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Forum Name Gameplay
Topic subjectRanger grabbag of questions.
Topic URLhttps://forums.carrionfields.com/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=6&topic_id=53270
53270, Ranger grabbag of questions.
Posted by Dallevian on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
Why can a ranger not see a hidden thief/assassin in the plains?

The damage buff to ancestral spirit is nice. I'd further suggest making the hometerrain bonus affect chance happen each cast and also allowing a chance for it to happen outside hometerrain.

Gust of wind still seems screwy in regards to targeted spells / area spell / avoiding (see bug board).

Serpentkin. Please lower damage and make 1 round skill?

Tame. Please add some ok 40+ mobs to tame?

Bearkin. Ugh, what a terrible skill.

Bedouins, please allow for a (high) chance at two tick dirt kick outside of hometerrain and if not an explorer? They give up so much already that I really feel like the dirt kick and auto-dirt should happen outside a desert without being an explorer.

Make cave shadowstride better when outside a cave at night.

Please add more bows for hunters THAT ARE NOT MAGICAL. Why are there so many friggin magical bows?

Allow non-storm giant mariners to cast herbs outside of water.

Boost stormcalling.

Make spirit howl and deafening howl more likely to deafen (and longer?).


Thanks for considering.
53274, I see one real question, and a bunch of please buff this skill requests. (n/t)
Posted by Ekaerok on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
(n/t)
53275, and? nt
Posted by Dallevian on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
nt
53276, He's right though.
Posted by Eskelian on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
Rangers have not really gotten much in the way of love since their revamp. There's only 3 or so viable builds out of the dozens that are possible. Beastmasters, Bedouin, Archers and Mariners could use some love/buffs (for quite some time now).

For mariners, really all they need is entangle on land and maybe a little better creeping on some terrains. I'm not sure about stormcalling since it didn't work when I played mine at all.

Beastmasters - those bears are a liability. That morale effect needs to go. Considering you give up scrolls to be a beastmaster it needs a pretty huge buff.

Hunters tend to do better in PVP without using their bows at all, which is bizarre. This is because of how bad aimed shot is and how hard it is to get their maledictions to land. I'd have to do immolating shot like 7 or 8 times to get it to hit on someone, that's not realistic in PVP. They also give up a lot, including bearcharge (effectively, since it doesn't lag at all), backrake, entangle, dual wield and axes...That's a lot considering aimed shot is awful, their maledictions aren't viable in PVP, timed shot takes 4 rounds to land and doesn't stack with harpoon and you can't dual wield while using swords/whips, etc. Also there's a huge amount of opportunity costs since you're stalking people to fight them better/adequately. So here I am stalking a guy for 15 minutes IRL time and then I get into a fight and can't even lag him to save my life or do enough damage to kill him. He words and I just wasted all that time.

Bedouins - honestly never played one and probably will never play one because of how niche they are.
53277, Beastmasters and hunters could use some love
Posted by -flso on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
That's not to say that they can't be deadly, my best PkPh rangers have all been
beastmasters, but a lot of their core skills are broken.

To reiterate what I've posted before:

* Tame is just bad right now, need more mobs to tame starting with:

* Wolf from kinship can not be tamed and is buggy re: chasing, getting confused

* Can't waylay someone when having a tamed pet. Given how often one would
like to use waylay vs ambush, this makes tame useless. Easy fix would be to make
all tameable mobs have camo. Another option would be to let waylay work on
snared villains even if the pet is not camo.

* Serpent kinship is just useless. It's 2 rounds of lag on you and can have 6 different
outcomes (fail to contact serpents, serpents miss, serpents hit for damage,
serpents hit for poison, serpents hit for confusion, serpents hit for paralysis).
This is way too random to be of serious benefit in PK, and this is a skill that begs
for rework or tuning via edge.

* Predator stance needs to hit for more damage at hero. Scale it up ala savage
feeding.

Wasps is pretty much the only beastmaster skill I'd say is strong. At medium levels,
if one has apiarist, it can be a death sentence for the majority of villains. Not so
at hero and it would be fine if the other skills were up to par.
53281, RE: Beastmasters and hunters could use some love
Posted by Ekaerok on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
Perhaps I just got very unlucky in the sparring I did with someone using serpent kinship, but I was paralyzed a lot from it.

Wolf may need some fine tuning and fixing, but as far as power it can be absolutely mean.

A lot of the ranger builds are very niche (and I think a lot of that is intended), making them tough choices to take for me.

If I had to guess, if a ranger isn't abusing savage blow or pounce/wanderlust they are likely destroying with beastmaster which says something. I might be off with that though.
53285, RE: Beastmasters and hunters could use some love
Posted by -flso on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
Agreed on the intended niche for some ranger builds.

Beastmaster is such a cool concept though, and it just feels bad
when the primary objective of the build (master of beasts) is
substandard.

I'm not sure what to say about your experience with serpent kinship,
I've spent a lot of hours trying to use it in PK and the major
problem is that it's too unpredictable. 6 different outcomes and 2 rounds
lag means that on average, if all outcomes are equally probable which might
very well be wrong, one will land one of the special effects (paralysis/confusion/poison) 50% of the time.

That's 4 rounds of combat lag on me, 4 serpent strikes that I could have done,
or a flee/ambush or 2 bearcharges.

So, one issue is that the skill lag does not fit in very well with how most ranger
fights play out (villain is ambushed literally or figuratively and trying to GTFO).

Another issue, maybe the most important one, is that I have no control over the special effect.
They're all seemingly random. I can't work serpent kinship into
my strategies with this kind of non-control of effects. This may work for
other classes, but a lot of the time rangers need to extract maximum value
out of every single combat round, without wasting any commands.


53294, same experience with serpentkin
Posted by Dallevian on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
landing the paralysis is rare and even when it does land it never seemed to last a decent amount of time. in pk, the longest i ever saw (rigid) was for 4 rounds. what's weird is that there were times it lasted over 2 ticks for mobs (like cabal outer)

**edit to add that this is through 4 beastmaster rangers
53292, Hunters
Posted by Chris.zhees on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM


Giving a Ranger Immolation and poison is very strong

Even with a tribunal in town, I was unable to heal and burned hundreds of gold before being forced into retreat or death
53280, RE: He's right though.
Posted by Ekaerok on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
Some of these I can't really comment on because I've never really invested in some of the ranger builds before.

Bedouins - After watching Iklahn, I have a hard time thinking there is anything wrong with Bedouins.

Hunters - They aren't being ignored, see this post as of this month - http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=47&topic_id=48&mesg_id=48&page=
They may not be perfect, but they are being looked at.

A few of the suggestions I thought were overdoing it - specifically from the sparring I have had with a beastmaster, serpentkin (the added affects) did quite a number on me and if it was every round I could see it destroying.

Mostly, I thought it was a little lame to mask a bunch of balance requests underneath the guise of questions. Thankfully, I'm not the one who would implement any of these so my opinion really doesn't matter.
53290, RE: He's right though.
Posted by Eskelian on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
"A few of the suggestions I thought were overdoing it - specifically from the sparring I have had with a beastmaster, serpentkin (the added affects) did quite a number on me and if it was every round I could see it destroying."

The thing about it is if I roll a beastmaster I want to use beasts lol. And between having tamed pets blocking waylay, tame being kinda meh and if your bears die you get some crazy -moral for 1 million hours...it has the archer problem where you're not using the skills you took the build to get. When I played my archer I never, ever used bow in PVP once I got the hang of the class...beastmaster has a similar problem when it comes to their beasts...you basically take the build for wasps + predators which seems backwards.

I'd be 'ok', nerfing some of the other stuff if the actual pet skills were more on par with how other pets in the game work.