couple ranger questions (archery/solo ability)

[m1s3ri]

My first class on EQ was a ranger because I thought the idea of an archer class was pretty interesting. This was pre-Kunark, so I ended up rather disappointed, and quit EQ altogether before Velious. However, I've heard from others that in later expansions, rangers gained the ability (at least at high levels) to effectively use a bow as a main attack. However, the SoD wiki says "Rangers are primarily a melee class," so I'm not sure if I was just misinformed or if perhaps rangers work differently here.

If I roll a ranger here, can I expect to ever get much use out of a bow? Or am I going to mostly be slashing/stabbing things with a bit of casting?

Also, would I have much difficulty leveling up a ranger solo? I'd prefer a group, but I'd still rather solo for some EXP than sit around if I can't find one.

 

[Llanoldar Lluindar]

In SoD bows are an effective weapon from level one, more or less. You could use them to solo, but melee is just as good up to about level 10 and you don't have to buy ammo. Once you get into the teens and up and mobs actually start to hit hard, melee will probably do more damage in a group, but archery will be better for soloing, if only because there is less downtime between fights. You will, however, find that keeping yourself stocked with arrows on long trips away from towns can be difficult. Getting some skill in fletching and carrying around stacks of components for simple arrows can allow you to carry a lot more arrows, and you don't need much skill/money to match the cheap store arrows.

So, you can pretty much always use archery, but melee is the standard until much later.

As far as relative damage, archery and melee hover around each other at low levels, primarily because it's a lot easier to get good melee weapons than it is to get good bows (fletched bows for example are terrible, while smithed mithril weapons are excellent and useable from level one). Around 50 or so melee will start to be more effective and stay there until you get your archery AAs. After you get 65, all your archery AAs and a good bow, archery stays ahead of melee until you hit mid-late raid tiers where really good 2h weapons show up that are more or less equal DPS or better DPS than bows from those tiers.

As far as difficulty, rangers are a pretty good solo class, as just about anything that doesn't summon and can be snared can be whittled down with arrows in time. I had no problem soloing pretty much from 1 to 65.