At Level 10 Rangers will get the quest from a trainer for them to choose their combat style: Archer or Swordsman.

You'll be sent to a little camp on Kojan where a bunch of NPCs wil have you do a few short quests. By choosing the rewards from each of these quests you determine your style and your animal companion. You can unlearn your style by buying an item for 3.5g later if you want to change styles by doing the quest again.

Animal companions are now basically permanant: They last an hour and the spell to summon them has only a 30second refresh. All animal companions are essentially the same in that they do the same damage and have the same ammount of hp so the choice is purely cosmetic. Each style of Ranger will have 5 different animals to choose from so that's 10 in all (my test toon got a Tiger yay). Also the companion is a minion not a pet so you can't name it I'm afraid.

New abilities and changes: Archer Rangers will gain the ability Crippling Shot during the quest (it's identical to the existing Cripple just a ranged attack).

Swordsman Rangers will gain the ability Cripple during the quest.

Offensive style is now for Swordsmen only. Precision Style is for Archers only. Both get Evasive Style.

Archer Rangers will learn the Static Discharge combo. Its a ranged dot similar to Swelter which is now for Swordsmen only.

Swordsman Rangers can learn the ability Blade Shroud from trainers. This increases the Rangers parry by 50% for 15 seconds (I don't know the cooldown yet).

The damage for all ranged abilities has been increased significanty and a few like Critical Shot and Debilitating Shot have had their effects changed slightly.

All Rangers can learn Prepare Campfire at level 10 from trainers. This places a campfire at the Ranger's feet which anyone can use to restore health and mana (like food). The campfire vanishers after 30 seconds.

yayy, i have to admit i like the sound of these changes for snakebite.

sux not being able to name the pet though but the campfires are a great addition. Was a poll script that did the exact same thing on some of the UO freeshards. Maybe our devs are starting to get out more :-)

Weeee love the campfire thing, an old one from UO but a good one

Finally a decent pet class yay.

That may be a class to play... though I think the pet will be more like the druids? and just support rather than a mini tank.?

Heh, nah Rangers most definitely not a pet class. The pet is still fairly frail so it'll die in a few hits from anything higher than a 2 dot and it has no special abilites like Shaman and Necromancer pets.

Its essentially just a portable dot. That looks cute.

ah damn :(

still a very nice touch to the class.

yea, never really made sense to me why snakes pet was out for 10 mins every hour.

Bastards though made the hyena a melee pet. Looks like Cecil and Snake will be parting company. Kinda sucks since the Hyena was really his racial pet, being from lomshire and all it made sense.

*snort* Cecil?

what? .........

You called it Cecil rofl? Even I worry about your sanity.

Yay! *is excited* *does a dance*

I'm gonna go ranged, since i'm halfling i do a lot of ranged damage already+giving basicly the same attacks as melee but different names and as ranged makes it even better! can't wait to have a pet and yay for campfires!
the only thing i will miss will really be my melee chains

Ah you dont lose those. actualy.
The only difference between the two styles are the ones I've mentioned above (Archers lose offensive stance, Archers get Crippling Shot instead of Cripple etc).

So Swordsman rangers can still snipe with bow special attacks and Archer rangers still use melee weapons if they have to defend themselves close up. They'll just do a lot more damage in their chosen style and have a few more tools to hlp them at it.

Yes lol he still calls all axes Colin and all horses Dave

in Spalding, steve and kaz ans averyone associated with them, still refer to axes as Colins lol, and on a side note, I now have a broom called Big Geordie.