Yakat, I respect your opinion. Its yours, to do with as you wish.Rangers can stand out of AoE and be considered invincible on endgame bosses. A bolased mob does 0 damage if it can't reach you. Also, a rogue with high Dex using the skills you mentioned will not ever get an endgame kill. Life steal helps survive but is not castable on other players like light heal. Survivability isn't a class role if that's what you're getting at. Rogues can't kite mobs. They can't heal others. They can't stay out of AoE. Also, what you said about rogues in PvP is true and I believe rangers need a buff in PvP as well but I think most people care about balancing out PvE.Reflex, lifesteal, high dex, ss, qs = great dps AND survivability, dat trade off right?To go down one path means to forsake the other. If rogues kept their current skills and rangers lost bolas entangle light heal spike and made sharpen weapons only castable on yourself or a single person it would make sense for them to match rogue dps even with the benefit of ranged combat if rogues retained lifesteal. If a class wants dps it must sacrifice something else. If a class wants something else it must sacrifice dps.
There are full vit rogues who still do good dmg because of their strong melees and skill dmg who wreck pvp, idk how someone can be so blind to obvious class inbalance, you are in denial, period.
Anyway. Just because we can stand out of MOST AoEs (have to be within some of them in order to use support skills- as you claim we are a pure support class with minimal dps [mainly because we have little dps and our skill dps is 0.000001 if a rogue's skill dps has a value of 10]) Bolas, entangle, light heal, defensive spikes (worst buff in game). And if something is on bolas, if the mob can cast skills well guess what? Skills are ranged attacks. Even if the boss has a hammer, his skills fly to hit anyone bolasing him. The only thing that bolas is counted safe against is a mob's auto attacks. If one tries to stay out of the range of skills, they risk the mob resetting or getting bored to death because they need to move around so dang much. Which is garbage. One isn't dpsing if they are running around like a jackrabbit.
Rogues got lifesteal BECAUSE rangers have light heal. If rangers didn't have light heal, rogues probably owuldnt have thought of asking for life steal! I was one of the supporters for rogues receiving life steal. It is unfortunate a rogue cannot cast the heal on anyone else and that a rogue has to be in-combat in order to heal. So there are some downsides to the skill. I will repeat what I said about kiting: Kiting isn't dps and 99% of the time will do exactly nothing to help dps wise (the 1% is for when it saves a group from annihilation- provided it isn't avoided)- so its quite useless bringing that to the table where we are discussing DPS.
Cant stay out of AoE. Hmmm... Lets see. How many other bosses and mobs are there that one cannot stay out of AoE even if they ARE a ranger simply because they don't want to be blasted in the back by a pack of mobs? Trust me, I have been in many of those situations. Personally, give me an AoE over 5-6 different mobs attacking me and whoever tries to help me in my group.
Once PvE is balanced, PvP will be balanced, or so I think anyway. Personally, I don't give a flying fig for PvP.
About your ealier 'to go down one path means to forsake the other' plenty of people get the best of both worlds. Its called the hybrid build. Warriors, Rogues, Druids can all do this with great success. Mages for the most part cannot, but many put firebolt into an ice build and shards into a fire build. So why do rangers need to be the only class left out?
Bolas is not entirely useless, but not good at anything, while root is a lot more reliable (in my experience). Entangle is junk. Spike is a joke, without pierce lure, and not everybody can have their own little lure monkey to help them out- so spike is a bad joke.
Light heal- the skill that makes the ranger class worth something at this point. Sure. We help rogues get their heal, now take ours... (in case anyone was wondering total sarcasm)
Sharpen Weapons- an already nerfed skill, as at endgame steady aim easily surpasses it in dmg as well as having the attack boost- mediocre (and only because it can be used properly by low and mid game rangers).
Ranged combat always turns into melee. Why do you think that since the dawn of the horseman cavalry have always been given the responsibility of eliminating the enemy archers? to bring them into close combat sooner...
Dps vs something else... I believe I already covered that sufficiently with my hybrid discussion above...
