Hello folks! I've managed to train up my hiding and stalking up quite hi, but the targets I'm fighting either run away or die before I can get armor training (leather), and I need only longbow and leather armor for about five circles... anyway, if I stand and bang I get torn up pretty fast with multiple blood wolves, so I took people advice and got some brawling gear, a parry stick, and backtrained my brawling and parry up while keeping myself well balanced.

Here's where I'm at now:

Leather Armor: 93
Parry: 82
Longbow: 105
Shortbow: 78
Brawling: 84
Hiding: 144
Stalking: 135

I'm looking for a good weapon combo utilizing my longbow (and I'll also make a Shortbow combo for my back training) that will do something like this.
Keep myself buffed with ranger spells Senses of the Tiger and See the Wind
Shoot Bow from hiding
Ambush / Brawling attacks

I'm a ranger with the following stats:
Strength : 16
Reflex, Agility, Wisdom, and Intelligence of 26
Discipline, Stamina of 24

Wearing Shalswar Leathers
Forged Steel Claws and Elbow Spikes
Store Bought Steel Footwraps

Using made razor arrows and bows.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Uh, you need to increase strength. 16 isn't enough. Unless you're doing it for very specific reasons. It'll increase your vitality pool a little, as well.

Personally I don't cross combo weapons. I just train bow via poach then swap and train brawling and etc. also yes, shield good. You might just post a basic run down on weapons, armors, stats, and other things. It seems like you have some fundamental misunderstandings of DR systems.

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Adding nothing to the conversation since 1834.

Armor hindrance can be worked off at fairly low ranks - I'd keep the Shalswars on since you're already most of the way there, and it's fairly negligible anyways. Just as long as you don't have a burden.

Train shield.

You don't need a ton of Strength to be effective, but I'd recommend raising it to about 20. After that you should be able to forget about it totally. Focus on Disc/Reflex/Int/Agil for awhile.

If you use longbow and brawling, get brawling moving first - being at melee will get your defenses moving. Use a lower damage brawling routine to get 'em rollin then switch to a higher damage routine when they're at a satisfactory level. Or you could do bow/hiding in-between and then finish brawling after they lock.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

>> I don't think I'd agree with leaving strength at 20, but I'm curious as to why. The increased load carrying is nice, but it's more a work up to using heavier weapons at lower RTs.

Because he's not in a contest to juggle lots of skills, only training 2? weapons, and at that level survivability is just more important. There just aren't many perks to justify training it much higher at this point(for the moment), assuming he has burden under control, and you get the most bang for your buck from those stats in each of their domains.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

Here's where I'm at now: Brawling is at 116, Longbow still 106, and Short Staff/Light Edged/Medium Edged/Heavy Edged all just a bit higher than 100, with parry at 127, shield at 132, evasion at 136. Strength atill at 16, charisma at 10, everything else between 26 and 28. Having a great time cutting through snow beasts with no trouble and started hunting gargoyles. The good thing is that all my melee weapons are doing a fantastic job taking out the critters. I'm sure if I just stuck to one weapon I'd start climbing levels faster. The issue is that shield/parry/evasion all locks fairly fast, even when I'm ambushing. I guess I'll stay hunting Snowbeasts until my armors stop moving before I move onto crocs/gargs full time. Gotta admit, archery has proven to be a very very slow hunting process, especially poaching.

Maybe I've got it wrong, but in terms of time. It seems that every successful hit pushes along the experience. Brawling currently is the fastest for me, for in my attack combo I do a 10 move combo. All my other weapons (LE, ME, HE, SS, Pike) all do 4-6 move combos. It seems that for each successful move, the damage adds to the experience pool. Just about every attack combo I do gets a kill, a devitalize spell helps quite a bit. However, the time it takes for the longbow to be loaded, aimed, and fired adds more time to the overall hunt, as well as the time spent recovering arrows. I was able to advance in longbow with a lot of patience and hard work (poaching turned out to be a huge time suck, chasing down critters with 4-5 arrows lodged in 'em). I was running a combat macro for quite awhile that fought at melee, but I didn't parry or wear a shield. I tried working in brawling to improve my parry, but mostly all I was getting was evasion failure and little to no movement in evasion. Of course, wearing a shield was useless with the longbow. Once I switched over to melee weapons, shield, and parry my armor/evasion/shield/parry all moved to lock, and my bundled filled up with skins in not time. Even with my encumbrance beyond heavy burden I can still bang with four snowbeasts with no problems.

I short, I deduced that if I wanted to continue my career as a stickbow ranger, I would have to pick up a melee weapon and train it at the same rate of the longbow.

But figure this. It took me about the same amount of playtime to gain 15 ranks in five melee weapons than it took me to gain 15 ranks in one ranged weapon. I guess if I wanted to go back to longbow I'd have to figure out what I'm doing wrong.