Chaosmancer
Legend
I apologize that you found it confusing. I try very hard not to post 2 or 3 times in a row, so I tend to clump replies together. If I had realized being quoted at different points in my post would have been confusing for you I would have kept all of your sections together instead of keeping things in chronological order as best as I could.
I am not “plain false” by level 7 you have the level 5 ability, which allows the ranger to attack once when the beast uses the attack action. I was working my way backwards and I understand you were confused by my post, but the very next sentence was “And until level 5 they cannot even attack without taking the Ranger’s action”
But, either way this is the problem. Many of your “solutions” such as “just have the beast use the Help action” are only viable 4 levels into the subclass. Other than attacking, what is the beast supposed to do that is so useful for levels 3, 4, 5, and 6?
Okay, the reach of the Giant Snake is 10ft, so unless you have a box of other characters around that snake, an enemy can still reach them by taking a 5 ft step. Unless you attack and retreat which may be viable, but still means that you are likely less than 30ft away which leaves you vulnerable to being closed in on and being in melee. Hence why wizards and archers generally try and stay further than 30 ft away, so they aren’t on the frontlines of a fight.
And flyby attack can be great, I’m not denying it. However, your point I was responding to was this “They can be used in combat, but mostly to help the ranger and to do some special things like knocking foes down, poisoning foes, doing a flyby attack on foes, and those sorts of things the ranger has more difficulty doing.”
So, they can be used in combat to do special things, like knock foes down (by making the attack action) or poison foes (which is just damage and is also the attack action) doing a flyby attack on foes (which is just the attack action) and those are things the ranger has a hard time doing… which means the attack action right? Because shooting an enemy with a bow for 1d8+dex mod is far more effective than doing a flyby for 3d4+1 (consider a dex mod of 4, 1d8 gives an average of 4.5 so an average of 8.5 damage. 1d4 is average of 2.5*3 7.5+1 gives us 8.5, but it is poison damage which is more likely to be resisted or ignored and the flyby has to enter melee reach while the bo can be 100 ft away), all the poison is just more damage, and while knocking prone is great, it also necessitates being in melee range constantly since wolves don’t have reach, and knocking an enemy prone can be bad in a party with a lot of ranged attacks.
So, I don’t see how you have this narrative that beasts are far more useful than their attack before level 7, when everything you list is part of their attack action. Or how you don’t understand how they are frontliners when the best “ranged” options are to move into range then back out which can still leave a combatant vulnerable to being chased down or getting hit with a readied attack.
So two points here.
1) Then your solution is not useful for archers. And considering half or more rangers are likely archers, that aspect of your solution is only useful for about half of all rangers. You might be fine with that as a design, but that doesn’t mean it is not a legitimate criticism that is being leveraged.
2) If you pick one of those snakes, or the owl, what use is the ability to protect them if they get hit in melee? You seem to believe that their abilities will mean they will almost never be in melee, and from my perspective, it leads to the same problem. If you are an Archer, you are likely trying to stay further back from the fighting than your companion who has to close into melee. You’ll rarely be next to your companion to take advantage of that ability.
I don’t think this is “I want it all” to think, what use is this ability when I want to be a ranged combatant. Nothing about Beastmaster says “You must be melee” so it is a legitimate choice to decide I want to use a bow, and that decision is what you are running into, not someone wanting everything. Well, unless you count “I want to use a bow” and “I don’t want my companion to die in melee” as everything. In which case, I suppose it is.
Moving this up here, per your request to format my posts differently.
Could you possibly explain how data on which 5e classes are the most popular is of any use to a competitor of DnD 5e?
I mean, unlike companies that make technology for example there is nothing to hide about the creation of DnD 5e, it was a public playtest after all. And the final product lays out exactly what they did for any competitor to buy and analyze for their own use. How they made it isn’t an issue, people know how to write game rules and any language tricks they used would be easily seen by spending the money to buy a book and reading them.
In fact, just about the only argument I could see is that a competitor might use that data to see what people like, and then design things like that so people will want to buy their thing… Which I guess costing them some money to do so is a decent strategy, but the thing is most of DnD’s competitors know the biggest selling point of DnD.
It’s DnD, the oldest Roleplaying Game system out there, the one that started it all. And since their competitors can’t make DnD, they are already at a disadvantage and they all know that.
Oh, it total is. I guess I’m just used to Errata being used to refer to small clarifications in the rules, or fixing misprints. This is neither of those, this would be rewriting the rules entirely.
Just a confusion of terms I suppose.
I don’t know, I think incredibly poor is a fairly accurate assessment.
Yeah, Hunter’s damage is fine. But there 1st level abilities are pretty terrible, advantage on tracking specific enemies is hardly useful in most campaigns (and tracking creatures like oozes, elementals and giants is either non-existent or laughably easy in a lot of cases. ) Having expertise only when in their favored terrain for skills they already picked is pretty poor when compared to other skill related abilities, like… expertise which is active constantly or jack of all trades which boosts non-proficent skills. Their spells being known instead of prepared is an absolute mess since many of their spells are highly situational, and they get incredibly few spells in total. Primeval awareness is simply horrible by pure RAW unless the DM is very generous in the reading, and it costs you spell slots to use which is just insulting with how little information you can actually get. Hide in Plain Sight might get used once, and it is for solo missions in a group game, and Foe Slayer is only useful for an accuracy boost against a small selection of enemies which you may or may not be facing.
So, yeah, incredibly poor. Not unplayable, I’ve never said that myself, but it is hardly fun if you end up in a party who built for the same things and constantly outshines you.
You far underestimate humanity. In particular, a lot of people here defending JC seem to be saying we all think the Ranger is bad just “because the internet said so”… pick your poisons carefully my friend.
We’ve been around this slippery slope argument quite a few times. I’m not engaging with it yet again.
So, there was never any call to do better than the 3e fighter. That’s amusing since one of the big things I remember being discussed in the playtest for 5e was how to NOT repeat the mistakes made with the 3e fighter.
But, it was popular so I guess all of those criticisms were baseless lies propagated by the internet.
After all popularity is more important than anything else for deciding what the design needs to be.
And you love appealing to “the masses” and relying on appeals to authority. I know I cannot objectively prove the majority opinion. I know that the majority opinion probably doesn’t care.
But telling someone “your voice is too small so your opinion doesn’t matter, suck it up” doesn’t mean you are right, and surprisingly, it doesn’t get people to agree with you.
Wait, the only possible way to get a fix to a class is to release an entirely new edition because most people aren’t online so they won’t know about it. How would they know about a new editions being released?
Better yet why do we have DnD Beyond, DMsGuild, Unearthed Arcana, Sage Advice, podcasts, livestreams, or literally any other thing on the internet that WoTC is devoting time and effort towards? It will only ever reach .3% of the audience so it isn’t worth it to continue.
Heck, I bet my local gaming store only sells DnD to about a thousand people, STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFIGANT, we should stop spending the money to send them books and only focus on the bigger markets.
You’ve taken your argument of popularity to absurd heights. If they utilized their online resources, people would learn about it. It would spread to the people who cared enough to look, and then those people would tell others the next time the ranger came up in conversation. That is how communication works. And if it doesn’t reach every single person, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the time and effort to put out the fix, so when someone does look, they can easily find that there was a solution provided.
So, we are going to ignore the tweet where he said that the problem was a vocal minority on the internet and that releasing the Revised Ranger only exacerbated the “perception” there was a problem.
As in, there wasn’t really a problem, it wasn’t a real problem, it was a fake problem created by a vocal minority on the internet.
Not that our perceptions are valid, that our perceptions are false.
But, I’m sure I should take that in the best possible light of just being unpopular.
You also don’t go on the internet and say that sales of chocolate topping Wal-marts ice cream sales for the month was all a lie perpetrated by vanilla haters to trick people into thinking that vanilla needs improving to keep up.
That the Ranger is popular? I don’t care.
That the Beastmaster ranger is Popular? I guess if I could see the exact survey numbers that showed the Beastmaster getting a large percentage of votes for classes people enjoy actually playing, along with survey data showing the majority of people would prefer no changes to the beastmaster because they believe it to work just fine.
That the Beastmaster Ranger works mechanically? Something pretty dang persuasive since after all this discussion almost no one has defended that position and the few attempts made have been incredibly poor at best. Likely, there is nothing he could point to, but I would try and keep an open mind about it.
Why do you think “I want this to be better” means “I want this to be perfect”?
We’ll never create something perfect. It can’t be done. But that doesn’t mean we need to settle for this.
