He is going to be fully and totally overshadowed with his new career. I’m sorry but dropping a handful of bullets and a potion/grenade every once in a while is a wasteful use of your Bardin slot. He just cannot compare even slightly to Slayer or Ironbreaker. He should play vastly different and most of the guns that are meant for him (aka everything but drakefire) are terrible. Ironbreaker is a better ranger by far if for the simple fact that his anti-backstab isn’t a 30% damage reduction but a full negation of a hit entirely, without even costing a talent. Drakefires are infinite ammo and even if you’re trying to take as much damage as possible with them, you’ll never actually be as squishy as ranger vet is.
I propose adding talents or even passives that can give him a unique niche and allow him to use a lot of subpar weapons. Here’s some examples, needs balancing of course:
Pushing an enemy gives you more pellets/penetration on your next shot/s.
Reload 1 ammo per melee kill.
Heavy attacks allow Bardin’s ranged weapons to ignore armor from the target for a duration or for a number of hits.
Damage to allies is reduced by 50% and enemies are less likely to attack you.
Damaging an enemy with a ranged attack allows melee attacks to recover 1 stamina when hitting that enemy for 3 seconds.
Ranged knockback is increased by 100% and dodge distance is increased by 20%.
Your ult automatically triggers when disabled and makes you immune to knockback and area damage for the duration.
These types of changes could see a Bardin that can take a whole different arsenal of weapon combinations as well as give him a unique identify to potentially take necessary risks to take out spamming specials or be totally undeterred in his pursuit to obtain an item or finish an objective. Kinda like what you’d see a scout or dare I say, a ranger, do.
I would have to ask the dps calculators. But I think there is few to nothing in the game which comes close to the damage doom ranger can do with that insane reload speed. And he can even do this while being invisible with even more increased ranged damage.
Ranger needs changes but not straight up buffs.
He is the support shooty character of bardin that has excelent ultimate but his passives are lackluster and weak
10% chance of not using a consumable is laughably small and can NEVER be relied upon by any measure - esp considering the engineer with 3 bombs is something we asked for ranger since the 1st beta of V2
If this passive worked in tandem with his elite slaying passive he would be MUCH more smoother to play - every boss drops a heal kit / every Xth elite a bomb / every Xth special a Potion
His bonus Beer talent is very nice to have but once again the problem arises that its 50% not quaranteed chance - you need 3 stacks - and the exprience is mixed because sometimes you are drowning in bear and sometimes you franticaly are searching for the beer to reaply the buff
This inst a good minigame.
Instead it could be used as engineers greande - ranger STARTS with that beer and you only need 1 stack and it lasts until you are downed. Its on his healing slot and you cycle through it. Killing specials and elites fills his beer barrel and then ranger comes to his teamate and same as with healing with the bandages he gives his teamate the beer buff.
(this also could replace his baseline passive of 10% not using stuff and one of the upgrades could be increase beer potency)
And before someone comes and says ''you said that -Ranger needs changes but not straight up buffs. and then list buffs"
He is a character with nonexistent passive that works only sometimes and you have 2.5 TIMES stroger ranger passive on neck trinket or charm
RV being one of strongest all around character, amazing support,
his ranged weapons are all good (maybe outside xbow, its sucks comparing to handgun in what it should do).
Unique buff/potions+bombs/or even more ammo that its pointless because 10% is enough to have everyone on full most of time
Good survivability, even in oh shiet situation he can save ppl with his ult/ bomb/ free bomb and with big chance to not waste healing him instantly.
Some talents needs rework they are quite outshined by rest but overall RV is strong if not strongest bardin proffesion.
I think it’s reasonable to worry the Engineer might overshadow Ranger Veteran.
They both appear to fulfill the same role or excel at ranged back-lining.
“Doomranger” is arguably one of the highest DPS build in DWONS but there’s far less density, bulwarks and fewer specials in official realm; Grudge-Raker is expensive to run and doesn’t get as much bang for your buck compared to DWONS.
Firing Fury Crossbow is pretty fun, DPS wise a Repeater Handgun Huntsman outclasses it and has better ammunition sustain. Handgun Huntsman is all around stronger than Handgun RV.
Throwing Axes are meme worthy and sadly better on Slayer.
I wouldn’t go as far to say his ammo support is “amazing”.
It’s barely noticeable in lower difficulties and considering Ranger Veteran’s main strength lies in sustained fire + Firing Fury/Master of Improvisation, it’s not really feasible to share that many ammunition caches, especially base 10% caches.
Right now Ranger Veteran’s biggest strength is his sustained ranged DPS + reload speed and bomb dupe.
The Engineer appears to have solid horde, boss and elite DPS with the mingun plus effectively infinite ammo, in addition to that he can run a true ranged weapon like the Handgun to deal with specials as well as potential bomb synergy.
FS mentioned his biggest drawback is lackluster melee capabilities but Ranger Veteran’s melee capabilities are nothing to brag about.
My biggest fear is the Engineer might step on Ranger Veteran’s toes, strength and identity too much.
I think your fear of RV being overshadowed by Engineer as the shooty-Bardin is pretty realistic. I don’t feel like some others do, that RV is a really bad class currently (at most that he lacks a little) however.
I think the solution is to make RV lean more into his hybrid / utility role instead of him trying to be shooty, so he “competes” with Engineer less for his role. Maybe RV should get some melee and toughness buffs, and I like the spirit of your ideas for talents making melee and ranged interact somehow.
A massive way to change Ranger Bardin would be to integrate one of Engineer Bardin’s features into him.
Get rid of the ‘10% chance to not use items’ innate ability, and replace it with something similar to ‘Carry 3 Bombs’. Instead, make it so Ranger Cardin can ‘Carry Three Items’.
That’s it.
How is that different, you ask? Well, usually, the character can already carry three separate items. Medkit/Healing Draft, Potion and Bomb.
Now, just have it so all of Ranger Bardin’s Item Slots can carry any type of those items. That gives Bardin the leeway to choose their own role. You want to maximize potions? Carry two or three of them. You wish to be Bardin the Grenadier with 3 bombs, sacrificing carrying healing or potions? You can do that.
Even being able to carry 3 healing items would be nice. How many times have people walked by a Healing Draft, because they were full, and a party member was too far away to backtrack to get it?
Those are your 3 problem talents (I say while regularly using them) because they don’t do enough to support the Ranger Veteran theme. Shotgun dwarf is extremely good, but he’s only sort of ok at everything else and not enough stand out stuff to make him really different from Huntsman. I think RV would benefit from having Master of Improv possibly moved to level 25 row and then completely rework the level 10 row with much more dramatic stuff. For example, WHC’s and BW’s level 10 rows contain powerful talents that determine ones builds in dramatic and satisfying ways.
RV just needs his stupid item dupe passives turned into something useful. That’s it. As long as Engineer can’t use Grudge Raker as well as RV or generate bombs/potions like RV can I’m sure he will retain his niche.
I still think those dumb dupe passives should be replaced with something that instead increases the potency of bombs/potions/heals. Would be unique and stick with a similar theme to what we have.
Edit: Ok yeah Last Resort also obviously needs to go, and Foe Feller & No Dawdling could be replaced with something more active and impactful. Needing a few talents tweaked or replaced isn’t really unique to RV though, that’s true of most classes.
Give him the Red 'raker from vt1 with 4 shots instead of 2 as a unique weapon.
I completely agree with @alsozara - the passives are largely useless as ammo is abundant on all ranged classes, potions and healing options are the same across all of the characters and classes and almost no one in QP drinks the ale.
Taking inspiration from D&D he could have a talent line for favoured enemies. - Skaven, Beastmen or Humans. giving some specific buff vs that race, or his passive could be a build on his self reliance giving him some kind of increased stamina, or THP goes to Green HP when fighting his favoured enemy.
OR he drops a potion only he can provide, like a combi potion of all three. maybe he could get a bomb from an ammo crate that only he can use.
There’s loads of ideas better than simply dropping ammo.
Oh sorry if I wasn’t clear. It’s only Ingenious Improvisation I have an issue with. Survivalist is great. I honestly like all the level 20 talents too though I would tweak them a touch:
Drunken Brawler: Ales only wear off one at a time rather than all at once (just like real booze!)
Grugni’s: Probably nerf down to 20%
Scavenger: Put the drops on a rotation eg strength pot, then grenade, speed pot, fire bomb, conc pot then back to the start. Would also help if they spawned every X special kills rather than based off a % drop chance.
Because Fatshark will never make two talents strong enough to even compare to Improv. It’s not a broken talent, they just aren’t going to top it in a meaningful way.
Eh that’s very weapon dependant. You’re probably not gonna get much use out of Improv with handgun for instance, so if they put something that synergises well with handgun on that row I can see it getting picked over Improv for that build at least.
Crossbow can definitely do well with Improv but only if you’re using it with firing fury and aggressively shooting hordes with it. If you’re mainly using crossbow for sniping and mostly going melee for hordes I can absolutely see a competitive option being added to that row for crossbow.
RV already has high dmg output with shotgun. RV is weak because monster dps is weak. Monster dps is kind of beyond your skill. As ranged dps, low monster dps means just weak.
As supportive career, party wise monster dps buff would work. While inside smoke, ally gets 50% monster type dps.
I think other changes won’t make much difference because he still can’t kill monster.