D&D 5E Rangers - any news?

Looking back at the revised rangers, the spell-less ranger and the new UA subclasses (such as Horizon Walker), my head hurts.

When will we see a consolidation of all these ideas into a coherent whole?

I mean:
* will ranger subclasses be called conclaves now? It was strange that only Rangers used the same archetype term as fighters.
* or are ranger archetypes the term for subclasses compatible with the PHB chassi, while ranger conclaves is the term for subclasses compatible with the revised ranger?
* which I hope is not the case, because I would much prefer if the game takes a step forward and officially presents a way to use all subclasses with the revised ranger

Then there are relatively minor issues already brought up; the revised ranger gains a terrible amount of useful stuff already at first level, some of which are close to supernatural in ability and power. There are some subtle and some not subtle differences ebtween favored enemy; let's hope for a single unified favored enemy definition going forward.

And how does the spell-less ranger fit into all of this?

Ideally, they will officially present a new Ranger complete with all the "conclaves" that officially makes it through, and then the spell-less ranger will be an alternative that still worsk regardless of which conclave you pick. Either that, or it's a conclave of its own (more or less a separate class if you think about it), which is also fine.

I mean, I appreciate the ability to bring in a real animal companion that isn't remote-controlled very very much, but I can't see myself offering the option if I started a new campaign today. There are simply too many rough edges and questionmarks.

So I wonder - anyone got a guess as to when we might see the finalized result in official print?

My ideal is that when the time comes, there will be official support for what I very much suspect my player will want:

A spell-less ranger with an independent Animal Companion, ideally one that could become a Horizon Walker when levelling up enough

CapnZapp said:

When will we see a consolidation of all these ideas into a coherent whole?

I mean:
* will ranger subclasses be called conclaves now? It was strange that only Rangers used the same archetype term as fighters.
* or are ranger archetypes the term for subclasses compatible with the PHB chassi, while ranger conclaves is the term for subclasses compatible with the revised ranger?
* which I hope is not the case, because I would much prefer if the game takes a step forward and officially presents a way to use all subclasses with the revised ranger

...

And how does the spell-less ranger fit into all of this?

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Well I don't know anything official, but between UA articles and Twitter comments, my feeling is that this is the current situation:

- the latest UA revised Ranger IS the consolidation of all ideas, barring some minor adjustments (which they have probably decided already, based on playtesting and UA feedback survey), and will be published in Fall 2017 expansion book

- both the PHB and the expansion book versions will be official and AL-valid

- the two versions are largely compatible in terms of archetypes, which can be used with both (the only adjustment needed by a DM is about Extra Attack, but it is a very easy one)

- the spell-less Ranger remains officially unsupported and not AL-valid, but may be included in the expansion book as a class customization example if they decide to include those guidelines; the reason for not officially support this, is that it is different enough from both PHB Ranger and the UA Ranger, that it requires a playtesting effort about as big as by a completely new class, as well as it would then require design effort to provide its own archetypes... I think WotC designers feel like it's more effective to invest such efforts in wholly new classes (Mystic and Artificer) rather than a variant of an existing class

Sure, but not everything from UA will be in the fall expansion book, surely?

No word on revised rangers since back when...? Or perhaps more to the point, no tweets?

I mean: essentially you're saying there is no info and all we can do is hope that the expansion book has a theme that doesn't exclude revised rangers?

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That said, I certainly hope WotC won't settle for merely being "largely compatible". I happen to believe we deserve full 100% seamless compatability.

If the ranger is revised, and it calls its subclasses "conclaves", I expect any ranger subclass (published at the same time and later) to be called a conclave, and to be fully compatible with the revised ranger.

Unless I'm incorrect, there are no official ranger subclasses outside of the PHB. This way it's easy to bring the "class tree" up to speed - merely include the three replacement conclaves along with conclave versions of the UA trio (assuming any of them survive the selection process).

Anyone wanting to play the PHB ranger can still do that, sure, but hopefully it will only be passively maintained - hopefully they will realize the wisdom in only keeping one actively maintained version going forward!

And hopefully they will some day succumb to temptation and turn the revised ranger into a precedent; so we can have a revised sorcerer (much more theme in return for no exclusive lock on metamagic) and a revised fighter (splitting up battlemaster into several subclasses, freeing up the maneuver subsystem for general martial usage) to look forward to too!

We'll find out in late-June/ early-July when the announce the fall book and discuss its contents.

Considering that book will not be finished for 6 months, I doubt even they know 100% what will be in it. Stuff will be cut for space.

We can anticipate the book will be 256 pages. All the Unearthed Arcana class articles so far (including some from early last year) would fill 65 pages. Which is something like 2/3rd the size of the monster section of Volo's Guide to Monsters. So they could publish everything and the artificer, ranger, and mystic. And 30% more including feats, and still have room for 150 pages of other content (lore and flavour).

Jester David said:

We'll find out in late-June/ early-July when the announce the fall book and discuss its contents.

Considering that book will not be finished for 6 months, I doubt even they know 100% what will be in it. Stuff will be cut for space.

We can anticipate the book will be 256 pages. All the Unearthed Arcana class articles so far (including some from early last year) would fill 65 pages. Which is something like 2/3rd the size of the monster section of Volo's Guide to Monsters. So they could publish everything and the artificer, ranger, and mystic. And 30% more including feats, and still have room for 150 pages of other content (lore and flavour).

Click to expand...

I know this will in all likelihood not be the case based on prior examples, but I hope the lore/flavor is kept to a minimum. This is going to be the first major rules expansion, and given their plans for a much slower release schedule, probably the only one we'll be getting for 2-3 years, so I hope the crunch is center stage.

Dualazi said:

I know this will in all likelihood not be the case based on prior examples, but I hope the lore/flavor is kept to a minimum. This is going to be the first major rules expansion, and given their plans for a much slower release schedule, probably the only one we'll be getting for 2-3 years, so I hope the crunch is center stage.

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It will likely not even be close to previous edition splatbooks, but we can certainly hope for a meatier product than SCAG (which was very low on the signal to noise ratio).

About the best we can hope for is something like Volo's Monsters - a third directly useful to me as a veteran DM; a third very lightly sprinkled crunch for players, and one third simply gone.

Jester David said:

We can anticipate the book will be 256 pages. All the Unearthed Arcana class articles so far (including some from early last year) would fill 65 pages.

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I think it's more likely three times as much pages once they bloat up the crunch. I think you are too generous in your assessment - if they keep more than half the existing UA material that would be a good haul.

Besides, based on SCAG, they are definitely not shy on drawing out their crunch.

Jester David said:

We'll find out in late-June/ early-July when the announce the fall book and discuss its contents.

Click to expand...

Thank you. So, at this time, the revised ranger could just as well not be included in this year's schedule at all, for what we know.

"No info" is the answer to the question I asked for, then.

On the "spell-less ranger" point, my expectation is that there will not be one in the forthcoming Big Book O' Mechanics. Instead, that is what the playtest version of the Fighter Scout and Rogue Scout subclasses were for.

The reason why I think this is really quite simple-- they cannot mechanically justify it.

I suspect the issue is this: You choose your Ranger Conclave at 3rd level. But you receive spellcasting at 2nd level. Thus you can't justify a Ranger Conclave that doesn't use spells unless you accept the wonky narrative that the Ranger had spells at one point (during 2nd level) and they just "disappeared" when they took the spell-less Ranger Conclave. And I'm willing to bet they were not willing to make that wonky narrative leap. So long as they kept the Ranger as a half-caster like the paladin (rather than a third caster like the EK and AT where spells appear at the same time the subclass is chosen), they'd never be able to justify the swapping out of spells for a different mechanical system because a level with spells just "disappears".

And that's why they offered up the two versions of Scout. To get towards what a spell-less Ranger might look like, without needing to completely rework the Ranger's subclass level system. Granted of course this justification won't be acceptable to some players... but that's really WotC's call at the end of the day. Some people might find it BS, but oh well. Nothing they really can do about it except buy/find/make their own if it matters that much to them.

DEFCON 1 said:

On the "spell-less ranger" point, my expectation is that there will not be one in the forthcoming Big Book O' Mechanics. Instead, that is what the playtest version of the Fighter Scout and Rogue Scout subclasses were for.

The reason why I think this is really quite simple-- they cannot mechanically justify it.

I suspect the issue is this: You choose your Ranger Conclave at 3rd level. But you receive spellcasting at 2nd level. Thus you can't justify a Ranger Conclave that doesn't use spells unless you accept the wonky narrative that the Ranger had spells at one point (during 2nd level) and they just "disappeared" when they took the spell-less Ranger Conclave. And I'm willing to bet they were not willing to make that wonky narrative leap. So long as they kept the Ranger as a half-caster like the paladin (rather than a third caster like the EK and AT where spells appear at the same time the subclass is chosen), they'd never be able to justify the swapping out of spells for a different mechanical system because a level with spells just "disappears".

And that's why they offered up the two versions of Scout. To get towards what a spell-less Ranger might look like, without needing to completely rework the Ranger's subclass level system. Granted of course this justification won't be acceptable to some players... but that's really WotC's call at the end of the day. Some people might find it BS, but oh well. Nothing they really can do about it except buy/find/make their own if it matters that much to them.

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Nah... it's fine by me.

All my players wanting some Ranger theme have in the end chosen Fighters anyway; the most Ranger anyone has gotten was four levels (I think).

That said, I can't remember what the actual Fighter Scout brings to the table. Probably it's still uninteresting compared to Battlemaster.

The revised ranger's favored enemy damage boost is a gamechanger in that regard.

Not to speak about Rangers that want to play Rangers not for the combat aspect, but the animal aspect.

In this regard, the ranger spells kind of don't cut it. Hunter's Mark costs too much - enemies fall quickly, having to switch targets all the time is not worth it: better to take Crossbow Expert to make a bonus attack instead. Most other spells can simply be replaced by "just kill it".

But since WotC clearly values Ranger Spells more; the dream scenario would have been a Revised Ranger with an optional variant on top to replace the spells with a measure of extra combat prowess that would be sure to be even better. (Perhaps Paladin-like smites to spend all those slots )