Introduction

Welcome to our Crossbow Staff Build guide for Throne and Liberty. This guide focuses on the PVP set-up for Crossbow Staff and how to play it.

Skills

Below are the Skills and Specializations we recommend for the Crossbow Staff DPS Build in PVP. This includes Large Scale and Small Scale:

Large Scale PVP (PVP Boss, GVG, Castle Siege)

Single-target focused Skills are largely ignored in this set-up. This is to ensure you have every AoE/cleave Skill available to you. Defensive Skills also play a large role in keeping you alive in huge player-count PVP scenarios.

Large Scale Specializations

With 100 total points to play with once you hit Level 50, below is our recommended Specializations for the Crossbow Staff DPS build for Large Scale PVP:

Every single cleave or AoE Specialization is selected for Large Scale PVP. The aim is to deal as much damage as possible to multiple targets.

Small Scale PVP (Arena, Dominion, Night PVP)

This set-up drops more of the AoE and cleave options to focus on single-target skirmishing and burst.

Small Scale Specializations

For Small Scale, picking more single-target CC utility and burst tools in the Specializations is highly recommended.

See our Skill Specializations guide for more information.

Weapon Mastery

This guide assumes you are at least in the range of Level 13-16 Weapon Mastery. However, if you’re below this threshold, it’s not an issue. Simply spec into the mastery trees that provide the most damage first.

Stats

Stats once you reach Tier 1 Epic gear can vary frequently due to stats built into gear. As a result, try to push for at least 60 Perception and 50 Dexterity while participating in PVP – gear depending. Below is our recommended baseline Stat allocation:

• Dexterity – 18 Points
• Perception – 14 Points
• Strength – 17 Points

Gear & Equipment

The gear loadout largely, if not entirely, stays the same across all content once you reach Tier 1 Epic. Our Tier 1 Epic set assumes that most of the base content has been unlocked with the Milestones completed.

We also recommend picking up Talus’s Crystalline Staff if possible. The passive from the Staff helps a lot to deal with Assassins that stun you with Greatsword. Finally, Queen Bellandir’s Hivemind Staff is the ultimate Staff to obtain. However, it is incredibly rare, as a result, do not expect to see it for quite some time.

For advice on Uncommon and Rare gear progression options, check out our Leveling guide.

Guardian

Guardians are a unique transformation on a 10 minute Cooldown that gives powerful bonuses to you for 30 seconds. Some Guardians work as an additional “Active” Skill, while others provide buffs. We recommend the following Guardians for PVP:

• Pale Nemesis Hartach – Hartach is as close as you can get to a Tevent’s Massacre Blade-style effect. This Guardian requires a bit more knowledge and skill to pull off. However, if you can utilize it well, it doubles as a strong defensive and offensive Guardian.
• Lady Knight Kamarshea – This Guardian is a fantastic safety net, just incase you’re taking too much damage on an engage. You’ll also get a huge amount of Cooldown Speed too.

How to Play the Crossbow Staff PVP Build

This DPS build has High Tier Damage capabilities when played extremely well. Below, we’ll break down the basics of the PvP gameplay approaches with the build.

For PVP, this build is used to deal damage through consistent Skill spamming onto enemy backlines, chipping frontlines and “melting” clumps of enemies. You are a potential menace in large-scale PVP.

As a Crossbow Staff PVP build, your role is simple. You aim to find the perfect window to activate your High Focus & Selfless Diffusion and unleash a torrent of Skill casts into a large amount of players. This is achieved through the usage of “Chain Thunder” to consistently activate your “Mother Nature’s Protest”. Doing this contributes to proccing enough Weaken effects to lower your cooldowns dramatically. Suddenly, long but impactful cooldowns such as “Judgment Lightning” become Skills that you can cast 3-4 times within 10~ seconds!

Large Scale

In Large Scale PVP, you only need to rely on a couple of support Skills from the Crossbow. The key Crossbow Skills for large scale is “Selfless Diffusion” and “Mother Nature’s Protest”. Both of these Skills enable the key synergy between these weapons to unleash a crazy amount of Skill spam in a short window. The larger the amount of opponents, the more you can spam.

To find success in Large Scale, find a decent position where you’re not in danger of having your casts interrupted and attempt the following:

• Toggle Mother Nature’s Protest
• High Focus
• Inner Peace (cancel the animation with Block)
• Serial Fire Bombs (Fully charged)
• Selfless Diffusion
• Judgment Lightning
• Chain Thunder (Spam this as much as you can to lower the cooldown of Judgment Lightning & your other Skills)
• Weave Inferno Wave & Ice Spear (if you need to CC) between the above Skills

Small Scale

Small Scale PVP is much more skirmish-heavy. Utilizing moments to poke from range and other moments that allow you to all-in is important. We recommend:

• Utilizing your range advantage to deal large portions of damage.
• Remembering that your Selfless Diffusion doubles up as a defensive CC break
• Using Nimble Leap to avoid and kite enemy melee players
• Try not to pump your combo into a Tank that has “Counter Barrier” active – you will die to yourself

A standard rotation to all-in a single-target is the following:

• Toggle Mother Nature’s Protest
• High Focus
• Inner Peace (cancel with Block)
• Selfless Diffusion
• Detonation Mark
• Quick Fire
• Ice Spear Bombardment
• Quick Fire
• Fireball Barrage
• Cancel Fireball Barrage with Nimble Leap
• Quick Fire
• Use both Judgment Lightning & Chain Thunder at the end of the Quick Fire
• Nimble Leap
• Quick Fire

Either at the end or mid-way through this combo, the Detonation Mark detonates 40% of the stored damage from your attacks. As a result, if a player survives the standard damage from the rotation, the Mark deals a huge chunk of additional damage – detonating the player. This all-in method is very tricky to consistently do right but with some practice – it’s satisfying. Finally, make sure to chose a moment where you’ve noticed an enemy player has used a major CC cooldown or two. This will give you the space to go all-out to destroy a player.

Conclusion

That Concludes our Crossbow Staff PVP Build! For more Throne and Liberty content, news and guides, be sure to check out our Throne and Liberty Home Page. Continue here to learn more about the Crossbow and Staff PVE and Solo gameplay.