Basic questions

Hi I play a level 47 Ranger and I have mostly used a longbow till now but I see a lot of other Rangers using shortbows so my question is ..

1.longbow or short bow..for pve and pve..why
2.Precision shot or Explosive Arrow...for pve and pvp..why
3. also do you personally believe Bigpoint will improve the Ranger class like removing the marking system or increasing damage or Hunting Arrow etc

 

For PvE: Q7: Herald (bow + gloves).
For PvP: Full moon (Wolf).

I don’t believe in anything!

 

rangers have 3 types of weapons: longbow and shortbow (1h) and siegebow (2h), let's see the differences of these weapons:
shortbow: low damage compensated by very high attack speed, useful only at the beginning;
longbow: slower than shortbow and higher damage, it has -20% concentration cost which helps very much because rangers' skills have high concentration costs and you refill it slowly during the time;
siegebow: 2h weapon, very high damage, very slow.

Now I try to answer you:

For pve you need to be as fast as possible so you need very much damage and the best option for this is a siege bow, but you can equip it efficiently only with good crafts on items, the biggest problem for rangers is concentration, so at your level the best solution is longbow and quiver: lower damage than siege bow, but really higher attack speed and critical rate, plus the -20% concentration that permit you to spam the strongest skills;

For pvp the most prefer to use a longbow for the concentration because is very hard to hit the enemies, so it's better to have more arrows to spam, some unique longbows have critical rate and lower damage in the base stats, these are better.
On the other hand, some (very small number) prefer the shortbow for the highspeed so you can hit and move faster to dodge.
In this case the shield is better than the quiver because you need the block to resist enemy attacks.

It depends on the situations: precision shot is cheaper and has good damage and hits every marked enemy on a row, explosive arrow has very high damage against a single target, plus AoE damage and break armor effect, but it's very expensive so you can't spam it a lot.
At your level you still haven't the break-armor (need lvl49) so it's useless, then you can use it for maps: one hit for the break-armor is enough, then precision shot and deadly blow to kill mobs (with this you can refill your concentration), for the boss fight when the break-armor doesn't work explosive arrow is useless until you can create a good build to spam it (q7 bow and gloves as others said, or q1/q8 torso and q5 shoulders plus runes of relentlessness).

Ranger is meant to work in this way and I prefer they won't change it

 

What the heck man? Who is using shortbows exactly? A few people.

Everybody is using siege hoax bows and some people are using longbows in PvE.
Everybody is using longbows and a few people are using something else in PvP.

Have you read some old posts or returned after a long time of not playing?

Marking system is part of the class... if you don't like... use a different class.
Damage of Hunting Arrow is enough... you don't need more anyways. EA can be spammed almost all the time by a top-notch build, PS by average build, DB can fill out times without EA for any build as long as you can go melee (with tank it's quite easy on bosses and generally you will do it on hordes for healing and conc. regen anyways).

Lack of balance in the game as a whole and forcing all rangers and dwarfs into a single build is a thing, but not like you're describing it...

Mages and Knights (especially mages) have some choice of build without really suffering due to it, but they're actually about as strong as a ranger using off-meta build.
Rangers are forced to use Q7 set, due to its damage buff and free EA spam. Without it, a good build is visibly weaker on bosses, sometimes even weaker than a good mage/knight build - but taking the unique sets out, classes are balanced (builds/ways of playing are not though).
Dwarfs are forced to use Q7+Q8 combo... because it triples mechanical turret's damage, makes cooldowns nonexistant and allows a permament damage buff and SS spam whenever they're not placing turrets. In idealised environment, they're surpassing other classes' best builds by about 5 times. In reality, it's usually about 3 times as fast as (Q7) ranger, compared to mage depends on boss (different elemental resistances of bosses), and not-sure-how much faster than knight.

Everything else you need, @DreamWill has already said.

 

Thank you very much for stating these facts.


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Thank you very much...it helps alot


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Thank you very much for widening my perception.