Pyros
<Silver Donator>
Well you can edit the penalty in the files to be 0, so you hit for full damage with bows, it's justifiable by the fact your archer could be shooting from behind your tank, or by the fact casters don't have any penalties. Even then though bow/crossbow damage is fairly bad vs fully speced melee. Part of it due to melee generally getting 2 branches to improve damage(the weapon and 2H or Dualwield), and better upgrades overall.So basically rangers are like they were upon EQ release, shitty. You'd think they'd do away with the short range penalty once you reach a certain skill level to make them viable at least..![]()
Will read through the thread now, thanks for the help..
That said as we mentionned in the last few pages, optimization isn't necessary for game completion at all, it just makes it faster by making a lot of stuff absolutely trivial. I finished the game with my first group which was similar to yours but I had a Mercenary instead of Runepriest(which arguably is even a worse setup). Didn't waste points in bows though because I had already rerolled from another group so I knew bows were shit and went with the Ranger as a DW dagger char. Nothing was particularily challenging once I got rolling, but still required some thought and using different skills and shit. If you make the perfect group, you can basically autoattack one round everything in the game once you reach lvl 20ish or so and you have 0 chances of dying ever. Only reloads you'd need would be if one of your chars get stunned or whatever because you forgot the fire buff and lost xp because of it. So yeah.