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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8129317" data-attributes="member: 1465">Favored Enemy is a very misunderstood ability. It's supposed to be a "ribbon" ability, not a substantial one. Why? Because in previous edition it was a substantial ability, but players were constantly complaining that their DM wasn't throwing the right type of monsters at them, and thus their Ranger wasn't getting the benefits of Favored Enemy.If you boost Favored Enemy, you only make it worse, because those players will complain they lose/waste even more. If you apply Favored Enemy to every monster, you divorce it from it original meaning. Even if you use the "trick" of allowing the Ranger to change favored enemy during a long rest (or even a longer period), because you can argue that technically this isn't too powerful, but then ALL Rangers in the game effectively are the same when it comes to favored enemies, they are at best different on a given day, but all identical on the long term, which is what gives a PC her own identity. Think about this example: if you ask me what's my favourite music, and I tell you it's X, but tomorrow I change it to Y and next day to Z, until I cover all kinds of music... do I still have a favourite music?WotC designers had the perfect idea for 5e: instead of having Rangers specialize on a category of monsters based on a "narrative type" (e.g. undead, orcs, feys, demons...) which is VERY subject to DM's narrative preferences, they had them specialize on a category of monsters based on a "tactical type" (hordes of minions, big bags of HPs, giant-sized...). That is what the Hunter's special abilities are for, those abilities are the REAL Favored Enemies abilities. In fact during the DNDNext playtest, the Hunter was split into 3 different subclasses, which were then combined presumably because of feedback from people who suggested it would be good to have the possibility to spread around your benefits instead of focusing againt a single tactical type.Perhaps WotC's mistake was to also add the ribbon "Favored Enemy" ability. They should have rather removed it completely, because people still look at the ability names instead of looking at the substance and then wonder why this ability is so small.</blockquote>

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