I was a little confused by some of these rankings until I noticed something. Do you count non-combat utility in your grading at all? I'd have pegged the Ranger at a higher tier because they had extremely wide skill use, good utility spells including speak with animals, dex focus and access to thieves tools alongside respectible single target damage, crowd control and survivability. It's a lot of utility even if the amount of times that translates to help in combat is potentially somewhat limited.
If you read my introduction (I don't blame you if you didn't, I understand its a long article and few people have time to read it all), I discuss combat vs. out of combat utility assumptions for the ranking. I also go into more depth on that in my earlier articles. Basically, for the purposes of power ranking, I factor role-play utility very low. I don't do that because I don't value role-play, I just don't think it can really be measured and compared like direct combat utility can, so I don't think it has a place in a tier list.
Speak with Animals is an example of a spell that I haven't been able to get very much combat utility out of, so yeah, it wouldn't factor in my guide very heavily.
