Heartwood Blade  

 

Mr. The Quick...
Ive read two of your posts now comparing rogues and rangers. I just want to say this: Yay for you for playing both a rogue and a ranger, but untill you are playing the high end game with your ranger you wont have any idea of the capabilities of the class. Rangers havent sucked since about 4 expansions ago, and the fact that they sucked even then is questionable. Rangers are a melee class used primarily for dps. Untill a ranger gets decent gear and some aa's, he will only be used for dps. At the high end of the game, however, rangers have 15K+ hp and over 2600 AC. That makes for a fairly decent tank in any group. Are we better than warriors or knights?? Hell no, we dont have the same array of defensive discs and we arent a plate class. I am not high end, I am about mid range... but I am still an extremely effective tank in MPG, archstone or any zones of similar difficulty - without taxing the cleric. What does that mean? Im not claiming to be a tank, but what that means is that rangers are versitle enough to be a tank in a pinch when you cant find another class to do it. High end rangers also have what you refered to as "sick dps". Better than a rogue with comparable gear?? I doubt it. Better than a rogue with average gear? You bet.
Rogues also have a great set of skills and can put out and enormous amount of dps, but comparing the two is pointless because they serve diffrent functions. Its fine for you to tell all the whining rangers to shut up, because I agree... but dont turn around and cry foul on the treatment of rogues. I dont know a damn thing about the rogue class, but Ive seen an unbuffed rogue solo trak, sev and a handfull of other old world dragons without much difficulty. Seems to me that how bad your class is "shafted" is based on gear and aa's more than anything that soe does. I wish rangers had better heals, nukes, and damage discs... but at some point someone somewhere is doing his or her best to preserve class balance. Im done rambling, just wanted to throw all that out. Oh one more thing! A rogue friend of mine was complaining about how rogues are getting the short end of the stick, and when I said "but you guys have the best dps around I thought" He was quick to inform me that wizards and beastlords put rogues to shame. If anyone knows if thats true, let me know.

Agreed, we are good at both easily, but before you get into the high weapons, archery is by far the way to go.

My Treant Composite Laminated Compound Bow does double the DPS (with maxed AM3/EQ AA's and a 13 damage arrow, consistently doing over 150 DPS) of my epics around 63, lvl 66 now and working on my 1.5, and have a few friends who can fairly easily get the fights done for me aswell, so will be more then happy to compare, add another decent weapon and sure my melee may out-dps my bow, but if I'm lagging and/or lazy at the time....sitting on autofire and not losing DPS due to having to readjust angle due to mob push etc, is the way I'll continue to go. Also very nice on mobs with a AoE, being that you can shoot from out of range, especially with high ranged bow/arrow.

First off for Carney.. I play in an Anguish level guild on the Rathe and our rangers are pretty much split down the middle for melee vrs. Archery. We all however agree that our new epic would have been better as a bow. It's true many rangers like melee now but if you at the point of being able to obtain your new epic you also should access to much better melee weapons as far as DPS is concerned. Do a search under ranger / any 1 hander with ratio / efficiency as the filters. You'll find our epic is n the bottom of the 3rd page already. That to me is pretty disapointing.

If it were a bow it would have been used more often by all rangers. The ones that prefer melee still use arching on many raid mobs / TS and situtations where it's just more convenient.

Winchester.... For the love of god... What kind of nuke do you expect to get as a class that is near the top of the melee elite. The new ones are to be more mana efficient but not more powerfull. If your nuking anymore then on the rare mob that is only vulnerable to spells then /reroll a wizzard.

Rangersown... Your on the right track but just so you know the cap on arching damage is a mith. This was based off the highest damage bow at the time so everyone thought it was a cap. Read posts on the frozen bow of the Geldian and you see that we are now hitting harder then that. Also Auspice and other crit enhancing spells can bump you over the "normal" mark as well.

The nice part of playing the ranger is that our class is more versitile then most.. You can pull (most the time), sit back and sling arrows, get in the mix and melee, have some spells to make soling a possible option, /auto and drink beer during raids, I can even tank many XP areas like WoS or Ele plains. I break 11K HP and 2K AC easily now. With the right AA you have all kinds of options. /reroll a rogue or monk because someone tells yous they are better DPS and see how many of these options you lose.