We’ve been hearing about some ranger love for about 3 expansions now, but at Fan Faire, we heard the first concrete info. Xelgad has elaborated on just what we can expect in an update falling between GU57 and GU58 (hopefully 4-6 weeks from now:

Greetings, Mighty Forces!

AE Auto-Attack and Flurry are indeed on the way for bows. We’re also removing the 20% damage penalty for bows, and we’re increasing the damage rating on all 81-90 bows (along with throwing weapons) by about 10%. The intent is to allow you guys to get full benefit from buffs and gear, not to make the class entirely focused on Auto-Attack.

You know how you get more auto-attack damage from your melee weapons in many cases than from your bow? These changes should fix that, unless your melee weapons are simply of much higher quality than your bow. At most, your auto-attack may jump from ~20% of your parse up to ~30% on raids, but I’d be surprised if many people end up with it higher than that.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

You can join the discussion on this issue in the thread What’s this all about? (bow changes) on the EQ2 Forums.

One of the unique characteristics of the Ranger mythical bow Eagle’s Talon is that it allowed the user to do ranged auto-attacks at point blank range (zero meters distance).

Once a ranger has completed the Epic Repercussions quests, they are awarded an enervated version of Eagle’s Talon with all of the special effects stripped off, and then zero-concentration spells are added to their Knowledge book to get all those unique effects on whatever bow they decide to use. The issue is that those persistent buffs do not grant the ability to use other bows at point blank (0m) range.

Fyreflyte has given some unexpected response on the subject of rangers always being able to use their bows from point blank range:

I feel rangers ought to be encouraged to deal their damage at range. I don’t plan on releasing any more bows with a min range of 0. Standard longbows have a minimum range of 2, which is close enough to use your CAs, so at present there is no benefit to 0 range except that it makes your positioning slightly more convenient.

The issue with having no 0m range bow is that some epic mobs are so gigantic, and their “hit boxes” are so large, that a ranger must back out 20-30 meters to get to a range where both melee and ranged combat arts are usable.

Flyreflyte continued with:

We’ve been discussing this internally, and have some good ideas for it. We’ve been holding off on touching this, however, until we can get a good idea of where everyone’s at after the stat changes and consolidation. Just to quell any suspicions, the ideas all focus on providing an incentive to attack from range, rather than a penalty for using the current melee range methods.

A ranger usually stands at 5 meters so that all of their ranged and melee attacks are available. A ranger that uses only ranged attacks is losing up to 40% of their DPS. It’s usually only done if the mob has a particularly nasty Area of Effect (AoE) attack. We’re not sure how this change will work. Although as he said it’s in the planning stages, not set in stone.