Dear Square-Enix,* The recast time of the job ability Bounty Shot will be reduced from 5 minutes to 1 minute, and a successful hit will occasionally enhance the effect of Treasure Hunter.
* The job ability Barrage will launch an additional projectile at level 90.
* Accuracy calculations for Barrage will be eased in proportion to the maximum number of shots.
You're increasing ranger's critical hit damage, which suffers due to the stupid cRatio numbers, and improving barrage's accuracy. This is a nice update thank you.
However, you will have to forgive me for not being enthusiastic. Do you remember camouflage? You know of Ranger's enmity problems? How the biggest fundamental flaw in the design of the job is enmity? The "great buff" to help with our enmity was the change to camouflage. The change to camoflage was pathetic. Especially concidering it was only worth using on a weaponskill or barrage and with the Enmity of actually using the ability generated, if you miss said WS or barrage, you actually gained more enmity than if you hadn't used it at all.
Camoflage was worthless before the update and it's still worthless afterwards. That single pathetic update was your attempt at fixing ranger's enmity and it failed.
With this in mind, you will forgive me I hope for expecting this critical hit damage increase to be nothing but traits similar to warrior's and thief's that work only for ranged attacks. I really hope I am wrong because in all honesty just giving ranger a Critical Damage +5% +8% or even +10% JA would not be enough to fix the imbalance between ranged and melee critical hits and the problems caused by the different cRatio limits.
Again, I really hope I am wrong. Because if this is your "fix" to ranger's critical hit damage problems then it is the same story as the enmity fix with camouflage from before: It's like pollishing a number two - it's shiney, but it's still a number two.
Also, an adjustment to make landing barrage easier is nice, however ignores the fact that accuracy still caps and barrage still misses with capped accuracy. Would it really be so hard to remove the "subsequent shots miss after one shot misses" clause from barrage? It's fairly unnecessary especially concidering it's long 5 minute recast.
Again, this is a small step in the right direction but it is not enough.
Why not just make Camoflage work like Super Jump? 100% enmity shed on a 5 minute or 3 minute timer is not a broken ability. Afterall Dragoon gets it and high enmity is nowhere near as detrimental for Dragoon as it is for Ranger. Not only that: high enmity on ranger, due to moving the mob, is detrimental for both the ranger and the rest of the alliance. This is a simple fix that would alleviate a lot of problems.
Thanks for the update, but please don't you dare think this is enough to fix the job because it's not. Not even remotely.