Everquest 2 - Overview Of The Ranger Character Class in Everquest 2

2008-08-25

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You specialize in shooting people while they’re looking the other way. Supposedly, this is a “good” class.

The ranger is a strong scout class that focuses on dealing physical ranged damage, with some melee harassment skills thrown in there. They chiefly use their bow to kill from afar, only occasionally switching to their melee weapons to dispatch creatures that get close to them. They must belong to either of the good aligned cities. One of their chief advantages is long range - they can attack from further away than any other class, increasing their versatility, particularly in a raid environment. They can attack from stealth and use poisons to increase their damage. Agility and strength are your most important statistics, with agility arguably being the most important, as it affects your power pool. In order to be successful, a good ranger has to make use of their mobility and variety of skills to continually put out damage over time, making it a class for players who like to hit a lot of different buttons in rapid succession. Their long range makes them well suited to pulling.

Rangers make for excellent soloers, as they are one of the only classes that can kite effectively. They need to run in tight patterns and make extensive use of poisons for damage over time, and it helps for them to also use high quality equipment. However, this technique allows them to bring down some powerful monsters on their own, getting all the loot for themselves. As such, the ranger is a good class for people who like having the choice of either soloing or playing in a group.

The rangers of EQ2 are very different from those of EQ1, which were hybrid casters. The new ranger has no real spells, instead focusing on being expert bow fighters. They have some strong traps that have snare, damage and immobilizing effects, however, making them useful additional crowd control for a group. They’ll chiefly be shooting at enemies from afar, however, occasionally using some of their area of effect skills to bring the hurt down on a crowd of weaker monsters. Some of their attacks have strong debuff components as well. Many rangers will start off a fight with some of their powerful stealth attacks, either from melee or far out. They also have access to several strong self-buffs, although they otherwise lack in group utility. Their Trick Shot line of skills transfers a large amount of hate to the ranger’s chosen target, greatly assisting in generating threat for a tank. One thing that rangers need to keep track of is their own threat - they can use their snare traps to help give the tank time to reacquire a stray creature’s attention.

This post is part of the series: Everquest 2 Character Class Guides

A collection of articles detailing the many classes in Everquest 2.