Archery DPS was very well warranted after how poorly tuned Rangers were pre-Luclin. The main issue with Archery DPS was more of an itemization thing. There was only 1 bow superior to the tradeskilled PoP Elemental bows (PoTime). Meaning if you had enough platinum, and had a 250 Fletcher and Tinker, and a group for a few hours in PoWater, you could walk away with a raid ratio quality item. Once your DPS started getting their hands on melee weaponry from EPs and Time, Archery DPS stopped being so ridiculous. Though the no aggro thing always was a bit of a bug I suspect. More likely a badly coded way in calculating it.
I agree in that the absurd archery DPS and even heavy melee DPS were a long time comin for poor ol rangers. Before endless quiver and archery mastery AA the ranger is just not a stand out class. I adore pouring on sustained DPS. Note too that some of the walled encounters still allowed reliable archery DPS if the ranger could find a good spot to stand, usually firing totally parallel with the wall in question. LIS was one that stands out for me.
Oakwynd was certainly a dumb item for them to have created for a contest. They created it before AM3/Trueshot. Then they forgot that a ranger on each server had one lol. But just normally obtained ranger bows were fine relative to Rogues and Monks and Wizards on Al'Kabor. Archery had other draw backs as well. No autofire, issues with walls/NPCs/PCs, etc.
Yeah no autofire was huge, took a rangers attention to sustain DPS. Meant a player couldn't just 3 box an archery team.
Good point about the mitigation! I'm not sure when archery was made wall-friendly, either. On balance, I like that the trade-off existed: killing a freestanding boss is a lot harder than cornering one, especially if there's an AE effect or AE ramp that makes the fight sensitive to small changes in position. Fennin, for example, has a 100' AE, which means that the clerics have got to stand in the sweet spot between 100' and 120' (with extended range foci equipped). Keeping both Fennin and the tank stationary without using the walls of the building is the touchiest part of the encounter. (Come to think of it, another early-late PoP difference was that PoFire mobs on Al'Kabor would just push straight through any wall you tried to pin them against; I think cornering Fennin and even walling some of the PoFire minis at the first castle became popular with later changes in the collision engine.)
Killing a freestanding mob is certainly harder than a cornered one, but let's not act like it was intentional of SOE to balance things that way. They just had collision issues that took a long time to figure out.
Oh, for sure. A lot of the realities of EQ's mechanics - especially in its first few years - were products of happenstance rather than of design. Of course, realities that came about by happenstance often evolved into features of design: FD splitting being everyone's favorite example.
