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a class is only as bad as its player.
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Yeah, and for a ranger to be of equal worth to any other given class, the ranger's player has to be better than the player of the class in question. Statements like yours are worseless, and I always chuckle a bit when it comes up, because it does so in any and every discussion about rangers. It was the same thing back on the eqclassic forums. There can be no possible argument against the fact that the ranger class is, from an objective point of view, significantly worse than any other class. That "pro ranger player" could play another class and contribute more. Also there is very little skill involved in EQ's game mechanics, and it's not as if a druid can become a better healer than an equally leveled/geared cleric just because the player is more "skilled", unless we're comparing him to a clinically retarded person.
There is almost no conceivable situation wherein a ranger is better than one or more of the classes that do things better than them. Their DPS is the worst of all the traditional DPS classes, and even worse than warriors (when they don't have to use sub-par ratio tank weapons) with the possible exception of groups that have both clarity and bard mana song available. They are far worse tanks than the three other taunt classes, and probably worse than monks as well except that monks can't hold aggro very effectively. Their spells are acquired so late that most of them are almost worthless already; SoW can be provided by two of the most common classes, and can pretty much be replaced by a soloable quest that almost everyone does anyway. Snare can be provided by SK, necro, wizard, druid, bard, and even clerics/shaman of Innoruuk can cast clinging darkness which, while a pretty bad snare, does its job to prevent mobs from sprinting through half the dungeon (which they don't even do here). Until later on, Rangers even have horrible skill caps, and many of the ranger-specific weapons have procs that make them a liability: root, slow, high-aggro stun nukes etc.
It doesn't mean rangers can't do anything. They're ok DPS, they can sort of tank exp groups to an acceptable extent, they have some decent utility, and they aren't
useless. It's just that there's almost no possible combination of classes a group can have that makes the ranger a desirable member, so usually it's a compromise rather than a valuable addition. And groups would always pick the rogue, wizard, druid etc. over the ranger unless it was a friend or guildie. That's what makes ranger the worst class in the game, and no amount of useless rhetoric such as quoted above will change that fact.