Ranger Start Tree feedback

Don't remove those axe accuracy nodes ! Not everyone is using RT :/.
I already have 430+ dext and they are useful to me still.

As a few other people have brought up, Revenge of the Hunted is simply not worth the points required. It doesn't connect with any of the skill point highways and results in a very poor efficiency.

In its current state, Iron Reflexes is completely gimped for rangers. Dexterity is already the weakest stat in the game. Completely removing the one decent aspect of dexterity is not balance in any shape or form. If anything, Iron Reflexes should be beneficial to dexterity based classes and have a negative condition for strength and intelligence based classes. There is no node on the skill tree, that completely removes a benefit from an attribute, besides this keystone, which is completely ridiculous.

There is no easy access to resistances at the start of the Ranger tree. Currently, there is NO keynode that has two of EV/armor/life and resistance. Whereas, there are many Armor/ES and EV/ES resistance nodes throughout or near the other class' starts. GGG seems to have forgotten about this missing node.

On that topic of resists, I think it's a cornerstone in the power of Magic Find builds. What you take on the passive tree gives you slack on affixes to optimize more Item Find% on your gear. A few of the other traits that make spell totems an ideal tool to use for it:

* Mana management. Even if you're all blue, you can not spam a simple zero linked fireball. Totems cost nothing to use in comparison.

* Weapon strength doesn't matter at all with spells. Nor do auras. Nor off-weapon +damage.

* Damage diffusion. Not only does having two totems up divide damage by two or three, you're in the zone to easily max minions. Which means any unit in your army takes less than 1/10th of the damage it would be taking alone. (And why the passive regeneration on skeletons in Diablo 2 works so bloody well. You can emulate that power in PoE by using a Totem of Rejuvenation btw; trash mobs can not kill your skeletons with one up.) In addition they have 100% uptime since they have no timer. It's roughly the same thing as having 12 or 15 endurance charges up at most times.

* There's some exploitable "low life" stuff for spells. Double Permanent Curses are also an option if you want to skimp awhile on Energy Shield% nodes, which is even more damage.

* Since there are no prerequisite passives on the tree to enable any skill (such as "You can now use minions" or "+1 to max auras" type stuff), there's really scant cost for going dual totem. Your traps, which are somehow still spells, will still kick ass. (I kind of like that "ability lock" sort of feature, it reminds me of Titan Quest. "What to be a pure summoner? You have to take the witch area for undead minions, and sally into the ranger zone to pick up their forest critter buddies." Limitations->variety->creativity etc.)

The purple region is just custom built for all that stuff. "Your gear, stats, and active skills don't matter, you still kick ass and stay alive."

In contrast, the ranger area is naturally rather weak at all of it. Beast pets (deadly baby ostriches) would help a little, though. Maybe some resist in the Crystal Skin area could smooth over some of the rest. An extra 10% from Crystal Skin would hardly break the balance of the universe, considering how much life you give up in the green over being in the red.

I really like the new Ranger Area, It is very easy leveling without dying once.

But it gets harder at some point later in Act 3 Merciless and end game maps.

I'd like more Resist Nodes / I think they are not placed that well at the moment, I mean especially the ones between the shadow and ranger start area.

Its probably because I dont play Ranger as Ranged, but still I feel it should be also easy available for Melees.

And besides that I think there should be a better Life Reg Node. So buff the existing one, or add another pls!

I am playing a Life/Evasion Crit Dagger Ranger Build:


My Gear:

Hi there. I really like to play split arrow mana-user archers. Mana-use is kind of hard to pull off and I feel the ranger start is not really helping. The big problem is primal spirit.

Lets assume you run 2x60% auras (grace, hatred) you have 5% reduced reserved mana from influence and a lvl 20 reduced mana gem. This is pretty cookie cutter imho. Also a mana-user is most likely not using ice-shot, lightning arrow or similar because of the high mana cost. Split arrow and frenzy from time to time.

This means you have 20% mana left over, so you want to beef up your maximum mana a bit from gear and maybe a few talents aswell.

8% maximum increased mana is not terrible, but not overwhelming either.

Primal Spirit on the other hand is in my opinion quite bad. Borderline completely worthless and I would rather have a 8% increased maximum mana,than this talent.

20 str
20 int
20% increased mana recovery from flasks
20% increased mana regeneration.

1) the 20% increased mana from flasks does 0 improvement (but is somewhat nice while leveling). This is because any high level mana flask has such a high mana regen, that you will hit your maximum mana within less than a second, even while spamming frenzy. So you actually need to use mana flasks that have high ilvl, but is not the best quality. So this does absolutely 0 in lvl 80+ and in most situations actually hurt your character performance.

2) 20% increased mana regeneration. This only increases your mana per second by a very little margin.

Let's assume you have an 800 mana pool (that's quite high btw). You regain 105% of your maximum mana per minute as base. Now it's 125% with primal spirit.

(800x1,05)/60 = 14,00 mana per second as base.
(800x1,25)/60 = 16,67 mana per second with primal spirit

The difference is virtually non-existant and not even close to being something you can rely on.

3) the stats. Well i guess +20str and +20int can be nice for gem requirement and it gives you 10 base mana and 10 base hp.

Overall quality of this talent = not close to being worth taking for characters that are not leveling.

So in my opinion remove the %mana regen and the increased flask recovery and give it x% increased maximum mana or y% reduced skill cost or something completely different.

hi. i just want to propose that to make ranger worth using the evasion and life nodes at the start are buffed to 6% life so they're on par with the warrior's.

eva is actually better than armor, so buffing to 6% would be unfair. 5% might be reasonable tho. considering mara has some CRAZY high phys and armor nodes.
as well as easily accesible resist nodes.