Rangers

Introduction

The Ancient Anguish ranger has only recently started being recognised for the power that it is. With few exceptions, this has been a class for newer players who dwell in ‘fuzzy’ areas like Harkke, Star Caverns and Anasazi. In my previous guide, I noted that mages were largely absent from parties, and this is perhaps even more true for rangers.

Rangers are given a dizzying array of little abilities, most of which are unfortunately more ‘toys’ than useful in any real manner. The upside is that the ‘real’ abilities combine to make the ranger a jack-of-all-trades, a strange combination of necromancer, fighter and rogue.

This guide has 3 goals:

* Teach players that a ranger is much more than a furry slayer with a Tamagotchi wolf
/me Raise interest in rangers, and increase the playerbase
/me Save the poor packrats, elephant seals, harkke wolves and bisons of the world

Most of this guide should be accessible to both powerplayers and the casual player. Most of what I said about mages required a solid connection, a very good sense of direction, and constant typing. A ranger is slightly more chilled out than that, and can pull the same sort of experience solo, are about equal as bashers, and are easier to tank with than mages (though in the hands of a very good player, the mage is better).

I viewed the mage schools as virtually different classes. This isn’t so with rangers, they all play roughly similarly. Also, a ranger has no spells, so this guide will be much shorter.

A ranger is an excellent class to learn the game with, mostly self sufficient, and quite easy to get the imagination going on AA’s rich world.

My first character was a ranger (half elf), as was my first level 19 (a different half-elf). Since then I’ve had 2 dwarves and my current one, Rhynst the human. I currently occupy the top experience earned/hour alcove for rangers, without using any pelts except those from the monsters I slayed in the hour. I have 1350 skills and over 50 million experience, and it is from that background I put forward this guide.

The Structure

Most people probably see rangers as a mediocre class overall. I’ll show how a ranger makes excellent bashers and soloers, and reasonable tanks. More importantly, I’ll show you how to move out of Harkke and into the real kills of the mud.

I’ll give a run down on the ranger’s abilities, how to use the wolf, the bola, weapon skills and choices, a discussion of the races available, how to powerplay your ranger, a leveling guide, a discussion of good guilds, equipment choices and useful alias’. As with any jack-of-all-trades, it takes a bit of understanding of all the trades before a ranger emerges from mediocrity to become a force.

Advanced players who know how they work can ignore the discussion of the ‘woodcrafting’ abilities and preliminary notes on the wolves. The sections on ‘using a wolf’, ‘strike’, ‘the bola’ and ‘Soloing’ are the most important if you’re looking for a quick read.

Now it’s all good and well to read my guide and think that you know what’s going on now, but you really don’t know anything until you’re willing to go out there and try it and put it into practice. It’s really not much use only reading what I say and not using it.

Abilities

Where the mage guide was dominated by spells, this one is dominated by the abilities. First I’ll talk briefly about the various defences, then a ranger’s range of crafting skills (well, the useful ones), and then finally the one and only combat related one, strike.

Defences

A ranger has access to block, none or dodge.

Defend dodge is impractical – as discussed in the mage guide, how much you’re carrying affects how well you dodge. A ranger has less dexterity than a mage, and generally carries more stuff as well – making dodge pretty useless the vast majority of the case.

Defend none is in every way inferior to block (unless you’re wielding a two handed weapon, in which case they’re equally useless).

Defend block is the only practical one. Block has long been seen as inferior to parry, but when it comes to rangers we have no choice. A 2-3 weight shield certainly mitigates more damage than any other 2-3 weight piece of armour (say, a helmet). So unless you’re dual wielding or wielding a two handed weapon, always have some sort of shield.

Having the best shield possible isn’t quite as important for a ranger as it is for a paladin or cleric. Whereas the paladin’s turtle ability scales with the quality of the shield, and a cleric is permanently under attack, a ranger shares the tanking job with the wolf, so getting the heavy silver goblin shield is impractical most of the time.

As such, my favourite shields for a ranger are, in approximate order, flying shield, wigwog skin, black/green shield, hoplon shield, silver goblin. The rest is probably not worth the time.

Woodcrafting

Rangers get a mind-boggling array of abilities, a lot of which we don’t ever use in our lifetimes. Note that what follows is more of a faq-help file than any tips on how to play a ranger.

(Thanks Gyn) the actual woodcraft ability you have is: 2 * DEX + 2*(greater of) Int/Wis + (lesser of) Int/Wis.

Glance and Observe

These abilities are useful for newer players. For 2 spell points, glance gives you a pretty good idea of whether an NPC will destroy you without blinking an eye or meekly lie down and die. Observe, if you can be bothered, can give you an idea of the best place to aim on what you’re fighting, thereby theoretically increasing your damage output on them.

Observe is also intrinsically involved in raising a bonded wolf, to see its ‘stats’ – more on the wolves section later.

Skin / Pluck / Gut / Carve

These 4 abilities are perhaps what make a ranger the most famous of all – the pageful of spam you get every time a ranger ‘cleans up’ a corpse. This nets you a pelt (for NPCs with pelts), feathers (for birds), sinew (all creatures you can carve, you can gut) and a hunk of meat (almost all pelt-able NPCs can also be carved for meat).

Make sure you skin or pluck the corpse before doing the other 2, as otherwise you’ll ruin the pelt or feathers.

The size of the pelt ranges from damaged (0) to Large (8), based on a combination of the size of the critter you killed, and your woodcraft skill (which is based on a combination of your dexterity, wisdom and intelligence, and maybe level). You get some experience for just the very act of skinning a corpse, based on the size of the pelt you come away with. It’s about 115 experience for a large pelt.

(Thanks Gyn) the formula for pelt xp is: (size of pelt) * 15 +5. So a size 8 pelt is 8*15+5 = 125 xp.

The sinew and feathers you get ranges from a bloody mess (0) to 4 lengths per corpse, and 0 to about 25 feathers per corpse. It depends on the same factors as above. You get no experience for this.

The size of the meat is factored by the same things. You get some experience for the act of carving itself. It’s about 190 experience for a huge hunk of meat. Meat spoils after a while, becoming useless (though you can still sell it). Cook the meat, eat it, or salt it to prevent this.

Gyn also supplied me with some sort of meat formula but it looks too complex to bother with. Basically you get some xp for carving, which adds up over time :P

As you can see, this is part of the reason so many rangers stick around in fuzzy areas – they get pelt and sinew which make valuables, and meat to heal them, and on top of that they get extra experience just for skinning and carving.

It’s mostly pretty logical which kills can be skinned and which cannot. One that should be but isn’t is Zhammar’s chimera, campaign your local wizard to fix this!

Forage

Foraging in outdoors rooms generally gets you a list of what can be gathered from the surroundings, using your ranger powers. These include wood, flint, herbs, stones, flowers, fruit, yew and seashells. Forage only tells you that these things are there, to get them you’ll have to ‘cut’ the wood or yew, or ‘gather’ the rest.

Cut

Cut is the next step from foraging. After figuring out there is wood or yew in your room, you can cut it into what you want. Note that you don’t have to forage before you cut, if you’re in a forest, it’s pretty obvious there’s going to be wood around.

‘Help Cut’ pretty much explains what everything is. You’ll need firewood to whittle pipes and whistles, you need a staff to make a spear, torches are useful too for obvious reasons.

Yew is rarer than wood, and you can only cut bowstaves from them.

You get no experience for cutting anything, at least not until you make something out of what you cut.

How ‘big’ something you cut is, depends both on your woodcraft and whether you’re wielding an axe or not. Great staves and great bowstaves are much easier to come by with when you’re wielding an axe.

Bigger staves and bowstaves also cost more spell points to cut – if you’re not getting many, try healing up to full spell points first. A great staff takes about 150 spell points.

Note that the weather and lighting are detriments to cutting. In driving rain and darkness, it can take a dozen tries before you successfully cut anything – quite annoying. Also note the natural AA law that when you do play your ranger, it will rain.

Strength may also affect what you can cut. If you can't wield what you're trying to cut, you might not be able to cut it (not confirmed). Basically what this means is, don't be a half elf or elf :P

Gather

Similarly to cut, gather is just to get the raw materials for your later processing.

Gather always costs 2 spell points, is similarly affected by the weather, and mostly we gather herbs and food.

If you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with a kill that’s nearly dead, think about gathering some food and herbs to quickly heal yourself back up. This tip is probably mostly useless for more experienced players – bought heals are much more efficient than raw fruits and rice and whatever.

Herbs gathered can net not only the stock standard forest herbs, but also pipeweed (useless), and mage components. Going price for nightshade is generally 1000 coins, whereas mandrake can fetch anywhere between 2000 and 10000, depending on your negotiation power.

Seashells and flowers are just ‘cutesy’ additions, with no real use.

Cook

So we’ve now gathered our raw materials with the previous abilities, now we process them into their final product.

Cooking is not exclusively a ranger ability, but it’s one used mostly by rangers. It prevents our meat and fish from spoiling – and more importantly, makes the food heal your more. Fruits, grains and eggs can also be cooked. You’ll need a fire of some sort – there are permanent campfires in the ranger camp, at the bear guild, at the scythe guild hall, where Carcera is camping, Tantallon fireplace, the one at the rodentid area down south, amongst others. You’ll also need a pan or other cooking instrument, usually from the tinker or the newbie manor.

With that being said, most powerplayers wouldn’t have much time to stop by and cook their food.

Distill

Forest herbs, various grains, fruits and flowers can be distilled into medicine, alcohol and perfume. This is also not an exclusive ranger ability.

You’ll need a piece of copper tubing from the wandering tinker – track him down with your abilities, and some empty bottles and jars.

‘Attach’ the bottle, then at a fire simply ‘distill x’, and when the bottle is full (usually 2 piles of herbs or whatever you’re distilling is needed), ‘detach y’.

Perfume has no practical use except spam creation, the alcohol you can make is vastly inferior in healing efficiency to alcohol you can buy, but medicine is brilliantly overpowered.

Medicine, similarly to tea, heals both spell points and hit points, without the potion ‘tolerance’ effect – that is, their abilities don’t diminish with increased use. You can drink it straight out of the bottle – for a 50/50 heal with a full bottle, or you could ‘apply medicine’ 6 times per bottle, for 8-10 hps/sps every time. Beware that when you drink it straight out, it may make you cross legged and thus prevent you from drinking anything else, most would apply the medicine. Medicine can also be applied when it’s just on the ground, not necessarily in your inventory.

Of course, this involves bothering to go and gather yourself a heap of herbs, which sort of balances medicine.

Whittle

Whittle is the ability we process our firewood with (unless we burn the firewood straight away). Whittling stuff does in fact give experience, with pipes being the most given – 150 per pop. This is very useful when leveling to supplement the experience you’re earning.

The whistle is essential to summon your wolf when it gets lost.

The toy and flute are just ‘cutesy’ features.

Braid

Braid is evil. It uses sinew, which should go towards repairing bolas, not braid. Don’t use it, ever. If you have sinew left over after you’re done playing, sell the sinew so other rangers can use your leftover sinew to repair bolas with.

Make

There sure is a lot of stuff a ranger can make. ‘Help make’ covers it all

Out of the fur items, pouches are the hardest to screw up – and they give 25 experience per scrap of pelt used. Collars and (leggings?) are the only things giving more – 26 per scrap, however those are a lot more likely to come out at lower quality. So to dispose of pelts at lower levels, make pouches, then make whatever you like later on.

The armour class of the ranger armours are rather pathetic, and they’re quite a bit worse than other armour.

In general, all these items are judged against solely your woodcrafting ability.

The strop in combination with a sharpened weapon, allows you to ‘hone’ it. This presumably either makes it more sharp or makes the sharpening last with you longer. Either way, a sharpened blade is pretty neat.

The wineskins rangers make eventually leak and burst, so don’t rely on those for your drinks, buy yourself a real one.

Our packs and sacks are also pretty bad quality, the quivers are average.

Our shields aren’t too bad, but move onto something better if you can.

Sharpen

With a fire, we can sharpen our staves into spears and beams into stakes. It’s not really that useful, they’re not that great as weapons. Also, failure can occur, which is rather annoying as you lose your staff or beam too.

Impale

‘Help impale’ explains it all, it’s not very useful.

Build

We can build 5 things, our own fire, a tent, a shelter, a snare or a bridge.

You could build a fire of your own for fun, but it sure won’t be getting you any more experience for the time you spent.

Ditto for bridges – not to mention the huge effort involved – ‘help bridge’ explains how to do it all.

The snare has no use vs NPCS and only annoys players, so refrain from setting them.

Rangers without a guildhall that provides personal storage facilities may like to build a hidden shelter. Note that other rangers can see even your hidden shelters, and in our age of courtesy most people just loot your shelter. There’s also a bug where if you put too much stuff in your shelter, it just disappears, though note it requires a LOT of stuff to do this.

Note all these things except the snare need to be maintained, or they’ll eventually collapse by themselves.

Repair

This repairs what we built above.

Survey

This neat little ability lets you see into all 4 of your surrounding rooms to determine whether there’s anything in them to kill. It only costs 2 sps and I use it all the time just to know where to go right after what I’m currently killing dies.

Scan

Scan costs 20 without an argument. It lets you see further than the immediate room – in fact as far as I can tell you see in that direction until there’s a mountain or ocean or similar. With a direction argument, you scan in that specific direction to see what’s to kill in that direction. It’s useful in the same way as survey.

Memorize and Bearings

Rangers have 2 locations automatically memorized – Tantallon and the ranger camp. Using ‘bearings’ allows you to figure out which direction these places are from your current location, and how far away it is. This is very useful for newer players or anyone a bit lost.

Memorize allows up to 6 more locations to show up when you use ‘bearings’. This can be used for people who frequent areas where they can’t remember the directions of, or a general aide to getting one’s sense of direction again.

Also, it’s useful to mark down where you find random treasure hunts, so you that you can go and get some heals and come back to kill it.

Track

One of a ranger’s most famous abilities, track is extremely useful when hunting bounties – it’ll take you to the area your quarry’s hiding in, if they’re inside an area, or to their very room, if they’re outside in the open.

Track costs 10 spell points, and 3 spell points for every room travelled, and it often adds up when hunting a person.

Wolves don’t seem to actually make track more effective, but I have no conclusive evidence.

Track is also useful for finding Shanni, Marika, Charky, the tinker, Carcera and a few other NPCs.

When you’ve actively tracked a rogue, you don’t need a silver amulet to ‘see’ them, so you can just go straight ahead and attack them if they’re in the same room, unlike other classes.

Elude

Elude is a convenient skill with a few practical uses. It makes the last monster that is hunting you not get free hits in when you return to the room, and it usually takes several rounds before it recognises you as an enemy and starts attacking you again.

This makes it excellent for archery (discussed later), and also to avoid the painful entry hits on certain monsters – if you have no other use for your spell points, why not prevent upwards of 50 damage with elude?

It is also essential for rangers who don’t use a bonded wolf. As they can’t rescue you, the only way you can get one to ‘rescue’ you is to ask your wolf to stay in the room with the monster you’re in combat with, leave, elude, come back, and resume combat.

Note there is a bug with elude, which is that it’ll only elude the last monster you were being hunted by. As we can have 2 monsters hunting us at a time, the second last monster will not be affected. This means that if, on the way you run somewhere to elude, you get hit by some random aggro (an orc, skunk or something), then you’ll elude the skunk, not what you really wanted to elude. Once this happens, you’re stuck being hunted by that original monster.

Though it all looks like a lot, most rangers only use a few of the above abilities, and they’re not too hard to remember.

Strike

Strike is the only use a ranger has for his spell points while in combat.

Strike costs 6 spell points for a successful attempt, or 1 for a failed one. Whether a strike is successful depends on your opponent’s dexterity and intelligence, and your own woodcraft ability, along with whether you’re aiming at their weak spot or not.

When you successfully strike but miss anyway, it still costs 6 spell points.

Thus it’s very important to always have a boomerang as a ranger, so more strikes hit as well – and when a strike is successful, there is also an increased chance it’ll actually hit. In this sense, similarly to a mage, there is an exponential benefit to every point of dexterity the opponent loses.

Otherwise, smart switching of where you’re aiming also helps – many kills are wearing heavy body armour but nothing covering their hands or legs.

You can attempt a strike every 2 rounds. This rate of spell point consumption is slightly higher than the rate of healing you’d get from just smokes and medicinals – note that Tabaq and Hobbitat Gold heals spell points faster than parkraz, and so when bashing, you’d need to pick up other heals every so often to supplement your spell points to constantly strike. However, most tanks don’t move this quickly.

Also of note is that when you use dotimes 100 strike, because of a bug or inconsistency in the coding, it will only let you strike once every 3 rounds. If you want to maximise performance you should manually strike.

In this way, strike is like a miniature pseudo-haste, about 40% as effective (due to the failed strikes you often get). But this also means that a ranger using strike is about 40% better than one not. It’s this ability that makes up the fighter component of the strange necromancer-fighter-rogue mix.

The Wolf

With Paldin’s recent additions to wolves, the vast majority of rangers are now using a bonded wolf (including me). I’ll go through some basics of how these new bonded wolves work, and how to use them, and also talk about how to play around with the non bonded wolves if you can’t be bothered idling days on end for one that is only marginally better.

The wolf makes up the necromancer part of the mix.

Growing a Wolf

To grow a wolf, you’ll need to bond with it first. Only small wolves and dogs can be bonded, I hear the threshold is ones you can tame with 4 wisdom. Either way, if you ask Graddam to train a wolf that can’t bond to carry something, he’ll say something that’ll make the case obvious. For one that will bond later on, he’ll just say it’s too small yet.

A wolf takes about 20 minutes to bond to you if you just idle with it. If you kill stuff with it, it can bond as quickly as within 5 minutes.

After that, make sure you keep it well fed and happy, for if it ferals, it’s gone forever.

After a certain size (large trained)?, when a bonded wolf dies, about 15 minutes later, Lars will return it one size smaller. This is usually equivalent to 24 hours of idling wasted, so don’t do it too often (though I need to heed my own advice).

The wolf requires time to grow – a LOT of time. In general, it’ll take about 12 hours for every ‘mini level’ – I’ll explain that later. Also, it needs to gain some experience too – though not that much. If you’ve idled for 20 hours without it growing, go kill something, that’s probably why.

If you’re going to grow a wolf, make sure you’re willing to put in about 3 days of idling for it to grow to enormous or further. Exact time charts can be found all over the place.

The maximum size a wolf will grow to depends on your wisdom, and as far as anybody can tell, being permanently on greenleaf or crosier does not change this – only your base wisdom matters. Only half elves will get the ‘gigantic’ wolves.

Your wolf will be able to learn to carry about 8 hours after bonding (provided you started with a reasonably large pup), it’ll learn to dodge about the same time if not earlier, it can then learn to guard items at very large and rescue at huge. Guard is largely useless, but carry, rescue and dodge are all good abilities.

A Wolf’s Stats

The wolf has stats like our characters, and to get a general feeling of what they’re at, you have to ‘observe’ them. This gives you a general description of how its stats compare with its current level – a weak enormous wolf would still be much stronger than a well toned small one.

Confirmed are the str, dex and con stats. Some think the eye description when you look at the wolf is an indication of its intelligence. I’ll just talk about the 3 main stats.

Strength determines how large the items your wolf carries can be. I’m not too sure if the strength actually has any effect on its combat damage. To raise strength, just idle with it carrying the heaviest item it can. You can usually tell from the messages how strong your wolf is, well-toned is the best message.

Dexterity obviously determines how much it hits and gets hit. You raise it by having it fight. It raises faster if the wolf is doing the tanking. Moving with practiced ease is the best message for a player controlled wolf.

Constitution is the third part of the message, and it presumably determines how many hit points it has and how much meat it can eat. It’s raised by keeping it as full as possible all the time. Sturdy is the best message.

It’d appear that if you neglect your wolf’s stats earlier on, it takes longer to raise it later on.

If you notice that all the stats of your wolf suddenly went down a level at the same time – it’s not your fault, your wolf simply grew a mini-level. As far as I can tell, there’s 19 mini-levels, like players. Level 19 is a gigantic, 16-18 enormous, etc. Of course, I’m just guessing, but there’s definitely 3 mini-levels within enormous wolves, and only 1 mini-level for gigantic.

In this way, the level of your wolf also limits the stats it can get.

The Wolf's Skills

Dodge is, I think, the most important feature. It’s pretty obvious how this is raised. To have it dodge better faster, try fighting rooms with many NPCs which are pretty easy – easy treasure hunts, the room full of guards at Kazarov’s area, various wandering bands around the mud.

You know your wolf is ready to carry stuff when instead of looking at you funny when you tell it to pick something up, it tries to lift it but fails. Ability to carry is determined purely by how long it’s carrying something – so by idling with a wolf with something in its mouth, it raises both strength and carrying. This is rather silly, as your wolf can theoretically get to 100% skill at obeying carrying orders by only ever successfully picking one item up. Graddam acts like Zhou for your wolf when it comes to the carry ability, though it’s not really essential.

Guard doesn’t seem to have any practical use. Norrick teaches it.

Rescue is taught by Marika at huge size. At the start the success rate is pretty bad, and you really want to have it at 100% to be able to rely on your wolf. Just fight easy things and continuously rescue the wolf/ask for it to re-rescue you and rinse-repeating to raise it.

It’s also rumoured there’s other ‘skills’ in a wolf, but those are the obvious ones.

Using a Wolf

Now I’m not very good at growing my wolf, mainly because I don’t care much further than its dex, con, rescue ability and dodge ability – the only ones you really need to kill stuff with it. Here I’ll give general tips on how to maximise the use of your wolf.

A wolf is like a second stomach for you – it eats meat, you eat meat, so it’s like you have double the normal heals consuming ability. Also, both stomachs digest simultaneously. This allows you to go longer without needing to resort to healing potions to get your hit points back. As is common sense, make sure both you and your wolf are digesting something or other at all times, or else it’s wasted.

The other main way to heal your wolf is through medicinals – make sure it’s bound at all opportunities (and yourself too).

Graddam has been a brilliant addition for rangers. He heals your wolf completely, free of charge (the first time), then costs increase, and he wants herbs too. The second healing takes 1k coins and 2 herbs, the third about 2k and 4 herbs. It stops being ‘worth it’ around the third healing – if you kill him, once he resets, he’ll reset back to free healing.

Use Graddam when you’re both completely filled up, and the wolf is quite seriously injured.

The wolf gets increased armour class from 2 primary sources – the collar and the armour spell. A good collar makes quite a difference – the best one in the game (now that dwarvish collars have been downgraded) are fine leather collars from Zubin. Following that are golden collar and the spiked metal collar. If you can, get your collar blessed by a cleric, for that makes it much better.

If you can’t take down both Marika and Zubin, try this trick. Throw a throwing weapon at Zubin specifically, and he’ll get angry and fight you by himself. You should be able to take down Zubin, I should hope.

The armour spell is also greatly beneficial. Any necromancers who use or used to use revenants would attest that armour spell on something that is completely unarmoured is godly.

Dodge works better against little kills, and not so good versus bigger things. The equivalent effect for block (what you’re using) isn’t quite as large. Therefore, it’s best that you tank the larger kills, and the wolf tanks the littler ones. For example, it’s best if you tank hermit, but the wolf can do general, fairy dragon and bulette fine.

Having the wolf share the tanking on multiple-NPC rooms is brilliant. Orcish captain and lieutenant are much easier to tank or solo when the wolf tanks one and you the other.

The wolf doesn’t take magical attacks very well. It gets destroyed by most of asvyan’s, wigwog, and almost anything that casts spells. It’s best that you’re the one who tanks those kills.

Try not to let the wolf down past the ‘hurt’ condition. A little burst of lag will get it killed. Another reason is that if it goes down to seriously wounded, and you rescue it, then you accidentally go down to dangerous hit points, the wolf will rescue you, despite being nearly dead itself. This is how I’ve lost my wolf several times.

When bashing, the wolf is a very nice addition to the party damage, just blow your whistle and get it to attack at every kill, it’ll soon become a habit.

Also when bashing, if you start being beaten on by some NPC, your wolf is a lot more reliable at rescuing you than the tank usually.

When you can’t carry that one last item, let your wolf do it.

In short, dress your wolf up well, let it tank the easier things, don’t let it get too hurt, and tank the harder things yourself.

Non Bonded Wolves

Now there are many people out there without the time to idle themselves a wolf. Don’t worry, non bonded wolves really aren’t that much worse in terms of pure combat ability. Sure they can’t rescue, or carry anything, or dodge, but in purely fighting terms, they’re only about 10-20% worse than an equivalent bonded wolf.

The main advantage of a non bonded one is that you can kill it off whenever. Every time you get a new wolf, the Graddam healing counter resets to ‘free’ again as well. This means that you don’t have that bothersome obligation to keep your bonded wolf alive, and swapping wolves really speeds up experience gain without needing to waste potions.

This is a way of playing that is most recommended for the higher wisdom races – half elf and dwarf. Orcs’ can only tame very large wolves with any decent degree of success – and those are much worse than the enormous bonded ones that they can get. Humans and elves’ wisdom is a bit low to consistently get successful tames – if you can live with this, then go ahead.

Generally, the non bonded wolves won’t last out fights quite as well as the bonded ones, but so what? You can just get another one. For half elves and dwarves, I’d recommend the 5 star caverns wolves, the Ebonbane winter wolf…and if you go through those 6 wolves faster than they respawn, I tip my hat to you. Before letting it die, make sure you use Graddam to heal it once or twice as well – no need to waste resources.

The Crosier of Pain would be of course a good item to have, the +2 wis bonus really helps to cut down failures.

Since you don’t really care if the wolf dies or not, it’s fine to let it tank big kills, especially since it won’t be trying to dodge them anyway.

Sometimes when my bonded wolf is down to seriously wonded, Graddam is asking for 10 herbs or something ridiculous, and I’m extremely stuffed and drunk, I wish I could just get another wolf. Both styles should work just as well as each other (provided you’re dwarf or half elf).

The Bola

This is the main reason I created the Rhynst character and have played him for so long *worship Mickie*. It’s the one thing that makes a ranger properly good at killing ‘normal kills’ as well now.

‘A leather bola’ is an item you get from an NPC called Venletta, in the same area the Drowgar spells come from. If you don’t know your way there, then you’d probably be slaughtered by her alive.

The bola trips monsters up. Only monsters that can be tripped by a rogue can be tripped up by a bola, plus a few more. Smarter NPCs with bladed weapons can also ‘cut’ a bola, and stand right back up.

When a bola naturally breaks, or is cut, it becomes a ruined bola. This can be repaired, for 3 sinew every attempt. Presumably success depends on your woodcraft.

When a bola naturally breaks when you throw it, it is left on the ground instead of the NPC’s inventory. NPCs who can usually cut a bola, can’t cut it if it breaks when it hits them. This is great when you get lucky. Beware that when this happens with Venletta and you, you’re in real danger of death.

Sometimes a failure to fix a bola fails so spectacularly that it turns into a ball of leather – then it’s gone for good. There’s a direct correlation between how well you’re doing on the day and how often your bolas ball up, I call it Paldin’s law.

You can usually tell how close a bola is close to dying by how much more often than usual you are failing at fixing it up, and how much more often than usual it’s breaking.

It’s a good idea when low on sinew to only throw a bola when the NPC is seriously wounded (if it’s using a bladed weapon), because if it dies before it tries to cut the bola, then no sinew is wasted.

Multiple bolas can easily keep down an NPC for the entire duration of a fight. As long as you hit the NPC it’ll 100% trip. This makes it more reliable than a rogue’s trip.

Try to throw a bola right before you use a strike. The worst time to throw a bola is right after you just struck – reasons obvious.

Hawkeye is bugged. He won’t stand up after you throw a bola at him.

Several monsters get pissed off at you when you throw a bola at them, while some you expect will won’t. Annoyed monsters include huge dragon, overlord, evil wizard, proud knight, Glock, Jarl’s wife, most of Drakhyra’s NPCs (but only after 3 ‘annoying’ pieces of conduct). Monsters you’d expect to get annoyed but don’t include Zarkan, Zhephani and Jalen.

If you get a bola, PLEASE finish Venletta off as well. If you can’t kill Venletta, don’t get the bola.

If you’re really scared of Venletta throwing the bola at you, let your wolf tank until she throws it. The wolf won’t be tripped up, then you can rescue it. Then, use Graddam to remove the bola, and then buy it back from him. If you use this technique to get a bola but not kill her, I will hunt you down and find a way to skin, gut and carve you.

Be careful of Venletta, she can easily do 60 points of damage in one round or kill your wolf.

Otherwise, try to always have a bola or two on you, and throw it on any humanoids. It will make things die quicker, you take less damage, lets you hit more so skill faster, amongst other things. This is the thing that completes the 3-class-hybrid, the rogue part.

It takes about 40 sinew per hour to upkeep a bola (if you’re careful with it) or over 100 (if you have multiple and are throwing them all the time).

Have fun with this little toy. The bola, the wolf and strike all added together makes a character that is a very powerful hybrid.