Return Of The King (ranger)

[Aadill]

Originally Posted by Aetherial [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I always had respect for players that stuck it out as a ranger to 50, and especially between 50 to 60.

I CANNOT WAIT HOLY CRAP LEVEL SIXTY HERE I COME.

[Aetherial]

Originally Posted by Aadill [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I CANNOT WAIT HOLY CRAP LEVEL SIXTY HERE I COME.

Can't remember if it was 60 or 62 but one of those levels you could get AA's, get Headshot, and go to Nurga (droga?) and headshot stuff and rack up AA's...

[Aadill]

Yeah but I can't wait to do 50-60 on P99. The first 50 were fantastic.

[Dantes]

Yeah, Ebony Bladed Swords make everyone's job easier. They aren't a liability because you just put the meat shield closest to the mob. And if you don't have a tank, then your group sucks anyway. Your ranger can be like the canary in a coal mine. He dies = you gate. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Noselacri]

Proccing root is bad because it's a relatively high aggro spell and you'll have no control over it. If you really want to use root to help the tank, you're better off casting it. With two weapons that proc root, you can and will proc it multiple times in a row and then have it break and end up tanking. It also makes the weapon useless for things like aggro kiting and mob positioning, and if you still have them by the time you start raiding, the proc amounts to nothing but a mini enraging blow on a DPS class. You're better off getting a Short Sword of Morin and a Dragoon Dirk.

Anyway, the point is that many of the ranger-specific weapons have iffy procs on them. Ebon Bladed Sword is the vanilla high-end tradeable ranger weapon, and it turns out to have a proc that severely limits its use. The PoF axe's proc is a stun, the last thing you want as DPS. Even their main-hand epic procs a slow, and while slow procs can definitely be useful, they should come from specialized weapons like Swarmcaller and Truncheon of Doom, not the weapon you'll want to be using in all situations. It's just really dumb that the three primary gear waypoints - top-level dungeon, plane raid, and Kunark epic - all have procs that will often work against the ranger and can easily make the weapon worse than if it didn't have that proc. It's one of the countless design flaws of the class, and one of the main reasons for all those lovely "ranger down" jokes.

[YendorLootmonkey]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Proccing root is bad because it's a relatively high aggro spell and you'll have no control over it. If you really want to use root to help the tank, you're better off casting it. With two weapons that proc root, you can and will proc it multiple times in a row and then have it break and end up tanking.

As someone who has actually used dual EBS's from 25 to 40, I have never had any problem with them. Rarely have the mob turn on me once root breaks. Rarely. Even after a string of 4 procs in 30 seconds. If it does happen to turn on me... I cast root and step back. Problem solved. Small price to pay for very useful weapons.

Also very useful for soloing, not only because the direct damage, but because you can back off after it procs and heal yourself if needed without having to try to channel your own root and use up mana on casting the spell yourself.

I carry a SSOM/Silvery War Axe for times when the mobs are too high level or too MR to avoid resists.

To your other points, I never had an Earthcaller proc on live turn a mob on me... and by that time I had Jolt/Cinder Jolt anyway.

[Noselacri]

You have to admit that there's something odd about almost every single one of the iconic ranger weapons through vanilla and Kunark having procs that are decidedly anti-DPS. A root proc might have been interesting for a class that can't spam-cast it at will. These are the kinds of things that should be on specialized weapons, like Swarmcaller, not on the weapons that are supposed to be the main milestones in your career.

Anyway, anecdotal evidence is fun, so here's mine: I played a ranger twice, once as my very first character up to level thirty-something eleven years ago and then as my main from Luclin to GoD.

In the former case, I did get two EBS and had just as much trouble as I had benefit of them. If root doesn't cause significant aggro here, that's a quirk of the server, because proccing root half a dozen times throughout a fight should certainly earn you aggro on par with what a warrior without extremely good gear produces. Until they get their SSoYs (or if they were smart enough to use Obs Shard, which wasn't widely considered a tank weapon back then) you absolutely would out-aggro a warrior with two EBS, and then you had to keep the mob rooted. It's a weapon with possible benefits, not something you should rely on as your primary all-purpose weapon, and that means the top-level dungeon ranger weapon is a situational tool rather than something to aspire for. It's not as if you're much better off with a pair of yaks, either.

The second time around, I did my epics even though it was Luclin by then, and I don't know how you can possibly claim that you never got aggro from your slow-proccing main hand weapon. That's absurd. Unless you only ever grouped with endgame warriors and always made sure to engage mobs after a safety delay and bla bla, all those things that certainly will reduce the risk but also kind of suck to have to do due to your class-defining item. I'm thinking you want your class to look a bit better than it really is, and will blindly defend any presented shortcoming and flaw to the point of silliness. Everyone knows that slow is pretty much the highest aggro spell type in the game, and the Earthcall proc does not have inherently reduced aggro. It was a commonly accepted fact that the ranger epics provided an excellent off-hand and a situational slow tool (that a common drop from KC did just as well), making it the only class whose epic wasn't a "for life" staple (until replaced in later expansions, of course). I certainly went out of my way to sidegrade my main-hand to something with a similar ratio and without a potentially crippling proc as soon as I could. To say that the slow proc won't cause problems is false or ignorant. Basic knowledge of game mechanics and a clearer memory would bring us closer to the truth; and Jolt isn't in the game until Velious, anyway.

[YendorLootmonkey]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

To say that the slow proc won't cause problems is false or ignorant. Basic knowledge of game mechanics and a clearer memory would bring us closer to the truth; and Jolt isn't in the game until Velious, anyway.

Perhaps you are the one with the memory issues and lack of knowledge of game mechanics, as has been pointed out above, Jolt was definitely a Kunark spell, and I definitely had it by the time I had my epics, so no... the Earthcaller proc wasn't a big deal to me. Played a ranger from near release to GoD as my main, re-rolled one here, because the class isn't as bad and the weapons aren't as bad as everyone is trying their damnedest to make them out to be. Even if we don't have Jolt, we have Grasping Roots as an aggro management tool. Failure to use it when necessary is just piss-poor playing and is probably one of the reasons for all of the "ranger down" jokes.

[YendorLootmonkey]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Anyway, anecdotal evidence is fun, so here's mine: I played a ranger twice, once as my very first character up to level thirty-something eleven years ago and then as my main from Luclin to GoD.

Also, to point out... if you played up to level 30-something years ago, you were probably okay tanking mobs unless you were doing that in the Kunark/Velious era. But you wouldn't have had epics at level 30-something so I suppose you're drawing more on your later experience.

In which case, after Luclin release, if you recall... unless you were one of those stubborn ones who held onto the "rangers should be melee DPS!" concept, the paradigm shifted to archery DPS for rangers with the introduction of AAs, in which case you kept Swiftwind in hand for the haste, Earthcaller in your main just for the stats unless you had something better stat-wise, and plinked the shit out of mobs with no aggro risk with EQ/AM3 for max DPS.

For raids, rangers had basically three primary roles...

1) Ranged DPS, in which case you maxed DEX gear for crits with EQ/AM3/Trueshot and resist gear in case your bow range did not exceed AE range (I just made Starwynd drool).

2) Weaponshield tanking (to let warriors establish initial aggro on high-DPS mobs)

3) Add kiting (more circumstantial on the encounter than the first two)

None of which involved issues with melee weapons at all except for (2), where you wanted the mob on you anyway.

But since we will never see Luclin here, we will never have the first role except for maybe the duration of our Trueshot disc in Kunark.

Also, and I will admit memory may not serve me correctly on this, but I thought I remembered in classic, a high level ranger was generally considered to be bad-ass and didn't yet have the HP/AC/mitigation issues that were revealed with the Kunark expansion. So I don't know if the mechanics changed drastically with Kunark release and were never rolled back properly here, or maybe I just remember incorrectly on this point.

[RKromwell]

Jolt came out during RoK. It was a level 55 spell. During SoV they added Cinder Jolt at 55 and moved Jolt down to 51.