Ranger Start Tree feedback

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We may need end up change Iron Reflexes as a result of other changes to Evasion.

+1

I'd love to see a few better life nodes. With exception of the Witch, each area has some 8/10%+ life nodes near the start.
If you take the upper path of Ranger, make you way to Heart of the Panther, then you're left with two choices: crit or shield block. Nothing for nothing for dual-wielding, while Weapon Artistry says "[...] while dual-wielding or holding a shield"

Additionally, those three early crit nodes are weak compared to others.
Ranger Notable: Pressure Points, 30% critical multiplier
Shadow : Assassination, 40% crit chance / 20% crit multi
Marauder: Deadly Precision/Disembowling, 80% crit chance with one-handed weapons each. While this are not as close to the starting point as the upper two, they are very strong. When looking at the Marauder, I see brute strength, the ability to smash his foes no matter what, and not an artful fighter that is able to find his enemies weaknesses in order to land deadly strikes. Which the Ranger actually should be better at than he is.

Dexterity is about being faster than your enemy, though, the Ranger isn't really good at this.
The Duelist and Shadow both do a lot better when it comes to melee.

I think the amount of stun avoidance you can get is just to low to be reliable. 24% means you'll still get stunned in three of four hits. Same for elemental status ailment avoidance.

The early evasion nodes could use a little buff, since they are just at an average value.
Some resistances would be great as well.

Resists, they need a good resist circle.

Or a circle that grants some portion of or evasion as spell blocking/evasion (or maybe something with movement speed as spell blocking/evasion IDK some way to mitigate spells).

Rangers have the normal two elemental resist set of three nodes all the other classes have more. Shadows have Nullification/Void Barrier, Templar have Body and Soul/ Mind and Matter/ Celestial Walker, Marauder have Diamond Skin, Witches have their various Walkers, and even Duelist has Diamond Flesh.

They need some resist tree/node.

For me to play a melee ranger I need nodes relating to the only pure dexterity melee weapons Rapiers.

And yes it has to be Rapier only because if I want to do swords Duelist is just going to be a better choice.

Ranger cannot compete with the sheer amount of sword nodes in and around duelist, they might as well grab a specific weapon and be really awesome with it.

Or honestly drop the entire Ranger with melee weapons cause with Claws and Daggers at Shadow and Axes and Swords at duelist why should I want to play a melee Ranger?

Also with all these calls for better life nodes, I have to say to don't really want them.

To make the life nodes worth while I have to grab a certain amount of strength to make the strength worth while I go up and grab iron grip and that is the exactly what I want to avoid.

I want a pure dexterity to actually be a viable choice, after I grab Reflexes, Elusiveness
(as a complete aside whoever decided that passives that have the exact same effect need different names needs to be told that was a dumb idea) , and whatever defense is in the new Ranger Tree I shouldn't be crying about the crappy life nodes around me because evasion sucks.

One other thing I'd like to point out about the ranger's starting tree. I was comparing visually to all the other starting trees and my first impression of the ranger's starting area is one of asymmetry and lack of direction. Most people use the ranger's tree for bow passives and yet 2/3 of the starting area is geared towards melee-type passives. Why not make a more attractive and more symetrical starting area, the bottom and top evenly laid out for both a melee and bow-using ranger.

Right now, if one were to even consider taking notables from the ranger's tree (rare if at all) then they would have to weave around the bottom defensive portion of the ranger's starting area to get to the offensive melee notables stuck in the middle. That's really inconvenient and unattractive to do for any other class.

Add especially attractive notable passives at the beginning and change the paths to make them more easily accessible to other classes. Right now the ranger's starting notables are both inaccessible and unattractive to most all non-ranger classes. Things like significant life regen, attack speed, critical hit chance/multiplier, evasion/dodge, some combination of these on one notable passive. Imagine a passive that gives *life regen, evasion, AND attack speed!* I'd love that. Or *Critical hit chance, attack speed, and accuracy.* Those are much more appealing and significant than what is currently presented.

Also, I'd like to see more flask passives as well as perhaps moving flask buff passives closer to each other. The 'Alchemist' notable is just sort of randomly positioned and I don't think anyone takes it at all. Change 'Alchemist' to 'Nature's Salve', make it 20% increased recovery from flasks and move the Flask Life nodes closer to it as well to make a sort of flask recovery area with maybe a few mana flask nodes as well for good measure.

Another area on the ranger's tree that baffles me is the 4-leaf clover section of dagger, sword, claw, and bow passives at the mid top area. These are very niche passives that require devotion into these weapon types but there are no really attractive notable passive options there to really consider working into this area other than the one for claws currently. Maybe move that whole section down to the area just after the ranger's starting area, around where 'Furvor' is now.

I created such a thread 2 months ago after the first nonproj race.
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/321073


First thing the ranger needs is a STR+INT node in the starting area so it is able to use hybrid swords/axes or can start as a str melee/caster without items.


Then the start should be more similar to the other classes that have 2 paths offered.


Meaning-->A Melee and a Ranged path since there are dex only rapiers.


Templar got a caster and a melee start
Shadow got caster, melee, and ranged start
Duelist got melee and ranged start

Maras have no STR only caster gear but if they go south they should get more dex nodes for hybrid melee weapons.
The witch totally fails that concept despite being suitable for ranged builds it takes forever to be able to use ranged gear.


Another weak point of the ranger is that the first life nodes are far away, which results in rangers taking damage nodes being able to take life nodes later than other classes.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/122071

The above link pretty much has ideas from many forum members regarding how to improve the Ranger area, including ideas from me. But to elaborate more, I’ll post some individual points on things that I think can be improved in no particular order. (Mostly likely said improvements will already be suggested by other people, but repetition never hurt.)

- General Asymmetry: I think one of the biggest issues with her tree is the lack of symmetry that all other classes have. This means that the melee and bow clusters are extremely inefficient regarding pathing. It also explains why most players take her evasion route (which isn’t even that good) to escape her tree as fast as possible. Everything else is a kaizo trap. I also have to point out that her bow-related passives are all over the place on the tree, like Master Fletcher down south, Heavy Draw/Deadly Draw to the southeast, Lethality to the east, Piercing Shots to the northwest. Mixed in with melee clusters, it makes for a skilltree laden with +10 dex points to reach all the juicy notables, which is highly point-inefficient. I personally think the Master Fletcher cluster should be placed somewhere on the outer ring near the other bow notable clusters to make things more efficient. This will clump bow passives in a relatively smaller area, and frees up points for players to allocate them elsewhere. Sword and 1handed weapon passives should be relocated to the south and southeast portion of the tree, and anything else (crit, claws, resists, avoidance) should be relocated to the outer rings. Also the defense highway should be located up north and the weapons highway south, i.e. reverse of their current position.


- Lackluster Life Passives: Her life nodes are extremely lacking and all over the place. I think her life nodes should be like the Templar, all life clusters should end in a notable with an 8% increased life node and +20 to max Strength OR a 10% increased life node. As an evasion-based character, she needs the life to compete with other characters, especially if you don’t go Iron Reflexes. Also the life cluster with 5 life passives is so out of place in the tree that nobody goes for it.


- Ineffective/inefficient Evasion-related passives:

1. This is a problem with evasion, but moreso the fact that in order to have an extremely good defense, she has to sink a lot of passives into 3 different keystones, that being Ondar’s Guile, Acrobatics, and Phase Acrobatics for a total of 7 points. This, on top of the need to stack life passives to prevent a ganking, makes people opt for Iron Reflexes as a cheaper way out on top of stun avoiding. Evasion has no mitigation against attacks, but armor does, which also allows players to skip stun avoidance passives because of said armor. I might be trivializing the evasion-issue (if you want a full discourse on how evasion is bad, take a look at Soujiro’s recent threads in Beta Feedback), but not only is her evasion-defense bad, it’s also point-inefficient. Phase Acrobatics is the only keystone/notable behind another keystone that’s locked away by 4 passive points instead of 2 or 3. I would consolidate the 3/3/2/2 into 4/3/3 or just 5/5.

2. The other major problem deals with the fact that her evasion notables are located OUTSIDE her tree and are placed on the borders of her tree. That does not make any sense as all other classes have easily attainable defense notables within their own defense highway. In short, this sort of setup undercuts the effectiveness of her defense highway, which needs redesign. In all honesty, the Ranger defense highway could take a leaf out of the Marauder’s book design-wise, just mixed in with evasion passives than armor passives. Perhaps the biggest problem is treating evasion as a primary defense when it does not, cannot function as life or ES in terms of damage absorption. Therein lies the major issue in her defense highway, and as such should be reworked around life and then evasion, not the other way around. Stun-related passives (avoidance + recovery) should be relocated on the outer-ring with a notable granting significant stun avoidance/recovery. This makes sense as all major evasion-keystones are located on the outer-ring, and Shadows that go CI can also grab such passives.


- Lack of Early Resistance/Int: Like many other people have pointed out, the Ranger really lacks some early resistance nodes that all other classes have. Shadow has Nullification, Duelist has Diamond Skin, Marauder has Diamond Skin AND a full cluster of resists, and Templar has Mind and Matter and Celestial Walker. Even the Witch has the Walker notables, even though that only provides resistance to a single elemental type. KenshiD made an excellent suggestion with a “Naturalist” notable giving +12 to all resistances somewhere early in the tree. This is necessary to provide the Ranger with a defense option that most classes are able to obtain early on. Also, if the Ranger is to be an accuracy/critical character, she needs early access to Intelligence as a lot of crit-related skills/supports are Int-based. Putting a +20 Int to the Naturalist notable would be a great addition.


- Weak Notables: Her notables are weak, and also less in number compared to her dexterity counterparts. For a list of certain notables that need reworking:


- The 6-point cluster fiasco: For some odd reason, the Ranger has bow clusters that require a total of 6 passive points to reach the notable at the end of it, which is strange considering all other notable clusters in the tree only requires 5 passive points at most (The Deadly Precision cluster in the Marauder tree is also another 6-point fiasco aside from the pure defense clusters like Body&Soul or Leather&Steel). I’m talking about the King of the Hill Cluster and the Heavy Draw cluster, which not only requires 6 passives to reach the end notable, the notables themselves aren’t even that attractive damage-wise. These 6-point clusters need a revisit and redesign either by putting the notable on the 5th point or just cut out a 6th passive point. The Heavy Draw notable itself should be increased to 24% or 28% for the amount of points needed to reach it.


- Mana Issues: Ever since Mana Flows has been moved to the inner Duelist tree, the Ranger faces heavy mana problems early to mid-game. The Mud Geyser notable is located out in the middle of the boondocks that no one tries to get. Relocating the Mud Geyser cluster into the Ranger tree between the defense and offense highway as a bridge would make more sense and eliminate the mana problem early on. Either that, or move the Mud Geyser cluster into a location on the starting highway border that’s readily accessible to both. Also the +5 mana gained on killing blow seems tame in comparison to other 8% increased mana nodes. Changing those to 5% reduced mana cost of skills nodes would be a better choice that players would opt to take.

If I think of anything else, I’ll tack it onto this post.

I dont have any specific node suggestions, but since Ive rolled and rerolled my bow ranger so many times: I would say my perfect bow ranger would be one that can stay in its own tree and be viable endgame. Ive tried this allready and well...yeah doesnt work so well. Atm it tends to be a flavour choice (a costly choice) and get out of the tree asap.

One thing I do find strange is that the pure dex (nimble/agile) class has less attack speed than the two dex hybrid classes.

I dunno it just seems if I want to make a ele bow user I should start templar and get RT, if I want an IAS bow user...duelist oh look RT, if I want a physical bow then marauder with full str and iron grip with the added bonus of more base life oh and RT again.

The way in which you will deal with accuracy may make pure dex more appealing. A 100% to hit build that can also crit should be possible without needing lionseye (not a QQ, i have one). This may or may not open up ranger builds.

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Dreggon wrote:

Arrows also "missing" an enemy (due to evasion) should be able to hit enemies behind the enemy that dodged - maybe make this a keystone?

I may be wrong but I think this is allready true, Im about 90% sure Ive missed enemies before on my wander and killed the ones behind them (by accident)

I'm rolling a 2H lightning strike ranger in Anarchy and so far it's going great, no deaths and the kill speed is really good.

I would say the only problem is first few starting nodes, which you are mandatory to take %evasion, as rest just sucks, and proceed towards duelist-mara part of the tree. She could use some mana regen points closer than the mana regen nodes in duelist tree, and maybe some additional crit chance and damage nodes.

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Qarl wrote:

We may need end up change Iron Reflexes as a result of other changes to Evasion.

Would you mind letting us know what sort of changes you might be considering?

In it's current state, Iron Reflexes is basically an essential node, especially for melee rangers. What I'd like to see is evasion itself being a viable defense method, but I'm at a loss as to how to do that, other than making a new keystone passive/making changes to existing ones, but that would kinda defeat the purpose. Nevertheless, unless you're planning on overhauling the way evasion functions, changes to current keystones make the most sense, I'd just like for the changes to make them 'better' if you work around them, with obvious downsides. Since armour is superior to evasion, Iron Reflexes essentially has no downside, especially when combined with unwavering stance. That being said, I'm not suggesting a nerf to Iron Reflexes, but a redesign with better positives and existent negatives. While saying that, I'd love to give suggestions, but frankly I'm at a loss.

Some changes to the ranger starting area might make evasion more viable however, such as enemy critical strike multiplier reduction nodes or reduced enemy critical strike multiplier/chance reduction nodes (or even a notable). On that thought, it'd be interesting to have some kind of notable or keystone passive that reduces enemy critical strike chance and multiplier, as well as possibly a flat amount of damage by a percentage of your evasion, (actual evasion, so it wouldn't work with Iron Reflexes). It could be combined into acrobatics or phase acrobatics, or it could be a third notable coming off one of the two, or it could be separate entirely. This reduction would apply to spells as well, giving pure evasion characters some form of magical resistance that improves as they progress, in the same sense that armour characters gradually collect life and energy shield characters get, well, energy shield. I don't believe that phase acrobatics is enough. A pure evasion character could be so dextile that it becomes next to impossible to critically strike them, and even when crits do happen, they're substantially reduced in damage.

While that's all well and good, even normal hits can be very dangerous to a pure evasion character, making using it in melee range laughable compared to the alternatives. Perhaps just a notable in the ranger starting area that reduces all damage taken by a flat amount as a percentage of their evasion, if the above suggestions regarding the new/changed keystone was a bit ambitious. Or even if not, really. Anyway, all this has been off the top of my head so it goes without saying take it with a pinch of salt. Other than what I've mentioned I'll have to say +1 to better and more accessible life nodes.

Armour mathematically gets an incread marginal benefit per point of armour as you get more of it. Evasion, meanwhile, is the opposite, where the marginal benefit of one more point of evasion is less than what the last extra point of evasion gave. As long as the math works out like this, it is more ideal to stack tons of armour than it is to stack tons of evasion. On the flip side, stacking a teeny little bit of armour doesn't achieve as much as stacking only a teeny little bit of evasion, but that's the equivalent of saying one weak sucky character is slightly weaker and suckier than another weak sucky character, and no one wants to stay weak and sucky for long either way anyways. It does, however, make Grace useful even for chars with no evasion and Determination useless for anyone with no armour, but that's besides the point.

As long as this mechanic is in place, any build that completely specializes in evasion (as opposed to a build that specializes in armour, energy shield, or mostly armour/energy shield with a little bit of evasion on the side), and thus rangers (whom are pure dex and thus more built for evasion stacking), really aren't very salvageable.

Accuracy is similar, too. Under current mathematical calculations, accuracy would be a terrible stat to specialize in even if resolute technique and Lion's Eye didn't exist.

...I suppose this isn't directly related to the ranger skill tree though. Although from what I can see, the ranger skill tree's terrible set up and weak notable passives would make it a terrible place to be even if evasion and accuracy were actually viable. At the very least the ranger tree should offer more speed, accuracy, and evasion than it currently does (not that the latter two stack up to armour or energy shield, though)