Edit: Changed tone of post and trimmed the length.

I'm really enjoying the early levels of Nevergrind. I've been playing each of the classes to find my favorite in time for the server accounts to go live. The game has a lot of great variety to the class design.

I'm curious how people feel about the Ranger. I leveled one to 35 and here are my thoughts so far about the class.

I think the class has an interesting skill set and I like how it takes a lot of inspiration from the Everquest class. The Ranger favors auto attacking with arrow skills to supplement that makes for a nifty number fountain.

However, I find I'm having a lot of trouble making the skills work. At early levels (Act 1), I found the mana cost of Faerie Fire to be really high and the low interrupt chance on the Kick to be disappointing. The opportunity cost of 20 talent points seems like too much in order to get a reliable interrupt.

After Act 2, the mob interaction disappears entirely as the class gains a tremendous power spike from the Snare talent bonus. The talent causes your auto attack to hit four additional times. You don't even have to cast Snare to gain this effect. This one talent turns the Ranger into an auto attacking murder machine. It's a nifty number fountain but not very engaging play to just auto attack mobs one by one rapidly to death. Here's a zone summary of my level 35.

The Ranger has several abilities and talents that look like they'd have interesting swarming potential but I'm at a loss how a Ranger could fight multiple mobs without immediately crumpling. Stuns and spellcasters are particularly dangerous as the Ranger lacks tools to counter them. I could see these vulnerabilities preventing the class from advancing into Nightmare. The class gets a lot of buff-and-forget skills that I feel could be replaced with additional tools.

Thoughts?

Cool, I'd be curious to hear how your impression compares. It's kind of funny considering our different reactions. I lament crazy auto attack damage as missing out on interesting gameplay because it makes half of the hotbar obsolete while you enjoy the number crunching and seeing how high you can push the dps. The class definitely favors a +damage gearing strategy.

Yeah, this is something I have given thought about. Should the auto attack timer reset or just continue looping? In classic EQ I don't really remember clearly queueing up your auto attack. Not that it has to be like EQ, but it's a nice reference point. How should it be? I'm not really sure.

Yeah weaving spells between auto attacks is an interesting concept but doesn't work in practice for the Ranger. That timing goes out the window when you introduce parries. My ranger has 25% chance to parry thanks to the Snare talent.

auto attacks queue in EQ. say you're a paladin with a 60 delay sword, and you're trying to cast a stun that has a 3 second cast time. if you turn on autoattack and perform your first swing at t=0seconds, then start casting your stun any time before t=3s, your next melee swing will happen at t=6s. if you cast your stun any time after t=3s, though (say, at t=5s), your next melee swing will come as soon as your spell finishes casting (at t=8s then).

as an aside (since it doesn't apply to the targetting system NG has)... if you have a melee swing that attempts to trigger but you don't have a mob targeted, or the mob you have targeted is too far away or out of your line of sight, then your timer will reset... so say with that same 60 delay weapon you swing at t=0s, then at t=6s you accidentally turn around and your target is behind you, your next melee swing will not attempt until t=12s

oh, also worth noting for you newer guys, at one point in NG beta rangers were pretty much the most powerful class to the point of being way overpowered. they got nerfed down to be more in line with other classes. perhaps they got overnerfed? idk. i haven't played a ranger past level 20 or so.