My Revised Ranger

[Garfunion]

I’ve transformed my version of the Ranger to be a bit more “native”. I’ve also removed some of the spells that go against many of the classes’ features for example; Goodberry in general goes against the foraging features of the class. The animal related spells would actually go to the beast hunter archetype. Hunter’s mark will probably go to the hunter archetype. And so on.

Features like favored prey provide more benefits as if the Ranger was getting into the mind, body, and habits of the beasts they hunt.



Ranger


Proficiencies
•Armor: Light armor, medium armor, shields •Weapons: Simple weapons and scimitar
•Tools: Herbalist’s kit
•Saving Throws: Strength, Dexterity
•Skills: Choose three from Animal Handling, Athletics, Insight, Investigation, Medicine Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Survival

Equipment
You start with the following equipment, in addition to the equipment granted by your background:
• (a) scale mail or (b) leather armor
• (a) two scimitar or (b) two simple melee weapons
• (a) a dungeoneer’s pack or (b) an explorer’s pack
• A shortbow and a quiver of 20 arrows

(Favorite enemy is being moved & replaced)

(Remove Favorite Terrain)

(1st level) Natural Explorer
-Difficult terrain doesn’t slow your group’s travel.
-You have advantage on any d20 roll you make with Survival skill.
-When you forage for food & water, you find twice as much than normal.
-Even when you are engaged in another activity while traveling (such as setting up camp, foraging, navigating, or tracking), you remain alert to danger.
-While you and your allies are resting (short/long) your group is much harder to detect (even with a campfire). Creatures attempting to detect your resting group have disadvantage on their Wisdom (Perception) rolls.

(1st level)Weapons of The Wild
You favor simple weapons for quick and ease of travel. Because of this you have learned to be more efficient and skilled at using such weapons.

When you use the Attack action on your turn and are wielding a shortbow, sling, two simple weapons or scimitars in each hand, or a quarterstaff in two hands, you can make one additional weapon attack as a bonus action.

(1st level)Bloodhound
You can use your action and spend one minute to touch the footprints/tracks of a creature that are no more than one day old (3 days old if it is your favored prey). For the next minute you learn the creature’s exact distance, which direction they are moving, and at what pace. You may use this feature a number of times per day equal to your Wisdom modifier.

(2nd level) Remove Fighting Style

(2nd level) Favored Prey
Beginning at 2nd level, you have significant experience studying, tracking, hunting, and even talking to a certain type of creatures.

Choose a type of favored prey: aberrations, beasts, celestials, constructs, dragons, elementals, fey, fiends, giants, humanoid, monstrosities, oozes, plants, or undead. You gain the following benefit listed below plus an additional benefit tied to your favored prey;
• You may add twice you Wisdom modifier(minimum 2) on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track your favored enemies. You also have advantage on any Intelligence checks to recall information about them.
• You learn one language of your choice that is spoken by your favored prey, if they speak one at all.
——Aberrations: You can telepathically speak to any creature within 20ft of you, if you speak a language they understand.
——Beasts: Your attacks with simple weapons or scimitars deal an extra 2 damage.
——Celestial: When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you reduce its fly speed by 20ft for one minute. Each additional hit reduces its speed further. If it’s fly speed is reduced to 0, it falls safely to the ground.
——Constructs: Your simple weapons and scimitars count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage.
——Dragons: You are immune to the frightened condition.
——Elementals: At the end of a long rest you can choose to gain resistance to one elemental damage type of your choice; cold, fire, lightning, or thunder damage. The effect last until you take a long rest.
——Fey: You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can’t put you to sleep.
——Fiends: You can spend (free action) a 1st level spell slot or higher to suspend any magical darkness within 60ft centered around you for one hour.
——Giants: The first 10ft of movement you take on your turn does not provoke opportunity attack.
——Humanoids: When you roll a natural 16 or higher on an attack roll and hit, the creature drops one weapon it is holding.
——Monstrosities: Your attacks with simple weapons or scimitars gain a +2 to the d20 rolls.
——Oozes: Squeezing or occupying another creatures space does not impose disadvantaged of your attack rolls
——Plants: You gain immunity to the poison condition and resistance to poison damage.
——Undead: When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, the creature can not regain hit points until the start of your next turn.

You choose one additional favored prey, as well as an associated language, at 6th and 14th level. As you gain levels, your choices should reflect the types of monsters you have encountered on your adventures.

This feature does Not stack with the fighting style class feature.

(2nd level) Spellcasting
New spell list


[b]1st Level

Absorb Elements*
Alarm
Animal Friendship
Beast Bond*
Cure Wounds
Detect Magic
Detect Poison and Disease
Ensnaring Strike
Fog Cloud
Goodberry
Grease
Hail of Thorns
Hunter’s Mark
Jump
Longstrider
Snare*
Speak with Animals
Zephyr Strike*

2nd Level

Animal Messenger
Barkskin
Beast Sense
Blur
Cordon of Arrows
Darkvision
Find Traps
Healing Spirit*
Lesser Restoration
Locate Animals or Plants
Locate Object
Misty Step
Pass without Trace
Protection from Poison
Pyrotechnics*
Rope Trick
Silence
Spider Climb
Spike Growth
Web

3rd Level

Catnap*
Conjure Animals
Conjure Barrage
Daylight
Flame Arrows*
Glyph or Warding
Lightning Arrow*
Nondetection
Plant Growth
Protection from Energy
Speak with Plants
Water Breathing
Water Walk
Wind Wall

4th Level

Conjure Woodland Beings
Freedom of Movement
Grasping Vines
Guarding of Nature*
Locate Creature
Stoneskin

5th Level

Commune with Nature
Conjure Volley
Cloudkill
Steel Wind Strike*
Swift Quiver
Tree Stride
Wrath of Nature*


(3th level) Ranger Archetype
Unchanged

(4th level) Ability Score Increase
Unchanged

(5th level) Extra Attack
Unchanged

(6th level) Greater Weapons of The Wild
You gain additional benefits listed below;
•Attacking at long range doesn’t impose disadvantage on your simple weapon attacks.
•You can draw a simple thrown weapon as part of the same action you attack with it. •You can retrieve any unattended thrown weapon as a free action.

(8th level) Land Stride
Starting at 8th level, moving through nonmagical difficult terrain costs you no extra movement. You can also pass through nonmagical hazards(like thorns, caltrops, etc.) without being slowed by them and without taking damage from them.

In addition, you have advantage on any d20 roll you make to perceive or resist the affects of magically altered terrain, such those created by the entangle or spike growth spells.

(10th level) Hide in Plain Sight
Starting at 10th level, you can use the Hide action as a bonus action on your turn. Additionally you only need to be lightly obscured to take the hide action.

(12th level) Master Weapons of The Wild
You gain additional benefits listed below;
•Your simple weapons and scimitar critical strike on a 19-20.
•Your simple weapons’ and scimitar’s damage die increases to a d8.
•Creatures do not gain the benefits of half cover and 3/4 cover from any attack you make against them from a simple weapon or scimitar.

(15th level) Un-trackable
You can’t be tracked by nonmagical means (even scent), unless you choose to leave a trail. Magical effects that attempt to track you, discern your location, or scry on you have disadvantage or you have advantage against them.

(18th level) Feral Senses
Unchanged

(20th level) Foe Slayer
You can choose three additional Favored Prey.

[Kane0]

Most Ranger subclasses grant something to do with your Bonus Action, which seems to conflict with your Weapons of the Wild (which itself completely invalidates TWF). Hide in Plain Sight also competes for your Bonus Action.

Edit: The level 15 feature also seems a bit lacklustre seeing as Pass Without Trace does almost the same thing way back at level 5. Speaking of spells, spells known instead of prepared is still painful.

[Dienekes]

Alright. I frankly love what you did with Favored Prey. Great means of making the characters choice work without just adding piddling bonuses that may never come up.

Weapons of the Wild, Hide in Plain Sight, and just Bonus Actions in general. I see you’ve removed Hunter’s Mark, which is fine. But that still leaves a bit of an issue.

But one of the core tenets of optimization in 5e is to find your most effective use of all your actions and then do that as much as you possibly can. 5e also emphasizes specialization. If your job in combat is damage you probably won’t be spending your Bonus Action to do anything that won’t increase your damage.

Now for a Rogue, Bonus Action Hide is great because it means you can keep getting Advantage on your Sneak Attack which only works once per turn anyway.

For your Ranger here, it is now needing to share it’s Bonus Action between its subclass ability, Hide, and Weapons of the Wild. And since your Ranger doesn’t really have other methods of defeating enemies other than damage, Hide will be ignored, and either your Ranger’s Subclass feature or their Weapon of the Wild feature will be ignored depending almost entirely on what deals more damage.

The best solution I’ve seen to this issue done in official sources, was in an Unearthed Arcana Ranger subclass that specifically noted that attacking with an off-hand attack could be done as part of the subclasses Bonus Action ability.

It also helped that the ability in question could effectively be used to replace Hunter’s Mark.

So my suggestion, try and figure out what you want the basic per turn actions taken by your Ranger to be. Make certain that every action, movement, bonus action, and reaction is accounted for. Then make the remainder of the abilities work within that frame. Or be better than that frame but limited in some specific way. If once per Short Rest you can do something way better than your standard turn, that’s not bad. Or if you can maybe do a better ability but it occurs infrequently, based upon either dice rolls or just how the encounter developed. It’s also better if doing this nova move does not slow your ability to start your standard turn after it’s over.

Now this does not mean you can’t have abilities that are not a part of this standard round of actions. But they’re best if specifically out of combat abilities or reactive utility abilities. And if they’re that, keep in mind when casters can perform similar abilities as an indicator of roughly what level these abilities should be gained.

There’s some good ideas here. Making thrown weapons viable is great, but maybe needs a spit polish.

[Yakk]

There are no free actions in 5e.

"Does not stack" is not 5e.

Rangers being crappy at longswords and longbows seems funny.


-Even when you are engaged in another activity while traveling (such as setting up camp, foraging, navigating, or tracking), you remain alert to danger.
"You have a +5 bonus to your passive perception and active checks against creatures who are hiding."?

I added a "Bloodhound" like ability, but just let you use Hunter's Mark on someone if you have access to their tracks. It is less fiat.

Favored Prey is poorly worded. I assume you are supposed to gain the spoiled feature as well, but you never say that.

Making your weapons magical is nice, but a ribbon past 5th level or so.

You killed Hunter's Mark. That is big.

[Garfunion]

Thank you for the feedback
•I’ll re-evaluate the bonus action attack
•I know there’s no free action I just didn’t want to write out “no action required” at the time.
•Hunter’s Mark is not gone, just moved to a archetype.
•The reduces weapon proficiencies is more in line with what a Druid would teach a non-Druid in terms of combat. Additionally I’m not trying to create Aragon, I’m tying to create a more “native” character class.
•I might have to alter some archetypes to better fit my theme, perhaps even giving some of those archetypes additional weapons and armor proficiencies.