How to improve the Ranger to make it the best an ARPG has ever seen

Here is my feedback for Ranger on Early Access so far. Ranger feels unfun to play, but GGG is close to making it amazing. In this post, I will explain why I feel that way and some changes that would make the class more enjoyable.

My background

I never played PoE 1, but I did play other ARPGs and, of course, Souls games. I am still in early game (act 3), but it is already evident that other classes like Sorceress and Monk are more fun to play at this stage.

Movement

"

When we started to work on the ranger, we knew we had to make a class with high agility. (…) Any kind of basic arrow skill can be fired while moving, with a movement penalty.

This is a quote from the Ranger Gameplay Walkthrough on the Steam Store.

The ranger right now, however, does not feel very agile. It unfortunately feels like a squishier Mercenary who does way less damage.

The movement speed bonus that the ranger can get from passives and from uniques does feel good; however, this good experience stops when we start shooting.

Movement penalty

From a design perspective, it is understandable to add a movement penalty while shooting a bow, crossbow, or casting spells. Without it, the Sorceress would become a force of nature, and the Mercenary an unstoppable tank.

This penalty, however, significantly diminishes the gameplay experience with the Ranger. The ability to decrease movement penalty while using skills is unfortunately currently locked behind a very lackluster ascension of the Ranger, namely the Pathfinder.

Having a damage penalty instead of movement penalty only when moving while using skills would make the Ranger more fun to play, in my opinion.

I know the PoE philosophy does not allow a class to get special treatment or mechanics right from the start. One solution for that would be to decrease the movement penalty while using skills with a node on the passive skill tree that, for instance, requires a certain amount of Dexterity and Intelligence. With this, other classes could allocate this as well.

Many of the hardest fights in the game already restrain your mobility one way or another. With enemy collision and small arenas, bosses can already punish ranged combatants; having game mechanics just add more salt to injury feels just unfun.

Vault movements

They are, in my opinion, a great idea, but they were poorly executed. The backwards vault movement and front leap over the enemy that some skills provide do make the ranger feel more agile, and they could be used to dodge attacks as well if the hitboxes were not so clunky.

Clunky hitboxes

The first improvement I suggest is to improve the hitboxes and collision with enemies while vaulting. It has been countless times that I got hit by an enemy doing a front attack while I was mid front leap animation above them.

Vault and leap as support skills

The second change and most meaningful one would be to modify the backwards vault and front leap to not be inherently tied to a skill, but to be bow support skills instead.

Of course, not every bow skill should support it. But why should the player not be able to shoot and aim, for instance, a single poison arrow while vaulting backwards? Imagine being able to start charging a bow skill and releasing it mid-air while vaulting backwards or leaping forwards?

I would rather have that gameplay and that movement, even if it meant that the damage of those skills got nerfed to the ground while these new vault and leap support skill gems are equipped.

Evasion

It would be immensely helpful to have a sound and/or visual cue when your character actually evades an attack.

Damage

Let's talk about the DPS for ranger. Ranger has good CC, although it is not the best. So in this part, I will focus on her single target damage.

Her single target damage, especially in early game, is laughable. The ailment bonus in her section of the tree is simply not enough. Currently, my favorite way to do single target burst damage is to allocate Intelligence and go to the Sorceress part of the passive skill tree and use some Elemental skills with the ranger.

The main reason for lack of damage comes again with the conflict of charging skills and movement. Let's be honest: you are facing the Executioner in act one, what would you rather do?

1. Dodge his attacks with high mobility while corroding his armor and stacking ailments, or
2. try to hit cool charge attacks that do high damage and be one-shot by a guillotine?

The main issue is that option 2 is not that much higher damage, especially when you, as a ranger, are sacrificing your most important tool, namely movement, to use that skill.

There are two solutions to this problem, not necessarily exclusive to each other:

a. Improve the movement of the character so that either charging or releasing charged bow skills could be done while moving or vaulting, or
b. massively increase the damage of charged attacks. I better feel like I am launching a nuke at the enemy if I have to stop for 3 seconds to charge an attack. I am talking about Decimating Strike levels of damage here.

Conclusion

This has been my feedback for Ranger so far; it does feel good to play, especially compared to other ARPGs, but I feel like it could be a lot more fun.

Thank you GGG for amazing experience so far. The bosses so far have been amazing.

tl;dr

1. Ranger has no movement penalty for bows, damage penalty instead
2. Backwards vault and front leap as support skills for bow skills
3. Fix hitboxes while vaulting or leaping
4. Sound or visual clue when attack is evaded
5. Ability to charge and/or release bow skills while vaulting or leaping; or immensely increase damage of charged skills.