Survival mode instances, I found the best teammate to have is a Sorcerer with the Black Hole skill. The sorcerer stacks all the mobs at one location leaving you a perfect target for your Dragon Bite combo.

But I’m not saying that you should ignore the melee classes! All their knockdowns and disables work wonders if you just want to stay out of range of a dangerous mob. The melee guys I usually take through survival mode make the mini bosses even easier than they already are. I can just be lazy and stay at one location while they keep the mob disabled, speeding up the run even more.

Summary/TLDR

First of all, I trolled you, there’s no TLDR version. If you’re looking at a guide and expect a TLDR version, then I can’t help you, as sorry as I am. But if you have specific questions, I may answer them ingame or in a PM

Overall our class has the choice of being either a pure damage dealer with a bow or a gunblade and shield wielding tank with some ranged abilities. Thanks to the way this game works, both specialisations are viable depending on the difficulty you choose.

As of now, I feel like the strongest spec is based heavily on Ferocity and around the Dragon Bite combo attack. A lot of Ferocity and Dragon Spell Power will boost the damage of the Dragon Bite combo through the roof. Bosses (when soloing) drop incredibly fast making the farming of Dunar on Survival and Hard a very trivial task. Even the lvl63 trash mobs on hard mode die in seconds.

And to finish, I’d like to thank you for taking your time and reading this (if you actually did). As soon as I’ve tested the influence of the various stats on the items some more, especially the offensive ones, I’ll update this guide with the information. For now I don’t feel like the data I have now is enough, but we’ll see about that

-Mir

Since I’ve recently changed my masteries and attributes, I got some up to date comparisons. I’m now full charisma for a while to get some more titles

Dragon Bite unbuffed (2750 Physical Damage, 168 Dragon Spell Damage):

Dragon Bite with Dexterity and Arcane Spell up (2340 Physical Damage and 698 Dragon Spell Damage):

Dragon Bite with Dexterity and Arcane Spell up as a full charisma spec, same physical damage and dragon spell damage as above:

Now you may think why the hell anyone would go full Ferocity compared to full Charisma if all you do is lose 300 Damage on your main attack. You have to keep in mind that you don’t just lose 300 Damage, you also lose up to 9% critical hit chance and critical damage, which is a lot.

If you’re wondering about the damage potential of a full ferocity build that’s built around the Dragon Bite combo, here’s a small video:

http://www.youtube.c…h?v=k-4Y7xDQ3tY

If you’re wondering why I jump around a lot. Jumping removes the movement speed restriction while shooting.

This is my current level 70 mastery template:

What’s good about this setup?

• A lot of critical hit chance and critical damage
• Fast moving, Dexterity and Agiity do stack.
• Other than Dragon Bite/Stab, it’s mainly passives, feels easier to use that way.

What’s bad?

• You’re built for damage and damage only. You have to be a lot more careful with this build.
• You need to be able to stack the mobs in a line in front of you, or have someone with you that does that for the full potential of this build. If the mobs don’t stack well, you won’t hit all of them with the Sphere skills.
• You rely on a second mastery page/template

What would I change if I’d respec?

• Right now. Nothing. I’m quite happy with this build. But if they change the mastery buffs, so they don’t stay up once you switch mastery pages, I’ll get rid of the Bow Mastery to build Arcane Spell into my current build. That spell is incredibly powerful with the Sphere masteries.