Personally I feel the only thing that could be considered OP is their bleed, which is superior to that of the berserkers, so maybe the solution is making it the same as what berserkers have.
That way their damage&utility is reduced a fair amount yet there’s no risk of making them useless.
In any case, I wouldn’t nerf their range, everything else has short to medium range already, and feels quite nice to have a setup with melee, mages behind then priests&archers.
I will say that whatever we do to address this will be a light touch - I’d rather err on doing too little than doing too much.
I would also only change the bleed…and take away armor piercing.
Early game, they are effective, late game they are not.
The range is a bit ridiculous at times, but at other times I want more for the points I’m putting into it. Hard to make up my mind on whether or not the range should be changed.
I would say that rangers are OP, but I would be very hesitant at changing the range. Damage… ok. I wouldn’t be terribly upset, but the real place to tone it down, in my opinion, is in the abilities. I think all of the units’ abilities need some fine tuning, and if that means the rangers get a slight nerf in the process I wouldn’t complain.
What exactly is ‘over-powered’?
They’re strong, probably the strongest unit in the game, but they’re also the only real ranged unit in a tower defense game. They form the bedrock of most people’s strategy but is that an issue? The way the levels are designed offer placements that allow rangers to cover vastly more ground than the other classes (in the few levels where that isn’t the case, and efficient ranger placements are thin on the ground, they’re far less effective).
There’s an alternate universe Defender’s Quest where it’s noted that archers cover 4 times as much ground on average as beserkers, and therefore are made a quarter as powerful. That would be ‘balanced’ but would be an entirely different game.
So yes, they feel strong but it really seems like they’re meant to be. Either the game was made purposefully that way, or it was an accident, but still, that’s the game that got made.
So the only real issue is if they ruin the game by being too powerful and I don’t think they do. Playing ‘normally’ you can’t beat levels with just archers. Yes, if you’re massively over-leveled you can, but at that point they don’t trivialise the higher level challenges either.
The one downside is that, probably because they’re the only real ranged unit, they have no weakness. I’d still drop armor pierce, make that their weakness, then from the other thread give dragons ranged attacks earlier and stick an armor break on that (maybe as splash damage or a dot to keep things interesting). Then you sort of have dragons mirroring knights where berserkers mirror rangers.
Yeah, basically what I think it all comes down to, is that no unit should be an “all-in-wonder” except for Dragons, who are then appropriately, but not prohibitively, expensive and have a minor drawback that makes them slightly harder to synergize (ie, fire).
As it stands, for the cost, rangers are a pretty cheap “all-in-wonder” and dragons are a pretty expensive one.
The notion I’m tending towards is giving rangers a core, qualitative weakness (removing armor pierce seems the most natural choice), and tweaking dragons so they are more versatile at early boost levels - I think this would mostly fix this issue. I think flipping claw with fire breath, and giving dragons an armor pierce or an armor break as a high level passive augmentation to claw might be appropriate, too.
If I ever manage to ship it, I’d like to unpack all the data files so you guys can just tweak things to your own personal preference, and encourage faster experimentation/balancing on these kind of things. Also unofficial mod support 
Oh, FYI, I’m pretty certain that lategame you can beat every mission with nothing but rangers (excluding the mission that actually has no rangers on it). It may even be possible to clear the current endless mode (up to getting the book) with just them and maybe a couple healers to light up the dark monsters. I think boss fights are probably trickier, but you can certainly beat any regular mission with only rangers, which you can’t say about any other class.
One “problem” with rangers is that the deadzone, which should be a disadvantage to counter their awesomeness, can be canceled in mostly every mission with correct placement.
They do seem to outshine berserkers, even in terms of dealing with swarms, and at higher levels are largely unaffected by armor.
Perhaps looking at it from the point of view of the opposition might help. In warfare, the enemy will try to guard against a known strength. Rather than nerf the archers, perhaps enhancing certain enemy units specifically designed to counter the rangers’ arrows is what is required. It seems like the Dark and armor wearing enemies are naturally suited to take the least damage from archers. Maybe make knights/dragons mandatory for getting through armor at Advanced/Extreme levels, and make the Dark’s visibility a function of the distance they are from any unit, thereby allowing melee units the advantage when dealing with these creatures.
— Begin quote from "TomR"
Perhaps looking at it from the point of view of the opposition might help. In warfare, the enemy will try to guard against a known strength. Rather than nerf the archers, perhaps enhancing certain enemy units specifically designed to counter the rangers’ arrows is what is required.
— End quote
This. Having an enemy type that is extra-resistant to ranged attacks (rather than just plain being armored) would be quite a help.
And what’s more, I think the bleed passive could be removed entirely. The fact that they can apply the bleeding over a wide radius is very powerful.
Maybe a stat for reduced %physical damage, totally separate from armor? I feel like Armor Break makes ice and fire DPS rather unnecessary. There could even be upgrades allowing physical classes to do a bit of magic damage, but they should scale slowly enough such that it really forces you to make choices. So an archer with points in, say, acid arrows would do less damage than a pure physical DPS archer, but more damage than an ice mage.
Actually, I’m not really sure whether the current game treats magic damage any differently from other types. Is magic damage blocked by armor?
Archers are powerful but how to change that without upsetting a lot of people is difficult. I agree that taking armor pierce is a good idea. And maybe swapping bleed with berserker’s so they can add powerful debuff on small area against weaker on wider area. To be honest I like ideas to leave them as they are most appealing. Instead adding monsters that are unable to be hit by ranged units (because they travel burrowed) or ones that block 50% of damage with an exception of fire and poison seems better. I’d also like to see monsters that can be damaged by mages and dragons only or archers/zerkers/knights only. That would probably “force” using more diverse setups of units.
Adding new mechanics/enemies that change the way the game is played seems like overkill. It would require going back and re-balancing every stage to account for them, would only work for stages that included them. The mechanics already seem well thought out, so at this point small tweaks should work better. The way I see it, each class has a niche:
Berserker - dealing with fast, grouped enemies
Knight - dealing with armored enemies
Mage - slows+AOE
Healer - healing+buffing+dealing with dark enemies
Ranger - covering a wide area (can damage multiple lanes and enemy types, but can’t take out any specific type)
Dragon - operating without the support of a standard “kill block” (similar to the ranger in that it can soften up enemies but can’t stop anything by itself)
The problem seems to be that rangers are usurping the niche of berserkers (and knights, if armor pierce is overly effective). In the case of berserkers this can be remedied by reducing their ability to hit multiple targets and swapping the bleed effect, and in the case of knights by reducing the armor pierce effect.
Indeed gaben - we need to keep the solution manageable. 
I think we’ll probalby just weaken the bleed and armor pierce effects, and maybe tweak the range and damage slightly. Hopefully it’ll be subtle enough just to have them not become one-woman killing machines and instead work well with everyone else.
I found that rangers are very good, but then again so are basically all the other units besides berzerkers. I NEEDED my rangers to win a few of the tougher fights (like the final boss on the hardest difficulty). I think that they can be a bit OP but if you’re playing on the toughest setting then their power is needed.
To me, rangers are good because of their low cost. You can start out missions with them covering a lot of ground and then you don’t have to worry about needing to spend so much placing and boosting every other class of unit (all of which you need multiple copies of when rangers not so much). They help pick off the weaker early waves while you get everything set up with your other units. And yeah, they do too good of a job with it. They’re not god tier to the point where it’s “all you need are rangers” but still a little strong. I’m definitely not advocating an increased cost, though.
So like gaben was talking about, rangers kind of take over the role of berserkers to the point where you might as well just use rangers instead. Berserker damage output is very good and their cost is low, but all in all I find berserkers are really only viable in maps where you can use them to cover more than one lane well (as in, not just the corners). And they only really shine when you can place one that covers all of the enemies. They work fine, though; it’s just the fact that rangers are better for the cost since you can almost always use them to cover all of the lanes, and their damage output is comparable due to the range.
So the berserker niche is taking out many weak enemies. The ranger niche should be something like dealing damage to many weak enemies in multiple different lanes. So looking at costs, on a map where you have two berserkers covering entirely different paths, you want something like “being able to place a ranger prevents me from having to boost these berserkers as much to cover my enemies.” Unfortunately, taking that to the extreme you come up with “being able to place and boost rangers prevents me from having to use berserkers.”
When the armor piercing skill is only at level 1, I find that my rangers have a pretty tough time with armored enemies. I would definitely consider dropping the armor pierce to give rangers a stronger Achilles heel. That may be plenty, but if it isn’t I’d look into bringing the rangers more into line with their “cheap early set-up” niche by making them scale poorly in terms of damage relative to berserkers and other classes, so that yes, rangers are great for covering the whole map, but you may run into trouble later on if you’re relying on them too much for your damage output when you should be using other classes instead.
At that point, you may have overnerfed them in that you made them bad at high boost levels. So they should serve another niche at that point by being dedicated debuffers.
So, my take:
I don’t think rangers being overpowered is bad. It means that me, as a new player I have a lot of choice. Maybe remove the armour piercing though, so that they have more need for knights.
The only thing they need changed is to have the same bleed as Zerkers. Either buff their’s or nerf the Ranger’s. Other wise they’ are fine.