Morning in Vana'diel: Ranger, the Poor Unloved Brother of the Melee.

Morning in Vana'diel is your daily dose of FFXI and all things Vana'diel. Give us your thoughts on the interesting topics of the day! Today, Ring wonders why the melee don't have to push a button every time that have to swing? Rangers have to hit a button every time they want to shoot! It's Rangerism!

Ranger gets it the short end of the stick. They used to be the little Gods of FFXI. They had their own parties, they could kill anything, didn't have to stand at a certain distance, and their main defense of this was that they were shooting their gil away, as if that was a reason for them to dominate all DD's by a mile. And then SE came around with a huge nerf bat and knocked them into next week. It was a while before we ever found them again, after SE took pity on them and let them be what they are today: a sub-par DD in general, but one that can DD at a distance and without wasting the mana of the mages.

Ranger has become much like BLM, stand far back, do good burst damage, but nothing compared to what a melee can do. But I am not here to lament the damage of RNG. I am here to lament the play-style of RNG. There is no ability for RNG to auto-shoot at all in FFXI. Every time you want to shoot an arrow, fire a bolt or put a bullet into a mobs brain, you have to hit the Ranged Attack button. The worst part is that it is treated like a JA but it doesn't have a timer, so there is no way to even make a macro to adjust for your delay or more importantly your Rapid Shot procs. You just have to guess when to shoot next, and with practice you can get it down pretty well, but even then if you hit it a fraction of a second too soon you will get that "You can not perform that action yet" message and the built-in delay that comes with it. I don't know about you, but I play FFXI because I suck at games like Rock Band, this kind of keeping an internal rhythm is not something I look forward to doing every time I am on RNG.

SE really needs to level the playing field between melee and RNG. I am sure that when RNG was conceived there was a good reason to have auto-shooting, but like many things in FFXI that good reason is a bad reason now. Maybe SE expected RNG to melee for TP then just shoot for WS? I have no idea what their motivation was for sure but it is time SE fixed the issue. Give RNG auto-shooting that takes advantage of their Snapshot like melee's get with haste and also factors in Rapid Shot procs. I can't imagine this would be difficult, but it would have to be handled server-side because we don't get exact delay information on the client-side.

Do you think RNG need auto-shooting? Do you think RNG deserve auto-shooting? Do you even care if RNG gets anything at all? Do you still think RNG deserves to be nerf from their ancient days of glory? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!