Fry is right about that too. 5E's haste is much better balanced than older editions. No more getting full extra spells or full extra attack actions. It's still freaking great because it doubles your movement and gives you an extra attack, plus an AC boost, etc. But yeah, at level 5, with a haste spell on, your max attacks without action surge are 4, 6 with action surge.
This is the point where I jump in with my 4E pedantry and harp on 5E for getting rid of Standard Action, Move Action, and Minor Action, even though that's exactly what they still have and discarding the standardized language has only made the game more confusing.
Okay I'm done now.
To be fair to 5E (you won't hear me say that much), there are reasons other than just "we're different from 4E" to change it, because 5E doesn't have a move action. You can split your movement however you want on your turn, so it's important not to make people think they have one single move action. Also, bonus actions are called that because they are in fact bonuses in 5E and not just a part of the standard action economy. A champion fighter with no feats for example can use a bonus action to second wind once per short rest, but that's it. Any time they're not using second wind, they do not use a bonus action at all. Hence why it's called a bonus. It's not a thing you just get every turn, and it's not a thing you require to be useful turn by turn.
Also, you can't downgrade actions in 5E. If they used the 4E terminology, move action would sound like something it isn't in 5E, and so would minor action because people would not think of it as a bonus but rather a thing everybody gets automatically, which isn't what it is.
All that being said, I don't think 5E achieved what it wanted, because people who play the game for the G in RPG immediate went "Okay, well how do I get a useful bonus action? Okay, I'll take polearm master. Free extra damage with that bonus action attack." And also splitting up movement makes turns take longer and is annoying.
13th Age is my jam, and it has what 4E had, standard action, move action, quick action, and you can downgrade them if you want, but no splitting up movement.
Joshmvii on
0
Options
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I wonder how hard it would be to hodgepodge a mix between Legend and 13th Age. I love the weapon and character track ideas of Legend, but for combat and most other rules I really love 13th age.
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
My favorite example is in the game we ran when it was still in beta my buddy made a flamethrower and it worked pretty well mechanically. It was a "Melee" weapon, had reach, did fire type damage and had the scythe ability, so it could attack enemies adjacent to the target at a -4 to hit for those attacks. It was pretty cool!
So for the hell of it, I thought I'd throw out the notes on My character for Storm Kings Thunder.
Bre'tai Atrox was a dragonborn who should have had a fairly simple life; Throtmir (familial duty) stipulated only that he help to tend to the clan's herds of goats, find a wife, have children and instill in them the same values that he had been given by his parents. No need for adventures or battles or any such thing's for the young man of clan Bre'tai, all he needed was to oversee the herd.
Unfortunately, the return of Unther ~a kingdom that had switched places with Tymanther during the spellplague~ had returned and it's demigod ruler had convinced his followers that the dragonborn had somehow trapped them on Abier to steal their lands and began lashing out at them, forcing the southern clans to flee north to reach the safety of the great fortress city Djered Thrymarr.
The Bre'tai were amongst these clans and were perhaps more fortunate then some; having herds of goats meant that they could take the basis of their wealth with them and needed less dedicated foods then cattle or horses, But by the same coin they couldn't move very quickly and the God kings minions were never far from their heels.
In his dreams, the young dragonborn began seeing an old man in strange clothes who kept trying to talk to him, to give him something, and each night it seemingly got more urgent, though Atrox never heard his words clearly nor accepted the gift; some part of him knew that if he did so it would change things for him in a way that didn't seem right.
Finally, there came a dream where the old man came to him and pushed something into his his hands shouting at him what sounded like a plea or a warning and Atrox awoke with a start to discover his clan was being attacked by raiders from Unther. Reaching down unconsciously he grabbed a hold of a weapon that was by his bed and rushed out to fight the raiders.
Though he had no formal training or armor and was possessed of a lumbering (some would even say clumsy) frame, The young dragonborn fought with a fury and skill that surprised his foes almost as much as the strange design of his sword. That same surprise rallied his kin and together they drove back the enemy with far worse losses for them then one would have expected against a clan of goatherds. Afterwards though, questions arose as to where Atrox had aquired the sword, and after hearing about his dreams, his great grandmother (a sorceress of some skill) divined that Atrox had accepted a gift from a god and as such was a paladin now.
For a person of any other race this would have been a cause for celebration; to be chosen by a god to be their champion was an amazing thing afterall. But for the dragonborn this was more complicated; many viewed worship of a god to be too similair to the dark days when dragons had held them as slaves and demanded worship and sacrifice from them. The one sliver of good news in this was that the god that had found him was Enlil, an old mulhorandi god that also happened to be the father of the ruler of Unther as opposed to Bahamut.
His grandmother revealed one other thing to him as well: that he needed to "go to the edge of Faerun" to gain strength against some threat that the humans faced out there before he would be ready to aid his people.
So it was that his family helped him to buy some armor and supplies before he set off on a ship bound for the sword coast.
Oh and that sword? Looks like the top sword in this pile:
Made with damascus steel so it has a pattern in the blade like this:
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
Wow, that sounds fun as heck. Don't give me even more games to check out, heh.
0
Options
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
Wow, that sounds fun as heck. Don't give me even more games to check out, heh.
It's Free! and technically at 1.1 so it should be pretty stable.
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
Wow, that sounds fun as heck. Don't give me even more games to check out, heh.
It's Free! and technically at 1.1 so it should be pretty stable.
I just realized I have not typed out my last two sessions in here, and the next session I run could be the final session for Curse of Strahd, as all that is left is to storm the castle. I might do a full right up of the past two sessions later, but I do want to share the sentence I never thought I would say: "The house makes an acrobatics check."
never die on
+2
Options
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited September 2016
Ohh I need to write up my most recent session too. It was another insane one. I've never heard my DM cackle in glee so much as in the last couple weeks.
So I think I've inadvertently created a town that perfectly plays on the fears/expectations of both my players and adventurers in general:
In our last session, they marched for a little over a week through increasingly snowy weather before stumbling upon this isolated city-state in the middle of nowhere. The city sits beneath the remains of a massive, ancient blade that slew one of the world's fallen gods. The blood on the blade (being magical in nature), led to them prospering alone in this spot, and the city eventually grew to the size it is today. The city is governed by a council of nine randomly-selected citizens, replaced once a decade. Crime is virtually nonexistent, because no one is homeless. It's basically a socialist paradise with one very particular law that is enforced without hesitation: if you shed blood, you are executed (magically, your blood drained and returned to the pool).
Because the Godsblood is shared among every member of the populace here, and because there is no source of additional Godsblood, life is precious. The magic inherent in Godsblood is what lets them prosper in an otherwise fairly shitty part of the world, remote to all other major powers as it is.
So it's a utopian paradise so long as you can follow one simple rule, the bane of murderhobos everywhere: don't fucking kill people.
The party spent so much time trying to dig for secret magical influences from a cult, or some kind of doppleganger infestation, or a secret government hit squad that kidnaps dissenters, anything to prove there's an evil, corrupt underbelly to this town full of happy, functional people. It honestly hadn't even occurred to me that they'd question the validity of this place and be digging for the "catch". The party's cleric is already finding himself questioning why they should ever leave. I got some great roleplaying moments out of him as he realized that his life has been nothing but nonstop stress and awfulness ever since that night they had to flee their home. He's legitimately wonder if the life of adventure is for him, and this city is just so damn comfortable and easygoing.
The rest of them are still all caught up in figuring out what's wrong with this place. I guess it's kinda like the first Matrix, where Smith explains that humans went nuts in their testMatrix that was utopian.
So I think I've inadvertently created a town that perfectly plays on the fears/expectations of both my players and adventurers in general:
In our last session, they marched for a little over a week through increasingly snowy weather before stumbling upon this isolated city-state in the middle of nowhere. The city sits beneath the remains of a massive, ancient blade that slew one of the world's fallen gods. The blood on the blade (being magical in nature), led to them prospering alone in this spot, and the city eventually grew to the size it is today. The city is governed by a council of nine randomly-selected citizens, replaced once a decade. Crime is virtually nonexistent, because no one is homeless. It's basically a socialist paradise with one very particular law that is enforced without hesitation: if you shed blood, you are executed (magically, your blood drained and returned to the pool).
Because the Godsblood is shared among every member of the populace here, and because there is no source of additional Godsblood, life is precious. The magic inherent in Godsblood is what lets them prosper in an otherwise fairly shitty part of the world, remote to all other major powers as it is.
So it's a utopian paradise so long as you can follow one simple rule, the bane of murderhobos everywhere: don't fucking kill people.
The party spent so much time trying to dig for secret magical influences from a cult, or some kind of doppleganger infestation, or a secret government hit squad that kidnaps dissenters, anything to prove there's an evil, corrupt underbelly to this town full of happy, functional people. It honestly hadn't even occurred to me that they'd question the validity of this place and be digging for the "catch". The party's cleric is already finding himself questioning why they should ever leave. I got some great roleplaying moments out of him as he realized that his life has been nothing but nonstop stress and awfulness ever since that night they had to flee their home. He's legitimately wonder if the life of adventure is for him, and this city is just so damn comfortable and easygoing.
The rest of them are still all caught up in figuring out what's wrong with this place. I guess it's kinda like the first Matrix, where Smith explains that humans went nuts in their testMatrix that was utopian.
The Cleric retires but starts a new character from this town Who is sick of the idyllic nature of the whole thing and wants to go see the world. Perfect!
I love that you're playing it straight though. Sometimes life is good, and this place is so isolated and so specific it obviously wouldn't work everywhere, which makes it fine.
ok, got some spells here to look at, but you can probably guess where I'm going with this.
Levitate 2nd-level transmutation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 ft
Components: VSM
Duration: Concentration, up to 10minutes
One creature or object of your choice that you can see within range rises vertically, up to 20feet, and remains suspended there for the duration. The spell can levitate a target that weighs up to 500 pounds. An unwilling creature that succeeds on a Constitution saving throw is unaffected.
The target can move only by pushing or pulling against a fixed object or surface within reach (such as a wall or ceiling), which allows it to move as if it were climbing. You can change the target's altitude by up to 20 feet in either direction on your turn. If you are the target, you can move up or down as part of your move. Otherwise, you can use your action to move the target which must remain within the spell's range. When the spell ends, the target floats gently to the ground if it is still aloft.
You touch a creature. The creature's jump distance is tripled until the spell ends.
Fly 3rd-level transmutation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: VSM
Duration: Concentration, up to 10minutes
You touch a willing creature. The target gains a flying speed of 60feet for the duration. When the spell ends, the target falls if it is still aloft, unless it can stop the fall.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you can target one additional creature for each slot level above 3rd.
Feather Fall 1st-level transmutation
Casting Time: 1reaction, which you take when you or a creature within 60feat of you falls
Range: 60feet
Components: VSM
Duration: 1minute
Choose up to 5 falling creatures within range. A falling creature's rate of descent slows to 60feet per round until the spell ends. If the creature lands before the spell end, it takes no falling damage and can land on its feet, and the spell ends for that creature.
Two cool warlock abilities come up at level 9, namely Ascendant Step and Otherworldly Leap. Basically they let you cast Levitate and Jump on your self at will, no spell slot expenditure.
I guess the big thing to discuss is how would some of the regular DM's around here interpret Leviation in regards to the other spells up here?
Do you consider it a low grade Fly spell for movement and ease of play?
Or more like, zero-g, where you need to kick off of something to move?
Do you consider it a straight line of movment, or a 'J-curve'?
What if you coupled it with Jump if movement lines and speed are the issue?
As long as you have ground underneath you, you're ok up to 20feet? What about a liquid like water or heaven forbid, acid?
I know I wouldn't use this to jump a chasm that was like 100feet across.
I've been playing Deus Ex for a bit and I added in Feather Fall to the discussion, because basically, I'm looking to Icarus Land with this. I'd understand Levitate doesn't have the quick cast time of Feather Fall, so a quick drop would still be an issue, but if I prepared for the landing from basically jumping off a cliff or an airship how'd you rule Levitate?
And since we're talking about Icarus Landing, might as well go whole hog and discuss the prep work involved with Icarus Striking.
spoiler vid for visuals of Icarus Landing and striking in Deus Ex.
If you levitate yourself, you can just move up or down 20 feet as part of your movement on your turn. That's all you can do with it. You don't need to be touching a surface to move up and down in this way, if you are the caster and the target.
Other stuff like Jump doesn't change the 20 foot restriction on how far you can move with levitate.
If you levitate yourself, you can just move up or down 20 feet as part of your movement on your turn. That's all you can do with it. You don't need to be touching a surface to move up and down in this way, if you are the caster and the target.
Other stuff like Jump doesn't change the 20 foot restriction on how far you can move with levitate.
Yeah, and even with Jump, you're still capped at the same movement rate as you normally would be. You can never jump further than your max move as I understand it.
This new take on rangers from the Unearthed Arcana blog seems like a step in the right direction.
I was expecting this to be the ambuscade ranger until I clicked through and realized they've now done another complete rewrite of the ranger class, giving us fully three different ranger classes since the phb release.
Presumably they'll eventually get it right just by the sheer law of averages.
Edit: Hilarious.
"Beastmaster Rangers are really bad. Please make a better version of the class so that they're something approaching viable"
"Okay. Beastmaster Rangers no longer get Extra Attack."
"???"
It looks like it's because their beast companion gets its own allotment of actions now and can attack without the ranger spending actions to command them (and they got some noticeable buffs in some other areas), but still.
Aside from the Beastmaster changes, for the most part it looks like they went down the list of shitty niche Ranger class features with a sharpie and either gave them a better version of the same feature or gave up and gave them a Rogue feature instead, the highlights being:
Favored Enemy: Enemy type choices are broader, and you get +2 to damage against favored enemies (increasing to +4 at level 6), in addition to the flavorful but mechanically narrow 'advantage on tracking' stuff.
Natural Explorer: Again, does all the flavor-based 'look, you're like Aragorn! He was cool!' stuff it already did but has real mechanical impact to the tune of giving you advantage on initiative, advantage against enemies who haven't acted yet, and the ability to ignore difficult terrain (seems to be all difficult terrain, not just natural terrain). Powerful, but weirdly kludgy - looks like they basically went 'this feature is shitty. what's a good feature? People take Rogue 3 for Assassinate, right? Let's just staple that to a feature called 'Natural Explorer'. We'll swap the auto-crits for advantage on initiative so you get a smaller benefit more often and call it good.' Seems likely to be the best/most class-defining feature now and makes Ranger 1 a pretty high-value multiclass if nothing else.
Primeval Awareness: Does the same 'sense your favored enemy' thing, and also lets you basically roll diplomacy on animals. Still seems to be mostly a flavor thing, with a side of 'cancel a random encounter if it's with an animal' since it explicitly lets you 'learn what actions you can take to prevent the animal from attacking'.
Land's Stride/Fleet of Foot: Since you already get to ignore difficult terrain via Natural Explorer now, this just lets you Dash as a bonus action. Again, they more or less swapped a shitty narrow theme ability out (advantage on saving throws against magic plants!) and swapped in a good Rogue feature instead, since this is basically just 'slightly worse Cunning Action' much like the new Natural Explorer is 'slightly worse Assassinate'.
Hide in Plain Sight: No longer needs the setup time, so it's actually useable in combat/exploration rather than basically being only for surprising people who try to ambush the party while you're keeping watch. It's basically just "+10 to Stealth checks while you're not moving" now, except for some reason they also changed it to impose a -10 on Perception checks to detect you instead, which in finest 5e tradition is mechanically the same but needlessly convoluted. Also, again, this is now basically a slight riff on the Rogue's Supreme Sneak feature - you get a +10 if you don't move at all, rather than a +5 if you move no more than half your speed.
It's definitely an improvement on the class, but the theory seems to be 'if we smash the Ranger features AND the Rogue features into the same class, they might accumulate into one workable class between them instead of both being obviated by Fighters', and I'm not really convinced - napkin math suggests this Ranger would be able to perform almost as well as a Fighter if it's in combat with favored enemies, and worse any other time.
On the Beastmaster changes:
Your animal companion acts on its own now, and gets a pretty substantial set of buffs - at level 5 a wolf companion is gonna have 16 AC and ~21 hp, and its attack is gonna be at +8 for 2d4+6, with a DC 15 save vs prone. You give up Extra Attack, but in exchange you'll get both the companion's attack and the ability to have your companion use its own attack again by burning its reaction - so in theory you're netting one attack over top of the Hunter Ranger.
Unfortunately you're giving up more than it looks like at first glance - your animal companion attacks don't benefit from Favored Enemy, nor from Hunter's Mark, nor from Sharpshooter, Natural Explorer, Archery fighting, etc, and you're also giving up Colossus Slayer/Horde Breaker from Hunter or (more likely) Underdark Scout and Stalker's Flurry from Stalker, so you're almost certainly losing a lot more damage than you're gaining by choosing Beastmaster (At level 5 your two companion attacks are gonna average ~22 damage if they both land, but with all the aforementioned stuff up the second Ranger attack you're giving up would be worth close to 30 and be more accurate. Horde Breaker would be even more damage, but conditional on having multiple adjacent targets.), and you don't even get much value from things like extra zone control due to having an extra body making OAs because your baseline damage routine already expends your companion's reaction (and conflicts with the Uncanny Dodge your companion gets at 15, meaning you basically don't get a level 15 feature from Beastmaster at all since making an extra attack is always gonna be more valuable than saving the reaction to try and take half damage from an attack that may or may not even hit).
This version of the Beastmaster is hugely improved from the old one...but is also still much weaker than the Hunter Ranger, and now there's a third option, the Stalker Ranger, that seems likely to be better than them both, and even that option is still usually worse than just rolling an archery fighter!
The insult to injury is that, just like the Ambuscade ranger, not only is the archery fighter still a better ranger than this ranger, but this ranger may have actually made the archery fighter better by letting them get pseudo-Assassinate by picking up a 1-level Ranger dip instead of having to go 3 levels into Rogue for it.
Perhaps the fourth ranger rewrite will work out better.
I wish they'd just drop ranger as a full class. It's a mix of fighter/druid and rogue backstabbing/stealth and skill monkeying. Favored enemy is such a dumb, boring mechanic.
I'd prefer if they made a Ranger an offshoot of Fighter (medium armor and fewer feats/ability bonuses, but you get a more skills and a pet!), or an offshoot Druid (no shape change but you get weapon proficiencies, fighting style, and a pet!)
tzeentchlingDoctor of RocksOaklandRegistered Userregular
Just played my actual first game of 5e yesterday. Settled on Fighter, GWF, Battle Master, L3, with a Halberd and Polearm Master. Was adventuring with a dragonborn wizard, gnome ranger, and human cleric.
At low levels, this seems like a pretty strong combination - I was putting out a significant amount of damage each turn (when I actually hit), and was moderately tanky on top of that (though I did get KO'd twice, both from the effects of poison). But I can definitely see how things can work in combination. Also, unorthodox use of Disarming Strike - twice I was grabbed/bit by snakes, and we ruled that the "drop something they're holding" part of the attack could be applied to my fighter himself!
That said, my gosh that party was murderhobo. I mean, they're my friends, but.... I was playing a 1-off character, a soldier at an outpost, very heavy on the duty/honor bit. Approached by a woman who claims to have escaped from bandits who took her husband and son, so we volunteer to go rescue them. As we go, following her lead, I casually see something glinting off to my east. Naturally, they all say "ooh, shiny! must check it out! it's only a short detour!" and my character is standing there going, "uh, we kind of have a mission, wtf are you all doing?" Nevertheless we go, fight a giant scorpion (one of my KOs), and they get a couple magic items. "Got your shinys? Good, now that I almost died, let's get back to rescuing a family?"
We arrive in a cave, woman is in hysterics, eventually runs past us into an open door (and past two half-ogres we're fighting). She's nowhere to be seen once we kill them. We meander through the mini-dungeon, killing monsters and falling for every single trap there could be, even needing a long rest to deal with the fact that our casters ran out of spell slots and we're all low on HP. Naturally, the final room is a giant temple, the woman was part Yuan-ti and was merely luring us to our doom/servitude, etc, and my character gets charmed into a pit full of snakes. I like to think he went back to the camp after it was all over and politely but firmly told the rest of the party to get lost.
+1
Options
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I'm currently running pretty much your exact build, but now at level 6. I by far outstrip everyone for damage if I can hit, and the expertise dice so far have been pretty helpful. I think my level 8 feat is going to be "lucky" so I get even more chances at a good roll/crit.
This new take on rangers from the Unearthed Arcana blog seems like a step in the right direction.
I was expecting this to be the ambuscade ranger until I clicked through and realized they've now done another complete rewrite of the ranger class, giving us fully three different ranger classes since the phb release.
Presumably they'll eventually get it right just by the sheer law of averages.
Edit: Hilarious.
"Beastmaster Rangers are really bad. Please make a better version of the class so that they're something approaching viable"
"Okay. Beastmaster Rangers no longer get Extra Attack."
"???"
It looks like it's because their beast companion gets its own allotment of actions now and can attack without the ranger spending actions to command them (and they got some noticeable buffs in some other areas), but still.
Aside from the Beastmaster changes, for the most part it looks like they went down the list of shitty niche Ranger class features with a sharpie and either gave them a better version of the same feature or gave up and gave them a Rogue feature instead, the highlights being:
Favored Enemy: Enemy type choices are broader, and you get +2 to damage against favored enemies (increasing to +4 at level 6), in addition to the flavorful but mechanically narrow 'advantage on tracking' stuff.
Natural Explorer: Again, does all the flavor-based 'look, you're like Aragorn! He was cool!' stuff it already did but has real mechanical impact to the tune of giving you advantage on initiative, advantage against enemies who haven't acted yet, and the ability to ignore difficult terrain (seems to be all difficult terrain, not just natural terrain). Powerful, but weirdly kludgy - looks like they basically went 'this feature is shitty. what's a good feature? People take Rogue 3 for Assassinate, right? Let's just staple that to a feature called 'Natural Explorer'. We'll swap the auto-crits for advantage on initiative so you get a smaller benefit more often and call it good.' Seems likely to be the best/most class-defining feature now and makes Ranger 1 a pretty high-value multiclass if nothing else.
Primeval Awareness: Does the same 'sense your favored enemy' thing, and also lets you basically roll diplomacy on animals. Still seems to be mostly a flavor thing, with a side of 'cancel a random encounter if it's with an animal' since it explicitly lets you 'learn what actions you can take to prevent the animal from attacking'.
Land's Stride/Fleet of Foot: Since you already get to ignore difficult terrain via Natural Explorer now, this just lets you Dash as a bonus action. Again, they more or less swapped a shitty narrow theme ability out (advantage on saving throws against magic plants!) and swapped in a good Rogue feature instead, since this is basically just 'slightly worse Cunning Action' much like the new Natural Explorer is 'slightly worse Assassinate'.
Hide in Plain Sight: No longer needs the setup time, so it's actually useable in combat/exploration rather than basically being only for surprising people who try to ambush the party while you're keeping watch. It's basically just "+10 to Stealth checks while you're not moving" now, except for some reason they also changed it to impose a -10 on Perception checks to detect you instead, which in finest 5e tradition is mechanically the same but needlessly convoluted. Also, again, this is now basically a slight riff on the Rogue's Supreme Sneak feature - you get a +10 if you don't move at all, rather than a +5 if you move no more than half your speed.
It's definitely an improvement on the class, but the theory seems to be 'if we smash the Ranger features AND the Rogue features into the same class, they might accumulate into one workable class between them instead of both being obviated by Fighters', and I'm not really convinced - napkin math suggests this Ranger would be able to perform almost as well as a Fighter if it's in combat with favored enemies, and worse any other time.
On the Beastmaster changes:
Your animal companion acts on its own now, and gets a pretty substantial set of buffs - at level 5 a wolf companion is gonna have 16 AC and ~21 hp, and its attack is gonna be at +8 for 2d4+6, with a DC 15 save vs prone. You give up Extra Attack, but in exchange you'll get both the companion's attack and the ability to have your companion use its own attack again by burning its reaction - so in theory you're netting one attack over top of the Hunter Ranger.
Unfortunately you're giving up more than it looks like at first glance - your animal companion attacks don't benefit from Favored Enemy, nor from Hunter's Mark, nor from Sharpshooter, Natural Explorer, Archery fighting, etc, and you're also giving up Colossus Slayer/Horde Breaker from Hunter or (more likely) Underdark Scout and Stalker's Flurry from Stalker, so you're almost certainly losing a lot more damage than you're gaining by choosing Beastmaster (At level 5 your two companion attacks are gonna average ~22 damage if they both land, but with all the aforementioned stuff up the second Ranger attack you're giving up would be worth close to 30 and be more accurate. Horde Breaker would be even more damage, but conditional on having multiple adjacent targets.), and you don't even get much value from things like extra zone control due to having an extra body making OAs because your baseline damage routine already expends your companion's reaction (and conflicts with the Uncanny Dodge your companion gets at 15, meaning you basically don't get a level 15 feature from Beastmaster at all since making an extra attack is always gonna be more valuable than saving the reaction to try and take half damage from an attack that may or may not even hit).
This version of the Beastmaster is hugely improved from the old one...but is also still much weaker than the Hunter Ranger, and now there's a third option, the Stalker Ranger, that seems likely to be better than them both, and even that option is still usually worse than just rolling an archery fighter!
The insult to injury is that, just like the Ambuscade ranger, not only is the archery fighter still a better ranger than this ranger, but this ranger may have actually made the archery fighter better by letting them get pseudo-Assassinate by picking up a 1-level Ranger d ip instead of having to go 3 levels into Rogue for it.
Perhaps the fourth ranger rewrite will work out better.
Seems like a pretty reasonable rework of the ranger to me. I think the issue is more the idea that a ranger is supposed to be the best possible archer class. I mean, yes you could have that be the case. But then it either has to have none of the other ranger abilities, or it would just be completely brokenly OP.
The best archer should be a fighter who uses all his fighter talents towards improving his archery.
I wish they'd just drop ranger as a full class. It's a mix of fighter/druid and rogue backstabbing/stealth and skill monkeying. Favored enemy is such a dumb, boring mechanic.
I'd prefer if they made a Ranger an offshoot of Fighter (medium armor and fewer feats/ability bonuses, but you get a more skills and a pet!), or an offshoot Druid (no shape change but you get weapon proficiencies, fighting style, and a pet!)
I hope whenever they finally release an Eberron sourcebook they put this much effort into Artificer. Having Ranger as a class while Artificer is a Wizard Tradition is baffling.
I have to say, because of the power of fighters and the lameness of using big two handed weapons i really like the longsword fighter. Grab some handaxes/other equipment for throwing and you get a lot of the advantages of a two hander without the dumbness of having to lug a polearm around.
edit: Also archers should not exist for adventurers, they're dumb. You have wizards for ranged DPR.
A fighter with the dueling fighting style will perform just fine, but it'll never come close to being as effective as a polearm master/great weapon master fighter who gets an extra attack for his bonus action and can power attack on all of his attacks.
Wizards are not good as a pure ranged DPR in 5E. They're versatile, they have the control spells, they have AOE, but for single target damage, not even close. Eldritch blast spam warlock is the best, followed by a battlemaster fighter using Sharpshooter.
I've never been a fan of dedicated archers in games like D&D though. Just because one of their biggest advantages is meant to be their range, but if you have fights take place in arenas where they can stay at max range, they're impossible to threaten and it's dumb. One of the many reasons I love 13th Age, which is a melee-centric game in general, and generally keeps the ranged attackers in threat range too.
I actually pick up GWF for the longsword fighter. (though you lose out on master and thus the power attack) you can almost always hold the longsword in one hand and then use the other to do other things when you need to.
Mainly though it only "works" if you're good at following equipment draw rules.
Wizards are not good as a pure ranged DPR in 5E.
True but pure ranged DPR is dumb, because the structure of fights has little to no tactical application(move away and shoot most dangerous target until its dead)
So Did my first session of Storm king tonight and It was a bit of a mixed bag (I'll get to the whys in a minute)
For clarities sake our party has:
1 human War priest running some sort of dex build
1 wood elf monk who has aspirations of ninjaness
1 High elf ranger with ADD
1 Human Rogue with... issues.
1 Dragon born paladin who ironically doesn't know anything about gods to speak of played by me (with the side objective of helping the newish GM as much as I could)
So our party had heard about opportunities for making money in a village called nightstone and decided to head over there to check it out, and hearing the sounds of a church bell ringing like crazy, I (being the party tank) moved up to the gates, called out a hearty "hail" and got... no response. Further complicating matters was the fact that it was night and thus 60% of the party could barely see anything. Other then boulders. Lots and lots of boulders.
What we did discover in short order however, was that there were some sort of large wolves stalking through the town square, and tapping into my characters background as a goatherd, I was able to discern that these beasts were in fact Worgs. Deciding to deal with two problems at once, my paladin (who did marvelously on his initiative roll) repositioned himself to unleash his breath weapon (brass dragon fire line) on the two beasts and did some damage in addition to setting them partially ablaze, so I could now see them clearly (always a concern when you don't have a dark vision character).
Amusingly, the monk showed just how terrifying he could be, as during his turn he managed to clobber one of the beasts to death and also intercept one that had been coming my way killing it too. Keen!
At this point our party had the decision to split up and cover more ground (because clearly thats a good idea) and while the other two ran across the town's square to investigate (RE: loot) what they thought was a blacksmith, I ked the monk and the war priest into the church, running under the assumption that someone was looking for help (or possibly an imbecile looking to get murdered) and being the good companion that he was the monk was kind enough to carry the torch for his two half blind companions which revealed: two goblins being imbeciles. Surprise surprise they got murdered super hard with one of them getting melted by the war priests inflict wounds spell.
We gathered some loot and then moved to the tavern where we discovered a dead goblin with an arrow sticking out of it's chest (along with a hole in the roof and a large rock); a quick glance around the room revealed that someone was in the upper room and after a quick bout of diplomacy with someone on the other side of the door, we were joined by a lady named Kiel and that the twon had first been attacked by giants and then goblins had come looking to scavenge the town. Further, the strange lady (who had a snake up her sleeve) was convinced to accompany us as we cleaned out the town.
Down stairs we heard something disturbing the kitchen so we ran to investigate and found a gobbo trying to make off with a sack of purloined goods, so between my javelin and the monk's Bison stomp we were able to take it down and then help ourselves to it's loot bag before the rogue (who had rejoined us) could get any of it.
That's what happened with us and it was on the whole pretty good if banal.
The other two Yahoo's wound up at a stable, knocked out two goblins (that the rogue alternated between wanting to keep as slaves and organ harvest), proceeded to tie them up, loot the stables and then decides to describe in detail how he first slowly stabs one and disembowels it before setting the other one on fire.
Something tells me that our newish GM (who warned us collectively about unacceptable behaviour and alluded to tiny dogs as a consequence) my very well brute force puzzle solve our rogue.
This new take on rangers from the Unearthed Arcana blog seems like a step in the right direction.
I was expecting this to be the ambuscade ranger until I clicked through and realized they've now done another complete rewrite of the ranger class, giving us fully three different ranger classes since the phb release.
Presumably they'll eventually get it right just by the sheer law of averages.
Edit: Hilarious.
"Beastmaster Rangers are really bad. Please make a better version of the class so that they're something approaching viable"
"Okay. Beastmaster Rangers no longer get Extra Attack."
"???"
It looks like it's because their beast companion gets its own allotment of actions now and can attack without the ranger spending actions to command them (and they got some noticeable buffs in some other areas), but still.
Aside from the Beastmaster changes, for the most part it looks like they went down the list of shitty niche Ranger class features with a sharpie and either gave them a better version of the same feature or gave up and gave them a Rogue feature instead, the highlights being:
Favored Enemy: Enemy type choices are broader, and you get +2 to damage against favored enemies (increasing to +4 at level 6), in addition to the flavorful but mechanically narrow 'advantage on tracking' stuff.
Natural Explorer: Again, does all the flavor-based 'look, you're like Aragorn! He was cool!' stuff it already did but has real mechanical impact to the tune of giving you advantage on initiative, advantage against enemies who haven't acted yet, and the ability to ignore difficult terrain (seems to be all difficult terrain, not just natural terrain). Powerful, but weirdly kludgy - looks like they basically went 'this feature is shitty. what's a good feature? People take Rogue 3 for Assassinate, right? Let's just staple that to a feature called 'Natural Explorer'. We'll swap the auto-crits for advantage on initiative so you get a smaller benefit more often and call it good.' Seems likely to be the best/most class-defining feature now and makes Ranger 1 a pretty high-value multiclass if nothing else.
Primeval Awareness: Does the same 'sense your favored enemy' thing, and also lets you basically roll diplomacy on animals. Still seems to be mostly a flavor thing, with a side of 'cancel a random encounter if it's with an animal' since it explicitly lets you 'learn what actions you can take to prevent the animal from attacking'.
Land's Stride/Fleet of Foot: Since you already get to ignore difficult terrain via Natural Explorer now, this just lets you Dash as a bonus action. Again, they more or less swapped a shitty narrow theme ability out (advantage on saving throws against magic plants!) and swapped in a good Rogue feature instead, since this is basically just 'slightly worse Cunning Action' much like the new Natural Explorer is 'slightly worse Assassinate'.
Hide in Plain Sight: No longer needs the setup time, so it's actually useable in combat/exploration rather than basically being only for surprising people who try to ambush the party while you're keeping watch. It's basically just "+10 to Stealth checks while you're not moving" now, except for some reason they also changed it to impose a -10 on Perception checks to detect you instead, which in finest 5e tradition is mechanically the same but needlessly convoluted. Also, again, this is now basically a slight riff on the Rogue's Supreme Sneak feature - you get a +10 if you don't move at all, rather than a +5 if you move no more than half your speed.
It's definitely an improvement on the class, but the theory seems to be 'if we smash the Ranger features AND the Rogue features into the same class, they might accumulate into one workable class between them instead of both being obviated by Fighters', and I'm not really convinced - napkin math suggests this Ranger would be able to perform almost as well as a Fighter if it's in combat with favored enemies, and worse any other time.
On the Beastmaster changes:
Your animal companion acts on its own now, and gets a pretty substantial set of buffs - at level 5 a wolf companion is gonna have 16 AC and ~21 hp, and its attack is gonna be at +8 for 2d4+6, with a DC 15 save vs prone. You give up Extra Attack, but in exchange you'll get both the companion's attack and the ability to have your companion use its own attack again by burning its reaction - so in theory you're netting one attack over top of the Hunter Ranger.
Unfortunately you're giving up more than it looks like at first glance - your animal companion attacks don't benefit from Favored Enemy, nor from Hunter's Mark, nor from Sharpshooter, Natural Explorer, Archery fighting, etc, and you're also giving up Colossus Slayer/Horde Breaker from Hunter or (more likely) Underdark Scout and Stalker's Flurry from Stalker, so you're almost certainly losing a lot more damage than you're gaining by choosing Beastmaster (At level 5 your two companion attacks are gonna average ~22 damage if they both land, but with all the aforementioned stuff up the second Ranger attack you're giving up would be worth close to 30 and be more accurate. Horde Breaker would be even more damage, but conditional on having multiple adjacent targets.), and you don't even get much value from things like extra zone control due to having an extra body making OAs because your baseline damage routine already expends your companion's reaction (and conflicts with the Uncanny Dodge your companion gets at 15, meaning you basically don't get a level 15 feature from Beastmaster at all since making an extra attack is always gonna be more valuable than saving the reaction to try and take half damage from an attack that may or may not even hit).
This version of the Beastmaster is hugely improved from the old one...but is also still much weaker than the Hunter Ranger, and now there's a third option, the Stalker Ranger, that seems likely to be better than them both, and even that option is still usually worse than just rolling an archery fighter!
The insult to injury is that, just like the Ambuscade ranger, not only is the archery fighter still a better ranger than this ranger, but this ranger may have actually made the archery fighter better by letting them get pseudo-Assassinate by picking up a 1-level Ranger d ip instead of having to go 3 levels into Rogue for it.
Perhaps the fourth ranger rewrite will work out better.
Seems like a pretty reasonable rework of the ranger to me. I think the issue is more the idea that a ranger is supposed to be the best possible archer class. I mean, yes you could have that be the case. But then it either has to have none of the other ranger abilities, or it would just be completely brokenly OP.
The best archer should be a fighter who uses all his fighter talents towards improving his archery.
I mean, in theory that's fine, but it only works if there's some other valid mechanical reason to be a ranger and there's mostly not.
You're getting worse sustained damage than the fighter, lower burst damage than the fighter, less durability than the fighter, worse saves than the fighter, lower AC than the fighter, and one less feat/stat bump than the fighter, and all you're really getting in exchange is better hiding, marginally better mobility and Ranger spells - except you're probably spending half your spell slots on Hunter's Mark just to keep your damage from being even more subpar, and most of the remaining Ranger spells aren't great - Spike Growth is good, but it takes concentration and so conflicts with your Mark. Conjure Animals and Conjure Woodland Beings are obviously fantastic, but you get them way late compared to a Druid, they also conflict with your Mark, and the official way to 'balance' those spells is that the DM gets to decide what you summon and as a result can basically fizzle your spell at will and invalidate summoning as a reliable option. Conjure Volley is really good...at level 17.
Like, the paladin theoretically is in the same basic position as the ranger - it's a weird middle-ground theme-heavy class that sits halfway between a martial class and a spellcasting class and could have just been realized as a multiclass build. It's a cleric/fighter in much the same way that the ranger is a druid/rogue, but it isn't a disaster the way the 5e ranger is because it has a valid niche - you get worse sustained damage than the fighter, but better burst damage, better saves, more durability, and Paladin spells. You're still in the Ranger boat of not really getting many spells because you burn most of your spell slots to support your damage, but 'worse sustain, better burst, better defenses' is a valid choice in a way that 'worse sustain, worse burst, worse defenses' is not.
I think the broader problem is that the class roles from 4e were important and without them enforcing meaningful niches, most class comparisons just boil down to damage output math and it becomes impossible to have enough mathematically valid choices to support the number of classes that exist - but at minimum a Ranger rework that built on and improved things like Horde Breaker and Volley and gave Rangers a lower-level equivalent to Conjure Volley, so that Rangers could support their low single-target damage with good multi-target damage, would create a valid choice ("less single-target damage, more AoE damage") and give Ranger something to do that a Fighter couldn't easily replicate with better underlying math.
Ranger should be a fighter spec and the animal companion should be a non-combat addition. Tracking/speaking to animals/overland movement* with some burst and favored enemy bonuses maybe. Not only does it fix their combat problems but it aligns them with non-dnd Rangers.
you could probably just give them all the non combat stuff and strap it onto the champion fighter build and be none the worse for it. Or bootstrap the eldrich knight with ranger spells.
I mean the most famous ranger is Aragorn... He used a hand and a half sword and did tracking and that is it.
* ok when do these things even really matter anyway?
I think the biggest trick to making rangers work would be to focus on making their magic both quicker (theres no reason their instant attack spells should be concentration based) and more utility focused (the role of tracker should be theirs first and foremost with some unorthodox distraction/buff type spells thrown in the mix).
In this way you'd be able to downplay the focus on DPR racing other classes or direct comparisons with other classes and focus on their value as a woodland scout.
As to the split between beast master and hunter, that ones a little trickier; I'd probably keep hunter the same since it's pretty fine for what it does, but beastmaster might be easily fixed by giving the pet a single action per turn at level three and the option for more abilities/actions doled out at set levels.
But you kinda can't. There are functionally only 4 roles in DnD. Tank, spank, control, and lead. Rangers could be semi spank and control... But that is what wizards are for. They can't be tank and spank better than fighters or barbarians. They're not tank and lead like Paladins. Or even spank and lead. They're pure non-combat. And there isn't really a way to fix them either. Short of giving them more attacks... Which has its own problems.
Plus they're thematically bad. They're supposed to be fighter/Druids but Druids are already fighter/Druids. If you pick hunter they're almost explicitly flavored as "fighters but with a bow or dual wield" and who decided to pick survival as a trained skill. If you pick beast they're a Druid that isn't very good at druiding.
So they functionally become someone you pick of you want to not deal with traveling. Which is kinda dumb.
If you have to keep the archetype as a hard mechanical structure then Ranger-hunter should be an offshoot of fighter. Probably setting on top of champion and ditching spells. And Ranger beast master should be an offshoot of barbarian. This time getting spells.
Alternately hunter could be an offshoot of rogue but I think it's better on top of fighter.
I don't know anything about Legend, so couldn't say. I'm a huge fan of 13th Age's handling of equipment though. In that it basically says "hey, we're a class-based game, so how bout we just make equipment stats be based on your class?"
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
Wow, that sounds fun as heck. Don't give me even more games to check out, heh.
It's Free! and technically at 1.1 so it should be pretty stable.
"Is good at tracking" can't really be a mechanical balance point. If you don't have a tracker, is your party just not going to have an adventure today?
The model for what the 5E Ranger needed to be is already there. It's the Paladin.
They did a good job creating the "concentrate on this until you hit then it goes off" spells for Paladin/Ranger, but the problem is they then made a staple Ranger spell (hunter's mark) take the same concentration slot. Hunter's mark should've just been a feature instead of a spell.
The base of these types of classes are:
- 1/2 caster with some good spells
- a niche
The paladin has the niche, because they have the best on-demand spike damage in 5E. Nobody is better than the Paladin at saying "I'm going to kill this one enemy and burn all my resources to do so." It goes even further because you look at the vengeance Paladin's channel divinity power, and it's basically a better version of the type of thing hunter's mark is meant to do. Once per short rest you get to have advantage on all attack rolls against a single enemy. Which synergizes with the crit fishing the class already wants to do with its spike damage.
Furthermore, Paladin actually has party support built into it that differentiates it further from say a Fighter. Giving all allies inside your aura a bonus to saving throws that for most levels of the game will exceed even their proficiency bonus is a big time benefit, and by level 10 making allies immune to fear, at a time when you're going to start fighting dragons who get to use a debilitating fear effect as part of their multiattack. Hugely beneficial stuff.
Then of course there's just the little stuff like being able to use lay on hands to bring people back from unconscious or more importantly to cure poison or disease without having a spellcaster prep/use slots to do so.
"Is good at tracking" can't really be a mechanical balance point. If you don't have a tracker, is your party just not going to have an adventure today?
I agree with your ultimate point, but in my last D&D game, tracking and using wisdom (survival) checks was a big part of getting where the party needed to if they were in the wilderness. It was the party Druid who took on those duties, but failing those checks doesn't mean you don't get to have an adventure. It meant that the party got lost for a while before trying to track the thing and the person doing the tracking ran them through underbrush filled with thorns or whatever and they all took some damage, or if they were trying to make survival checks in dangerous environments like intense heat/cold, levels of exhaustion for failing to find the way through easily.
As with all things, you have to have interesting fail-forward consequences for things like tracking outside of just "you don't find any tracks, adventure stops here."
But you kinda can't. There are functionally only 4 roles in DnD. Tank, spank, control, and lead. Rangers could be semi spank and control... But that is what wizards are for. They can't be tank and spank better than fighters or barbarians. They're not tank and lead like Paladins. Or even spank and lead. They're pure non-combat. And there isn't really a way to fix them either. Short of giving them more attacks... Which has its own problems.
Plus they're thematically bad. They're supposed to be fighter/Druids but Druids are already fighter/Druids. If you pick hunter they're almost explicitly flavored as "fighters but with a bow or dual wield" and who decided to pick survival as a trained skill. If you pick beast they're a Druid that isn't very good at druiding.
So they functionally become someone you pick of you want to not deal with traveling. Which is kinda dumb.
If you have to keep the archetype as a hard mechanical structure then Ranger-hunter should be an offshoot of fighter. Probably setting on top of champion and ditching spells. And Ranger beast master should be an offshoot of barbarian. This time getting spells.
Alternately hunter could be an offshoot of rogue but I think it's better on top of fighter.
Bard similarly should be an offshoot of rogue.
I agree that Rangers should've been archetypes of Fighters/Barbarians, because they don't have a niche.
Bard definitely should not be a rogue archetype. Bards are full progression spellcasters. You simply can't make a full spellcaster an archetype of a non-casting class, because they have spells from level 1. Rogue has arcane trickster, the 1/3rd caster which makes sense.
Bards are not rogues at all. They're full potency spellcasters with extra flexibility in the form of magical secrets, with party support like bardic inspiration/cutting words, which are hugely badass abilities.
But you kinda can't. There are functionally only 4 roles in DnD. Tank, spank, control, and lead. Rangers could be semi spank and control... But that is what wizards are for. They can't be tank and spank better than fighters or barbarians. They're not tank and lead like Paladins. Or even spank and lead. They're pure non-combat. And there isn't really a way to fix them either. Short of giving them more attacks... Which has its own problems.
Plus they're thematically bad. They're supposed to be fighter/Druids but Druids are already fighter/Druids. If you pick hunter they're almost explicitly flavored as "fighters but with a bow or dual wield" and who decided to pick survival as a trained skill. If you pick beast they're a Druid that isn't very good at druiding.
So they functionally become someone you pick of you want to not deal with traveling. Which is kinda dumb.
If you have to keep the archetype as a hard mechanical structure then Ranger-hunter should be an offshoot of fighter. Probably setting on top of champion and ditching spells. And Ranger beast master should be an offshoot of barbarian. This time getting spells.
Alternately hunter could be an offshoot of rogue but I think it's better on top of fighter.
Bard similarly should be an offshoot of rogue.
If this was 4th edition with it's job hat design you'd have a point, but we're talking about 5th where things are a little more complicated.
As such I'd break down classes into these roles with some obvious overlap:
1. Front liner: someone who can decide the line of battle by being either too meaty or too crunchy to fall down quickly.
2. Flanker/skirmisher: classes that can do good damage but are too fragile to fight up front, work best as a second wave
3. Blaster: Someone who can dish out damage to a pile of enemies
4. Trickster: focuses on debuffs and incapacitation as opposed to straight damage
5. Skill focused: has a skill that is applicable to the situation at hand.
6. Medic: keeps you out of roll up a new character land.
7. Swiss army magic: when you need an alternate solution to a problem then what is obvious.
Ranger as Josh pointed out could easily have been a variation on paladin with a focus on disrupting the enemy, and still could be if they reworked how their magic worked a bit.
Like take hunters mark; I would have split it's effects so that it's tracking aspect was something you could do as something along the lines of 2+wis mod per long rest while the more fighty part of it I would have changed to a +2 to damage for all party members against the target.
Throw in some extra effects for tracking/hunting magic types and you could have a character that could easily fulfill roles 2,4 and 7.
Posts
To be fair to 5E (you won't hear me say that much), there are reasons other than just "we're different from 4E" to change it, because 5E doesn't have a move action. You can split your movement however you want on your turn, so it's important not to make people think they have one single move action. Also, bonus actions are called that because they are in fact bonuses in 5E and not just a part of the standard action economy. A champion fighter with no feats for example can use a bonus action to second wind once per short rest, but that's it. Any time they're not using second wind, they do not use a bonus action at all. Hence why it's called a bonus. It's not a thing you just get every turn, and it's not a thing you require to be useful turn by turn.
Also, you can't downgrade actions in 5E. If they used the 4E terminology, move action would sound like something it isn't in 5E, and so would minor action because people would not think of it as a bonus but rather a thing everybody gets automatically, which isn't what it is.
All that being said, I don't think 5E achieved what it wanted, because people who play the game for the G in RPG immediate went "Okay, well how do I get a useful bonus action? Okay, I'll take polearm master. Free extra damage with that bonus action attack." And also splitting up movement makes turns take longer and is annoying.
13th Age is my jam, and it has what 4E had, standard action, move action, quick action, and you can downgrade them if you want, but no splitting up movement.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Legend says "Here are the game rules for generic weapon. Martial weapons can add these upgrades, Exotics two of them" then lets you loose. Entirely possible your longsword works different than that guys longsword because you built them differently.
Edit: Like the last step in the weapon creation process is "Oh yeah, maybe come up with a name for this thing?"
My favorite example is in the game we ran when it was still in beta my buddy made a flamethrower and it worked pretty well mechanically. It was a "Melee" weapon, had reach, did fire type damage and had the scythe ability, so it could attack enemies adjacent to the target at a -4 to hit for those attacks. It was pretty cool!
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Bre'tai Atrox was a dragonborn who should have had a fairly simple life; Throtmir (familial duty) stipulated only that he help to tend to the clan's herds of goats, find a wife, have children and instill in them the same values that he had been given by his parents. No need for adventures or battles or any such thing's for the young man of clan Bre'tai, all he needed was to oversee the herd.
Unfortunately, the return of Unther ~a kingdom that had switched places with Tymanther during the spellplague~ had returned and it's demigod ruler had convinced his followers that the dragonborn had somehow trapped them on Abier to steal their lands and began lashing out at them, forcing the southern clans to flee north to reach the safety of the great fortress city Djered Thrymarr.
The Bre'tai were amongst these clans and were perhaps more fortunate then some; having herds of goats meant that they could take the basis of their wealth with them and needed less dedicated foods then cattle or horses, But by the same coin they couldn't move very quickly and the God kings minions were never far from their heels.
In his dreams, the young dragonborn began seeing an old man in strange clothes who kept trying to talk to him, to give him something, and each night it seemingly got more urgent, though Atrox never heard his words clearly nor accepted the gift; some part of him knew that if he did so it would change things for him in a way that didn't seem right.
Finally, there came a dream where the old man came to him and pushed something into his his hands shouting at him what sounded like a plea or a warning and Atrox awoke with a start to discover his clan was being attacked by raiders from Unther. Reaching down unconsciously he grabbed a hold of a weapon that was by his bed and rushed out to fight the raiders.
Though he had no formal training or armor and was possessed of a lumbering (some would even say clumsy) frame, The young dragonborn fought with a fury and skill that surprised his foes almost as much as the strange design of his sword. That same surprise rallied his kin and together they drove back the enemy with far worse losses for them then one would have expected against a clan of goatherds. Afterwards though, questions arose as to where Atrox had aquired the sword, and after hearing about his dreams, his great grandmother (a sorceress of some skill) divined that Atrox had accepted a gift from a god and as such was a paladin now.
For a person of any other race this would have been a cause for celebration; to be chosen by a god to be their champion was an amazing thing afterall. But for the dragonborn this was more complicated; many viewed worship of a god to be too similair to the dark days when dragons had held them as slaves and demanded worship and sacrifice from them. The one sliver of good news in this was that the god that had found him was Enlil, an old mulhorandi god that also happened to be the father of the ruler of Unther as opposed to Bahamut.
His grandmother revealed one other thing to him as well: that he needed to "go to the edge of Faerun" to gain strength against some threat that the humans faced out there before he would be ready to aid his people.
So it was that his family helped him to buy some armor and supplies before he set off on a ship bound for the sword coast.
Oh and that sword? Looks like the top sword in this pile:
Made with damascus steel so it has a pattern in the blade like this:
Wow, that sounds fun as heck.
It's Free! and technically at 1.1 so it should be pretty stable.
Legend
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Site's not working, though,
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
In our last session, they marched for a little over a week through increasingly snowy weather before stumbling upon this isolated city-state in the middle of nowhere. The city sits beneath the remains of a massive, ancient blade that slew one of the world's fallen gods. The blood on the blade (being magical in nature), led to them prospering alone in this spot, and the city eventually grew to the size it is today. The city is governed by a council of nine randomly-selected citizens, replaced once a decade. Crime is virtually nonexistent, because no one is homeless. It's basically a socialist paradise with one very particular law that is enforced without hesitation: if you shed blood, you are executed (magically, your blood drained and returned to the pool).
Because the Godsblood is shared among every member of the populace here, and because there is no source of additional Godsblood, life is precious. The magic inherent in Godsblood is what lets them prosper in an otherwise fairly shitty part of the world, remote to all other major powers as it is.
So it's a utopian paradise so long as you can follow one simple rule, the bane of murderhobos everywhere: don't fucking kill people.
The party spent so much time trying to dig for secret magical influences from a cult, or some kind of doppleganger infestation, or a secret government hit squad that kidnaps dissenters, anything to prove there's an evil, corrupt underbelly to this town full of happy, functional people. It honestly hadn't even occurred to me that they'd question the validity of this place and be digging for the "catch". The party's cleric is already finding himself questioning why they should ever leave. I got some great roleplaying moments out of him as he realized that his life has been nothing but nonstop stress and awfulness ever since that night they had to flee their home. He's legitimately wonder if the life of adventure is for him, and this city is just so damn comfortable and easygoing.
The rest of them are still all caught up in figuring out what's wrong with this place. I guess it's kinda like the first Matrix, where Smith explains that humans went nuts in their testMatrix that was utopian.
Sometimes the catch is that there is no catch, though.
The Cleric retires but starts a new character from this town Who is sick of the idyllic nature of the whole thing and wants to go see the world. Perfect!
I love that you're playing it straight though. Sometimes life is good, and this place is so isolated and so specific it obviously wouldn't work everywhere, which makes it fine.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Two cool warlock abilities come up at level 9, namely Ascendant Step and Otherworldly Leap. Basically they let you cast Levitate and Jump on your self at will, no spell slot expenditure.
I guess the big thing to discuss is how would some of the regular DM's around here interpret Leviation in regards to the other spells up here?
Do you consider it a low grade Fly spell for movement and ease of play?
Or more like, zero-g, where you need to kick off of something to move?
Do you consider it a straight line of movment, or a 'J-curve'?
What if you coupled it with Jump if movement lines and speed are the issue?
As long as you have ground underneath you, you're ok up to 20feet? What about a liquid like water or heaven forbid, acid?
I know I wouldn't use this to jump a chasm that was like 100feet across.
I've been playing Deus Ex for a bit and I added in Feather Fall to the discussion, because basically, I'm looking to Icarus Land with this. I'd understand Levitate doesn't have the quick cast time of Feather Fall, so a quick drop would still be an issue, but if I prepared for the landing from basically jumping off a cliff or an airship how'd you rule Levitate?
And since we're talking about Icarus Landing, might as well go whole hog and discuss the prep work involved with Icarus Striking.
spoiler vid for visuals of Icarus Landing and striking in Deus Ex.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Other stuff like Jump doesn't change the 20 foot restriction on how far you can move with levitate.
Yeah, and even with Jump, you're still capped at the same movement rate as you normally would be. You can never jump further than your max move as I understand it.
I was expecting this to be the ambuscade ranger until I clicked through and realized they've now done another complete rewrite of the ranger class, giving us fully three different ranger classes since the phb release.
Presumably they'll eventually get it right just by the sheer law of averages.
Edit: Hilarious.
"Beastmaster Rangers are really bad. Please make a better version of the class so that they're something approaching viable"
"Okay. Beastmaster Rangers no longer get Extra Attack."
"???"
It looks like it's because their beast companion gets its own allotment of actions now and can attack without the ranger spending actions to command them (and they got some noticeable buffs in some other areas), but still.
Aside from the Beastmaster changes, for the most part it looks like they went down the list of shitty niche Ranger class features with a sharpie and either gave them a better version of the same feature or gave up and gave them a Rogue feature instead, the highlights being:
Natural Explorer: Again, does all the flavor-based 'look, you're like Aragorn! He was cool!' stuff it already did but has real mechanical impact to the tune of giving you advantage on initiative, advantage against enemies who haven't acted yet, and the ability to ignore difficult terrain (seems to be all difficult terrain, not just natural terrain). Powerful, but weirdly kludgy - looks like they basically went 'this feature is shitty. what's a good feature? People take Rogue 3 for Assassinate, right? Let's just staple that to a feature called 'Natural Explorer'. We'll swap the auto-crits for advantage on initiative so you get a smaller benefit more often and call it good.' Seems likely to be the best/most class-defining feature now and makes Ranger 1 a pretty high-value multiclass if nothing else.
Primeval Awareness: Does the same 'sense your favored enemy' thing, and also lets you basically roll diplomacy on animals. Still seems to be mostly a flavor thing, with a side of 'cancel a random encounter if it's with an animal' since it explicitly lets you 'learn what actions you can take to prevent the animal from attacking'.
Land's Stride/Fleet of Foot: Since you already get to ignore difficult terrain via Natural Explorer now, this just lets you Dash as a bonus action. Again, they more or less swapped a shitty narrow theme ability out (advantage on saving throws against magic plants!) and swapped in a good Rogue feature instead, since this is basically just 'slightly worse Cunning Action' much like the new Natural Explorer is 'slightly worse Assassinate'.
Hide in Plain Sight: No longer needs the setup time, so it's actually useable in combat/exploration rather than basically being only for surprising people who try to ambush the party while you're keeping watch. It's basically just "+10 to Stealth checks while you're not moving" now, except for some reason they also changed it to impose a -10 on Perception checks to detect you instead, which in finest 5e tradition is mechanically the same but needlessly convoluted. Also, again, this is now basically a slight riff on the Rogue's Supreme Sneak feature - you get a +10 if you don't move at all, rather than a +5 if you move no more than half your speed.
On the Beastmaster changes:
Unfortunately you're giving up more than it looks like at first glance - your animal companion attacks don't benefit from Favored Enemy, nor from Hunter's Mark, nor from Sharpshooter, Natural Explorer, Archery fighting, etc, and you're also giving up Colossus Slayer/Horde Breaker from Hunter or (more likely) Underdark Scout and Stalker's Flurry from Stalker, so you're almost certainly losing a lot more damage than you're gaining by choosing Beastmaster (At level 5 your two companion attacks are gonna average ~22 damage if they both land, but with all the aforementioned stuff up the second Ranger attack you're giving up would be worth close to 30 and be more accurate. Horde Breaker would be even more damage, but conditional on having multiple adjacent targets.), and you don't even get much value from things like extra zone control due to having an extra body making OAs because your baseline damage routine already expends your companion's reaction (and conflicts with the Uncanny Dodge your companion gets at 15, meaning you basically don't get a level 15 feature from Beastmaster at all since making an extra attack is always gonna be more valuable than saving the reaction to try and take half damage from an attack that may or may not even hit).
This version of the Beastmaster is hugely improved from the old one...but is also still much weaker than the Hunter Ranger, and now there's a third option, the Stalker Ranger, that seems likely to be better than them both, and even that option is still usually worse than just rolling an archery fighter!
The insult to injury is that, just like the Ambuscade ranger, not only is the archery fighter still a better ranger than this ranger, but this ranger may have actually made the archery fighter better by letting them get pseudo-Assassinate by picking up a 1-level Ranger dip instead of having to go 3 levels into Rogue for it.
Perhaps the fourth ranger rewrite will work out better.
I'd prefer if they made a Ranger an offshoot of Fighter (medium armor and fewer feats/ability bonuses, but you get a more skills and a pet!), or an offshoot Druid (no shape change but you get weapon proficiencies, fighting style, and a pet!)
At low levels, this seems like a pretty strong combination - I was putting out a significant amount of damage each turn (when I actually hit), and was moderately tanky on top of that (though I did get KO'd twice, both from the effects of poison). But I can definitely see how things can work in combination. Also, unorthodox use of Disarming Strike - twice I was grabbed/bit by snakes, and we ruled that the "drop something they're holding" part of the attack could be applied to my fighter himself!
That said, my gosh that party was murderhobo. I mean, they're my friends, but.... I was playing a 1-off character, a soldier at an outpost, very heavy on the duty/honor bit. Approached by a woman who claims to have escaped from bandits who took her husband and son, so we volunteer to go rescue them. As we go, following her lead, I casually see something glinting off to my east. Naturally, they all say "ooh, shiny! must check it out! it's only a short detour!" and my character is standing there going, "uh, we kind of have a mission, wtf are you all doing?" Nevertheless we go, fight a giant scorpion (one of my KOs), and they get a couple magic items. "Got your shinys? Good, now that I almost died, let's get back to rescuing a family?"
We arrive in a cave, woman is in hysterics, eventually runs past us into an open door (and past two half-ogres we're fighting). She's nowhere to be seen once we kill them. We meander through the mini-dungeon, killing monsters and falling for every single trap there could be, even needing a long rest to deal with the fact that our casters ran out of spell slots and we're all low on HP. Naturally, the final room is a giant temple, the woman was part Yuan-ti and was merely luring us to our doom/servitude, etc, and my character gets charmed into a pit full of snakes. I like to think he went back to the camp after it was all over and politely but firmly told the rest of the party to get lost.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Seems like a pretty reasonable rework of the ranger to me. I think the issue is more the idea that a ranger is supposed to be the best possible archer class. I mean, yes you could have that be the case. But then it either has to have none of the other ranger abilities, or it would just be completely brokenly OP.
The best archer should be a fighter who uses all his fighter talents towards improving his archery.
I hope whenever they finally release an Eberron sourcebook they put this much effort into Artificer. Having Ranger as a class while Artificer is a Wizard Tradition is baffling.
edit: Also archers should not exist for adventurers, they're dumb. You have wizards for ranged DPR.
Wizards are not good as a pure ranged DPR in 5E. They're versatile, they have the control spells, they have AOE, but for single target damage, not even close. Eldritch blast spam warlock is the best, followed by a battlemaster fighter using Sharpshooter.
I've never been a fan of dedicated archers in games like D&D though. Just because one of their biggest advantages is meant to be their range, but if you have fights take place in arenas where they can stay at max range, they're impossible to threaten and it's dumb. One of the many reasons I love 13th Age, which is a melee-centric game in general, and generally keeps the ranged attackers in threat range too.
Mainly though it only "works" if you're good at following equipment draw rules.
True but pure ranged DPR is dumb, because the structure of fights has little to no tactical application(move away and shoot most dangerous target until its dead)
For clarities sake our party has:
1 human War priest running some sort of dex build
1 wood elf monk who has aspirations of ninjaness
1 High elf ranger with ADD
1 Human Rogue with... issues.
1 Dragon born paladin who ironically doesn't know anything about gods to speak of played by me (with the side objective of helping the newish GM as much as I could)
So our party had heard about opportunities for making money in a village called nightstone and decided to head over there to check it out, and hearing the sounds of a church bell ringing like crazy, I (being the party tank) moved up to the gates, called out a hearty "hail" and got... no response. Further complicating matters was the fact that it was night and thus 60% of the party could barely see anything. Other then boulders. Lots and lots of boulders.
What we did discover in short order however, was that there were some sort of large wolves stalking through the town square, and tapping into my characters background as a goatherd, I was able to discern that these beasts were in fact Worgs. Deciding to deal with two problems at once, my paladin (who did marvelously on his initiative roll) repositioned himself to unleash his breath weapon (brass dragon fire line) on the two beasts and did some damage in addition to setting them partially ablaze, so I could now see them clearly (always a concern when you don't have a dark vision character).
Amusingly, the monk showed just how terrifying he could be, as during his turn he managed to clobber one of the beasts to death and also intercept one that had been coming my way killing it too. Keen!
At this point our party had the decision to split up and cover more ground (because clearly thats a good idea) and while the other two ran across the town's square to investigate (RE: loot) what they thought was a blacksmith, I ked the monk and the war priest into the church, running under the assumption that someone was looking for help (or possibly an imbecile looking to get murdered) and being the good companion that he was the monk was kind enough to carry the torch for his two half blind companions which revealed: two goblins being imbeciles. Surprise surprise they got murdered super hard with one of them getting melted by the war priests inflict wounds spell.
We gathered some loot and then moved to the tavern where we discovered a dead goblin with an arrow sticking out of it's chest (along with a hole in the roof and a large rock); a quick glance around the room revealed that someone was in the upper room and after a quick bout of diplomacy with someone on the other side of the door, we were joined by a lady named Kiel and that the twon had first been attacked by giants and then goblins had come looking to scavenge the town. Further, the strange lady (who had a snake up her sleeve) was convinced to accompany us as we cleaned out the town.
Down stairs we heard something disturbing the kitchen so we ran to investigate and found a gobbo trying to make off with a sack of purloined goods, so between my javelin and the monk's Bison stomp we were able to take it down and then help ourselves to it's loot bag before the rogue (who had rejoined us) could get any of it.
That's what happened with us and it was on the whole pretty good if banal.
The other two Yahoo's wound up at a stable, knocked out two goblins (that the rogue alternated between wanting to keep as slaves and organ harvest), proceeded to tie them up, loot the stables and then decides to describe in detail how he first slowly stabs one and disembowels it before setting the other one on fire.
Something tells me that our newish GM (who warned us collectively about unacceptable behaviour and alluded to tiny dogs as a consequence) my very well brute force puzzle solve our rogue.
I mean, in theory that's fine, but it only works if there's some other valid mechanical reason to be a ranger and there's mostly not.
You're getting worse sustained damage than the fighter, lower burst damage than the fighter, less durability than the fighter, worse saves than the fighter, lower AC than the fighter, and one less feat/stat bump than the fighter, and all you're really getting in exchange is better hiding, marginally better mobility and Ranger spells - except you're probably spending half your spell slots on Hunter's Mark just to keep your damage from being even more subpar, and most of the remaining Ranger spells aren't great - Spike Growth is good, but it takes concentration and so conflicts with your Mark. Conjure Animals and Conjure Woodland Beings are obviously fantastic, but you get them way late compared to a Druid, they also conflict with your Mark, and the official way to 'balance' those spells is that the DM gets to decide what you summon and as a result can basically fizzle your spell at will and invalidate summoning as a reliable option. Conjure Volley is really good...at level 17.
Like, the paladin theoretically is in the same basic position as the ranger - it's a weird middle-ground theme-heavy class that sits halfway between a martial class and a spellcasting class and could have just been realized as a multiclass build. It's a cleric/fighter in much the same way that the ranger is a druid/rogue, but it isn't a disaster the way the 5e ranger is because it has a valid niche - you get worse sustained damage than the fighter, but better burst damage, better saves, more durability, and Paladin spells. You're still in the Ranger boat of not really getting many spells because you burn most of your spell slots to support your damage, but 'worse sustain, better burst, better defenses' is a valid choice in a way that 'worse sustain, worse burst, worse defenses' is not.
I think the broader problem is that the class roles from 4e were important and without them enforcing meaningful niches, most class comparisons just boil down to damage output math and it becomes impossible to have enough mathematically valid choices to support the number of classes that exist - but at minimum a Ranger rework that built on and improved things like Horde Breaker and Volley and gave Rangers a lower-level equivalent to Conjure Volley, so that Rangers could support their low single-target damage with good multi-target damage, would create a valid choice ("less single-target damage, more AoE damage") and give Ranger something to do that a Fighter couldn't easily replicate with better underlying math.
you could probably just give them all the non combat stuff and strap it onto the champion fighter build and be none the worse for it. Or bootstrap the eldrich knight with ranger spells.
I mean the most famous ranger is Aragorn... He used a hand and a half sword and did tracking and that is it.
* ok when do these things even really matter anyway?
In this way you'd be able to downplay the focus on DPR racing other classes or direct comparisons with other classes and focus on their value as a woodland scout.
As to the split between beast master and hunter, that ones a little trickier; I'd probably keep hunter the same since it's pretty fine for what it does, but beastmaster might be easily fixed by giving the pet a single action per turn at level three and the option for more abilities/actions doled out at set levels.
Plus they're thematically bad. They're supposed to be fighter/Druids but Druids are already fighter/Druids. If you pick hunter they're almost explicitly flavored as "fighters but with a bow or dual wield" and who decided to pick survival as a trained skill. If you pick beast they're a Druid that isn't very good at druiding.
So they functionally become someone you pick of you want to not deal with traveling. Which is kinda dumb.
If you have to keep the archetype as a hard mechanical structure then Ranger-hunter should be an offshoot of fighter. Probably setting on top of champion and ditching spells. And Ranger beast master should be an offshoot of barbarian. This time getting spells.
Alternately hunter could be an offshoot of rogue but I think it's better on top of fighter.
Bard similarly should be an offshoot of rogue.
Ever since seeing this and downloading the PDFs I've been thinking of how to hack 5e with tracks and whatnot. You've corrupted me!
They did a good job creating the "concentrate on this until you hit then it goes off" spells for Paladin/Ranger, but the problem is they then made a staple Ranger spell (hunter's mark) take the same concentration slot. Hunter's mark should've just been a feature instead of a spell.
The base of these types of classes are:
- 1/2 caster with some good spells
- a niche
The paladin has the niche, because they have the best on-demand spike damage in 5E. Nobody is better than the Paladin at saying "I'm going to kill this one enemy and burn all my resources to do so." It goes even further because you look at the vengeance Paladin's channel divinity power, and it's basically a better version of the type of thing hunter's mark is meant to do. Once per short rest you get to have advantage on all attack rolls against a single enemy. Which synergizes with the crit fishing the class already wants to do with its spike damage.
Furthermore, Paladin actually has party support built into it that differentiates it further from say a Fighter. Giving all allies inside your aura a bonus to saving throws that for most levels of the game will exceed even their proficiency bonus is a big time benefit, and by level 10 making allies immune to fear, at a time when you're going to start fighting dragons who get to use a debilitating fear effect as part of their multiattack. Hugely beneficial stuff.
Then of course there's just the little stuff like being able to use lay on hands to bring people back from unconscious or more importantly to cure poison or disease without having a spellcaster prep/use slots to do so.
I agree with your ultimate point, but in my last D&D game, tracking and using wisdom (survival) checks was a big part of getting where the party needed to if they were in the wilderness. It was the party Druid who took on those duties, but failing those checks doesn't mean you don't get to have an adventure. It meant that the party got lost for a while before trying to track the thing and the person doing the tracking ran them through underbrush filled with thorns or whatever and they all took some damage, or if they were trying to make survival checks in dangerous environments like intense heat/cold, levels of exhaustion for failing to find the way through easily.
As with all things, you have to have interesting fail-forward consequences for things like tracking outside of just "you don't find any tracks, adventure stops here."
I agree that Rangers should've been archetypes of Fighters/Barbarians, because they don't have a niche.
Bard definitely should not be a rogue archetype. Bards are full progression spellcasters. You simply can't make a full spellcaster an archetype of a non-casting class, because they have spells from level 1. Rogue has arcane trickster, the 1/3rd caster which makes sense.
Bards are not rogues at all. They're full potency spellcasters with extra flexibility in the form of magical secrets, with party support like bardic inspiration/cutting words, which are hugely badass abilities.
If this was 4th edition with it's job hat design you'd have a point, but we're talking about 5th where things are a little more complicated.
As such I'd break down classes into these roles with some obvious overlap:
1. Front liner: someone who can decide the line of battle by being either too meaty or too crunchy to fall down quickly.
2. Flanker/skirmisher: classes that can do good damage but are too fragile to fight up front, work best as a second wave
3. Blaster: Someone who can dish out damage to a pile of enemies
4. Trickster: focuses on debuffs and incapacitation as opposed to straight damage
5. Skill focused: has a skill that is applicable to the situation at hand.
6. Medic: keeps you out of roll up a new character land.
7. Swiss army magic: when you need an alternate solution to a problem then what is obvious.
Ranger as Josh pointed out could easily have been a variation on paladin with a focus on disrupting the enemy, and still could be if they reworked how their magic worked a bit.
Like take hunters mark; I would have split it's effects so that it's tracking aspect was something you could do as something along the lines of 2+wis mod per long rest while the more fighty part of it I would have changed to a +2 to damage for all party members against the target.
Throw in some extra effects for tracking/hunting magic types and you could have a character that could easily fulfill roles 2,4 and 7.