Why warriors are always better than mercs and pets

Bards that are not boxes or alts are a myth!

There is a difference b/t applicants to your guild and a group. You expect new people to gradually get better in a 30 to 60 day period of time and you are also expecting them to perform on raids for you over that period and hopefully many more months after that.

Groups will sometimes be over in an hour, depending on what your doing. Do you really want to spend 30 minutes of that hour telling someone how to play their class? I personally try and help people out but it gets frustrating when you have to repeat yourself and teach someone their class when there are numerous websites out there to help out every class.

Main point: Groups are very short and you will probably never see those people again, it is probably a waste of your time to 'mentor' people. Applicants to a guild is over a much longer period and you should expect they need to be mentored.

Edited; Not productive towards this thread.

All I will say is dont get stuck in an elitist attitude and turn people away from the game. Today's casual is tomorrow's raider.

Don't mind my double post....

That's EZ mode, Shang. Real rangers invite a bunch of random people, then proceed to do the tanking, CC, pulling, healing, and dps.

While I normally group with friends I've known a long time, I've always invited random folks from the /lfg tool or /ooc if there's a spot or 2 left to fill.

Some are good, some not so much, and surprisingly some have become quite good friends.

Take a chance folks, you might be surprised!

Post was valid until DPS was stated.

Welcome to the new age of Rangers. We're like a less desirable bard, that is truly a master of none, and can be outDPS'd by a priest when Bullseye isn't up.

*this is unrelated to anything a specific person in this thread has said*
People thought that by nerfing headshot that rangers would be getting boosts in other departments lol. Don't get me wrong, I really dislike people that refuse to play their rangers in current content and refuse to ever leave feerrott... but the whole thing proves exactly why the whole concept of "losing one thing and gaining more of something else is" is a fallacy. It's why nerf calls are always such a bad t hing, cause the class loses a handy but ultimately non game breaking ability then ends up with pretty much less than nothing when their class is stagnated on top of it.

Rangers got shafted so hard in tier 3... Rangers needed a means to recover mana better (and to a much lesser extent so did druids) So what happened? Clerics got quiet miracle upgrade on top of their 2nd quiet miracle, Rangers needed a boost to their melee dps to make them more competitive in close combat - so what happened? Rangers did the fusion dance and merged with griffons in the commonlands augmenting their melee dps by exactly the same amount of damage as what an original era eq griffon hits for.

Awesome.

Shadow knights get stagnated due to their swarming every year. Granted, they are pretty close to being able to swarm current content as is, and are the favorite tanks regardless.

I don't really know I'd rangers get stagnated due to headshot, I don't think they do. I think rangers get stagnated because it's easy to play them and be better than average.

I'm assuming Rangers are still parsing well in the mid tier, but in higher skill guilds, we're dead last. Only real solution is to add more difficulty to the class, or make it more gear dependent.

We're still fine if there's a beastlord, bard, and cleric feeding us mana.

Really? Curious to see your numbers, heh.

That was the joke.... We're only competitive on any long fight by being pumped with mana constantly, heh.

I wish they'd return Summer's to it's original efficiency, convert the arrow reagent spells to the mana dump spells (and completely remove the dumb animal/humanoid restriction), and give us a focus for them.

I swear we're being held back because the devs have this misguided fear of raising our ranged dps. Nevermind our ranged dps is worse than an enchanter's once Bullseye is over.

There are people in RoI who help others learn EQ, but we mostly stick to our class or archetype and do it in places outside of pickup groups. Shang is a ranger, I doubt he has must interest in teaching tanks or bards anything. Class forums, sites and serverwides are where people should be asking for help from high skill/experience players.

Beat a guy on a couple NToV dragons and he'll never let you forget it.

I've helped a few rangers in the past. I've also helped many Clerics. I will, however, teach Beastlords how to paragon me.

Most of them argue with me and tell me I'm wrong, even though I've consistently outperformed them in every standard available, yet i'm clearly not in the know.

You can't make a horse drink water, and you can't fix terrible.

That said, ;t xegony.shang for all your Ranger needs. Please have a magelo, and be ready for criticism en masse.


Rouan -
Elidroth has stated several times our Archery damage is too high, even though a bulk of that comes from our two archery spells. Maybe someone that he likes can somehow persuade him differently.

Wow this got off-topic.

Anyway back to the OP, as a MAIN bard that boxes a mage, I can say for certainty I prefer a pet over a player tank 9 times out of 10 for the things I do (read T3 named, T2 group missions). I can pull a mob on my bard and the mage pet will tank it 100% of the time, because the pet isn't afk, or /telling someone, or in 1st person mode like hes playing CoD:Medieval Warfare and has 0 situational awareness.

A HUGE benefit of pets in recent expansions which you neglected to mention, is their ability to ignore the majority of detrimental effects named mobs cast which will require a live player to counteract.

Was touched on but a fire elemental pet can hold aggro over a Wiz merc on BURN, which is some of the highest "group" dps and due to how pet aggro actually works they have 0 problem holding aggro on multiple mobs assuming the group isn't dividing their dps which a real tank will struggle with as well.

And i seriously hope any player that is 90+ understands how melee aggro works when a pet is tanking, that is an obvious downside and provides a good reason to use a PLAYER tank when your group makeup calls for it.

Merc tanks do suck, they serve a good role for when you absolutely have no other choice but for any "real" content should be benched.

A lot of this is all well and good if the tank is your main, but when it comes to alts who the heck wants to gear a box that requires ten times more work than any other class. A tank alt is a black hole, sucking away all of your free time to feed it every possible upgrade in every tier until it can handle the next. I don't want to fall into that trap again.

By the far the lowest effort path is a pet tank. But that of course means no melee dps.

Lawlz

Which is an issue SOE should address. There is a big disadvantage to early tanks. From what I am told, it is not bad at the top-end but the crawl up there is painful.

A lot of issues would be solved from this imho.

Cliques are just a survival mechanism for a game that is progressively getting more dangerous. There was a time when you actually had time to think to yourself, "Aw crap. This is going to hurt." as things went south. In today's game things happen so fast that the first hint something is going wrong is when you find yourself floating above your corpse.

It really doesn't matter how good the LFG player is, he/she WILL kill you. If for no other reason than they don't know your strengths and weaknesses. The bright side of this is that you don't know theirs either, so you will probably wind up killing them, too.