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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8006045" data-attributes="member: 6988941">In our archery scenario you have been beating your pet's attack since whenever you maxed your Dex, provided you took the Archery fighting style. More broadly, most campaigns have magic weapons, but most do not have magic fang enhancers for giant snakes. This means both that the to hit probably ends up a wash with most of the rest of the party eventually, good, but likely not as good as yours. More importantly, a lot of high level enemies will be straight up immune to its nonmagical weapon attacks, and far more enemies will be immune to its poison. And this is our optimal damage beast companion, it won't be everyone's preference, and I think since this is considered a weak subclass people are more often than not taking it for mechanical benefit. Also its a (ten foot reach) front line fighter with slightly less HP than a wizard. You're going to be patching it up a lot. As far as the help action goes, it's helpful, but by very high levels you could have found the ASI to take a feat and get a familiar; save your bonus action for casting and managing all the Ranger spells you have.Which is not to say it's as bad as it's accused of being, and certainly you've brought up good ways to optimize it. I'd add that, in a low magic campaign, the beast would be more consistently useful. But I can't think of another subclass where all the abilities centered around one not particularly amazing thing. If their beast is in some way out of commission they effectively don't have a subclass. Basically all the really good Ranger abilities other than spellcasting and the normal array of martial stuff come from subclasses, so this is quite a handicap. But still, end of the day, they have all the normal Ranger magic, so they're always going to be fairly decent.Returning to the Sorcerer discussion, I think they share one major thing with Rangers in terms of disappointing people: too many levels where you don't get anything exciting; to much waiting for that level X where they will become worthwhile. Which is why I'll actually say that if anything the Shadow Sorcerer is not powerful enough at level 18. They had a long slog to the top and deserve the rewards.</blockquote>

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