Coverage can be called an almost worthless lvl 80 CA/Buff. The fact that after you use the correct pre-CA, it lights up and you hit it and all you get is a message that says your too close, so you back up, ohhh wait Auto Attack just went off, so now it tells me I can only use it after certain CA. so how much DPS did I lose from backing up, clicking this piece of junk twice, and running back in to do my "Melee" dps, because without us pretending to be assassins for a few seconds while we wait for our Ranged CAs to come back up, we are non-existent on the parse. How about making it grey/red out like other CAs that cannot be used because your too close, or BETTER YET, Take the proximity off the stupid thing. For rangers to do max DPS we have to be Rangers 1/2 of the time and Assassins the other 1/2. So why only grant us that bonus 1/2 the time. So what you are telling us is we only deserve 1/2 of a special ability. When put in a perfect group standing in the sweetspot, I can hit 5k in a raid fight. GREAT. but guess what. I never use the Coverage, because I would have to back up. Now if I stay back, I am worthless on the parse. Quit making us be part-time assassins!!!! We use BOWS remember. You already make Assassins DPS gods, that dont have to pay for their DPS. Now to try to run second I have to pay for my arrows, because the CA made arrows are, well how do I say it nicely. Ohhh wait I can't. leave it at that, and I have to play part-time assassin. That is just not right. I say cut the reuse on our Ranged CA's in 1/2 and lets see if we can come close to catching the assassins. I bet that wouldnt even make us beat them. How about it DEVS, try it in test, or DEV. Cut our ranged CA's reuse timers in 1/2, and remove the proximity restriction on coverage, and see what a ranger can do then. Isnt the whole point of DEV and Test to try new things? I am a programmer, and I try stuff all the time. Give it a shot, see what it actually does. If we blow by the assassins, then try tweaking from there. But for god sakes give us a little something. even if it were just the end of line STR ability and it removed the only CAs over 2 min recast. It is insane to think if I betray my ranger to an assassin I can double my parses (or close too it). How fair is that? So when my raid leaders just wants more out of me, I guess I will just betray, and go back to Adept III CA's and I will still parse higher than my ranger with many masters. Woot. ugggg. I know these are long standing issues, but with the fix/nerf of conservation, why not try and see if we can get the DEVS to take a look and try some things out. quit making a 3% ranged crit addition to a bracelet and say there ya go all better, now you can DPS....right?..... How about take a little time and play with reuse timmers, etc. reuse timmers are static, more or less, so dont mess with damage. that is a calculation that I imagine can eaily be screwed up. So just lower the timers and see if you can get us closer to our easily betrayable counterpart. SOE made these multiple classes for a reason. Lets do a little something to make rangers just a bit closer to their evil counterparts, shall we. OK, I am done venting now
... because when you put "DEVS" into a subject, you can be sure that they aren't going to read it. Not saying I disagree at all. We just have to figure out how to get SoE to see the point.
Yep, Coverage is pretty useless unless you are duoing with a summoner or enchanter and pulling a mob that is not facing you.
You would think that they would listen to, ohhh I don't know, THE PEOPLE THAT PLAY THE CLASSES!!! Just a thought. HEY SOE READ THIS POST AND TRY SOMETHING FOR A CHANGE!!!!!!!!! There, maybe that will work better. HAHAHAHAHA There, maybe that will work better. HAHAHAHAHA
Um didn't you just post a few minutes ago in these forums that you hadn't even macro'd your melee ca's to ranged autoattack and you have about 5 pieces of suboptimal gear. Yes Coverage is way to hard to use right. But it works when you have to joust out on an AE anyway. And there are lots of classes that have submoptimal 80 spells. You could also double your parse with a few modifications to playstyle and a couple of easy gear upgrades. Well you never said where your parse was or what kind of group you have for buffs or what the parse of the assassin your chasing is or what gear he/she has or what buffs they have, so I can't say double for sure but I think you get my point. Also I'm Tired of hearing how rangers are the only class to pay for Damage. Everyone pays to some degree. Everyone uses potions, we are the only folks that get them half price, or in the case of cure potions for 1/10th price. 4 classes use poisons, we get them for half price. Every class uses arrows or thrown weapons. We just use them more and our epic does reduce the amount we use. Having actually compared it with the Assassin's and Rogues in my Raid I spend roughly the same as them all things considered. Yes SOE made mutiple classes for a reason. It aslo means that similar classes might have very unique playstyles and the Ranger is one of those classes that doesn't play like any other.
Boramyr wrote: Did you even read what you wrote? "Every class uses arrows or thrown weapons" -- I know of no tank, mage, summoner, druid, or healer that uses these. Tanks do sometimes lob an arrow every 10-15 minutes to pull a difficult to reach mob. Not sure how that equates with burning through 1200 arrows in a single raid session. "Every class uses potions" -- other than cure potions in raids, some temporary adornments, and fighter/scouts coating their weapons with these, they are primarily the purview of assassins and rangers. No other classes have AA lines which so dramatically improve the effectiveness and functionality of these. Rangers must use these items to equal the DPS of over classes. Classes like mages, who have NO CONSUMABLE MATERIAL for any of their DPS. Unless you count food LOL. Coverage is clearly a half-baked spell that penalizes you for being close to mobs, meanwhile our epic weapon Eagle's Talon penalizes you for not being close to mobs. Over and over I see advice from seasoned rangers that running in and out of range will lower your DPS and is a bad strategy. So which is it? Are the players wrong or is Coverage designed wrong?
I can settle the cost issue right away. I played a ranger for over 3 years before I betrayed, and my raid costs are the same as an assassin as it was as a ranger. Some of you old timers may remember me. Rangers are still borked big time, but I wouldn't focus on the cost of arrows. The savings I got from potions and poisons more than paid for the arrows as a raiding ranger. I just didn't know it at the time. Qualifier --> I only use mastercrafted potions/poisons, so someone who uses the cheap stuff may have a different experience.
OK, wasnt really complaining about the cost of arrows. Just making a point that without arrows the bow doesnt work, but assassins 1-handers do. If Arrow expense was a huge deal I would either make a wood worker or betray. Just stating a point on that one, that's all
Alas my friends as long as we have our current Dev you will be farting in the wind with any suggestions to improve our class. Are best hope is of him retiring or getting a better job. Please do not ask him to fix anything else, that never turns out well for us. We are the good counter part to the Assassin, so common sense seems to dictate that we should be on a par dps wise with Assassins. You know Ying Yang. But he sees us as Ying, Yuck.Yet for some unexplaned reason our dev has decided that this is not to be. Get so tired of seeing our Assassins with almost twice the dps I have when before R dev got his stickey little hooks in us I was maybe 10% behind the top one. It's nice to hear that other classes have useless or broken CAs too. Ours being Coverage, Stream and Reclaimed arrows not to mention our stupid bird and I have no idea why Sniper shot is on a 15 minute timer. Why any CA should be on a 15 minute timer. Put that on a 5 minute timer and watch r dps rise. Oh wait a minute, thats right they don't want it to rise. we r fine where we r now. Until our Dev decides to swing his mighty nerf bat(Generic term) once again. But my problem is there should be no broken or usles MAs after all this time. And r dev can take the time to "fix" r litttle conservation problem to our detrement but he cant be bothered to do something about r useless MAs. Because that would raise r dps. Unless of course he pulled another bait and switch on us while "fixing them." The first ranger master I ever saw was...... Stream of Arrows. A guildie offered it to me. I told him its usless and he should sell it. A month later he still had it and offered it too me again forgetting he had earlier. Isn't that sad? So please DO NOT ask him to "fix" anything else.
Ryik@The Bazaar wrote: blackdog1 wrote: How much DPS are you and your Assassins doing? 2K vs 4K or 4K vs 8K? Question for both of you? What is more important to you as a player: Playing a Ranger no matter how much DPS you can do with him, or doing the most DPS with your toon no matter what class that is?
It's like 2.8k- 5.3k give or take. But often can be more. Once in awhile less. I am never put in the dps groups any more since The "Fixes" Rightfully so. I went from top 3-5 dps to top 10 in raids. If we're short people, I am always in the group who is short. If my guild ever folded I would probally quit because I would be hard pressed to find another guild that will take me on every raid when they could take another more usefull class instead. We bring nothing to the raid but dps. How can the Dev justify us not being up there with Assassins DPS wise? Whats more important isn't just black and white like that. I would rather play a ranger more than the dps but it is very hard to see my dark, sister class pumping out so much more dps since this dev started fixing things. I mean it's right in my face every raid. Your going to say betray then. But I only really enjoy playing Rangers, what can I say. I'm sure if there were no Rangers I would enjoy playing something else. But I just don't want to level another character up to 80 and I don't really want to be an assassin at the cost of losing my Ranger. I picked the Rnager class because I love playing Rangers. Sony decided to make us major dps in this game. I didn't pick Ranger because it was dps. But since its my job to be dps I want to be good at it.Sony and or r DEV won't let us do r job that they assigned to us properly. The most glaring thing of all is the simple fact that if you betray you darn near double your dps. Arn't we suppose to be mirror classes? Thats the way I always took it from the time the game started. My other gripe is we are Rangers, other posters will come out with the definition of Rangers meaning we travel over great distances and it has nothing to do with ranged attacks. If that is the definition Sony is using for us then please explane to me why Sony has seen fit to make r main weapon bows? If your main weapon is a bow it seems to me the definition of Ranger Sony is using is the one of "at Range to target". And since all the classes in this particular game "range" over the same distances at basically the same speeds after horses potions and such, I argue that the other definition for a Ranger dosn't apply to this game. What sense is it calling us Rangers when all classes have the same range? Unless refering to the range of our bows. So why does Sony make us fight on top of the mob to get maximum dps? We have a bow GD! We are suppose to be fighting from afar not on top of the mobs. Someone else said we should be called archers then. Seems to me that is one of the tittles I am avaible to be called, yet even so, I am on top of the mob. This cheeses me off as much as the dps situation. And why does this dev never fix anything that we want fixed that would help us without taking something else away? Fix r useless MAs instead of fixing Conservation so that we take yet another dps hit. I don't care if all the other classes have broken MAs too. Their devs r dropping the ball also. I care about my class and just because theirs r broken is no excuse for ours to be broken to.
Sounds like part of your problem is your gettin crap for buffs. Any raid leader that doesn't realize that a T1 DPS's job is to convert other classes DPS potential into actual DPS is screwing their raid. Of course that means if you have too many T1 dps classes you are wasting spaces. My guild can spike 90k on Kor Sha trash. One assassin can spike 10k I can spike 8k and the other assasin has spiked 7.5k. My top assassin's average zonewides with named is around 3.8 to 4.8 and mine is 4k to 4.5, usually i'm higher in the zones he's lower in. But I keep very balanced groups and make sure there are no more T1 dps than I have buffs to give them. My top assasin has better gear than me and my second assasin has worse. I'm pretty sure I couldn't just betray and double my dps. Let me say we are not an Avatar killing guild and I know there is still room for some improvement to everyones numbers. We still have Trakanon and Byzola to beat for instanced content. I can't say what casting order you use but I had to change my playstyle three times during Kunark progression to keep up my dps. I would say though if you can't adapt to the class don't blame the class, and I would agree Ranger is probably the hardest dps class to play because of the range issue.
Very hard to adapt because I'm never in a steady group. So lets say one week I have a small Str bonus added. My dps is lower. I try to adjust the next raid and my dps is much higher, but I look and see I have a much higher str boost in the group this week. So did my adjustment do any good or is it all because of the extra str.Then the next week I will be in a short group or something with completly different combination of buffs.The double pars difference is partially because of the lesser groups I'm in but the reason I'm in the lesser groups is because the other classes have passed me by dps wise since the fixes. My guild trys for a mixture of being good and taking all people on the raid so alot of times theres lots of dps. Since I can only really raid on Sundays they make sure I get an invite. We r just starting the tier 2 raid content. We actually reached that point back in the early spring but lots of people have been away for summer or left for Conan and we r just starting to get them back. Listen Boramyr I'm happy that you were able to maintain your dps but you seem to be the exception to the rule by far. To me if we have several threads complaining about r dps as compared to an Assassins and within those threads the complaints r running like 10-1 that something is wrong, then I suspect something is wrong at least for the masses. Maybe it something more subtle like, you have to do and know every trick of the book, and exacute it perfectly and then your Ranger can be as good as the Average Assassin. There r plenty more Avg Rangers than their are uber ones. I by no means am a Uber Ranger but I think I'm better than average because I'm the best one in my guild and my guild is a better than avg one. And every level 80 Assassin out parses me before I got switched to the lesser groups. My point being that you shouldn't have to be an Uber Ranger to come close to the Average Assassin in dps. I am not trying to put your Assassins down by calling them Avg. Just going by the fact that your pretty much the only Ranger defending the way things are and the only one posting here that has been able to come close to the Assassin dps. I'm sure your not the only one but your the only one that is posting. So my conclusion is your better than most of us and your Assassins arn't as good at they're trade as you are in yours.
Well the fact of the matter is so few rangers post on these boards I know I'm probably in the top 5 rangers on AB definatly in the top 10 and I know who all of those other guys are and they never post on these boards. And honestly if my work hadn't opened the firewall to this site I wouldn't be posting here either. But I had the time to check it out and I saw a bunch of people spouting the same misconceptions and wrong information over and over beamoaning the sorry state of a class that isn't really broken. And I thought to myself you know a long time ago these boards used to be a pretty helpful place and a great place for new rangers to find help. Now we have level 50 guys coming for help prefacing their posts with "I know this class isn't the best but..." When I know that yes the ranger class is harder to play that some we have some crazy things we have to do but we aren't hurting. There have been times in the last two years where our class was hurting, but now really isn't one of those time, But like I said earlier I don't play my ranger the same way now I did last year or even before getting my mythical. or before getting my fabled epic. You have to adapt. Kind of Ironic since the classic ranger is supposed to be very adapatble. So I'm here to help. And for the sake of the new guys to the class I'm going to stand up and speak out against flat out wrong statements. Everyone needs to remember only a very very small minority post on the forums but most of the people in power read them. And the more a class badmouths itself here the more it gets that rep no matter how wrong it is and the more new players to the class give up. And I'll tell you right now my assassins are far from average. And depending on certain peices of gear the gap can widen or lessen. I know it pretty much sucked the three weeks between when we beat druushk and when we beat Nexona and went on to clear VP. Wizard and Assassins were beating me by 1k easy zone wide. It was disheartening and my dps suffered because at that point I really couldn't catch up. I inspect every ranger I come across and I can fully say that fully 80% of them don't have optimal gear loadouts, and I'm not talking about do they have the best vp gear (I only look at that if I see a mythical) I'm looking for the instanced gear. When I get back from Fan Faire I'll see about posting up my casting order to see if that helps folks out some.
I definatly appreciate your taking the time to help out and I will try out anything you post to see how well it works for me. But you metnioned that You have your Mythical, is it possible that the Mythical corrects some of the dps problems we as a group r complaining about? And also unattainable by 90% of the ranger population. I can't help what particular Rangers post on these boards and what ones don't. But I'm sure the reasons you gave for some happy Rangers not posting can be used for just as many probally more unhappy ones not posting. Unless these boards r just a complete anomaly, there r way more unhappy Rangers not posting than happy ones not posting. But it seems to me by your own addmission the only ones that r happy with the Rangers are the top of the heap Rangers. My point being once again that the Avg. Ranger is having big problems with the class. Maybe the differences between the classes lessen as you become better equiped. Equiped with stuff that 90% of us can't get. Or the class is so hard to properly play only 10% of us can figure it out. That 10% just happens to be doing the high end raids. Why have so many long time Rangers posted on here that they either quit the class or the game entirely because of our issues? Why do we have the reputation of being whiners? I am sure your not saying that if your a whiner you decide to become a Ranger. I will agree with you if a group of people start to whine it can snowball. But what is the the reason for the whining starting up in the first place? Why does it take years to fix our arrows and then have the Dev not metion what he was nerfing in the process of fixing the arrows? Even trying to play up the new utility he gave us that while nice, has no effect what so ever on us being chosen for a raid and further helps the Assassins dps while doing nothing for us.That breeds alot of distrust for the Dev. and Sony. Why do we have basically 3 useless MAs and fettering is still broken with no fixes in sight but r Dev can fix the Conservation. Why does sniper shot need to be on a 15 minute timer? Why do I have to have 3 MAs ready(honed reflexes,primal rage and focus aim) plus a iffy fourth one(coverage) plus another certain type of MA(one from behind or while hidden) all ready to hit so sniper shot can do max damage once every 15 minutes if your lucky and planned everything right. Cool, make me work to get the Max damage. But once every 15 minutes is stupid. And making us use a MA that we have to be at great range to use, thus forcing us out of the stupid sweet spot they make us fight in. Even worse for you with the Mythical. Am I right in assuming coverage is pretty usless for you? If they would bump Sniper Shot down to 5 minutes and get rid of the range restrictions on coverage I would shut up and go away. Or keep it and make stream of arrows a high dps end USABLE MA. You may be completly right with everything you say Boramyr. I do find it very interesting that it's mostly the high end Ranger that have no big problems with the class and almost everyone else seems to be. But the perception, right or wrong is that we are a gimped class. Avg. Rangers rightly or wrongly believe this and Sony does nothing to change the perception. And are dev breeds distrust in his shananagins. So being right will be a small consolation prize when Sony finds they only have the upper 10% playing plus a few newbies on the way up. You bring up some excelent points but I suspect your view point is a little skewed because you play in a very good guild with very good players with very good equipment that most of us are unable to obtain. I suspect you can do things the rest of us can't do because of superior buffs and tactics applied by players that are more "hardcore" than the rest of us. I suspect your higher end equipment neutralizes some of the Assassins advantages. Equipment we can't obtain. this would explane our Dev being happy where we r dps wise. he plays under the same conditions as you and is unaware of whats going on for the Avg Ranger. I have never looked but just wondering, are they complaning on the Assassin baords about anything. Or is life good right now for them? I don't expect to be putting out your type of numbers or your Assassin's numbers. But I do expect to hold my own with people of the same level and equipment as me. Once again thanx for your help. P.S. I actually play on your server.
I know I started EQ2 after some of the big nerfs and changes to rangers had already gone through. Now that I have learned timing my autoattacks and respeccing my AA trees several times and changing armor I am really enjoying the character. Yes, it's not cheap to be a ranger, and we are so gear-dependent it's not even funny. But overall I'm not complaining too much. Coverage was clearly put in by someone who doesn't know how to get the most out of a ranger and so we need to give feedback on it. One thing I'm hoping to get feedback on is some equipment I stumbled upon in CoA which seems equal to other items in the extremely helpful and well-organized "non-raid gear" thread. I entered the item into Wikia too. I didn't actually LOOT the item. An assassin in the group got it, but it looked like a darn good upgrade for a ranger even compared to faction gear.
Hey all. Let me give you my 2cp on this whole mess. I was in a good rading guild, not a top one but good. We have just got into VP and all and we were moving along nicely. I was going well on the parse. I belive all things being equal: buffs, player skill lvl, masters, ect, rangers can do well on parces. Even when compared to assassins. This is from my personal experiance and i have heard alot of diffrent things on the forums. But again this is from my own exp. I dont think we do enough damage, assassins still do better, but we arent total crap either. Assassins do the big numbers on trash. Who cares if some assassin does 10k on a trash mob and we do 6k? On the nameds fights, you know the ones that matter, we can do ok. And on the zw we do ok too. Again i dont think we r where we should be yet but its close. My problem is the latest nerf, and yes i know it wasent a real nerf but it was still a nerf, to our DA pots. -3.2 DA, again i dont care what the skill said in this case change the skill to 100%, was unneeded and uncalled for considering we r not blowing away anyone on any parses and indeed still lower than we should be imho. 3.2 DA isent the end of the world, although it is big, so i have decided im done with this game. 3.2 DA nerf was the last straw. Canceling tonight and i hope you guys get a much needed boost. Im not giving away any pp, so dont ask lol. Also the fact im not giveing anything away is cause there is always a chance ill be back. Well see how good Warhammer is. This ranger thing wasent the only reason, there were others that had nothing to do with eq2 being a bad game, but it was a major one. Good luck fellow rangers and keep up the good fight.
I am NOT in an uber raiding guild. I am not in a “raiding†guild at all. I am in a casual guild that raids at most once or twice a week, sometimes we go three weeks without raiding at all. Our guild alone does not have enough players to completely fill out a raid, so when we raid we end up filling out the raid with alliance guild members or other friends. And I have joined our alliance guilds in filling out their raids. So my situation is different than yours in that I am filling out an “empty†DPS position where it seems you are competing for a limited number of DPS positions. As for DPS, when I first got to level 80 I was doing 1.5K. I was not happy with this when the assassins and wizards I raided with were doing 3K so I took it upon myself to do what I could to improve my gear and my game play. Slowly my dps improved until today it is 3.2K zone wide in my last two raids. So again my situation is different than yours. None of the assassins and wizards that I raid with can do 5.3K zone wide. At best they are even with me at around 3.2K. So either your assassins rock or mine suck. I would consider myself lucky to be in a guild that can put together raids that do 50K+. Mine do 35K at best, which limits what we can kill and the content that I will get to see. I have been to PR, Thuuga, SoH, but I doubt that I will ever see VP. On the other hand I don't raid enough to get there. It is my impression that VP is designed for those players that raid several times a week, not once or twice a month. You say that you used to be in the top 3 DPS. When you were, what was your DPS and what was the DPS of your assassins? Has your DPS slipped or has the assassin’s improved? For me the assassin and wizard DPS has stayed pretty much the same, maybe a 10% improvement, but mine has improved a lot, more than doubled in fact. There are a couple of other points that many people seem to overlook. First a Ranger can do 85% of his max dps while standing 50m from the mob, Assassins cannot. So if you are going to have to deal with mobs where range is an advantage this should be considered. With so many mobs doing AoEs I find it easier and in many cases I can do better overall DPS if I stand back out of the mobs range. 85% of my max is better than getting stunned, feared, or blasted out of the fight (i.e. doing 0 DPS) 20+% of the time. Second, despite all of the issues with rangers, there are many more Rangers than Assassins, so perhaps DPS is not everything for the “average†player. Perhaps the "fun" of playing a ranger is worth more than the extra DPS of an assassin? In the end I stand by my previous statement. This is a game. If you want to play a Ranger, play a Ranger, no matter if your DPS is 1K or 7K. If you want to do the most DPS, then pick the class you think will do the most DPS and play it. But do not be surprised if your DPS does not double the first day that you play it.
