Wed Sep 10 14:41:28 2014

At 2 o'clock PM, Day of Thunder, 10th of the Month of the Battle
on the Theran calendar Erjoloc perished, never to return.

Well, it was a fun ride.
Erjoloc was my first Ranger ever and I made him to try the class. He was also my first outlander above lvl 30. I had a lot of fun with Erjoloc and learned a bunch about rangers. Here were my thoughts:

Forester:
Nice and easy. Good for a newb ranger to learn with because of the amount of forests in game. I do not really have anything bad to say about it.
Beastmaster:
This was Meh at best.
Bears were ok if I knew I had a great chance of winning, but they almost never followed me when I fled.
Serpent kinship sucks. Its VERY Niche and I don’t understand why you can’t use it in cities. IRL snakes can be found in cities, maybe make it useable without the chance for poison? Or make it a bit more like the Bear kinships so that the snake stays a bit? I really don’t know.
Wolf kinship was really cool, I wouldn’t change it a bit.

All in all I had a lot of fun. I tried to be balls to the walls and that caused a bit of grief for some, and got me killed a lot (Ulamette killed me 5 times within an hour one night)!

I deleted mainly because I was on a con slide and I didn’t want to tie up gear for anyone else. There are a lot of sunwardens that are all pretty cool. I got mad at one for not responding or coming to assist with that night against Ulamette, but I didn’t let it get in game.

Outlanders:

Eialanthius: Awesome character. You stuck to your guns on a lot and seemed like a good Sunwarden. Keep it up!

Tamraelas: My cat brother! I loved when you logged in because we could wreck #### with pack sense. Keep going man!

Foedett: Man! I loved watching you work and working with you when you logged in. We had some great times!

Reyn: Keep plugging away. I will talk more on your death thread, just for now keep going strong and don’t give it up.

Tribunal:

Eletar: You were scary to me until I hit hero. Then you were slightly scary. When you lost your weapon I knew I could get you finally. I had a lot of pay back to give to you and only got it once. I actually came to die to you because I was trying to con die. Turns out it didn’t happen!

Elasia: Ugh. That’s all I can say. I knew you were tuff and you proved it every time we fought. I got you once with Foedett’s help but without his traps you had my number.

Regrag: Erjoloc Hated you. I didn’t really, but I always wanted to catch you outside of town and you NEVER left alone. Get out man! You’re a healer, get a bit aggressive and have fun. Idling in town is boring!

Rylium: I liked our talks and named you Aer’nok(chance) because of that one conversation, then right after you did something that pissed me off and I went against that promise I made about the scales. I can’t remember what happened exactly, but erjoloc was mad about it and I took the scales a few times because of it.

Others: Just seemed like Tribunal number 838504385. Do something exciting! Stop being bland lol. This is probably because I didn’t get much RP in with you, take it with a grain of salt.

Empire:

Jarlduz: I KILLED YOU ONCE! LOL That was the highlight of Erjolocs short life. You were nasty to fight and don’t look forward to it again.

Others: Ashmon and I RPed a tiny bit after he smashed my face, but other than that I didn’t see much.

Strienat:

Thanks for giving me the chance, I knew this was coming and wanted to do it before we spoke again. This was the first time I followed an Imm without one of their spheres. I have no idea what would have happened but it was neat to think about. You are a strong force for Outlanders and a REALLY cool (one of my top three) imm. Keep up the great work.

If I missed you please reply. I would love to talk to you!

is awful. it is the lowest expertise other than survivalist, which i might take some survivalist builds over it just to keep scroll skill.

- there are no mobs to tame once 40+, that is just stupid.
- serpent kinship rarely lands special effects. it should land and land often or be targeted. not only that but i've never seen hold person last longer than 4 ticks on a pc. i've held npcs for 3 ticks though, which makes zero sense.
- predators stance, it's ok but has no benefit once in hero range
- wasps, awesome in the 30s, not all that awesome in 40+. hard to land, easy to deal with as a hero. good spell but becomes very situational
- wolfkinship, great, fun skill, but would be best if it could be called more frequently. also would be cool if different terrain wolves had different special abilities (some bite for bleeding, pounce, hamstring like dire wolf, raking claws, etc)

**editing to add that serpent kinship either 1)fails to contact any snakes or 2)the person leaps out of the way or 3)just damage is what tends to happen. honestly, the distribution seems 25% across the board of fail, miss, damage, special effect, so getting the RIGHT special effect out of the randomness is so worthless to not bother attempting.

Erjoloc - I had a few interactions from you from another side, and enjoyed it. I was a fan, sad to see you go so fast.


Beastmaster Thoughts
Having fought a few beastmasters, I think you are wildly underestimating wasps and wolf kinship.

Wasps make battles that could be close suddenly winnable, as they can make your opponent fail abilities and freeze so that they can't run away easily. This can have quite the impact on a caster/communer. Even if the freeze wears off quickly, you have pathfinding. You should be on top of them quickly. Should they truly get away, it is possible that the wasps will just flat out kill them.

Wolf kinship is good, and becomes amazing if combined with outlander beast call. Having two strong mobs tracking on someone gives a huge advantage. Even by itself it has some value.

I'm not going to argue the rest of the abilities, tame has limited potential and serpent kinship is incredibly unreliable. That being said, beastmaster has great potential. At one point savage may have been flat out better, but with the tweaks to savage blow I'm not convinced it is now. I'm not sure what other expertise someone would consider a clearly better choice than beastmaster. I can see others to choose, but there is a trade off to each in my mind.

All that being said, if you want to continue this conversation, lets move it to gameplay.

Ordah dictates I kill termites when I know they wanna come to their deaths.

Ack! I saw the hollows after logging in and sighed sadly. The last thing I wanted to see. Had some fun trucking along with you. It is really too bad our times didn't match up just a little better.
Hope you can come back in some incarnation or other.
Edited to add:
I have always wanted to try a beastmaster but haven't because I probably wouldn't survive half as long as you did. There a couple of things I need to survive as a ranger that beastmaster doesn't have.

I had no idea they were adamantite!