Rangers

First I'll just acknowledge I was wrong about my EQ2 expansion prediction. Anyone who plays knows that the 'ice' stuff was a prelude to Halas becoming a new starting city.

So on to my topic. Rangers. I give very little qurter in debates about rangers because I have been playing ranger archetypes in MMO's since shortly after EverQuest 1's release. Almost exclusively, definitely over 90% of the time.

So with my knowledge I can tell you, rangers in EverQuest 2 are some of the worst treated in the MMOVerse. They get little to no utility, no tanking ability, and aren't capable of putting out numbers as high as the other top DPS'ing classes. With Aeralik gone, and thus a severe bias to Assassins, I think this problem will start to go away. He had clear intentions of making assassins THE best DPS class in the entire game by quite a far margin. So not only did other classes in general have a chance, their good counterpart, rangers, were almost bastardized as a result. Apparently since they could wear 'chain' and DPS at range like a cloth wearer their DPS was to suffer. Problem is wearing chain over cloth means very little in groups and almost nothing in raids, and they couldn't reach anywhere near their full DPS potential staying at range. As a matter of fact their signature weapon as of late requires them to be in MELEE range to get the most DPS out of them. So the whole 'DPS at range with chain' argument is shot down from several pieces of evidence.

Here's hoping the next expansion pack, Aeralik free, will mean promise for rangers. What is going to be really messed up to see is assassin's go down a bit but probably stay a bit overpowered, and assassin players will still whine.