[Estu]

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

You're right that in luclin we got the endless quiver aa and the archery mastery aa, both of which brought us into a special era that set us apart especially so. But I think it got drowned out after that and melee once again assumed front and center stage for most of us. We still used trueshot, though.

But you know, even in hte beginning, the class symbol for a ranger was a quiver and bow. From the start, we get criticals with our bow at level 13 or something. Tolans Bracer gives us summoned arrows. With snare, our bow can actually be used to kite rather than as a pulling agent. Combined with our dots, it allows us to take a target down from a distance if the need presents itself. We're naturally drawn to outdoor envrinments because of our skills and we're best able to kite in an outdoor envrionment as well.

I still wish they had thought more deeply about the ranger and figured out a way to make our bows more worthwhile while not making us too powerful in the different fields of battle.

I also think there're two groups: Aragorn and Legolas. One group thinks we're meleer's that carry big swords, and the other wants to use a bow and two shortswords for close combat. But legolas was actually an archer, even though he displays many of the things we relate to the ranger class. He could see far away and had a strong tracking sense. He used his bow to thwart the enemy from a distance. He could fight up close and dual wield his two short swords with deadly accuracy. He had a strong sense of magical things, elven things, evil things from mordor, etc. He and Aragorn had many of the same traits, except that Aragorn almost always used his two handed sword. Like Legolas, he could track a prey and hunt it down. His eyes are not as far seeing as Legolas, though. But I got a sense from the novels that he made up for that because of his knowledge, skill and intuition from his long years crisscrossing middle earth. To be honest, I think that the conventional ranger fits Aragorn very well, but the ranger class in EQ is best fit by both. Another thing that suggests this to be true is that neither Aragorn nor Legolas used any magic; other than a magic sense ability. This tells me that the ranger class should not be confused with its conventional D&D counterpart nor the historic ranger we know of that patrolled for the king. We have to be willing to bend with it and see that it's an evolving matter.

I do think that classes have distorted our thinking. Skill-based games don't do this.

LOTR isn't really the best class reference anyhow since barely any of the characters used magic of the kind that you see in D&D, EQ, and various fantasy RPGs. They've clearly deviated a lot from the Tolkien universe in that regard, which is good since magic makes these games a lot more fun.