How to ranger

Thinking about making a ranger soon. Still deciding on sub-guild and such, but I heard that listen and scan are an incredibly hellish torture to raise. Any tricks to this? Or things to avoid as far as the timers go or what not?

Not 'that' easy. Finding places where NPCs are certain to be hidden requires either a respectable degree of meta knowledge or to start in a place like Red Storm. Listen requires actually having access to places where people are likely to be talking, which makes it appreciably more difficult for a ranger whose preference is to stay out in the wilderness. There's essentially no definite way to raise listen than by hanging around in a tavern during prime time hours in a reasonably populated area. And while this is fine for some people, it's not for others.

Other possible means of raising listen, I believe, can be accomplished by listening one room away from a chattering NPC. Another way of raising listen is to have try and shadow. Listen is checked for noticing if someone is following you while hidden.

Both of these skills have to be taken to around ~80 to branch sneak and hide, which is a ranger's bread and butter. Desert elves don't have this issue, as they start with sneak and hide.

So it's not 'ridiculously' easy. Ridiculously easy was how it used to be, when you just turned scan or listen on, and it had a success check, right then and there. Then you could get scan/listen to max in about 2-3 days play time.

In the current incarnation of the system, even with meta knowledge and twinking, it will probably take 6-9 days to branch sneak and hiding. Generally speaking, the fewer days it takes to branch scan and listen, the more time it will take to raise everything else, since there is no convenient way to work scan/listen at the same time as everything else a ranger has to do.

This does make it much more of a drag than it used to be. 

Yes, perhaps in the grand scheme of things, listen and scan is easier than say, branching parry or getting an advanced weapon skill. But it definitely interferes with my rhythm in the first ten days of rangerhood, and is unavoidable because of how much stuff branches from those two skills. Trekking out to where the hidden NPCs are is a pain in the ass, since they're typically nowhere near where you want to be hunting that early into your career, and tavern sitting is boring as hell, and again, you don't want to be drawing attention anyways. And you better hope there's people around having a conversation when you're around. You're fucked if you're an off-peak player...it's not unheard of for some off-peak players under the new system to not branch listen until 12+ days in.

Again. It's easier if you're prime time and social, but most rangers will end up sucking hardcore if they get tied down to a clan, or start in the wrong place, too early on. In fact, provided you want to have a twink ranger, and not just a ranger, I recommend avoiding all clans and clan responsibilities until at least parry is branched.

I really wouldn't waste an extended subguild on a ranger just to get hide early on. You'll want to raise scan anyway and it can be done in the wilderness, it's not a skill you can neglect, unlike listen. Several subguilds give sneak which lets you ignore listen which is frankly the biggest problem since it's virtually impossible to raise in the wild. Sneak is also the more important skill during the grinding phase as you need it to fight stilt lizards.

Extended subguilds aside, the thief subguild rules supreme. It gives you the following:

City stealth: immensely useful to anybody really. Should need no further explanation, but since I've seen some posters who were confused about this on the GDB in the past, the two stealth modes are not mutually exclusive. Ranger gets wilderness stealth by default (once they have the actual skills, of course) and adding any subguild with city sneak gives the ranger city stealth in addition to wilderness stealth -- not just sneak but also hide, even if the subguild doesn't give hide. Obviously you still have to branch hide.

Sneak: starting with sneak means you don't have to worry about listen. This is crucial if you're reclusive during the heavy skill grind of a ranger's early life. Listen is not inherently useful, but it branches into sneak and thus would need to be raised which is a very annoying task. Thief lets you start with it and it acts as if you've branched it. Contrary to what some believe, you don't need to bring listen to the branching point in order to raise sneak beyond the subguild cap.

Sleight of hand may not be the biggest deal in the grand scheme of things, but the ability to silently draw poisoned longknives is very useful. I think it might also be used to silently open/close doors and containers, which would be nifty, though I haven't tried since that code was added.

The subguild steal skill is awful and I would never even try to use it for actual theft, but there is potentially some remote value in the fact that it lets you steal gear off a sleeping/unconscious person without a) breaking stealth and b) echoing to the room. Note that while thief doesn't get peek, you can peek with 100% success at an unconscious target. Probably not something that will be relevant to a ranger very often but it's worth being aware of.

Delves have an easier time raising listen because they operate in packs, and anyways, they start with sneak and hide.

At the end of the day, for non-delves, sans getting around it with a subguild, raising listen still requires going grossly out of one's way and spending an inordinate amount of time on it. There's no chance of raising it in the wilderness unless you're partnering with someone, and one of you already has sneak branched.

When a non-tribal, typical dwarf or human lone wolf ranger has no means of raising something in the wilderness, that automatically disqualifies it from being ridiculously easy. It might still be sorta easy, or kinda easy for some people. But anything that is essentially impossible for off-peak, non-tavern sitting, non-clanned concepts just can't qualify as 'ridiculously' easy. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it because I branched it like 20 times doing it the old way and had a good routine established for those first 5-7 days.

After it took me like 9 days, playing off-peak, to finally branch the fucking thing, all of my future rangers went thief subguild, absent the half-giant.

I don't entirely understand your reticence at admitting something which can't be raised by one's self - my theory regarding the potential utiliy of NPC criers aside - isn't as perfectly simple as you'd like everyone to believe.

It seems by default that this would make it, at the very least, less convenient than every other skill which doesn't require other PCs to raise. My personal experience was that reliably finding random strangers in off-peak hours was often vexatious.

 I just think we have very different philosophies about what constitutes an efficient use of time in a ranger's first ten days of play time.

I'm sorry to say, but I have a suspicion that unlike myself, you're not a twink. Sorry for the accusation, but most of my advice is geared towards twinks. As a twink, I found taking 6-7 days playtime longer to branch something than I used to, a real inconvenience to my moving to stilt lizards.

And his point is that it can by definition not really be "ridiculously easy" unless you're doing something that's mutually exclusive with raising one's other skills, i.e. dicking around inside a city or spending time with other players which makes it difficult to justify the kind of skillgrinding regimen that this thread is based on.

He's right. Most people burn through characters at an amazing rate from what I've seen. Listen is probably one of the toughest things for a ranger to fast-track next to weapons skills. It really wouldn't hurt to sit in a tavern once in a while and just hope you're not in a crowd that likes to sit there and way each other and often you can catch snatches of conversations outside too. Unless just "appearing out of nowhere" being good is your thing, people generally won't bother you in a meaningful way if you're sitting at your little table off to the side.