Rangers
 

What use do rangers have?

Weaponshield in a year and a half.

Tracking.

Pretty much tracking eh?

It's fine. The class is fine. This isn't world of warcraft.

Butt of jokes

The upside to a ranger is the versatility of the class and not having to do the same thing over and over again. The downside is that very few people give a crap about your versatility in groups/raids.

Always the same tired fallacy. As if wanting distinct, strong classes is anywhere near the same as wanting the class balance of WoW.

The problem with Rangers is exactly as the original poster put it - "What use do they have?" There isn't anything in EQ you need a Ranger for. Moreover, in the example of the weaponshield ability Rangers eventually get, that's not much of a unique role anyway. It's just a vanilla, limited raid ability that doesn't even fit in with the flavor of the class.

The classes of EQ are actually already a lot more in the vein of WoW than they should be (even aside from how people are playing EQ in 2011). This is because the intended vision of EQ is simply not what could be logistically implemented when the game was created and also because, as the game went along, they tried to balance the classes by making them do similar things rather than giving them distinct functions. All of the melee classes do damage by turning auto-attack on and clicking a couple skills on recharge. Not very interesting.

for a second as i began scrolling down i feared yendor may not have replied to a topic with the word "ranger" in its title. i was wrong. boyyyyy i was wrong.

The ranger class is ok, but it's still the weakest of the lot. You can do alright if you know what you're doing, but you could have done better with a better class. Fun to play, great at nothing, required for nothing.