Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Need Help With a Build Concept

I was watching a You-Tube video on Nerdarchy. They had this concept of a crazy Kensei Monk who talked to his longbow. When I think of longbows, I think of Elves and Rangers. Wisdom and Dexterity are important to both Rangers and Monks. So I thought I'd design a Wood Elf Hunter Ranger/ Kensei Monk. For Monk weapons I've decided on longbow and duel hand axes to start, and maybe a polearm at Monk 6. All weapons chosen are options for a Dex-based Kensei Monk.

But I'm having trouble deciding levels per class, and what to take when. Ranger 3/ Monk 7 gets me Evasion, Stillness of Mind, 7 Ki Points, and Horde Breaker. but I lose an ASI. Ranger 4 I gain the ASI, but I lose the Monk specials. Monk 8 I keep the specials, but lose the Hunter sub-class and Horde Breaker. And should I start with Ranger for the extra skill? When I started building this, I took Ranger 1 and the Outlander background, then straight Monk for 5 levels. For skills I took Athletics, Acrobatics, Survival, Perception, Stealth, and Insight.

As a rule of thumb, it´s usually better to have all your ASIs or feats for all your characters, so I will not advise ranger3 unless you got really really good stats from the start and you don´t want some feat. You already have extra attack as a monk so you do not really need more than 4 levels of ranger. So, one level or 4 (or 8, etc) if you want all your ASIs.
My choice would not be pick only one level of ranger tho, because the only non-RP reason I want levels of ranger for a monk would be hunter´s mark sinergy with flurry of blows (And to use it in a more efficient manner you want to go melee because is a bonus action to cast it like kensei´s shot, so you only get to do one of them per turn and it´s also a concentration spell) and that requires at least two levels of ranger. Sadly lvl 4 rangers do not improve lvl 3 spellcasting, you are stuck with 3 cantrips, 3 1st level spells.

That said, about taking levels of ranger, can I give you my personal opinion? As an elf you already have longsword, longbow, etc proficiency without taking any level in a martial class (And a kensei gets weapon proficiency with their chosen weapons automatically anyway).

And if you really want a fighting style and martial weapons proficiency, just pick one level of fighter instead of two of ranger. You have more fighting styles to choose from, also requires 13 dex and you could get 19 levels of monk, with all the ASIs and feats, included the level 19th one; all the monastic features of your subclass and empty body (plus Second wind, albeit at a very very low level).


About Horde breaker:


The extra attack rocks, but only works if the enemies are stacked together, less than 5ft. I do not know if you are playing a campaign with lots of mobs and choke points, but usually your targets are not all together, side by side, even more if you are attacking with a ranged weapon so the use will be situational at best.
You need 3 levels of ranger for that, forcing you to go 4 levels of ranger or lose one ASI/Feat. and also losing the last Monk order upgrade, Empty body and Perfect self of the monk class.


I am assuming you don´t want the rangers` favored enemy or natural explorer, voted worst class features 3 years in a row, for some reason for your build, of course, but if you want the ranger class to add flavour to your monk, go ahead, could be fun to roleplay that character concept.

Unfortunately my D&D group stopped playing together in the late 90s. Half of them are dead now, the others are hundreds of miles away. I get my D&D fix from cRPGs. I'm considering online play, but I have a weird work schedule, and would have to get up to speed on the "how to" of online play. This build, all of my builds are for BG3, so 10 levels max for now.

Ranger is mainly for Hunter's Mark, Horde Breaker, and RP. Yeah Ranger 4 sucks. For feats I've only decided on Athlete, which would give me an 18 Dex/ 16 Wis. Hopefully Larian fixes Favored Enemy, but I'm not counting on it.



Yep that's my problem. So I'm probably best taking 2 levels of Ranger and giving up Horde Breaker. It sucks but at least I'll get Hunter's Mark. On a side note, if WotC wanted to fix Ranger; they'd give them both Two Weapon Fighting and Archery. Give an attack and/ or Damage bonus to Favored Enemy, and give all Rangers a scalable animal companion.

Oh and thanks for your reply.

We had a player that has a story similar to yours. He found tiresome to have to meet a new group, learn new rules, use a new app, etc He just entered a one-shot because his 12yo kid wanted to play and he has to DM his kids and he wanted to know the "how-to"s of r20
... And now he is in his second campaign online.

Look, there are pages like https://app.roll20.net/lfg/search/ where you can find games to play online. You can pick "Games that welcome newbie players" and "free to play" as an option and now with the COVID situation, there are plenty of people doing one-shots and helping people on how to play online.
Just try one one-shot, 2-3 hours session, no strings attached. Do you like it? great! You don´t? At least you know now.

There are several options to play online and forget the work and the usual nonsense, with different schedules ( There are groups with working people, with kids, retired, etc), from different games (Pathfinder, Starfinder, Anima, TDE, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Resurgir del Dragón, etc) and weekly, bi-weekly, play-by-post, etc.
and different platforms, from roll20 to Fantasy grounds in Steam, games played in Discord or Epic table, etc.

Yeah, BG3´s level cap of 10 is more restrictive. You may want to go 6/4 or 8/2 to get all your ASIs and the extra attack if applicable. I doubt you will have the feature to run through walls and water of the monks in BG3, so It´s safe to abandon the 9th level monk unless you want to go full monk for the Purity of body feature of level 10. You really want the level 7
evasion and still mind over the (OMG What did you do to the rangers, Wotc) ranger´s 4th level class features so I suppose 8monk/2 ranger would be the best bet, IMHO, if you want to maximise your character, as you asked, but other options you pointed out seemed fun as well.

ED: Read and cry.
Primeval Awareness
Beginning at 3rd level, you can use your action and expend one ranger spell slot to focus your awareness on the region around you. For 1 minute per level of the spell slot you expend, you can sense whether the following types of creatures are present within 1 mile of you (or within up to 6 miles if you are in your favoured terrain): aberrations, celestials, dragons, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead. This feature doesn't reveal the creatures' location or number.

(It´s so situational and restricted that It makes you cry, and you have to spend a spell slot in this)

Yeah I copy/ pasted your parody, of a Ranger, Druid, and Diviner to Reddit. Funny but really not. It's sad what 5e did to PHB Rangers, they were my favorite marshal class in 1e, 2e, 3e, and 3.5, now they are a joke. Well at least there's Gloomstalker, but we'll probably have to wait for modding for that.

Agreed, gloomstalker and the hunter are addequate, but I miss the unique flavour of some ranger archetypes of Pathfinder, like the skirmisher that has unique ambush tricks (they´re like battle maneuvers unique to the rangers) or the trapper that uses traps of different kinds in combat for extra spicy effects.
At higher levels a trapper can even affix a magical ranger trap to an arrow, crossbow bolt, or thrown weapon, allowing her to set the trap remotely or use it as a direct attack.

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/ranger/archetypes/paizo-ranger-archetypes/skirmisher/

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/ranger/archetypes/paizo-ranger-archetypes/trapper/

Didn't Swen say that they were looking at the revised Ranger. I was checking it out, like night and day. +2 Damage to Favored Enemies. And those new Wilderness abilities Wow advantage on initiative, advantage on attack rolls the 1st turn of combat if you have initiative, ignore difficult terrain. I'm assuming that's limited to the terrains listed in the PHB, but all of them. I copied/ pastes the upgrades to my character sheet under notes. For some reason even with Play Test Material and Homebrew enabled, I couldn't find the revised stats, but the notes section will do. The new Primal Awareness is very nice too. I'd say Unearth Arcana fixed the Ranger.

He didn´t say what revised ranger. As of now there are lots of versions, because there is no official alternate ranger version.

Officially the RR ranger of the WOTC´s UA in 2016 was shut down (And was never official to begin with, it´s just playtest material). I hope you are right and the Larian guys revive the old one or make a custom version for the game.

https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1023352291837935616

The "consensus" on Reddit, is we are going to get the 2019 UA CFV version of Ranger, not RR nor the PHB version. :
https://media.wizards.com/2019/dnd/downloads/UA-ClassFeatures.pdf

Edit: It's very nice, not as op as the RR, but fixes the problems.