What do you look for in a ranger pawn?

[Flying Scorpion]

I've been looking at a good healer pawn and I've realized that it's hard to find a pawn with everything that I'm looking for in a healer. If you're reading this and you have a healer pawn, I'll totally rent from you if it has the following: Anodyne, Halidom, Voidspell, and Spellscreen (edit* Just learned that it's impossible for all four of these to be on the same pawn) - as well as a Medicant primary personality. Having the staff that auto-ressurrects the pawn would be a nice bonus.

If I could find such a pawn around my level (93) I would be sure to use it for a long time. It's just hard to find such a pawn.

This got me thinking... what about my ranger pawn? What are others looking for in a ranger pawn?

My pawn currently is:

Challenger/Utilitarian

Dagger skills:
Hundred Kisses
Advanced Trigger
Dazzle Blast

Bow Skills:
Ten-Fold Arrow (amazing combination with mystic knights magic cannon)
Spiral Arrow
Crippling Arrow

Augments are mostly stuff that increases her damage output.

nearly 1K damage strength on her bow. Definitely could be more, but it'll come later.

If you're interested, I'll share the story of how my pawn has been shaped through my playthrough...

Level 1-30: I allowed my ranger pawn to become whatever personality she wanted. I was an assassin, and she developed a scather personality. I noticed that she started to prefer to run in with her daggers and climb on top of enemies, instead of using her bow.

Level 30-60: I used potions to change her personality to become Challenger/Mitigator/Utilitarian (as suggested by many other players). I switched my own voction to Ranger so I could try out the skills that she was using to see what it's like to actually *BE* a ranger. Together we rained arrows on our enemies, side-by-side. I decided that body binder is too difficult to use for the AI to use properly, and I noticed that pawns are VERY good at timing deathly arrow shots perfectly. I learned that ten-fold arrow does much better DPS than deathly arrow; however, ten-fold arrow burns through stamina pretty fast if you spam it - and pawns use this ability sparingly.

Level 60-90: I took away her body binder skill and I switched my main vocation back to melee. I've watched her persnoality evolve from this point and I haven't really had to use potions on her much at all. She's been rented a number of times and I gained about 450,000 RC from her rentals. She knows more quests than I do now, and she's got mostly 2/3 or 3/3 stars in her bestiary. Without using potions on her, and even while playing a melee class, she has developed a challenger/utlitarian personality. Which seems fine for me, for a ranger.

Her gear is good enough for Bitterblack Isle. I plan to upgrade it after I finish getting better gear for my main character.

So what do you look for in a Ranger?

[Armgard]

Voidspell is only for sorcerers, you can't get it all in one package. And why would you want Medicant as primary? It just makes the pawn heal all the time. From my experience you don't necessarily need Medicant even in the tertiary priority, the pawn will still heal if you take lots of damage or fall under 50% health, at least mine does.

[Senpire]

You'd be surprised how many people will hire your pawn if you dress it well, and if the inclinations are nice.

I have a ranger pawn myself, but didn't like how she would seem to use her daggers more often than her bows. I made her a challenger/mitigator. So I removed her daggers. I also tried to design her to look as cool as possible.

[GrayHound]

Ranger pawns are divided into three categories:
1) Has great gamble
2) Doesn't have GG
3) Has a 3rd tier skill and is therefore useless

I prefer rangers with GG as they have perfect aiming and can do insane damage, especially to dragons and cyclopes. It's just preference, really.
As for daggers, I may be better to give them just hundred kisses and nothing else as the other attacks are useless.

[Flying Scorpion]

Originally posted by Smartnik:

Voidspell is only for sorcerers, you can't get it all in one package. And why would you want Medicant as primary? It just makes the pawn heal all the time. From my experience you don't necessarily need Medicant even in the tertiary priority, the pawn will still heal if you take lots of damage or fall under 50% health, at least mine does.

Well thank you! I was wondering why it was so hard to get a pawn with all four of those abilities! The hunt is over, finally.

[Severian]

Originally posted by GrayHound:

Ranger pawns are divided into three categories:
1) Has great gamble
2) Doesn't have GG
3) Has a 3rd tier skill and is therefore useless

I prefer rangers with GG as they have perfect aiming and can do insane damage, especially to dragons and cyclopes. It's just preference, really.
As for daggers, I may be better to give them just hundred kisses and nothing else as the other attacks are useless.

What's useless about 3rd tier ranger skills? I don't have any of the rings yet, but I'm curious, since my pawn is also a strider or ranger most of the time.

[Uimet]

Originally posted by GrayHound:

Ranger pawns are divided into three categories:
1) Has great gamble
2) Doesn't have GG
3) Has a 3rd tier skill and is therefore useless

I prefer rangers with GG as they have perfect aiming and can do insane damage, especially to dragons and cyclopes. It's just preference, really.
As for daggers, I may be better to give them just hundred kisses and nothing else as the other attacks are useless.

I agree mostly most of the time you would want your pawn to dish out the most damage and finish it off instead of dancing around

Her spira and deadly shot are great but I received report from Friends that they are hardly any better then tenfold even with the the upgrade version with the ranger band which I had

So dagger
1. Thousand kiss
2. Dazzle kinda helps for lower level player but end (farming daimon mode) game does not matter anymore

Bow
1. Tenfold and tenfold only

You don't want her to do anything else but tenfold

[Flying Scorpion]

A smattering of opinions I see.

Siggan says don't equip any daggers and inclinations should be challenger/mitigator
GrayHound says only have great gamble and hundred kisses for daggers
GamerJH says thousand kisses and ten-fold arrow only.

Personally, I like having dazzle on my ranger as it helps lock down enemies and prevent damage from coming in. Also helps lock them down as I close the distance to perform melee.

[Greb]

I don't look for Ranger pawns at all.

Striders are better with Daggers.
Fighters are better for overall utility.
Mages are better for keeping everyone topped up, and fighting with buffs.
Sorcerers are better for finishing off large enemies, and keep everyone de-petrified.

Rangers lack in the dagger department, and since longbows suffer a damage penalty at close range and even Pioneer primary pawns can't hang back far enough to make any real use of their bow, except in only marginal circumstances, they're functionally worthless.

A Strider pawn with Thousand Kisses, Brainsplitter and Hailstorm Volley will take anything on short and midrange without much fuss involved at all.

If I did look for a Ranger pawn for whatever reason, I'd make sure they had Challenger/Pioneer as their inclinations (with Scather as a Tertiary hopefully) and had no daggers equipped at all, but with a Gold Rarefied Rusted Bow so they could Torpor enemies with their rapid hits.

Rangers can have an interesting function with Great Gamble if they decide to use it, since they can be eerily accurate with it.

Honestly the only real use I can see for a Ranger is giving it Great Gamble, giving it 50 Mushroom Potages so it is forced to drink them constantly to stay in the fight, and acting as your personal stamina battery for the whole party, randomly recovering the groups stamina while they do all the REAL work killing monsters.

[Recumbent]

I'm still really low level, but I play a Ranger Arisen with a Ranger pawn.

In my case, my pawn is there for crowd control, being a Utilitarian, synergizing with other pawns. /I'm/ the cannon.

I've tried loading out my last playthrough's ranger pawn with GG, and she never ever used it. Perhaps I need to load myself up with it as well, and demonstrate it to my pawn repeatedly to get the AI to start using it?

[Uimet]

Originally posted by Flying Scorpion:

A smattering of opinions I see.

Siggan says don't equip any daggers and inclinations should be challenger/mitigator
GrayHound says only have great gamble and hundred kisses for daggers
GamerJH says thousand kisses and ten-fold arrow only.

Personally, I like having dazzle on my ranger as it helps lock down enemies and prevent damage from coming in. Also helps lock them down as I close the distance to perform melee.

Yes dazzle works wonder it's a good thing she does not spam dazzle on bosses because it does not work on them

It's mostly for people that are still exploring new area and challenge with non-op builds to help out the fight....but in most case at my stage of the game I basically killed everything before she could dazzle anything or even dazzled but does not matter anyway

[Black Hammer]

I really don't care for ranger pawns at all, to be honest. If I'm a spellcaster, I want a backup caster pawn with the spells I don't have or don't want to be bothered with (buffs, healing, off elements), and two tougher melee pawns, one targeting strongest enemy, one targeting weak ones.

If I'm playing a strider/assassin/ranger myself, I want a caster or two and a tank.

Only if I'm trying to tank would I want an archer. In that case, I'd want a dagger/kiss spam climber type. I've never noticed pawns making good use of bows to target weakspots half as effectively as they use damage spells.

[Harukage]

Ranger without the Great Gamble skill is not a Ranger. Nothing else among ranger's skills can even get anywhere close in terms of damage output. Combine it with a perfect accuracy of a pawn.

[Uimet]

Originally posted by Harukage:

Ranger without the Great Gamble skill is not a Ranger. Nothing else among ranger's skills can even get anywhere close in terms of damage output. Combine it with a perfect accuracy of a pawn.

That's what you think and what most people think here, but not on my report thou

Most people I have interviewed has been saying they have too Long of a cast time and not very effective in most fights either they stand there and take a hit and die or get Knock out of cast

[BurlsoL]

Originally posted by Flying Scorpion:

A smattering of opinions I see.

Let me add another one. I've rented a few Ranger pawns with challenger/mitigator. They tend to have trouble deciding what to do against anything more dangerous than a harpy. The last one I rented, with no daggers, no dagger skills, and only tenfold was nearly useless. It would still try to climb onto most enemies and try to punch them to death when it wasn't just running around uselessly trying to get into position before rubberbanding back close to where I happened to have been fighting. Maybe it's designed as a pawn for someone who is more range focused, but if so, it's an example as to how pawns can be very different for different people.

For me, I like a pawn that can behave autonomously without me having to babysit their behavior or constantly keep reviving/saving them. For melee types, this means being able to distract one drake while I work on another. For rangers and sorc, this means waiting for the right moment to strike. For Mage, this means keeping the party healed and enchanted without constantly being killed.

As I tend to play more close quarters and do a fair amount of climbing, the best Ranger pawns I've seen have been Scather/Pioneer. Yes, this means that they will occasionally use their daggers or dagger skills to assist the party, But if the skills they have access to are more support than damage, like dazzle or toss&trigger, this bit of cqc they do usually helps stun and break the defenses of what is being fought. It may not be optimal, but it's what I've found works well for myself.