[I really want my first play through to be as a shifter... Am I an idiot?]

Doing Shifter on my second play through (did Bleakwalker/ghost heart ranger vs playthrough)

 

This time with Shifter i've paired it with Trickster....which is working pretty good in my opinion, trickster gives me some really good defensive spells that I can use with Shifter to stay up a very long time. 

[Are ranger pets pretty useless?]

I did a BleakWalker/Ghost Heart setup when I did my play through.

 

Dual Wielding 1 Handed Spears, would run up on enemies, summon my pet behind them (which gave them flanked) and activated the Flank damage passive on my Spear as well. He was a decent dot and would wreck a lot of the monsters fairly easily. 

[Xoti's lantern upgrades]

Has anyone managed to get the Threshing Aura (party damage boost) upgrade for Xoti's lantern? I have all the ingredients for it, but it is greyed out. So I'd assume that means that the other upgrade - Light of the Dawnstar - is a prerequisite for it. But when I get Light of the Dawnstar, the Threshing Aura upgrade disappears, indicating they were exclusive upgrades. So I see no way to get the Threshing Aura upgrade. Anybody figured this out?

 

During her Quest where you decide to hand over the Souls to Animancers or taking them to the Glowing Adra if you choose the Glowing Adra it'll give you that Enchant.

 

If you choose the other it'll give you the other enchant.

[Rangers bad again?]

The ranger subclasses are just riddled with heavy penalties, to the point where I don't feel like taking any of them. It's even worse than wizards who at least get major bonuses in exchange for their substantial penalties. And the pet is a giant hassle and liability, bonded grief is such a severe debuff.

 

Sharpshooter gets a recovery penalty that mitigates the damage bonuses. The -10 deflection is harsh as well. Unless you invest a bunch of points into resolve (again counteracting the damage bonus), you're gonna have like 10 deflection or something and every enemy will make a beeline for you. It's just not worthwhile to have a character with a permanent -10 deflection penalty unless you're playing on a lower difficulty cheesing your way through the game somehow.

 

Ghost Heart gets no actual bonuses and is pure garbage. You get to not suffer a debuff when your pet dies, but you have to spend time summoning it in every fight and it has a duration. I'd almost consider taking this subclass and not bothering to summon a pet, just to get the ranger abilities without having to deal with the bonded grief debuff. But it's not like that's actually worthwhile.

 

Stalker is really strong on paper, but the amount of micromanagement you have to do to always stay within 7m of your pet will drive a level-headed man insane after a few hours. There's no pet AI option to have it stay close to you, so you have to constantly babysit this character. 7m is like half the range of a bow. It literally doesn't make sense that you start to suffer grief as soon as your pet moves further away from you than you could throw a chair. That's to say nothing of the 4m distance you need to maintain in order to actually get the bonus.

 

The main issue is that the pet simply isn't good enough to warrant this burden. If you invest several skill points into pet-related passives, it starts to become vaguely okay, but then you could probably have gained even more damage from some other class. You could make a very strong Devoted/Brute archer, for instance. These days, most games that have a class with a permanent pet let you choose a setup that forgoes the pet in favor of some passive buff, and this game frankly needs something like that.

 

I'm doing a Bleakwalker Paladin/Ghost Heart Ranger

 

I'm not sure why you think the Ghost Heart Ranger is bad? You get a pet that has an insanely fast cast time that you can cast directly behind an enemy once you engaged with him and make him instantly flanked. He then runs around the battlefield assisting and attacking mobs.. and if he dies who cares.. you can instantly summon him again.