After playing with a buddy of mine excessively with RV and HS, we kinda came to the conclusion that RV is more or less just a smaller version of HS that provides ammo. RV is largely defined over his equipment. I mean, you could arguhe that his kit is more geared as a melee-ranged-mix, but he is a tad bit too squishy for melee and a tad bit too dps-less for ranged. He works well with grudge-raker, handgun and crossbow, but he is left in the dust for both burst and sustained dps. His active is quite useful and versatile, but lacks profile and doesn’t allow him to bring much damage to the table. It also doesn’t help that it deploys so slowly and he has to stay in a very confined area to make use of it. And his talents really don’t allow him to tweak his playstyle too much. They are all nice to have, but if you look at huntsman, you have very pronounced choices that actually allow for a wide variety of weapon and talent setups to accomplish many things. With RV’s focus on just some small buffs and his passive, he doesn’t have the same versatility. It is pretty much the same no matter how you kit him.
So here are my suggestions to make ranger veteran a bit more interesting and not just a midget-huntsman.
Health: As much as Sienna and Keri are ranged carreers at heart and all their carreers reflect that in some way, Bardin is a melee hero at heart and always will be. With that in mind, it is kinda ironic that only IB has 150 hit points, and both Slayer and RV only have 100. None of Bardin’s carreers should have 100, they all should have at least 125. Even RV’s talents suggest that he is a melee-ranged-hybrid, with the attack speed, movement speed, hero power on depleted ammo and healing buff that you usually only find on other heroes that have a melee focus or just give you the impression that he is encouraged to often go into melee.
Ranged: His ranged is actually pretty decent, but he lacks the ability to truly dish out those heavy dps, it is nigh impossible to gear him into a boss-killer that can get even close to what HS, Pyro or any Keri can accomplish. Grudgeraker can do quite the number on elites, but falls flat against super-armour (which is understandable and absolutey a-okay) and bosses. Handgun and crossbow are too slow for good boss dps. He definitely needs access to some other ranged weapons.
Other than that, I think RV should just get an “Anti-Large” bonus upfront, the same way he gets a reload speed bonus. It would be very in tune with the lore because that is something dwarves in WH just do, hacking away at large targets. With large, I mean maulers, CW and bosses. Maybe give him a 15% bower boost against those.
Level 15 talents: I still maintain he needs to something when picking those talents that benefits him the most, see above.
Active skill: The damage boost is nice, but you are confined to a very small space and the game rewards mobility, not to mention he actually gets the option to go the movement-speed-route. I think an attack speed and reload speed bonus would be in order, though not big one. Most importantly: Make him invisible no matter if he stays in the cloud (like it is with the time extension now) but give him bonus damage, reload and attack speed only when he stays within the “initial blast radius”.