As a Ranger Mage, the most IMPORTANT things to you will be your hit points (HP) and spell points (SP). You will need a lot of HP because you are a Ranger Mage and will hunt in places with many strong monsters that hit hard. But, at the same time, you will need a lot of SP, as you will need them to cast heal, colors, and other spells. To ensure that you attain a lot of HP and SP you MUST learn the Physical Training skill and the Spiritual Karma skill. You must learn these skills ALL YOU CAN ALWAYS. They should always be your first priority. Trust me, you'll be thankful later .
Once you have these skills learned as much as you can in your current portal or shop, you need to learn the Missile Weapons Skill to the highest skill rank possible. If learned high enough, you can have a one-second rebalancing time, which is crucial to your progress as a Ranger Mage. It also helps because the faster you are in firing, the better gap you can form between you and your enemy, giving a little more time to cast spells if needed, before it can advance again. This is how you will mix your usage with your bow and your spells. You should NOT learn offense spells, as their damage is capped for non-standard mages and you'll not get anywhere with them. So no fireflames, chill or zap at all! Now, in order to learn the MW skill, you need to either seek out a fellow Ranger Mage, or a high level Ranger of the Fighters' Guild. Lastly, learn the Riding skill as high as you can too. You will need it for cool mounts like the guild mount. When riding a mount, you can charge for damage up to three times your original attack. That's it for the Ranger side of your skills. For your mage side, be sure tae ALWAYS learn the NSU skill and be sure that the heal spell and colors are your first spells tae max! That is VERY important.
As a Ranger Mage you are confined to a slim choice of bows/crossbows and such, since all the other special bows are only offered in the Fighters' Guild. But the ones you will get will be effective nonetheless. Your choice of weapons are light and heavy crossbows, willow bows, ash wood bows, and the elven short bow. In my best opinion as a Magus Ranger, the elven short bow and heavy crossbow will be the two weapons that will best help you to progress. The elven short bow especially, because there are special monsters that you can only damage by using a magical weapon, and the elven short bow is a level 1 magic item. So you will need this to hunt in some areas with magical monsters. Also over time, I've noticed the elven short bow gets better enchants than just normal weapons, which will be explained in the next couple of sections. The best damage is done by the heavy crossbow. As with any other item, you can find out a weapon's stats by examining it repeatedly.
There will be many places for you to hunt and gain good experience. Fight under the bar of the Adventurer's Guild until level 4. Your style of fighting as a Ranger Mage will be somewhat like this: shoot shoot shoot... retreat... shoot shoot shoot... retreat. Your goal should be to hit the enemy and stay out of advancement with your opponent. The beauty of using bows and crossbows is that you never have to waste time advancing and risking getting hit to wound the creature. So basically all you have to do is shoot, shoot, shoot, and then when the creature advances on you, retreat right away to give you more time to get in shots before he advances again. This will be your fighting tactic as a Ranger Mage. And it's a pretty safe tactic where you shouldn't get hit too much, unless by VERY fast enemies or other opponents that use bows/crossbows as well. You'll just have to rely on the heal spell for them, or wait till you're a bit stronger.
Once you have attained level four by hunting under the Adventurers' Guild bar, you will be kicked out and prohibited from hunting there anymore, as you will be too high level for the monsters. From here, you will need to move on to the Catacombs, where ye will also find the necessary item needed to join the Mages' Guild. It is here that you should hunt at least up to level nine or ten. To hunt here, what you want to do is to find a place where you can go north and south. Then set a macro for n;;s;;n;;s. This macro, when repeated over and over, will make you move back and forth between the two rooms, rapidly causing monsters to come out of their hiding and fight you. This is called luring and hunting. This is what you'll do to gain your experience from monsters. Once you have attained level nine or ten, start guildtithing 75% so ye can gain your guild ranks and keep them close to your land level. Now, once you have done that and are ready to move on, you will go to a stronger place to hunt, called the old fortress, or the fort.
The Fort
Hopefully by this point you have maxed your Naturalism Spell Use Skill and Heal spell. You will need it here, since there are orcs that use willow bows and hit for up to 30 damage at a time, which really adds up! Also, you'll REALLY need the Heal spell here if you get hit by ogres, since they hit the hardest. Be very cautious of them. Once you have got the pattern down for this place, you should be able to level up to about 16 to 18. Remember to keep your guild rank close to your land level, or else it will be a major pain to catch up later. A nice heal macro to use here will be t;;cast heal&. This macro will target you, while immediately casting the heal spell again right after. So basically it constantly has the heal spell readied for you in battle. Once you have gotten to about level 16-18 here, you will need to move on to the next hunting ground, a different kind of hunting area called the graveyard.
The Graveyard
The only spells you really need here are the Heal spell and the Antidote spell.
Now, the way the graveyard works is by patterns of movement to unlock rooms, which release groups of monsters when you enter. Each group has at least six skeletons and one leader of the group. Some leaders can only be killed with a blessed weapon. So you will need to bless your elven short bow in order to take out the leaders. Once the leader is taken out, then you can kill off the rest of the skeletons with a normal crossbow. DO NOT WASTE BLESS ON THE SKELETONS. The bless enchant comes at the cost of 500 gold per enchant and ye have to have at least strongly or divinely blessed for it to be effective on the leader. If you get slightly blessed or just plain blessed, then you have to pay another 100 gold to get the weapon discharged and then pay 500 gold again to try to get it blessed right. You can also ask wizards for bless, as their bless is better usually and has more charges, even if they charge more than Forgrim's. When fighting in the graveyard, to make battle a lot easier, set this macro to toggle between your blessed bow and your normal crossbow: (macro 6 = pack right;;unpack crossbow) (macro 7 = pack right;;unpack elven short bow). So here's how it works. Hold the blessed bow and kill off the leader. As soon as it's dead, hit the macro to change to the crossbow and kill off all the skeletons. The macro just basically makes it a lot faster when switching between weapons, and gives you less chance of typos when trying to type the commands really fast. Once you've killed off the group, collect your gold and items. Make sure to collect scimitars, chain-link armor, ruby bladed swords, bone chariots, and all gems. Forgrim gladly pays good gold for these items and they can add up and pay for the enchants of your bow. Another great tip for this place is that if you get your crossbows deadly poisoned with level 6 or 7 poison by a high thief, you can kill the skeletons in one hit! The graveyard offers awesome experience, and you can rocket in levels here when using deadly poison. Unbelievably enough, you are good to hunt here all the way up to level 30. Have fun!
Hunting Cats 2
Cats 2 can give you good experience probably till about level 30 and beyond, if you're very careful. In my opinion, you can probably be more productive in the graveyard, but if you hunt here, you will definitely need to know how, as it can be deadly. Plus there are oodles of quest items down here! Now, the first thing you need to do is set yourself in berserk mode. (Being in berserk stance adds to your damage; ye'll prefer that over normal stance all the time, anyway.) Then give yourself all the colors you have and make sure you are at full health. Now, set that heal macro I explained before to the F7 key. You will need this during battle, since everything here hits pretty hard. Make sure to be aware of banrog demons, splinter beasts, tunnel hulks, and dark trolls, as they physically hit you the hardest. But even more importantly, when you're luring, you MUST make sure you kill all stunners in the room FIRST. Now, the easiest way to do that is to set a "stunner macro".
This macro will be: ch mouther;;ch giant spider;;a crocodile;;a stun jelly;;a imp&. This will charge the mouthers and giant spiders, to kill them the quickest, and attack all other stunners. Make sure ye don't have much to lose when first starting out here. Honestly, you will probably die a couple times before you can hunt constantly without dying, so just hunt here awhile until you get in tune with the place.
Colors will be key spells to help you progress on your path as a Ranger Mage. Colors consist of Ogre Strength (red), Eagle Eye (green), and Light Shards (shards). The green spell will be very important to ye, as you are a Ranger. It will make you more accurate with yur bow/crossbow. The red spell will help raise the damage you do when you charge with your mount, so its good to keep this spell high as well. And the shards spell will be good tae have too, especially if you have a good dodging skill. It will help ye even more and will enable you to dodge more enemies. So learn these spells all you can whenever possible. Learn all of these till novice level. You can start with the second level colors at GR 10 (Demon Shards) and GR 20 (Giant Strength and Tiger Eye). Then max these spells. As a ranger you'll never get access to the third level colors.
Charging can do very high damage, but the only disadvantage is that it advances you on the opponent. So charging should, in your case, be mainly used in things like stunner macros, as to take out the stunning enemies the quickest. It may take four shots with your bow to kill an enemy, but only one charge with your mount to do the same, so make sure you learn the riding skill as high as you can.
Finally, bow enchants. As I explained earlier, one enchant you will surely need is Bless Weapon. You must have a blessed weapon to take out the leaders of groups in the graveyard. But there are other useful enchants as well, such as cold enchants, fire enchants, etc. When you get confident enough to hunt Dark Blizzard Pass, it will be helpful to get a bow enchanted with fire, as the cold monsters are weak aganst fire. The same idea goes for the Lowly Downs -- as those monsters are fire-element-based, the cold enchant will definitely help there. Play around with these enchants when you get enough gold and see for youself how they work!
Whenever you think you may be stuck and don't know what to learn, these are some skills and spells you always need to learn and keep maxed!
Skills
Physical Training
Spiritual Karma
Missle Weapons
Riding
Resilience
Dodging
Barter
Arcana (learn this to adequate)
Naturalism Spell Use
Sorcery Spell Use (keep this one maxed once you use hold spells and need quicker delay time)
Spells
Heal
Antidote
Green (Eagle Eye to novice level, then Tiger Eye)
Red (Ogre Strength to novice level, then Giant Strength)
Shards (Light Shards novice level, then Demon Shards)
Unlock (only learn this two or three times at most)
Ensnare (and other hold spells like entrap, and sloth/time stop that slow monsters)
These are some skill and spells that you should always learn. Remember, skillwise, always learn PT, SK, and NSU as much as you can first. And spellwise, you should always learn heal and colors first as much as you can. After you have those out of the way, gain a couple more levels and learn the rest of those skills and spells. And if somehow you have all those learned, expend some buildpoints towards more SSU and ensnare. Ensnare will be useful for holding fast enemies and even some that stun. Scribed by Shieka, first Ranger Magus
Approved and Sealed by Sodagayo, Year 187
Alley back to the library foyer.
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