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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrowhawk" data-source="post: 5642598" data-attributes="member: 6679551">Rather than banter with Dandu, I'm going to talk to the OP because that's why I entered the thread. Gray, let me remind you of a couple key tenants in RPG's.  1) There is no "right" way to play.  2) The best build is the one you enjoy the most. 3) Go back to 1.  With D&D used to be about "role" playing. Your character filled a role...like Fighter, Monk, Thief, Ranger, etc. With the changes to 3.x it moved more towards "roll" playing. Powergamers/ min-maxers started flocking to the game. This is essentially what WotC wanted. They knew there was a large segment of people that would really enjoy the build process and they were right. Making builds appeals to people's sense of both creativity and engineering. It's an art as well as a science. The problem however is that they only way to compare builds in PnP is to find some metric that they can be measured against. What is that metric? Damage. In a balanced campaign, characters are rewarded for all kinds of non-combat abilities. But it's impossible for people to compare builds based on how it functions in a campaign. The only way people can obtain an objective comparison is to talk about how much damage it can do. How good you are at being a "Ranger" has no metric for comparison. So inevitably, people talk about damage. This is natural because there really is no objective basis for evaluating builds outside of damage. Gray, let's look at some of the things you've identified about your character:  So you want a Ranger? You've named a specific class. You haven't said I want a frontline fighter or a skillmonkey or an Arcana specialist. You specificially are thinking of playing this character as a Ranger not as a concept build. Then you've created a back story to support this Ranger professoin:  later you said this:  So my educated guess is that the Ranger or some forset-centric build is important to the concept of your character. That you're looking for more than a combat focused build, and that you're probably more into roleplaying as opposed to "roll" playing.  Here's is what powergamers take from your post.  Translation: I want to min/max my build.  Translation: I want to min/max my build.  Translation: I want to min/max my build.  Let's look at what Dandu suggested and some of the words she used   Dandu's advice completely ignores your character concept and focuses on damage. In fact, she suggests you change your race because HO is a "bad race for everything." Do you think that includes "role" playing? Later Dandu gets more specific:  So Dandu tells you Fari is a good "Ranger" build and then tells you that for your character you should be focused on AoO. Why? Because "it's what Fari does." Let me ask you Gray, did your vision of Keera invovle running around a dense forest with a Guisarme and spiked armor? Is that how you envisioned Keera would roll? My guess is no. What am I doing here? I'm pointing out that the majority of advice you're going to get on builds is going to be based on people's own concept of what you should be doing...not on what you want to do or what is going to make the game more enjoyable for you. The first line in you OP is that you want to be "VERY proficient" at builds. The problem is that there is no objective measure of "proficiency" outside of powergame builds for doing damage. How does one prove proficiency at roleplyaing builds? You can't. What you can prove is my build does more damage than your build in X situation. This is what build monkeys want to talk about because any other build aspect is opinion.  Is Fari going to be a better at being "Keera" than the build you've designed? There's no way to answer that question. The only thing Dandu can argue is damage and maybe a DC check on a specific skill. However, I notice Fari's skill ranks in Survival is 5 out of a possible 16 at level 13. Here's my advice... 1. The only way you're going to become "proficient" with builds is to build them and play them. You can read all the advice about chess you want, but you have to play the game to be good at it. 2. In our campaign, we let low level characters swap out feats and even skills between sessions for the purpose of becoming familiar with them. Especially newbies. As your DM for the same leniency. The point of the game is to have fun and if you make a bad choice with a feat, it hurts both you and the DM to force you to keep playing with it.  3. Taking 2 a step further, make different combat focus builds. Ask your DM to let you swap it for any particular battle so you can see if there are synergies. But don't try and use this as an exploit e.g. taking Blind Fighting just to avoid a darkness penalty because you guys forgot torches. A final thought is to remember, you aren't competiting with the other players. A party works best when everyone compliments each other and the party is diverse. Building a "Ranger" to go out stealth a Rogue or out DPS the Fighter is more likely than not going to make the game less enjoyable for people who play those characters. But hey, if you want to powergame / min-max, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just reading your post and offering you another perspective. </blockquote>

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