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Bedouin skills:
Endure Heat - This actually did come in handy a few times. I fought an AP who was spamming fireball and with protection heat/cold, I was taking dismembers and massacres instead of devs like the Huntress was taking
Sandswirl - I fought only a couple of times in the desert and never found a use for this skill
Stash - Not sure how much it can actually hold, but a 30lbs sack wouldn't fit
Whirling Simoon - At hero, this would do damage between injures and devastates, but only in desert terrain. The only conceivable use I could think for this would be to initiate combat if you were blind. Otherwise, bleh.
Dervish Dance - This was the only skill I thought was worth anything for the terrain set. Anyone that is fighting you directly, you get up to two (regular melee damage) hits against them. If you hit them twice, they "swing wildly and miss" one attack the next round as though they were feinted. I'll go into why this was useful later.
Bedouin as a whole was somewhat disappointing. Yes, you can blind for several hours in the desert, but desert fights are VERY limited. You can camouflage in an area most other rangers can't. You can resist dirt and blindness dust attempts decently. Other than that, you lose entangle and snare, which make killing in the wilderness a lot harder. If there was one thing I'd like to extol, it would be dervish dance.
Animist:
Animism/Speak with Spirits/Track - Made finding and tracking people easy.
Zephyr - On it's own, this was fairly decent in keeping dirt kicks and blindness dust away. With the Bedouin bonus, there was one time I got strangled by an assassin and he failed 15 attempts in a row to blindness dust me. I thought that was pretty awesome.
Symbiosis - It was hard to pull off a lot of healing in a fast-paced pk. If they could just walk away, then this didn't have much use with how many hp it would heal. However, being able to heal others while ranking and save them from death as a somewhat gimped healer made it a nice perk.
Cloud of Wasps/Primordial Vengeance - I'll lump this together because if you get them both off, that person would either be dead, broke from paying for healing, or have to use a lot of extra resources. Taking wasp damage for however many hours without healing will kill you, going to the wilds to mitigate the wasps, vengeance will kill you. Both will lag the person they're on too. I originally wanted to gun for Sunwarden, because combining this with insects would be nasty.
Spirit Allies - Not sure how secret this is, so I won't go into detail. I will say that this made the expertise choice VERY nice, both offensively and defensively.
Gust of Wind - Seemed to be a low-rent buffet. I remember it doing a couple of oblits against a flying opponent. Personally, I felt like it cost too much to be used effectively in a pk situation. It *could* have it's uses.
Spirit Guardian - Eh. Not great. Okay at best. Nothing to really say about this spell.
Spirit Howl - I think this could only be used in the wilds and if you weren't in combat, which severly limited it. Using it would also take away your surprise and your waylay/ambush.
Animists overall: Lack a LOT of power outside of the wilds. They were, however, severely overpowered in the wilds. You have POWERFUL damage over time spells (wasps/vengeance) that would make it impossible to stay in the wilds and survive. You have the heightened ability to heal yourself and others as an offensive non-empowered melee class. You also have great tracking abilities.
As a Bedouin Animist: The saving grace of this set was dervishdance, which made raiding Spire and Empire a lot more doable. I found this particularly nice when a necromancer kept fleeing and returning to fight in the Spire and I nearly killed him. A ranger *nearly* killing someone out of the wilds at the inner in a raid situation, to me, is damn impressive. I also found the skill useful in ranking since all you really have as an animist in your non-spell arsenal is pugil and kick for damage. The second perk was the zephyr/bedouin resistance combo for avoiding dirt kick. When I got disarm to 100%, dirt kick/disarm (which I don't see enough people use any more) got rid of a lot of threats. This isn't a class set I'd suggest to anyone without patience, but it was fun while it lasted.
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