So, Xelgad, tell me this.... By my own "research" ... including pocket-book parsing... there are roughly 850 lvl 90 Rangers world wide... Which, with a $15 d'sub, equals about $13,000 Monthly from those people that cared enough about ranger to get them to level 90... And that equals $78,000 over the last 6 months since the expansion was released... So...... for the roughly $80,000, you're telling us that we have no solution in sight for a broken game with broken mechanics. I wager if I were to offer $80,000 to any of the people posting right now they could come up with a solution in 6 seconds for what needs to be done to resolve these issues at hand. ...... Why are you trying to sell me an $80,000 barrel of crap? .... Actually why the hell am I paying $15 a month for a broken game... *ponders* FIX RANGERS IN 2010!
Honestly, until xelgad posts the numbers and the data file to back it up, I'm outright calling him a lying sack of crap for that post. You'd either have to be a complete failure at 3rd grade level math to mess the comparison up, or there is something that is not working right on live if they can get rangers to produce equal numbers to assassins. Sure, rangers CAN equal assassins at times just like there are times when a troub can hit 150k dps when the stars align and the procs go off exactly right and the troub is farting pure clouds of epic win caliber luck on a 40 mob linked 2 second fight, but to outright say that the rangers are at the place they're "supposed to be" and parsing equal to assassins? Those must be some seriously fail assassins in those "other sources" if they're getting equalled by rangers when they have that much of an advantage over the rangers. Either that, or a large majority of players are getting duped into thinking they're at the "right location" and theres some super secret trick that apparently only a select small number within SOE are privy to. Honestly I don't even understand why there is such a distance requirement because whats the real difference if you're 4 meters or 8 meters away? Rangers are going to stand where they can min/max their output, so why put an arbitrary mark on where that point is? Nevermind the fact that rangers are supposed to be experts with bows and really shouldn't NEED to be closer than any other melee user stands to get better use out of their weapon of specialty that they're supposed to be more proficient with. Honestly now I fully believe we were better off with aeralik because at least he acknowledged even if passively that he was a pos that played favorites. Bravo SOE, a new low even for you.
I'm still holding off on unloading on him on a personal. He's relatively new, and frankly there aren't enough high end rangers to even get accurate numbers because a lot of them betrayed/quit for some odd reason. He needs to limit the number parsing to high end guilds and rangers. Looking at mid to lower end guilds and seeing that we are 'keeping up' with other classes would lead him to the conclusion he has now. Also, keeping up for the most part isn't enough for even the high end. I was really surprised by how boring the game got when it went from fighting for first, to no way in hell am I getting first on the parse if the other DPS classes are trying. Hey look I'm getting a distant third pretty consistently, woohoo. I mean think about, a pure DPS class and can't even properly compete for the top spot, what else is there to do? Personally I've been charged with raid tasks that aren't class specific. Clicking and managing raid mechanics. What's sad is I could do that all on any other class and instantly be more useful. Aside from numbers you have the most vocally disgruntled class in the GAME here. Not going to tell me things are fine. Even if its 100% A-OK on paper that means nothing when you have so many players of said class, and former players, so incredibly PO'd. Can sweep it under the rug as' dur hur hur rangers always whine on EQ1/EQ2.' Well I got news for you, our archetype doesn't do it this much on other MMO's. I'm talking about 7 other top MMO's here. This is because they were confident about the rangers role being TOP DPS purely at range. No weird balancing because they were a non-mage DPS class that could range, or generally didn't have to deal with the same problems as backstabbing classes. They didn't screw around and make it where they have to melee a small portion of most fights for top performance. It's just 'your an archer, you use a bow to do top end DPS, try and stay at range'
I think a lot of the difference between the lower end raid guild and the higher end raid guild ranger parses have to do with masters. Ranger masters are dirt cheap compared to other classes. (I wonder why? lol) This means that in a lower end raid guild the ranger is likely to be (as in my case) mastered long before anyone else. I was fully mastered and cleaning house on the parses within a month of the expansion hitting. But, as time goes by and everyone else gets more and more mastered, they have been advancing steadily on me. Suddenly 35k doesn't seem like much, especially when there are fighters doing 30k. A wizard with only half his masters is at about the same point I am now on the parse and I suspect he will top out a LOT higher than me considering all of his damage is spell based. I have a hard time believing that their 'in house parses' break down what percentage of that class has what percentage of their masters.
Jack@Lucan DLere wrote: I've been seeing this story retold a lot and it happened to me as well. I had a nice jump on AA's and masters when xpac came out, I was dominating the parse. As things advanced my parse went up but others were going up at a much faster rate, and now we have the current situation. If you have a raid setup of all sub-par players I wouldn't be surprised to still see a ranger do quite well in comparison. But when you have a very skilled raid this means almost nothing. Basically the ranger has a easy but shorter maximum potential curve imo. It's easy to get a nice running start, and getting to mid-high to high potential on a ranger is not too difficult, getting to maximum is pretty hard though. Problem is doing 'pretty good' on a wizard or assassin gets the same results as a ranger working his butt off and doing everything to min/max his performance. This is why when anyone says 'well soandso ranger beats this assassin/sorcerer all the time' ranger's just say the people playing those are way behind on equipment or just plain suck. the problem isn't casual mid to low end ranger's or pvp. It's at high end raiding and very bad. Any problems low to mid level rangers have would fixed with the same solutions for high end just as long as it isn't itemization based.
I love how we're a mighty force when standing at the correct range (within melee) yet Fyreflyte posted this 5 months ago: " The fact remains that rangers are intended to be a ranged class, and and we are going to make some changes that make this more viable than it has been. In the mean time, I am not creating any more 0 range bows. You have a number of abilities to help keep mobs at range; rangers were using these long before any 0 range bow was available."
Yes, intended, and plan on improving it. Didn't say we are currently and don't need to melee. When they have talked about modifications to rangers in the past it had nothing to do with DPS really, just more or less making us more ranged and less melee with bows possibly able to exploit mechanics like flurry and auto ae. Those two comments aren't in conflict logically. Factually though, we are not a 'mighty force' in my and most players opinions. So its kind of a horizontal move they have planned from what they have said so far. No real intentions of upping our DPS, just to make us less melee and more ranged.
The only numbers that matter are the ones from the Rathgar posting. Top assassins are doing 76+kish while rangers are doing 50k+ish. Thats about a 20k+ dps gap. Are we still good Xelgad?
It's been my experience that rangers have done well at the beginning of every single tier since KoS (provided it's a ranger that has decent gear and knows to time auto attacks and where to stand and so on and so forth we all know this by now). And then other classes catch up fast and we never, ever, ever progress at anything othe than an absolute crawl. Also, I have had a bout of pure insomnia and haven't slept at all, so for your amusement I present a very incoherent TL;DR history of ranger problems, lulz. Because I can, obvs. : In T7, our issues were an incredible lack of decent bows and arrow mechanics. KoS had it the worst, we'd just been hit by the nerf bat at the end of DoF, and the only semi-decent bow was a drop off of TARINAX, and the only actually high end bow was the most ridiculous rare drop off of Venekor (seriously, you don't want to know how many times I ran HoS trying to get that #%@# sarnak warbow, and never ever saw it I H8 U VENEKOR and then someone I know went ONCE and it dropped for him and aghfsdfhsf). In addition, we also needed to grab one of the ammo summoning bows, either the aforementioned bow from Tarinax, or, barring that, the bow from the drake that was entirely worthless outside of the arrow summoning. Did I mention that all three of these bows were stupidly rare? Let me mention it again, because once we had those things, we were suddenly able to be competitve, but good luck getting them. Especially good luck getting them once EoF was released and your raid had already blown through that content and was moving on to EoF things. (Oh and at some point in here I don't even remember, some dev, Lockeye I think, informed us that we were all silly and that their internal data showed rangers having no issues really guys totally cool. So this is not a new problem with their data collection). EoF did help in that it added more respectable bows, but once again these bows were drops off of the boss mobs of the expansion, which meant that by the time your raid was able to kill these mobs you were probably being sat or dropped entirely because you simply could not keep up with all the other DPS classes. Rangers lucky enough to have got what they needed in KoS did fine, even shone, but rangers who weren't so lucky were left out in the cold unless they had very, very, very generous raid groups. Oh yeah and not one single major story questline had a bow reward, because durrhurrhurr, who needs bows, srsly? RoK rolls around, and there is consternation (I believe this started in beta, it's been a while, but I'm quite sure it did), because with a new tier that all important ammo from those ammo summoning bows (summoning no longer looks like a word) is now worthless, and there are no ammo summoning bows in T8, and lots of people far, far, far better at math than I am draw up all these charts and examples and pretty much go 'hay SOE this is REALLY BAD, arrow mechanics have been borked forever but now they are unforgivably borked and we need halp' and so a certain dev in charge of such things at the time (who P.S. no, I would not want back over Xelgad because as much as Xelgad's interview answer made me froth at least Xelgad is not--well, something the boards don't allow me to elaborate on in a polite or impolite fashion), anyway this dev was like 'lo, fixes are coming guys'. And we rejoiced. And then oops, the fixes rolled onto Test server and as it so happens, the arrow mechanics were fixed (huzzah!) and we were nerfed. Yes, remember when that big touted fix was a nerf? Fun times. Happily the actual nerf didn't make it off of Test, but by the time the 'fix' went live we'd had it made very clear to us that this certain dev thought we were performing exactly as we were meant to perform (badly) and that he'd taken measures to make sure that we gained absolutely no DPS from this fix. There was a lot of froth. (Also, should any mechanics dev be reading this massive spiel, insofar as we know that blanket 30% nerf to our bow damage or whatever he did is still there. Hidden to us of course. Because a major point of the arrow mechanics fix wasn't to stop us having to perform calculus to figure out how our damage worked or anything. Just making sure you guys know about that. You do know about that, right? ) Oh yeah, and mythicals. I could write an entire essay on the disparity between the ranger mythical and the assassin mythical but let's just not do that. Anyone with eyes can pull up both examine windows and have a look. TSO! Oh TSO. You guys realize I've been hoping for fixes to itemization since KoS, right? And mechanics overhaul since at least the late end of EoF, but definitely RoK? And that there are some mechanics problems that have existed since the game launched? Yeah I'm just saying. Okay, TSO comes and...and...and things get worse, okay? Because we have flurry and AE auto attack and they're getting rather more prominent, but of course rangers can't use those, because that would just be silly. Also, to speak about outdated AAs for a moment, you realize we have an endline ranger AA that adds...8% doubleattack (it was nerfed from 10% because lawl overpowering I guess)? And that I got boots fairly early on in TSO that had more doubleattack than that? I mean I'm just saying here. Okay anyway, so really, nothing was done for us in TSO except to exempt us from new special toys that all the other reindeer got to play with, and itemization went completely insane--I'm just saying--and we could kind've...sort've...I mean sometimes we were okay, I guess? Sometimes? ... Anyway nothing was done and it was just sort've left to lie. And SF gets announced and rather like during pre-RoK, and pre-TSO, we all get bright eyed and everyone is all 'I bet fixes will come in SF!' And some people noticed the only thing really mentioned as being looked at in Fanfaire was, well, Stream of Arrows. But hey Stream of Arrows had been broken since DESERT OF FLAMES SERIOUSLY PEOPLE so that was a hopeful note, wasn't it? Also we got a new dev to take care of this stuff about when closed beta started, woooooo. And yeah then SF beta. And guys, we do complain a lot, but this is why I froth and rage about the recent interview and yet I still can't hate Xelgad, because seriously the state of our new AAs in beta was horrible. It was like the final screw you from a certain dude, it was cry worthy. And most of our AAs now are still really heavily favoring assassins on the predator side and the ranger ones are mostly not as cool or effective (but I love you long time Arrow Barrage <3 <3 <3) but honestly if you had seen how they were when beta started (and if you did, then you know) and how Xelgad was working like a busy bee to make them not quite so terrible, then well, something. I can be grateful for that. Also we got minimum range on our AEs taken away (P.S. THIS IS STILL BROKEN WHEN USING ANY BOW THAT IS NOT THE MYTH THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW, GUYS) just like that, and it was sweet. And makeshift arrows stopped being horrible. And Stream of Arrows stopped being horrible. And...well that's where the good things kind've stopped, really. Everyone got fixes in SF. Our fixes were nice and great and all, but what we need is an overhaul, and that did not come. And then we saw the itemization and everyone else's AAs and new adornments and we started realizing, guys, guys we are so screwed if things aren't changed, and the devs were like 'yeah, there are problems and we're going to monitor the situation, but we really can't do an overhaul now 'cause duh expansion', and this was a frustrating but reasonable point. So we somewhat subsided a little. There was hope, because hey things might come in the next GU, I mean with Halas. Halas + ranger fixes, wooo, just maybe. Yeah, that didn't happen. Aaand...yeah the likelihood of us seeing anything in this upcoming GU is in the negatives at this point (P.S. we are a mighty force. P.P.S. I know you'll hate having said that forever Xelgad but if we don't mock we'll cry big fat ranger tears of woe). Guardians might. I'm happy for guardians. I expect we'll hear nothing. In a few months people will start looking hopeful and starry-eyed again, because maybe the Expansion-That-Totally-Isn't-Obviously-Velious-Really will contain badly needed ranger fixes, and you guys, we just need to hold on a little longer and... ...And yeah. I'm just saying here. So, in closing:
^^^ /agree with wall of text. I'm just demoralized in general. But, I guess that's okay, since I'm a mighty force and all.
After seeing their response to lag, and saying how they don't experience it, I know they don't have a grasp of what is really going on in raids. Game lag was like a myth to them, something players talked about but NONE of the dev team saw themselves, specifically because they don't friggin raid. they literally admitted to the fact none of the dev team saw the amount of lag players were complaining about. People including myself told them it was on raids and they responded 'we suspected it was on raids.' Only way that could happen is if their playing on private servers or possibly the russian ones, or they just aren't raiding. So it's not a big stretch to think they see rangers doing fine, never really seeing them in raids. They need to be in a raid, or at least spectating a raid as it happens with a ranger in it to see what we are talking about, and there is a big indication they haven't. Only thing they have shown to notice about raids is who has killed what. I'll agree we are fine solo, pvp, and even groups, i do quite well in most groups. Raids on the other hand, it isn't a slight variation in performance, it is a huge drop when compared to other DPS classes. It is extremely embaressing when I purposely save all my temps, all my big hits, make sure i got the spirit arrows in, and time everything perfectly pulling out all the stops and some mages just casually beats me with a comfortable margin.
yeah at the moment we're 'OK' in groups but I've definitely noticed a change (for the worse) with my ranger this expansion. She feels sluggish in groups, compared to when I play my inq or my other scout and I've definitely noticed other classes' dps increasing. True, I do still need a few upgrades to my gear (what is available at group level) but it is not going to make a huge difference (a difference yes). Previous expansions / nerfs / being overlooked haven't really been noticed at group level too much - this expansion it has. I sincerely hope they take another look at this 'mighty force' and start tweaking/adjusting us soon because if the new expansion contains lots of new goodies for other classes that rangers can't take advantage of, we are going to be dying at group level soon too.
kartikeya wrote: Nice writeup, even if you did neglect the glory days. But you missed a few things. First off, there was the stormcaller bow from the questline in EOF, which I thought was pretty darned good. Second was the fact that the crafted bow you got from EH remained the best bow through most of ROK, I think practically until the mythicals came out wasn't it? Or did that change when the arrow mechanics were 'fixed'. But, if you think that's bad, do you realize the poisoned seeds from EH are still better than T9 caustic poisons? Speaking of which, I need to see if anyone in my guild wants to clear the first floor of EH with me. I wonder if we have to mentor to get seeds and the recipe to drop. Does anyone know?
Neiloch@Kithicor wrote: Sweetpea, sometimes i wonder if they even have a grasp of what is really going on in GAME period, much less raids
-=Hoss=- wrote: Rigid Scale Bow. Yes that was the best bow at the end of EoF. And when Aerlick found out all rangers were still using it in RoK he nerfed it when his "mechanics" fix so we all had to start using Raincaller which was worse but we had to use it because of the way Aerlick made arrows work. The in RoK you had to wait until your guild could kill Overking to get another bow. So while all melee classes had DWs dropping like candy, we had to use a heroic bow (raincaller) until our guld made the progression to a t2 zone - the overking. Seriously to this day I don't understand why he hated rangers so much and it seemed like he purposely screwed us over time and time agsain. Put us in a hole we will never dig out of.
Ranja wrote: Rumor was the ranger he raided with kept up with him and beat him sometimes because he couldn't play for crap, hence why assassin's kept seeing gains and rangers were stagnant or lowered. Certainly seems possible form what we have seen thus far. So maybe we need a dev who raids on a ranger and can't play well. I really hope they normalize bows to act more like other weapons, taking advantage of all the mechanics they use and maybe they can start balancing us proper.
Rain Caller, yes. You don't want to know how long I used Rain Caller (a...what? T6 bow?), it was obscenely ridiculous. Wonderful bow, but I started loathing it just because I absolutely could not get anything better, as my luck on raid drops was horrendous throughout the entirety of T7. I finally found one shortly before I hit 80 in RoK. I skipped the glory days (I assume you mean DoF?) mostly because I intended to talk about ranger troubletimes, and partly because I only came back to the game during the second half of DoF and don't remember most of it. But maybe I shouldn't have, since I could have pointed out that the glory days were awesome, but the entire reason rangers were so good then had nothing to do with the class being awesome and everything to do with procs being hilariously broken. That's why we were so horribly broken in KoS--they fixed procs (as procs did seriously need fixing), and then were like 'ehh, okay have a short term root' when rangers freaked out. I can't remember the numbers, maybe someone can help me out? I seem to remember in DoF procs made up something like 40%-60% of our DPS (sound familiar?), and the reason why they were so powerful was because rangers had the longest delay weapons in the game, so the way proc mechanics worked then was that we were pretty nearly guaranteed a proc on just about every shot. And then what was truly broken about that was that procs had a chance of setting off other procs. It was insanity. I would honestly argue rangers were just as broken in DoF. The arrow mechanics, our underwhelming CAs, nearly everything we're suffering with these days was still in place then in one way or another (we even had bow itemization issues), but the proc mechanics favored us so highly that it didn't matter. They finally fixed proc mechanics because they saw in KoS we would be doing (this always makes me laugh these days), 4k DPS. Which at that time was like zomg unbelievable. So they fixed proc mechanics and then mostly went LA LA LA when every ranger in existence pointed out that now all the class deficiencies were laid bare and we needed actual class adjustments. And it has pretty much been LA LA LA as the official response to rangers ever since. We've had a few scattered fixes and a seemingly intentionally malicious mechanics dev (seriously, I will never understand) and I have yet to see one single instance of the devs going 'you know what? Rangers really are significantly underpowered (and these days, utterly broken), we're going to follow this up with a needed revamp and scrutinizing across the board'. 'Mighty force' saddens but doesn't surprise me. It's been SOE's party line for a ridiculous number of years. I expect because at the base level, ranger mechanics are so convoluted and twisted and sprinkled with hidden numbers (thanks Aeralik) that no one wants to touch that code with a ten foot solid steel pole.
Karimonster wrote: Oh I suspected they had little idea, but this is different for me because it is basically them admitting they have no idea what is going on, at least in raids. They admittedly never experienced the lag in raids, they ask for raid parses to be posted, along with their long term basic ignorance of various raid aspects. Far as I'm concerned now, there is at least a few DOZEN players of EQ2 that know more about raids in general than the actual developers. Which makes me even madder when we bring practical results of our sub-par performance both here and the 'other' message board and they just say we are fine. They don't have the knowledge to state we are in any kind of state including 'fine.' I suspected that myself and some other choice individuals knew more about rangers on raids than them, but now its a provable fact complete with testimony confirming ignorance of raiding. The smart thing for them to do now is to be humble and take advice from people who know more than them.
Neiloch@Kithicor wrote: until then I guess I should bring up my healer and maybe wizard(sigh wanted to use her to see as much of norrath as I could)
And ad to that the frustration that we're not asking to kick everyone else's ... parse ... we just want to be COMPETATIVE. We want to be CLOSE.
