Will Gravity please make it impossible to put new traps under the feet of monsters and characters. The point of a "trap" is to be a trap. There is a reason Spring Trap was implemented. If a trap is to do instant damage it should require the use of 2 skills.
And how much time will this take? We wan't to AOE-level like anybody else, not play nifty tricks setting up traps like Mac Guyver.
Well, we (Ranger+AB) tried to level with Cluster Bomb during the Juperos tripple spawn event, but it amounted to not very much, since if you run in a small mob with more monsters respawning constantly, finding a cell where you could actually put down a trap (it has to be one field away from monsters and one field away from other traps) while monsters tend to have positional bugs and not be where they are shown, and then try to mob them over the 1x1 area where the trap actually detonates, you could actually have killed them one by one with control click with less risk. We did 1.1 m/h with control click and 1.3 m/h with Cluster Bombs, but died much more often in the latter case. After the Ragner learned detonate, we only had to mob somewhere closeby to an already prepared trap, but we still had to stand in a secluded position and get only 3-5 monsters at a time. Exp wen't up to 1.4 m/h. Only later on, with Burning Traps, we started to get some Exp that justified actually using them, and came in with around 3 m/h. We never used Cluster Bombs again, since it's too clumsy a slow.
Some players don't realize that traps, even the ones you place under the feet of monsters, are more messy to use than a skill you simply cast somewhere. You need to actually put it somewhere under or closeby to a monster where it will detonate. If your moster happens to be shown at a different position than the server thinks it's really at, you can only manually detonate, which makes things very time consuming. Moreover, mobs (especially in AL) can kick away your traps, and if you can't see where they are because they're lying in the water or beneath other crap, you can't detonate them manually, and you start fratically clicking the ground around you trying to detonate and hoping that you find them before you get wiped. Oh, and don't try to take on ghost property monsters since ranger traps are forced neutral.
Compare this to classes with an aoe skill that you cast on the ground: Wherever you wan't your skill, it will be there, you don't need to pay attention to anything, not to mob position, not to positional bugs, not to mob skills pushing traps out of sight, you don't need to find and detonate traps before you can recast. You just cast, things fall over, and if not, you cast again.
Killing with traps, even the ones you put under the monsters feet is more tricky than with a run of the mill AOE skill (*cough* Severe Rainstorm), and it does rather generous damage for it, but DPS for Ranger traps will be nerved in a future patch anway, so it will start to suck soon enough.
By the way, it does seem as if Gravity actually intented aoe killing to be the way of living of 3rd classes. Even though I dislike it, Gravity gave most of the classes pretty efficient aoe skills. Making ranger traps not be able to be placed directly beneath targets would make them infinitely more restricted usage wise than the aoe skills of other classes, since you had to apply a certain tactic and play style, while other classes just walk and cast away in whatever style of playing the situation needs.
As somebody said in a previous post: Consider the Ranger traps to be grenades, if you must, and ask for a renaming, but don't envy rangers a skill that is actually halfway useable while leveling, since most other classe's aoe skills are even easier to use, still.
Edited by ValeriusM, 19 January 2011 - 01:36 AM.
