0.9.2 schedule and my feelings on 0.9.1 balance

Glad to hear this, Chris! I wonder what goodies have you prepared for us in the next patch. :)

By the way, you devs should look at the accuracy percentage when dual wielding. I mean, it's absurd to have 75% chance to hit and to miss an enemy of my lvl 5 times in a row. Either make the accuracy stat more...well... accurate (^^) or buff the crap out of it.

Also, I hope that you're working on the ''character doesn't die until it's fully loaded'' thing, because I lost my lvl 26 hc marauder today by dying while loading from the portal. I was very sad, but made a ranger. :)

Other than that, the new UI looks and feels great, the drops are a bit better and the mobs are definitely more challenging. Keep up the good work!

If I may - you guys could probably do a no brainer nerf of Surgeon mods some more.

With a decent crit rate, Surgeon still translates to infinite mana.

The problem seems to lies mostly that you proc Surgeon for every target crit on per cast. The effect needs to occur once per cast, somehow - whenever a very tiny cooldown or some other code trick your coders can come up with.

If Surgeon is continually nerfed because of high crit builds by lowering charge gain per proc, it will become completely useless for everything else.

Just some quick ideas for ranger skills.

-Trap skills. Fairly obvious what they do.

-Snare/Ensnare abilities to slow enemies

-Exploding Arrow does fire damage to a decent radius.

-Arrow rain AoE where a bunch of arrows rain down like a Blizzard, maybe 15 arrows that do 1/10 weapon damage each.

Its a RANGER! Forest stuff etc... I want Pets! Summon Crab PLZ! With Shell ofc. :P

PS. Being serious some Pet companion spell (Dire Wolf maybe - this will fit into PoE i think) will be great. Or maybe "CHARM ANIMAL" type spell, something like Tame Beast from MMO's. You tame Animal mob and he follow you until he dies.
Make ranger something more than arrow cannon. :)

"

turbo4i4ka wrote:

By the way, you devs should look at the accuracy percentage when dual wielding. I mean, it's absurd to have 75% chance to hit and to miss an enemy of my lvl 5 times in a row. Either make the accuracy stat more...well... accurate (^^) or buff the crap out of it.

I've noted this before as well... the probability of missing 4-5 times in a row is 0.4-0.001% chance at 75% hit rate, however I notice that it happens fairly often.

I had it happen when my thingy said 90%, which would be a 0.01-.001% chance... which might happen once a month :P

That hit % would have to drop to 50% to have a reasonable chance of this happening such that you'd notice.

I don't necessarily mind the fact that Rangers are underpowered in AoE but they would need some serious single target skills to compensate. Viper Strike is a decent start. It'd be an interesting niche role in a party and definitely have a very different playstyle than the other classes.

Although this touches a little on a separate issue which is that I feel like the game places too much emphasis on AoE. It's always emphasized killing large groups of enemies and those groups were made even bigger in a recent patch. While it's fun to kill off 50 or more enemies in a single battle I think it may be a little too much. Single target skills are only really viable if they can keep up with the total dps of AoE skills against a group like Double Strike. The only real use for single target skills is against bosses or other rare enemies but since rare enemies always come accompanied with an entourage they're not really even useful in that situation and bosses aren't really even that big of a part of the game. So the conclusion is that unless a single target skill is overpowered enough to be spammed to the effect of an AoE skill, it doesn't have much of a use.

Great ranger skill idea: Raining Arrows... or Volley.... just shower an area in arrows. Add fire gems and now you got a fire arrow storm going on, muwhahahahahahaha!

"

Chris wrote:

I've been reading the 0.9.1 balance reports carefully and completely agree that Rangers are currently less viable than other classes in the end-game. There are two problems that cause this:
a) Evasion.
b) The lack of good AoE Ranger skills.

@ a) I agree, if not in 9.2 it have to be redone before dex/int will be announced/included.
You could actually play ranger but you gotta be on alert all the time on lagged mobs. Much more than playing other classes. But in current item req system there's no pain in getting zombies/spectres who can help a lot.
Solving lag/de-sync issues would help ranger even with current evasion a lot.
There must be some trade-off for making glass cannon build.
Ending up with fragile char is pretty obvious imo.

@ b) whack? :>
Besides casters who are obviously OP thx to many issues with other classes, rangers got best aoe among chars dealing psych dmg.
Rangers bow skills got unlimited range, can deal dmg to 5 to 10 times more mobs than melee char skills could and they can be augmented and boosted by a lot more supp gems than them.
It could be some more aoe skills for ranger (more active skills is always good thing) but not because there's nothing like this now, it's rather to provide ppl with some choice.
But imo it could wait, other classes don't have any viable aoe skills at all.
This should be addressed asap.

btw I consider split arrow and all skills that could be used with bow as aoe skills, they could be paired with multiple projectiles and pierce after all.

If some1 says that ranger's skills suck it's because lack of decent items to execute them.
But that's common issue among non-casting chars now.

"

tpapp157 wrote:

I don't necessarily mind the fact that Rangers are underpowered in AoE but they would need some serious single target skills to compensate.

Since rangers are not underpowered by any means with their AoE skills pool, their single target skills are not that big problem imo.
It could be some new single target pure dex skill but it can't be as good vs single target as duelist or marauder because those classes probably won't get any skill allowing them to hit several dozens mobs at once in any place 2 screens from them like ranger can.

Current ranger skills are imo good base for expanding them further.
I think that some ppl don't know that they could actually boost one skill with several supports not max 2. It should be emphasized more, it's great feat of this skill system.
Split with multi, pierce faster attack mana and life leech or some added effect gem rocks.
Same goes with double strike.
Poison arrow needs some further balancing but it could be viable with supp boosts also.
Compare that with marauder who could use only like 3 supp to increase his active skill output (stun/knockback and inc melee dmg).