enhancement pass: Ranger and Dodge

[CrackedIce]

Hello All!

Once the enhancement pass comes along (whenever that will be), the Devs say that PREs will no longer have their feat requirements.

That means that a tempest ranger need not take dodge, mobility, and spring attack to get tempest.

(Stay with me as I will get back to dodge %)

Most Rangers will now have some nice choices for their feats and can now be more balanced with ranged, melee, and self heals:

7 feats:

The five feats that most rangers attempting to maximize the ranger strengths will be:

toughness, empower healing, PA (precision), Improv crit - melee, Improved crit - ranged

Leaving two free feats to play around with such as:

cleave, great cleave

precision (PA), BPS

one of the marks, dodge...wtr

There is now more custimization with the ranger when it comes to feats even where they focus on their primary strengths (melee, ranged, and self heals)

THAT SAID.....

the ranger is a d8 hit point class. They have evasion, so light armor is recommended.

In todays game other than concealement and incorpreal, dodge and prr have become vitally important for damage mitigation.

Prr on light armor is not enough...

Ranger needs more intrinsic DODGE.

Barbs monks and rogues have it. Rangers dont.

I am ok with rangers not having intrinsic dodge as it doesnt fit the feel of a ranger.

But the feats MOBILITY and SPRING ATTACK do!!

therefore the suggestion is this:

come the enhancement pass, ADD mobility feat for ranger level 7 and add spring attack feat for ranger level 12

Adding 4 more dodge to a ranger is not OP, but it does add some extra dodge help to a class with evasion.


Secondly,

Please have the tempest ac bonus to wielding 2 weapons stack with other shield bonuses.

Currently the 5 min shield clicky kinda defeats the point of the AC tempest bonus.

And this bonus was made nonstacking before U14 when pajama (monk splashed) rangers ruled the ac department

I feel that these two additions to the ranger class will help them a bit (but not overtly so) in the area they need a little help; namely their defenses.

Please let me know what you guys think

Thanks

[Jay203]

MORE free feats for ranger?
no thx

[Jaid314]

rangers need help doing more damage, not with survival. they're already quite good at not getting killed if you have any idea what you're doing at all. maybe not the absolute best, but they're up there.

the reason rangers are disliked so much is that they are absolutely awful at DPS except for when manyshot is active (and yes, there will be those who will want to announce how amazing their ranger is and how they are way better at DPS than some random barbarian out there... the simple fact is, if you were to give a barbarian the same level of gear, and the same level of player skill and experience, the barbarian would be massively higher DPS, and that remains true for almost any class that isn't a bard or a paladin).

my proposal: add haste boost. that will help their melee quite a bit. i'm not sure why fighters do get it, and rangers don't. it probably won't completely fix the problem, but it will help.

[HatsuharuZ]

Instead of giving rangers more auto-grants, how about giving them more spells? It wouldn't be too hard to give them blur, or some ranger-only spell that grants dodge bonuses, would it?

[RobbinB]

The new AC system vastly downgraded the utility of a few points of AC.

Before doing something new, the devs should address problems that arose from the new system. Specifically for rangers, the barkskin spell should have more tiers, capping out at +8 or +10 at caster level 25. As mentioned by the op, the shield benefits provided by tempest should either be increased or made to stack with the shield spell.

After those changes, by all means we can talk about changes to dodge, but I think monks are at the head of the line for that.