Revisting my ol' Pet Peeve

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SlixSC wrote:

With the end of this season, we will presumably see two things exit the racing scene for a long time, Bow Ranger and Descent.

Descent is plagued by serious problems that have been discussed numerous times now, but ironically it is the only race in which Bow ranger is actually viable and can compete with other classes.

Bows, for the most part, have not been viable in standard races for years now. A slow start (split arrow), coupled with the generally low damage of base bows and limited gear options have made it practically impossible for bow ranger to compete.

There are some easy solutions to this problem though and ways to sensibly make bow ranger viable in all races.

Here are the proposed changes:

Given that (ironically) Rain of Arrows is only really useful as a leveling skill early on and is much later easily trumped by both Split Arrow and Tornado Shot, the first change I would like to suggest is to simply switch Split Arrow and Rain of Arrows. Rain of Arrows should be the level 1 skill, Split Arrow should be available at level 4.

This change would drastically improve the slow ranger start and allow ranger to compete with other classes early on.

The next change is pretty straight forward. Simply buff the base damage of Crude bows, long bows and composite bows by a few dps.

Which leads to the third change I would like to suggest. Point Blank is probably the only reason why Bow ranger can even compete with other classes in Descent. To make Bow Ranger viable in standard races the easiest solution is to make Point Blank available much earlier on. Ideally at around lvl 15-18.

There are two ways to do this. You could either swap the positions of damage nodes and health nodes on the ranger tree (top part would be the bottom part and vice versa) to allow ranger faster access to point blank this way, or alternatively (and this is less intuitive) you could move point blank significantly closer to the top half of the tree.

Both options would help, though personally (in my biased opinion) I would love to see both, move point blank even closer and switch the positions of damage and defensive nodes on the tree.

Kind of unrelated to this, but I think a caster nerf is in order aswell, caster has gone from probably being by far the weakest option roughly 5-6 seasons ago, to being a mindless and easy way to do much better than all weapon-based classes, even for players with limited skill.

edit: Oh and given that Rain of Arrows is absolutely useless endgame, I would suggest to significantly decrease the mana cost of rain of arrows at all levels, this would allow for RoA based endgame builds again and make racing with RoA linked to other support gems significantly less painful and annoying (especially if you lack damage on gear).

I can only assume that the RoA mana cost is a remnant of early-beta times, there is absolutely no reason RoA should cost twice as much mana as split arrow and quite substantially more than Tornado Shot.

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jstq wrote:

Mindless casters huh? So what IQ do you need to roll ipd+flat weapons? 290+? And what IQ do you need to get non empty zones?

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HeaT1 wrote:

playing leapslam duelist was just as "mindless" as caster imo. maybe more so, slap on chest for extra defense, no qs required.


-HeaT

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HeaT1 wrote:

playing leapslam duelist was just as "mindless" as caster imo. maybe more so, slap on chest for extra defense, no qs required.

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mallow wrote:

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HeaT1 wrote:

playing leapslam duelist was just as "mindless" as caster imo. maybe more so, slap on chest for extra defense, no qs required.

no. it's pretty tough, man. refer to kyuzoudono's posting history for a keen insight into the struggles of the duelist playstyle.

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mallow wrote:

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HeaT1 wrote:

playing leapslam duelist was just as "mindless" as caster imo. maybe more so, slap on chest for extra defense, no qs required.

no. it's pretty tough, man. refer to kyuzoudono's posting history for a keen insight into the struggles of the duelist playstyle.