Happy to discuss further in a ranger recode thread.gold bezie wrote:They dont need to be slaying machines, but as it is now it is so badly coded that there are several bugs (at least it was like that when i left) and they are so terrible underpowered compared by the other guilds, i must say it is ashame.
ofcourse wizards have lives and we dont blame them, at least i dont.
But yes the situation for the rangers is a mess for years (as long as i entered the realms it is)
I do am wondering Arman if the idea's ive shared (as well as other rangers) are still used even though you seem to take over now
No need to answer...
There have been conversations with the ranger council since around August, although it has more been in contextualising the issues and getting an appreciation for the core elements the guild members want to maintain as part of the recode.
But... a recode is only part of the solution to making the ranger guild more playable. There are a number of global issues at play as well that impact on them:
* the special attack bug. Guilds impacted the most by this bug are those with weaker special attack specials... and rangers have no special attack specials, so are probably the guild most impacted, followed distantly by monks and Neidar.
* the ranger _class_. Conceptually, they have since day one been seen as a jack-of-all-trades. They get access to all skills without penalty... but only to a point. Around superior veteran. After that they get extreme penalisation for skills that go over that. Which is an extreme penalty that essentially makes most ranger guilds suboptimal compared to other classes... kind of like a half-way class between occupational and layman as far as skills go.
* sneak and hide mechanics. They aren't great.
As for the guild, it is actually ironic that they are unarguably a weak guild compared to others... as based on current combat aid formulas they are four to five times OVER the caid cap.
No one would argue that they are four or five times more powerful than any other guild, or even remotely close. But what it does indicate is that the rangers guild have an incredible spread of abilities that provide combat aid at a single point in time in a way that doesn't really benefit them. A non-standard heal that by itself goes over the occ guild cap, night vision, a range of potions that provide potential benefit in combat, a blind that has no cool down (essentially infinite aid), disarm... its pretty amazing really when you start to add it all up.
To have all those abilities within the caid cap using standardised abilities will result in a poor experience. I have no doubt. So the ranger recode isn't as simple as recoding them. It is also reconceptualising them, while maintaining their core elements... and maybe even changing some global rules to make rangers a playable class (being the AoB, I can do that ).