Quote:
Originally Posted by Elmarnieh
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Thats a shame.
A ranger should be pushed to the edge to prove how valuable they are to a group not sit there and let casters force feed them. The ranger must know when to root for aggro, root for cc, when to snare to bring mobs in staggered pulls to the group with good timing for the speed at which the group kills, when not to snare because it would take aggro from the tank, when and when not to use flamelick to offtank and to peel for root parking, when to heal the necro, or the tank, or a dps who is dying on a damage shield and doesn't realize it before they get low hp aggro and die off, when to "get lost" on the pull because the warrior is ignoring the cleric saying LOM and that the shaman said "afk baby is crying". A ranger needs to learn when to use sneak and when to use harmony. When to face pull, snare, root pull, and when just harmony and shoot an arrow. A ranger needs to know when to load that big nuke and when to cast it to burn gater or poor on dps because there on lots of mobs in camp and ench is getting nervous (and to keep an eye on the health of that nervous ench because the cleric will need mana for CH's on the tank with all the mobs in camp). A ranger needs to know how to sort track for the most advantageous list for their level and the camp and the mobs the group is capable of, know how to get them, and know how to get them back single.
The life of a ranger is knowledge and practice in the art. Sit on your ass in cdok if you want kiddies and wear the class but you'll never BE THE CLASS.
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I think rangers are a pretty cool class, and I was really looking forward to playing one, but after investigating how bow damage works, the experience penalty, their lower damage output than other melee classes, their inability to tank compared to other tanks, I genuinely don't see the point to playing one outside of novelty. Or to be a maverick, or because you genuinely just enjoy the way the class plays and min-maxing be damned.
And those are all fine reasons but the problem still is that very few of those comments are unique to rangers. A lot of these are, "Because I'm a ranger and not quite as good as everyone else at doing something I have to do this really roundabout thing to look useful". You can make those sound like separate actions, but almost all of those are tantamount to the fact that rangers just aren't tanks and they don't do particularly great damage and are awful at healing.
The rest of them are made to imply that the group is incompetent and somehow by being a well played ranger you fix all of that, which is a pretty loose road to travel down since you're predicating your usefulness on the stupidity of others. This makes your argument that rangers can only actually be useful if they are played to their fullest while the rest of the party is not.
I wouldn't ever turn someone down because they were a ranger, because quite frankly I don't care, but it's pretty hard to try and argue that rangers bring something unique to the table that merits their XP sink. For instance, a druid has no exp penalty and could satisfy better almost all the criteria you mentioned. They have better snares, roots, CC's in general, they offer better healing, and their damage output is pretty solid between the DoT's and Nukes they offer. They also offer substantially better buffs.
They cannot tank, but this is fine as rangers can't either (they can just not tank longer than druids can by a bit), and would resort to similar tactics to alleviate tank damage (probably snaring and rooting).
Like I said though, I wouldn't turn a ranger down--but if this thread is asking "Why does everyone hate rangers?" it's for the reasons listed: They have a 40% experience penalty while offering the worst of damage of the dps classes, the worst healing of the hybrid classes, the worst tanking of the hybrid classes, the weakest buffs of classes that can buff, and their only real benefit is that they simultaneously provide the worst of everything so that in the event you need them to, they can go full-blown gimp-healer, gimp-tank, or mediocre-dps.
I don't think we should really misinform people about the state of that class, they should know full well what they're getting into if they're interested in playing it. I was planning on making a ranger as my alt, but after reading all the material on this site and the wiki and other sites, but as a bit of a min-maxer I just can't find an applicable reason to do so.
The perks of playing a ranger however are: they get very cool weapons, despite how much they suck they also get critical hits with bows which are cool, I prefer the look of chain mail to plate, they get to turn into a wolf and fight bitches.