From my perspective, they're making some very weird changes still The increase to guard gauge is appreciated, the increase to HP makes Gold more viable as a pick, so I think that's fine The main issues that I have with the patch are that: 1. There's still only two win conditions; the first being guard breaking and the second being high/low (IE Monk) 2. Backroll hasn't been addressed as a problem 3. Clear cubes are still too strong Some of the Gold cubes have buffed MP recovery now, but there's barely any reason to run them, especially since the meta characters minus Ranger can all blast past Gold HP threshold, especially if they're already in awakened Clear For character specific buffs, the big winners seem to be Striker, Brawler, Kunoichi, Launcher, Hitman, and Spectre. Notably, among those characters, only Spectre wasn't considered high tier while Hitman was the character that wasn't top tier. This is going to further enforce the current meta and it's still going to be an unhealthy one at that. I think Ranger will have more trouble in the next patch, but at least he'll be *in* the meta. Rip Battle Mage The TLDR is that their direction in balance is still very concerning. It seems the devs don't care about DNF much outside of the meta characters which are all guard break characters/ Monk.
Ranger didn't change too much in the patch all things considered. The only major thing that got removed is the infinite grenade airstall which makes complete sense. The only problem about Ranger in the new patch is that while Ranger stayed relatively the same, his worst MUs got much worse
@randomuser-mv7bb I'll be honest, it's hard to gauge Ranger's placement when 90% of players, including the pros, don't do basic counterplay against Ranger. It's hard to say that he was ever top 1 when most high level Rangers are getting away with knowledge checks. To answer the question, Ranger honestly has bad matchups against the other top 5 characters. Talking about both this patch and past patch since Ranger got very little buffs, he loses hard against Monk, Kunoichi, Striker and Brawler while having difficulties vs Inquisitor. I'm not too sure about the Dragon Knight MU and with the new changes, Launcher probably has an advantage over him as well
