What about the Rangers?Follow

Alright. I'm not a Ranger, but I'm heading down the path so I decided to review the Ranger section in the Official Prima Guide, and here are some of the abilities they highlight as being some of the best ranger abilities:

Trick Shot - An ability to be coordinated with your group's tank. You hit the enemy with your shot and the next person who hits it gets a huge amount of aggro... this looks like something that will kick some serious *** in group settings.

Rip - You rip an arrow you just used and you even cause damage to the target. This sounds like a good money maker. Makeshift Arrows is a similar skill that should save you cash.

Sniping Shot - A really long range attack that seems good for pulling enemies.

Wounding Arrow & Survival of the Fittest - Are both good debuffers. Wounding Arrow causes the enemy to lose parry and deflection defenses, SotF lowers enemy defense & stamina. Both seem good to use in big fights.

Now for some good damage attacks.

Hidden Shot - You gotta be in stealth to use this, but it does high damage.
Shadowflame - High fire-damage stealth attack.
Shadow Lunge - A stealth atttack that's melee-based. Must be behind the enemy and deals very high damage.
Triple Shot - Does three ranged attacks, but if one misses, the attack ends.

There are more, but these are some of the earlier skills that you get. All-in-all the Ranger ability set looks pretty damn good, and should be able to compete with assassins in some departments, if not all of them.

Well, I think that would be partly true except the 15 may be a few more points, depending on what weapons they are dual-wielding. ;)

Predators should always dual-wield and have a great bow, but that's just my personal opinion. ;)

Scouts (exept bards) are tailored towards dual wield with poison ability. Faster = better in our case. Melee damage is realy not importaint on a weapons, delay is. More attacks = more chances to it with poison. Once you become predator or rogue, get yourself poison in line with level of mobs you are fighting (something afordable, but not durt cheap, 50c to 1 silver per potion maybe? if you are level 10-11) and see how well it works. Do not bother with cheap ones, they are useless. They get resisted by all mobs at level you are fighting them. Certain mobs resistant to poisons, keep in mind and fight in proper areas.

If you are not going to be too cheap with poison you bought, you will be procing poison damage every few seconds because of your 2 atacks every 1 second and that poison damage will add HUGE to your damage. On its own, our straight melee damage sucks, all our damage comes out from abilities and poisons mostly.

If you want to have straight up melee high damage dual wielding class, go with fighter or brawler.

Edited, Wed Dec 1 12:11:43 2004 by Siroc

Trick Shot - An ability to be coordinated with your group's tank. You hit the enemy with your shot and the next person who hits it gets a huge amount of aggro... this looks like something that will kick some serious *** in group settings.

PLEASE tell me Assassin has an ability that is similar to this?

I know this is a cheesed down version of "Trick Attack" in FFXI but who cares, I love these agro-shifting abilities.

Wow, thanks for the info, guys. I had no idea rangers did some of these things, but they definitely seem to fit right along with the ranger persona. What's even cooler is that I noticed my character looks like a younger, elven version of Aragorn =) Anyway, I need to go look around for a skill listing on the Internet somewhere... none of them seem to have any of the sub-class-specific skills or spells. The only thing that I feel a bit wary about is how archery requires arrows (of course), and although arrows stack to 99, you will still run out, especially with double/triple shot.

I'm lv 25 nearly 26 ranger now, so far i'm really enjoying the class, some pointers though.....

Trick Shot is very hard to co-ordinate with the MT most of the time I found that the nukers just couldn't hold the trigger long enough and was getting aggrod, so I decided it was much better to use mid-way into a tough fight and hope the MT has build up enough hate if something goes wrong.

I've grouped with an assassin and worked out that both classes are pretty much balanced, the assassin does indeed do much damage in a single blow but is far outmatched by the ranger in other areas, especially pulling. So far, the ranger isthe ultimate pulling class, not only can the ranger pull mobs safely and at a very long distance, can with practice and some co-ordination transfer a large amount of hate onto the MT, for instance, start the pull with sniping shot, once the mobs in range follow up with trick shot and wait for the MTs first attack, then follow up with some debuffers then jump into hand-to-hand. I always save backshot for when the mobs close to death.