First imagine that you are the DM. You are controlling a nonplayer character that happens to be a wolf. What can the wolf do?
It can attack. It can use the Attack action and it can make an opportunity attack using its reaction.
It can Dash, Disengage, Dodge and Help using its action.
It can Hide and Search.
It can Ready itself to attack a creature who threatens it.
It can even Use an Object to some extent.
Obviously there will be things it cannot do due to lack of opposable thumbs, ability to speak a language etc.
Now apply the specific rules of the Beast Master archetype to this wolf.
It can still attack. It can make opportunity attacks. It can take the Attack action if the ranger verbally commands it and the ranger uses her action.
It can still Dash, Disengage and Help if the ranger verbally commands and uses her action.
It can still Hide and Search if the ranger verbally commands it (ranger’s action is not required).
It can still Ready an attack if the ranger verbally commands it (ranger’s action is not required).
If the ranger doesn’t command an action the wolf takes the Dodge action.
You may have found a loophole in the rules. I really don't think that this is what the designers intended. Someone with a twitter account should tweet this to Jeremy Crawford and see what he has to say about it.
Oooh I see what you're saying now. The decision to have your pet attack or you attack twice is basically a pointless decision until level 11. Depending on what pet you took and what weapon you're using, you might even be better off ignoring your pet altogether until then. After 11 I think the subclass actually makes at least some sense but prior to it I agree that it's pretty bad. It looks like the UA ranger fixes a lot of the issues you mentioned. The only issue I see there is the game mechanics surrounding it are a little more advanced.
I'm DMing a game and my girlfriend chose to be a ranger because she got excited about the pet aspect. She doesn't care as much about the mechanics part as I do so I think she'll still have fun. I'm a little worried that the shepherd druid in the group might steal her thunder though.
Any advice?
This is really the crux of the issue. You can build a beastmaster that makes baseline DPR numbers. Treantmonk did a video on how to do it. I'd post a link, but I am not certain that's allowed. Of course, you have to make certain pet selections and class build selections to do so, but you /can/ make decent beast masters. Unfortunately, most beasts that newer players pick (iconic wolf, I am looking at you) are...not so good.
Advice? Don't kill her pet off. She's your girlfriend and you will not win brownie points for doing so. Just ignore the pet and try to keep the other characters from pointing out how suboptimal she is.
So I watched the video you mentioned (I think). Here is the link for others as I think it's fine. They gave us a way to link for a reason!
It's long! I guess I had a lot of issues with the video. Firstly, he literally said that intelligent enemies wouldn't attack the beast because if they kill the beast the ranger actually gets stronger. This is because now the ranger uses two attacks. This I think is the issue. The beast is so bad that just not using it is probably the optimal way to go until level 11.
He then talks about a bunch of useless ranger abilities that he wouldn't even write on his character sheet. He says some of the things that the ranger does get that are good, but none of them are unique to the ranger. He then uses arguably one of the cheesiest mechanics in the game to get advantage once per round. Ok sure.
I guess my issue with this video is that he starts by saying how bad everything is, then does some power gaming to make it viable. Power gaming usually makes a class very strong. Powergaming the beastmaster makes it ok and I think that's the issue. His starting argument was that the beastmaster was ok. I don't think he actually proved that though. Everything he said to make it better is oddly enough something that pretty much any class could do to be stronger. I would also argue other classes doing the same things would be a lot stronger.
He also says that other classes require work to be useful but I don't think any class takes as much effort to be useful. You really have to game the systems in order to be anything coming close to useful.
One thing I did like is where he talked about giving the pet barding to up the armor class. I think that's something I'll explore with her.
What you've said here is spot on though. I think I'll create situations where her pet could be at risk, but for the most part do what I can to help her keep it alive.
I think I'm going to stick with the RAW rules but try to keep her on par with the rest of the group by giving her slightly better magic stuffs.
What my fear would be is exactly as you expect; she's going to roll up to the table expecting her wolf or panther to be super cool. Then, her wolf or panther is going to hit something for weak damage and she's going to realize that's ALL she gets to do...shoot bow/swing sword OR attack with her wolf. Meanwhile, the moon druid is going to literally turn into a bear and RAWWWWR all over your baddies, and your GF is going to be like "wtf is this, my wolf sucks, my class features never do anything" and feel like her character is underwhelming. This is how we get to the point where people think that rangers are a bad class and beastmasters are the capstone of badness. They trap you with a cool thought in your head, then completely fail to deliver on that mental image.
Yeah this is what I'm worried about as well. Reading this is actually making me reconsider the Revised Ranger...
What about using find familiar instead of beastmaster? Is she sold on a race? If not, if she picks variant human, she can spend her feat on arcane initiate:wizard and summon a familiar to be a pet. Depending on what she's interested in, she can have a cool owl as a pet that is legitimately USEFUL, PLUS pick a different archetype of ranger that works better than a beastmaster does. For example, say she wants to be an archery ranger, her owl can swoop down on her target and use the help action to provide her advantage on her bow shot. if it dies, she can re-summon it. There are other familiars but the owl is my favorite. It's just a thought that might scratch her itch, without the baggage that goes along with beastmaster.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
What about using find familiar instead of beastmaster? Is she sold on a race? If not, if she picks variant human, she can spend her feat on arcane initiate:wizard and summon a familiar to be a pet. Depending on what she's interested in, she can have a cool owl as a pet that is legitimately USEFUL, PLUS pick a different archetype of ranger that works better than a beastmaster does. For example, say she wants to be an archery ranger, her owl can swoop down on her target and use the help action to provide her advantage on her bow shot. if it dies, she can re-summon it. There are other familiars but the owl is my favorite. It's just a thought that might scratch her itch, without the baggage that goes along with beastmaster.
If you go a route like this I have considered that there should be a spell called "Find Beast Companion" which functions very similar to the Beastmaster's Ranger's Companion feature at level 3 (with or without the higher-level features is up for discussion), available to both Ranger and Druid, but then a homebrew Beastmaster would still be necessary to add benefits when interacting with animals which are friendly towards you. Expanding on the Animal Handling skill with expertise or some such would go a long way.
A lot of this reasoning comes from how in third edition, Find Familiar and Find Steed were class features instead of spells, and the Druid also had its own animal companion (that was even more powerful than the Ranger's). 4e took a weird turn when they made animal companions exclusive to a Ranger archetype, which I think contributed to the current design of the classes. In this way, however, I think the theme of a Druid having wider control over more animals through spellcasting whereas the Ranger has limited control with fewer animals, though a greater bond and better combat functions, through skill challenges or a couple of features fits both of the classes very well.
I believe the problem is that you must give the beast a specific order EVERY TURN. I would think a generic order to attack our enemy, or stay by __ and take the help action once at the begining of the fight and allowing the beast to act on it's own would solve most of this problems. Even summoned undead can be made to do this, making them much better than a beastmasters pet. This is a simple fix without lots of rules.
I agree that this is the best approach. It doesn't make any sense that the companion is so mindless that it can't do anything on its own. It's fine to have to burn an attack to say "kill that ogre," but the companion should then continue to attack the ogre every round until one of them is dead or a new order is issued.
I also think it would go a long way if its hit points were changed so that the companion starts with the maximum hit points possible in its stat block, and then gains 4 hit points plus its con modifier every time the ranger goes up in (ranger) level.
I will note: the Revised Ranger is mechanically more powerful, but also a number of years out of date, unsupported on D&D Beyond here (which should theoretically matter) and also boring beyond comprehension. They made the Ranger significantly more powerful in its Revised guise at the expense of stripping absolutely every single tiny little piece of flair or style away from it. It is milquetoast. It is plain. It is nothing but a bag of mildly overpowered, too-heavily-frontloaded abilities designed to deal with the fact that the base Favored Terrain and Favored Enemy abilities are nichey and often perceived as weak. In many cases they are, but the answer is not "give the Ranger a flat damage bonus against humanoids, then give them advantage on everything so long as they're not in the middle of Waterdeep."
Lots of people really want the Revised because it's a munchkin's wet dream - a bunch of really powerful abilities with no theme or style to get in the way of that crunchy math.
Sadly, this means that anyone wanting to make the online sheet work needs to deal with the nightmare morass that is DDB's subclass homebrew editor and basically reinvent the Beastmaster from the ground up if they want the critter to be more than a fluff companion. The old UA Sidekick rules, the 'Warrior' especially, provides a solid basis for what might be possible for a Beastmaster Redux. Every other companion spell/ability draws a spirit which is given a physical form defined by the power - why not a ranger's bonded beast?
I also rather like the idea of the 'Find Beast Companion' spell, especially for those rangers who like the idea of a hunting hawk or similar non-fighty companion that doesn't really jive with the Beastmaster's weirdness. But that would also be some heavy homebrew. Sadness.
I am not too worried about no DNDBeyond for the RR. She doesn't use it anyway.
Why do you say it's boring? At least a basic comparison makes it look like it has better version of all the same things. What was stripped out that you think made the class more fun?
I'll agree it's much stronger. However, my girlfriend is making a lot of sub optimal choices anyway so it won't be overly strong compared to the other players.
It's boring because Wizards eliminated all the choices you get to make - in an edition already starved for meaningful character choices - in favor of making the abilities more universally useful without bothering to keep any of the interesting trappings of the more limited variations.
Favored Enemy becomes "you get a +2 damage bonus to humanoids, as well as the old bonuses", because there's no more selection of a specific type of creature your ranger is particular adept at hunting - you get to pick between 'Humanoids', or a bunch of other choices that are so drastically inferior to 'humanoids' there's really no choice to be made. 'Greater Favored Enemy' doesn't even make sense - when were you developing this deep lore and understanding of these "greater" foes? Why are they only valid as your preferred prey after 6th level? Favored Enemy was never an amazing feature, and everybody wanted damage from it because damage is the only thing people care about, but it offered a seriously meaty roleplaying hook. Why is your ranger particularly adept against a certain type of foe? What in the history of your character gave you the incentive to learn all this additional information about your chosen prey?
Revised Ranger's Favored Enemy/Greater Favored Enemy has exactly none of that Cool Factor, because the categories are so broad as to be nearly meaningless. Especially when one of the categories is "humanoid", and thus eighty percent of the targets in most campaigns.
Natural Explorer is much the same - the 'Favored Terrain' feature of the base ranger is often a flat-out mechanical waste, or at best something the player argues for advantage on at times, because 5e's exploration rules basically don't exist. But rather than improve those rules, Wizards went the route of "make THE WHOLE WORLD the ranger's Favored Terrain, allow them to ignore any and all types of difficult terrain forever, and give them advantage on everything they do in the first round of combat - all at first level - because to hell with thematics." Again - favored terrain was a way of telling people what kind of ranger you were and why you ended up the way you did. it didn't always come into play, and I don't care for those choices being repeated multiple times at later levels, but the Revised version saying "FUGGIT, JUST HAVE IT ALL" is both overpowered and boring.
The entirety of the revision follows this vein - adding power by slicing away choice and style. Revised rangers are just doods who shoot people and are kinda inexplicably supermen so long as they're not in a city. It's so boring as to be vaguely offensive. That and the document is going on three years old, incompatible with the existing Ranger subclasses, and was never meant as a long-term option anyways.
EDIT: and before anyone says 'you can still have all that stuff, that's what backstories are for!" - don't be dense. Nobody likes it when their story has absolutely no impact or effect on their character's actual mechanical abilities. If they did, nobody would be playing this game at all save the Adventurer's League guys with their variant human Crossbow Sharpshooting Expert fighter/rogue/ranger/paladin multiclasses. Revised Ranger is no more a 'ranger' than my Tempest cleric is, and it's sad.
Your argument is all very opinionated and not at all impartial. Having bonuses work in more than 10% of environments is too strong? Getting a bonus to damage against humans is strictly the best regardless of setting or campaign? Learning how to fight stronger monsters after reaching a higher level doesnt make sense (but suddenly learning magic or how to have a pet does)?
I'm not even arguing for the revised ranger. It is just that your argument all sounds very personal and not at all likely to convince anyone that doesn't already agree with you.
Most arguments for or against revised ranger are. The primary argument against it is that it's a 2016 UA which was explicitly abandoned with no hope or expectation of being revisited, which means it's increasingly incompatible with all current and future ranger class updates as well as the 2019 version of 5e in general, but most of the folks who like Revised don't care.
That said, yes. I don't care for the Revised ranger, and I end up Frowny Face when I see people point to it and say "See? just use this. It is literally perfect and cannot possibly be improved upon, unlike the utter tripe that is the base class." Revised Natural Explorer is hogwash, Revised Favored Enemy is boring and over-incentivizes humanoids (which also accounts for virtually every 'evil' species in the game, not just bandits), the way RFE/GRFE works means you cannot hunt your actual preferred prey if your backstory calls for it to be one of the Greater groups until level 6, and most of the features above GRFE are bunk. Fleet-Footed, Vanish, and HiPS can be read as "you spend three level-ups and seven times the actual level investment to learn an extremely shitty version of Cunning Action, that thing rogues get at level 2. Oh, also: if you indulge in the super common and extremely popular Rogue/Ranger multiclass, your Ranger's 8th and 14th levels are dead weight, and your 10th-level only lets you hide until you decide to do something useful." Foe Slayer is still one of the worst capstones in the game, and the Revised Beastmaster isn't even good.
You no longer get to pick your choice of companions - the DM instead assigns you one based on criteria you have no say or control over, and all the fun choices are off the list. It removes your companion's multiattack, reducing it to whichever pathetic basic attack it gets, and while it no longer requires you to sacrifice your action to attack, the Revised Beastmaster also no longer gets Extra Attack itself. Instead, you get to burn your critter's reaction to make a second 1d6+2 or whatever basic claw attack it gets. The critter can never attack a given target more than twice a turn - once with its attack, once with its reaction. The only thing Revised Beastmaster has going for it is that it scales your critter's health and defenses appropriately for your level. The Revised Beastmaster's critter companion is significantly tougher than the base Beastmaster but has almost no offensive presence, and unlike its ranger companion, the critter can't locate magical gear or weapons to counteract this - nor, might I point out, does it get the ability to pierce magical defenses the way the base version does.
The critter will live, but it will never be more than a minor inconvenience to anything powerful enough to remotely threaten its master or the party. It explicitly forbids the popular Hawkmaster archetype and ensures that the Ranger herself is weaker than other characters in her group (Natural Explorer aside) because the game assumes half her damage is coming from a critter that rolls attacks at +3 and deals an average of five damage without homebrew. It doesn't really solve the problem that there's no synergy to speak of between Critter and PC, especially when you look at things like the Battlesmith artificer and realize that Wizards is entirely capable of getting it right (or at least close to right), they simply categorically refuse to with rangers for some dumb reason.
Most arguments for or against revised ranger are. The primary argument against it is that it's a 2016 UA which was explicitly abandoned with no hope or expectation of being revisited, which means it's increasingly incompatible with all current and future ranger class updates as well as the 2019 version of 5e in general, but most of the folks who like Revised don't care.
That said, yes. I don't care for the Revised ranger, and I end up Frowny Face when I see people point to it and say "See? just use this. It is literally perfect and cannot possibly be improved upon, unlike the utter tripe that is the base class." Revised Natural Explorer is hogwash, Revised Favored Enemy is boring and over-incentivizes humanoids (which also accounts for virtually every 'evil' species in the game, not just bandits), the way RFE/GRFE works means you cannot hunt your actual preferred prey if your backstory calls for it to be one of the Greater groups until level 6, and most of the features above GRFE are bunk. Fleet-Footed, Vanish, and HiPS can be read as "you spend three level-ups and seven times the actual level investment to learn an extremely shitty version of Cunning Action, that thing rogues get at level 2. Oh, also: if you indulge in the super common and extremely popular Rogue/Ranger multiclass, your Ranger's 8th and 14th levels are dead weight, and your 10th-level only lets you hide until you decide to do something useful." Foe Slayer is still one of the worst capstones in the game, and the Revised Beastmaster isn't even good.
You no longer get to pick your choice of companions - the DM instead assigns you one based on criteria you have no say or control over, and all the fun choices are off the list. It removes your companion's multiattack, reducing it to whichever pathetic basic attack it gets, and while it no longer requires you to sacrifice your action to attack, the Revised Beastmaster also no longer gets Extra Attack itself. Instead, you get to burn your critter's reaction to make a second 1d6+2 or whatever basic claw attack it gets. The critter can never attack a given target more than twice a turn - once with its attack, once with its reaction. The only thing Revised Beastmaster has going for it is that it scales your critter's health and defenses appropriately for your level. The Revised Beastmaster's critter companion is significantly tougher than the base Beastmaster but has almost no offensive presence, and unlike its ranger companion, the critter can't locate magical gear or weapons to counteract this - nor, might I point out, does it get the ability to pierce magical defenses the way the base version does.
The critter will live, but it will never be more than a minor inconvenience to anything powerful enough to remotely threaten its master or the party. It explicitly forbids the popular Hawkmaster archetype and ensures that the Ranger herself is weaker than other characters in her group (Natural Explorer aside) because the game assumes half her damage is coming from a critter that rolls attacks at +3 and deals an average of five damage without homebrew. It doesn't really solve the problem that there's no synergy to speak of between Critter and PC, especially when you look at things like the Battlesmith artificer and realize that Wizards is entirely capable of getting it right (or at least close to right), they simply categorically refuse to with rangers for some dumb reason.
For some reason, multi-quote isn't working. So sorry in advance for the formatting.
When you say that the Revised Ranger is "increasingly incompatible with all current and future ranger class updates as well as the 2019 version of 5e in general," what exactly are you referring to? What class updates have there been that are incompatible? What 5e updates are incompatible? I am completely clueless to what this is in reference to.
"You no longer get to pick your choice of companions - the DM instead assigns you one based on criteria you have no say or control over, and all the fun choices are off the list." This is completely optional and I really don't know why a DM would make this decision for the player. It says the DM might do this if the setting calls for it. It never says that the DM has to make the decision. An optional rule that I would never use anyway is not a real criticism of the subclass.
"It removes your companion's multiattack, reducing it to whichever pathetic basic attack it gets, and while it no longer requires you to sacrifice your action to attack, the Revised Beastmaster also no longer gets Extra Attack itself. Instead, you get to burn your critter's reaction to make a second 1d6+2 or whatever basic claw attack it gets. The critter can never attack a given target more than twice a turn - once with its attack, once with its reaction. The only thing Revised Beastmaster has going for it is that it scales your critter's health and defenses appropriately for your level. The Revised Beastmaster's critter companion is significantly tougher than the base Beastmaster but has almost no offensive presence, and unlike its ranger companion, the critter can't locate magical gear or weapons to counteract this - nor, might I point out, does it get the ability to pierce magical defenses the way the base version does." Most of what you say here is objectively false. The normal beastmaster doesn't really get extra attack either if they ever want the beast to attack. If they don't use the beasts attack, then what's the point of going beastmaster? One thing you didn't mention is that at levels 3 and 4 the Beastmaster has to choose to have the pet attack or use its own attack. So basically you get the core features of the beastmaster and can't even use it much at all until level 5. That is such poor design. Also, the PHB beastmaster's companion doesn't get multiattack until level 11. Effectively the PHB beastmaster gets it's normal attack and then a single companion attack at level 5. That is true until level 11 when the pet gets 2 attacks. The RR beastmaster gets its attack, the companions attack in its turn, and at level 5 has the option of using its reaction to make another attack. At 11, it gets an area attack. It already effectively gets 2 attacks most of the time due to the reaction attack. This makes the RR Beastmaster so much stronger offensively The offensive prescience is even higher for the RR beastmaster companion due to getting ASIs. You can up the beasts hit and damage through that or give it more AC or hit points or build it however you want. The companion uses the rangers proficiency bonus for its attack bonus in addition to the strength or Dex modifier, and adds the proficiency bonus to attack damage and AC. That's almost exactly the same as the PHB ranger (the only difference is the ranger adds the proficiency bonus to the existing +hit which amounts to +2 more to hit). You mention that what the RR pet does have going for it is that it can actually survive and that might be the only thing we agree on. Removing the magic piercing attacks is a hit but the ASIs make up for it to a degree. You also mention that the pet options are more limited but since this obviously isn't AL there is nothing keeping you from homebrewing something that isn't on the list. It's just most beasts at CR 1/4 make awful pets and the smaller list makes the choice easier for most people. The list of useful pets actually seems stronger for the RR because it adds a few that weren't available before.
I would also add that the favored terrain and favored enemy are terrible in the PHB. Making 1 choice out of a bunch of largely meaningless choices might be choice, but it's not interesting choices. It also either is meaningless most of the time or the DM changes the setting so that the ranger can actually use two of its core features. I think you make an interesting point when you said that there is no story hook in just getting a greater favored enemy, but that's no different than the random added favored enemies that the PHB ranger gets as it levels up.
I'm not saying the RR is perfect but honestly it seems so much less frustrating than the PHB ranger. You may be right about all the advantages rangers get in the exploration part of the game, but I feel like that is supposed to be something the ranger is good at. Giving players an opportunity to use their class features is what makes classes unique. The ranger outside their favored terrain or not dealing with the favored enemy are just as bad at exploration and tracking as everyone else. You might see flavor and options, I think most people just see a crappy unused feature.
They mentioned a while back they might take another stab at an official ranger with optional rules and I really hope they do. But until then players are left with the god awful PHB beastmaster or the mechanically sensible and less frustrating RR beastmaster.
I appreciate your posts though. Reading and evaluating your position made my thoughts about the ranger and specifically beastmaster more refined.
The more I think about it, the more it feels like the problem with creating a base Ranger that is both thematic and mechanically sound is that Wizards is trying to cater to two very different kinds of campaigns: the group of friends who get together for D&D vs. the random group that gets together via Adventurer's League. A lot of stuff about Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy are easy to fix if you play with the same group of people week after week b/c the player retains the same DM or at least a DM who knows the former DM. AL play and similar random group play make accountability re: Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy troublesome. Of course, the other aspect is not trying to duplicate stuff already given to other classes too much, notably Rogues and Fighters.
RE: Beastmaster. I think the Revised Ranger version of this sub-class is mostly an improvement except that you lose the ability to have the spells cast on you also affect the companion. However, I agree with Yurei that the Revised Ranger itself is a boring due to themelessness and narrative-damaging to the point of making it diffcult for DMs to use environmental hazards to slow and confuse the party in any wilderness setting. It feels very much like a class designed specifically fr the people who enjoy AL or convention games.
Yes and no. I've played with the same group of players for nearly 10 years, and I can't think of a single game where we thought, man, we sure could have used a ranger to make this easier. The fact is, in normal play for us, favored enemy and natural explorer are truly useless. They never come up in play, even when we've HAD a ranger. When you DM has to work around your class features to such an extent to not make those features seem utterly useless...those features are utterly useless.
A cleric built around fighting undead for example is not going to miss out on a whole lot when he doesn't fight undead. The features and abilities still /work/. They're still useful.
As for the the whole "themeless and boring" argument, imo, that's a lot of rubbish. I don't need or want WotC to ram fluff down my throat. Just give me a bunch of mechanics that work well, and let my imagination come up with "who" the character is.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Not an issue, Kendis. The quote system in the DDB forums here is a disaster, and discussions like this are a good way for both sides of a debate to refine their point. I know I can get zealous, and apologies for that. Heh, in the end your game is yours, Rule 0 is sacrosanct. That said, I'm enjoying the discussion so here we go.
"Incompatibility with Current Rules" The Revised Ranger eliminates several of the core ranger's abilities in exchange for 'improved' versions, and heavily modifies the behavior of a number of others. Any new content that interacts with these core rules must either be homebrew'd into working with the Revised version, or discarded. You cannot, for example, make a Horizon Walker revised ranger without homebrew. You need to replace the level 5 "Enclave" ability the Horizon Walker doesn't get, and you need to ensure the Horizon Walker's abilities don't conflict or interfere with the revised ranger rules. That's relatively straightforward for the Horizon Walker, but the more time passes and the more game content and revisions/errata are released, the more the old 2016 UA document is out of date.
"Reduced Companion Selection" The revised ranger rules assume you have one of the beasts given in the feature. If someone wants, for example, a blood hawk pet - a common choice for 'classic' Beastmasters - the DM has to be wary of a Super Buff Bloodhawk managing to find rules abuse and loopholes they weren't ready for. The revised Beastmaster makes the same assumption that the rest of Revised Ranger does - that the player of the Revised ranger is not interested in telling a story or having an interesting/non-tropish background and is instead just looking for the most powerful Drizz't expy they can con their DM into giving them.
"Revised Beastmaster's beast is weak." The beast gets to act normally on its turn, which is a bonus. It's also the lowest-hanging possible fruit for fixing the classic Beastmaster - remove the restriction on requiring the ranger's action to command the beast to attack "Sic 'em!" does not require a full round's battle focus for someone touted as a mystical master of beast training. In exchange the beast loses its multiattack if it has one, and any CR 1/4 beast is either designed around the presence of a multiattack or is designed to be encountered in groups. Wolves, for example, are never encountered singly as a combat threat - either there are a bunch of wolves or there are no wolves. Removing the multiattack option from a beast which has it is equivalent to removing the "has buddies" option from beasts designed to swarm their prey - it eliminates the critter's primary combat tactic outright.
The critter is supposed to gain that power back by coordinating with the Beastmaster, but the Beastmaster has to give up half of its own strength to get the critter going. Remember, the ranger's iconic Hunter's Mark does not work when its critter takes a swing, so you lose not only half your weapon damage but also half your Hunter's Mark damage. Plus, a critter that's constantly using its reaction to swing when you do is also a critter that no one ever need fear an opportunity attack from, so the critter loses what little ability it has to pin things down in melee combat. Any basic single critter attack, regardless of whether it's enhanced by the ranger's proficiency bonus or not, is going to be extremely weak. They just don't give CR 1/4 beasts single attacks worth the name. ASIs may seem awesome, but the game designers specifically state that the Road to Power (or at least damage) in 5e is landing more attacks, not Bigger Damage. Neither ranger nor critter can ever make more than one singular attack under Revised Beastmaster rules without expending their reaction.
Better than the base Beastmaster? Probably. Good? I don't really think so, not when the artificer gets much better companion combat rules as an also-ran side thing.
"PHB Favored Terrain/Enemy are Pointless" As standalone, this-is-all-you-get-this-level class features, I tend to agree. Those things should not be the only thing the ranger gets at the levels they come in, as the bonuses they provide are not generally strong enough when averaged across an entire game to be worth the entirety of a level-up. The 5e PHB ranger is not flawless, and I very much understand the desire for revisions. My argument is mostly that Song of Blues is correct - the revised ranger was built to appeal to number-crunchers at the expense of storytellers.
A game is best when its mechanics and its story line up and push in the same direction. As an example, let's look at the successful Rogue class and one of its underrated features - getting double the number of proficiencies other classes do. You get to pick four skills, not two, from a very broad list of Rogue-y skills, which heavily reinforces the idea that the rogue is a highly trained expert with a great deal of honed skill. What that skill is, however? That's up to you. Is your rogue a charming con man with a bevy of Charisma skills? Are they a clever-fingered cutpurse with Sleight of Hand and Acrobatics? Does the rogue favor detection, with perception and Investigation to help them find burgle-able loot more effectively? A rogue's choice of skill proficiencies, and their accompanying choice of Expertise points, says a lot about that particular rogue, what they do, how they were raised and trained and what sort of person they are. The choices you make help you determine what your character is, which is what the game should be about.
What does Revised Natural Explorer say about a ranger?
It says that this character is completely unaffected by difficult terrain, whether it's natural difficult terrain or, say...the crumbled remains of a collapsing dungeon, the effects of a Spirit Guardians spell, the effects of a sack of caltrops, or difficult terrain on another plane of existence completely foreign to Prime Material life that the ranger has never seen or experienced before in his life. It says he has advantage on literally everything he does in the first turn of combat because reasons I guess, and it says that this guy - who is a level 1 character at this point - could track a fruit fly through a desert he's never seen before whilst remaining immune to ambushes, impossible to shake or lose, and able to find enough food and water to feed a herd of wildebeests. They don't even need to make skill rolls to track stuff - they just get direction, type, number, and time since the target of their hunt has been through.
Natural Explorer says "this individual is more of a nature wizard than your Druid." It says nothing about what kind of ranger the character is, or how they managed to learn to be an omnicompetent superman of this sort. It would be somewhat akin to the rogue simply getting proficiency in ALL of their possible skills, not just four of them, and then getting Expertise in ALL their proficient skills at level 3. Much more powerful? Yes. Boring and obnoxious? Also yes. No choices are made - you're simply assumed to be gobshyte amazing in literally ANY location that is not a heavily urbanized metropolis, without rhyme or reason. This is perfectly fine for higher-level rangers - I would even say expected - but doesn't it seem a little weird for a level one ranch hand setting out for his first real adventure? Man, people say the warlock is too front-loaded.
Any revisions made to the ranger class should (ideally, at least in my view) preserve the interesting story-generating specialization and tight mechanical/story linkage of the original whilst providing the character with meaningful boosts and gains in power with each level it takes. One of my favorite ideas for a simple and easy homebrew is to grant the ranger two skill Expertises every time it gains a new Favored Enemy. So at sixth level you gain a favored enemy, which is generally assumed to've been something you've spent levels 1 through 5 dealing with, but also two Expertise-level skills. Same at 14th level. Not an optimal solution, but a quick and easy way to make up for the scant power the ranger gains at either of those levels, as well as one that ties back into the ranger also being one of the game's three Expert-style classes that're expected to make a lot of rolls and be very good at hitting them.
Crzyhawk, I'm not arguing that Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy are great abilities by RAW. I'm arguing that they are easily fixable through homebrew if the PC is playing with roughly the same group of people week after week. Small to-hit boosts or temporary status effects for Favored Enemy can be tied to fighting particular enemy types a set # of times for Favored Enemy instead of attaching it to leveling up. Example: after fighting in 10 combats with Ogres, your Ranger becomes better at defending yourself from and killing Ogres - you get a +1 AC and +2 to hit when fighting them and can impose a status effect of Blinded, Prone or Frightened for 1 round if you do damage to that Favored Enemy whom you have already damaged that round. Something like that.
A similar fix can be applied to Natural Explorer. After taking maybe 5 days of journeying in a type of terrain and 5 long rests you get to add a type of terrain to your Favored Terrain - provide for small boosts while in Favored Terrain like Advantage on initiative rolls and once per day saving throw bonus while in Favored Terrain. And the numbers I'm throwing out here are just as examples, these would obviously need to be playtested thoroughly to see how well they work in real games.
The argument that Yurei and I are making is that gradual progression and gradual utility should be built into the class in a way that is both mechanically useful and contributes to richer storytelling. The problem with thematically appropriate fixes similar to what I've described here is that there is no way to track in them in AL-style play. So that's probably one of the reasons the devs went with level thresholds for adding Favored Enemy and Favored Terrain. The Revised Ranger, however, just throws away any semblance of character progression for Natural Explorer and gives all kinds of terrain benefits right from the get-go in a way that would make a lot of Druids quit to become Rangers if not for that fact that Druids get some obviously superior spells and/or better levelling summons/Wildshapes than what the Ranger can muster.
Assuming you wanted to break apart one person's quote to more easily respond to individual points, all I do is hit "enter" after the point I want to respond to and then hit the "blockquote" button (closing quotation between "strikethrough" and "source code") and it separates block into separate quotes.
"The argument that Yurei and I are making is that gradual progression and gradual utility should be built into the class in a way that is both mechanically useful and contributes to richer storytelling."
I can agree with this. I just don't think the PHB ranger favored terrain and enemy succeeds in being mechanically useful often enough to warrant it being a major class feature. The RR seemingly goes the other way making it mechanically useful is major ways while perhaps not contributing to ticket story telling. Of the two options, I think I can overcome weaker sorry telling. You can't easily overcome weaker mechanics.
Honestly, I think the PHB ranger base is fine but only for the mechanically sound subclasses. The beastmaster is a mechanical disaster until level 11 and even then is messy. I think moving the beasts second attack to level 5 and having it use the beasts reaction, while the beast also getting its own turns, is what makes me want to use that over the PHB one. I really like having options for the reaction. Do you want to use the reaction to or dgive attack the beast another attack or save the reaction to discourage an enemy from leaving the beasts area? Do you want to save the reaction to decrease the beasts damage taken at later levels? How to use the beasts reaction is a very interesting and impactful choice to make in combat. It seems so much more satisfying than "do I attack or let my pet do it this turn?" The best answer is always going to be you attack until level 11. Then it's probably let the pet attack. I think that more than anything is the issue at hand. Maybe the best option is a combination of the two.
"The critter is supposed to gain that power back by coordinating with the Beastmaster, but the Beastmaster has to give up half of its own strength to get the critter going. Remember, the ranger's iconic Hunter's Mark does not work when its critter takes a swing, so you lose not only half your weapon damage but also half your Hunter's Mark damage. ". This is even more evident in the PHB beastmaster. The ranger literally either uses its two attacks or uses one to let the beast attack. The best option is always use two ranger attacks until 11 when it's probably always better to use one ranger attack and two beast attacks. The RR version removes the former choice while strengthening the latter. It also provided a method to choose more damage delt by the beast or to let it have some battlefield control. Eventually you get another option to save the reaction to halve an instance if incoming damage.
I can accept your critique of the RR base class but the PHB beastmaster subclass is just a mess. The RR beastmaster has so much more interesting choices to make and has a lot more mechanical cohesiveness to the point where I think it's an impossible argument to make the case for the PHB beastmaster.
Assuming you wanted to break apart one person's quote to more easily respond to individual points, all I do is hit "enter" after the point I want to respond to and then hit the "blockquote" button
Great to know! Thanks!
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You may have found a loophole in the rules. I really don't think that this is what the designers intended. Someone with a twitter account should tweet this to Jeremy Crawford and see what he has to say about it.
Yeah this is what I'm worried about as well. Reading this is actually making me reconsider the Revised Ranger...
What about using find familiar instead of beastmaster? Is she sold on a race? If not, if she picks variant human, she can spend her feat on arcane initiate:wizard and summon a familiar to be a pet. Depending on what she's interested in, she can have a cool owl as a pet that is legitimately USEFUL, PLUS pick a different archetype of ranger that works better than a beastmaster does. For example, say she wants to be an archery ranger, her owl can swoop down on her target and use the help action to provide her advantage on her bow shot. if it dies, she can re-summon it. There are other familiars but the owl is my favorite. It's just a thought that might scratch her itch, without the baggage that goes along with beastmaster.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
If you go a route like this I have considered that there should be a spell called "Find Beast Companion" which functions very similar to the Beastmaster's Ranger's Companion feature at level 3 (with or without the higher-level features is up for discussion), available to both Ranger and Druid, but then a homebrew Beastmaster would still be necessary to add benefits when interacting with animals which are friendly towards you. Expanding on the Animal Handling skill with expertise or some such would go a long way.
A lot of this reasoning comes from how in third edition, Find Familiar and Find Steed were class features instead of spells, and the Druid also had its own animal companion (that was even more powerful than the Ranger's). 4e took a weird turn when they made animal companions exclusive to a Ranger archetype, which I think contributed to the current design of the classes. In this way, however, I think the theme of a Druid having wider control over more animals through spellcasting whereas the Ranger has limited control with fewer animals, though a greater bond and better combat functions, through skill challenges or a couple of features fits both of the classes very well.
I agree that this is the best approach. It doesn't make any sense that the companion is so mindless that it can't do anything on its own. It's fine to have to burn an attack to say "kill that ogre," but the companion should then continue to attack the ogre every round until one of them is dead or a new order is issued.
I also think it would go a long way if its hit points were changed so that the companion starts with the maximum hit points possible in its stat block, and then gains 4 hit points plus its con modifier every time the ranger goes up in (ranger) level.
Yeah I do like that. I also think I'm going to get rid of the favored terrain and give it to her all the time. Possibly also favored enemy.
Either that or just encourage her to switch to the revised ranger.
I will note: the Revised Ranger is mechanically more powerful, but also a number of years out of date, unsupported on D&D Beyond here (which should theoretically matter) and also boring beyond comprehension. They made the Ranger significantly more powerful in its Revised guise at the expense of stripping absolutely every single tiny little piece of flair or style away from it. It is milquetoast. It is plain. It is nothing but a bag of mildly overpowered, too-heavily-frontloaded abilities designed to deal with the fact that the base Favored Terrain and Favored Enemy abilities are nichey and often perceived as weak. In many cases they are, but the answer is not "give the Ranger a flat damage bonus against humanoids, then give them advantage on everything so long as they're not in the middle of Waterdeep."
Lots of people really want the Revised because it's a munchkin's wet dream - a bunch of really powerful abilities with no theme or style to get in the way of that crunchy math.
Sadly, this means that anyone wanting to make the online sheet work needs to deal with the nightmare morass that is DDB's subclass homebrew editor and basically reinvent the Beastmaster from the ground up if they want the critter to be more than a fluff companion. The old UA Sidekick rules, the 'Warrior' especially, provides a solid basis for what might be possible for a Beastmaster Redux. Every other companion spell/ability draws a spirit which is given a physical form defined by the power - why not a ranger's bonded beast?
I also rather like the idea of the 'Find Beast Companion' spell, especially for those rangers who like the idea of a hunting hawk or similar non-fighty companion that doesn't really jive with the Beastmaster's weirdness. But that would also be some heavy homebrew. Sadness.
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I am not too worried about no DNDBeyond for the RR. She doesn't use it anyway.
Why do you say it's boring? At least a basic comparison makes it look like it has better version of all the same things. What was stripped out that you think made the class more fun?
I'll agree it's much stronger. However, my girlfriend is making a lot of sub optimal choices anyway so it won't be overly strong compared to the other players.
It's boring because Wizards eliminated all the choices you get to make - in an edition already starved for meaningful character choices - in favor of making the abilities more universally useful without bothering to keep any of the interesting trappings of the more limited variations.
Favored Enemy becomes "you get a +2 damage bonus to humanoids, as well as the old bonuses", because there's no more selection of a specific type of creature your ranger is particular adept at hunting - you get to pick between 'Humanoids', or a bunch of other choices that are so drastically inferior to 'humanoids' there's really no choice to be made. 'Greater Favored Enemy' doesn't even make sense - when were you developing this deep lore and understanding of these "greater" foes? Why are they only valid as your preferred prey after 6th level? Favored Enemy was never an amazing feature, and everybody wanted damage from it because damage is the only thing people care about, but it offered a seriously meaty roleplaying hook. Why is your ranger particularly adept against a certain type of foe? What in the history of your character gave you the incentive to learn all this additional information about your chosen prey?
Revised Ranger's Favored Enemy/Greater Favored Enemy has exactly none of that Cool Factor, because the categories are so broad as to be nearly meaningless. Especially when one of the categories is "humanoid", and thus eighty percent of the targets in most campaigns.
Natural Explorer is much the same - the 'Favored Terrain' feature of the base ranger is often a flat-out mechanical waste, or at best something the player argues for advantage on at times, because 5e's exploration rules basically don't exist. But rather than improve those rules, Wizards went the route of "make THE WHOLE WORLD the ranger's Favored Terrain, allow them to ignore any and all types of difficult terrain forever, and give them advantage on everything they do in the first round of combat - all at first level - because to hell with thematics." Again - favored terrain was a way of telling people what kind of ranger you were and why you ended up the way you did. it didn't always come into play, and I don't care for those choices being repeated multiple times at later levels, but the Revised version saying "FUGGIT, JUST HAVE IT ALL" is both overpowered and boring.
The entirety of the revision follows this vein - adding power by slicing away choice and style. Revised rangers are just doods who shoot people and are kinda inexplicably supermen so long as they're not in a city. It's so boring as to be vaguely offensive. That and the document is going on three years old, incompatible with the existing Ranger subclasses, and was never meant as a long-term option anyways.
EDIT: and before anyone says 'you can still have all that stuff, that's what backstories are for!" - don't be dense. Nobody likes it when their story has absolutely no impact or effect on their character's actual mechanical abilities. If they did, nobody would be playing this game at all save the Adventurer's League guys with their variant human Crossbow Sharpshooting Expert fighter/rogue/ranger/paladin multiclasses. Revised Ranger is no more a 'ranger' than my Tempest cleric is, and it's sad.
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Your argument is all very opinionated and not at all impartial. Having bonuses work in more than 10% of environments is too strong? Getting a bonus to damage against humans is strictly the best regardless of setting or campaign? Learning how to fight stronger monsters after reaching a higher level doesnt make sense (but suddenly learning magic or how to have a pet does)?
I'm not even arguing for the revised ranger. It is just that your argument all sounds very personal and not at all likely to convince anyone that doesn't already agree with you.
Most arguments for or against revised ranger are. The primary argument against it is that it's a 2016 UA which was explicitly abandoned with no hope or expectation of being revisited, which means it's increasingly incompatible with all current and future ranger class updates as well as the 2019 version of 5e in general, but most of the folks who like Revised don't care.
That said, yes. I don't care for the Revised ranger, and I end up Frowny Face when I see people point to it and say "See? just use this. It is literally perfect and cannot possibly be improved upon, unlike the utter tripe that is the base class." Revised Natural Explorer is hogwash, Revised Favored Enemy is boring and over-incentivizes humanoids (which also accounts for virtually every 'evil' species in the game, not just bandits), the way RFE/GRFE works means you cannot hunt your actual preferred prey if your backstory calls for it to be one of the Greater groups until level 6, and most of the features above GRFE are bunk. Fleet-Footed, Vanish, and HiPS can be read as "you spend three level-ups and seven times the actual level investment to learn an extremely shitty version of Cunning Action, that thing rogues get at level 2. Oh, also: if you indulge in the super common and extremely popular Rogue/Ranger multiclass, your Ranger's 8th and 14th levels are dead weight, and your 10th-level only lets you hide until you decide to do something useful." Foe Slayer is still one of the worst capstones in the game, and the Revised Beastmaster isn't even good.
You no longer get to pick your choice of companions - the DM instead assigns you one based on criteria you have no say or control over, and all the fun choices are off the list. It removes your companion's multiattack, reducing it to whichever pathetic basic attack it gets, and while it no longer requires you to sacrifice your action to attack, the Revised Beastmaster also no longer gets Extra Attack itself. Instead, you get to burn your critter's reaction to make a second 1d6+2 or whatever basic claw attack it gets. The critter can never attack a given target more than twice a turn - once with its attack, once with its reaction. The only thing Revised Beastmaster has going for it is that it scales your critter's health and defenses appropriately for your level. The Revised Beastmaster's critter companion is significantly tougher than the base Beastmaster but has almost no offensive presence, and unlike its ranger companion, the critter can't locate magical gear or weapons to counteract this - nor, might I point out, does it get the ability to pierce magical defenses the way the base version does.
The critter will live, but it will never be more than a minor inconvenience to anything powerful enough to remotely threaten its master or the party. It explicitly forbids the popular Hawkmaster archetype and ensures that the Ranger herself is weaker than other characters in her group (Natural Explorer aside) because the game assumes half her damage is coming from a critter that rolls attacks at +3 and deals an average of five damage without homebrew. It doesn't really solve the problem that there's no synergy to speak of between Critter and PC, especially when you look at things like the Battlesmith artificer and realize that Wizards is entirely capable of getting it right (or at least close to right), they simply categorically refuse to with rangers for some dumb reason.
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For some reason, multi-quote isn't working. So sorry in advance for the formatting.
When you say that the Revised Ranger is "increasingly incompatible with all current and future ranger class updates as well as the 2019 version of 5e in general," what exactly are you referring to? What class updates have there been that are incompatible? What 5e updates are incompatible? I am completely clueless to what this is in reference to.
"You no longer get to pick your choice of companions - the DM instead assigns you one based on criteria you have no say or control over, and all the fun choices are off the list." This is completely optional and I really don't know why a DM would make this decision for the player. It says the DM might do this if the setting calls for it. It never says that the DM has to make the decision. An optional rule that I would never use anyway is not a real criticism of the subclass.
"It removes your companion's multiattack, reducing it to whichever pathetic basic attack it gets, and while it no longer requires you to sacrifice your action to attack, the Revised Beastmaster also no longer gets Extra Attack itself. Instead, you get to burn your critter's reaction to make a second 1d6+2 or whatever basic claw attack it gets. The critter can never attack a given target more than twice a turn - once with its attack, once with its reaction. The only thing Revised Beastmaster has going for it is that it scales your critter's health and defenses appropriately for your level. The Revised Beastmaster's critter companion is significantly tougher than the base Beastmaster but has almost no offensive presence, and unlike its ranger companion, the critter can't locate magical gear or weapons to counteract this - nor, might I point out, does it get the ability to pierce magical defenses the way the base version does." Most of what you say here is objectively false. The normal beastmaster doesn't really get extra attack either if they ever want the beast to attack. If they don't use the beasts attack, then what's the point of going beastmaster? One thing you didn't mention is that at levels 3 and 4 the Beastmaster has to choose to have the pet attack or use its own attack. So basically you get the core features of the beastmaster and can't even use it much at all until level 5. That is such poor design. Also, the PHB beastmaster's companion doesn't get multiattack until level 11. Effectively the PHB beastmaster gets it's normal attack and then a single companion attack at level 5. That is true until level 11 when the pet gets 2 attacks. The RR beastmaster gets its attack, the companions attack in its turn, and at level 5 has the option of using its reaction to make another attack. At 11, it gets an area attack. It already effectively gets 2 attacks most of the time due to the reaction attack. This makes the RR Beastmaster so much stronger offensively The offensive prescience is even higher for the RR beastmaster companion due to getting ASIs. You can up the beasts hit and damage through that or give it more AC or hit points or build it however you want. The companion uses the rangers proficiency bonus for its attack bonus in addition to the strength or Dex modifier, and adds the proficiency bonus to attack damage and AC. That's almost exactly the same as the PHB ranger (the only difference is the ranger adds the proficiency bonus to the existing +hit which amounts to +2 more to hit). You mention that what the RR pet does have going for it is that it can actually survive and that might be the only thing we agree on. Removing the magic piercing attacks is a hit but the ASIs make up for it to a degree. You also mention that the pet options are more limited but since this obviously isn't AL there is nothing keeping you from homebrewing something that isn't on the list. It's just most beasts at CR 1/4 make awful pets and the smaller list makes the choice easier for most people. The list of useful pets actually seems stronger for the RR because it adds a few that weren't available before.
I would also add that the favored terrain and favored enemy are terrible in the PHB. Making 1 choice out of a bunch of largely meaningless choices might be choice, but it's not interesting choices. It also either is meaningless most of the time or the DM changes the setting so that the ranger can actually use two of its core features. I think you make an interesting point when you said that there is no story hook in just getting a greater favored enemy, but that's no different than the random added favored enemies that the PHB ranger gets as it levels up.
I'm not saying the RR is perfect but honestly it seems so much less frustrating than the PHB ranger. You may be right about all the advantages rangers get in the exploration part of the game, but I feel like that is supposed to be something the ranger is good at. Giving players an opportunity to use their class features is what makes classes unique. The ranger outside their favored terrain or not dealing with the favored enemy are just as bad at exploration and tracking as everyone else. You might see flavor and options, I think most people just see a crappy unused feature.
They mentioned a while back they might take another stab at an official ranger with optional rules and I really hope they do. But until then players are left with the god awful PHB beastmaster or the mechanically sensible and less frustrating RR beastmaster.
I appreciate your posts though. Reading and evaluating your position made my thoughts about the ranger and specifically beastmaster more refined.
The more I think about it, the more it feels like the problem with creating a base Ranger that is both thematic and mechanically sound is that Wizards is trying to cater to two very different kinds of campaigns: the group of friends who get together for D&D vs. the random group that gets together via Adventurer's League. A lot of stuff about Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy are easy to fix if you play with the same group of people week after week b/c the player retains the same DM or at least a DM who knows the former DM. AL play and similar random group play make accountability re: Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy troublesome. Of course, the other aspect is not trying to duplicate stuff already given to other classes too much, notably Rogues and Fighters.
RE: Beastmaster. I think the Revised Ranger version of this sub-class is mostly an improvement except that you lose the ability to have the spells cast on you also affect the companion. However, I agree with Yurei that the Revised Ranger itself is a boring due to themelessness and narrative-damaging to the point of making it diffcult for DMs to use environmental hazards to slow and confuse the party in any wilderness setting. It feels very much like a class designed specifically fr the people who enjoy AL or convention games.
Yes and no. I've played with the same group of players for nearly 10 years, and I can't think of a single game where we thought, man, we sure could have used a ranger to make this easier. The fact is, in normal play for us, favored enemy and natural explorer are truly useless. They never come up in play, even when we've HAD a ranger. When you DM has to work around your class features to such an extent to not make those features seem utterly useless...those features are utterly useless.
A cleric built around fighting undead for example is not going to miss out on a whole lot when he doesn't fight undead. The features and abilities still /work/. They're still useful.
As for the the whole "themeless and boring" argument, imo, that's a lot of rubbish. I don't need or want WotC to ram fluff down my throat. Just give me a bunch of mechanics that work well, and let my imagination come up with "who" the character is.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Not an issue, Kendis. The quote system in the DDB forums here is a disaster, and discussions like this are a good way for both sides of a debate to refine their point. I know I can get zealous, and apologies for that. Heh, in the end your game is yours, Rule 0 is sacrosanct. That said, I'm enjoying the discussion so here we go.
"Incompatibility with Current Rules"
The Revised Ranger eliminates several of the core ranger's abilities in exchange for 'improved' versions, and heavily modifies the behavior of a number of others. Any new content that interacts with these core rules must either be homebrew'd into working with the Revised version, or discarded. You cannot, for example, make a Horizon Walker revised ranger without homebrew. You need to replace the level 5 "Enclave" ability the Horizon Walker doesn't get, and you need to ensure the Horizon Walker's abilities don't conflict or interfere with the revised ranger rules. That's relatively straightforward for the Horizon Walker, but the more time passes and the more game content and revisions/errata are released, the more the old 2016 UA document is out of date.
"Reduced Companion Selection"
The revised ranger rules assume you have one of the beasts given in the feature. If someone wants, for example, a blood hawk pet - a common choice for 'classic' Beastmasters - the DM has to be wary of a Super Buff Bloodhawk managing to find rules abuse and loopholes they weren't ready for. The revised Beastmaster makes the same assumption that the rest of Revised Ranger does - that the player of the Revised ranger is not interested in telling a story or having an interesting/non-tropish background and is instead just looking for the most powerful Drizz't expy they can con their DM into giving them.
"Revised Beastmaster's beast is weak."
The beast gets to act normally on its turn, which is a bonus. It's also the lowest-hanging possible fruit for fixing the classic Beastmaster - remove the restriction on requiring the ranger's action to command the beast to attack "Sic 'em!" does not require a full round's battle focus for someone touted as a mystical master of beast training. In exchange the beast loses its multiattack if it has one, and any CR 1/4 beast is either designed around the presence of a multiattack or is designed to be encountered in groups. Wolves, for example, are never encountered singly as a combat threat - either there are a bunch of wolves or there are no wolves. Removing the multiattack option from a beast which has it is equivalent to removing the "has buddies" option from beasts designed to swarm their prey - it eliminates the critter's primary combat tactic outright.
The critter is supposed to gain that power back by coordinating with the Beastmaster, but the Beastmaster has to give up half of its own strength to get the critter going. Remember, the ranger's iconic Hunter's Mark does not work when its critter takes a swing, so you lose not only half your weapon damage but also half your Hunter's Mark damage. Plus, a critter that's constantly using its reaction to swing when you do is also a critter that no one ever need fear an opportunity attack from, so the critter loses what little ability it has to pin things down in melee combat. Any basic single critter attack, regardless of whether it's enhanced by the ranger's proficiency bonus or not, is going to be extremely weak. They just don't give CR 1/4 beasts single attacks worth the name. ASIs may seem awesome, but the game designers specifically state that the Road to Power (or at least damage) in 5e is landing more attacks, not Bigger Damage. Neither ranger nor critter can ever make more than one singular attack under Revised Beastmaster rules without expending their reaction.
Better than the base Beastmaster? Probably. Good? I don't really think so, not when the artificer gets much better companion combat rules as an also-ran side thing.
"PHB Favored Terrain/Enemy are Pointless"
As standalone, this-is-all-you-get-this-level class features, I tend to agree. Those things should not be the only thing the ranger gets at the levels they come in, as the bonuses they provide are not generally strong enough when averaged across an entire game to be worth the entirety of a level-up. The 5e PHB ranger is not flawless, and I very much understand the desire for revisions. My argument is mostly that Song of Blues is correct - the revised ranger was built to appeal to number-crunchers at the expense of storytellers.
A game is best when its mechanics and its story line up and push in the same direction. As an example, let's look at the successful Rogue class and one of its underrated features - getting double the number of proficiencies other classes do. You get to pick four skills, not two, from a very broad list of Rogue-y skills, which heavily reinforces the idea that the rogue is a highly trained expert with a great deal of honed skill. What that skill is, however? That's up to you. Is your rogue a charming con man with a bevy of Charisma skills? Are they a clever-fingered cutpurse with Sleight of Hand and Acrobatics? Does the rogue favor detection, with perception and Investigation to help them find burgle-able loot more effectively? A rogue's choice of skill proficiencies, and their accompanying choice of Expertise points, says a lot about that particular rogue, what they do, how they were raised and trained and what sort of person they are. The choices you make help you determine what your character is, which is what the game should be about.
What does Revised Natural Explorer say about a ranger?
It says that this character is completely unaffected by difficult terrain, whether it's natural difficult terrain or, say...the crumbled remains of a collapsing dungeon, the effects of a Spirit Guardians spell, the effects of a sack of caltrops, or difficult terrain on another plane of existence completely foreign to Prime Material life that the ranger has never seen or experienced before in his life. It says he has advantage on literally everything he does in the first turn of combat because reasons I guess, and it says that this guy - who is a level 1 character at this point - could track a fruit fly through a desert he's never seen before whilst remaining immune to ambushes, impossible to shake or lose, and able to find enough food and water to feed a herd of wildebeests. They don't even need to make skill rolls to track stuff - they just get direction, type, number, and time since the target of their hunt has been through.
Natural Explorer says "this individual is more of a nature wizard than your Druid." It says nothing about what kind of ranger the character is, or how they managed to learn to be an omnicompetent superman of this sort. It would be somewhat akin to the rogue simply getting proficiency in ALL of their possible skills, not just four of them, and then getting Expertise in ALL their proficient skills at level 3. Much more powerful? Yes. Boring and obnoxious? Also yes. No choices are made - you're simply assumed to be gobshyte amazing in literally ANY location that is not a heavily urbanized metropolis, without rhyme or reason. This is perfectly fine for higher-level rangers - I would even say expected - but doesn't it seem a little weird for a level one ranch hand setting out for his first real adventure? Man, people say the warlock is too front-loaded.
Any revisions made to the ranger class should (ideally, at least in my view) preserve the interesting story-generating specialization and tight mechanical/story linkage of the original whilst providing the character with meaningful boosts and gains in power with each level it takes. One of my favorite ideas for a simple and easy homebrew is to grant the ranger two skill Expertises every time it gains a new Favored Enemy. So at sixth level you gain a favored enemy, which is generally assumed to've been something you've spent levels 1 through 5 dealing with, but also two Expertise-level skills. Same at 14th level. Not an optimal solution, but a quick and easy way to make up for the scant power the ranger gains at either of those levels, as well as one that ties back into the ranger also being one of the game's three Expert-style classes that're expected to make a lot of rolls and be very good at hitting them.
Does any of that make sense?
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Crzyhawk, I'm not arguing that Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy are great abilities by RAW. I'm arguing that they are easily fixable through homebrew if the PC is playing with roughly the same group of people week after week. Small to-hit boosts or temporary status effects for Favored Enemy can be tied to fighting particular enemy types a set # of times for Favored Enemy instead of attaching it to leveling up. Example: after fighting in 10 combats with Ogres, your Ranger becomes better at defending yourself from and killing Ogres - you get a +1 AC and +2 to hit when fighting them and can impose a status effect of Blinded, Prone or Frightened for 1 round if you do damage to that Favored Enemy whom you have already damaged that round. Something like that.
A similar fix can be applied to Natural Explorer. After taking maybe 5 days of journeying in a type of terrain and 5 long rests you get to add a type of terrain to your Favored Terrain - provide for small boosts while in Favored Terrain like Advantage on initiative rolls and once per day saving throw bonus while in Favored Terrain. And the numbers I'm throwing out here are just as examples, these would obviously need to be playtested thoroughly to see how well they work in real games.
The argument that Yurei and I are making is that gradual progression and gradual utility should be built into the class in a way that is both mechanically useful and contributes to richer storytelling. The problem with thematically appropriate fixes similar to what I've described here is that there is no way to track in them in AL-style play. So that's probably one of the reasons the devs went with level thresholds for adding Favored Enemy and Favored Terrain. The Revised Ranger, however, just throws away any semblance of character progression for Natural Explorer and gives all kinds of terrain benefits right from the get-go in a way that would make a lot of Druids quit to become Rangers if not for that fact that Druids get some obviously superior spells and/or better levelling summons/Wildshapes than what the Ranger can muster.
Assuming you wanted to break apart one person's quote to more easily respond to individual points, all I do is hit "enter" after the point I want to respond to and then hit the "blockquote" button (closing quotation between "strikethrough" and "source code") and it separates block into separate quotes.
"The argument that Yurei and I are making is that gradual progression and gradual utility should be built into the class in a way that is both mechanically useful and contributes to richer storytelling."
I can agree with this. I just don't think the PHB ranger favored terrain and enemy succeeds in being mechanically useful often enough to warrant it being a major class feature. The RR seemingly goes the other way making it mechanically useful is major ways while perhaps not contributing to ticket story telling. Of the two options, I think I can overcome weaker sorry telling. You can't easily overcome weaker mechanics.
Honestly, I think the PHB ranger base is fine but only for the mechanically sound subclasses. The beastmaster is a mechanical disaster until level 11 and even then is messy. I think moving the beasts second attack to level 5 and having it use the beasts reaction, while the beast also getting its own turns, is what makes me want to use that over the PHB one. I really like having options for the reaction. Do you want to use the reaction to or dgive attack the beast another attack or save the reaction to discourage an enemy from leaving the beasts area? Do you want to save the reaction to decrease the beasts damage taken at later levels? How to use the beasts reaction is a very interesting and impactful choice to make in combat. It seems so much more satisfying than "do I attack or let my pet do it this turn?" The best answer is always going to be you attack until level 11. Then it's probably let the pet attack. I think that more than anything is the issue at hand. Maybe the best option is a combination of the two.
"The critter is supposed to gain that power back by coordinating with the Beastmaster, but the Beastmaster has to give up half of its own strength to get the critter going. Remember, the ranger's iconic Hunter's Mark does not work when its critter takes a swing, so you lose not only half your weapon damage but also half your Hunter's Mark damage. ". This is even more evident in the PHB beastmaster. The ranger literally either uses its two attacks or uses one to let the beast attack. The best option is always use two ranger attacks until 11 when it's probably always better to use one ranger attack and two beast attacks. The RR version removes the former choice while strengthening the latter. It also provided a method to choose more damage delt by the beast or to let it have some battlefield control. Eventually you get another option to save the reaction to halve an instance if incoming damage.
I can accept your critique of the RR base class but the PHB beastmaster subclass is just a mess. The RR beastmaster has so much more interesting choices to make and has a lot more mechanical cohesiveness to the point where I think it's an impossible argument to make the case for the PHB beastmaster.
Great to know! Thanks!