Ranger Archive

I hope not, but I do have some feelings on our chosen profession:

They stem from the belief that everyone wants to feel useful or powerful (or both).

We all have different playing styles, but most (combat oriented) players are looking for one of two things:

1) To be self-sufficient OR

2) To bring something unique and useful to a group.

I am now going to explain why being a ranger provides neither of these.

Despite our description, there is nothing about a ranger that is self-sufficient. Since we spent so many skill points on master scout and ranger (140) we have precious few left for any kind of elite combat class plus novice medic. The only thing that makes us even moderatelyeffective at solo is our phecnacine darts and adhesive mesh (but those are scout traps anyway).

Personally, I am not complaining that we cannot solo. I don't want to solo. Doing things alone completely defeats the purpose of playing a MMORPG. I want to group with others.

The problem is, we don't really bring anything to the table in a group either. Sure, if the medic is running low on stims, he/she could crank a few out at the crafting station in the field base. I can tell the challenge level on creatures before we start attacking them, nobody cares. I can't tell whether the animals will assist each other, the only piece of information that I really care about. There's no compelling reason for me to lead the group out to the hunting grounds because I don't know where the hunting grounds are any more than any other player. I can run on rough terrain faster than most, but being in a group I can only move as fast as the slowest member. I can mask my scent, but this does no good when noone else in the group can do so as effectively. I haven't thrown a trap since making trap master because I'd rather spend the turn actually dealing out damage and getting combat XP, to say nothing about the completely useless ranger traps. All the extra hunting skill affords me no noticible difference in accuracy vs. creatures. My harvesting conversion rate is only about 5% better than a master scout. There's very few groups that run around asking for a Ranger to join them. On top of all that, despite the fact that I have nice camps, I still have to go through the difficult and painful process of getting in a camp/harvest order.

Currently I do believe that I can solo and that I am useful in a group, but both these come from my carbineer tree, not from my ranger tree.

Every couple of days, this just gets to me. Perhaps it's because I spent all night last night spamming camps to get to master.

I'll give the devs kudos for letting us set up camps inside no-build zones. I can pop up a field base in the newbie spawn and get lots of people to come visit for a while and talk to me. It makes the time pass a lot faster.

Alright, I'm done

Codak

Ranger / Carbineer

Nice post and I agree with everything you say .

Using up all those skill points for master scout and Ranger then having nothing left over is hurting my template too .

The fact is Ranger offers very little at the moment , and all we can do is hope that our correspondent can get the busy designers ear for a moment and push some of our concerns to the forefront .

We'll be waiting a while , me thinks .

Until then good hunting

Jon

you bring up a lot of good points, however these points have been brought up time and time again in previous posts. you would think they would notice a trend wouldn't you? and yet here we are.