I think I'm starting to understand the nerf stick a little better now.

The increase in a character's damage output as they level is not very linear.

While you gain only 5 attribute points per level, you can gain twice that from your gear.

The base damage of your weapons go up, the damage bonus on your equipment goes up and the damage output of your weapon/spells go up too. In additional your durability via armor/resis increases too.

So while the classes may have been ok at the lower levels, they slowly became too powerful at the higher levels.

Unfortunately when the nerf was applied, it cascaded through all the levels. This made some things too weak at the lower levels while balancing them appropriately at the higher levels.

Cleave is a perfect example. At the lower ranks it's not worth using. You rarely got swarmed with things that took more than 2 hits to kill and gaseous blast was more effective for the mana and damage output.

But as you level, the mobs took longer to mow down and the swarms got larger. It became more common to need another multi-target attack while gaseous blast was cooling down.

And even at 50% damage, if you're hitting for 1k-2k, then cleave's decent again.

Once the skills are revamped we'll have a better feel for how everything pans out.

I played a warrior, wife played a ranger to level 58. The higher you level, the worse the nerf.

In fact, ranger was useless. Couldn't use any ranger weapons in the 30s, 40s or 50s that could overcome mob-boss regen. Rangers thus picked up axes. Unfortunately, ranger hit points are well below those of the warrior, so the class was fully and totally gimped by the developers with the first March patch.

Going classless might alleviate the death-blow delivered to those who chose ranger, but with all the "working as intended" attitude to obviously messed up nerfs, I saw no point in "hoping" things would get better when these devastating nerfs are considered "working as intended."

I laugh at those who attain level 15 and opine that the nerfs are all well and good. When they reach the 40s and 50s we'll see how sure they are.

I discontinued my membership. Purples and rainbows were just vendor trash and scrabbling for yellows that were barely better than blues seemed silly. What was the point? The game wasn't fun any more and it's all "working as intended."

~Muttkicker

I have a level 60 ranger (with a crossbow even) and think the game is fine now. I took one of the biggest hits in damage that I heard of and am perfectly happy with my damage output as of build .51.