Can a ranger twinked thusly tank for groups 1 - 50?
 

Full set of Rubicite, FBSS, Dual Lammies, and the other slots filled with 500 - 2k items.

Instead of Ruby get some tolan's higher AC, Rubi stuff is pretty shitty given the era we are in.

Back in the day when 50 was max I had a dope ranger friend. Rubi bp, fbss, SSoY / Root Sword combo, held better agro, tanked more damage, and dealt more damage than any other tank in sol b.

Oh there is not doubt that a Ranger can get the job done. You HAVE to have a pretty well equipted Cleric to heal them. They take a lot of damage compared to a Ogre. As a Cleric I just don't like them in a group. They are a mana sink to me. CH is overkill for them, if you wait too long they die before it hits, and lesser heals are just not mana efficent. So you are either over healing them or jumping up and down with lesser heals. Either way you are always behind mana on them.

I play a Ranger but there is a reason they can't get a group.

My ranger tanked from 1-50, and at times I had some fairly crappy gear, lol.

Also to webrunner5, my ranger has no problems getting groups, /shrug.

Very few rangers gear as a tank, thus the complaints from clerics. With good gear (tolans, obsessive AC hoarding) they can leveling groups as well as the other classes, given that the skill caps havn't been reached yet.

Playing my druid back then, I can tell you this is entirely false.

A well equipped ranger, especially given the equipment that has become available since, will crush sol B mobs with his nice dps, ac, ds, and ykesha & root procs. Hell, since we were a ranger / druid combo and he could tank well enough, we would duo the spectres in Feerrott -- a 30 point damage shield tears them apart.

Once again - a ranger in str gear? No. A ranger itemized for HP and AC with proccing weapons, however, is quite a potent threat to the Oldworld dungeons like Sol B and LGuk.

Rangers can tank just fine from 1-60. They hold aggro well and their mitigation/hp is fine. Whether you can tank in groups isn't a matter of how good your hp and mitigation is relative to conventional tanks (wars, sk's, pallies), but instead whether your hp and mitigation is good enough for pulls to still be efficient and for exp to be reasonably fast. Here's a list of classes that usually satisfy this condition:

Pally, Monk, SK, Warrior, Ranger, Bard, Shaman.

Usually if you suggest a ranger, bard or shaman for a tank in an exp group people will raise their eyebrows, but I've pulled for groups with the above classes as tanks in zones like Charasis and the exp was still pretty fast (definitely faster than the average pug). Be open minded and don't just deny someone a group invite because they aren't an SK, Pally or Warrior.

edit: I agree with what people say above though that the ranger should be wearing tank gear though.

The difference between Knight vs Ranger is double the difference between Warrior vs Knight.



2 coppers.

With good gear a ranger is a great tank at lower levels, but later on you will just get worse and worse compared to the 3 other tanking classes.