Allanaki Ranger Advice?

If you don't mind burning a spec app, ranger/protector is like, a living god.

I should add that most of my priorities when playing games are holdovers from playing Diablo 2 on hardcore mode. Normal mode on nightmare/hell levels was bad enough, on hardcore you REALLY have to consider different things, whereas the glass cannon is viable in normal (you're still going to want to pump your life and damage reduction), in hardcore you really DO NOT want to invest a month of your life building up your character only to lose them to some lag, a glitch, those exploding dolls or a sudden lightning burst from a whisp boss pack. You start thinking about your utility skills which you can use to bait and mez the enemies, and having a good meat shield horde of skeletons and revives is only bad in that it can lag up or glitch out the game, so you won't be insanely popular in groups but relatively safe if you take it slow.

But hardcore wasn't my favorite way to play the game, it was normal mode, with my kill everything magic finding, key running frozen orb firewall sorc, just bouncing around with teleport like mad and freezing and burning everything to death, or a smiter paladin, which, is just like a boss killing chainsaw. That kind of shit's dangerous in hardcore, it can be pretty vexxing in normal. The only real parallel here is perma-death, which is a pretty big issue you have to consider before every decision, even writing a character app. I don't know about you, but one thing I cannot stand is having something in my PC's background that clearly defines when X happens, my PC HAS to do Y, because there's always going to be situations where doing Y fucks my PC over in some way, whether killing their buddies or charging recklessly into a gith horde, when it was completely up to me in the first place to leave some wiggle room for adaptability. It's just like, oh god, facepalm.

What's the best way to level riding, and is it risky to use when fighting at low skill levels? (I know you can get knocked off your mount and such) No-handed riding comes later, I know (though, is there a good way to tell when you can?) so before that, do you just fight with a single weapon, then?

And how do you determine which mounts are the best? They obviously have various pricing, but there's also a lot of different kinds, and I don't know what I should be looking for in the short/medium/long term.

And thanks a ton for all the advice. I have no idea how you're supposed to learn half this stuff on your own, just given the time it takes to skill up a character.

There's no reason for a non half-giant to ride anything besides a war beetle. Everyone that claims differently is just jerking off. Beetles are superior in every terrain, and can even climb reasonably well. I have regularly walked mine up cliffs and out of every pit in the game. And they take a long time to tire. There's just really no comparison. 

Riding anything but a war beetle is essentially either an act of desperation (half-giants and inixes), ignorance (newbies) or a sophisticated act of masturbation (that dude who is always riding a gwoshi or some such fuckery). Even ratlons (and at one point, I had three of them, which were the only ones surviving in Salarr custody since the glory days of Expansion Division) were basically bullshit. I took one out once, and never rode it again.

So far as I've observed, from owning and riding just about every possible mount in the game, with the exception of ultra-rare stuff like the templar's horse...Mounts have virtually no effect on combat, whether offensively, defensively, or in charge/trample. If they do have an effect, it's very small. Pretty much the only noticeable difference, is stamina and walk speed. Inix go a little bit faster than beetles, but their stamina is shit.

Back in the day, when charge was more broken than it is now (you could just spam it over and over), I smuggled an erdlu into some weird places, to kill shit (subdue, throw). I owned meks, ankhegs and Nyr's god-statted desert elf with a human ranger on a beetle or erdlu. There's not much different these days, except they nerfed charge, and trample is like a shittier, more dangerous version of kicking.

The essential #1 reason for fighting mounted, is that the sheer act of being mounted makes you immune to a lot of dangerous, special attacks. But then, so does sitting down in combat. I used to fight spiders sitting down with a delf, just so I wouldn't get bashed.

Tangential Rant:

The thing about the game's documentation that most people don't realize, is that most of it is like 15-20 years old, and the game has been tended by coders who are basically just like that shitty DM friend you had growing up - who was always compelled to make all of his NPCs stronger than the strongest PC. They stealth nerf, tweak and adjust things all the time, purely on the spur of the moment. They have the same kneejerk reaction to everything. Like in the very same week that Nadhir managed to get a couple magic weapons, they changed it so only mages could use magic weapons. Sure, sure...In a time when the game had fifty people prime time, and ten of those were my subordinates, and we were all building up a cache of magic weapons to equip ourselves with, they just happened to decide, after a RL decade, that mundanes couldn't use magic weapons anymore.

Another example is when Expansion Division learned how to put skulls on farm mode. Never mind the fact that it took like six of the best, most veteran characters on the game working in perfect coordination to pull it off safely. Something that noone before them had managed for YEARS of RL time, staff nerfed the skull drops and made it a death trap. Because God forbid, that 3 RL years later, a team of like-minded, skilled individuals, has a chance of pulling it off again.

They do that shit ALL the time.

A max weight dorf has to dismount a beetle to pack corpses to the beetle, or a mostly full backpack too so take that into consideration.

Also, every time you unstable a mount, its stats get randomly generated. All critters in game have random stats.