VSOH - The Official Ranger Issues Thread on OVF : Vanguard News

Talisker just posted on the official vanguard forum with explanations to why they want to make this ranger change, and what their plans are for rangers in the future. It's a great read for all that are concerned with the new changes to rangers. You can read and post your response HERE.


Good morning everyone. I wanted to talk about a few things.

Ranged Attack Expendible Change

Why?

This was meant as a class improvement. This is NOT a balance change, nerf, etc. Now, some of you will post and say "In no way was this an improvement!" but here is our take on it. Repeat: This is not a balance change. In no way were we thinking that you needed to be adjusted or nerfed down.

We did some recent DPS testing with the class leads. I spent a good deal of time on test, getting damage numbers for Rangers. Both melee and ranged where tested. The ranged dps was well below where we want it, as expected. One of the factors affecting this was endurance regeneration - It took far too long to deal the damage over time. Exacerbating this was that fact that if you spam Warden's Ranged you freeze your endurance regen - you need to stop attacking periodically. The first 3-4 attacks boosted dps significantly and then it quickly spiraled downward.

So we sat down and spoke with a few devs here who play high level rangers in the game. One thing that we had noticed, both in play and while observing DPS and raid testing was that Rangers rarely if every even use their energy. Sure, we realize that you DoT, snare and heal yourself and others, but those abilities cost little energy and there is so much mana regen available - I digress, we'll talk about this later.

So we started thinking - what if we allowed the Ranger to more fully utilize this expendable pool that is largely unused? That and other minor changes would allow for more ranged DPS, sustained dps, alternate builds and it wouldn't really affect the ranger who was a melee build. It sounded like a win win to us. Costs would need to right of course and alternate forms of energy regen would need to be added. This was the first step to augmenting ranger ranged combat.