Optimized Ranger (sniper) build

[Sinrus]

Hello all, a friend of mine wants to make a ranger as its his favorite character but wants to specifically be a sniper type build. If anyone has suggestions or advise I would really appreciate it! I haven't found to much in the time I've had to look but I have had good luck in the past with the community having excellent insight for specifics like this. Thank you again.

[Urpriest]

Ranger isn't really a class that focuses on sniping, at least in the conventional sense. It gets bonus feats related to shooting multiple arrows in one turn and bonus damage that is multiplied by the number of arrows shot, so if by sniping you mean "shoots one arrow at a time for a lot of damage" then a Ranger just isn't the right class. Why in particular does your friend want to make the character a Ranger?

[NoACWarrior]

I have an unoptimized 1 shot build - its not super great but I bet there are those ridiculous splinter shot builds which can help. It revolves around using Hunter's mercy (SpC), but has a fire rate of 1 shot per 2 rounds.

Where the build shines is having enough time to warm up for that 1 shot - which must actually hit the target's AC - for the critical to take effect.

You do things like have a thundering bow, and also use energy burst or fiercebane on your arrows. If possible set your bow to both thundering and a single energy burst and use other energy bursts on your arrows and / or fierce bane if you need it.

I also played around with using an arrow of bone, but it simply doesn't do that much more damage to justify the cost.

The build runs only 5 levels of ranger, and 7 levels of deepwood sniper.

[paperarmor]

it's more of a "ranger" build but a swift ambusher works like this sneak up to someone in thirty feet and fire the bow then using shot on the run sneak away again.

[Snowbluff]

That being said, ranger has some good spells for this:
Sniper's Shot (SA at any range)
Hunter's Mercy (Auto crit)
Guided Shot (Ignore range penalties and cover AC)
True Strike (+20 to hit, ignore concealment)
Hunter's Eye (Sneak Attack)

[VoxRationis]

Since when do rangers get True Strike? It's a core spell and it's not listed by the SRD as being on the ranger spell list.

[Snowbluff]

Since when do rangers get True Strike? It's a core spell and it's not listed by the SRD as being on the ranger spell list.

Mea culpa. I don't actually play ranger, I just poach the list for wands. I do factotum or cleric archers. :smalltongue:

[Sinrus]

Ranger isn't really a class that focuses on sniping, at least in the conventional sense. It gets bonus feats related to shooting multiple arrows in one turn and bonus damage that is multiplied by the number of arrows shot, so if by sniping you mean "shoots one arrow at a time for a lot of damage" then a Ranger just isn't the right class. Why in particular does your friend want to make the character a Ranger?

As to why he wants to he just likes the type of character a ranger is. As to the whole "one shot" big dmg I think as long as the build has good damage from range it doesn't matter if its from one shot or multiple arrows. I know he wants to focus on range combat so any ideas to make this effective would be helpful.