When you create a ranger character in the builder, it conforms to the original PHB version of the ranger until and unless you activate "Optional Class Features" in your character's settings, then use the Optional Feature manager to turn on or off the Tasha's features you want.
The words "Revised Ranger" have about seventeen different meanings since Wizards has tried to Revise the Ranger about seventeen times. Do you mean the old UA Revised Ranger. The original "Revised" ranger from a very early 5e UA, where a developer revised the Ranger as an example of a DM homebrew-modifying a class? The Tasha's edits to the Ranger? Something else? You'll have to be more specific in this case.
The words "Revised Ranger" have about seventeen different meanings since Wizards has tried to Revise the Ranger about seventeen times. Do you mean the old UA Revised Ranger. The original "Revised" ranger from a very early 5e UA, where a developer revised the Ranger as an example of a DM homebrew-modifying a class? The Tasha's edits to the Ranger? Something else? You'll have to be more specific in this case.
Yeh sorry, i mean the Tashes' edits. I wasn't even aware of the other "Revised Rangers". I heard they are better than the Phb version, what would be your opinions on that? You seem to know what your talking about.
I'm playing a Tasha's ranger now. I never played the old one. The new one is good, IMO. Beastmaster companion - whatever it's called now - is useful. The class as I'm playing it is fun, but it is a very social and RP heavy group so we don't really min-max much.
Yeh sorry, i mean the Tashes' edits. I wasn't even aware of the other "Revised Rangers". I heard they are better than the Phb version, what would be your opinions on that? You seem to know what your talking about.
The Tasha's Cauldron edits to the ranger class give it broader, more universally useful abilities at the cost of those abilities being less potent than the original versions. When Wizards of the Coast wrote the rules for fifth edition D&D, they did not know that players would widely and consistently remove all of the travel rules altogether as well as discarding the longstanding D&D tradition of wishing to learn about their foes prior to engaging them. Natural Explorer allows the ranger to greatly ease travel, exploration, and survival in their favored terrain, while Favored Enemy gives the ranger the ability to easily learn about their specific most hated enemies. Personally, I find both features to be very helpful for telling the ranger's story. They're very flavorful and good at informing both the ranger's player and the ranger's companions of that ranger's history.
The usual complaint levied against these features, and why they were soft-scrapped in Tasha's Cauldron, is that both features are narrow in scope. Players complained that it Did Not Feel Good to build a cool ranger with favored enemies and terrain, only for neither the enemies nor the terrain to come up in a campaign. Rather than wondering if player-DM communication is at fault, the playerbase instead demanded that Wizards rip out both features and replace them with something that would be useful all the time forever, no matter where the ranger was and whether the table was using travel rules or not.
Deft Explorer, replacing Natural Explorer/Favored Terrain, is a hit. The ranger class badly needed native access to Expertise; the ranger is an "Expert" style class just like the rogue and the bard, but lacking Expertise meant both the aforementioned classes could always outperform it as an expert. Moving languages here to decouple them from favored enemies and allow the ranger to learn the tongues of the lands they travel is neat, and the additional bonuses at 6th and 10th levels help home in on the idea of a being at home in the wilds. Other classes might be faster; the ranger is more able to cope with wild terrain and handle the rigors of long travel.
Favored Foe, replacing Favored Enemy, is a trap. It is terrible. Absolutely awful. It is a bad feature and it should feel bad. Rangers are already overburdened with concentration effects as it is, the extra damage from the feature is absolutely pitiful, and the absolute lack of any other abilities tied to Favored Foe make the ability boring, as well. I have never built a ranger, since Tasha's Cauldron released, that opted to switch out Favored Enemy for Favored Foe. Even if Favored Enemy never comes up, the extra languages it offers and the narrative flavor of having a specialized creature group my ranger is particularly adept at handling/dealing with is more valuable to me than one flippin' d4 per turn of random damage that conflicts with all the other cool concentration spells I get and does literally nothing else. Favored Foe can suck eggs and die.
The expanded ranger spells are simply nice to have, no reason not to turn them on if your DM is open to TCoE at all.
The expanded fighting styles are neat, and Druidic Warrior is honestly a very cool option to give to rangers. The ability to snag a couple of cantrips from the druid list and lean more into the Nature Magic angle of the ranger is awesome. Not all rangers will want to take Druidic Warrior, but the fact that they can if they like is very cool. Shillelagh's presence on the druid list means you can do the stick-bonking Wisdom-focused ranger builds that previously required a feat or a multiclass to get their basic combat option free of charge now, which is super helpful. Blind Fighting also makes a lot of sense for many rangers, even if it's overall less flavorful/impactful than Druidic Warrior. Does really help players who want to make that keen-edged wild warrior though - no amount of dust cloud will save you from the ranger's blade.
Being able to use a druidic focus as a casting focus just kinda makes sense, and unclips rangers from needing to buy component pouches. I kinda favor the component pouch anyways, I like the idea of rangers storing away useful little bits during their travels. Feels very ranger-like to me. But being able to use a druidic focus helps the players who want to lean into the nature-mystic angle without dealing with the Druish Furry Convention.
Primal Awareness is fantastic and offers the ranger a great deal of beneficial utility. Primeval Awareness, the original ability, has always been kinda fiddly; replacing it with a base-class ESL that comes with free once-a-day casts is technically/theoretically "boring" ("you're replacing a unique feature with just more spells, booooo!"), but in practice having limited free access to these otherwise relatively niche spells means the ranger gets to play with very ranger-y spells they often don't have room to take as their spell picks. They get to cast these things that make them feel like rangers, masters of naturer and all its beasts, and have cool moments with them. Much better than getting vague, nebulous senses of whether your favored enemies are in a given area. Highly recommended, as good as Deft Explorer if not a little better.
Martial Versatility is fine. Use it if you want it, but I doubt many people use it very often. Fighting styles don't tend to drastically shift after character creation.
Nature's Veil trades a long-term mundane ambush option for short-term mostly-defensive magical invisibility. Hide in Plain Sight had limited applications, but it was also a very on point ranger feature. the whole Rambo thing of pressing yourself into a mud wall for however long it took to get the drop on your enemies, which doesn't come up often but tends to be a cool story when it does. Nature's Veil is, running with the theme, more broadly useful at the cost of being less cool in any given circumstance. You can trip invisibility until the start of your next turn, letting you try and bamboozle your way past observers or slip away from something that wants to eat you. Kind of a toss-up as to which one fits your character better, I'd say. Neither ability is amazeballs or going to change the way you play your ranger, so pick whichever sounds like it'd be the most fun to use.
That covers it, unless you're playing a Beastmaster. If so, take Primal Companion. Just...do it.
I played a Beastmaster ranger from 3 to 5 in a short semi-campaign over the course of threeish months, testing the basic Tasha's changes. Took Deft Explorer, Primal Awareness, Primal Companion, but kept Favored Enemy. The character's fluff was that she was a guide, a far-traveling world-wandering general expert on getting from point A to point B through the wilds. Deft Explorer made sense for her - she has a broad knowledge of nature-in-general rather than highly focused knowledge of any one type of nature in specific, represented by Expertise in Survival and the promise of better mobility at higher levels. Favored Enemy also made more sense for her - FE: Beasts allowed Knioke to know much more about the mundane creatures of the wilds and how to deal with them, both peaceably and otherwise, while guiding her charges through the wilderness. And Primal Companion is both more powerful and a lot more fun than Ranger Companion is.
I found that with a Druidic Warrior, Wisdom-focused ranger using Shillelagh and a homebrew arrow cantrip, the primal companion was actually a pretty savage little hecker. In early levels Knioke was a potent damage dealer, able to bust out a second full-up attack from her companion while most characters could only manage a feeble offhand TWF attack at best. Primal Awareness' speak with animals, combined with the primal companion's INT score of 8, also makes it a very capable scout and a being you can coordinate timed plans with. Far from the whole "rangers are totally useless, maaaan!" bit everybody keeps throwing around, Knioke was a very capable character both in and out of initiative even without the crapass d4 from Favored Foe. I'd absolutely have no qualms about picking Knioke up again, or doing something similar with a longer-term character in the future.
I think the idea behind favored foe was to give them baseline hunter's mark damage without having to use their limited spells/slots on it. It starts out at d4, an average of 1 less damage than hunters mark but doesn't use a spell slot. At 6th level it matches hunter's mark damage and then later surpasses it at a d8. I won't argue that it's not just flavorless damage, but looking at it through the lense of 'baseline version of hunters mark' it at least makes sense to me why they did it. You don't get the tracking benefits of hunter's mark but this means you could save that actual spell slot for those relatively less common cases of tracking a specific foe over a period of time, and use the FF charges for pure damage.
Still, I think a compromise could have been interesting to still add some flavor. Something like, still choosing a favored enemy type, and favored foe not expending a charge when used on that enemy type could have kept some of the situational flavor, while still being useful without that enemy type being present.
Favored Foe does not, at all, match 'baseline Hunter's Mark damage'. Hunter's Mark is on every attack you land against the target, including out-of-turn attacks like opportunity attacks or a Battlemaster's COmmander's Strike. Favored Foe is "the first time on each of your turns".
I understand what Favored Foe was trying to do, but it does so poorly. I'd rather have to burn the spell slot than the concentration, frankly. Rangers have so many things to concentrate on that many of their coolest spells often go unused simply due to concentration conflict; using my concentration for a piss-poor two-odd extra damage per turn is just blah.
I can kinda vibe on the idea of combining the two, though. I honestly don't think it'd be overpowered at all to simply let rangers have both features. Favored Foe is so weak it's not going to tip the balance in any encounter anyways, and the idea of allowing Favored Foe to apply for free* to one of your favored enemies helps reinforce the idea that you know where to hit on your preferred prey.
Ah right, I haven't played a ranger outside the first few levels so I forgot hunters mark benefits from extra attack and FF doesn't.
It is pretty underwhelming for a concentration ability, I think taking concentration off of FF would be good. HM at least lets you mark a new creature if the first target dies and benefits from extra attack, as well as the situational but fun flavor of making it easier to track a target if you expect them to flee.
The other issue is that FF targets one enemy and when it dies your use is over, whereas you can move HM around for as long as you're concentrating. So unless you're facing a BBEG or something, it's generally gone in 1-2 rounds.
The UA giving concentration-free HM was admittedly too good to be true. But they really overcorrected when they scaled it back.
What baffles me about Favored Enemy is that they didn't use it as a hook for subclass features, which would have given it a bit more oomph while also supporting your chosen themes. It's like they abandoned the concept almost immediately after they wrote it.
If i am creating a ranger character is it automatically the revised ranger or the original unchanged ranger?
When you create a ranger character in the builder, it conforms to the original PHB version of the ranger until and unless you activate "Optional Class Features" in your character's settings, then use the Optional Feature manager to turn on or off the Tasha's features you want.
The words "Revised Ranger" have about seventeen different meanings since Wizards has tried to Revise the Ranger about seventeen times. Do you mean the old UA Revised Ranger. The original "Revised" ranger from a very early 5e UA, where a developer revised the Ranger as an example of a DM homebrew-modifying a class? The Tasha's edits to the Ranger? Something else? You'll have to be more specific in this case.
Please do not contact or message me.
...or the Monte Cook Ranger from 3e? :)
Yeh sorry, i mean the Tashes' edits. I wasn't even aware of the other "Revised Rangers". I heard they are better than the Phb version, what would be your opinions on that? You seem to know what your talking about.
I'm playing a Tasha's ranger now. I never played the old one. The new one is good, IMO. Beastmaster companion - whatever it's called now - is useful. The class as I'm playing it is fun, but it is a very social and RP heavy group so we don't really min-max much.
The Tasha's Cauldron edits to the ranger class give it broader, more universally useful abilities at the cost of those abilities being less potent than the original versions. When Wizards of the Coast wrote the rules for fifth edition D&D, they did not know that players would widely and consistently remove all of the travel rules altogether as well as discarding the longstanding D&D tradition of wishing to learn about their foes prior to engaging them. Natural Explorer allows the ranger to greatly ease travel, exploration, and survival in their favored terrain, while Favored Enemy gives the ranger the ability to easily learn about their specific most hated enemies. Personally, I find both features to be very helpful for telling the ranger's story. They're very flavorful and good at informing both the ranger's player and the ranger's companions of that ranger's history.
The usual complaint levied against these features, and why they were soft-scrapped in Tasha's Cauldron, is that both features are narrow in scope. Players complained that it Did Not Feel Good to build a cool ranger with favored enemies and terrain, only for neither the enemies nor the terrain to come up in a campaign. Rather than wondering if player-DM communication is at fault, the playerbase instead demanded that Wizards rip out both features and replace them with something that would be useful all the time forever, no matter where the ranger was and whether the table was using travel rules or not.
Deft Explorer, replacing Natural Explorer/Favored Terrain, is a hit. The ranger class badly needed native access to Expertise; the ranger is an "Expert" style class just like the rogue and the bard, but lacking Expertise meant both the aforementioned classes could always outperform it as an expert. Moving languages here to decouple them from favored enemies and allow the ranger to learn the tongues of the lands they travel is neat, and the additional bonuses at 6th and 10th levels help home in on the idea of a being at home in the wilds. Other classes might be faster; the ranger is more able to cope with wild terrain and handle the rigors of long travel.
Favored Foe, replacing Favored Enemy, is a trap. It is terrible. Absolutely awful. It is a bad feature and it should feel bad. Rangers are already overburdened with concentration effects as it is, the extra damage from the feature is absolutely pitiful, and the absolute lack of any other abilities tied to Favored Foe make the ability boring, as well. I have never built a ranger, since Tasha's Cauldron released, that opted to switch out Favored Enemy for Favored Foe. Even if Favored Enemy never comes up, the extra languages it offers and the narrative flavor of having a specialized creature group my ranger is particularly adept at handling/dealing with is more valuable to me than one flippin' d4 per turn of random damage that conflicts with all the other cool concentration spells I get and does literally nothing else. Favored Foe can suck eggs and die.
The expanded ranger spells are simply nice to have, no reason not to turn them on if your DM is open to TCoE at all.
The expanded fighting styles are neat, and Druidic Warrior is honestly a very cool option to give to rangers. The ability to snag a couple of cantrips from the druid list and lean more into the Nature Magic angle of the ranger is awesome. Not all rangers will want to take Druidic Warrior, but the fact that they can if they like is very cool. Shillelagh's presence on the druid list means you can do the stick-bonking Wisdom-focused ranger builds that previously required a feat or a multiclass to get their basic combat option free of charge now, which is super helpful. Blind Fighting also makes a lot of sense for many rangers, even if it's overall less flavorful/impactful than Druidic Warrior. Does really help players who want to make that keen-edged wild warrior though - no amount of dust cloud will save you from the ranger's blade.
Being able to use a druidic focus as a casting focus just kinda makes sense, and unclips rangers from needing to buy component pouches. I kinda favor the component pouch anyways, I like the idea of rangers storing away useful little bits during their travels. Feels very ranger-like to me. But being able to use a druidic focus helps the players who want to lean into the nature-mystic angle without dealing with the Druish Furry Convention.
Primal Awareness is fantastic and offers the ranger a great deal of beneficial utility. Primeval Awareness, the original ability, has always been kinda fiddly; replacing it with a base-class ESL that comes with free once-a-day casts is technically/theoretically "boring" ("you're replacing a unique feature with just more spells, booooo!"), but in practice having limited free access to these otherwise relatively niche spells means the ranger gets to play with very ranger-y spells they often don't have room to take as their spell picks. They get to cast these things that make them feel like rangers, masters of naturer and all its beasts, and have cool moments with them. Much better than getting vague, nebulous senses of whether your favored enemies are in a given area. Highly recommended, as good as Deft Explorer if not a little better.
Martial Versatility is fine. Use it if you want it, but I doubt many people use it very often. Fighting styles don't tend to drastically shift after character creation.
Nature's Veil trades a long-term mundane ambush option for short-term mostly-defensive magical invisibility. Hide in Plain Sight had limited applications, but it was also a very on point ranger feature. the whole Rambo thing of pressing yourself into a mud wall for however long it took to get the drop on your enemies, which doesn't come up often but tends to be a cool story when it does. Nature's Veil is, running with the theme, more broadly useful at the cost of being less cool in any given circumstance. You can trip invisibility until the start of your next turn, letting you try and bamboozle your way past observers or slip away from something that wants to eat you. Kind of a toss-up as to which one fits your character better, I'd say. Neither ability is amazeballs or going to change the way you play your ranger, so pick whichever sounds like it'd be the most fun to use.
That covers it, unless you're playing a Beastmaster. If so, take Primal Companion. Just...do it.
I played a Beastmaster ranger from 3 to 5 in a short semi-campaign over the course of threeish months, testing the basic Tasha's changes. Took Deft Explorer, Primal Awareness, Primal Companion, but kept Favored Enemy. The character's fluff was that she was a guide, a far-traveling world-wandering general expert on getting from point A to point B through the wilds. Deft Explorer made sense for her - she has a broad knowledge of nature-in-general rather than highly focused knowledge of any one type of nature in specific, represented by Expertise in Survival and the promise of better mobility at higher levels. Favored Enemy also made more sense for her - FE: Beasts allowed Knioke to know much more about the mundane creatures of the wilds and how to deal with them, both peaceably and otherwise, while guiding her charges through the wilderness. And Primal Companion is both more powerful and a lot more fun than Ranger Companion is.
I found that with a Druidic Warrior, Wisdom-focused ranger using Shillelagh and a homebrew arrow cantrip, the primal companion was actually a pretty savage little hecker. In early levels Knioke was a potent damage dealer, able to bust out a second full-up attack from her companion while most characters could only manage a feeble offhand TWF attack at best. Primal Awareness' speak with animals, combined with the primal companion's INT score of 8, also makes it a very capable scout and a being you can coordinate timed plans with. Far from the whole "rangers are totally useless, maaaan!" bit everybody keeps throwing around, Knioke was a very capable character both in and out of initiative even without the crapass d4 from Favored Foe. I'd absolutely have no qualms about picking Knioke up again, or doing something similar with a longer-term character in the future.
Please do not contact or message me.
I think the idea behind favored foe was to give them baseline hunter's mark damage without having to use their limited spells/slots on it. It starts out at d4, an average of 1 less damage than hunters mark but doesn't use a spell slot. At 6th level it matches hunter's mark damage and then later surpasses it at a d8. I won't argue that it's not just flavorless damage, but looking at it through the lense of 'baseline version of hunters mark' it at least makes sense to me why they did it. You don't get the tracking benefits of hunter's mark but this means you could save that actual spell slot for those relatively less common cases of tracking a specific foe over a period of time, and use the FF charges for pure damage.
Still, I think a compromise could have been interesting to still add some flavor. Something like, still choosing a favored enemy type, and favored foe not expending a charge when used on that enemy type could have kept some of the situational flavor, while still being useful without that enemy type being present.
Favored Foe does not, at all, match 'baseline Hunter's Mark damage'. Hunter's Mark is on every attack you land against the target, including out-of-turn attacks like opportunity attacks or a Battlemaster's COmmander's Strike. Favored Foe is "the first time on each of your turns".
I understand what Favored Foe was trying to do, but it does so poorly. I'd rather have to burn the spell slot than the concentration, frankly. Rangers have so many things to concentrate on that many of their coolest spells often go unused simply due to concentration conflict; using my concentration for a piss-poor two-odd extra damage per turn is just blah.
I can kinda vibe on the idea of combining the two, though. I honestly don't think it'd be overpowered at all to simply let rangers have both features. Favored Foe is so weak it's not going to tip the balance in any encounter anyways, and the idea of allowing Favored Foe to apply for free* to one of your favored enemies helps reinforce the idea that you know where to hit on your preferred prey.
Please do not contact or message me.
Ah right, I haven't played a ranger outside the first few levels so I forgot hunters mark benefits from extra attack and FF doesn't.
It is pretty underwhelming for a concentration ability, I think taking concentration off of FF would be good. HM at least lets you mark a new creature if the first target dies and benefits from extra attack, as well as the situational but fun flavor of making it easier to track a target if you expect them to flee.
The other issue is that FF targets one enemy and when it dies your use is over, whereas you can move HM around for as long as you're concentrating. So unless you're facing a BBEG or something, it's generally gone in 1-2 rounds.
The UA giving concentration-free HM was admittedly too good to be true. But they really overcorrected when they scaled it back.
What baffles me about Favored Enemy is that they didn't use it as a hook for subclass features, which would have given it a bit more oomph while also supporting your chosen themes. It's like they abandoned the concept almost immediately after they wrote it.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm