The other night, in another form, I attended a very enlightening talk by Mazarian in the warmie guild. The talk was about how warmies can use different tactics to use their magics in concert with others, especially against the Elpaizi. So that got me to thinking (always dangerous) what are rangerly magical tactics we can develop?

For instance, I found out that warmies can cast some of their spells area or cast creatures(plural) to help keep critters away or affect their position and balance. I'm not talking about tactics like weave or bob, though those of course could be added. I mean how can we rangers work to spellcast to the best we can and also help others. Mazarian described an effective trio where one warmie casted fire rain, another casted shockwave and the other casted TM spells at the Elpaizi.

So, any suggestions for working magic with others?

Zinaca and her fully-grown raccoon, Shadow

You have two problems with rangers using magic to assist others against the ELpalzi. Let me explain this using say red leucros, which teach from say around 200 to around 320. A rangers top magic requirement is 10 ranks at circle 10, 50 ranks at circle 30, and 130 ranks at circle 70. You can hunt leucros well before circle 70 and even at circle 70 your magic (Debilitation and TM) wont be all that effective on red leucros. The sad fact for us to be effective on the Elpalzi a ranger must work their magic well beyond the requirement which most dont do. Before magic changed to 3.0 there were some rangers that worked magic heavily to have it effective vs what they were hunting. That usually meant working magic at 3-5 times requirement level. Now its possible in 3.0 to have your magic work on bigger critters but its still really low odds, you need the skill to do so and just satisfying requirements wont put you high enough.

Second most of the invasions are in town and a lot of our Debilitation and TM spells simply wont work in town. The ones that do are fairly useful however if you have the skill to affect the Elpalzi most of the time. The best one right now is the use of DEVOLVE. This spell takes the top two stats of the target and reduces them for a time. It can be the difference between winning and loosing a fight. I can affect most elpalzi with 430 Debilitation casting at 40 power. I can affect them at lower power but it dont last very long. So you need to use it and concentrate on the elpalzi being attacked currently. How effective is the spell. I've walked into a room with one person fighting a Rebel, getting maybe 1 in 5 attacks to hit. The moment I either advance the critter or cast Devolve on it they start ripping it apart. That means both my Tactics and Devolve are enough to allow someone to start ripping a rebel to shreds. TM would be helpful as well but like most rangers I got about 290 TM skill, which is probably high for most rangers. I have a lot of trouble with TM at that level even getting hits on the bigger elpalzi. The rest of our spells either dont work in town or if they do, they get you arrested no matter what. For example if you group with someone then cast SWARM using CAST AREA. You can hinder their perecption greatly but you spend the rest of the time getting arrested and fined. Branch break and Haraweps bonds and Grizzly claw wont work in town. So your sole option is DEVOLVE.

Get outside of town though and you can start to use Grizzly claw to knock the Elpalzi down, giving mages and other combat folks a great chance to get good clean hits. And lets not forget tactics the higher your tactics the better your group is in a fight. Most of my magics are in the 500+ range so i'm not having much of a problem using magic on the elpalzi but then again if I were just at requirements for magic I would only have 220 magic skills. And at that level there is not much you can do except to keep casting devolve all the time and hope you get some skill from it. Since my magic is fairly high if i'm alone or with 1 or 2 folks I sometimes use awaken forest. The spawn can be very helpful but once the critters are down you need to release the spell. The spawns ability to damage critters is based on TM and the mana you used to cast the spell (higher the better). Which again only gives you more time to hurt the critters unless you got a lot of TM skill. So if you cant hit them with your weapons well you got a real problem. Branch break works pretty good outside of town but you have to prep the spell and when someone damages or stuns one of the elpalzi cast it at that one to put it to sleep.

Ranger Pfanston and his soggy pup.