Standard poison-interrupter ranger

The Standard poison-interrupter ranger refers to a common PvP setup for a ranger that pressures the opposing team through well-timed interrupts and poison.

General principle
The poison-spreading, interrupting ranger is a popular setup in most forms of PvP. It utilizes powerful ranger interrupts along with a poison skill to pressure the opposing team through various tactics. With the ranger's inherent defense against elements coupled with a block stance and/or speed boost, this ranger proves to be very self-sufficient.

Basis
The most common variant's staple skills to this setup are Savage Shot, Distracting Shot, and Apply Poison. Natural Stride is taken as both a block stance and speed buff. In the lower end arenas or for split tactics, it is not uncommon for a ranger to bring Troll Unguent as a self-heal. Also taken in Random Arenas is Resurrection Signet, since a powerplay can completely change the outcome of a match. A damage skill such as Point Blank Shot can be taken as well.

The beauty of this build is that there are many different elites that you can take to complement your team. Burning Arrow is taken as a spike or gank skill. Melandru's Shot and Crippling Shot are taken as a snare. Magebane Shot can be taken as well, for an unblockable and powerful interrupt. Incendiary Arrows is used to apply Area of Effect burning and Poison to the enemy team. Using Escape is not unheard of, as it provides a near maintable speed boost and block stance. Another elite skill that is not unheard as being used by a ranger, but requires being a secondary class Monk, is Empathic Removal. This skill helps alleviate some of the pressure from the opposing team, while still dealing out tons of pressure.

A common secondary class is the Monk, due to the skill Mending Touch. This skill is good for not only removing conditions from yourself but also removing conditions from fellow team mates. The monk class also provides Healing Breeze, which can be used in place of Troll Unguent. The downsides to using Healing Breeze are that it can be stripped and it is not in a ranger attribute. Another secondary class used is the Necromancer for enchantment removal skills, such as Rend Enchantments.

This ranger makes use of armor with Survivor Insignia and Insignias which give you higher armor against certain elemental types (dependant on the meta and game type). You can use Radiant Insignia, but it is not recommended since a high rank in expertise renders that superfluous. The suggested weapon types are: a Crippling Longbow for Snaring far away players, a Vampiric Recurve bow for Spiking and pressure, a Poisonous Recurve bow for spreading poison, a Vampiric Flatbow for ganking NPCs and of course a shield set to mitigate damage, stop the vampiric mod degen and give a +30hp (or, depending on the situation, sometimes more).

Side skills
In situations where you can't bring Mending Touch, Antidote Signet can be used in its place. Lightning Reflexes serves as a good attack speed buff and as a block stance. If you're bringing along a damage skill, you can choose from Keen Arrow, Sloth Hunter's Shot, Needling Shot, Forked Arrow. Good bow attacks that cause conditions are Pin Down and Screaming Shot. Another good pressure skill is Debilitating Shot. If running a Monk secondary, any skills you can use to make your monk's job easier, such as Purge Signet or Remove Hex are good.

Battle behavior
In general, this has three primary functions. The first is to spread poison all over the enemy team. Draining away the life of the enemy team is awesome as it pressures the opposing monks. The second purpose is to interrupt important skills depending on the situation. If the opposing team is applying too much pressure, interrupting offensive skills on their midline is beneficial to the survival of the party. If your team is doing well in applying pressure and pushing kills, taking down Guardian, Weapon Spells, Word of Healing or even Blinding Surge will help force wipes as it debilitates the opponent's ability to mitigate damage. The third is to split off to wherever you are most needed, as well as preventing foes from splitting off to wherever they are needed most.

Random Arena: Since you aren't guaranteed a monk or even a good team, a self-heal plus Resurrection Signet are musts. Make sure you spread poison to the entire enemy team, this give the enemy monk tons of pressure and, if they have no monk, can even degen their team to death. Concentrate your interrupts on defensive skills (Guardian, weapon spells), heavy healing skills (Word of Healing, Zealous Benediction), heavy degen skills (Apply Poison, Illusion of Pain, Empathy, Insidious Parisite, Blinding Surge, etc.) and heavy damage skills (Searing Flames, Burning Arrow, Wounding Strike, Palm Strike, etc.). This will greatly reduce your enemy's damage output and increase your own.

Alliance Battles: Playing this build in AB gives you great survivability. However, splitting off by yourself is not recommended as this ranger lacks the damage output to efficiently take down shrines by himself. The best strategy is to stick with your team-mates and support them with offensive pressure, condition/hex removal and snares. However, in the situations where you do find yourself alone against other players, here are a few tips. If being chased by a front-liner, snare them and keep kiting to either mitigate their damage or stop them from chasing you. Casters need to stop their movement to cast their spells, so interrupt their snares and move on. Fighting other rangers requires a different strategy, as both of you will try to snare the other and interrupt their respective snares/support skills. Be wary since the other ranger will most likely have a blocking stance and a lot of them follow up their snare with an interrupt skill. Because NPCs don't move (if out of range) use a Flatbow while trying to solo shrines, since it offers an increased fire rate with no drawbacks. Make sure you spread the poison around to all the shrine NPCs. For warrior NPCs, use your Longbow and snare one constantly while only running back in range of the others to poison them. Note: Don't forget that Resurrection Signets are useless here.

GvG: Playing this type of ranger in GvG requires you to be able to play multiple roles. You must be able to snare, pressure, split and support at different times, depending on you and your opponents play-style. While it may be acceptable to interrupt any kind of skills in lower forms of pvp, in GvG you must be able to consistently hit critical spells and skills that usually have a cast time of a second or less. One of the most unique things about this ranger is survivability and flexibility; in GvG, you must use this advantage and split off (by yourself) to where you are most needed, whether it be driving foes out of your base, forcing your foes to split up their own team to drive you out of their base or helping with the main group to pressure/spike to score kills.

Heroes' Ascent: Your role is similar to GvG, in the respect that you are required to interrupt critical spells and pressure/spike your foes. But being a different game style all together you would spend a great deal of time more with the main group (especially in low levels of HA). Sometimes you will even be asked to run a different build, often with paragon shouts or earth snares as support.

PvE: Although this build is not favored in PvE, remember to do your job. Interupt key defensive/offensive skills and keep poison on as many foes as possible. Bring PvE skills which greatly strengthen the effectiveness of this build (such as "I am the Strongest!" or "You Move Like a Dwarf!").

Disadvantages
This build is not designed to deal much DPS but rather to provide utility and pressure through Degen. As such, it sees very little, if any, use in PvE. This build's main counter is anything that prevents your arrows from hitting your target, such as block and blind and skills which punish you for attacking, such as Empathy or Insidious Parasite.