This page needs a lot of work! Currently I am copying mostly off Oaklief's Page, but soon it will be a strictly ranger page addressing our specific concerns.

While all of these issues are also outlined in the appropriate issues and bugs section, these are the issues that rangers feel must be addressed because they are having serious detrimental effects on the basic balance and playability of the class or the game as a whole.

Many view the ranger as not being desireable for a group! This has ben addressed a few times in the Team Lead Report, but needs mentioning here! While nothing specific is mentioned to increase the group friendliness of the ranger here, suffice it to say that many of the skills below, if implemented, would go a great deal towards making rangers disireable in a group!

Pathfinding is the single most viable area to make rangers group friendly that would not grossly overpower a ranger. First of all, these buffs should be Concentration based. Even if the duration of them is increased, the general concensus is that they will just "suck for an increased amount of time" instead of doing anything for us. Making them concentration based though will put them on a power pool for further Pathfinding enhancements. Additionally, the values that these spells add need to be adressed. Especially the Armour Factor Buff!

Another enhancement is to make the pathfinding spells truly unique, allowing them to stack with any other spells out there! In addition, some of the spells should affect the entire group (in particular the Damage Add and the Forest Spirit Series). These should be Concentration based, and based on the ranger's power pool (this will give elven rangers a reason for the additional 10 points into Intelligence too!). The Forest Spirit spell needs to function a bit better as far as not being broken by anything (to include a stiff breeze it seems). Reducing the recast timer on this spell would help a great deal as well. Especially considering all the other speed spells in the game currently, this is just a small factor for other classes to deal with.

There needs to be some more utility in the ranger line of spells as well. Here are a few ideas for spells. Exact implementation is left to the developers:

• 1. A Group "To Hit" chant that increases the Weaponskill number for all members. (Went to heros it seems with a recent patch.)
  
• 2. A Group "Defence" chant that increases evade, parry, and blocking base chances for all members. (Went to heros it seems with a recent patch.)
  
• 3. A type of Erase Aggro spell for those pulls that go really bad.
  
• 4. A Group Camoflage spell (if this isn't made part of the stealth subskills). Oh well, looks like Assassins got this as part of ToA...
  
• 5. A Magic Turn Chant to absorb a magic spell (damage or other ill effect).
  
• 6. Ablative Aura Spell to decrease damage we take (stacks with alchemy ablatives).
  
• 7. A Hit Point boosting spell (make the SRT buff a STR/CON buff or a separate CON Buff).
  
• 8. A Group Speed chant that functions like the (improved) Forest Spirit spells.
  
• 9. Animal scout spell. Allow the caster to assume an animal shape (mouse, wolf, bird) to scout and move freely aropund obstacles.
  
• 10. Mirror Image. Let the ranger make duplicates of himself to confuse the enemy in combat.
  
• 11. Summon Portal. Transport self (and group?) to certian wilderness locations previously selected. (Looks like we got this in Sojouner with ToA...)
  
• 12. Safe Passage. Monsters normally agressive to you and party allow you to travel through unhindered.
  
• 13. Double Blades. A base increast to Celtic Dual chances.
  
• 14. Magic Misslies. The ability to summon arrows for use with your bow (in case you run out).
  
• 15. Self Blade turn.
  
• 16. List left open for further ideas.
  

As it stands, shooting a bow requires a large amount of endurance, and as designed, very rarely can a ranger kill their target with the bow alone. As such we often enter into melee with a much reduced (if not depleted) pool of endurance. As such are innefective in melee, and we also have no options open to us but to try to stand toe to toe (something we are clearly not designed to do). We cannot melee, nor can we shoot our bows. While many classes that are designed to melee can still swing their swords and take the damage, we cannot use our primary form of attack (the bow) in any way. While casters are also in this same situation with their mana pool, they have the distinct advantage of still having a pool of endurance to sprint out of there if the situation becomes bad, while archers must just stand there, move slowly, and usually die.
Some proposed solutions to this Catch-22:

• Allow archers the ability to fire arrows (albeit for reduced damage) if they are out of endurance.
  
• Reduce the endurance cost of shooting arrows.
  
• Give archers more ways to escape a situation if they are out of endurance (perhaps make the Forest Spirit lines of spells more useful).
  

This ability is a very good thing, but if anything it is slightly less useful than I believe was intended due to the duration of the timer and what causes the timer to reset (recent changes have much improved this concern). Other adjustments to archers and particularly abilities granted to other classes have killed the viability of sniping as an archer tactic in all but the rarest of situations, so a slight strengthening of camouflage is warranted.
Another suggestion is to make camoflage, if available, automatically engage when the character is stelathed. Basically make this a passive ability. This would clear up the much used hotbars for archer classes.
The easiest adjustment to camouflage would be to slightly decrease the timer on re-entering camouflage. While I think that if this is the only change it should be set to 5 minutes, I think setting it to 8 minutes as an intermediate step while looking for a balanced skill is the course of prudence. That would also leave room for some of the other improvements I'd like to see for this skill. Another suggestion for the timer would be to decrease it by 1 minute for every member in the group besides the archer. Then it helps to reward use of this skill for scouting for a group instead of sniping, but that may let groups of archers/assassins become gank squads easier.
I think that it could be improved by adding a speed increase while camouflaged to bring camouflaged speed closer to normal run speed without requiring full stealth spec. After all, the lower archers are willing to leave their stealth skill by having it be useful to them for scouting, the further away assassins can find them with Detect Hidden. Currently groups frequently pass those who are supposed to be scouting for them due to the snails pace of stealth speed, greatly reducing any stealther’s ability to scout and increasing an archer’s desire to go full stealth spec to get every little bit of speed out of the skill that they can so they can be effective group members in RvR. By letting camouflage increase stealth speed when in this scouting mode (not sniping mode) rangers would be better able to keep ahead of their group, or trail an enemy group while stealthed. The anti-sniper stipulations and archer’s increased willingness to leave stealth at a lower spec would combine to make this a balanced skill. Currently, all stealthers have their speed determined by (stealth spec level)/(character level). One suggestion would be to add a flat speed increase when in camouflage mode, another suggestion would be that archers use 1.5*(stealth spec level)/(character level) on the same chart to determine speed when camouflaged, capped at maximum stealth speed. Then a 2/3 stealth spec or higher archer would move at the same speed as a full spec assassin when camouflaged and at 2/3 speed compared to a full-spec assassin when in normal stealth mode, but the assassin would still have a greater detection range all the time. A full stealth spec archer would still move at the same speed as a full stealth spec assassin when camouflaged, but would now move at the same speed as the assassin when in normal stealth mode as well. This is a diminishing return though, so more archers would be likely to stop at 2/3 stealth spec, giving assassins a boost to detect hidden as well.

These are just brain storming ideas. Also, they are relatively old ideas, but I am keeping them here for historical reference as well as something to possibly draw from in the future.

Stealth must get subabilities for archers. I have some recommendations for the archer subabilities which are all geared toward increasing the reconnaissance abilities of archers as well as limit the specialization that archers feel they must put into stealth (once again giving assassins a slight boost to their Detect Hidden skill):

• · At 10 spec in stealth archers should receive Danger Sense which alerts the player when a mob scout has focused on the party. This is currently an assassin subability, but a lesser once compared to the others on their spec line and makes sense for those learning to scout for their parties.
  
• · At 12 spec in stealth archers should be able to Determine Safety, which would determine whether a location is within agro range of wandering mobs. This is designed to make archers desired in a group by being able to determine a safe location to camp. It is a low level skill so that new archers can be useful to a group while leveling up, but it will also make rangers useful by being able to predict where guard patrols are in the frontiers.
  
• · At 15 spec in stealth archers should receive Falconry 1, see below for two suggested implementations.
  
• · At 18 spec in stealth archers should get a Social Sense which should be able to determine whether the targetted mob will BAF, predict how many BAF mobs will come with a pull, and determine if the mobs are social enough to call for help. This skill is also designed to help archer group desirability, and has a low suggested spec due to that.
  
• · At 21 spec in stealth archers gain a passive ability to determine a target's class in RvR and realm rank title. This could be as simple as the message upon clicking the target reading "You examine Scout Montish, he is an Albion Warder." (Note the addition of the class there.) This would help the scouting role by allowing us to report back appropriate information. It would also allow you to implement the basics of a Disguise ability, where assassins could pick the wrong fake class to be reported as, and then be able to dress up appropriately. Also, the change for displaying the realm rank is necessary because we often try to initiate combat outside of the "name range" and can't tell the experience of our target unless we memorize lists of names.
  
• · At 25 spec in stealth archers should receive Falconry 2.
  
• · At 29 spec in stealth archers should gain a passive ability to determine a target's guild/alliance in RvR. This could be as simple as message upon clicking the target reading "You examine the Hunter Ailill, he is a member of Fid-Nemith in Strength of Lamfhota." This would help the scouting role by allowing us to report back appropriate information, similar to the 21 spec ability.
  
• · At 33 spec in stealth archers should be able to determine the number of creatures/characters in a 1000 unit radius of your ground target, plus or minus 10% accuracy.
  
• · At 38 spec in stealth archers should receive Falconry 3.
  
• · At 43 spec in stealth archers can determine the average level of the creatures and characters in the same region as the 29 spec ability.
  

Was told this is off the table, but keeping it here for now.

The design goals for tracking that I've heard would be wonderful, but admittedly Mythic is having difficulty with making the skill as they desire it useful without making it overpowered. So, I'd like to pass along a suggestion that has been made for an alternate use.

• i. Tracking would be gained on the stealth spec line, and would be an active skill on a timer. Suggested timers would be 5 minutes for the first level of tracking and decreasing from there to about 1 minute for the highest level of tracking. Please compare the utility of this skill to ranged insta-cast cc (10 minute timer) and insta-heals (15 minute timer). Tracking needs to be a staple skill for archers. A tracking skill that was on a long reuse timer, and was not overly accurate will actually work against archers abilities to group. It will become an annoyance for a group to follow an archer to find he led them wrong. Coupled with the fact that he won't be able to use it for another 10 minutes and you are better off grabbing a bard and assassin and zipping around looking for people.
  
• ii. Tracking would detect enemy presence from just inside the viewing bubble (to cover lag effects) to a decent distance beyond the viewing bubble. Exact ranges would need to be determined by Mythic as they know how far outside the viewing bubble other players and mobs are tracked on the server. If there is space for it, each additional level of tracking would grant an increase to the maximum range.
  
• iii. All calculations would be performed on the server and only the results would be sent to the archer using tracking to help prevent abuse by those running Odin's Eye or DaoC Unleashed style programs. (A bannable offense, don't go looking for that program!)
  
• iv. Tracking would check each octant (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, or NW) and have a 10% base chance plus a 2% chance per enemy character in that octant of alerting the archer to the presence of enemies in that direction. My suggestion is that hidden characters are included in this percentage chance, though it won't really help locate them due to the minimum range restriction on how tracking would work. True Sight would still be needed to locate hidden characters in viewing range.
  
• v. The archer would receive alerts as to enemies in order from largest group detected to smallest group detected. Groups that were not detected would be omitted from the detection list.
  
• vi. The archer would be able to detect one group per level of tracking skill. So an archer with Tracking 1 would only receive a report about the largest detected population of enemies in one octant. An archer with tracking 3 would receive up to three reports of detected enemy populations.
  
• vii. The messages about detected enemies varies based on the number of enemy players (either realm) in that that octant. Eight or fewer enemies would be listed as "a scouting party," groups of nine to twenty-four enemies would be listed as "a raiding party," and twenty-five or more enemies would be listed as "an enemy incursion." Alternatively eight or fewer enemies could be listed as "some movement," nine to twenty-four enemies would be listed as "light troop movement," and twenty-five or more enemies would be listed as "heavy troop movement."

In trying to make rangers desired by groups, a group camoflage skill should be allowed. The basic suggested workings are as such:

• Can only be used with the same timers as self camoflage.
  
• The whole group must be stationary.
  
• Gives the group a base stealth of 1/2 the ranger's stealth spec.
  
• Is vulnerable to See Hiden and True Sight.
  

How about a graphical quiver option?.

Critical Shot Message – there is currently no way to differentiate critical shots from normal shots using the log. We used to rely on the printed delay, but needed tenths of a second to tell which was which. In some cases now both the normal shot and the critical shot appear to have the same delay printed. Can we please get the damage line to indicate "You shoot the target with your bow and hit for total damage (attack-type vs. armor-type modifier) damage" on the normal shot, and "You critical shoot the target with your bow and hit for total damage (attack-type vs. armor-type modifier) damage" on a critical shot.
Longshot Message – the only way to differentiate Longshots from normal shots using the log is to look back to see the message when you drew the shot. Can we please get the damage line to indicate "You longshot the target with your bow and hit for total damage (attack-type vs. armor-type modifier) damage".
Volley Message – the only way to differentiate volley shots from normal shots using the log other than noting the lack of subsequent draw shots (hard for a parser to recognize). Can we please get the damage line to indicate "You volley the target with your bow and hit for total damage (attack-type vs. armor-type modifier) damage" for each of the 5 volley shots.
Rapid Fire Message – there is currently no way to differentiate rapid fire shots from normal shots using the log. Particularly as there is no indication that rapid fire shut itself off when a critshot or longshot or volley was made. Can we please get the damage line to indicate "You rapidly shoot the target with your bow and hit for total damage (attack-type vs. armor-type modifier) damage" while rapid fire is toggled on.