ReverendPaqo wrote:
Be a rebel. Go brigand. Being serious though, when your ranger's still firing away at mobs that you need to stay ranged against and the swashy/assassin is doing no dps, you can sling crap at them and infuriate them so much that it makes up for everything.
Ok, for real in all seriousness, the ranger has a very underappreciated ability to buff the tank's hate by a non-trivial amount and reduce the mob's defensive ratings significantly. A well played ranger can squishify a mob against physical damage to an equal degree as bards can debuff the mob not to mention the accuracy bonus on focus aim and the additional hate they can provide to the tank that can literally make an agro magnet out of even low parsing guardians. Rangers provide a lot more utility than people give them credit for, but it takes a skilled player to make such utility actually work, and it takes an equally as skilled not to mention informed player to understand that the ranger is responsible for that difference.
Sorry reverend, but what are you talking about?
A ranger has NO buff for the tank. The one hate increase a ranger has is an increase of ~30% hate for the next one to hit the mob (blame Arrow), regardless of who hits it. It could be the tank but it is generally unlikely.
Nature's Bonus (not Focus Aim, the Focus Aim part is ranger only) is under-rated IMO and does provide a nice ToHit% buff that can result in a 100% hit rate for the group 1/3 of the time (15 or 20seconds every minute or so). It is not as nice as the constant though smaller ToHit% available elsewhere.
As for debuffs all scouts have debuffs the brigand has by far the best debuffs, followed by bards, swashy's then lastly rangers.
For hate tansfer swashy is best followed by the assassin, unless you count a dirges hate control in there. Rangers have passive hate dump on their own DPS nothing else.
A Ranger is very fun to solo (in the open) more fun than anything I have played. Not so fun if you do not have room to kite. A Ranger can be very frustrating in instances if you are trying to solo.
Swashy's solo fine, not as fun or as effective as a Ranger in open territory IMO, but the swashy is quite a bit better in closed areas.
Unless some changes happen you are better off with a swashy because your play style may change and you may want to do instance groups and/or raids.
I have a 80/250AA Ranger and an assassin, I would currently trade one of them for a swashy, but ..... that is just me.