How are Rangers soloing now a days? I loved mine years ago except soloing was a pain. Has the addition of mercenaries made life any easier?
Depends on what your looking to solo, your level and gear. Anything classed as Solo is beyond easy for a good while for most classes. Rangers mow through solo stuff very quickly especially end game. Mercs help a lot with the tougher stuff but dont expect to be soloing latest heroic zones any time soon. Its night and day compared to years ago where you needed to control the mob ... now they more often than not always fight you at enough range to still use bow attacks. So its no longer a game of keeping the mob at all cost. Plus with the crazy DPS with CB, Potency, 700 Multi attack etc... means everything "solo" just kinda falls apart on inc..
Well when it comes to solo content ranger's destroy mobs. If you are looking to try and solo heroic content you are going to be in trouble unless you have high end gear. With raid equipment and a merc I can comfortably solo the contested heroic zone (skyshrine) from last tier. With a fair amount of effort i can do it in the current one but the work/reward ratio just doesn't seem worth it. So ranger's solo fine, just don't expect to solo group content with ease.
My hope was to actually be able to solo heroics as needed for quests. Maybe not yellow and orange but it seems like most HQs are heroics with many a tough boss.
Current content probably not unless your gear is going to be very very good (ie top raid stuff). However if your wanting to mentor down / do level appropriate stuff as you level then for the most part it will probably be doable with a merc and reasonable gear / CA's.
The new mercs make soloing heroic content very doable with a ranger. My ranger has the legendary fury merc and it can solo most of the named in Obol without me. Through GU66 I find my ranger to be the easiest toon to solo with. I used to prefer my Illu and then later my Necro but since they've given most mobs immunity to stun and stifle or greatly reduced the duration the illu is about worthless against the heroic content. I have a zerker that I use to power level guildies that with a good merc can solo allot of content but no where near what my ranger can. I've played about every class and equally geared to play solo I'd pick my ranger with a healer merc over everything else. If you can't find a legendary merc the Templar Lucien is great and really helps when you need under water breathing. All that said, if you don't mind taking forever to complete quests a healing class with a tank merc can get you through most content.
If you are just talking about older content, like say monks for FBSS or Everling and such, you could probably solo those. If you have a healing mercenary you would be pretty set I'd guess for most anything until the highest levels.
Maybe I'm biased, but I think Rangers are pretty amazing solo, even at low to mid levels. Just make sure you are always burning a Fettering Poison to slow down mobs. Chances are, they're dead before they even get to you. Also make sure to run Vitality Breach Poison as that damages the mob and provides you with a heal (ignore the low numbers on EQ2U, it's actually a pretty good number depending on your level). You can always have a Red, Blue, and Purple poison running at all times.
Just keep in mind that Rangers are pure DPS. They can't heal themselves, and have practically no crowd control. However, if geared correctly (as in level appropriate gear, doesn't need to be over the top) with a healer mercenary, I don't see any problem with soloing older content, especially with the changes SoE implemented with GU66, namely taking away minimum range. While soloing, minimum range was always the one thing that pissed me off the most, because mobs didn't always respect that. But not that's not an issue anymore, as it was taken away.
