Ranger (Final Fantasy XI)

The Ranger is an advanced job in Final Fantasy XI. Rangers excel in the use of ranged weapons of all sorts including bows, crossbows, and guns. They also may used thrown weapons; however, that is a rarity considering there are no weapon skills for thrown weapons and the damage for ranged weapons of that sort is not as great. In this way, Rangers are similar to Archers and Gunners in other Final Fantasy games.

Though any race can play any class, Mithra's high agility offers them a slight advantage in terms of ranged accuracy, though Elvaan's relatively low accuracy does not discourage there from being a huge number of Elvaan rangers.

Becoming a Ranger
When a player becomes eligible to do the Ranger Quest, known as The Fanged One, at level 30, he can go and speak with Perih Vashai, a wise Mithra resident of Windurst. She informs you in order to follow the path of ranger, one needs a fang of the king of the tigers, but also so that the ranger might come to understand death. The player must travel to the Sauromugue Champaign and find a cave in the South East portion of the map inside will be some old bones. After entering the cave, an ancient tiger will enter as well, and slowly die of natural causes. Upon its death, the player must inspect the remains and they can return to speak with Perih. She will grant the character the ability to level as a Ranger as well as fashion the tiger fang into a Ranger's Necklace.

Ranger Abilities
{| border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" width="100%"
 * valign="top" width="50%" |

Job Abilities

 * valign="top" width="50%" |

Job Traits

 * }

Rangers in Final Fantasy XI
Ranger is a ranged attack job. They are proficient in the use of guns, bows, and crossbows. They also have reasonable melee ability where they can use swords, knives, or axes. Rangers have the ability to track through the use of Widescan, one of their job abilities, but otherwise focus mainly on dealing heavy damage. They are also the only job that has the ability to use ranged weapon skills so a character wishing to use these powerful attacks must either be a ranger or take the subjob of Ranger.

Strengths

 * Able to attack with high damage from a relatively safe, distant position.
 * High Accuracy available through job traits and easily found on equipment.
 * Potentially fast TP gain.
 * One of only two jobs able to find and track enemies.

Weaknesses

 * Costly in terms of Arrow/Bullet/Bolt/Tools expenditure.
 * Low evasion and defense makes Ranger very fragile.
 * High damage creates a lot of enmity.
 * Haste has no effect on Ranged Attacks.
 * Ranged criticals are less impressive than melee criticals, which is something of a mixed blessing considering Ranger's other weaknesses.

Ninja
Rangers typically use Ninja for their subjob because spells like Utsusemi help the ranger avoid hits while pulling, the act of bringing an enemy back to the party to fight. Ninja also allows a ranger to wield two weapons. Considering the version update that changed ranged attack and ranged accuracy to physical distance, damage from melee weapons is secondary for a ranger when compared to his ranged attack and melee weapons are only held for the purposes of boosting those ranged attacks (through bonuses found on those hand to hand weapons) so the use of two such weapons will increase the effectiveness of a ranger's ranged attacks. Since ninja is a high agility job, having ninja as a subjob will also provide a moderate increase in accuracy over other jobs.

Warrior
Warrior is probably the second most common of all ranger subjob choices. Rangers in this setup will experience a great increase in damage for a moderate hit to accuracy from the loss of a second melee weapon that they might otherwise have been afforded with ninja. Berserk is used to further increase damage.

Samurai
Samurai is the third most viable subjob for Rangers in Final Fantasy XI. The job adds two major bonuses for rangers; the trait store TP and the ability meditate. A ranger with this choice of subjob will be able to throw many more weapon skills at an enemy than any other job combination thanks to the presence of these two abilities, increasing the TP gained per successful hit up to 20% with some guns. Third Eye may also be used to negate one attack versus the Ranger every 30 seconds, offering a slight defensive advantage over Warrior, but the Ranger/Samurai will still lack the second melee weapon a Ranger/Ninja would have.