Ranger (Ranged with Pet), my experiences

Hello,

I thought I'd write a bit about my experience as a new player who started just this release, no prior SOTA experience (but I played some of the Ultimas and then UO for 8 years).

Before I go into the Archery stuff, let me show you what I did before in the game, so you get an impression of how a new player might behave and think (telling from MANY forum posts here, many players have been around for ages and completely forgot their newbie days).

I started out as a mage with Fire and a sword. A guildie crafted a 2hander for me and it worked very well. Before I knew it, swords were already over 50. I only had it in case focus runs out or to finish mobs, but the further I came, the more it was clear that fire doesn't cut it - of course it doesn't, if you read the "fire is bugged" thread somewhere here, you'll know why.

Anyways, I tried out Death, but the pet decayed fast, impossible to keep it up with my heals, which were gimped by my death innate. Well, I scrapped that idea after just 1 day and went on to play a pet user with Life as only real skill tree.

At one point, I died and my pet vanished from my whistle. I'm not sure if this is bug or feature, but I thought maybe cloth mage and pet won't work out, so I went for Archer, got leather gear, a bow and arrows.

Okay, so shooting for skill is not only expensive, it's also frustrating, because you don't hit a truck in your face. The hit rate is abysmal, to say it how it is. It took forever to take out a little zombie at Solace bridge. One of the small spiders kicked me out of my "Epic Leather Boots".
I unlocked Ammo Scavenger and then Eagle Eye and leveled them (at that point I already ran into XP issues because of my prior attempts to find out what to play for fun), so I locked it all, except for Dex in the Subterfuge tree, which then kept eating almost all the XP I made. I had to disable that, too, hack away with my sword, accompanied by a wolf, to fill up my XP bar a bit before I could try to skill Ranged again.

Now, Ammo Scavenger may be great later, but given 1 arrow costs 2gp at the NPC and 1,5gp at player vendors, it's still not cheap at all. Even hunting only humanoids (every animal would be a waste of money and burn a hole in my pocket), you can barely make good for the arrows. I know, crafting them yourself does work, but scrapping my main source of income, rusted weapons, turned out to be the worse option. Buying them after selling the loot was still easier and cheaper in the long run.

Eagle Eye helped a bit with the hit chance, but it's too far up in the tree and it goes up so slowly, you'll spend ten thousands of gold to get it to a level where you have a chance to do damage comparable to an underequipped melee.

Yes, there is a trick to work around it: Get a Lesser Wand and turn auto attack on.

Now your ranged skills will go up without spending 1gp for it (you only have to use a repair kit from time to time, but that's true for every class) - but now you will hit for 1-4 damage and not be able to kill anything at all. And this is where my "second half" of the class experience "Ranger" comes into play.

I had a pet from the earlier mage days and used it as an archer, too. It basically did the kills while I was running after it and tried to skill (needless to say that this was not fun). My purse bled to death, since the pet sometimes died to funny bugs like the one I described above, or it died and I couldn't rez it, or I had to dismiss it every other fight, because my healing spells wouldn't keep it up against more than one enemy.

When I found out I could use Lesser Wands, this made the hemorrhage of my purse stop briefly, but I now had to buy new pets every so often, because there is no Veterinary skill in game, the normal healing magic isn't so great, unless you skill it really high. The pet also eats half of my focus, which means I can only throw a couple heals, then I'm "oom". All this combined:

• Archer is slow and not fun in the beginning
• Tamer is impossible without a giant stash of gold
• Pet game play is very risky and expensive (because you have to buy a new pet often)

Now, I'll not just complain here. It's Pre-Alpha, isn't it. Things have been thrown in the game and lots of placeholders do still exist. No polish, no balance, not even feature-complete. I knew this when I started, and that's also why I post this here on the forums, to give the devs the chance to see my impressions as a newbie, trying to get a foot on the ground.

I would first start by fixing the Ranged Combat tree:

• Raise base accuracy to a level where you still miss, but not 4 out of 5 shots or more.
• Move Eagle Eye up one tear, maybe swap it with Ammo Scavenger
• Simplify and cheapen the recipe for arrows and make arrows cost less at the vendor
• Lower the speed of bows by 50%, raise the damage by 50%

(Arrows are not spells, they're not tactical to the same degree, they're our equivalent to the "white damage" of melee classes and as far as I know, melees get their damage for free).

Now for the pets.

• Taming is not possible. Just this. You either are high level enough to far the silver yourself or you need to be millionaire, that simple. Fix it. I won't propose anything here other than introduce proper tiers for the animal tiers you have in game. How you do it I'm not the right person to tell you.
• When you die while your pet is out, don't make the pet die. This is utterly frustrating. You cared for the pet, you healed it, you put yourself at lower priority, because the pet was your main damage, and then you die and the pet is gone. This is a punishing mechanic, not an encouraging one.
• Fix the bug with rez where you have to run around in probably mob infested areas to find the "sweet spot" where rez actually works. I lost a pretty expensive one just today because its body decayed before I could find a way to revive it.
• Introduce pet bonding, where you could resurrect your pet later, the ghost would follow you.
• Introduce potions or magic scrolls to resurrect, those can be expensive, just have an option that's not in another skill tree, as to not force the player into a certain template. Or make Ankhs rez your pet's ghost and you have to search for them, even though they're invisible to you while living - this could even be a somewhat fun mechanic.

All right, that's it for today. I'll now grab my cheap pet and haunt Kingsroad at player level 28, where nothing exists that could kill my pet, just to collect some rusty swords and maybe gain a point in Eagle Eye, by shooting with my wand.
Someone wake me up when the morning comes.

 

Maybe instead of Eagle Eye, start off by leveling aimed shot. It uses regular arrows, hits harder with those arrows, gives you more combos to throw. It is also good at killing things without arrows once you get it up decently - at least beginner area stuff, you can actually start using to make money without ammo. Then work up the other special arrow skills a bit - these work fine without the arrows too - beginner stuff, you understand - That way, you can charge attack stuff once, double combo with aimed, and finish with the ammo-less special skills. At least, it seems to work for me. YMMV Then move on to leveling the other stuff.

Also standing still seems to make you miss less.

 

I appreciate your reply.
Skill use does help a little, but it doesn't fix the underlying problems: Accuracy WAY below melee, damage not really higher, at least not in the beginning (tuning this in the end game is a different issue than the stage I describe here).
Arrows are also a pain in the butt to craft. I remember killing birds and chopping trees in UO, that was all that was needed. It still took time, because 100 arrows are gone fast, so there was no need to add anything else on top of that for SOTA.

Among other things

 

At least we have feathers on chickens now. It's good to know that all the whin....umph, feedback we gave was taken into consideration.

 

Yea, I did whine here, too - deliberately. I think if there's a time to shed some tears, it's now, while things are still in flux and the devs might profit from their game being seen through the eyes of a newbie like me, walking a different path than mainstream "plate and 2hand"

 

Leather/Bow/Polearm config is viable but a pure Bowman setup is very difficult to level up if you're a new player who hasn't gone through the other Rxx releases. I spent 25% using the bow and 75% polearms early on because I kept running out of arrows. Once you get the trick of finding good ore sites and using nightvision to contrast the ore against the rock background that shortage will ease. 100% range combat isn't doable though without a tank and between the current pet dynamics and elementals - I'd pick elementals for that role hands down.

TLDR : ranged , whether magic or arrow is a secondary weapon at early levels. You need melee

 

I know NOTHING of ranger in game but how much does it cost to make Arrows? wouldn't it be more effectiveness Mining and Wood cutting and having a actual craftsmen craft your arrows for you? it should be cheaper as his chance of success are high. Purely asking as I have a friend that wants to me a Hunter type class.

 

Good opening post! Ranger is my preferred playstyle and what you described is what holds me back from spending much time on it so far.

 

If it wasn't for the fact that one ingot makes one arrow head. That, alone, makes me weep.

 

so you need 100 ingot to make 100 arrows??

 

Unless it scales up with skill, yes. I only had a 14ish in blacksmith, and that's what it took me.

 

It's fairly random at the moment unless you're fairly high probably - simply because crafting really is a tear-jerker at the moment. Almost as much fails sometimes as you get from mining - what's more those fails cost money each time.

I used to sell them at 1g last release. This release I jerked it up to 2g like the npcs - mostly because someone cleared out all my arrows at 1g and I had none left to go adventuring with Maybe I'll go back down once I get higher and my carpentry and blacksmithing skills improve.

 

I am so sorry people keep saying that a ranger is so hard because of the arrows. I am sorry but this is just false. With the exp bonus with older chars this is just pointless. Look at my posts and you can see you can do this with out using ONE arrow. NOT ONE.

Yes it can be more difficult and sure ant of the other wearrior skills could be easier but a ranger is still very viable. You just have to work at it and be smart in your training.

 

Well, I laid out my reasoning above. I didn't just come here and said "archery sucks, pets suck". If you want to discuss, discuss. Bring on the points, I'll try to figure out a viable route with you. But don't just say "no, that's not true", because I didn't make stuff up. This is a report of m,y experience so far.

If you say shooting with skills with no arrows is a viable way to raise the skills for you and you're having fun with that, that's your personal opinion.
Compare that to someone going melee, they put on armor and a weapon and have fun outside, while the archer stands in a pen shooting at sheep or has an elemental at their disposal to tank for them or kites around like crazy, taking three times as long to kill anything.

You also need to realize that there's a fundamental difference between someone who is already lvl 50+ and then picks up archery on the way, and someone who starts fresh, has no clue, no funding, no friend list and only a rough idea on how the game works, is overwhelmed by various aspects and then... stands there and shoots 5 minutes at a zombie.

Not everyone wants to be forced to play to mid-game with a class they don't like only to then be able to start anew with a class they would like but can't play due to almost insurmountable hardships on the way.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...ining-i-will-keep-updating-and-posting.40078/

I am sorry you didn't read or look at this first, I started with 17 gold and worked from scratch Only boost I had, if you care to look was 4x exp

There are MANY tutorials and such here In these forums. TY for you input and your opinion.

 

I read your thread and that was what inspired me to give this approach a go.

However, re-read my original posting. The way you raised the skills is not fun. It's not playing a game, it's grinding skills. If this was the way the game worked for everyone, I couldn't dispute anything, but that's just not true.

ONLY archers face these kinds of problems. Mages don't have 80% fizzle on their spells and melees don't miss 80% of their hits until they raised a skill in tier 3 to a high level (in the time that takes, their main weapon skill is at 80+ and they still hang around Kingsroad to kill Small Wolf Spiders).

Add to this the problem with pets being unreliable due to bugs and unfinished design and you have a package that's more trouble than ANY other class in the game.

I didn't say "it can't be done", but I do say that it's a long drawn-out, frustrating, expensive, ineffective grindfest.

 

Forgot to suggest this earlier on why accuracy drop for you as an archer when you play the way you do (probably). Run an experiment - go to town and pop open your stat sheet. Take a look at your numbers (dex in particular) when you stand still. Now, start running from one end of town to the next with your stat sheet open. Keep looking at your numbers. Notice the huge dip in your dex? It's because you're running - which is why as an archer, your accuracy drops compared to other melees that stand and fight. Probably because we (or at least I) kite a lot.

So, if you don't have a pet to distract so you can hit safely, what to do? You need to do what other melees do, stop and fight - or in this case, stop and shoot. You really start hitting things a lot more and your arrows will thank you for it. Run, stop, shoot, run, stop, shoot, rinse and repeat. As your numbers get higher, you'll need to stop less and hit more as you run - as long as what you're hitting doesn't have high dex.

(And yes, you probably know this - but just in case someone else was thinking of taking this path)

 

Yeah I know, I tried to stand still. It worked better when Eagle Eye was above 25, but still not really well. I had to rely on the tamed animal a lot

 

Some people are very happy with the current grind and don't see any issues with it. I've been trying to go straight mage from the start (ineffective without a melee weapon). The devs focused a long time on getting melee combat right, now they have been tweaking spells to make them more effective (albeit not enough to actually BE a primary caster). To my knowledge, ranged classes are still the least touched/reworked of the skill sets. The wand is a great way to level up the range skill, but annoyingly enough it never actually gets any benefits from the ranged skill (no improved damage) so it is wasted experience for those who are magic users and decide to use a wand instead of a melee weapon. I thought you post was a great one, including the fact you are not getting the 4x exp that others seem to take for granted when talking about how the grind isn't a grind. Anyone who says melee isn't the only class that is practical from start currently is either ignorant (i.e. without knowledge because they haven't tried it) or doesn't mind a disgustingly long dull grind prior to actually being able to play.

I know my comment doesn't add anything to your post, but I experienced much the same you have only on the magic side (which is probably vastly more developed than ranged is). Again, thanks for a good in depth look at your experience, as that is the type of experience most if not ALL new gamers will get unless they spend a LONG time digging through our forum posts. A few really good players have done great intros and how to guides, but they are rather buried with all the other posts. I am actually surprised that so many people expect new gamers (especially casual ones) to pour through forums for info instead of expecting to devs to make the game more accessible to new players. I know that down the road we hope they will address our concerns, but for those who belittle them now they are missing the intention.

 

I agree with your points on tamed pets. The current system is simply ridiculous. Perma-death will make the system little utilized. I can't imagine I'll ever be able to convince people they want pets that cost 1,000+ gold that could die at a moment's notice. Couple that with telling them they can only summon it once an hour and you have yourself a system that only masochists will participate in.