Thread: Ranger Guide

Ranger Guide 3.7 - 4.0

I. Summary, Why Ranger, Whats So Special About Them?
II. Gearand Manastone Building
III. Stigmas
IV. The Bad Side
V. The Good Side
VI. Option Tweaks, and Optimal Setups to play Ranger
VII. The Fun Stuff
VIII. Rotation, and Priority
IX. Weaving, Should I Be Doing It, and How?
X. Final Notes and Tips, Stuff You Need To Know
XI. Ending notes/Credits
XII. PvP videos which might help you.

I. Summary:

I like to think come 4.0, Rangers are seen of a bit of a underdog class with the new release of Gunners, which is one of the reasons why I currently love mine. They're a long ranged, high burst, but sustained physical damage class, which requires a quick reaction time, good movement, a tactical approach on things and the witts to outsmart your enemy. They're defiantly a class to be feared on the battlefield, and are not something people take lightly while facing.

We can stealth, sleep, root, slow, silence, blind, teleport twice, have some lifesteal/manaleech, and one of the classes with the most stuns out of all the classes in Aion (screw you yes/sawy). We're a force to be reckoned with, and despite popular belief, take a lot of skill and practice to master. If this sounds like the class for you, then it most probably is.

II. Gear and Manastone building:

For gear, its pretty simple, you want the full Custodian's Divine or the Shepherd's Divine set, both are the same. So it doesn't really matter. For accessories, you want the Discordant Combat accessories. For the bow, Exalted Noble Katalium Bow combined with Custodian's Flatbow (Exalted on top)

For Manastones, you have a few options in which you can go, all giving different play styles, and different benefits, instead of telling you builds, I will tell you what each Manastone can do for the class, and how it can help you in various ways.

Attack: Increases your bonus physical attack by a fixed amount, 1 attack = 1 more damage to skills and auto attacks, but due to increases, physical defense, and all this, it is very hard to see the exact amount of damage bonuses you are getting from this.

It is important to note though, Skills that buff attack power by a percentage apply only to the base attack value. It does not take into account any mana stones, passive attack boost skills, or any other +attack source that increase your green bonus attack value.

It is also important to note that even though this might be increasing your damage, critical hitting with skills more often, hitting the target and not blocking more often, will also increase your damage much more would then flat out attack

My opinion on this manastone: Its hit and miss, I can't tell you its bad I can't tell you its good, it may seem like a safe pick, but I wouldn't recommend socketing this straight up, play with some other manastones first and get a feel for them and see how much you feel like you're critting/hitting/resisting and then un-socket your manastones accordingly

Crit strike: The safest manastone you can ever socket, crit gives us a number of things, Knock backs, 1.7x Damage on our skills and auto attacks, and the power to kick ass.

A safe number you would want to get to is higher then 950, with huge strike resist numbers now, and everyone having the best gear, you need a high number of crit to be critting at the max of 50% ,

M.acc: Now you might be thinking, "I thought rangers were a physical class, whats the point of having m.acc?!" Well, theres areasons for this, It lowers the resistance chance on Traps, Sleep arrow and all of our slows/silences, which helps to land sleep, root, snares, slows and silences.

Now, this manastone is very viable, and one that NEEDS to be socketed. But like I said, its up to you to decide how much you should socket it, what I've done is have a set with Crit/M.acc fully for targets with MR, and then a set with my other manastones (Such as Crit/Attack etc)

Evasion:
Not that great, but I want to cover all I can, with evasion, the more you have, the more chance you have to dodge someones attack. The max chance you can have to evade someones attack is 30%, this is a build not many, or hardly any use anymore.

Magic resist:
Kind of the same deal with eva, wouldn't recommend it for a ranger.

HP:
Not much to say about this, feel like you need HP? go socket some then haha helps you live longer, makes you a bit more durable in team fights.

Accuracy:
Socket this if you feel like you're failing to hit targets often, but usually our base accuracy/using the buff Aiming should do the trick.

In my opinion, for starters, go for Crit/M.acc and a bit of HP, don't go to overboard with M.acc though, but it does help a lot, and it'll let you not fail most skills etc.

III. Stigmas:
There are a few builds you can use, first I'll start with the most commonly used lightning shot.

Lightning Arrow:
Bestial Fury I
Blazing Trap V
Focused Shots I
Gale Arrow VII
Heart Shot VI
Lightning Arrow IV
Silence Arrow VII
Sleep Arrow I
Speed of the Wind I
Breath of Nature V
Retreating Slash I

This is one of the best starter builds, and defiantly one of the best builds in 4.0. No other builds can compete with the damage output, and utility Lightning Arrow build brings. The only things which are subject to change in this build is Sleep arrow, and debatebly Focused Shots (Not recommended, but saying is an option). You can switch Sleep for Fient, or Snare Trap, but I'd stick with sleep

Hybrid:
Bestial Fury I
Silence Arrow VII
Sleep Arrow I
Bow of Blessing I
Explosive Arrow V
Focused Shots I
Hunter's Might I
Sharpen Arrow I
Speed of The Wind I
Arrow Deludge VIII
Trap of Slowing VI

You now have some leway, either go Snare Trap, Nature's Resolve, or Lethal Arrow
Read the tooltips, its all up to you, each have different options.

Agonizing Arrow:
Bestial Fury I
Silence Arrow VII
Sleep Arrow I
Bow of Blessing I
Explosive Arrow V
Focused Shots I
Hunter's Might I
Sharpen Arrow I
Lethal Arrow III
Arrow Deludge VIII
Agonizing Arrow II

Same as above build, but with Lethal Arrow and Agonizing instead of Trap of slowing and Speed, and you have an extra slot for leway which you can decide for yourself.

I'd recommend Lightning for starters.

IV. The Bad Side
Now we've got all the boring stuff out of the way, I'd like to talk about the downfalls of the Ranger class, and why you should consider them before choosing this to be your new class/main or whatever.

1. Incredibley Squishy

One of the squishiest classes in the game (squishy means dies very fast/gets hit very hard), we probably have lower survivability then any other class (Apart from maybe sorcs) and we rely on our positioning, CC, speed and mobility to get us out of these situations

2. RNG, RNG RNG RNG RNG and did I say RNG.

"A random number generator (RNG) is a computational or physical device designed to generate a sequence of numbers or symbols that lack any pattern, i.e. appear random."

A lot of our skills are completely random, this little bugger can love you some days and hate you the next, I've had crits on players up to 5k, I've had crits on players up to 800. The class is completely dominated by the factor of randomness, and its very hard to counter this, sometimes it'll win you fights, sometimes it'll lose you fights, other times it will be how it should and just be 50/50 with everything.

RNG also determines our skills hitting/stunning and resisting on players, so if you don't mind a lot of randomness, then this shouldn't bother you.