HCSSF Deadeye (achieving the impossible)

Hi all I will keep it brief as there is a lot of info here to cover.

For a long time I have wanted to make it to 100 as a Deadeye in HCSSF.
I will only speak about defence here and not damage.

The defence layers are like this:
I use Ice shot which is the biggest defence of the build. I keep my attack speed as low as possible to minimise the amount of time I spend standing still
(this concept has proven to be hard to understand by many so what I mean by this is high attack speed = very little time in-between shots to move and dodge projectiles or melee hits therefore a low attack speed means much more time to move in-between shooting.)
Ice Shot being a long range skill so staying at range is obviously a huge point of defence especially when combined with far shot I try my best to stay offscreen from most enemies and have even found you can cheese/bug many encounters by using maximum range.

Not going to draw to much attention to freeze and chill but obviously these greatly help. Before I move onto the passive defences high move speed is a critical point of defence for this kind of build and is high priority.

So without any passive defence layers I am already very defensive something that no other class/build in the game can boast. This sort of active defence in manually evading attacks slowing/freezing enemies whilst staying max range is often incredibly overlooked mostly because its hard to translate to raw numbers and there is an underlying level of skill involved this some simply cannot be bothered with.

Now the sole purpose of this build is to do it all. Bossing, juiced maps, farming all in hcssf. So my passive defences thus far look like this:

Stacking as much Life as possible aiming for 7k but upwards of 5k can be enough depending on how everything else is looking.

Capped Evasion, 0 Armor, 0 ES. Unless stacking Armor very high it does nothing for Big hits from bossing. Evasion greatly synergises with all our other defences - more on that later. Energy Shield is skipped simply because it doesn't have the same kind of synergy or ROI as Evasion does with everything else in mind.

Also on the point above I get a lot of blind "freely" greatly adding to my passive evasion

Capped Spell Dodge. Now on its own this is NOT worth the investment however considering how it amplifies and synergises with all our other defence layers it is a must to have this capped at 75%

Wind Dancer and Wind Ward are really what tie everything together. the addition of these which most neglect are paramount to this build. If I am already manually dodging most attacks and the odd projectile that finds its way to me then has a 95% chance to miss ignoring blind for now then this damage is reliably reduced by Wind Dancer and Wind Ward. I cannot think of a single encounter where Wind Dancer and Ward are not reliably defending me with everything else in mind. To all the naysayers I have never had any problems with these Passives and they prove to be invaluable to this build.

Now this is great and all for Hits. In fact when we look at damage from hits alone I feel unstoppable with all this criteria met. (so long as I'm not mindlessly standing still). But as you are all well aware DoT is the great killer of us rangers. Now without going into the obvious solutions I have found the final piece to my puzzle is simply Life Regen.

Life Leech is not reliable enough for HC. Sure its great QOL but for HC I do not bother.

Now it's no surprise that getting Life Regen to feel relevant on a ranger is difficult but when you get it along with all the aforementioned layers WOW does ranger feel like a complete Tank. I actually don't take any life regen from my tree as its not worth the travel or is linked to things such as life on hit. What we want is % life regen or flat +50 life regen. Now because most of my defences are met from the passive tree alone this leaves a lot of room on my gear for life regen.

As this build is for HCSSF I have purposely not spoken of items for obvious reasons and the goal is to have a Good defence for pushing content without relying on Rare items to fill in the gaps.

The point of this post is not to brag but for the past few years I have been told what I'm trying to do is "stupid" or will "never work". "Deadeye just isn't cut out for HC" and having recently finished my puzzle with the final piece being Health Regen - Yes my damage is not great but that's to be expected with HCSSF. All that's left now is to push this build as far as possible!

I'm writing all of this from my alt account but I am preparing a full guide very soon when I have all my ducks in line. Thanks my rangers for taking the time to read this and I wish you all good luck in your Projects! ^^






Last bumped on Dec 21, 2023, 6:31:01 AM

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