Originally Posted by Lastman
Originally Posted by TomReneth
isn't very important in most fights and can actually reduce your dmg output if you have to constantly use your BA to reapply it instead of making a BA attack (dual wield, hand crossbows or polearm master).
this is exactly why it doesn't need to be weighted down with concentration even more... anyway a passive that lets you have hunters mark concentration + a normal spell concetration would go a long way to making the class more fun to play and that's what really matters in the end at least to me.

All i can say is this is a video game you are confusing things.

There are huge differences i literally had like 10 speak to animals potions and that was after talking to every animal in EA. enough for full game i reckon... So that spell you mentioned doesn't do anything at all and it's useless if anything it would be a huge waste of spell same as +10 steath. We have vision cones i don't even need sneak stat most of the time... So picking those two and then finding out that i can do that any time with a potion or items just isn't fun in my opinion. Choices and skills like that should matter more.

And it's like that for most things related to everything. i would say unlearn table top dnd for bg 3. Again video game...huge diffrence. i think this is why this thread was made.


Then you can pick up other powerful spells, like Flog Cloud, Ensnaring Strike (which is buffed by Bounty Hunter), Silence, Spike Growth and Barkskin (16 AC + dex).

Rangers have always been a powerhouse class at lvl 2-5, with a strong combat foundations and a great deal of flexibility. Hunter never even needed Hunter's Mark until higher levels to scale their damage high enough, so it's just not a big deal to not spend concentration on it most of the time. Their lvl 1 features are kinda terrible in the PHB and needed to be looked at, but making the Ranger better at skills than Rogues was not the right answer, since they're already better at combat and magic. At low levels, more proficiencies tend to be better than expertise.

It's not about whether or not it matched tabletop, it's about game balance. Rangers didn't need to largely invalidate Rogues. They didn't need to be given more customizeable and powerful features than most other warrior classes when they weren't even weak to begin with. The thing that Rangers need is better scaling after level 5.


Originally Posted by The_Red_Queen
Originally Posted by TomReneth
Combat is a part of it, but it does Rogue better than Rogue in BG3 because you get more skill proficiencies, have additional non-combat solutions through spells like Speak With Animal, can get a huge +10 to stealth with Pass Without Trace for the party and Guidance is so easily available that the Expertise bonus just kinda disappears into the background. Expertise isn't a very strong feature at low level, because it depends on your proficiency bonus and it is only 2 skills.

Okay, with you. Thanks for your patience smile.

My own take on this, as a non-PnP player not otherwise familiar with 5e, is that yes we can make a sneaky hunter-type ranger who is good enough to open all the locks and disarm traps we come across in EA. To me this feels like a valid ranger archetype, and building in this way means compromising to some degree on the other things a ranger might be, such as a heroic Aragorn-(or Drizzt?)-alike or a nature buff. Particularly as we don’t have multiclassing I think it’s great we can make this kind of ranger. And even if we do get multiclassing, I think I actually prefer focusing on using backgrounds and emphasising areas where classes overlap to give one class the flavour of another over taking levels in another class, especially given we’re not expecting all that many levels even in the full game.

None of which, I realise, gets at what I think is your biggest problem. I do agree that rogues could justifiably be grumpy that the right build of ranger can do everything they can (well enough, if not always quite as well as them), plus other stuff too. For me, though, this is something I’d like to see addressed by balancing tweaks and careful consideration of how rogues vs sneaky rangers progress from level 5 to 11 or whatever it ends up being, rather than by revising the BG3 approach to rangers.

To conclude with a desperate, if possibly doomed, attempt to make all this seem on topic … the main thing I enjoy about the fact that we can pick FE/NE options at character creation is that it, along with the Background, helps me come up with a story for my ranger that brings them to life. The specific benefits of these picks might be tiny in themselves, but I enjoy thinking of ways to build on and take advantage of them to make distinct kinds of ranger, including sneaky trap/lock handling ones!

No problem smile

It's not that the Ranger is able to overlap that is the problem. The right background in tabletop also gives access to the thief role for Rangers (and anyone else). It's that they made it so that Rangers have more skills, more additional features like PFEG and Find Familiar, and made Guidance omnipresent together that just pushes the Rogue right to the side, because the only measurement on skill checks that matter is "good enough". The Ranger didn't need all these features at lvl 1. What the Ranger needs is better scaling from lvl 6 onwards. And BA Hide needs to be Rogue exclusive.

Last edited by TomReneth; 29/12/22 03:45 PM.
Don't you just hate it when people with dumb opinions have nice avatars?