doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Returning to the thread topic, all WotC needs to do is pick one or two Ranger concepts, and develop those into actual good and desirable abilities. The rest should be dropped; or at least not stand in the way of the main abilities. So far, being given half-arsed capacity in five different areas only make the result a compromised design.
Make it good and the players will come. Then we can leave the endless discussions about "Rangers should do N. No, Rangers are defined by M!" to obscurity...
It *does not* matter whether Rangers do spells, or companions, or two blades, or archery, or whatever... Just as long as it does it *better than anyone else*.
Each class needs to take an aspect of combat and be the go-to guy when you want to do that better than any other party member.
This is why we're discussing the weakness or failure of the Ranger class: it gets a lot of doodads, but it amounts to very little in DPS excellence, all the while struggling to not have it's various subsystems trip over each other.
I mean, I know at least a dozen people just in my social web that didn't like 4e because in their opinion it literally didn't feature a Ranger, so I don't really buy the idea that as long as it's exceptional at something people will flock to it.
It's "thing it's the best at" has to be something iconic to the Ranger concept.
The biggest problem with the ranger is that they overvalued several of it's abilities. The class is much, much, more popular in terms of people playing it than it is in terms of satisfaction levels. Meaning people are playing it even though they aren't satisfied with it. Because it evokes the right thematic elements, and has an identiry they grok, it just lacks power compared to other classes, particularly at low levels, and particularly compared to the number of low level choices you have to make.
Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy need to do everything they already do, AND provide benefits to all types of scenarios. Natural Explorer needs to provide benefits like improved movement, ignoring difficult terrain, the ability to help the whole team mitigate environmental hazards, advantage to saves against things, etc, that are usable in areas outside of travel.
Favored Enemy needs to eat the Hunter's gimmick, and provide tactical advantages in ways that make fighting your FE easier, but aren't actually specific to that enemy. Dragons might provide advantage against elemental damage and fear, and/or the ability to slow flying targets. Giants might provide the ability to hide more effectively against creatures 2 sizes or more larger than yourself, and/or the ability to deal extra damage against larger creatures. Fiends might provide the ability to negate damage resistance temporarily. Humanoids might provide bonus damage when you attack multiple targets.
The particulars could be hashed out with playtest so I'm not going to engage in any way with debate over them. The point is that the class doesn't need any kind of overhaul, it just needs it's existing features to have more oomph.
Oh, and more known spells. Like, 1 extra at level 2, and then increase again roughly every time you get a new spell level. Or just keep it inline with what a Paladin who starts with Cha 14-15, and increases it to 18-20 by level 20 would have.