It's absurd that I, as an Inquisitor, am excited to get a crossbow and set my auto to forced range because it's such a DPS boost. The class fantasy is basically to be a big boy DPS healer and their entire kit was once built around swinging a big hammer. Now we're stuck plucking away with a crossbow and I personally hate that. Hunter's quests are the worst.
No man. Flawless buffs just make people not want to come back because nobody likes being stuck behind and guilds get tired of wasting raid nights to go back and get those buffs for people. Please leave flawless buffs and all that anti-returning-player nonsense on live. I played live up until VoV and it sucks because of stuff like that. The game was much more populated in the past without these gimmick mechanics. Just toss em in the trash where they belong and work on making loot that's worth farming!
Hunters/Other weapons in terms of raw "damage" from auto attack begin to even out in Tier 9. I posted my results in the other thread about ranger myth vs crossbow. In short, it shows how a generic level 80 fabled dagger with 10 less rating parses within 2-3% of a hunters weapon from ROK. Right now it looks like my hunters dagger from KOS is about 35% better than a fabled 70 weapon from EOF. This is a problem. As far as OP is concerned, as I told the other guy; your mythical bow for ranger is better as it has auto attack multiplier, black adorn, mod from agi, etc. There is no situation in which you should be taking it off for a crossbow. This also doesn't factor in the idea you can still wear two OTHER items, like neck/offhand, or double fervor shoulders. As far as T5-EOF, yes; hunters weapons are incredibly overpowered and should've been shelved and turned into adorns a long time ago. It's frustrating to see so many things drop from mobs that are worthless because you wear prismatic/hunters. At the very least, I think that the "weapons" (xbow, shield, dagger, hammer) should be removed from the game, or hunters should be shifted to an adornment system. I would like to see these turned into green adorns ideally, you get necklace from KD and two ring adorns from hunters. One ring is flay, the other is the cloak proc, and possibly the ability to buy the hunters buff as a third item thats currently from the neck/charm. I would also like to see wands removed from the game, but that will never happen.
Other weapons being within 2-3% in RoK is still not good though. So the hunter's weapon is still BiS and there's only 1, MAYBE 2 more expansions after RoK before the TLE server basically dies and people wait for the next one to do it again.
Shortening the range would do nothing but make it more annoying to use, unless you're talking about the damage range.
