Class Request: Ranger

[Shurrikhan]

Chances, I'll say...none.

The armory system is pretty strict, so you'll never see another job branching from an existing class. And you'll probably never see a job with multiple weapons, even if we consider that with the classes on the road to irrelevance, the crystal would be enough to determine your job. Besides, since range does not affect the damage output, you don't need a weapon for "melee attack".

It's not the armory system that's strict, nor would its being strict be what would prevent a second splitting source class. It's SE's desire to save face by keeping absolutely nothing to do with its the failings of the last splitting class in future design (despite also having no desire to correct those "errors" in our one current splitting class).

The use of a conditionally more powerful melee weapon could also just as easily be something unique to Ranger. The only governing inter-class principles to damage viability are potency and categorical damage (magical, piercing, slashing, blunt), after all. We've no inherent elemental effects, actual differences between weapon types, etc. Why then would you require a universal mechanic to determine range/melee viability? It'd just be another shallow class passive, like virtually all of whatever complexity we have in this game.
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A larger problem is that there needs to be a certain mindset that the Ranger would seem to promote, and ridiculous actions like firing from afar only to run up (or even stutter-step up) in order to sword strike aren't likely to match that. You need not only a theme for the Ranger, but also a theme to combat from their perspective. I also doubt that a Ranger, who you'd expect to need to be fairly mobile from time to time, would be wearing any heavier armor than a typical archer. At present we only have a sort of full plate / mail / leather / cloth division of armor classes, and I doubt they'd make the jump all the way up to Dragoon (mail) armor.

The other issue would be the stat splitting. If it merely forced rotational differences as you move from Dexterity to Strength or vice versa, that'd wouldn't be so bad, but it rarely does. More likely, unless certain skills take insanely high advantage of stats while their associated weapon takes below average advantage, you will simply drop half your arsenal and proceed onward with a single stat as, basically, half a class. An easy suggestion would be to take the rogue side, make the melee skills more seemingly agile or finesse based, and go pure Dexterity, as per your base class.

So, @OP, I'd suggest that you figure out just how you want the Ranger to really play and feel. Having access to two things does not mean the class will actually use both, let alone in an interesting way. Similarly, increased armor class, in itself, does nothing for gameplay and almost nothing for identity. How else would the job vary from Bard? I could give you a lot better feedback if you could detail that, especially.