Ranger Start Tree feedback

Not being able to leech mana and therefore to use mindrinker to handle mana cost is quite a big deal for some build.

Focusing on pve is obviously the way to go for now, but what I meant, is that I really feel that things such as resolute technique are just not fit at all for pvp, and by designing the game in order to have some good pvp in it, this should not exist, imho.

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Fruz wrote:

Not being able to leech mana and therefore to use mindrinker to handle mana cost is quite a big deal for some build.

I suppose. Do recall that PvP is different from PvE and mana is managed much differently. Your character won't have as many chances to just stand there and spam skills/spells because you should be moving around in different positions to gain an advantage, dodge, and attack your opponents who would also be doing the same. Thus, minddrinker itself might not be as good for PvP vs other forms of mana management such as regen or blood magic. Need to do some testing to see whether it's actually true though since I've personally never gotten Minddrinker on my characters. Never really like it because I don't really expect my opponents to just stand in one place and let me constantly hit him. I could be wrong.

To be serious about PvP, always think everything in terms of PvP and not PvE. Otherwise you'll be in a lot of trouble against people who actually know what they're doing. PvE is just a pathway to get to the PvP game. This is why there are PvE builds and PvP builds. If you watch a lot of streamers, most of them (currently) will give a very PvE-centric perspective, so watch out for that.

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Fruz wrote:

Focusing on pve is obviously the way to go for now, but what I meant, is that I really feel that things such as resolute technique are just not fit at all for pvp, and by designing the game in order to have some good pvp in it, this should not exist, imho.

You are likely correct. Game mechanics that lets 1 type of character completely negate 100% of the time another type of character's defense doesn't seem quite balanced. Games that involve these forms of mechanics tend to have certain bad aspects of PvP (e.g. a 1-shot fest). For example, there's an old game called Ragnarok Online (RO) where you can get a boss card called the Golden Thief Bug card to socket into the your gear and you become immune to all magic spells (take 0 damage). You can see that it was quite ridiculous since mages in that game were basically useless against those players.

This is why I think and hope really hard that GGG will balance these aspects of the game in the future. Wait for the big PvP patch after the game is officially released, haha. Good PvE and crap PvP won't sustain some of us for 10 years like D2 did, as GGG are probably aware.

Sorry for getting off-topic as this is a thread about the Ranger Start Tree and not PvP. To somewhat relate it back to topic, you can see the King of the Hill cluster between the shadow and the ranger. I would presume the majority of the players don't get this cluster because it just costs too many points for what it does which gives some damage, arrow speed, and knockback on crit, especially for PvE.

For PvE, why bother with knockback when you can invest in more points to get more damage or other methods of CC such as stun (only certain monsters/map mods have stun immunity), freeze, shock, etc? Knockback, however, can be very useful in PvP because there is absolutely no knockback immunity (thank goodness) in this game unlike stun, freeze, burn, and shock immunities that players may get. Arrow speed nobody really cares about in PvE, but in PvP can be very important because your opponent will have a much harder time dodging your arrows. Thus, the King of the Hill cluster is a very obvious PvP-centric cluster if I've ever seen one. It still seems that 5-6 points to get the whole cluster is a bit too costly because currently knockback seems a bit lackluster compared to what we've been used to in D2 and even D3 I believe. We'll see what happens though.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Instead of its current functionality, Resolute Technique should double your chance to hit with melee attacks.

I really like this idea - so basically it would be like an inverse of the blindness effect. "Your attacks cannot be evaded" causes all sorts of problems for the accuracy metagame, and no crits is too weak of a drawback because there are lots of builds that can't really afford to invest in crits anyway. Restricting it to melee attacks is also the right thing to do because bow users ought to have enough accuracy not to need this. (Wand users have to work a bit harder for accuracy, but to compensate they get a pretty good deal out of critical strikes, amongst other things, if they do get accurate.)


On the question of Accuracy per point of Dex, there's a bit of a balancing act if it's to make Dex relevant. Too little Accuracy per Dex, and even high-Dex characters don't get much of an advantage and need to stack Accuracy on gear. (This is the current situation.) But with too much Accuracy per Dex, everyone will get to ~100 Dex including item bonuses (not a bad idea anyway to access a wide range of items and gems) and find that this is already enough to hit everything, so again, high-Dex characters don't have much of an advantage.

A very long thread for a very old topic. Since they have not been linked to yet, here are the older versions of this thread:

Improve. The. Ranger. Area.

Archer location, I am disappoint

Holistically related: "Tax Nodes". It's about area value on the tree, something melee rangers are dead last in.


Cliffs:

* Dexterity is terrible. It will never not be terrible as long as its based solely on Accuracy, no matter how you modify that system. (Well, you could implement "spill-over" accuracy contributing to critical damage, but this lies "outside the constraints you'd impose upon yourself.") Additionally, it is a handicap mages and Resolute Technique do not put up with. The very best ranger in the world still misses 5% of the time. What the hell. Seriously. The only reason you'd choose to opt in to the accuracy economy is to make a sub maximal character or for an attack-based critical strike build.

* The ranger melee notables (and melee starting gate) are underpowered, in both the stats they grant the character and the tree coverage it unlocks. You spend a ton of points to crawl through a clogged pipe to end up right where you started from.

* Non-existent melee link-up with the shadow area. Simply a weak transition area.

* Critical bow nodes are pretty meh.


As personal preference, I'd also like cheaper movement speed to be available in the area, but that's just me. (Why play a ranger if you don't want to zoom?)

And in a cosmic sense there ought to be actual dedicated trap nodes (+% trap damage) equally assessable to the shadow and ranger. Just a crazy idea all around, but:

Maybe a couple more things should be moved into the dexterity slice of the pie. Like... critical hits, maybe?

No, that would take away from the Shadow Tree. Rangers should have consistent damage.

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Lyralei wrote:

No, that would take away from the Witch Tree.

Fixed.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

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Lyralei wrote:

No, that would take away from the Witch Tree.

Fixed.

Bit of the portion between Witch and Shadow at any rate but I wouldn't move them. If anything, I really like notables like Alchemist and Piercing Shots because those distinguish the ranger from other classes. Unfortunately Resolute Technique exists so..

I also feel the area around the ranger doesn't have enough life node to build good survivability. There is not any incredible noticeable unique node to it's class except acrobatic(most ppl ignore this node) that people often use(static shock, double totem, vaal pact, CI, blood magic, etc...)

I'm going to provide some feedback that's related to the survivability issues of the Ranger.

I started a new Ranger in the Anarchy league, so that means post-patch .11.

Here's my lvl 59 tree with Oak/Oak/Kraityn rewards

Gear:

Depending on which rings I equip, my life ranges from 1.7k to 1.85k life. DR is around the high 50s with Grace.

The worst part about it all, is that I feel like glass. And not even the cannon part of glasscannon, just glass. (Although once I get my RoA and Frenzy 4Led, I'll feel glasscannony.)

Mobs are hitting me for crazy amounts of damage. Death is nothing I can't avoid (unless I'm zerging a zone or being careless or fighting that rogue exile), but I do die on the occasion where I can't react fast enough and/or desync. Which drives the point in that 1.8k life doesn't feel much at all, even with a high damage reduction number. If you look at my tree, I have sunk passives into the nearest life nodes, and it still doesn't seem enough. The only reason why my build has been able to carry itself this far was because of the Slitherpinch gloves (takes care of mana problems) and the combined total of 5% leech from physical damage. Without that, this build would have encountered twice the difficulty getting up to where it's at.

Rangers that head over to the Str part of the tree clearly have the life bonus and the better life clusters available than the Dex/Int part of the tree, which is meager and unbalanced. This is why the life clusters in the Ranger tree need to be addressed to provide better life bonuses and life has to be worked into the Dexterity stat. If not, dexterity-based builds will ALWAYS be inferior to Strength builds and that is something that can break this game. Either that, or you reduced the mob damage without nerfing life/ES passives. But that only makes the weaker builds marginally stronger and strong builds even stronger.

I still think it comes back down to reworking the Dexterity stat so that it isn't useless. Fixing the Ranger tree will help, but in the long run, Dex has to change.

Red (str) side of tree has LIFE

Blue (int) side of tree has ES/CI

Green has neither of the two, and evasion is not viable. Maybe ramp up evasion a thousand fold, and include things like the ability to partially evade attacks, so that a ranger can survive with less health and ES simply by stacking evasion. If other classes want to jump on the evasion bandwagon, they'd have to head to the ranger area.

Picture it: A party with a marauder, templar, and ranger. The marauder says, "Rhoa hit big. Me no care. Me tank it." The templar says, "God has blessed me with a shield and takes some of the damage away for me." Then the marauder adds, "of course, we have big health just in case." They look around for their third party member, the ranger, and can't find her. The templar starts to call out for her, but just as he does, she comes out from behind a tree. "I'm a little confused," she says, "are you saying you actually got hit by that slow thing?"

I just respecced my 83 bow ranger into a melee ranger to try something new. Since I was going to be using daggers, I did not make the long trek to the marauder area to get life. Instead, I went CI because I felt like that was my only other option. The trek to get to the shadow area was long and the passives available to me basically told me I would have been better off as a shadow.

The Mana Geyser node in between the shadow and ranger areas (but more toward the center) is a good node, but it doesn't really feel like it's part of the ranger area due to its placement. Other than that, I can't think of any really great nodes in the ranger area.