The Fan, Shit is Hitting It

I try to be general in what MMO's I talk about, but I gotta talk about this. Its EQ2 related so if you don't care about EQ2 just skip this I guess.

Rangers on EQ2 have been getting screwed for quite a while. It came to a peak though with Rise of Kunark. This is because Rise of Kunark was an expansion with new levels. Meaning everyone got new armor and weapons as they leveled up. Sadly rangers did not. Some equipment was better, but most lacked benefits to ranged weapons. The biggest thing was, we didn't get any better ranged weapons. We are essentially still using level 70 bows, and doing level 70 damage BTW, at level 80.

So rangers rallied, complained, and quite a few gathered up tons of useful data for the devs to use. It is literally quantifiable by the players to show how unbalanced and lacking we are. The devs seem to like ignoring this, or flat out saying its quite the opposite, that we are just fine, despite the hundreds of angry rangers who all agree rangers don't do enough DPS for a class that can do ONLY DPS. Rangers are good only classes, our evil counterpart CRUSH rangers on most parse's especially on raids.

And Raid DPS is what this is about mostly. Rangers do fine solo and Group, quite balanced actually, but rangers get slaughtered on raids. Classes that can tank, heal, WHILE doing DPS have the capacity to out damage rangers with rangers using some of the best equipment available. Even rangers say a raid leader would be foolish to take along a ranger rather than ANY OTHER CLASS.

So it was finally too much, the devs couldn't keep a lid on it. So they announced that in game update 44 they will be fixing arrow mechanics. In a nutshell broken arrow mechanics is why a level 70 bow is better than level 80 bows. So for a time rangers cheered! Rangers will use appropriate arrows and bows and do as much damage as they should! This only lasted until the patch hit the test server.

On the test server is was found:
A. The bow we have been using has been severely nerfed
B. ALL bow damage was REDUCED

The patch basically did the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the rangers wanted. It lowered Ranger DPS instead of raising it.

This really lit up the forums. The scout Dev was barely getting posts in, getting trampled in what seems like a post ratio of 100:1 with the dev on the losing side. He CONTINUES to say rangers are fine, that the ranger DPS is fine while every ranger who bothers to write about it DISAGREES COMPLETELY. Both this dev and the moderator just couldn't keep up, the ranger anger even spilled into other class forums. So today one of the associate producers even stepped in and started replying, not directly about it of course, but hopefully this means the piece of shit scout dev is getting reamed/fired or at the very least someone else is looking at this travesty.

So spread the word, EQ2 rangers are fucking broken. Rangers need to do more DPS to keep up with their counterparts and fill their role as a raider. I've seen several rangers who have already canceled their accounts and dozens more promising to do so if this crap is pushed and rangers aren't properly fixed. So how many does that translate to in a game of thousands?