It's vastly superior to play a crossbow ranger than a merc.

For defense and utility:

Deadeye Ranger:
- Tailwind gives +10% movement speed, 30% skill speed (which also applies to reload speed), 150% evasion rating. This node is connected to windward which is incredible
- Windward which straight up reduces ALL damage type by 30%. With a high skill speed coming from tailwind, it is easy to keep it up fulltime, especially bosses who hit less often.

Witchhunter Merc:
- Sorcery Ward which only applies a damage reduction to elemental damage after decreasing your armour and evasion by half. Why does ranger get no penalty? Considering it's called "sorcery" ward, please add chaos damage reduction as well.

For offense:

Deadeye Ranger:
- 20% more damage point black/farshot that's connected to endless munitions (+1 projectile)

Witchhunter merc:
- Decimating strike which is useless when playing with a friend, culling strike which is underwhelming (5% for unique in a world where monster HP doesn't scale much so my normal skills do way more than 5%), witchbane that is underwhelming due to having to build up concentration for it and invuln phase resets it. Merc has some sort of penalty attached to its offense while it's straightforward damage increase for rangers. I'd like the full life condition removed from decimating strike so I can use this and also play with my friends.

Please buff merc instead of nerfing ranger.

Witchhunter's culling needs to be like Slayer's culling in order to make it feels good. Just make it straight up cull 20% of remaining HP for all, unique boss, rare, magic, monster. The explode chance baseline needs to be doubled, 20% as baseline, and 75% for undead and demon.

Deadeye is the golden-child of PoE, and she really needs to be tuned down for PoE 2. Tailwind skill speed needs to be cut down to half. 10% Movement speed is fine, but 30% skills speed and 150% evasion rating at 10 stacks are just too much.

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bewilder2#0356 wrote:

Witchhunter's culling needs to be like Slayer's culling in order to make it feels good. Just make it straight up cull 20% of remaining HP for all, unique boss, rare, magic, monster. The explode chance baseline needs to be doubled, 20% as baseline, and 75% for undead and demon.

Yeah that sounds great. I didn't play much PoE1 compared to the average people here so I never knew ranger has always been OP. I hope it gets more balanced for PoE2.