Ranger Archive

• There are people who play the profession despite it beingbroken, and do their best to tell people about how to maximize the usefullness of their profession and try to inspire a positive vibe.


• There are people who play the profession despite it being broken, butinstead of helping, they choose to make fun of the people who can't do what they can do and only add to the negativity on the forums


• There are people who no longer play the profession who constructively provide data onwhat is wrong with the professionand ideas for improving the profession, and generally are helpfull and productive


• There are people who complain incessantly, making the forums much more negative, while providing no objective crtiticism or intelligent insight past the obvious "Ranger is teh suxxors" type of post that is self-serving and utterly pointless.

Playing a Ranger despite it being broken doesn't instantly make you a positive member of this community. Nor does not playing it instantly make you a negaive member of this community. There are people with bad attitudes on both sides, none of which are dedicated to making this forum a positive place to be. Their attitudes bring down the community as a whole.

Personally, I think that there are a lot more people who bring the community down with their negativity. I fully admit I could be biased since I think the profession needs work, but refuse to get really down because of it. I think that the negativity on this forum has gotten out of hand and is counterproductive since it doesn't seem to produce more results for Ranger, but only serves to annoy the other members of the community. But maybe people see me as one of the negative posters from the other side. I honestly think that this isn't the case, but people are rarely the best judge of their own character.

In the end, bad attidues will always be unwelcome in my book, whether it's an elitist view of current Rangers who laugh at those who dropped it and complain, or those who complain non-stop without actually contributing anything new or interesting to the discussion.

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Jillzar wrote:

Please share what your all smokin.

Gryphonx

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000000000000000000Dyrwen Sy-X
000000000000000000
000000000000000000Imperial Master Ranger.
000000000000000000Meat Manager
000000000000000000Hide Heretic.
000000000000000000Bone Busybody.
000000000000000000
000000000000000000General PAC Man 
000000000000000000Penny Arcade Clan 
000000000000000000

---

Jillzar wrote:

Please share what your allsmokin.

Gryphonx

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Agree JB... We are not useless in harvesting ...

regards

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Iseult wrote:

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Serraphin wrote:

Iseult this is why. The traps that decrerase/remove defenses do notincrease damage, the states provide little, and the Pdart only helps professions that don't have a comparable attack. The harvesting is quite redundant given a group of scouts but for solo hunting they really are all a Ranger has worthwhile. Camo I contend is still broken and the newCL aggro range systemmasks this I believe. Terrain negotiation above scout is really of no benefit comparatively to that provided by scout. Area track has limited usefulness do to blind spots, reliance on spawn gerneration and the fact that once you have been a Ranger long enough you have more then enough waypoints or knowledge of your specific server to essentially no longer need it. The camps have been utterly reduced to eye candy as now you can insta pull out vehicles with no delay and again who really gets wounds outside of space. The player behind Ranger is useful but the profession is no longer useful. Ranger has become a sinking ship with a lot of FINE captains refusing to leave.

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ok - let's take this point by point:

1) The traps that decrerase/remove defenses do not increase damage, the states provide little, and the Pdart only helps professions that don't have a comparable attack - ok, this might be so, but sonic pulse actually will reduce a creature's defenses. Yep - this doesn't make a great difference if you're solo, but if you're in a group, then that means that everyone in the group hits for more. Stink bomb traps mean that states stick better -again useful in a group. As for p-dart traps, well, p-dart by itself = creature slowly creeping towards me. P-dart + carbineer cripple shot = creature not moving. I don't know, but I like creatures not moving a lot better than I like creatures coming at me, at whatever their speed. Oh, I should add that there is a timeout for carbineer cripple shot, whereas there is not for the p-dart. That means I can keep the creature snared at all times with a p-dart, whereas if I were just relying on cripple shot there would be times between the snares for the creatures to attack me. OK, so traps are admittedly not as useful as they could be, but "useless"? - not by a long stretch.

2) Terrain negotiation above scout no benefit comparatively - pretty much agree - might be "useless" unless you can get people to bet on a crawl race.

3) Harvesting redundant - not sure what you mean here. Grouped with another master ranger, I've harvested over 1000 units. Now even at current resource prices (20 cpu), that 20k credits per single creature. Not useless at all.

4) Area-track has limited usefulness - yep you have to wait for the spawn system to catch up. But my experience is that if you combine your knowledge of the spawn areas with a knowledge of how the spawn system works and areatrack, it's much, much more efficient than driving around on a scooter hopeing for that lucky spawn. Yep- it would be nice for areatrack to get some help, but it's certainly not useless. How many times have you had to find a mission npc in a city and used areatrack? Or saw a player scoot by in the distance and wanted to know his/her/its name? Areatrack works really well here.

5) camo still broken - might be, but it still has its advantages. You can apply it on a speeder for example - wow, you can craft it and apply it without even slowing down. This means no more stopping to unmount, /maskscent , /mount anymore. You can apply it to people without the maskscent skill (and better yet, they can apply it to themselves, so they don't need to bother you). This is a lifesaver on the lowest level of the ryatt trail (one of the few places where kash camo does work), where the mynstyngers are really agressive stalkers. With camo, you can single pull them with traps. Without camo, you see the herd creeping towards you, and then you have to fight six at once. Also, consider that the harvesting changes have actually made camo more viable, because its that much easier to get the resources they require. Camo broken, well maybe in some instances, but not completely by any means.

6) camps - well, you actually don't take wounds in space anymore. At least, I don't. But let me suggest that camps are actually a little more useful now since you don't see the massive amounts of pre-cu wounds. Why? Because a camp actually makes a lot of sense when you have a few wounds to heal. You can just pop a camp, wait a few minutes, and your five wounds are gone. Don't forget that camps are useful calling droids and creatures in the field. Sure, you can wait fifteen seconds to call each droid, but say you have five droids in your datapad and you can't remember which one you left your spare crate of veghash in. Well, using a camp to call each of these droids in the field is much more efficient than waiting 15 seconds between droids without the camp. We can also pitch camps near lairs now - this is incredibly useful on Dath where you get lairs perched halfway-up a 90 degree slope, but a camp will level the terrain (camps stay up for a while after they disband, so you can still enter combat). And, of course, there's the tried and true camps as a means of getting to a mob stuck in a tree and camps as rallying points. Yep - camps could be made a lot more useful, but, here again, this does not imply that camps are "useless."

Again, it doesn't have to be black and white - "useful" to "useless" is actually a continuum, and my suggestion is that we keep acknowledging the useful parts of our profession as we keep fighting for improvements instead of falling back on this rhetoric of "useless."

Iseult
Master Ranger / Mediocre Carbineer
Bloodfin

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1) Pdart + Cripple shot issnare stackingand the Devs have slowly been working to correct this. When they are finished no snares or roots will stack and the devs are even working to mitigate chain snaring or rooting. The additional damage boost given by traps that lower defenses is so low may 11 point gains that against big game the group is better off with the damage you would do rather then watch a trapping animation. Every trap effect is available through one of the combat trees in the ranged professions and can be done as well if not better then the trap effect and combat specials work against both npcs and creatures. Traps, well creatures only. Again the most useful traps (if you call them useful) are from the Scout tree, not Ranger.

2)No dispute. I think we both agree on this point.

3) A group of Dual Elite Combat + Scout support the economy so unless you are solo hunting the Harvest mods really are not missed.

4)Area Track just depends on point of view I guess. I expect it to be so much more then it is but it does have its moments just not enough to overshadow a cost benefit analysis of the skill points invested for Master Ranger versus what the Ranger Profession has to offer.

5)The new CL system utilizes aggro ranges similair to WoW and that eliminates the need for Camo in most cases and also makes Camo appear to work more then it actually does since your CL will prevent a lot of aggro or detection. Mask Scent still rules over Camo in terms of benefit versus skill point and economic costs. Mask Scent is still resource free. Also, a dual Elite Combat class such as MBH/Master Carbines/4000CM really does not need camo in the areas you are talking about. I am sure other templates work nicely. It would be nice if Camo worked as it should and a group truly needed a Ranger to Camo them to get past an instance

6) The fact that camps mitigate design bugs or game flaws doesn't make them useful. Camps just don't warrant even the skill points scouts must spend on them

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Phenix1050 wrote:

I'm afraid to say that I don't reallyfind that to bea fair assesment of people, Cuchulainn. You present only one side in a negative light, when an objective person would be able to see that there are people who are bad on both sides, people who are good on both sides. The fact that you lumped it up into 3 categories, only one of which is negative (conveniently not including the negative side of the other viewpoint) really doesn't reflect well on your ability to objectively assess a situation.

Here's the way I see it:

• There are people who play the profession despite it beingbroken, and do their best to tell people about how to maximize the usefullness of their profession and try to inspire a positive vibe.


• There are people who play the profession despite it being broken, butinstead of helping, they choose to make fun of the people who can't do what they can do and only add to the negativity on the forums


• There are people who no longer play the profession who constructively provide data onwhat is wrong with the professionand ideas for improving the profession, and generally are helpfull and productive


• There are people who complain incessantly, making the forums much more negative, while providing no objective crtiticism or intelligent insight past the obvious "Ranger is teh suxxors" type of post that is self-serving and utterly pointless.

Playing a Ranger despite it being broken doesn't instantly make you a positive member of this community. Nor does not playing it instantly make you a negaive member of this community. There are people with bad attitudes on both sides, none of which are dedicated to making this forum a positive place to be. Their attitudes bring down the community as a whole.

Personally, I think that there are a lot more people who bring the community down with their negativity. I fully admit I could be biased since I think the profession needs work, but refuse to get really down because of it. I think that the negativity on this forum has gotten out of hand and is counterproductive since it doesn't seem to produce more results for Ranger, but only serves to annoy the other members of the community. But maybe people see me as one of the negative posters from the other side. I honestly think that this isn't the case, but people are rarely the best judge of their own character.

In the end, bad attidues will always be unwelcome in my book, whether it's an elitist view of current Rangers who laugh at those who dropped it and complain, or those who complain non-stop without actually contributing anything new or interesting to the discussion.

---

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Serraphin wrote:

Again the most useful traps (if you call them useful) are from the Scout tree, not Ranger.

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• skills that are redundant = useless: for example, ranger harvesting skills are redundant because scouts can harvest; camo is redundant because of the CL system changes; camps are redundant because scout camps work just as well, etc.... But what about the efficiency factor? A sonic-pulse trap when deployed against a cluster of attackers is much, much more efficient than targetting and applying stun and dizzy to each of the attackers in turn, esp. when you consider that the combat equivalent of these attacks do far less damage than non-state attacks (this was JB's point). Harvesting is essentially a no-brainer. Sure a scout can group and harvest tons of stuff, but I can do it 2-3 times faster. Which means I can earn the same amount of creidts in 1/3 or 1/2. And even camps, which are admittedly very redundant, increase in efficiency as your skills increase. HTFBs have a higher healing modifier than do scout camps; HTFBs have two crafting stations. Sure I can get a crafting droid, but keep in mind that the stations on a craftng droid take up stations that I could use for combat or trapping and that the crafting stations are private.
  
  
• skills are not scalable: Ranger skills actually increase in relative usefulness when you're in a group. Sure, the stun side of a sonic pulse might equal just 11 points of damage more for me solo per attack and that might not make up for the damage I could have done if I just skipped the trap and hit with one of my high damage attacks. But multiply this times the members in a group and the damage numbers start to look a little better, esp. when you consider JB's point that others in the group don't have to use lower-damage attacks to apply these states to each target individually. Harvesting again is a no brainer -- rangers in groups = more harvest for everyone. Very useful. Camo is a no brainer too - sure, if you have a group of level 80s on dath, then the CL changes mean for the most part they don't need camo or even maskscent for that matter, but what if some members of your group are level 60 or 70? They are going to take aggro, and camo can really help here, esp. if they don't have maskscent.
  
  
• a lot of your points seem to posit master ranger: note that JB's post was not titled "Master Rangers are not 'useless' but "Rangers are not useless." If you really think that the terrain negotiation tree is useless, then drop it. Same with camping. Drop the trees, get 14-28 skill points back and invest them elsewhere. I myself think that you actually lose a lot of usefulness in the prof (for example, advanced camo kits, harvesting mods, melee and ranged defense mods) by not going master, but if you can make the case that the skill points in these two trees are better spent elsewhere, then by all means invest them elsewhere. It seems that this approach is much more healthy than the master-ranger all or nothing stance that you guys take now, because as it stands now, you single out the same trees over and over again and use them to prove what you claim as the uselessness of the entire profession.
  
  
• useful and useless are mutually exclusive, binary polarities: again, I don't understand why things are so black-and-white to the adherents of the "useless" camp. Why can't you guys accept that "useful" to "useless" is actually a continuum and that while a lot of us here think that our skills, esp. camping and terrain negotiation, could be a lot more "usefull," that does not mean that they are necessarily "useless." How hard would it be for you guys to actually acknowledge the parts of our profession that are useful and use that as the starting point to ask for changes?
  

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Ragao wrote:

camo would help CL1 crafters/entertainers who might needs to venture outside of a town for some strange reason

why doesnt that happen more?

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000000000000000000Dyrwen Sy-X
000000000000000000
000000000000000000Imperial Master Ranger.
000000000000000000Meat Manager
000000000000000000Hide Heretic.
000000000000000000Bone Busybody.
000000000000000000
000000000000000000General PAC Man 
000000000000000000Penny Arcade Clan 
000000000000000000

Message Edited by Jillzar on 09-09-2005 06:51 PM