Rangers: what has to be changed to make it better ?

gabrieldourden

Some more comments on the Hunter after a few weeks of playing it.

In general performance is all over the place and vastly depends on the content you are facing.

Rapid Volley has an incredible burst against mobs in a large area, meaning that hunter will obliterate any other dps in places like the CotDG elevator, where mobs comes in large groups with intervals. Unfortunately Rapid Volley is not sustainable after the initial burst. Rapid Volley is great also in places like the Siege HE in Avernus and really good for soloing daily content.

In single target performance is really poor. It's horrible on the ranged version (taking the feat that doubles your ranged damage and halves the melee) and only slightly better using a kind of trapper-ish approach with roots and stance-switching.

The main issue is a combination of long encounter cooldowns, low recovery rate for encounters and pitiful at-will damage. Dailies are also lacking unless you use Disruptive Shot with the Apprentice set for a solid damage boost in group content. This is anyway completely reliant on a single equipment set that might become obsolete should stat caps increase.

Basically it's the opposite of the Warden Melee. Let's compare Warden Melee with Hunter Ranged on single target

Encounters: looking at the magnitudes and comparing Boar's Charge-Marauder's Rush-Hindering Strike with Constrictive Arrow-Longstrider Shot-Commanding Shot gives us a not so unbalanced situation. Melee cooldowns are a bit shorter and ranged Magnitudes a bit higher. Higher crit severity and focused partially balance the double damage feat of the ranged side. All in all ranged Hunter has a slight edge as far as I can see

Recovery: this is where things start to be wildly different. Melee reduces cooldowns by three seconds with each of the three encounters. On a complete rotation this means that the overall reduction is 18 seconds (6x3). Ranged has an option of 5% with roots or 2 seconds on 2 powers using the cooldown feat on Commanding Shot. This boils down to maximum 4 seconds. So Warden Melee gains at least 14 seconds per rotation.

At-will: what do the two rangers do when encounters are on cooldown? Hunter uses Rapid Shot at a pitiful damage. Warden has flurry-powered Storm Strike for a massive advantage, and can pile up Call of the Storm procs for even more damage.

arkaias

Honestly been a big fan of aimed shot, however 4 rapid shots will equal to 1 Aimed Shot. So I would want Aimed shot to have either shorter cast time .75 from 1.25, or have increased magnitude to 300 from 200.

levdbronstein

levdbronstein said:

Before mod 16 dropped the argument being made was that going from a choice between two paragon paths and three feat trees was fine because we'd get two legitimate choices (instead of not really having a choice given the superiority of the meta build). With rangers, at least, they have failed miserably: they grafted trapper feats on to archer but in so doing, they both gutted the synergy that had made trappers playable and failed to keep the features that made archers hit so hard (at least situationally).

For those rangers who, like me (maybe only me), stubbornly refuse to abandon the trapper playstyle, the following would be helpful (to a lesser degree for those unicorns that play archer-style hunters):

1. Rate of change: diminishing returns means that, to consistently benefit from the 5% buff, you need to *constantly* switch stances. Make it last a set time (5 sec) without the diminishing or keep the diminishing and bump it to 10%.
   
2. Longshot: unless I'm misreading it, adding 50% to ranged (1:1.5) at the cost of reducing melee by 50% (1:0.5) is a bad deal, especially since hindering strike tends to account for the most damage. Either bump the ranged buff to 100% or reduce the melee penalty to 33%
   
3. Thorned roots: the base magnitude (50) is terrible as is the hit control-immune targets take (100); all told they account for very little damage. The base should at least be doubled and the hit against control-immune targets should be comparable to hard-hitting encounters (400ish)
   
4. Critical action: so, wardens get a permanent 30% crit severity buff at the relatively insignificant cost of 3000 crit. Hunters, meanwhile, *could* get up to 24% for 10 sec upon daily use. Methinks a rethinks is in order.
   
5. AP gain: I know, everyone could use more, but the reduction of Biting Snares to 10% from 35% (or whatever it was before) + adding a 20 sec cooldown = pitiful AP gain
   
6. Predator: a tier 3 feat that gives a 5% buff for 10 sec against one target? No thank you. This would need to be in the 15-25% range to make it worth considering.
   
7. Better cooldowns: Commander in chief is useless (2 sec reduction) and Forestbond gives a measly 5% reduction *if* roots are applied. Compare this to Storm's Recovery which reduces encounter cooldowns by 3 sec on encounter *use*. Bumping Forestbond to at least 10% wouldn't bring back the old capacity to spam encounters endlessly, but it would make rotations far smoother and more tolerable. For Commander in chief to be useful, it would need to be at least 5 sec
   
8. Plant Growth/Cordon: the addition of weak roots to PG helps with cooldowns, but other than that, one of the best pre-mod 16 encounters is now decidedly mediocre. To make it useful for more then added cooldown relief for the hunter/trapper, upgrade PG to strong grasping roots (in conjunction with buffing thorned roots) and make cordon hit harder. Also, 24 sec cooldown for PG and 20 sec for CoA? When it was a beast, sure, but now those times are just silly
   
9. Careful attack: put it out of its misery or make it useful already; 10 magnitude per hit (when it isn't bugged, that is)? Seriously, call a priest.
   
10. Casting times: 1.65 sec for aimed shot, especially given that all the other at-wills are awful (and don't benefit from flurry like warden) is ridiculously long. Same with Commanding Shot and, to a lesser degree, GW and aimed strike.
    

So, I look forward to the above being implemented. I also think its time for the devs to either call uncle insofar as trying to make people enjoy archers, or actually putting some thought into how this might actually work.

RD

So, of these proposed changes, it looks like 1 (rate of change), 5 (biting snares), 7 (forestbond) and 10 (aimed-shot cast time) have been implemented on preview. In addition, CoA (instead of PG) has been upgraded to strong grasping roots, which wasn't asked for, but, combined with the existing weak roots on PG, I certainly won't complain. Cooldowns on these, though, are still ridiculous.

All in all, long overdue, but welcome.

RD

clericalist

All in all, long overdue, but welcome.


You must forgive me if say I am very skeptical of this, every time they promised an archer overhaul things got worse. However I REALLY hope that I am wrong on this because the archer is the weakest now than its ever been, and that is saying a lot because it has been generally the weakest of all dps classes in most of the games history.

mparcher

I'm not sure if this has been posted already, but the HR is not in an ideal state right now. What I mean by ideal is that we only have 1 viable role right now and that is DPS. So if we are one of the few classes that only have 1 role, it would be ideal if we were near the top of damage potential. We are not. And after reading about proposed changes, it appears that we have moved even further down the ladder of damage potential. It seems counter intuitive that multi-role classes are having more damage potential than HRs. This problem seems to get even worse in the upcoming changes in MOD19.

levdbronstein

clericalist said:

You must forgive me if say I am very skeptical of this, every time they promised an archer overhaul things got worse. However I REALLY hope that I am wrong on this because the archer is the weakest now than its ever been, and that is saying a lot because it has been generally the weakest of all dps classes in most of the games history.

I actually don't care for archer builds and don't think these proposed changes will overly help those who do. They will, though, help those of us who are playing trapper-like builds using the hunter path.