Dungeons & Delvers Deep Dive Review: Rangers

By the time I realized his paladin video was up, Bruce had already rolled out his thoughts on the ranger!

Some answers and commentary (you'll need to watch the review for full context): 

Though I mostly started Dungeons & Dragons with 2nd Edition, I don't recall anyone playing a ranger except in 3rd Edition, and that was only ever for a level or two in order to get better saves and the two-weapon fighting stuff.

Though I'm not really a min-maxer, the ranger never interested me due to its lackluster class features. You had to wait until 4th level for an animal companion, and due to Hit Die scaling it wasn't very good. You also lagged behind on spells, which never made sense why all rangers always get them. 

Favored Enemy was their iconic class feature, and it was terrible because you only got to make five choices over a twenty level spread and couldn't change them. So you had to either choose the most commonplace monster types, guess what the DM was going to include, or just have the DM tell you what your best choices would likely be.

What I liked about 4th Edition was that it did away with all that. You instead got to target an enemy to deal bonus damage (so your Favored Enemy-by-another-name was always useful), and eventually they rolled out an animal companion version which was really helpful.

While we didn't do that in Dungeons & Delvers, we did make Favored Enemy-by-another-name (ie, Hunter) more flexible and useful. You pick an enemy type for free, and then as you level up can invest skill points to have it apply to other types, and increase the value at higher levels. 

Rangers don't get a baked-in Damage Bonus like fighters do. Instead, they have to spend skill points to get it against specific types, plus other bonuses. Perhaps in 2nd Edition we'll give them a global Damage Bonus, albeit at a slower rate. But maybe not because Bruce thinks Giant Expertise is the tits.

The Expertise Talents was a way to make them even better at dealing with specific creature types. I remember early on we had Talents that let you resist and deal with specific attack types. It's been years and I forget what they were or how they worked originally, I just remember there were quite a bit, they weren't terribly focused on a single concept, and didn't seem worth it.

Something else I notice is that there's no Dragon Expertise Talent. Whoops. I guess here's something for that:

DRAGON EXPERTISE
Prerequisite Hunter bonus applies to dragons

You're immune to the Frightened condition imposed by dragons. When inflicting damage against a dragon, your attacks gain Armor Penetration 1. Any saving throws you make to resist the effects of a dragon's breath weapon are Assisted.
If the GM rules that drinking dragon's blood has a special effect, add your ranger level to the result if you do.

For the Large and Huge Companion, the part about a GM permitting a size increase is if for some reason he just really doesn't care that, say, your wolf explodes in size Mario style, or there's some other weird way you can justify it without swapping out your companion. 

Though rangers don't get inherent spellcasting capabilities (again, this never made sense), you can always just multiclass into druid (or cleric, or wizard), and the way we have it set up your spells don't end up sucking because you failed to keep your spellcasting class levels maxed out.