Talk:Ranger 3.0
As requested, these are posts from the forums with player opinions of the new systems:
|
Well I played with it a bit. First not everything is done and bug free so its subject to change. Yet from my observation high level survival primes did get hit hardest in the TDP area, there was just no avoiding it since a lot of the skills we worked were combined into 1 skill. At first I mourned this but, after playing with the bonus pool data and checking my exp gains. I Should be able to retrain the lower survivals i ignored in the past pretty easily. I will like to focus on mostly positives but I will point out some negatives I see. Firstly, locksmithing while i never really considered it a rangerly thing, i can see how disabling traps in the wild could be a good thing. Under the 3.0 locksmithing is a lot easier to learn considering you get experiance from picking and disarming the box, thus not needing to get hordes of boxes to get the same results. This is definately a plus. With combat, and it taking longer from you to die, instead of being critically hit and instant death. First aid actaully becomes way more important than it has been in the past as well as a lot easier to learn since you will get bleeders normally before you experiance death. My experiance in dr 2.0 has pretty much been if i got hit hard enough to get a bleeder I was typically dead. Ranger magic and you: Moving on! Magic, while i can say i'm still not thrilled about the seemingly loss of awaken forest (yes i will lament this spell forever), Natures Canopy (if it does get added to blend yay), and Grizzly claw(under the new system i would think this spell was needed way more than before.) I can say i'm pretty happy with the ranger spell book and how magic is sorta scaled. Of course this might change in the future, but at the moment... Swarm actaully works to lower perception of the area, which will make steal training a lot more pleasent when you get hordes of critters in your room. Also the spell teaches Debilitation rather well. They have curved the mana needs of Cheetah swiftness and Bear Strength, while i'd still not suggest them for rangesr with magics under 300 or 400, given how much attument or mana they cost, with the right setup, or careful watching they can be very very neat and interesting spells to use. Besides they teach magic wonderfully PM/Augmentation/Warding just for keeping it active. Since Bear Strength increases strenth its really good to cast on harder swims. Moving on to the newer spells. Memory of Nature. Not sure how much I love this spell because i keep forgetting to cast it when i move into a town area, but at first glance it can be a bit confusing rather its talking about bonus preservation or something else. I will tell you what I know. If a room is formally considered netural it has a wilderness setting which will allow you to cast earth meld and other wilderness restricted spells. So it gets a big Smilely FACE from me on that end. A must get for the ranger spellbook. Stampede is a targetted multi cast spell. I personally might learn to love it but i haven't backtrained TM enough to really say more about the spell besides it looks cool to trample your enemeies with a stampede. Athleticism really I wish the name was just different, sounds so... silly to me. Its pretty much climbing and swimming bonus, not much to note there. Magical Feats: 3.0 I'm simply going to tell you what I think is most important being me. Raw Channeling, allows your cyclic spells like BES and CS to run off your attument if you run out of mana, this can be a powerful tool for when you are moving and can't hold a cam or need to recharge cam if you finess it properly you can use cam and raw channeling to support your cyclic. Efficient Channeling pretty much reduces the cost of cyclic spells making them much more usable, without it, its just not as usable or worthwhile to have cyclic spells so its a must to get. Efficient Harnessing makes your spellcasting affect your attument less, also a cyclic bonus perk since you can easier cast buffing spells while having a cyclic active. Deep Attument regerates your harness faster, again if you are using attument for your cyclic spell, a must get. Debilitation Mastery mainly most of our offensive spells use this so a bonus to those should not go ignored. After this, i'd say its the spice of your ranger life what you want to pick up. If you use targeted magic i'd pick up the target enchanging feats, if you want your bonuses and agumentation spells to get a boos augmentaiton mastery is good for that. Since Rangers don't get as many spell slots as a prime. I think its rather wasteful to get recognition of other guilds preps personally. If they look at me wrong i'll shoot first ask questions later don't really need to know what they are prepping (check open pvp first. :P). There are really too many feats for my taste i'd focus on filling out the ranger spellbook before getting anything else. Anyone else can debate me on that more than happy to hear others opinions. COMBAT: 3.0 Style As it stands now You will need to adjust, we're rangers we do that rather well I think by now. We've been from never needing target to needing target, to massive guild focus changes to having our feet chopped off by pigmy tribesmen in the wild to only crawl out of the forest and be healed by a empath 8 days later after sustaining on wild herbs we dug up while we crawled. We are TOUGHER than any changes! That is what I tell myself. Okay Combat. You'll have to play around with critters you normally hunt and that you thought were higher than your level and a bit lower, because they seem to have rescaled some critters to fit better. So i can't say what critters beyond what I hunted so i'll say the old PAFO (Play and find out for you newbies) I can say a few of the more intersting things i've found. We still have dual load . i'm happy, and not sure if its a bug or not but we can load with shields without See the Wind up (.) even more happy. I'd be even happier if we could load with medium shields with see the wind up... but i'll probably be pushing my luck. One thing that is a nice feature I hope stays at the moment if you are loading and aiming, you can actaully block an attack with a huge penalty, but some protection is better than no protection, at least that is what my Mom always told me. I personally think that will save many leetle ranger lives while they are out there trying to learn their range and get pointed out at a bad moment. I have to admit also, i like just being able to attack. Honestly when it was new fangled and stuff i was all like OH we have to use COMBOS and after a month and you learned what the combos were and which was best, it OH we have to use COMBOS??? Well now forget all those combos take out your weapons back in the AOL days and attack! For attack is your friend now and it works!!! You can use other moves like sweep but attack is butter. I'm sorta hungry so butter and bread is sounding good right now. I can't comment on the Missle Mastery or Melee Mastery or even Defending, because I don't get it myself. All i get is it trains while i'm training a melee weapon or a missle weapon or... Defending. Which works for me really i don't have to use any speical verbs or syntax or take my armor off and roll around naked with a shield trying to learn it. So its good in my book, get used to it, extra TDPS anyways. YAY. Maybe a GM Will really dig in and explain it for my simple mind why we need skills of mastery. As you all know bows are now one skill, but the slight bonuses (or imaginary bonuses) of the diffrerent bow type still exist. Maybe this has always been me being obscure or seeing what i want to see. Shortbows are still way more accurate than composite bows, and Comoposite bows still hit way harder than shortbows. Longbows sorta fall in the middle, but hey now you can use them all to your liking with ONE bow skill. So i need to hold a memorial for my 40 odd bows and keep just two or three.. maybe four. (o.o) I'll miss you bows. Sniffles Okay i got a bit emotional there. As always you should train shield and parry, and use them according to the situation, don't let anyone TELL YOU to just use shield, use BOTH. Not to mention Shield didn't make our sphere of influence(later complaint) so bonuses might never happen beyond the feats. Which brings me too... Sphere of Influence 3.X: Where I complain a lot... Sphere of Influence might be a bigger deal later on but currently its just, what spells will bonus the best for us if we have spells to bonus those skills. This gives magic more flavor personally it really starts to confuse me some. Yet all in all if you say have a spell that bonus something outside your sphere of influence then you'll get a lesser bonus than say something IN your sphere of influence. As long as this stays to magical means i'm more than happy to accept it. If this becomes something they use to keep certain abilities from certain guilds at a later date. I will probably not be so happy.
The other... issue I had with it is we ended up with Augmentation rather than Debilitation as our magic which I guess I can conceed a bit on, but at the end were just the two things missing from the list that caught my eye. Yet as you can see there really isn't much to discuss on it its just is what it is, not sure how GMs decided to make it what it was Anyways I hope my post helps some at all, maybe a tiny bit.
|
Being a ranger with a lot of magic skill I'm always stretching the limits to see how well I can cast a spell. So to help out here is what I did when I visited test to try out the magic in 3.0. 1. I found a room. Then I checked what my max cast of SOTT could be in the room, found it to be 55. Seems you can now exceed what the room can handle when using cambrinth to assist. This is huge, this means you can pretty much max out any spell you have using cambrinth as long as you can make the minimum cast (and have the skill to do so). Currently in DR if you tried that you would backfire badly, I was able to do this with Instinct, WS, HOL, SOTT, WOTP, EM, BLEND, STW, probably all our spells but thats all I had time to check first time in. It was mentioned that cambrinth would become more important in DR3 and it sure has based on this test. Now this does not mean you need to cast all your spells at max cast but it gives you a means to do so when needed. Current DR if you cast any combo of prep + harness + cambrinth that exceeds your max cast for that room you backfire, in DR3 thats no longer true and its really important to take note of that. One other thing to keep in mind the spells in test right now have some bugs in them, the key there is to get an idea of how to do things and develop a way to use your magic in the new system. The next thing I noticed was that the Duration was much longer than we currently get which is good based on how long it now takes to kill the critters off. Now based on what I can see the higher you cast a spell the better you learn from casting it. However, there is a way to enhance this so you can cast at a lower level and still learn pretty good. This is based on SPELL STANCE. Currently SPELL STANCE (potency %) (duration %) (integrity %) is set where all 3 values are set to 100%. If Potency is greater than 100% you can learn casting your spells at much lower values. This leads me to believe that SPELL STANCE is very important, just how important I'm not fully sure yet because you can arrange the 300 total percent you get in a number of ways. The one draw back is if you want to take full advantage of this you need to create a macro that allows you to change it on the fly. I still need to check out what kind of advantage this gives you in using your spells and also learning magic from casting them. Then came the test with instinct. Right now it has min prep of 1 and max of 99. It appears the higher you can cast it the more defensive skill you get from the spell. Since this spell replaced SOP, which you could prep sop 5, cast, and pretty much get max defense from it, while further casts just gave more duration. To get the best from instinct now you need to put some power in the spell. Just where the cut off is to how much defense it adds is still a guess and will take a while for me to figure out. This is where Cambrinth comes in. You can pretty much cast this spell pretty high without wasting all your attunment using cambrinth. SO I RECOMMEND RANGERS START LEARNING LOTS OF ARCANA so they can use cambrinth fairly easily. And having SPELL STANCE at 130, 85, 85, definately improves the defense skill you get from the spell. This will be important as you try to figure out what level of a cast you need to give you the skill boost you need to keep on living. Ok spells I hear natures canopy is supposed to be in blend, its not currently but I hope it is later. Also Griz claw is supposed to be in our spells but in the test instance its not there, I suspect it will be there sooner or later. The magic feats help but as I look things over, you will have to decided when and if you get these, they definately can help, but you probably dont want get them all. Rangers get 1 spell slot every 2 circles through circle 100, and 1 every 3 circles from 101 through 150. That means up to circle 150 we will get 66 spell slots. The spells currently live cost 30 spell slots and there may be a few missing like grizzly claw. There are currently 32 spell feats, which would take 32 slots plus whatever prereq they require. And I'm pretty sure some rangers are going to take a few other types of spells as well, so you need to figure out how you are going to go about this. I suggest you get all our spells first then decide between other spells and spell feats as you definately dont need all the spell feats. Now combat! This is important to learn. Using RETREAT like most of us do in DR, will now cause a stackable penalty to your attack strength and perhaps defense too. I suggest you test in a lower critter and do the following so you see what happens. Use a bow, retreat once a critter gets to melee 1 time. Then type assess. You will see what the penalty is to your attack and defense from using that and how long it lasts. Then do it 3 times once its at melee and type assess so you can see how it stacks. Basically you have to relearn using combat a bit in this situation. You need to have the evasion to stand there and defend yourself, or the stealth to be able to hide at melee (Side note swarm can actually help you hide, keep it in mind). The second thing about combat using ranged weapons or TM spell is that you get a delay time, where you cant leave the room till the time decays. You can also see this using ASSESS, its not long but its long enough to keep you from Firing and moving in the next instant. The one thing I did not check is if this one is also stackable. In other words if I get a super short bow of 1 second load time for life, and snap shoot a critter 15 times before it can get to melee on me, then what time did I build up before I can leave the room? Not sure if this one is stackable or just new with each shot, but its definately there. So you need to consider this when using ranged weapons or TM spells. For the way I hunt it does not appear this will affect me much right now but I'm pretty sure those folks in PVP are going to really hate it. Oh one other thing I saw. Beseeches for rangers in DR3 have been enhanced. They are much better than as they currently exist. I found this quite by accident, never really intended to use them but for some odd reason I did. Take a look you might like what you see.
|
|
<<Thanks for the info Pfanston. Helped with a question about power we can put into a spell. You think with EM and a good mana cast you'll still be able to hide on things to get rid of the RT for firing a bow or using TM spells? I know I'm a bit unusual but hiding's my top survival. (Go figure)>> Right now it appears there might be a bug in EM, but when I max it out, I can definately hide better on what can normally find me with 3-4 searches, (the shalswar riders when the shalswar is dead). So yeah you can hide better with it cast bigger. I think I would make sure potency is over 100% too. Also if I remember right Blend is supposed to have canopy meshed into it but right now in test it does not have that. As far as getting rid of the Delay time for firing a bow before you can leave the room, that wont happen. But if you can hide again it means it does not matter. Its not long enough duration that you cant just move out after hiding again. Thats why I say its not going to affect how I hunt at all. Its in there mostly for when folks run into a room fire and run out right away. I see that mostly in invasions and PVP situations. Cambrinth items are interesting and of course based on arcana. Since my arcana is right at 400, its hard to say if its changed in DR3. But in DR2 if you will, an arcana skill of 150 or more usually made it so you could wear it and still work with it. Let me clarify that. To charge them you need to remove them and charge them. But over a level of arcana I think it was 150 or maybe 250 for sure that you could charge the item. Then wear it and once you wear it you can focus on it when needed. Then prep and cast your spell. Meaning you could do that with a bunch of cambrinth items and use them one at a time as needed. Just need the skill to be able to focus on them while they are being worn, which I thought was 150 arcana. I think the cambrinth actually holds the charge longer in DR3 than it does currently as well but I need to check that out a bit more and see if I'm just putting so much in it that its draining is not really noticable.
|