How to Play a Ranger

Thank you for the feedback on my Warrior guide. As always, I would like to discourage cheating and look forward to a time when Armageddon staff will be willing to take part in a legitimate dialog with disgruntled players that would make a board of this sort unneeded.

I am writing this guide primarily for new players. If you've been playing for much more than a year you probably won't learn anything new, however I am sure that there are at least a couple of folks who will enjoy reading. I've already had a couple of requests for this and wish you the best of luck with your ranger.

A new player who has played five or six warriors will be ready to attempt a new ranger character. I really like rangers much more than warriors. While warriors are indeed really good at fighting, most of the other classes (including ranger) can also become quite good at fighting and will additionally get some very interesting skills that make gameplay much more enjoyable.

So roll up your character. Humans can make quite good rangers, but here I'll also give a mention to the dwarf. Dwarves are one of the easy twink vectors of Armageddon. Role-played properly, dwarves come with personality quirks that would far outweigh any coded benefits, but the good news (heh) is that most players just ignore these, and the staff simply don't hold players accountable. So go ahead, play a dwarven ranger with impunity. A good focus could be something general and combat/exploration related. If you haven't played a dwarf yet, now would be a good time. Desert-elf characters should almost always be rangers, unless you're playing a magic-user.

Your beginning steps with your ranger will not be dissimilar to those as a warrior. You'll want to raise just a bit of money and procure your starter gear, and then get into a game clan. You'll want to invest in a decent hooded desert cloak. You'll want to keep your hood up most of the time. One of your earliest tasks should be to buy or steal a complete set of cures, which are the antidotes. Poison is one of the more dangerous attacks in the game, but is usually survivable if you take the simple precautionary step to carry a couple of cures. If you've been poisoned, and are not sure which antidote to take, consider taking all of them. It may say your life.

As mentioned, the Byn is a reasonable choice. Inside of your game clan, you will be exposed to a bit of sparring, etc. that will buff up your character.

To clarify, you're developing a set of general combat abilities that you will mostly use defensively. Once you are an elite ranger, there will not be a lot of point in engaging your enemies (or monsters that you're hunting) in extensive hand-to-hand combat. Your primary offense will be through your bow.

Indeed, I would consider archery to be the penultimate ability of the ranger. Useful for hunting. Useful for penetrating troop positions. And a useful weapon for assassination. Indeed, it could be argued that if you intend to play an assassin, that ranger's make a better guild for this than the actual assassin guild. Unfortunately you will not have many opportunities to train this skill while you are in a game clan. Pestering your sergeant over this will result in all likelihood only in drawing their ire. But when you leave your clan, this is the first skill you should work on, and the skill that will serve you the best.

Training archery will be expensive until you can make your own arrows. Consider buffing up your archery skill by using a sling first. This is such an easy/effective twink that it's a shame that they don't teach this to new characters. It's easy to forage for the small black stones that make reasonable sling ammunition.

A word about equipment – don't sand-bag yourself by wearing too much armor. Rangers can get by wearing less armor and cheaper armor than a warrior. The one item that I would really recommend splurging on is a good bow.

Now that your archery is twinked up to a level where you can kill a raptor in less than five shots, it's time to make sure that you have a good mental map of the major trading posts in the game. Allanak and Tuluk, the usual starting positions, sit at opposite ends of the North Road. In the middle of the road sits Luir's Outpost. Be careful in Luir's. Luir's makes an excellent meeting place due to it's central location, and both a decent trading post and place to get the news, but I'll advise against having lengthy interactions with House Kurac. Consider avoiding them altogether. House Kurac periodically serves as a collection point for various disgruntled PK who think it's humorous to sick their half-giant NPC bodyguards on you when you're having a drink. Consider avoiding Luir's Outpost altogether when Kurac is active. Red Storm East is gone. Red Storm lies to the south of Allanak. Cenwyr is in the Red Desert.

And next it's good to work on your general navigational abilities. I suggest when you're new, get your hands on a good map from another player. I'll admit I had one. It's funny – I don't consider myself to be a hardcore cheater, but it's hard to imagine playing Arm without the benefit of a good map. Do just a bit of poking around to verify regions of the map. Commit most of the map to memory, and then stop using it. This is important – I can't imagine being any good at Armageddon if I were using a map as a crutch. You need one to begin to visualize the game sandbox, but over-reliance on it will stunt your navigational abilities rather than promote them.

Let's face it – sometimes it's easy to get turned around. If you're running from a gith and then you bump into a raptor, a couple of uses of the flee command can leave you unsure of your bearings. But finding your way home will not be difficult in most cases, since most regions of the game are competitively small. Study each region until you have a simple formula for finding your way back. For example, if someone dropped me off at a random point in the salt flats, I would simply head south until I found the shore, and then follow the shore back west to Red Storm. Boom, home in two turns! Or let's say I was lost somewhere in the dusty plains? Head north until I find the road, and then the road should bring you back to Allanak! It's pretty difficult to get lost in most regions if you understand where the boundaries are and where the roads will take you.

I would recommend learning where the Black Wing Outpost is, but will recommend against frequent trips there. The staff seem to have given free reign to desert-elf players to beat up and PK players there with few repercussions and to no real purpose.

Now that you know how to hunt and how to find your way around, I'd recommend doing most of your melee from horseback. In my experience, once your ride skill is good enough you will be a more effective fighter when mounted, and will be better poised to flee if needed. Additionally you will get access to the trample skill, one that I find to be overlooked.

Then begin working to brew your own cures. This may produce a limited form of income given that most new hunters will want to buy some of these from you, as well as most mercantile groups and military organizations. The little red pills, one of the more important cures, can be made from two bimbal leaves, which are the sap-filled plants near Allanak. I'm sure someone else will be willing to provide additional recipes as I don't remember them all. If cheating is not your thing, veteran hunters often trade these recipes around legitimately in game indiscriminately.

Having learned to brew your own cures, ride, hunt and navigate, you are really basically self-sufficient. Water can be procured by breaking a couple of plants in the red desert, as well as foraged at several easily accessible points in the forest that lies east of Tuluk. You will have no real need for money. Which becomes ironic, because rangers are in my opinion the guild best suited to procuring tons of money.

If for example, you plan to become to become a merchant, rangers are *much* better suited to this than the actual merchant guild. While guild-merchants have impressive crafting skills, rangers have reasonable crafting skills of their own. Guild-merchants will be dependent upon rangers for materials and will frequently develop supply problems, which almost never becomes an issue for a ranger. What's more is that the ease that a ranger can move between trading points should be taken into account.

Now that you're really self-reliant, the you might be wondering what to do next? I'll provide a few ideas but this list will certainly not be exhaustive. If for example, you've got some hunting in mind, consider teaming up with a buddy and getting an apartment or two somewhere. If you can get an extra mount, you'll find that two (or three) guys can transport a fantastic amount of cargo, materials and trade goods from the desert and between cities.

Probably the most impressive ranger that I ever worked with (when I was new) was probably a staff controlled character, an ex-Bynner. This guy had a small gang that traveled around. We'd start in Red Storm and go mine or hunt a bunch of stuff, then make a drop in Allanak to a couple of our customers. We'd spend the night near Allanak foraging for stones. The next day it was right back out to the desert and we were hunting scrabs. Scrabs were the real money maker for us. Remember to always let a ranger do the skinning, as the cut can make a big difference. Most of our money was actually made selling food and so it's important to build your cooking skill if you plan to earn serious money. That evening we would spend in Cenwyr polishing hides and the like. The next day it was into the Red Desert for us, and we'd take down some raptors and things. Our circuit would continue up to Tuluk which was probably our home base. We made our own arrows. In the course of a real life day, our little gang of three or four people would pull in two thousand without really pushing it.

If the hunting life doesn't appeal to you, another good and easy niche to fill in the game world, is to map out all of the locations where herbs grow. Staff change these periodically and so accurate information will be valued by other players, as will the raw herbs or brewed items themselves.

Another, perhaps more exciting avenue to adventure is to work procuring (illegal?) spell components for the gemmed. Usually these can be found foraging for stone in caves. By making yourself useful to the gemmed, it's not difficult to get access to the plotlines and information that would usually be restricted from mundane characters.

The criminal potential of rangers should not be overlooked. Probably my most successful criminal character, from a financial standpoint, was a ranger. During raids I took probably tens of thousands of coins worth of materials and specie from player characters, usually clanned player characters. My ability to fade into the wilderness and avoid human settlements made it very difficult for the sponsored clan characters to retaliate.

If you feel the need to explore, keep in mind that staff sometimes discourage this, except for certain areas. The Red Desert makes an excellent place to explore if you are a newish player. The salt flats are mostly fine, as is the area around Allanak and to the east of Tuluk, provided you are mindful of cilops. It might be better to avoid the Tablelands.

I'll offer a few more words of advice. Avoid traveling in the desert alone. There are many simple problems in the desert that can be easily solved by having an extra skin of water or some rope or something that will otherwise kill you if you don't have a buddy with you that can offer a bit of assistance or can ride off to get help. If you encounter a magic-user in the wilderness, consider running the hell away. If you encounter a desert-elf in the table-lands, run the hell away. If staff animate a character out in the desert or something, consider it a warning and be prepared to run the hell away. Avoid poking around in any of the numerous mysterious caves that seem either to be haunted, evil or home to sinister sorcerers. There won't be very much around for you to do except to get killed. It's a crappy way to loose a character. Take twice as much survival gear into the desert with you as you think you'll need. You never know when you'll run into a trap or a sandstorm. Poisons are worth exploring but make sure to keep a steady supply of cures on hand first. It's easy to accidentally dose yourself fatally on poison. Use your ability to quit in the wilderness quite liberally. It's useful for escaping the militia, raiders, monsters or even just a boring sandstorm.

Thank you for taking the time to read this guide. Please feel free to provide criticism or feedback. I'll be providing my guide for playing an assassin tomorrow. Thanks for the encouragement that I've gotten from other players. It's interesting how polite and civil that people are on here which is supposedly a cheater's board, compared to how snarky people are over on the GDB. Please let me know if you have any additional requests.