Been trying out Rangers recently to test out the "Melee Ranger is actually good" theory that people have been floating about, and yep - you can build a melee ranger and they are way better than making a ranged Ranger, which unfortunately renders a lot of their ability selection useless.

 

I have heard that Rangers have possibly been revamped a bit (I think Anthony Davis mentioned it on the codex), but regardless there's quite a large feedback issue with the Ranger Animal Companion (and probably other 'summon' type units too I guess).

 

That problem is 'feedback'. You don't really know any of the stats of the Animal Companion, for instance if I asked any of you what DT the different animal companions had, what their accuracy was, what their defenses were, how would you know? You don't - until you see an enemy attack them in the combat log and you determine the value.

 

One problem is that you can't scroll down in the Character Creator at the moment to see what the text in the textbox says. I'm not sure if it has a detailed breakup or not. 

Another thing I'm not sure about is whether the Animal Companion scales with level or not? Do they get the same bonuses as the Ranger on level up? I'd probably guess they do, but the game doesn't tell you that either.

I think the defenses bit could probably be remedied if they were shown on mouse over like enemy defenses are if you have the Show Relative Defenses on. When you mouse over the animal companion, it would show the shared Endurance/Health (which I think should be completely chucked out anyway) and their defenses in the tooltip like enemy ones. 

 

You could probably also add Bestiary Entries about them maybe (since you face them in the game), and give the general stats and stuff.

And the companions themselves probably need some re-balancing, but that's another issue. 

Go on your ranger character sheet and scroll down, you'll see the pet information. Well, the limited pet information available there (stats and a couple of other things). It does include the level-up bonus currently applied to them too.

 

 

 

 

Oh it is there is it?

 

Lol

 

edit: just checked then: No Accuracy, damage, defenses and DT though? 

Also doesn't show stuff like the Ranger's INT bonus to their Deflection, and they all have stats of 10, which seems odd.

Edited January 15, 201511 yr by Sensuki

Shared pet damage should be toned down by 50% that would fix the ranged ranger. Also a pet with ranged attack would be interesting.

They probably just need a debuff or something.

One other quick change that might help the Ranger would be to give them a Endurance value equal to that of a Ranger + the Animal selected (instead of 36+12/lvl => 60 + 12/lvl). At the moment all the animal companion effectively does is give you an ability to do weak attacks somewhere else and allows flanking for melee. If you have two bodies and are sharing the endurance one would think you should have a bit more endurance to share. Undoubtedly the ranger has some other issues but at least that would improve the survivability of class a fair bit.

Shared pet damage should be toned down by 50% that would fix the ranged ranger. Also a pet with ranged attack would be interesting.

 

The shared health should be dropped completely.

Looks like there's no longer shared Endurance at least, going by the stream.