Looking for opinion on rolling Ranger for new TLP

I made no secret that rangers aren't great raiders and probably shouldn't be tanking but I think you are underselling them a bit and overselling monk defensiveness. Monks shouldn't tank bosses either lol. If you had the ridiculous, rare, tank pieces from the planes I think you could tank Kunark bosses. Your hp is lower largely by virtue of your race, but your mitigation is totally comparable, your pool may be a bit lower, but you **could** raid tank. You just shouldn't, lol. In groups rangers are excellent tanks once heavily geared. 1-50 you will not be very tanky no, but neither will a warrior or anyone else. All tanks get diced up in the hole in classic gear, but with slow tanks are fine. Like all melee they are weak as 1-50, but you can still level, track is super useful, their epic is easy to get, you will get gear easily, you won't be top dps, or even good dps but you can tank in raids, I see no reason not to let anyone who wants to try and tank say, a golem, in fear, and it's not like you can't come to raids. Rangers aren't a bad idea, and come luclin you will be feelin' reaaal good. They are the squishiest of the tanks, they are way tankier than monks once geared (monks are slightly tankier 1-50 because they don't need gear, but can't hold threat anyway), their utility in a group without a druid is actually pretty dope, snare is the cats meow in a group, and they can break CC with root.

So what i am reading is if i want to be a 4th choice tank roll Ranger in Classic-Velious. If i want to be a solid raid dps wait till Luclin. Is this correct?

Anyone that has actually raided high end on RF or LJ got a opinion as Ranger as a DPS raid opinion?

Rangers are steady melee DPS, that is not to be underestimated. It's not so important in Classic and Kunark, but come Velious when certain dragons lock out particular casters, it's nice. Not to mention the ranged option which is not available to all melee. This really comes into play during PoP. Finally, learn to kite. A good kiter is worth 10 dps when GoD rolls around!

I also learned to not be masochistic when playing from behind, you can establish yourself in a prominent guild and class swap when it benefits both you and the guild. Adding a ranger to a raid pre-AA's is dumb at best. They are void fillers, not performers. Velious is OK, Luclin is better...all hybrids excel with AA counts, they need both the melee AND the spells. This is why they are hybrids. Bards are the exception, and are always useful, but that is because their strength is songs, not melee and songs.

Sure rangers will have track, but so will druids...and they contribute far more to a raid until certain thresholds can be met by rangers/beastlords.

You are making the mistake of thinking class above personality. In my experience, the people that choose to dedicate the time behind a Ranger and perform well are a cut above.

It's self-selecting statistics. Anyone can play a certain classes, only someone with their own class can pull off a Ranger.

In your world maybe, in reality if every class is played to it's maximum potential rangers are far and away behind every other class for the first three expansions. There is a reason there is a stigma with the class and Brad Mcquaid himself joked about it, they made a mistake that wasn't remedied until another hybrid class (beastlord) came out and they shared a lot of the same AA and spell advancements to make them useful.

I'll stick with my world! The Rangers I've know have topped stat maxxers every day of the week!!

Archery DPS is actually OK considering it can avoid any AE with a 200 range bow. Plus makes a decent enough triage station for those dodging out to get patched up rather than wasting a real healer to do so.

Wizards are better dps than rangers on basically every Velious fight, no PoP encounter requires ranged dps, and no GoD encounter requires rangers kiting.

I can't speak to Kunark, but in classic there's two encounters where this is somewhat useful, both were still really iffy on the range. Queen Bee and Dracoliche. If they moved at all though, you generally still got hit. On Vox/Naggy, you just use the corner. On most others, eating DT's is the name of the game.

The problem is the dps is still very very low. Even with the 45/60 DD proc bow, it's still abysmal. Plus when it procs, you'll piss everyone off since it knocks bosses high into the air and they often don't come down (not kidding).

I was usually better off meleeing and trying to spot healing myself through it. Still, I enjoyed my ranger overall.

You do know about the parsing error for bows, right? If you're not accounting for that, you're likely missing half the bow DPS that actually is being done.

And not familiar with WS's issues, but RC has 200 range too. 27/45 with the best 125 range arrows - which isn't god awful with the double damage bonus. About on par with the ubiquitous BABS (24/39 - 0.6 for RC +7 DMG arrows, 0.613 for BABS) before the double damage bonus for being stationary - and with zero risk or lost DPS from dodging/fears/etc.

I wasn't around for the "Free AA boost" so I don't know if that only applied to melee or not (sensibly it SHOULD effect bows as well though to me) - so that might have changed things from previous to it - but for Classic, bowing absolutely had a place in raiding if you were wise (and willing to throw the cash at the arrows - it wasn't cheap).

Innate AA, auto granted beginning at level 40, that increases melee damage by a set percentage and goes up as you level. It'll be on any melee class' AA screen under class, "innate ##".

Nah, the bow damage really is abysmal. Even if you were to double it, it wouldn't even be close to our melee, which also isn't close to what a caster was doing in classic.

I don't have a ton of logs (especially with bow dps), but I did find one Protector of Sky log where I used my bow. Even if you were to double it, it would be 350 damage over 14 hits (~48 seconds). It is really really bad. That's with max haste, very high dex, and the best bow in the game.

I found another log of Spiroc Lord... 23 hits for 262 damage + 1 proc, so if you're right about bows doing twice the damage in my log, then that's 600 damage over 80 seconds at best.

Eye of Veeshan: 368 damage, 29 hits, 1 proc.

Again, I'm granting you that bows do double what is showing in my log without confirming it, (I'm about to log in and test it against a low level mob that I know the hp of; I'll edit once done). Even so, it's really terrible dps.

Are there specific circumstances that causes logs to not show full bow dps? I'm not able to replicate that against low level mobs (damage shown corresponds with how much damage the mob takes from other abilities as a percent of their hp).

Only YOU can log your own bow DPS properly I believe is the key thing. I believe if anyone else does they'll miss it. I'm not sure all the nuances, but after seeing a few parses from others that they were literally quoting half the DPS my parse was, I put it together.

Ah, in that case bow damage is even worse than stated above. I hear 51+ it gets double damage against stationary, non-rooted targets, and then 120% more from AA's after that, but in the classic era, it's really bad.

Hey Elaida you plan on rolling a toon on Phinny? Ranger again? I'm going to go monk this time I've had my fill of ranger for awhile I think lol.

I bought and set up a larger desk in case I want to play another char on my surface pro. Going to start off flying solo though.