Dual Wield Handcrossbow Ranger Advice

[Zertryx]

My brother is starting a game in a week and I Decided I wanted to be a Drow that Dual Wields hand Crossbows

Now i understand that dual wielding Hand crossbows isn't actually very useful but i wanted to do something flavorful but i do want to attempt to at least make it work somewhat.

We are starting at level 3 and so far i have chosen
- Race: Drow
- Class: Ranger (Hunter Fighting Style / Prime Shot)
- Theme: Escaped Slave (part of my story cant change this)
- Background: Born under a bad sign
- Stats: STR-10, CON-11, DEX-20, INT-10, WIS-16, CHA-8 (+2 was given to DEX / WIS from drow racial)
- Feats:
[] Quick Draw (from hunter Style)
[] Sneak of Shadow (to multiclass to rouge)
[] Two-Fisted Shooter (Allow me to dual wield the cross bows)

What i want to know is what other kind of feats should i choose to try and make this build work better?
Should i choose different starting feats? and take the dual wield option next level?

the feat i was planning on picking up next level is "Ruthless Hunter" to turn my hand crossbows into D8's and high crit

Is there a better way to do the dual wield crossbows with different classes?

[Sol]

Pretty tough to make work at low levels, to be honest.

By 30, static mods outweigh anything your weapon could possibly bring to the table, but at level 3, you are literally going to do less damage with two successful hits on twin strike than a rogue would do with nothing but his sneak attack dice, if he's either a STR rogue or has backstabber.

If you're willing to overlook the fact that a rogue's offhand weapon doesn't actually do that much, a rogue would be much better here. Prime shot doesn't help you much until paragon.

You could also go hunter or seeker, and focus more on control than damage - or just do the same as a full ranger - by mid paragon they're better controllers than hunters and more or less the same level of control as a seeker.

[wolfstone]

Pretty tough to make work at low levels, to be honest.

By 30, static mods outweigh anything your weapon could possibly bring to the table, but at level 3, you are literally going to do less damage with two successful hits on twin strike than a rogue would do with nothing but his sneak attack dice, if he's either a STR rogue or has backstabber.

This is the second time I've heard reference to static mods. Is there a handbook on that? I'd like to learn more about them and what all to go for to get them.

[Sol]

This is the second time I've heard reference to static mods. Is there a handbook on that? I'd like to learn more about them and what all to go for to get them.

Probably not, but read through the stuff on the wotc char op boards for sure.

There's waaay too many ways to list them in one place.

By "static modifiers" what I mean is

• Whatever stat modifier(s) you add to damage
• your enhancement bonus to damage
• your item bonus to damage
• your feat bonus to damage
• any vulnerabilities you can force a creature to have to your own damage
• any power bonus to damage you can maintain or be provided by your leader(s)
• any untyped bonuses to damage

At a minimum, this would end up being +8 (stat mod) + 6(enh), +0(no item bonus), +3 (focus feat), +nothing else, or +17. The DMG outlines expected combat durations as no longer than 5 rounds, but in order for that math to work out correctly related to monster HP, you need much, much higher than that +17, unless you're using a beastly weapon with 7[W] powers, or are swinging 3-4 times/round, because a cleanly divided party member's share of monster health at 5 round combats is 60 damage per round at level 30. Given that many leaders and defenders are going to be doing substantially less than that, and that some varieties of controllers eschew doing *any* damage in order to screw the monsters over more, the charOp numbers for striker competency are 30DPR/tier, so 90 damage per round at 30, at a minimum.

Now, how necessary that is depends on your party. Fully optimized parties make 2 round combats trivial. But a fully un-optimized party might take 10 rounds for the same combat, and use 4 times as many surges as a result. Most parties are somewhere in the middle, but as a striker you should still aim for that baseline 60 number, even if you aren't reaching for the stars.

How do you get there? Most untyped damage bonuses are tied to specific elements. Some elements offer additional damage instances, which often don't get all of your modifiers again, but which can double-tap vulnerabilities. Most elemental-typed feat bonuses are 1 point stronger than focus feats.

The best vulnerability in the game comes from having a Morninglord in your party slapping vast swaths of monsters with vuln 10 radiant. Neither Pelor's Sun Blessing nor Pervasive Light even requires that you use radiant damage to trigger the resulting +10+wis/con damage per hit. Radiant One also offers you a cheap way to ping this vulnerability no matter your original damage type, if MCing divine for Pervasive Light is a bad choice for your build, or if your INT mod is significant. A Firewind blade can turn every hit into a double-tap on both radiant and fire vulnerabilities, if you've got Radiant one, which makes the Sarifal Feywarden and Elemental Warlock Pact quite strong, as well - either of them can add +15 vuln fire to a target that's already been hit by the morninglord, and assuming CA your powers are all "fire powers" for firewind blade due to Radiant One, and then the firewind blade double taps both vulnerabilities, leading to +60 damage (with a relatively crappy 5 WIS or CON mod) before anything else is considered.

Of course, all of that is much harder to impossible with hand crossbows, but the main idea is that the 1d6 from the hand crossbow will be vastly overshadowed relatively fast by whatever other damage you can add to your rolls. Even at level 1, a 1[W]+dex power is going to be 1d6+5 (there's no reason for a dex primary character to not take a 20 DEX post racial. It's your attack stat, your AC stat, and your init stat), and 1d6 averages out to 3.5...which is less than the +5. Even boosting that up to 1d8 bumps it up to an average of 4.5, which is still less than the +5. Ruthless Hunter is technically better than Weapon Focus at heroic, because of the incredibly marginal 5% chance for an additional 3.5 average damage (high crit on bad dice is bad, guys. this is +0.225 average damage per attack), but it fails to scale in paragon and epic. They stack, but it's your call how much it's worth. IMO, 1.675 damage in epic isn't really worth the feat space.

As Twin Strike, a ranger's main damage source, lacks a native stat mod to damage, this gets even worse for hand crossbows, especially at low levels.

I really do recommend just going with a rogue, in this case. Hand Crossbows are still worse for them than throwing daggers, but not by the same degree that hand crossbows are worse for rangers than a bow, and you really won't notice the difference until paragon comes around and you can't take Daggermaster.