Some mariner loving would be vastly appreciated. Most of my useful skills come from being a hunter, all the mariner stuff seems pretty weak. I could go into more detail but I don't want to sound whiney.

>Some mariner loving would be vastly appreciated. Most of my
>useful skills come from being a hunter, all the mariner stuff
>seems pretty weak. I could go into more detail but I don't
>want to sound whiney.

Overall, a useless post as there is no real suggestions in how to improve mariner rangers. Moved to Long-term projects to see if anyone else has thoughts.

When I played a mariner, I thought the neatest thing about it was being able to camo on water. That's huge considering that most everyone has to cross the continents at one point or another. You're only giving up snare, charge, and pathfinding, all of which are given equivalent replacements. Snare - netcasting, charge - harpoon, pathfinding - navigation.

Suggestions for improvement, if anything, could be giving them the drown spell, letting entangle work to lesser effect on land, allowing the ability to scan on the Open Sea, and maybe strengthening stormcalling. Otherwise, you're able to camo and creep in the one place that every character has to pass. Outlanders and their enemies cross regularly, there's a ranking spot or two you have to cross the water for, and, to get to Seantryn, Veran, Basilica, Trothan, Vaults, etc., you're going to have to cross the water.

Mariners are terrible, evidenced by the fact that after all these years AFAIK my ranger Trevant (who was a hunter), is still the most "successful" Pk-wise mariner to date.

Mariners, IMHO, would be fine under two circumstances :

1) Netcasting works better.
2) That lightning spell they have actually works/does something. That was totally broken when I had it (broken as in you cast it and nothing happens at all).

They don't need anything super epic, just fixing those two skills would make them decent. Netcasting, a whole lot of times, just did nothing noticeable at all. I think its too easy to save against or whatever. Stormcalling never worked when I had it, if it actually works now and does call lightning multiple times on people then that's cool.

Well, now that storm calling has been fixed I'll have to re-evaluate. Part of my logic was that the spell seemed useless ;).

Few things spring to mind however, with storm calling fixed:

1) Some really useful tweaks would be to make it so that creep wasn't quite so penalized or that you could stay camo'd while affected by water currents. With the way it currently works I have to keep flight up at all times while stalking people.

2) Netcasting is good but it used to be (may be changed) that you could just spam it and eventually hit the flee without getting lagged at all. Since I don't have parting blow, maybe give it a round of lag on flee?

3) The engulf prog could use some polishing, the problem is that everything underwater is immune to drowning and it doesn't fire frequently enough to be a factor in PK. Maybe have something that can go off on land, or up its frequency so its more likely to go off against someone in a PK fight?

Possibly a small buffeting affect when underwater.