The recent build/ascendancy balance is hilarious

They've said that all ascandancy classes will be reworked/rebalanced in PoE 2. The question is; do they need to rebalance them earlier, for then again to rebalance them to fit PoE 2?

I very much like changes on the tree, and usually want more of it, so I would say yes. But there's a lot of people out there that don't.

They need to buff ranger side of the tree life nodes by 1% so they match the value of life nodes from the bottom/left side. Ranger had an excuse in the past when you could actually avoid most of the danger by killing things faster or by simply dodging/evading/manually dodging because you naturally had more speed, but now you take damage from everything and killing stuff before they touch you is no longer an option in high delirium maps, so ranger builds are simply worse in that regard.

what ranger needs is dex looking at, evade is pretty unfavourable right now and accuracy has been significantly devalued over the years, str vs dex is where the largest part of the life difference is between beefybois and raiderinos.

Knowing GGG they will change life from str in armour though and we'll all suffer

I don't think improving survivability is going to be enough to save the ranger tree anymore.

There's nothing interesting happening at the bottom right of the tree. Compare that to the top left side.. you see all these keystones that enable some vastly different playstles: EE, EO, MoM (this node also is great for enabling a bunch of timeless jewel keystones), the brand/totem nodes.

The ranger area gets what.. wind dancer and point blank.. both of which doesn't change anyone's playstyle at all, and then acrobatics which is a good keystone but shoehorns builds into going all or nothing on binary defense layers which to me is such a flawed way of layering defense.

And then there's the ascendency problems themselves. Every class got a major rework on at least one of their ascendencies.. except ranger.

Raider is numerically not.. bad I guess, a bit underwhelming imo but the ascendency doesn't have anything particularly interesting going on.

I haven't played pathfinder but as someone who hates flask pianoing.. fuck this ascendency.

Deadeye got robbed. Their main selling point is now a boot mod. As far as attack hit bow builds go.. if feels terrible playing deadeye on a low budget.

And then on top of all that is the glaring survivability problems. It's like in ggg's eyes this bottom right of the tree hasn't existed for the past half decade.

good summary yamface and totally agree with the quality of the passive tree zones so to speak, top left is definitely best and bottom right is pretty much the worst.

Hopefully somebody at GGG finally notices, Raider is my favourite ascendancy and i've found it extremely hard to choose it for a build recently as its so much weaker than something else.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

good summary yamface and totally agree with the quality of the passive tree zones so to speak, top left is definitely best and bottom right is pretty much the worst.

Hopefully somebody at GGG finally notices, Raider is my favourite ascendancy and i've found it extremely hard to choose it for a build recently as its so much weaker than something else.

I also liked raider quite a bit and played it as melee (lol memes on me). But the uniqueness about raider ascendancy is gone.

Alinment immunities? - benchcrafts and ordinary skill tree for 100%
Frenzy Charges on hit? - Redeemer chest with frenzy charge on hit replaces that
Onslaught? - flask, abyss jewel mod and for now in Harvest Onslaught as a implicit on boots (even more common in standard).

Raider lost its complete identity over time its a dead class in my opinion.

Yeah zzang she is totally useless this league in particular you can get all the notable points from raider and deadeye ascendancies on gear :/

It really isn't the same as say Assassin's Elusive because that is superior to the mod version, both in potency and application.

I used to make a couple of raiders every league for the ailment immunity, kinda switched to elementalist once that got buffed for the same reason but the last few leagues you can just get it off gear or cluster jewels.

Rangers have needed buffs forever i don't know if they don't due to lack of imagination or if they are scared of the LUL bow best crowd but it doesn't make much sense to me.

I guess the ranger class is a victim of the way the game has evolved.

I have no issue with rangers being a defensively fragile class. The fact that there are actual face tank ranger builds is something I personally dislike. It just doesn't resonate with how I think a ranger should play and this kind of tells you a lot about where the game is at.

As arguably the most fragile class ranger should be the best class when it comes to DPS. Unfortunately because DPS can be easily scaled to "delete boss" levels the game has been geared towards staged boss fights and annoying damage shields. If a build is squishy it should at least be able to consistantly delete a lot of the content. Risk=reward.

Sadly because every class can reach delete level dps rangers just don't make sense. Why take a rippy build when you can clear just as quickly with something twice or three times as tanky. Your risk isn't properly rewarded and this is something you can't really fix by changing just the ranger class. If you just boost their DPS potential they will still delete the easier content like before but the phased bosses will still be an issue. You would need to significantly boost monster and Boss hp again to add value to the extra dps but that would ruin so many mediocre builds. Alternatively they could start cutting the dps of other classes but that again would ruin much of these builds and make the game even harder for new players.

The way the game is built simply doesn't reward a glass cannon play style and fixing that would require a lot of tinkering that would cause far too much disruption. My hopes lie with POE 2 to hopefully make a glass cannon worth playing.

Sure you could add some defensive layers to the ranger class but it doesn't really match the class. If anything they should make them far superior to other types of builds DPSwise that it is worth actually running a squishy build. It pays for deep delving and there you see a lot of rangers in use, sadly for other content it isn't worth using so I would love to see a change that embraces the fragility of the ranger class and plays to it's strengths. Don't reduce the risk, up the reward.

I've always been fond of Elementalists and Ascendants. While Ascendant isn't as focused as other advanced classes, flexibility makes for it. But Elementalists... Look on top Elementalists on poe.ninja and it's almost always a summoner build. Shaper of Desolation and Beacon of Ruin aren't worth it for several leagues now. If you are playing non-summoner, last 2 ascendancy points are wasted on golems, which die too easy on non-focused builds. Hell, even Necromancer is a better caster now, with both superior damage and defenses. Occultists lost their edge as defensive pick to Necro as well, and probably curse immunity and an extra curse are two sole reasons ppl take them anyway.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

what ranger needs is dex looking at, evade is pretty unfavourable right now and accuracy has been significantly devalued over the years, str vs dex is where the largest part of the life difference is between beefybois and raiderinos.

Knowing GGG they will change life from str in armour though and we'll all suffer

Dexterity should give bonuses to action apeed.