Rangers ever use range in VoS?

[Daldaen]

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

During burns with trueshot up, YES. I even mentioned that in my post. Again, 2 minutes out of every 60. Melee has always been better without trueshot burning unless you have bad weapons or have neglected melee AAs.

Not really no.

Especially during PoP. Partially due to itemization. Because the 2nd/3rd best bows of the day were the Obsidianwood/Primordial Driftwood Bows. Though they required drops from the elemental plane to make, they were tradeable (the later being easily farmed with a group at D3 camp).

Basically it lead to situations where many Rangers had access to an EP quality bow and their weapons were just VT quality or Epic quality. The difference between them was stark.

Even once Ranger got access to EP No Drop 1handers, the bows still out parsed. Looking through some posts from EQMac, 65 Ranger with max AA/ATK pulled out 150 DPS with Coirnav Hammer/Agnarr Sword during a 10 hour parse with 100% Haste. Now bow parses of 11+ hours pulled up:

Featherwood - 150
Stonewood - 153.5
Primordial - 156.8
Obsidianwood - 166.2
Bow of the Tempest (PoTime) - 175.5

All done with 100% Haste. Bows were the best option even when other things were equal. The reason many Rangers didn't use bows 100% of the time was because of arrow collision. Any mob being corner tanked, the arrows would get lost in the wall and do 0 damage. As a result If you wanted that ranger burn and solid sustained DPS, you had to tank the mob out of a wall/corner which meant balancing push and less easy to avoid AEs.

Archery also had the benefit (atleast on Mac server, but I'm fairly sure this is a classic feature) that it generated nearly 0 hate. So while Rogues had to evade and monks had to FD and Wizards had to Concussion pants and Necros had to FD... Rangers were always the last to die in a wipe because of how little hate archery generated. I would imagine it calculated the hate off the arrow instead of off the bow, which bugged it to be 1 hate per arrow or something.

[Morlaeth]

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

Yeah, the ranger class not having superb ranged abilities from the get-go was one of EQ's greatest fuck ups.

Imagine a ranger epic bow with cool lightning and shit with bow/arrow haste

hot damn boner

Bards should've been instrument and song pew pew only.

[fadetree]

Pop was freakin awesome, the pinnacle of EQ. But yeah, ranger aa's were in luclin...it was glorious to finally have something special to do. We were not top DPS automatically, but we were close for the duration of trueshot.

[fadetree]

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

Not really no.

Especially during PoP. Partially due to itemization. Because the 2nd/3rd best bows of the day were the Obsidianwood/Primordial Driftwood Bows. Though they required drops from the elemental plane to make, they were tradeable (the later being easily farmed with a group at D3 camp).

Basically it lead to situations where many Rangers had access to an EP quality bow and their weapons were just VT quality or Epic quality. The difference between them was stark.

Even once Ranger got access to EP No Drop 1handers, the bows still out parsed. Looking through some posts from EQMac, 65 Ranger with max AA/ATK pulled out 150 DPS with Coirnav Hammer/Agnarr Sword during a 10 hour parse with 100% Haste. Now bow parses of 11+ hours pulled up:

Featherwood - 150
Stonewood - 153.5
Primordial - 156.8
Obsidianwood - 166.2
Bow of the Tempest (PoTime) - 175.5

All done with 100% Haste. Bows were the best option even when other things were equal. The reason many Rangers didn't use bows 100% of the time was because of arrow collision. Any mob being corner tanked, the arrows would get lost in the wall and do 0 damage. As a result If you wanted that ranger burn and solid sustained DPS, you had to tank the mob out of a wall/corner which meant balancing push and less easy to avoid AEs.

Archery also had the benefit (atleast on Mac server, but I'm fairly sure this is a classic feature) that it generated nearly 0 hate. So while Rogues had to evade and monks had to FD and Wizards had to Concussion pants and Necros had to FD... Rangers were always the last to die in a wipe because of how little hate archery generated. I would imagine it calculated the hate off the arrow instead of off the bow, which bugged it to be 1 hate per arrow or something.

I think distance was a factor in the hate calcs too. I always shot from max range. For corner tanking I found that if I could lev up somewhere above the crowd I could get a decent hit rate.

[wormed]

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

If you take away the Book system from the plane of Knowledge, PoP was an awesome xpac. It would be cool if in 2016, well after Velious was launched, the team here at P99 went to work on some "custom content". And i do not mean TOTALLY new stuff. I just mean a selective roll out of features, and zones that were true to EverQuests original spirit. For instance, some of the zones in PoP, making rangers ranged.. etc.

Agreed.

I don't mind how Nilbog hates the idea of AA's being, "hey, you dinged 50 another 6x for that skill, grats!", but he did say that maybe some class defining AA's would be implemented via quest, or something like that.

As a Paladin... I want some of those AA's! Slay Undead was very cool. Hell, even Mass Group Buff was just awesome.

[uygi]

IIRC ranger DPS in Velious was almost worthwhile with TS and a stationary mob. TS made your DPS kinda-similarly equivalent to AM3.

Ranger bow AAs were really just a Luclin thing. EQ/AM3 were the OP abilities. After that you increased your DPS with gear and by just buying crit AAs and boosting ATK (which applied to melee as well...). Archery stayed viable because for a while they kept putting out good enough bows. By GoD/OoW era the melee AAs had bridged the remaining gap and properly set up melee rangers were doing more DPS.

But that was never really the point. There were lots of raids where only rangers could avoid AEs. I still thought Mystical Arbiter of Earth was super fun as a ranger. Everybody else got hit with the mana/hp DoT and all died, but the rangers stayed out of range. As soon as the mob died, the rangers would race in and heal like fuck to keep 1-2 clerics up. The clerics got a kick out of that. Of course on P99 we'd just use clickies so it wouldn't matter.

The utility of the class was always the point. In any zone with some room (and especially once snare and root stacked) rangers were solid pullers/CCers. The original harmony spell was OP for a long time, but eventually phased out. The new single target harmony was still really powerful combined with root/snare. Add ranged DPS and WS for emergencies and they were badass.

[webrunner5]

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

http://wiki.project1999.com/Disciplines

Trueshot shown as a 2 minute disc doubling bow damage (for some reason 3 sticks in my mind though).

The problem with Trueshot in old discipline world, is burning it prevents you from using Weaponshield. And as far as tactics go, Weaponshield is far more valuable to a Raid than some ranger doing mediocre Windstriker DPS.

That is not true. Having 6, 8, 10 or more Rangers doing Trueshot at the same time with crits, softening up the Mob, and dying doing it, is probably the reason you might have had some good gear on live in a Raid that was successful. Not counting tracking the Mob to find it to start with. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Give a Ranger a BIG hug the next time you see one. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[curtischoy]

Nah I don't have any proof. I just remember ranger bow dps was the best for a while. Maybe stopped being the best after GoD came out? I don't remember.

And it def wasn't due to the competition neglecting melee aa. I was in raiding guilds and many had max aa the month after any expansion with new aa came out.

[Xealias]

Most rangers probably could stay ranged DPS till the darkglint blade dropped in Ikkinz. The infamous elf shoe. That said, many didn't, because you could easily approach ranged dps with time weapons and very few guilds didn't have everyone equipped with gear by the time you could start raiding GoD.

http://zam.zamimg.com/images/5/0/50a...f200dfb084.png

As for ranger AAs, click snare and insta-invis were pretty game changing for me. I'm sure AM3/EQ were at the time, but in the long run snare/camo were insanely powerful abilities.

[Thulack]

The fun times being a ranger doing Plane of Time Zek bros lol.