Rangers

Guide to Training

Foundation
The first two skills that I always recommend to learn first is Physical Training and Missile Weapons. Physical Training will improve your body. Because of this, you will heal more of your wounds when resting. Also, when you gain in power, your physically fit body has provided you with more health as well. The missile skill will help accuracy with bows and crossbows as well as reduce the time you need to knock another arrow. These two skills form the foundation for any Ranger.

Offensive
The next set of skills that I find very useful are the offensive ones. These skills include Multiple Attacks, Warcraft (gl 9), Called Shot (gl 13), and Stunning Blow (gl 20). Multiple Attacks allows you the chance to fire your bow twice in a given attack. The more you have this skill studied, the better chance you will do a multiple attack. Warcraft helps you find inherent weaknesses in a monster and exploit that weakness to deal more damage to it. Learning warcraft to extremely high levels will greatly help your damage. Called shot allows you to aim at a monster. Aiming at a monster takes more time and the chance of hitting that monster is reduced. However, because you are targeting a weaker point on the monster, you will do more damage than you normally would. Stunning Blow allows you the chance to strike a monster in such a way to incapacitate them. The higher your skill in this, the stuns will occur more frequently and longer.

Defensive
The defensive skills include Toughness, Dodging, Resilience, and Spell Resistance. Toughness reduces the damage you will take by improving your physical fitness. Dodging helps you avoid blows entirely. Similiarly, Resilience and Spell Resistance represent the magical defenses. Resilience will reduce the effect from magical attacks. Spell Resistance will completely resist a magical attack.

Non-Combative
The Non-Combative skills that I find useful are Weaponsmithing, Armourer, Riding, Barter, and Awareness. Weaponsmithing will help you forge weapons. Likewise, Armourer will help you forge armor. However, there are better reasons to learn these skills. When you achieve a skill level of pre-eminent for weaponsmithing, you will be able to balance your own weapons. A balanced weapon will help you do more damage. I estimate it to be 20-100% more damage that compared to an unbalanced weapon. When you reach the Ranger subguild, you will have a chance to make your own armor. Thus, you will want to have a bit of the Armourer skill to make dyed leather and, at a later guild portal, dragon armor. Riding will help you mount your mount. Barter will reduce the cost of buying items and increase the gold received from selling items. And Awareness will help you discover things.