Rangers... the weakest of classes?

[zealot73]

There was a letter in Dragon Magazine a while ago where a guy was dissing the Ranger Class because compared to all of the other classes it has the fewest abilities. They don't compare to any of the other warrior classes because they don't get the Fighter's feats or the Paladin or Barbarian's abilities. He basically said that if you want to play a "Ranger" why not simply play a Druid and take Tracking as your first level feat since it isn't a class exclusive feat AND druids have Wilderness Lore as a class skill too. They don't have near the skill points as a Rogue and they don't have the saves or abilities of a Monk by a long shot. The Bard is the closest in power but they start casting spells earlier than Rangers AND they get a better selection. We won't even go into the Sorcerer, Wizard, or Cleric. Anyway... I thought I'd see if any of you have any thoughts on redeeming qualities of Rangers and why anyone should play one.

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Lots of thouhts and I've posted them so often I made up a webpage for it.


http://www.murchadslegacy.com/rantranger.htm

Rangers rock.

 

[Christian]

And here is the most recent of an uncountable number of threads on this topic in this forum.

 

[Dark Dragon]

The ranger class has been discussed a lot, I wonder if there are players and DMs using the basic ranger .

With some players I'm testing an alternate ranger (with some ideas from Monte Cook).

Ranger

Level Special
1 Track, Favored Enemy +1
2
3
4 Weapon Focus any one bow or crossbow
5 Bonus Feat, Favored Enemy +2
6
7
8
9 Favored Terrain, Weapon Specialisation one bow or crossbow
10 Bonus Feat, Favored Enemy +3
11
12
13
14
15 Bonus Feat, Favored Enemy +4
16
17
18
19
20 Favored Enemy +5

The ranger gets skill points and spells as the base class. The spell Polymorph self allows a ranger taking only animal forms (incl. dire animals). Ambidexterity and TWF is no more automaically gained at first level. Favored terrain allows normal movement in one special terrain and the ranger gets a +2 competence bonus to hide, move silently, intuit direction and wilderness lore.

Favored Terrain Movement
Barren, Badlands x1
Plains and rough Scrub x1
Forest x1
Jungle x1
Swamp, Marsh, Moor x1
Hills x1
High and Low Mountains x¾
Sandy desert, Rocky desert x1
Ice desert, Glacier x1

The ranger has the advantage of being proficient with all simple and martial weapons, light and medium armor, a better HD and base attack than a druid. The druid is a better spell caster, has better saves and his wild shape power (the ranger must be able to cast 4th level spells to get poly self).

We changed the bard too

 

[Christian]

Oh, and here's a recent tidbit from my analyses. I had made a spreadsheet analyzing the core classes in terms of their roles in a party (rather than individual strengths, as they are most often compared). The categories were stolen from a 'net page/post from eons ago, then I tweaked scores for each class and weighting for each role to get the classes as close to balance as I could. There were three classes that were tough to bring into line with these weightings, and ended up on the top in the analysis of party contributions. In first place, the cleric. (Big surprise, there, I know.) Second and third were the bard and the ranger, two classes that end up near the bottom in individual power rankings.

Both of these classes have the same basic problem, I think. They have a wide range of things they're good at, and nothing that they're the best at. As individual characters, this means that they always seem to lose in a head-to-head comparison. But in a party, the wide range of contributions makes them highly effective for the group.

OK, I'll quit now.

 

[hammymchamham]

our 'tank' is a ranger. Does quite well with the bow and with melee weapons. We lost our fighter recently so we'll see how the ranger holds up in the tank posistion. He's really good at hitting with bow or melee weapons (but prefers the bow).

 

[Crothian]

People want the Ranger to be something it's not. The Ranger is a fine class in the hands of someone who can play it. So, don't blame the class when it's the player who is deficient.

 

[Number47]

Dungeon crawling, the ranger is very weak. Especially coming up against a lot of constructs and undead.

In a long-term campaign that takes place in a variety of places and features a good amount of non-combat, the ranger can be very valuable. If you need to follow someone or puzzle out what happened based on evidence, you need a ranger.

The only thing I don't like about the ranger the way it is built is that they will have a low favored enemy bonus against dragons, but a high favored enemy bonus against orcs at, say, 13th level. What good is that? You could take dragon as a favored enemy at first level, but then it would be useless until much later. I'm not about to change it, though, because my group could really give a care about combat effectiveness.

 

[Shard O'Glase]

People want the Ranger to be something it's not. The Ranger is a fine class in the hands of someone who can play it. So, don't blame the class when it's the player who is deficient.

Lots of time its not the player but the camapign that makes a class deficient. If you are playing a dungeon crawl, rangers might loose some power. In my games fighters seem a tad weak, since the lack of skills is a major deficiency in many aspects of my games and the ability to kill things really well doesn't fully make up for it. I let my players know this in advance though so they aren' caught playing a class that sucks for my game.

 

[Stalker0]

A number of these kinds of threads has had me rethinking my opinion of the ranger, and I think the ranger suffers from two main problems, none of which have to do with power:

1) The ranger never gets a chance to shine: While the jack of all trades role is well and good, every class should get a chance to shine once in a while, and imho, the ranger never gets a chance to do that. The perfect example is his favored enemy. This is a schtick for the ranger, and its nice, but its not really...cool. Rage is cool. Extra feats are cool. More spells is cool. Sneak attack is cool. +1 to some skills and damage is not cool, its...nice.

I think the ranger should get something special against his favored enemy, like a miss chance when they hit him, or a special ability or attack to use against them, something...cool.

Some of this is how you play your ranger, but I believe that it is an inherent flaw in the class.

2) You don't get a lot of bang for your buck as you progress in levels. A 15th level ranger is all well and good, but its a hard road to get up there. Most of the other classes get something preety decent every 3 levels or so, and usually at least something every couple of levels. For the ranger, you usually have to progress 4 or 5 levels to get the next big thing. And every level, you only get maybe 1 more spell and some good skils, which is nice, but not when comparing it to the other classes.

While I think the power of the ranger is balanced in terms of usefulness compared to the other parties, I think the ranger as a concept is not balanced to the other classes.


I'm not going to post any fixes, there are lots in the house rules forum, including one I just made up a little while ago (which I'm tweaking btw You could take a look at Monte's Alt. Ranger, but imo that ranger is too powerful.