Sorry for the delay; I was finishing up the last three episodes of
The Midnight Club.
Yeah, I went back and forth with the Guardian, Seeker, and the Stalker. Because like other UA playtests, things get...weird.
What are the Guardian and Wanderer compared to Primal Guardian and Fey Wanderer?
Edit: found the article. Seems almost like apples and oranges.
See, these three subclasses are a part of a rewrite of the 2015 Ranger re-write (Unearthed Arcana #8, released on 9 Sept 2015), which refers to them as "Paths" instead of the usual "Conclaves." The goal of this Unearthed Arcana was to make a more powerful ranger class that focused more on having a spirit animal companion instead of being a half-caster. It was written in response to feedback on the Ranger being underpowered, and lacking the animal companion of previous editions. And like everything else Ranger-related, it...wasn't very well-received.
Since I made the decision to include all subclasses, and these are
technically subclasses of an Unearthed Arcana class revision...I was kind of in a corner. In the end, I decided to include them both for the sake of completeness, and also to invite some discussion about the Unearthed Arcana 2015 Ranger playtest. These three subclasses depend on the Spirit Path ability of the UA playtest, and were only described for the first 5 levels of the class (instead of all 20 levels), so they're missing the 6th level abilities and up...but here they are. It was only the 8th UA written for 5E, and WotC was still trying to figure out the playtest format...I thought it would be fun to dig it out, dust it off, and give it a read again after 7 years.
Those of you who voted for/against these three subclasses: let us know what you liked (or didn't) about them. I genuinely want to know! The Ranger gets so much hate on these boards, even after the WotC developers go through the extra trouble to completely rebuild it...I'd like to learn why. I mean, it's not like it's anything ridiculous like
a bard.
Hopefully this is the weirdest one. There will be other UA content in the remaining Survivor threads, but this one is probably the one that's gonna feel the most "off" compared to the others. Well, except for maybe Strixhaven...