They seem to be fine leaning toward the powerful imo, certainly better than rogue. Probably much worse than dual wands but those are in a category of their own so I'm not counting/using them.
I have a knight pc/wizard pc/wizard/ranger party, the ranger's damage output is on par with the 2h fighter.
A few things:
- forget precision stance and per(if you're not using him as a detector, I am but the damage is still fine). Get power stance, pump dex/spd. Special arrows/attacks don't miss, when you are shooting at a target affected by any kind of disable(90% of the time I'd say) you automatically have 100% hit chance anyway.
- talentwise get bully, man-at-arms/mages will get you plenty of knockdowns and you can just go to town. The rest are up to you, ranger seems pretty flexible.
- special arrows: their status% chance doesn't scale with dex/marksman so the direct hit status ones aren't very good. Poisoncloud ones are very easy to craft and they are the gifts that keep on giving: they do their normal damage to the target, do aoe poison to suspectible targets and explode when your fighter lobs in his molotov for a ton of extra damage. I'm a fan of steam and static cloud ones too, but they are a bit harder to get in quantity.
- get 1 point of rogue for 2ap selfhaste and trip, you have high dex anyway and if someone gets close knockdown/2 bully arrows to the face.
Honestly I think Tactician is still too easy once you reach level 10+
It's been very easy since I've got my full 4 man party. It's probably because we both use 2 mages, just with 1 point in each magic skill they have so much control it doesn't really matter what's on the other side.
When all else fails set up a burning oil wall and park the melee in front. Since the smoke blocks los they have to slog through the fire and get ultramurdered by the saved up ap of 4 chars. I'll probably do another playthrough without hard cc mages to see what happens.
