Improve the ranger for PVE

I like to go full damage and have someone protect me. A dragonknight is the most natural class to tank damage, but if there is no boss, a mage is very useful with their freezes, mind control and guardian taunting other monsters, and singularity. A weak dwarf can provide protection by spamming dwarf in a box. Ranger slows down mobs, but it is lacking when you compare it with the other classes.

All armor breaks in PVE need to be buffed or fixed, what is meant to be a 3 second armor break lasts half a second it seems in fatal mode because the mini boss monsters debuff it. Singularity keeps applying the armor break if the mini boss breaks away from it, so lasts the full 8 seconds.

The rangers net +5 skill could be changed so that it has the taunt feature, and also the concentration cost of explosive arrow reduced in pve, a different concentration cost from pvp to maintain the balance.

 

Please don't. We could of course suggest to change or modify whatever. But, focus needs to be on other classes right now that need significant changes and upgrades, and to the entire system that is out of wack. Not knocking you or your ideas but, the tweaks we need are miniscule in comparison.

 

@BigPapa From my experience of the game, the ranger is still the most discriminated class. In group play, nobody needs a ranger. The ranger doesn't have a 2h like the dwarf or mage, so it doesn't even compete damage wise. I have noticed a trend of players switching over to dwarf, if this continues the dwarf will be nerfed significantly. I would rather see significant buffs on the other classes so the trend slows and the nerf doesn't happen.

Buffing the damage and skills requires little development time.

Feel free to share how the other classes should be buffed.

 

I gotta disagree on the "nobody needs a ranger" part, personally I found their marking skill VERY useful when I was fighting against Dragan, for example, since they were the only ones who could debuff him in any way, same for other big bosses where I, as a spellweaver, have no way to slow them down in order to hit them, and in any map, even without big bosses, I accept a ranger of good degree in my group.

On the other hand, I gotta agree, since I play the 4 classes as much as my time permits me, that my level 37 ranger is the worst of them when it comes to crowd control by playing solo, maybe this will change when I get the thorns skill, I'm still slowly working my way there, but seems to me that that's one of their main crowd control-ish skills, and was also surprised about the area of effect of the EA armor break wich I expected to be a lot less, but I also think it might need a little increase in duration in PvE, but all this are just observations I made by grouping with different rangers, since mine is still a little one.

I think that BigPapa might be talking about the DK, who still needs quite some work on it, and I find the 2nd most difficult char to play with, just after my ranger, easiest for me in that range of levels is the steam mechanicus, but we also have to consider that this might be my personal perception/level of skill/gear on each char.

We might as well wait for R160, they said on twitch there are going to be further "balancing measures", but didn't mention a specific class, but considering how they have been doing things lately, I'm a bit scared of what might come.

 

What experience?
My main toon is ranger and I disagree with you. You need friends ... then nothing else is important.

You want to go full damage? Good ... I am doing this for years. But do you know what you need? You don't need Dragonknight to nurse you ... you need ability to kill the monsters before they reach you.

 

Ranger class have abilities that are never used... ever.... since the beginning of the game, these skills are forgotten.

 

On the other side, ranger is the only class who could do longbow together with shield or quiver. It is the only class who could enjoy both offensive and defensive dragan set bonuses at a time. I'm not sure about this one, do you guys get 50% to longbow damage with dragan?

Ranger cannot do a 6k dmg build, true, but if you want to build most effective damage build as a mage, you wouldnt go 6k (5k average), but much lower to improve critical hit and critical damage as alltogether they play better than raw damage. So as a mage you would end up with 4k max dmg, 70% crit, 275% crit dmg. Can't you do similar with a longbow and quiver?

Ranger is also very useful as a team player. Going with ranger is much faster thanks to his no cooldown EA, and even more useful if there are two rangers. It is much better than Singu against regular mobs. Singu would play better on minibosses.

And finally ranger is surely not an underdog in pvp. Not sure what you complain about.

 

Only 15% increased damage on Longbows, if I'm correct, exactly because of the reason you exposed up there, they can use a quiver and a buckler with a longbow, the rest of the classes get 30% increased damage on 2H weapons.

As a Spellweaver I gotta disagree on this one, I find EA better against single targets like minibosses since a lot of them are completely immune to all effects of the singu, or against small groups of mobs, but I find the Singu to perform much better for crowd control because it's more durable and because of it's slowing effect on big crowds, plus, we can deploy double singu with mind control+astral phenomenon or even what I call "perma-singu" repeating this combo, wich I use very often against mini-bosses, but again, just my humble opinion.

 

Yeah, right on the bonuses.

On the Singu vs EA it depends on how fast the group kills the new bulk of mobs. Strong teams do that very fast so Singu couldnt recover. Using it with MC will slowdown the group, assuming it is strong. Unless of course MC is used against special monster.

But my point is ranger and mage complement each other pretty good in PVE as oppose to the OP claim that rangers are useless in PVE. Both armor breaks have its use in different situations.

And DKs beat both mage and archer with their 2h options. I can only dream about getting a staff with critical hit included by default.

 

You and me both. Except for one extraordinary staff I found around lvl 30, with damage and crit, every staff I've found since (including legendaries) gives good damage but no crit. I'm now thinking, at lvl 47: screw crit, focus on base dmg and critical dmg (which do seem to be frequently paired).

 

Not sure if you understood, just in case, I was talking about DK type of weapon that has 1.5k or so critical hit as a base value, and 4 modifiers on top of that. So they could just go damage only. Mages do not have such kind of staff. I own one, pretty good - 158%dmg and 1400+crit. It is good, but DKs could go much higher.

 

My bad. Haven't played DK yet, so not familiar with their gear. But playing mage, it sux this constant choosing between dmg/crit. This must've scored high on the devs' Frustration Index Generator.