Heya,

I'm nowhere near a combat expert, but it looks like you might need to backtrain shield until it is on par with your other armors and defensive akills. While backtraining shield, you could work on brig and plate as well as your lowbie weapons. I think black goblins or stompers near Boar Clan could work or the juvenile/young armadillos on M'riss...

When you are using your bow skills, are you reducing parry to 0 and increasing shield to max?? I'm assuming you are also using all available defensive buffs-sks, instinct, sott, CS (for balance and position), and MAF/LW when appropriate? At the same time debuffing the heck outta your old at level critters (storm bulls,etc) with devolve, cotw, HB or deadfall, and weave?

Also, you could try switching to being a metal (chain) armor primary Ranger or the lowest hindrance shield you can find. Training strength and discipline should positively impact your shield usage.

-Kivi, proud to have shield as my primary armor.

With only 30 more evasion than you, i've been in young wyvern around, but have higher stats and parry/shield. I love Hib/Boar as a ranger hang out, and started with mountain giants, went to stompers, apes, and then splitters, then hopped to wyvern. Goblins might be a good fit in there and depending on how you do with buffs you could swap between stuff to work boxes and skins.

With your evasion so far outpacing every thing else, it'll take a while to get balanced again. I used to push my bow far ahead to circle and then found I had to work in multiple hunting zones. Easier to just make sure the secondary/tert stuff is keeping up and then move on.

Jalika

Young and juvenile wyverns don't do the dropping thing, don't have to worry about that till adults. They do have stacking poison though, so bring herbs, especially ones that heal internals.

Ya, I haven't gone up to the adults yet, though I did pick up one of the cloaks at the last fest preemptively. I'm starting to feel like I'm going to be in this hunting ground forever, kind of like how I felt after Rossman Gryphons. I think I'll probably be ready to move on after juvies.

Jalika