Ok I finally got a chance to test out my character and this is what I noticed. First of all, I did not go to KoS (I'm only 56) so instead I went to SS and also tried out the Tears instances in Maj'Dul. In all the cases, I was using only one poison (the cheap vendor bought poison) because I'm cheap. In SS, I had no problem whatsoever killing giants (50^^^) and gnolls (51-52^^). It took a little longer than before but I still used the same pre-LU20 strategy I had: snare and kite. I did however notice a big change in the Tears instances zones in Maj'Dul. First of all, correct me if I am wrong, but it appears that with the KoS expansion they added a few new Tears quests: in this case, I was asked to go into a house and evict the residents, who were all frogloks. In all my time of doing Tears quests, I had never been given one where the Maj'Dul residents were frogloks. Perhaps I was just incredibly unlucky, but these frogs were frickin' tough...at least alot more than the normal residents. I think they were monks or something by the attacks they were doing, and they parried about half of my bow attacks (all my CAs are Adept I or better with most being Adept III and the one M2 Stealthy Fire). Also, they seemed to break my Thorny Trap very easily. So the first few times trying this zone, I had to flee because I was getting owned. Finally, I changed my strategy a bit, and ran the frogs around in a circle and ranged autoattacked them to death, only using one CA on the pull. Using my ranged autoattack my poison procc'ed nicely and they dropped. Not too fun though... Though I haven't been to KoS yet, I was wondering if these parry issues, etc were being experienced in these new zones as well. If these frogloks were added with KoS then maybe all the KoS mobs are parrying or dodging melee/bow attacks at an asanine rate, which might explain why some people have observed spellcasters having an easier time with them. If that's the case, it might not just be rangers having problems, and perhaps it will be changed soon. Just a thought. Also, up until this point, I have never been a proponent of allowing us to use our ranged CA's on the run. While some people thought this made sense, I never thought it was too realistic (realism in EQ2? gasp). I always thought ranged CA's were special attacks that required concentration and precision, and running around while doing them didn't make much sense. Having said that, after the changes, I would like to see a few more of our CA's made so we can move and shoot. The reason being that since our dps has been lowered by a sizeable amount, and many tougher mobs are resistant to our cheap shot, we are having to melee more than we used to in order to solo (or at least I have been). This kind of goes against the spirit of my class, imo, and I'd like to see us still be able to solo while using most of our ranged CA's. Just a suggestion. -Feynman
Okay I got in a little playtime last night, so I can comment on #3 I can still solo effectively at level 43. I was finishing up some quests and I took down a group of 3 level 40 2 arrow down mobs. I went to Feerott and was fighting groups of 2 and 3 2 and 1 arrow down level 40 mobs. These are all blue groups to me. However, non-arrow mobs may have gotten a bit of a beef up. Prior to LU20, I was taking no arrow blue mobs with relative ease. One hit with Triple Fire or Hidden Fire and they were down to yellow. I killed some no arrow green toilers last night in Zek and they weren't quite down to yellow, but I had no problems soloing them. I took out the Left Hand of Thule, level 42 1 arrow up rather easily, although I had to run from his 3 arrow down blue buddies. But I went back and killed them with no issues. So, I say I can still solo rather well. I did have the parser running and I capped out at about 200 DPS, but I don't have any records from before. From feel, however, I don't seem to be taking any longer to kill mobs I was killing before.
I dunno guys.... from what I've read and seen you guys were doing WAY too much dps for your class and the thing is you all knew it! was grouped with a ranger last night and he was still at teh top of the dps chart so basicly you guys went from outrageous dps to acceptable dps. as for not being able to solo solo mobs now that's just sad =(
For one, most statements I've seen from devs regarding rangers had to have been done comparing fully buffed raiding rangers. There's no way a solo ranger could get 4k DPS. So they don't seem to have looked across the board there, looking only at the very top and not surveying a variety of level, gear and spell ranges. For two, many here have said this sort of damage is insane. We know rangers were overpowered. What we're debating is if these changes were excessive, and I think they were.
Ok.. killed a few more mobs and parsed some more situations. It boils down to solo=we suck, grouped=not where we should be, but not as bad as I thought. Took on some average solo blue mobs (think it was 57, im 60) and parsed them. DPS ranged from 125-200 depending. Unacceptable in my book. Groups were a little better, but not by alot. It was very eratic as well. It ranged from 200-450 ( and the 450 was very very rare... maybe twice in the 2 hours of non-stop grind) Seemed to hover right around 300 for most of the night. This was using Adestes and either Glox or Shissar, and if you want to see my gear http://eq2players.station.sony.com/en/pplayer.vm?characterId=266227104 I also have all masters or Ad3's. In comparison, the Fury was DPSing at about 450-500 consistantly ( something very wrong when the healer out DPS's the DPS ) and the conjurer was right about 600. (please dont read in that I want those guys nerfed.. I dont! I just want myself improved). I will say, the Wizzy's need some love too, because he was right at 300 with me.
I would agree with the above statement. Solo is much harder but group isn't really that bad. We don't really have to hold up on damage now and there are still key skills that provide very consistent dps in group. One of them is Stream of Arrows which roughly provides 450+ dps for 30 seconds every minute, which somehow makes me question by the way how some people are parsing less than 200 dps as if you only used StoA and did nothing while it is down , on a long parse you should still be above 200 dps
I too feel that I can solo decently when given the option to kite and snare. The question is whether we're able to perform well when fighting in close quarters or against mutli-mob encounters. Up to level 50 rangers only have 1 AoE attack. This attack requires stealth. Our melee abilities are limited, and partly positional, making life hard for rangers at times. Hopefully these issues will be addressed soon!
I was told last night, rather urgently (in tells), that this thread was getting ugly and that it needed to be rectified. Reading these posts I'm not seeing much flaming or anything, besides accusations of lying and other minor ridiculousness. If someone doesn't believe you, let them; it's their own misery they seek to perpetuate. You know what you did, you know what you're capable of, and if you're using that experience to help other ppl, you're doing the right thing IMESFHO. Just ignore people who you can't reason with after one or two attempts. This is a *major* adjustment for us. The biggest one in our lives as EQ2 rangers. I don't think it's hopeless, but I do sometimes feel that way. I know I need to relearn my game, discard all my old routines, and start from the ground up. I can't do half the damage I used to, and doing all that damage enabled me to slack on the basics of soloing as a scout class. If I got jumped by a blue ^ mob, I just laughed, stunned it, then vaporized it with two ranged CAs. I can't do that anymore; I'm stuck in melee, cycling HOs, using Honed Reflexes and other buffs to try and max my DPS. I need to relearn those basics. Got about as discouraged as I can get last night when I'd get caught unawares and my monk partner wasn't immediately nearby to pull the mob off me. As I said to her, "I feel like I can't let go of Mommy's hand now." I used to walk around fearless - totally confident that just about anything with the temerity to start a fight with me would quickly regret it. Now, I enter stealth as soon as I zone in. I stay invisible so I don't aggro any wanderers or sneaky solo mobs. I re-stealth as soon as we finish fighting, b/c if I blunder into something and draw aggro, I'm going to lose a significant amount of health fighting it off on my own. Hmmm...do I have a point? Probably not - I rarely do - but I'm coming to terms with this being a long, painful adjustment. I'm not adjusted yet, but I'm beginning to see that this will require that reacclimation. I'm getting past the anger that we're being forced to re-learn our class (again). We can still get by. I hope it gets back to being enough fun that I continue to enjoy the game. I hope Sony fixes us up a bit so we're not dealing with many factors limiting our effectiveness. I hope we aren't left behind and forgotten. But this is to some degree in our hands, to continue to collect information, raise awareness, and advocate for change.
Jay you hit the nail right on the head, dead on. Before LU20 we could get sloppy and we did. We walked around frearless knowing that any mob designed for an individual was toast in 30 seconds or less, many times dead with but a single bowshot. So we got sloppy, we stopped being a Ranger. We stopped "hunting". We just charged in and let the arrows fly and the mobs dropped. Now it is payback time. We have to relearn how to be a Ranger, how to be a hunter, how to use ALL of our CAs to there maximum effectiveness. For those like me that enjoy a challenge this is going to be a great fun time. Mobs will again fear us when we sneak up on the ONE mob we want, set our trap, let the arrows fly from our bow, draw the mob into our lair and proceed to beat the life out of him, just the way a true hunter should. Looking forward to the fun...
Things are starting to sound more positive today. maybe we aren't as bad as we thought. I haven't been on the last couple days (I went on once on tuesday and then got off) I've been a little too bummed out to actually try to get on and do anything. Some people have been reporting that there may have been some kind of stealth-fix this morning because they seem to be doing better today. Not sure about that. The jury is still out apparantly. I do hope things get better but someone reported doing about the same as a wizard and that's good. I actually honestly don't care if conjurers do more damage than us I'm more concerned with being even with classes meant to be Tier 1 DPS because I know it'll be easier for SOE to adjust around us if we're all where we should be in our tier. Out of curiosity, Jay have you parsed any numbers? You are pretty well respected here and rational so I would certainly trust you to parse numbers for us and I'm just curious as to what you're doing compared to other T1 DPS classes you know.
Well, to be honest I don't use a bow anymore. Especially if soloing. I get one shot off that does literally a 1/20th of the targets health worth of damage then by halfway through casting the second shot I'm already hit at close range. At this point I'm screwed. My strat right now is to just group with people and do melee dps. It's funny how people complained about "kiting" and SOE's solution was to eliminate all our dps. \sigh
I'll just go through and put out the facts I've seen from my parser so far. I have't adjusted anything, gear etc. from before the patch, I'm still exactly the same gear and spells. Pre KoS Post KoS Solo DPS: 300-500 100-250 Group DPS: 400-600 150-300 Raid DPS: 600-1100 250-450 These are all rough averages over the course of 23 parses for Pre KoS and 6 parses for Post KoS. It is a little early I don't have as broad a range of parses or more so as big a number of parses for post KoS as I'd like but I think I've pretty much seen what I need to and I can feel the decrease big time. These are all my personal numbers so they may look different than other peeps. Across the board before and after it was a mixed lot of mainly blue to yellow con fights with lows and highs. My highest spike Pre KoS in order of solo to raid were (these are fights that lasted longer than 30sec) 1.2k, 1k, and 1.5k. For post KoS in order solo to raid my spikes in dps were 300, 400, and 500. These are rounded off of course I never actually managed to break 500 dps yet on my few raids since KoS, it topped off a like 489dps. I've seen people get higher numbers, or I've seen them say htey have and I believe them but my numbers in general hurt. Every aspect of the game from solo to raidign was a crawl and soloing was especially a tedious afair and far more dangerous than it should be especially given there are still a fair share of classes out their easily capable of soloing heroics and I have as of yet to beat anything higher than a ^ white con solo. I was being outdps'd by bruisers and monks, and every dps class t2 or higher in all situations and found myself lagging 200-300 dps behind other classes on non AE raid fights and either just barely making top parse in AE ranged fights or being beaten by around 100dps or so. That is for other melee dps. Mages consistently outdps'd me in all fronts. It may be a need to change play style which i did to the best of my abilities moving in to melee for extra dps when possible, trying to get my haste as high as possible, and using my dps increasers and auto attacks to my full abilities. In my own personal experience, I was doing t2 and t3 dps numbers while a few classes from those tiers are still consistently doing t1 dps. In all imho we need to be tweaked back up, we got hit with a 40%ish nerf with varying degrees by Ranger when we needed around only a 20% decrease to bring us in line. I look forward hopefully to a tweaking of our CA damage or something to pipe us back up into t1. As it stands now, it is extremely depressing to play my Ranger, even with all the new neat things from the expansion futily trying to prop my spirits up. My raid force took a large, noticeable hit with our Moonchild fight taking 2 to 3 times longer for us to kill. We had 3 rangers not as an exploit, but because that is how our Raid force grew up and it crashed our dps line up. In all, I look forward to seeing my fellow Rangers around and to continued and furthered developement into this matter. Hopefully, we will see some turn around.
To give further weight to my post, I am a well geared Ranger. I have all fabled/legendary gear about half and half. I've played for a long time and feel as if I know my class well and find proof inthe fact that since the changes I always out dps both my Ranger counterparts. In all, if I am making these numbers with a decent str, agi, and sub par int score plus self haste around 40%, imagine what it must be like for someone who doesn't raid and grind out gear. Imagine what the numbers must be like for the casual or even medium ground playing character who has half of what anyone on the high end of gear has. App4's and lower, no masters, no adept 3's, no fabled/legendary gear, and mediocre poisons may completely cripple a Ranger of said calibre no matter how good he is at his class. I look at my numbers and cringe, I play and feel burdened to myself and to my group. I wonder if I'd even still be here if I was "casual" geared.
Gailstryder, I have only been able to parse one raid so far - Court of Al'Afaz but your numbers for raid DPS reduction correlate well with my own findings. I can't comment on solo or group since #20 as I haven't had a chance to play those styles yet. Hopefully tonight I can generate some data with a guild group. My gear is a mix of legendary / low end T6 fabled with all ranged CA's at A3 level. I'm just wondering how your damage compared to the other classes in your raids? I was below Necro pets but usually above the tanks - I can't give numbers or %ages yet but will do a slightly deeper analysis over the weekend if time permits. Mirdo.
I went into SP Upper Tunnels last night and I was having no issues soloing there, either the no arrow solo mobs, the one arrow down or the groups of mobs. I maxed out in DPS on my parser at about 300 on some of the groups. Now I'm by no means top of the line geared or anything, and I was just using cheap, storebought poison to test what the absolute bottom of the barrel is. Maxing at 300 just really is rather low, though. I think I'm not having as much trouble as most because of what Jay said. I am constantly in stealth, especially in any new areas. I choose my targets carefully, position myself to the most advantage, and I use my melee CAs on a regular basis. I can confirm that for up to no arrow mobs, Cheap Shot is NOT broken or reduced. I counted 6 seconds on it, the same as it's always been for me, and I'm able to Cheap Shot, Pouncing Attack, Crippling Blade, Surveil and Raven Embers all before the mob wakes up. I did it constantly last night in SP. I couldn't do that if it were only 1 or 2 seconds as some are reporting. I have noticed that one arrow up's do seem to only be 1 or 2 seconds, but I had noticed that was the stun duration on them prior to LU20, so I don't see a change there.
Stylee Mc'Cutta 62 ranga Nek <Myrmidons> solo ability atm i would say is fine.... no class should really be able to take heroics within their level range, and while others can, thats no reason to whine that we no longer have the ability... group dps- ridiculous. Once again comparisons arent really my thing, but pre lu13 or whateva it was, we were prolly worst class in game, and getting there now again... dps in groups is cut in less than half, and many tanks (zerkers and brawlers) can get AWEFULLY close to our parses, which are always lowest of the dps classes if your playin with people around your skill and gear level...our dps ability in groups is almost nullified. (mobs die too slow, cant burn to save group etc) raid dps- i mean cmon. Multiply group parses by about 2x and thats what we parsed before... say a 60 ranger parsed 6-700 average on group mobs... usually parsed a little over 1k in single epic encounter raids.... now i parse between 250-350 average on groups... lets just go ahead and say that that makes it about 5-550 dps on raids without any utility? (<thats not even mentioning that we could proc b4 when the ca failed) No thanks...\ im hoping that they did this to make server merges + xp gain smoother... that way groups of a guard, 3 rangers, enchanter and healer couldnt run thru whole zone bomb squad style... but who am i kiddin g'luck yall on getting groups and spots in raid!
in relation to aa's bein what is supposed to make the difference... what aa's are gonna make the difference? HAh! there arent any that are gonna help until people get at least 16 points
Did lots more soloing yesterday, and what can I say? There were times, streaks even, when I would be proccing nearly as much as I was before, and then the mobs would go down quite fast. Then I would be going after the exact same mob, same level, same abilities, and he would swat me across the zone without blinking. My methods were exactly the same. Same poisons, same ability line up, everything. It was totally random. I never liked how much we were dependent on procs before, but at least with the nutty mechanic my damage was somewhat dependable. Now soloing is a matter of clicking and praying.
Speaking from soloing only.. Yes it was hit pretty hard from where we were. I found a bigger hit on my solo abilities after lu19 more so than lu20..at least lu19 i really noticed it while lu20 was less so...only my personal opinion here though. Having said that, and the fact that I have always semi role played my Ranger, I actually enjoy the challenge now, at least in the open. I guess I'm the type that likes the sense of danger while playing. Before I didnt worry about things +/- around my level. I even had to go lvls above to get some satisfaction from the 1-2 shot incoming on the lower/even lvls (and some V above lvl). The problem was the higher lvl ones when they got to you just hit to hard. This left a small space for actually fighting head to head once they did get to you. Now, im restricted to my lvl or lower. So when they get to me I can actually take some pain before one of us goes down which means I need to bring my best game if its not going to be me. For power levelers ( which im not lvl56 after 14 month), this could be bad as I barely notice any exp gains on anything my lvl or lower. What I wish though is to be able to use my bows more before they reach me. All my harvesting time and rares found were put into adept 3's for agro control and Range ca's. That leaves all my melee ca's at adept 1 and pretty bad at that.. I also wish bow shots did not miss/get parried as much as they do. Didnt notice it much before as some proc always seemed to land. The first time I noticed this was when I went after an even con, solo, no arrow harpy. I laid the trap, stealthy fire, sharp shot..then trapped. Noticed about 5-10 % off health. Now trapped, i let go with triple fire..first one hit then nothing. I fired thru all my range ca's that i could fire from front and it was still at about 60%. I was sort of dumbfounded and even more shocked as it was still trapped! Basically the random generator and procing was totally not on my side for this pull. I ended up running to it and meleeing it and with a sliver of health left I beat it. When in a group though, I want to do my job and deal damage..Bringing my lack of DPS I see solo into a grp doesnt make me feel good.
