Ranger Archive
Thread: What is the point of bieng a ranger?
Harvesting resources is not a Ranger ability, it is a Scout ability. Anyone with Novice Scout can harvest resources; Scouts and Rangers will get more but not really so much more as to make the expenditure worthwhile.
The only useful trap in the game is the Phecnacine Dart, and it is a Scout trap.
Foraging is only good for fishing bait and pet food, and frankly, buying crates of pet food is less annoying. Fishing is essentially useless.
Tracking in its current form is not all that. People can just run around the good spawning grounds and find what they want to kill. Tracking saves us a little bit of running, maybe. If and when we get the proposed /track command that spawns targets, Tracking will be worthwhile.
"Everything we do is in a support capacity"...no, we are a combat profession, albeit a bad one. The entire profession is geared to PvE hunting, but does not offer nearly enough benefit to that activity to be worth the expenditure of 63 skill points.
Then Creature Handler is a combat profession, because I get Combat XP when my pets drop mobs.
But the devs said CH isn't supposed to be a combat profession.... 
~J
I assert that this criteria is invalid. I assert that a profession is a combat profession if it is necessary in practical terms for its practitioners to engage in combat in order to advance.
On that basis, Rangers are a combat profession because it is impossible for them to advance in the Advanced Trapping line without engaging in combat, and it is impractical at best for them to advance in either Tracking or Wayfaring without engaging in combat.
Incidentally, just today I tossed a few traps on a mob another player was fighting, without using my weapon at all, and received combat experience at the end of the fight. That was probably as a result of the few points of damage inflicted by the traps. That discharges the above criteria in any case.
"A profession is only considered a combat profession if you can get combat experience from using a skill or ability fom the profession."
We get Combat Experiance when using traps, so by that token we are a combat profession.
If I stand back and use only my traps while someone else takes a creature down, I will recieve Combat Experiance.
We get trapping experience for using traps, not combat experience. You are not required to kill anything to get trapping experience (you can throw traps on leviasqualls all day without actually getting into combat with them), but you must kill something to get combat experience. It is impossible to kill anything with traps alone (there is your exploit to run up the trapping tree with no risk). The only way we can kill anything, and thus get combat experience, is to use a weapon.
As of now, there is no way for a ranger to kill anything (and thus get combat experience) without using a skill or ability from a combat profession. If someone can post a contradiction to this, I'd love to see it as I really want to see the Ranger as a combat profession.
As one of the first Chilastra Rangers, I am not sure what the point is any more really. Partly it's my playstyle - I'm finding the only fun I have in game is PvP, and Ranger gives me virtually nothing for this (Little bit of melee and ranged defense at Master).
But part of this is because they have made PvE less fun for me. With the nerfs to resources, bugs to resources (such as the 1 resource of ANY type off a creature), lack of usefulness of traps on uber level creatures...wait; let me say I have used snare traps on Kimogilias to good effect when partnered with a pistoleer. I don't think I've ever had a snare or root trap work ona Krayt, however.
Sadly, I don't even use Mask Scent any more. When I do, some creature usually ends up warping onto me with aggro. It's simply easier to skirt creatures' aggro radii. In general, high level NPC's aggro me at 40m, creatures at 15m-20m. Don't get me wrong, it definitely has it's situational uses, but this is really a Scout skill anyway. Once they get rid of the floral component from /conceal kits, I might re-evaluate some of the usefulness of our profession.
The main reasons I am hanging onare because I don't like the idea of throwing away the time I invested getting master (even though I have excess ranger xp stored), and there are some potentially tasty upgrades on the way (New placeable traps, new combat/special use camps, further expanding our tracking for specific creatures).
Aside from these upcoming changes,I would like to see a couple things. Traps that can work on creatures/player creatures, and damage bonuses vs. creatures only. We should be able to kill creatures faster than other players, not based on our weapon profession, but because we are Rangers, able to take down the greatest of prey.
Try this:
Get a partner and have him attack a creature.
You only trap the creature without attack it with a weapon (unequip your gun to be sure).
When the creature is killed, by your partner, you will recieve some combat experiance.
You did nothing but toss traps, yet you recieve combat experiance...
I noticed this when I was grinding my trapping skills up.
I'm 4/2/4/0 in Ranger, and I'm not progressing any further there.
However, Ranger isn't as gimped as some make it out to be. It definately needs a lot of work, however.
Tracking - extremely useful. Especially in PvP, when I'm searching for one particular player who needs to die. Not to mention the PvE aspect for finding babies.
Camps - Having a mobile food and chemical crafting station is what makes the camp worth it. In a huge Rebel vs. Imperial battle between Anchorhead and Bestine, the Field Camp was used by Imperial medics to drive back the Rebels. The medics were running out of supplies really fast, and without that camp, we wouldn't have driven them back. We didn't win that battle, but the Field Camp had an impact.
That's pretty much all I use of Ranger at the moment. I've got the Wayfaring line since I'm waiting on them to fix it.
sbjnyc wrote:We get trapping experience for using traps, not combat experience. You are not required to kill anything to get trapping experience (you can throw traps on leviasqualls all day without actually getting into combat with them), but you must kill something to get combat experience. It is impossible to kill anything with traps alone (there is your exploit to run up the trapping tree with no risk). The only way we can kill anything, and thus get combat experience, is to use a weapon.
As of now, there is no way for a ranger to kill anything (and thus get combat experience) without using a skill or ability from a combat profession. If someone can post a contradiction to this, I'd love to see it as I really want to see the Ranger as a combat profession.
No, you may not throw traps at creatures all day without getting into combat with them. Creatures will not agro if a trap fails, but once one lands, the creature will agro and you are engaged in combat. You cannot improve the traps lines without combat, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
As for killing something without using a skill or ability from a combat profession: this argument is pedantic, but if you insist, the answer to your question is to drive something's bars down to near nothing with traps and finish it with a CDEF weapon (which anyone can use). Yes, that is ridiculous. That's the problem. The fact that Rangers don't get any real offense is a problem to be addressed, not a defining feature of the profession that should remain as-is.
I did this early in my career as a ranger. A hunting group let me throw traps at a fambaa they were killing. I got plenty of trapping experience, but no combat experience. I've also been in a group with a rifleman in my younger days where I'd throw a debuff trap and the rifleman would kill the creature before I got near enough to pummel it. Again, no combat experience. I suppose I can try it again, but if anything it seems like a recent change (I don't think I'm maxxed in combat exp yet).
Ki_Gu_Lon wrote:
Try this:
Get a partner and have him attack a creature.
You only trap the creature without attack it with a weapon (unequip your gun to be sure).
When the creature is killed, by your partner, you will recieve some combat experiance.
You did nothing but toss traps, yet you recieve combat experiance...
I noticed this when I was grinding my trapping skills up.
This is true and in fact I use a D18 which I have no cert in to knock big lairs from a distance to cause spawns. It is ridiculous and that was my point.
DFH wrote:
No, you may not throw traps at creatures all day without getting into combat with them. Creatures will not agro if a trap fails, but once one lands, the creature will agro and you are engaged in combat. You cannot improve the traps lines without combat, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
By combat I meant actually engaging in combat rather than merely be aggro. There's a significant difference. Being aggro will never cause damage to a creature, only engaging in combat will. Sorry for being vague.
As for killing something without using a skill or ability from a combat profession: this argument is pedantic, but if you insist, the answer to your question is to drive something's bars down to near nothing with traps and finish it with a CDEF weapon (which anyone can use). Yes, that is ridiculous. That's the problem. The fact that Rangers don't get any real offense is a problem to be addressed, not a defining feature of the profession that should remain as-is.
Once you land a trap on a creature, you have initiated combat as far as the system is concerned. At that point you fight, run or get incapped.