Alternative for favored enemy.

[Rainbownaga]

Besides selecting "magic user" as a favored enemy, are there any favored enemy substitutions (official or homebrew).

Favored enemy can be flavorful, but it is far too circumstantial for such an apparently major class feature.

The idea was to use the wildshape variant ranger and swap wildshape and animal companion for the druid shifter variant so as to get strait in the 'shifting' feature of the game. I know ranger spells then become useless, but there are alternatives for that too.

[lsfreak]

Well, one good thing would be to condense the number of options down. When "undead" covers all the anatomy and behaviors of everything from sentient worms to ten-story manifestations of pure negative energy, it makes a lot of sense to drop it down to something like Humanoid (reptilian), Humanoid (goblinoid), and Humanoid (everything else). Same with animals and magical beasts (oops, this animal is almost exactly like the one you just fought, but has 1 more intelligence, sorry!), and maybe vermin. Same with outsiders. Monstrous humanoid and giant.

[FMArthur]

I much prefer substituting the Knowledge Devotion feat from Complete Champion for Favored Enemy. It's usually weaker than Favored Enemy but it's more versatile and identical flavor-wise. You make a knowledge check for the creature's type (for a list check the Knowledge skill description in the PHB) and gain a bonus from +1 to +5 to attack and damage depending on your result against that creature type for the encounter.

<=15: +1
16-25: +2
26-30: +3
31-35: +4
>=36: +5

I would give the ranger all the knowledges as class skills and every time you would normally get Favored Enemy, you get Skill Focus (or just a bonus) in a knowledge skill of your choice.