Funny thing is, Ranger was THE most popular class in 1999 and actually relatively strong in the early days, because Rangers had very nearly the same stats as Warriors (partially due to everyone wearing the same Rubicite armor), plus tracking and useful spells...although hybrids didn't have meditate back then. Hybrids got meditate in 1999 around the time Rubicite stopped dropping and Warriors started getting better armor than Rangers, so people still really liked Rangers at that point and the RPG urge to play the class lived on.
Rangers quickly went from being the most popular class to being probably the most maligned class in Kunark. Rouges/Monks/Warriors all got massive gains in comparison to the hybrid classes with that expansion, but Rangers in particular had the most difficult time because in 1999 era they were viable enough tanks for a lot of content, but then for much of the Kunark content they couldn't tank effectively enough. To make matters worse, even though they were doing less DPS than Warriors, they were still pulling aggro away from Warriors because low-delay dual-wielding inherently generated more aggro in the game code back then. After much outrage they were finally given the "Jolt" spell, a shitty fix to the problem, but they still remained sub-par tanks and sub-par at DPS. When you throw in the exp penalty in addition to that - people were increasingly disgusted by it when they learned it was "shared" in groups, especially because of how long it took to level post 50 - it left Rangers in a very bad place.
At the end of Velious era, after all of the improvements to the hybrids are put into place (including the boost to 2-handed weapon damage, which is a large benefit for SK's and Paladins), the hybrids will usually outshine Warriors in most situations except for the handful of raid targets Warriors are still needed to tank. Annoyingly, Monks get a large DPS boost at the same time as the final round of hybrid buffs, so they just become even more OP in comparison. I really hope that final round of melee class buffs is skipped on p99 and considered "Luclin era", since it happened right before Luclin was released and is pointless power creep. The removal of exp penalty + first round of Velious hybrid buffs is what feels most classic and that's enough to put the hybrids in a solid place (along with the 2-hander damage boost, which is something the devs back then talked about for a long time before finally coding correctly and getting into the game).
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08-25-2015, 01:27 AM
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