The role and purpose of a Ranger

What about a trap that holds until damaged or a stun for 2 seconds? Kinda like a polymorph … ?

My suggestions for ranger. Which might need some balancing maybe.

  1. The trap. When in a party, make it hold all enemies for minimum of 3 seconds even if they have been hit subsequently. This makes it a viable alternative to frost. I dont see why a fox should escape a trap just because it has been hit by another arrow.

  2. the trap. Shake it to make it a bandage instead. Can be applied to team mates if you throw it and hit them with it. Or stick it on them. Think aragorn treating frodos wounds. It could decurse or unpoison and possibly heal or heal over time.

  3. Arrows. Have additional small hitboxes on enemies that offer signifiant additional damage. Like 100% certain critical hits. I.e. if you shoot the enemy right in the eye. Think Legolas taking out a cave troll. This adds significant more skill to the role of dps. Makes precision count, giving skill based critical hits. Rather than how fast you can spam arrows. These hitboxes wouldnt be shown. Rangers would have to learn where the weak spots were. It might even be possible to blind mobs by hitting both eyes. Or slow them by killing their legs.

  4. cloud arrow. Make it actually work on mobs so they loose path when they are in it. Or path to move out of and around the gas. Make it apply a d.o.t poison area effect to mobs while they in the cloud. This could allow ranger to save the party by making mobs back away. In a similar way to push back from mages. Elites might push through the gas taking damage. Smaller mobs might be more wary and avoid it, path finding out and around it.

  5. Special arrows. Let ranger change arrows in combat and have 4 fully flexible slots. Think hawkeye from avengers. Each slot could have its own but longer cooldown e.g 2x current. Therefore you could equip 4 x poison. Or all 4 different arrows. Or 3 precision one gas cloud. Or 2 multi and two poison. Etc etc. So rangers could save multiple precision arrows for critical points in boss fights etc. Or stack lots of poison on a single enemy. Or poison multiple mobs in a group.

  6. special arrows alternative. Just have 3 slots for lvl 20. But make them fully flexible so you can have all the same type of arrow if you want. I.e. 3 x poison etc.

  7. Changing special arrow type in combat. Grab arrow in slot and button push to cycle the type of arrow?

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To piggyback on your good trap idea… what about a ‘‘reduce damage aoe trap’’ where thrown all members within trap aoe take reduced damage…

Really love 1 and 2 !

All of these are excellent suggestions! To build on it more, how about multiple types of traps that explode when shot, and release different effects like poison aoe or healing, or change stop target to slow group, etc… So if you shot it with a regular arrow, it’s just the effect of that trap, but if you shoot it with a special arrow, its effect gets different properties.

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So many great suggestions here. However, even if one or several of these ideas would be implemented partially or fully - and even if that/those changes would bring balance to the current situation, the fact would still remain that warrior, musketeer and ranger run on a limited arsenal system while the runemage does not.

This may very well present similar class problems down the line if the OrbusVR devs ever want to increase the amount of classes or expand upon the existing ones. At which point the whole ordeal will probably repeat itself with X class(es).

Well the mage also requires the most skill so I am ok with it having a large pool of options. But the ranger needs something just to even be considered.

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Even if a Runemage has a lot of options and no ‘actual’ cooldown, Runemages cannot replace warriors or Musketeers. What keeps Runemages in check is that they cannot do what other classes can. So the suggestions here in my view are to give Rangers something new to do that makes them have a niche place in a party.

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I completely agree, and that may fix the current situation.

However, a few problems with that as i see it:

Current content (as people describe it in this thread above - i have not done it myself yet as i have written) seems to require these basic components:

  • Tanking
  • Healing
  • Single target dps
  • Aoe dps
  • Decursing
  • Edit: And possibly CC

All of these roles can currently be filled with the warrior/musketeer/runemaster combo, but can not be filled with swapping the runemaster out for a ranger. This in turn means that any new niche created for the ranger will either need content to be rewritten for it (which probably isn’t very likely), or the new niche will have to overlap with one or more of the old categories above but be desirable enough to make people want to take a ranger instead of a runemage in one or more slots.

That seems to me to be a knife-edge balance that probably will be very hard to achieve. It could easily err on the “underpowered” side of things, not changing much at all. Or it could be on the overpowered side of things which in turn would pee off the runemaster community.

I don’t have a solution to this. I only propose that the problem as i see it lies deeper than “just” tweaking existing skills/adding new skills/adding an extra arrow slot etc. Which are all great suggestions mind you. I just don’t think it will solve the issue long term.

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My hope is that there will be a viable option to have a ranger in your group. NOT a replacement for a mage but a competitor. Imagine you’re new guy to orbus and you desire a ranger and think ‘‘wow, such dps, much fun, super wow’’ and then after 100+ hours having ‘mastered’ the ranger you reach end game and groups decide to ignore your LFG bc a mage also offered a slot in their group. The ranger is ‘ok’ as is but suffers from the obvious… its lack of ability to compete with a similar class that has more available options.

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You make excellent points, but there’s more to my reasoning for group composition than class abilities - I prefer to take the player, not the class as much as possible. As things are, a mage is needed in every group, but if rangers had a decurse ability, or some new tools to help with trash mobs, and/or more single target DPS, then I would be happy filling the last two DPS spots with rangers.

Then i salute you sir!
No really, i’m an old mmorpg veteran from the days of Everquest and forward (as you and many others in this thread probably are as well). And while taking the player rather than the class is admirable, the reality of most mmorpgs are that those are few and far between.

@SixtySix Same here. Currently i enjoy ranger the most as well. My little guy only just reached level 8 (with warrior, musketeer and runemage at lvl 2), but then again i started playing 2 days ago. In other words i am also hoping to be viable once i get further in the game and reach demanding group content :slight_smile:

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I like the idea I think someone mentioned here of having smoke arrow also apply a Masked Scent like effect to players inside of it. Could really help with certain shards in endgame too (like sneaking past the Mi-Go Kelpie in Sentry) as well as make rangers useful for Wilds runs.

It also would be a pretty different type of of CC than Runemage’s polymorph (single target) or Musk’s Gravity Orb (offensive positioning CC).

Perhaps more abilities like this could make ranger into more of a “stealth” class, something to really differentiate it from Runemage or any of the other classes.

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Perhaps while ‘masked’ by the smoke all affected mobs take an additional charged shot damage % or are weaker to magic damage… thus creating a usefulness for ranger and mage to co-exist?

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Sorry but as a high level runemage I can safely say there is a speed cap to all spells; a moment where you have to wait for a split second after cast and after shooting the spell where you can’t cast, there is a delay before you can fire the spell and a delay can happen after if your too fast.

I see my Ranger as

  • Fokus DD
  • the one that pull the Mobs to the Tank and survive
  • kill wandering Adds and survive
  • save the Mages/Musk from Adds, bring them to the Tank and … survive :wink:

I have a big Problem with my 6 Globes! I think It should be the other way around.
At the Beginning the Globes should be charged and missing or moving reduces the concentration and so the Globes. If you concentrat, stand still and/or hit in a row, the Globes are filling up again.
Maybe a littel more crit Chance and crit Dmg and the Ranger would be perfect.

The other problem is the distance … nearly in every Bossfight you must stick together at some point and
you have no Golbes because of the short distanz to the Boss.
I must teleport to an efficient distanz, fill up my Globes and than I can make Dmg on the Boss … that takes way too long.
I love to be a Ranger but at Soulkeeper I want to be a Mage!

Not really,

Soul Keeper is the only boss where you have to go in and out of orb range.
Worm Boss you may have to go close to kill a worm.

2 other bosses have a mechanic that target you where you should stop DPS anyways to allow tank to get aggro back.

The core issue comes down to that Mage has equal damage and utility.
There is no downside to having 2 or 3 mage DPS except that their DOTs may overlap.

Sure Hunters Mark may help, but I feel that doesn’t justify what Mage brings to the table.

I suggest you give Rangers something to benefit the group or the mage.

For example, you could give the Ranger an arrow that increases magic damage received by 50% for 5 seconds with a 30 sec cooldown.

This would justify you bringing a Mage and Ranger.
This would cause Rangers in a 10 man to work together to cycle the arrow debuff on a Boss.
This would cause you make a decision if the Boss requires Poison/Piercing or Poison/Debuff, depending on if the Mage is just decursing or AoE’ing adds the majority of the fight.

Food for thought.

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I’ve been thinking this ever since day 1 of being a ranger.
I feel like having a “power mode” that is reliant on stamina would be super cool.

Basically hold down the left trigger to engage it and it starts draining stamina, but during that time you have a aiming cursor and a target shows up somewhere on each enemy, your shots do bonus damage if they hit the target, Or hitting the target breaks it, lowering the targets defenses or causing a bleed or slow.

This would allow them to excel in single target damage and make the class feel a little more exciting having specific spots to aim at, maybe having a few pre-set target locations on each enemy and each time you engage the skill it randomly picks one of the targets. This way it keeps things interesting so you aren’t always aiming for the same spot on every enemy.

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also its not a question of mages and rangers having equal dps, Mages 100% has more, which i have seen evidently recently by a mage being able to fire ball 2 spam kill a standing still self healing musket, while a ranger cant come close