Ranger's Read me! (and other classes too!)

[dbodenheim]

Ok after playing this game for two weeks I have seen the following comments when joining groups:

"A ******* ranger? Im out." Monk leaves.
"Well we have 6 people and no Monk......lose the ranger."
"Rangers suck."

And so on and so on and so on......I chalk this up to Everquest players who grew an absolute Loathing for the ranger class. ( way to screw it up across the internet Sony) I also chalk it up to WE being rangers, and there are loads of us, who dont know how to play this class at all. You've got the "teen" rangers, the Orlando Bloom wanna-be's. Then you've got the "Power" Rangers, even younger then the teens, thats the "check out my leet bow. i pwns you" crowd.

And in the middle of it all you have the confused "adult" rangers. Who are basically saying " Well it seems like Im helping the team." But on the inside are really saying, " What the **** am I doing with this class?" and "Im broke as hell in RL."

Anyways...I play a Ranger/Monk. PvE im fine with the whole "Apply Poisen, spam shots on warriors target shtick." but Player vs. Player is different.....

You cant do this routine in PvP, and although some of you will say "well duh" the vast majority of ranger's are saying "well why not?" Because "We dont know how to max the class out with our secondary."

Once I figured out that as a Ranger/Monk I am NOT a huge damage dealer, I drastically made a conversion and changed most of my skills over to becoming a "Dissruption Archer". I lost the pet, lost all the ritual crap---and truly ( I mean TRULY) focused on shutting down and stalling W/M's and all casters. You know what? It works better! I shot from "team helper" to "pain in the ass!" Now Dissruption Archer of course is just one of the Focused path a ranger can take, but we need to lose the jack of all trades persona after a while and really decide what we want to be. Of course I kept "Restore Life" at the end of my skill bar because rezzing people 4 times a pickup game used to be my thing. I do it less now, but its still there.

Anyhow, whenever Im in public instead of saying R/M 20 LFG over and over again. I say "Dissruption archer" LFG. Ive gotten a lot more invites. :)

[roselan]

very nice post.

However yesterday I rerolled a monk (more for their sublime dance :p than anything else) and stoped at lvl 4 when i had to chosse my second profession.

back to my ranger.

If monk is *never* a bad secondary, I believe that mesm is a better one for being a disruptive archer.Warrior tactics can be interesting to too disrupt while under warriors oath, but survival has 2 nearly equivalent defensive stances, plus some disruptive skillz too. in pvp I tested a r/w with no bow, no marksmanship, but full expertise. use Evade to close on your caster, and cut it to pieces with your sword. He will be dead before he has time to cast, so it is no use to disrupt usually :P

but any archer can be disruptive if he knows how to read what the caster is doing! This needs utter experience!

in pve, I noticed that the best is surely to not attack enemy tanks but supportives roles behind them (caster/rangers), and spare your energy. If a bad guy decides to attack your monk, then you dump your energy and skill spam this fool. Never stay in the front line and voilà, brainless efficient group pve... btw, this is the only thing to be carefull imo: You get so few aggro, that when you get attacked you may not notice it, and be dead before you realise it!

I play a ranger coz it suits... my personality. I was quite amazed to see so many ranger in gw. I always thougt it was some kind of outcast class...

[Sting]

Well I totally agree with the OP, but it isnt just Sony and EQ but also DAoC and Mythic. Ive never played EQ but Mythic NERFED the ranger/archer classes to the point of them being a joke (now DAoC has become primarally an item based game so its lvled out some). Wich is partly the reason the rangers got nerfed/balanced in this game people could not comprhend losing to a ranger (so out came the nerf bat). Although ANets nerf bat wasnt the total class killers of those other mentioned games it was still enough for people to classify us as a "junk" class (taking into acct thier exp with rangers fromt he games they played B4).
The only thing that rangers can do effectively is disrupt wich many groups would given the choice pick a mesmer/??? or N/Me as to picking up the ranger (perhaps its cool armor/dance envy LOL). But the bigest issue is energy costs and rangers lack of (only way rangers have of controlling the energy costs is to throw a large amounts points into expertise). I also went from trying to be a damge dealer R/E to R/Me interupter type and now at lest I feel somewhat usefull LOL.
As for the jack of all trades tag ANet made us into they need to look at that old saying "jack of all trades and master of none" is what they did with us. Even in a game that IS as balanced as this game is there is still the lower end classes (wether actual or percieved) and the majority believe the bottom 2 classes are R/?? or N/??.
Some may make the statement that rangers can be huge damage dealers but they say you have to use almost all ranger skills to do it compared to say an E/?? that can use the best of thier primary but also augment their secondary MORE effectivelly.
I make these observations by being a ranger and only a ranger. I have 1 character RP (thinking about making a PvP monk). I have been booted from more groups than id care to count.

[Typhoon]

They also nerfed the hunter class in WoW, even when it was already underpowered and nobody was complaining about it in the first place.

[Makkert]

I'm playing a R/Mes, and want to move to the 'disruption ranger' play. i'm still learning the trait. Any tips about which skills/attributedistributionpoints would be welcome.

kind regards,
Makkert

[Xellos]

The two most "important" classes currently in PUG trends are monks, and warrior monks. Rangers just get the short end of the stick, because their seen as a cross between a warrior and a elementalist, which is pointless since they have warriors in the bucketloads already.