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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Ranger Review
Thrakedons
Member, Alpha Two
After maining ranger and playing mage and tank as well as also tampering with the other classes I've had time to finalize my thoughts during phase 1 and 2. I'll get right to the point, Ranger in my opinion is the worst designed class in the game at the moment and brings almost nothing to a group that isn't done better by the other classes. (Obviously this is an alpha so take this as feedback for intrepid and not as doom and gloom as I'm sure this class will see changes. I'm just expressing areas that need it.)
1. Hunts and Marks. What is rangers defining features? The devs say the hunt and mark system. Currently hunts and marks are extremely weak and honestly are pretty much the last abilities I get in the skill tree. For instance, hunt of the tiger increases crit damage by 10%. Lets break this down. At decent gear and much of the way through the game, our crit chance is at max 20% This might change at the highest gear point but that is my experience so far. Dexterity isn't all that common in gear unless you are completely maxed out. 10% higher damage on 20% of your shots is a grand total of 2% higher damage overall. This seems extremely weak to me and not worthy of being called a defining ability of the ranger class. Marks also have 8 second up time and 60 second down time. This also seems extremely weak to me and should either increase the time up or the effect of the ability as at best you are increasing your crit hance by 20%, arguably somewhat decent but still not even close to feeling as if the enemy is marked for death.
2. Range. One defining feature of rangers in other games is a longer range. Even if just slightly longer, this can give them the ability to kite the enemy and truly feel like snipers. In the current iteration of the game, auto attacks are standard across the board due to range being dependent on weapons. In a similar way, our skills are 30 range like bard or mage with the exception being snipe and concentrated scatter shot. So ranger has basically no longer range and the ones that are have a charge up time that mitigates the advantage that would give.
3. Damage. Admittedly ranger can do decent single target damage in bursts but doesn't have abilities to follow it up and its auto attacks are barely stronger if even at all stronger than the other classes auto attacks. Lets break this into two further parts.
4. Skills. Ranger has some pretty cool looking skills at a glance but they have next to no synergy and many feel like a waste of points. Due to the amount of marks, hunts, and ammo imbues, you can get all your abilities without having to really make a choice as there isn't really any other options besides really one(maybe two) rotations that are at all synergistic or viable. If marks, hunts, and ammo imbues are going to take up so much of our potential skills slots then they need to hit hard to make up for the missing abilities.
5. Auto attacks. At a glance, rangers auto attacks should be very good with hunts, marks, and ammo imbues all buffing them, but after playing ranger you'd be heavily disappointed. As pointed out earlier hunts and marks are disappointing and ammo imbues are also underwhelming. Take mage for example. Mage gets elemental auto attacks after using elemental abilities. There are no skill points spent and abilities can take advantage of the status effects applied. ranger has to spend skills points to get their ammo imbues and they aren't even stronger than the mages status effects, in fact I would argue they are weaker and more niche. Even the weapon skill trees apply bleed, stagger, and other effects that make imbue ammos even more redundant and less useful.
6. Regen. Rangers one regen is so weak it might as well not be there in any pvp or pve scenario. It only helps outside of combat recover a few seconds faster than if you didn't have it at all. Other than this ability, we have no regen.
7. Shields/mitigation. We have no meaningful mitigation and no shields. The only defensive, if you can call it that, is the thorns you can apply on yourself that have a 10% chance of applying bleed on the enemy. As you can see, this doesn't even really count as a defensive and is extremely weak and redundant dependent on bleed in the weapon skill tree and imbue ammo.
8. Mobility. We have good vertical mobility but are consistently outpaced by bard and soon, from what the devs have said, rogue. Ranger was originally described as the second most mobile class but obviously this isn't currently the case. The reason I bring this up is that if we don't have defensives or heals than we need very good mobility to get out of sticky situations as a class with no survivablity.
9. CCs and stuns. We have one silence but its at the cost of using the worst ammo imbue available to us. I do like the rangers air strike and vine field as they slow the enemy down. Both of those abilities feel good.
10. Higher level ability damage. At the third tier of our abilities we see two abilities that deal very little damage, airstrike and rain of death. These need a buff as currently they feel extremely weak.
11. Buffs. Our buffs are also extremely weak as our speed increase to the party is very little and hardly impactful. Our marks are the other buff we give which as already addressed are quite weak and you almost never hear shot callers calling for marks as they are negligible increases in damage.
Overall, our synergies feel bad, we have practically no options in build, no regen, no defensives, weak to useless hunts, marks, and ammo imbues, average auto attacks, and very weak buffs and higher level abilities. If one were to ask what the point of being a ranger is in the current iteration of the game, which obviously isn't finished, then I would be hard put to say what we could offer to a group. Vine cc would be one of the only ones I could say. As far as damage goes the mage is better in both single target and aoe damage with abilities that synergize far better and status effects that they can obtain without spending skill points like ranger. Other forms of cc like trips and stuns are better as they prohibit the enemy from attacking and not just moving which would be pointless on ranged enemies. So what is the point of ranger? Stealth? Rogue is about to knock that out of the park (as it should).
In summary, Ranger needs either a large buff or complete overhaul of many of its skills. What that should look like I'm not sure. I would love if we had more skills than just being reliant on our hunts and marks. Its a cool system but in the end is almost entirely a stat or status change and doesn't feel near as satisfying as the other classes abilities. If the hunts, marks, and imbue ammo system had more effect on an increased roster of skills with either at least one defensive or regen then ranger would feel much more like its own class with options other than just dumping dps and praying that works.
Cheers all and happy new year!
1. Hunts and Marks. What is rangers defining features? The devs say the hunt and mark system. Currently hunts and marks are extremely weak and honestly are pretty much the last abilities I get in the skill tree. For instance, hunt of the tiger increases crit damage by 10%. Lets break this down. At decent gear and much of the way through the game, our crit chance is at max 20% This might change at the highest gear point but that is my experience so far. Dexterity isn't all that common in gear unless you are completely maxed out. 10% higher damage on 20% of your shots is a grand total of 2% higher damage overall. This seems extremely weak to me and not worthy of being called a defining ability of the ranger class. Marks also have 8 second up time and 60 second down time. This also seems extremely weak to me and should either increase the time up or the effect of the ability as at best you are increasing your crit hance by 20%, arguably somewhat decent but still not even close to feeling as if the enemy is marked for death.
2. Range. One defining feature of rangers in other games is a longer range. Even if just slightly longer, this can give them the ability to kite the enemy and truly feel like snipers. In the current iteration of the game, auto attacks are standard across the board due to range being dependent on weapons. In a similar way, our skills are 30 range like bard or mage with the exception being snipe and concentrated scatter shot. So ranger has basically no longer range and the ones that are have a charge up time that mitigates the advantage that would give.
3. Damage. Admittedly ranger can do decent single target damage in bursts but doesn't have abilities to follow it up and its auto attacks are barely stronger if even at all stronger than the other classes auto attacks. Lets break this into two further parts.
4. Skills. Ranger has some pretty cool looking skills at a glance but they have next to no synergy and many feel like a waste of points. Due to the amount of marks, hunts, and ammo imbues, you can get all your abilities without having to really make a choice as there isn't really any other options besides really one(maybe two) rotations that are at all synergistic or viable. If marks, hunts, and ammo imbues are going to take up so much of our potential skills slots then they need to hit hard to make up for the missing abilities.
5. Auto attacks. At a glance, rangers auto attacks should be very good with hunts, marks, and ammo imbues all buffing them, but after playing ranger you'd be heavily disappointed. As pointed out earlier hunts and marks are disappointing and ammo imbues are also underwhelming. Take mage for example. Mage gets elemental auto attacks after using elemental abilities. There are no skill points spent and abilities can take advantage of the status effects applied. ranger has to spend skills points to get their ammo imbues and they aren't even stronger than the mages status effects, in fact I would argue they are weaker and more niche. Even the weapon skill trees apply bleed, stagger, and other effects that make imbue ammos even more redundant and less useful.
6. Regen. Rangers one regen is so weak it might as well not be there in any pvp or pve scenario. It only helps outside of combat recover a few seconds faster than if you didn't have it at all. Other than this ability, we have no regen.
7. Shields/mitigation. We have no meaningful mitigation and no shields. The only defensive, if you can call it that, is the thorns you can apply on yourself that have a 10% chance of applying bleed on the enemy. As you can see, this doesn't even really count as a defensive and is extremely weak and redundant dependent on bleed in the weapon skill tree and imbue ammo.
8. Mobility. We have good vertical mobility but are consistently outpaced by bard and soon, from what the devs have said, rogue. Ranger was originally described as the second most mobile class but obviously this isn't currently the case. The reason I bring this up is that if we don't have defensives or heals than we need very good mobility to get out of sticky situations as a class with no survivablity.
9. CCs and stuns. We have one silence but its at the cost of using the worst ammo imbue available to us. I do like the rangers air strike and vine field as they slow the enemy down. Both of those abilities feel good.
10. Higher level ability damage. At the third tier of our abilities we see two abilities that deal very little damage, airstrike and rain of death. These need a buff as currently they feel extremely weak.
11. Buffs. Our buffs are also extremely weak as our speed increase to the party is very little and hardly impactful. Our marks are the other buff we give which as already addressed are quite weak and you almost never hear shot callers calling for marks as they are negligible increases in damage.
Overall, our synergies feel bad, we have practically no options in build, no regen, no defensives, weak to useless hunts, marks, and ammo imbues, average auto attacks, and very weak buffs and higher level abilities. If one were to ask what the point of being a ranger is in the current iteration of the game, which obviously isn't finished, then I would be hard put to say what we could offer to a group. Vine cc would be one of the only ones I could say. As far as damage goes the mage is better in both single target and aoe damage with abilities that synergize far better and status effects that they can obtain without spending skill points like ranger. Other forms of cc like trips and stuns are better as they prohibit the enemy from attacking and not just moving which would be pointless on ranged enemies. So what is the point of ranger? Stealth? Rogue is about to knock that out of the park (as it should).
In summary, Ranger needs either a large buff or complete overhaul of many of its skills. What that should look like I'm not sure. I would love if we had more skills than just being reliant on our hunts and marks. Its a cool system but in the end is almost entirely a stat or status change and doesn't feel near as satisfying as the other classes abilities. If the hunts, marks, and imbue ammo system had more effect on an increased roster of skills with either at least one defensive or regen then ranger would feel much more like its own class with options other than just dumping dps and praying that works.
Cheers all and happy new year!
8
Comments
The vine snare, our vaults our (still) 50%-functional camo is pretty much the abilities that make ranger fun.
Our DPS abilities, our hunts/marks and ammos (no matter how much I adore the ideas) simply do not really feel like a class - it feels more like a weapon talent tree.
I love the *feel* behind the single target buffs of the ranger - but the regen and bleed feels pointless. We already apply bleed in 5 different ways (and half of them being from our weapon basic attacks), why would we need an additional "chance to trigger when struck" bleed?
Our ammos just feels bad - literally things we already apply via weapons save for daze... Which is also the only ability opening up for our *only* interrupt.
Marks has a super low duration, long CDs *and* share CD. That feels extremely underwhelming - although I, yet again, love the concept.
Our hunts just feels like budget versions of the fighter's stances (yet those are not the defining class features of the fighter - it is for the ranger though.)
I certainty dont want "just" a buff for the ranger - in fact, it would make me extremely sad. Rangers need a slight rework. Not number tuning.
The combat mobility felt great but the actual damage abilities and rotation did not. I didn't make it to level 20 though so grain of salt.
I've played Fighter up to 25 if including xp debt and Mage the past few days. Mage is far and away the strongest dps class by a mile. I played Bard in A1 and for support it was solid.
Fighter and Ranger need love. They fall short. Ranger feels half-baked and a bit jank while Fighter is basically a Whirlwnd bot atm that offers little else. Fighter needs defensives to be a front line. Currently everything is more punishing in melee both for pvp and pve.
Mage only playing for a few days I have up to 17 and it has numerous diffefent openers, combo's, build variations, single target and aoe, and even full clump and dump. Mage feels over-loaded with strong abilities while Fighter and Ranger only have a few to hang their hat on. Ranger's mobility was a lot if fun to mess around with but for group pve its mostly irrelevent and you just stand still auto attacking. Mage goes dumps like 10 strong abilities in a long aoe chain of partical effect fire works while massive pulls die at your groups feet.
For Ranger it felt to me like the class should have a long bow path and a short bow build path but instead the abilities all worked at a set distance range which invalidates the long bow's purpose besides snipe. Maybe an ability tree in a center vertical line like a tree and left-side short bow intended modifier and right-side long bow intended modifier.
Ex: Scatter Shot: Short bow mod to increase cast animation speed. Long bow mod to increase damage or add a disable effect or cc.
The weighted ammo was nice for pvp but agree with others that the bleed spam didn't feel great, maybe doesn't stack correctly atm? Too many ability points spent in marks and passives and not fun abilities to use that deal damage. Mobility 9/10 though. If Ranger gets a good damage ability rotation it could jump from worst to first quickly with its movement kit.