This guide is a little dated, but mostly accurate. I’m putting it up to help linking articles to each other.
Rangers have a lot of versatility, but do not have the same focus on offensive power as barbarians or the Crimson Brigade’s skill in defense and leadership. For this reason, many dismiss it as a newbie guild. Their high hit points, strong basic combat skills, and skill at exploring a hostile world should indeed make them a popular choice for new players. While more advanced nomads often prefer to specialize as a Barbarian or Crimson, there remain more than a few who find the versatility the ranger guild offers invaluable, not to mention the enhanced peer skill. As nomads go, rangers tend to have the easiest time playing alone, yet should also have little difficulty finding a party.
Overall abilities:
Rangers are above average in their overall offensive ability. They are best with axes, but can also use short and long blades. Rangers don’t get the barbarian’s damage boosts, but bladed fury is a very strong offensive skill. Rangers are a little worse than most other nomad guilds in defensive ability.
Rangers have by far the best recovery and healing skills of the nomads. With enough fire building and mastery of fire building, a ranger can noticeably add to the speed at which a party recovers, and their tremendous skill in camping allows extra fast personal healing as well, not to mention their ability to create herbal remedies.
Other abilities:
Rangers have a slew of secondary skills available to them, some useful, others largely worthless. Keep in mind that many of these skills are important for the ranger quests, and thus even a character with infravision may want to put torch creation up a considerable amount if they want torch 1000. Other skills, such as location memory, needent be pushed all that high for the average ranger. Most rangers will want to train hiking and pathfinding to compensate for their lack of navigator spells.
Combining nomad hit points and skills like hiking, enhanced peer, alertness, and scouting, rangers are an acceptable option for new players who want to explore as much of the mud as possible. Their only real deficit when it comes to exploring is the lack of an invisibility spell, alchemist potions are an expensive but wise investment for the ranger looking to travel in dangerous places.
Ranger Quests
Rangers have a number of guild quests they can use to earn points toward a few special abilities called ranger boons. Some of the quests require deliberate effort to go and get, but many of them are actually quite easy to accomplish while healing up after soloing for a while.
Quest List
Quest Name Earning the Quest may require: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Torch 1000 Torch Creation, Patience Torch 5000 Torch Creation, Extreme Patience Torch 25000 Torch Creation, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Push 10 Push, must be low player level and not have reinc exp left Bladed fury 150 Bladed Fury, influencing factors Bladed fury 200 Bladed Fury, influencing factors Bladed fury 250 Bladed Fury, influencing factors Bladed fury overkill Bladed Fury, kung-fu mastery of slicing and dicing Camping 175 Camping, influencing skills Camping 222 Camping, influencing skills, and probably high con Camping 100000 Camping, influencing skills, and narcolepsy Leather craft muff Leather Craft Warm newbies Fire building, newbie friends/toadies Excellent cooking Hunting, Fire building, mastery of fire building Fire building professional Fire building, mastery of fire building Fire building master Fire building, mastery of fire building, pyromania Catch a pheasant Hunting Catch a mackeral Fishing Catch a marlin Fishing Catch one of each fish Fishing First aid 100 First aid, make bandage, plant lore Win the king of hiking event Hiking, knowledge of the maps, fast connection, miracle Shroomin Plant lore, patience, knowledge of the world 51 daughters Overall might Ranger lord 25 Overall ranger skills Ranger lord 50 Overall ranger skills Ranger lord 75 Overall ranger skills Ranger lord 95 Overall ranger skills Become ranger lord If you don't know by now...
Fun Facts about the torch quests
Although high skill at torch creation lets one make two torches at once, the torch quests are legendary in their ability to turn good players into robots. Some quick math shows us why these quests are so universally loathed: Torch creation is a twelve round skill, i.e. 36 seconds per use. Thus torch 1000 takes a rough minimum of 18,000 seconds to accomplish even if your character always make two torches at once. Our good friend torch 5000 thus takes an additional 90,000 seconds, and grandpappy torch 25000 takes 450,000 seconds. All in all, this amounts to 125 hours, divide by 24 for 6.25 days. Six and a quarter days of real life time fashioning tens of thousands of sticks in the likeness of the one lodged up Duke’s…hey, I’m kidding, kidding! Duke’s a good coder, he probably put the torch quests in just to poke fun at the Lords of Chaos.
Ranger boon list
,--------------------------------------------------------------------------. | # Boon Desc | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 1 bladed fury Gives your bladed furies +10 damage | | 2 camping Gives +20 heal when camping | | 3 discount Guild levels cost 25% less money | | 4 enhanced peer +25% to enhanced peer | | 5 fast camp Let's you wait less time between camps | | 6 fast scout Scouting takes only 1 rounds | | 7 fire building Gives your fires +1 regeneration | | 8 hiking +25% to hiking skill | | 9 leather craft ep Leather craft takes 50% less ep | | 10 long blades +4% to long blades skill | | 11 turbo push Push skill can now interupt skills/spells | `--------------------------------------------------------------------------' * means you have the boon Each boon costs 10 quest points Command: pray <number> pray for clear - clears all ranger boons, 1 use per 7d
Ranger boon selection
The short answer for what boons to take is “The camping ones”
A quick look at the list of boons shows that many of them can help get more of the ranger quests done. Bladed fury, fire building, camping, hiking, and leather craft can all be boosted with ranger boons, which in turn opens up the chance to get more of the quests. Since the boons can be reset once a week, there is little risk in experimenting. A cash strapped soloer might have a surprising amount of luck combining ‘fast camp’ and ‘leather craft ep’ for instance.