After spending a little time as a ranger I'm starting to get the feeling that not spending any significant amount of time as the yellow vocations during my first 130 levels has gimped my ability to do damage as them now. The bow I got has ice element on it, so I could just be getting crappy results trying to use it against resistant enemies, but even just comparing my own stats to pawns my level wielding the same bow, their STR numbers are considerably higher than mine. My magic on the other hand is a few hundred higher than theirs, but that doesn't seem to be helping me at all.
I think I need to reserve judgment until I can get a purely physical bow, but things are not looking good. I might have to just stick to wizarding and the like.
Sounds like you need to look into magick bows!
But note that several lv.2 weapons are underwhelming, especially the physical bows. The ice longbow isn't
too bad against, say, Gorecyclops and other enemies weak to it, but I've always found the Dragon's Ire to be underwhelming myself, using a balanced build of my own. However, the lv.2 magick bow was pretty decent and I did well with it (until I got the lv.3 and now annihilate everything xD), but that might be because I had good rings too, turning sixfolt into ninebolt and turning Explosive Rivet into Explosive Volley.
There's also a decent lv.2 dagger when silver-dragonforged (Helmbarte), as I said. I killed the last BBI boss's second form in seconds with it once I managed to grab the weak spot and spam 4x periapt'ed Thousand Kisses. With the Framae Blades I got after, it's of course even faster. On the other hand, I seem to recall Sapfire Daggers kind of sucking? Maybe they're good vs Cursed Dragon though. But I didn't get them this time around, so I'm not 100% sure.
Lately though I've not been using Hundred Kisses and instead Magic Rebalancer (you can double your magic damage with it). Cutting Wind and Immolation are just too useful to get rid of too in comparison. Immolation coupled with your basic light attack seems to do more damage than just Hundred Kisses on bosses anyway. Immolation and Hundred Kisses together would do even more, but you would need to drop Cutting Wind, which is just too useful, even if only for movement or escaping. Normally it's your melee oriented way to deal with multiple creatures at once, and with Immolation up, you can set most of them on fire at once.
Hmm. I agree with the bow skills but I dropped Cutting Wind on my MA in favour of Thousand Kisses, Immolation, and Instant Reset, and I don't miss it one bit. Instant Reset has been way,
way more useful than Cutting Wind to me. Small mobs of enemies? Who cares, pawns take care of them pretty well usually, if not, I can just spam regular magick bow shots too. And Thousand Kisses is just, well, the boss nuke.
For Strider, I'd go Thousand Kisses, Helm Splitter (the other boss nuke) and Instant Reset.
Assassin; Thousand Kisses, Gale Harness, Instant Reset. Though I could probably replace Wind Harness for Cutting/Biting Wind I guess.
For a Ranger there's no special dagger skill so I'd keep it along with Thousand Kisses and Instant Reset.
Just can't let go of Reset though. It's so gamebreaking.
Also, as annoying as it is to do, it would serve you greatly to focus leveling up the MA with mixed levels of Fighter, Warrior, Sorcerer, Strider and Ranger (or Assassin) if you're going for a balanced build.
Honestly that's what I did (though I was also MK for a while, since I enjoy that) and my MA right now is incredibly powerful. I didn't find it annoying at all, because I enjoy mixing things up, but ultimately it's nice to be able to take hits, spam enough shots, etc. without using so many consumables, and still do very good damage with both magick bow and daggers.
I'm not even level 200 yet, and my pawn handles himself better than some level 200 pawns who are so squishy I am constantly reviving them. The worst are min-maxed sorcerer pawns, sure they got high magick but die way before even casting one of their big impressive spell. Yawn.
Min maxing is for suckers. Wow playing 100 levels at the same thing just so you have a slight damage boost on some boss? Ridiculous. And the rewards dropped by the online Ur-Dragon pale compare to BBI loot. So yeah... I don't see the point at all.
Honestly I am more of a balanced player, in some other games I can be a bit of a min/max kind of guy but for the most part I just play the game and go for balance.
This game is a bit of a mystery as to how the stats work.
For this game, you are playing it 100% right. Don't worry about stat growth. I never paid attention to it and I can still wreck bosses. It's mostly about gear.
