NPC melee fix(ed?)

[messiah_b]

The origin of the Ranger joke thing was from classic. It comes down to their skill sets and skill caps which didn't give them place in the group that couldn't easily be filled better by other classes.

If you want melee dps, rangers certainly had the skills to have high dps. Dual-wield, double-atk, combined with high dexterity and something like double yakks made them dps machines. Big problem was that they were paper thin and didn't have any aggro or dmg mitigation. Their dodge / parry / riposte skills were laughably low capped and they were given taunt instead of evade.

Anyone remember seeing this scenario...

Mob gets ~40%

*Ranger snare
*quad proc - yak proc, quad proc, quad proc - yak proc
*has aggro and starts to get chain stunned
*Warrior presumably fails taunt and cleric's heal goes off on a dead body.
*Everyone looks around wondering wtc just happened

Results are either
a) You have a ranger laced for dps, but you encounter the scenario above. Even if the ranger doesn't die he will take enough dmg in short duration to be a drain on the healers.
b) You have a ranger along for snares / off heals but a Druid was 10x better.

Edit: To the point above about taking hits as well as melee, they did okay. Certainly not as well as the plate classes or monks (due to skill caps). They took hits as well as rogues but rogues shouldn't have aggro for more than 5 seconds after a backstab.