Ranger Start Tree feedback

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Vipermagi wrote:

Hello, Arctic Armour. What a lovely green color you have. :) Even does the whole slowing monsters thing with its ice trail. Gonna require a bit of juggling to keep it going (might as well not try maintaining it), but it's there.

Very true. However, there's nothing that scales with your Evasion.

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Your life cannot be decreased by more than x% of your max HP pool per second.

This will be very strong against big damage hits.
Like immunity against one-shot.
But yeah, that won't do much, except vaal, maybe.

AND THIS WILL SYNERGY well with alchemist passive

Let me take example.

Your life cannot be decreased by more than 80% of your max HP pool per second.

Assuming i have 3500 hp (well, it's hard to mantain as ranger such amount of hp, but whatever)

Merciless Vaal Smash me for 9000 combined damage.
4500 fire
4500 phys.

75% resists = fire damage taken is 1125
4500 phys taken part.


5625 damage taken.

After being hit by vaal smash my hp decreases from 3500 to 700 hp

That means in next second i will take 2800 damage.

2800 damage is 80% of 3500 life, at this moment i have 700 hp

that will instantly kill me anyway, but assuming i have some flasks passives and 3 insta-flask:
15% life recovery from alchemist
30% life recovery from two green flask nodes.

Default 20% quality instant flask heals for 392 hp

By adding passives this will be 568 hp

ASSUMING I CAN SMASH ALL 3 charges of 3 insta-pots in less than one second (0.5 second).

568*9 = 5112 LIFE HEALED INSTANTLY

But yeah, problem is that this damage will come overtime and not with "TIK-TOK, you have 1 second to life"

So my calcucations is very-very basic.

I guess this KEYNODE can take it own place, but there should be drawback then "You can't leech life" or "you can't regen life"


And i think 75-80% is best number for balance

But i would loved to see 50% number, actually :3, because evasion chars suffer from big packs of blue mobs, where RNG can hate you and you will take 3 hits for 50% of your life

i didnt read the whole thread sry
the only problems i have with the ranger starting area is,that there is no option for mana/manareg (at least no notable you would go for)
yes shadow has no manareg node as well but you could go for mind drinker + he has more int for base mana
on top of that mana problem there isnt any lifereg nor any notable lifenodes/strength (for a bit phyisical dmg and base life) around
all other classes have either notable lifenodes(or ESnodes) or mananodes (most of them have both i.E. duelist/templar)
the defense is ok with the eva nodes (if you want armor even IR is easy to reach and you will mostly get green sockets)

another problem is ranger is a dex class and i would lave to play her with crit/accuracy (would work nice with much dex for eva bonus + acc) bute the bonsue dex gives to acc is far to low so you still have to look for items with flat + acc
if dex would provide more flat acc all the % acc nodes would get betetr and migth be worth taking them
and even when you dont want much crit you shouldnt feel forced to go all the way to RT (RT isnt op in my opinion,if you think about spells that always hit etc,its just that acc is far to weak)

As well as the re-balancing of the melee/ranged nodes, i really like the mentioning of Flasks.

A lot of good ideas have been brought forward but i think the most interesting is the aforementioned Nature's Essence

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Nature's Essence - "The power of nature, harnessed and distilled to perfection"

20% increased flask effect, 100% increased flask recovery speed. Life regeneration and life leech have no effect.

Having a Node which does the opposite of Vaal's Pact would be very interesting and maybe combined with some Flask Charges gained on hit/crit/evade/dodge(or same balanced variation) would definitely make for some interesting builds. It would promote Life over CI Builds again and make it so that Life Leech isn't the only means of survivability, which is normally the case with top-tier builds.

While i still think that bosses should be able to one-shot careless players, i do think Evasion/dodge need's to have a safety-net, because i don't mind running a risky build, but there's risky and then there's careless, running an evasion/dodge build in HC/Onslaught atm is just pure careless, albeit saying that i have seen it work for the fair few individuals.

Because i visualize Evasion/dodge builds being able to avoid strong/slow hits and succumb to small, faster hits, i was thinking something along the lines of:

Attacks that bring you into 'low life' have their damage reduced/dealt over time with a timer of some sort.( if this seems too strong, then maybe you take increased damage for a limited time after this effect procs)

Every x amount of seconds you can fully negate/negate x% of physical damage dealt to yourself. ( If it's too powerful, remove something like half Armour or half Evasion)

After an unsuccessful evade/dodge roll that would deal x% of your life, penalize a % of damage/attack speed, the amount penalized is the % reduction you gain for that hit/allotted time. ( or something like that, be nice if peopled played around with this concept, i think it's really interesting).

A change to Dexterity would be nice also.

Mana issues need to be addressed too.

A new skill gem summoning a beast/pet with the nodes being in the ranger part of the tree would be a really nice concept

That's all i've got for now.

@Rijken: Glad to see someone liking my idea :D.

The reason why I also left the Nature's Essence "20% Increased flask effect" was to make sure it wouldn't be overpowered when combined with the Alchemist notable, which is already pretty friggin strong.

This sort of keystone would also allow evasion/dodge characters able to use Seething/Bubbling Flasks to great effect and be far more ready for the next attack to get through one's defenses. Currently I prefer Bubbling because it gives more life back (even at a slower rate). Seething flasks always seem to run short whenever I use them, and I'm not fond of said flasks.

As for flask charges gained on hit, I think that would be a bit unbalanced considering that flasks don't really have that much charges to begin with, and life flasks have 30. (exception of Diamond Flask with 80 charges) Perhaps something like a notable granting 15% increased flask charges? It would really help out as you now have more charge capacity without having to roll the Ample prefix. And with the Ample prefix, you could gain a whapton of charges.

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I think another thing that would help out with the mana management would be to lower the cost of Frenzy. Understandably the skill itself is very powerful when built around it, but a starting cost of 15 mana? It's one of the few single-target attack skills that right out the bag is extremely mana-expensive, aside from Dominating Blow. For single-target skills for bow-users, only few skills are used, that being Burning Arrow, Frenzy, and Elemental Hit, and most players in lategame end up using Frenzy/Elemental Hit anyways. The mana progression for Frenzy should be revisited to encourage use and make Rangers less mana dependent due to the fact that she has no notable mana passives in her tree except on her borders and her neighboring classes.

Or add a mana related notable in the Ranger tree and I'd be happy, something like:

"Mana Quencher" - 1% of physical damage leeched back as mana, 20% mana regen, +20 Int

This would also give the Ranger an early Int option to grab that she needs in her part of her starting highways. Mara/Templar have Versatility, why not the Ranger?

Some mana regeneration or even mana leech passives please. Since duelists stole mana flows all my rangers are sad. Islidox's Mana Quencher sounds good to me.

New notable
Perfection of the body : gain 5% of accuracy as life.
Perfection of the mind : gain 3% of accuracy as mana.
Slightness : lose all armor. You cant have armor. Physical damage reduction is set at 30%

Would prolly need some tweak on numbers, but THAT would make me think about go in that part of the tree.

Edit : the thrid,one is crap. But the idea to have a fixed low phys reduction (in the way of fixed crit dmg reduction near mara start) is worth thinking.

Life regen is absolutely necessary for any life-based build due to the chaos damage map mod. There is no life regen on the entire right side of the tree. Regardless of any considerations involving theme, the current state of the game makes fairly wide traversal necessary for any life-based Ranger. Life builds are already in a pretty precarious state right now, so better life and life regen in the Ranger area would be a good bandaid until the values can be retooled at a more fundamental level.

Another reason that Ranger is a questionable start (independent of node values/placement) is due to the weakness of dexterity in general. The value of the accuracy granted by dex is incredibly weak at later levels, while the life portion of str and the mana portion of int, also flat values, stay relevant in comparison to the bonuses available on gear and passive nodes. By the same token, better accuracy nodes and notables in the Ranger area would do a lot to improve the power of the class while allowing it to retain flavor different from Duelist or Shadow.

If IR is being looked at for 11.2, then I'd suggest removing the synergy with Grace by reducing Grace's flat evasion rating value substantially and adding a "%more chance to evade" stat to bring it more into line with Determination. Doing this makes Grace highly beneficial for evasion characters while reducing its exploitability for armor stacking. Of course, if the node itself is being reworked, then no such change may be necessary.


In response to Rilken's post above, I think a lot of the ideas are great because they address the core issues while opening up lots of new build options and maintaining class distinction and flavor. My own thought's on a "Nature's Essence"-type node would be to make Inner Force apply to auras only and re-buff it, and then place a corresponding cluster for flasks somewhere in the SE portion of the tree. For general evasion buffs, I think putting that low-life pinch mechanic as the keystone behind Acrobatics, and then combining Phase Acrobatics into the main keystone and returning it to "Removes all Evasion and Energy Shield" would make the cluster more attractive. Adding %HP to the dodge nodes would also help.

I also really like the "Summon Familiar" idea, especially if the standard +Zombies/Skeletons notables and uniques don't apply to it and it gets its own cluster.

I've been wondering and I just can't convince myself why

There's no bow circles at marauder or witch.
There's no spell circles at ranger/marauder.
There's no melee circles at witch
And still there should be tons of melee nodes at ranger?

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