Ranger Subclass Tier Ranking (Part 2) In Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode is sponsored by easy roller dice rpg players can never have enough dice and these affordable and high quality dice are perfect for building a personalized collection on a lightweight budget their dice come in a huge range of colors materials and fonts so you can have the perfect set to match your characters spells and monsters we've been using their awesome dice trays at our own game table to keep all of our dice in one place for years now visit easyrollerdice.com or follow the links in the description below to visit their online store you'll also find below our discount code which you can use to save on select purchases and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode this is part two of our subclass tier rankings for the ranger in dungeons and dragons fifth edition in part one we looked at the two subclasses introduced in the player's handbook the hunter and the beastmaster as well as the updates to the beastmaster in tasha's cauldron of everything and today we are looking at the three subclasses introduced in xanathar's guide to everything in a while we'll be posting a third video where we'll follow up looking at the tasha subclasses once we've had a little bit more time to see how they work out at the table if you look on the screen right now you're going to see the criteria that we use to rank the subclasses we've pitted the subclasses against each other we are not taking role playing into account because all rangers have an equal opportunity to be role played really well we might suggest some multi-classing but it is not a core option that we're looking at when ranking these subclasses we are looking at the complete subclasses and how they rank against each other as always we do use a little bit of a discretion in the final rankings and kind of massage things based on the criteria you'll always have a lot of fun with any subclass regardless of which you choose but we are looking at their absolute performance how they perform in combat exploration and a wide variety of interaction and role-playing scenarios that are common in most dungeons and dragons campaigns there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling out of the darkness steps the gloom stalker a master of the darkness and the deep places of the world whether the deepest depths of the underdark or the deepest depths of the feywild forests the gloomstalker was introduced in xanathar's guide to everything and man oh man does this subclass tell the other ranger subclasses just how it's done let's take a look at some of the abilities that the gloom stalker gains right away at third level you gain gloom stalker magic now overall the options presented in the xanathar's guide to everything have these expanded spell lists that grant you additional spells beyond the regular ranger spell list and that's something that the player's handbook doesn't have which is really exciting and the gloom stalker spell list is pretty great this includes spells like disguise self rope trick fear greater invisibility and semen these are added to your spells known and don't count against the number of ranger spells you know they're a pure bonus just layered right on top and this is universal for all the new subclasses introduced since the author's guide to everything also a third level you gain dread ambusher and this is a really outstanding ability not only do you get to add your wisdom modifier to your initiative roles but you also get to add 10 feet to your walking speed on the first round of combat and if you take the attack action on the first round of combat you get to make an additional attack and if it hits you add 1d8 additional damage to that attack all in all this makes the first round of combat for gloom stalker incredibly deadly and it's important to note that this applies to the first round of combat it's not contingent on gaining surprise but it's way nastier when it does happen when you have surprise in order to help you get surprise though you gain another feature right away at third level called umbral sight this grants you dark vision if you don't have it already and if you do have dark vision because of your base features you gain extended range to your existing dark vision but that's not all umbral sight gives you the ability to evade the notice of creatures that rely on dark vision to see you while you are in darkness creatures that rely on dark vision to see you treat you as invisible if you can't be seen by a creature you just get advantage on attack rules against them as long as you can see them this means that if you are simply standing in an area of darkness as a gloom stalker ranger any enemy even if they have dark vision you have advantage on attack rules against you this won't defeat true sight or blind sight but a very large number of creatures have dark vision and rely on that to see in underground environments and you're invisible to them the seventh level ability iron mind gives you proficiency and wisdom saving throws and if you already have that then you get to choose whether you want proficiency and intelligence or charisma saving throws not quite as standout as the third level abilities but an extra proficiency is always useful at eleventh level you gain stalkers flurry this allows you to potentially turn a miss into a hit because on your turn when you miss with an attack you are then able to make an additional attack as part of the same action this is a really interesting power because it means that it's not a re-roll it's not advantage if you have an advantage on it on an attack and you still miss anyways you just get to make another attack again this ability combines so well with so many other features for instance if you have the sharpshooter feet and you take a -5 penalty it's likely over the course of your round of attacks you're probably gonna miss at least once this means that you get another shot literally to try to get that damage in it really really works well in a lot of cases and while it's not a true extra attack it compensates for a lot of the inaccuracies that can happen over the course of a battle at 15th level you gain shadowy dodge if an attacker that you can see makes an attack roll against you and doesn't have advantage you can use your reaction to impose disadvantage on the attack roll you have to use this feature before you know the outcome of the attack so let's get into it the gloom stalker ranger gains the ability to have advantage if they're standing in darkness on the first round of combat they can lash out with bonus attacks bonus damage at 11th level if they're missing they get to make more attacks they are virtually invisible in the dark and i would argue a better assassin than the assassin wrote they are so good in the darkness they are so good at killing targets i see no ability here that is wasted the weakest ability that the gloom stalker gains in my opinion is the proficiency in wisdom saving throws and that is still a great extra ability to have there's a great defensive features a really strong spell list is here like we've got we've got rope trick in here which is a fantastically useful utility we have greater invisibility we have seaming we have the sky itself so the gloom soccer is equipped with a lot of ways to infiltrate both using illusion and the fact that they're naturally invisible to creatures with dark vision in the darkness so this is a really subtle but powerful augmentation to the rangers ability to explore and infiltrate that i think tends to get lost in the midst of its outright combat power but the combat power i i think is unmatched there is nothing that i read here that doesn't excite me that doesn't make me inspired to play this character i think they're great and they're well written and all the abilities add in a meaningful way and seem to have this kind of continuity amongst them that i just wish more subclasses had this is an s tier subclass it's the best ranger subclass and i think it's one of the better subclasses in the game in terms of the way it's designed and i think we should see more things as well designed as this i completely agree the gloom stalker is in a position where with the right tactical positioning and the support of your party members if you're playing in a party where everybody has dark vision you can reliably be in circumstances where you're attacking with advantage all the time um which is warping in its impact on encounter building and encounters design that alone regardless of what kind of weapon whether your melee ranged whether you're doing the feats that we know and love like sharpshooter or not the ability to blanket advantage on top of everything and if you do go far enough with this class you get greater invisibility so you'll have a trump card if you're in it in perfect daylight and the amount of extra damage that you can get with one extra attack on the first round of combat is really significant and while many of the other ranger subclasses do gain extra damage abilities it takes three or four rounds of combat for an extra d6 or d8 to equal the amount that an entire extra attack represents because remember that extra attack is adding the base damage of the weapon attack the extra d8 that it innately gets and then if you do have things like hunter's mark or sharpshooter on top of that that extra attack can represent 20 maybe more damage 20 30 damage very very easily and at very low levels of play the damage is high and reliable and very hard for the other subclasses to match cap that off with all the exploration powers and as kelly said this is an s tier subclass umbral site dread ambusher the expanded spell list all happen right away at level three so you can do just as jill did in our drakenheim campaign and take five levels of ranger and then slough off to rogue or fighter or something else and feel like a gloom stalker and build on like the multi-class is amazing here as well past the darkness is the dawn of a new horizon and also introduced into xanathar's guide to everything is the horizon walker an interesting subclass on the ranger that rather than looking at new vistas on the material plane considers the broader horizons beyond the planes themselves and steps even between worlds much like the other xanathar's guide everything ranger subclasses this has horizon walker magic which is going to expand the rangers spell list right away at third level and add some really really cool spells to the rangers arsenal protection from evil and good misty step haste banishment and teleportation circle what an awesome combo of spells to add to the ranger haste and misty step are money also at their level you gain an ability called detect portal which as it's described allows you to detect nearby portals which might come up now you're thinking with portals uh watch watch out glados the horizon walker's gonna find all those portals yes but just like the cake this uh this ability is a lie um detect portal is an ability that is there to make your horizon walker feel like a horizon walker yes you can detect portals if it comes out that one time in your campaign and you go guys i know there's a portal over here you did it you used the ability you saved the day the other third level ability that you gain is planar warrior as a bonus action on your turn you can select an enemy within 30 feet of you and if you hit it with an attack for that attack it's going to be forced damage and it's going to do an additional 1d8 damage this changes to 2d8 at 11th level note that there's no limit to the number of times you can use this ability you just have to spend a bonus action every turn to turn it on and it only applies against the next attack that hits the target that you designate that has to be within 30 feet of you at seventh level you gain ethereal step which allows you to cast the etherealness spell without using a spell slot and instead of lasting the full duration it only lasts until the end of the turn and you regain this ability on a short or long rest still jumping into the ethereal plane without expending a spell slot can be really useful for exploration and combat purposes at 11th level you gain the distant strike power when you take the attack action before each of the attacks that you make you can teleport 10 feet so if you can make two attacks you can teleport 10 feet before the first attack and then another 10 feet before the second attack and in fact the other component of this power is that if you attack two different creatures you can make a third attack against a third creature potentially allowing you to teleport 30 feet in total at 15th level you gain spectral defense which is basically uncanny dodge as a reaction on your turn you can give yourself resistance to an attack that has just hit you i really love the horizon walker i think this this is a unique take on the ranger and i love the teleportation powers i think that it's just a little bit on the clunky side planar warrior is tricky to use alongside hunter's mark and other ranger bonus action powers because you have to activate it every round as a bonus action it doesn't stay in play and that's my biggest complaint about the horizon walker on round one of combat you're in a little bit of a tricky position are you going to throw down hunter's mark with your bonus action to get an extra d6 points of damage on every attack you make or are you gonna get the extra 2d8 or the extra d8 or 2d8 depending on your level damage on one attack by converting it to force it's a little bit of a difficult choice that's going to vary based on the enemies you're fighting and the resources that you have at your disposal but they don't sing sync up as elegantly as i would like them to the other tricky thing with the teleportation power in general is that it's really great with ranged combat because you can just go in any direction but of course you have to teleport before you make the attack so as a melee character you can't use it to zip out because if you use it to zip out you then have to do it before you attack so it doesn't do that kind of like ambushy kind of thing that i would love to do where it's like you teleport in attack attack teleport out it doesn't work that way it's got to be before the attack which is a bit of a limitation that i that kind of disappoints me so while i love the subclass a lot there's kind of these clunky mechanical flaws with it and i will admit even the etherealness spell is hard to use when you only have it for one round so i want to say for me it's a solid b i think in the right campaign where you can detect portals it might be s tier which is the definition of a b i just think that there's some clunky things here where i'm not sure what the right build or what the right strategy is to get all the abilities working in sync with each other to really nail that damage output all really good points i do have a few things that i want to add because i actually think the horizon walker is superb at certain things that we don't talk about a lot first of all hunter's mark is the bread and butter spell of the rangers but that might be a choice that we've implemented into our brains based on the original outing of the arranger there are lots of great ranger spells and this might prove an option to not take hunter's mark and to explore some other spells as well not only that but if you are hunting a large target you're going up against a monster of some sort that is going to survive for multiple rounds then yeah you lay one on first round you lay one on second round and as long as your hunter's mark can stay on one target for a boss battle you're now dishing out extra damage no this is not as good as the gloom stalker in terms of all out attack but let's talk about the exploration potential of the horizon walker being able to teleport gaining misty step gaining forms of teleportation maneuverability etherealness i'm also going to clump into this ability to just move around you have a lot of tools here that are unique and separate this ranger from every other ranger it makes it really special and i think that the ability to banff around in between attacks yeah you're right as a melee combatant you can't bamf in attack and banff out but if you want to play an aggressive character that's really cool or if you're playing a ranged character like you said the ability to be on the ground level shoot an arrow or bamf up ten feet shoot an arrow bamf up and uh another ten feet and now you're three stories up in a building sniping the guy and you did that all in one turn without missing an attack opportunity there's a lot of battlefield positioning that the horizon walker gets it gets to be where it wants when it needs to be there and do what it has to do damage output not the same as the gloom stalker but the the package here is just great it gives you something that adds to the ranger i think in really meaningful ways i'm willing to give this a strong a tier because we said that the gloom stalker actually adds in almost every aspect of the ranger this one adds slightly less in certain categories but excels at others you know in light of that one of the other things that i didn't think in my initial analysis here is the subclass has haste on its spell list and so when why would you use hunter's mark when you have haste and in that respect haste at higher levels of play plays really well with all the extra mobility here right it's bringing in that extra attack that extra opportunity to use planar warrior its abilities actually are really hard to use with a dual wielder and when i think about the horizon walker i love that night crawler image of like dual wielding going in stab stab stab stab but like they don't work it doesn't play with dual wielding it actually kind of breaks with dual wielding but this could be an interesting way i think the ranged option is a like absolutely an a there's some cool build options but i think actually they're really good so i you know what especially in light of the the new tasha's changes the xanathar's changes yeah i'm gonna upgrade from a b to an a you've convinced me something something that's really interesting is if you're replacing hunter's market later levels with haste is your concentration spell now you get to when you're using the ability to teleport 10 feet before you make an attack you also can move between that and your speed is going to be super high because of the extra haste so we we we are so we are imagining this situation where you bamf from one enemy to another or banff 10 feet and attack but you can banff before you attack so let's say that you're arranged target and you are in close combat you can bamf 10 feet away shoot them and then run it's so it's actually really good in that respect of the ranged character because if they run up to you to engage you because you're teleporting before your attack you can use the teleport to disengage so you don't have disadvantage on the ranged attack roll and then yeah you can use your other speed and the other teleportation to close the distance like as a ranged character with a horizon walker you can really kite somebody around especially with hates they're never going to catch you unless they're a monk so the final of the three subclasses introduced for rangers and xander's guide to everything is the monster slayer in many ways a great homage to the very classic image of the ranger as kind of like this van helsing or geralt of rivia witcher type of character in many ways i think it's resonating on this kind of knowledgeable slayer of monsters vampires the things that go bump in the night and so like all the other ranger subclasses introduced in xgte it also gains new spells in the monster slayer magic its spell list might not accept you as the other ones though because it's got protection from evil and good zone of truth magic circle banishment and hold monster an interesting array of kind of investigative defensive type spells your spell saving for odc is not going to be that good because wisdom is a kind of a secondary if not tertiary stat for many rangers so starting at third level you gain 100 cents this allows you to look at a monster within 60 feet of you and use an action to determine whether it has any resistances vulnerabilities invulnerabilities you get to learn a lot about the monster you can use this a number of times equal to your wisdom modifier and it's a great way to gain information about the creatures that you're hunting the better third level ability is slayer's prey as a bonus action you get to choose a monster within 60 feet of you you now do an additional 1d6 damage to it the first time you hit it on all of your turns this ability doesn't require any concentration and has no limits to the number of times you can use it you can just only have one target under the effects of this at a time it otherwise stays in place until you finish a short or long rest so it's kind of a concentration free once per turn hunter's mark once it's in effect it's in effect requiring no additional action from you beyond the initial bonus action setup it stacks with hunter's mark so over the course of two turns you can stack this up and get an extra 2d six points of damage on the first attack that you hit on that creature and then once you kill it you then have to spend two turns to set the same thing up again on someone else or you can just conserve your spell slots and not worry about hunter's marker use a different spell instead entirely at seventh level you gain supernatural defense this ability means that if your slayer's prey tries to do something that requires a saving throw or you need to escape a grapple from it you get to add an additional d6 to your role to either escape the grapple or to your saving throw at 11 level you gain magic users nemesis when a creature within 60 feet of you casts a spell or teleports you can use your reaction to force it to make a wisdom-saving throw if it fails the wisdom-saving throw the spell is negated and the spell slot is wasted or the teleportation is simply negated at 15th level you gain slayer's counter if your slayer's prey forces you to make a saving throw you can now use your reaction to attack that target if you attack that target back which can be a melee or ranged attack and the attack hits you automatically succeed your saving throw this this is a tough subclass for me i have played briefly a monster hunter and the slayer's prey is useful but not as useful as i imagined it to be i still think that there's a lot of great uses here and i think that the monster hunter actually benefits from large targets that take multiple rounds to kill kind of like the horizon walker because you have this ability that requires a bonus action to add on additional damage but you also have hunter's mark that requires a bonus action to add on additional damage it means that you're taking two rounds to get a good amount of additional damage stacked up mind you if you are a monster hunter hunting giant monsters you're probably going to get a few rounds in of being able to dish out this damage the monster hunter excels at finding the large scary target and saying i'm a professional at killing this that's about all that it has going for it though i've been back and forth on the monster hunter on whether or not this deserves a b or a c on one hand i think that in the right campaign where you are hunting big dragons or or scary giant taras maybe the monster hunter excels in these campaigns but even when it's excelling does it excel as as much as the horizon walker or gloom stalker who i think are just as good at doing what the monster hunter is best at for that reason it might be a c and i actually haven't quite made up my mind even during the filming of this whether or not it's a b or c i keep flip flopping the thing for me is that i would enjoy playing a monster hunter i love what's offered here i think i have a few cool monster hunter ideas in my head i've played one in untold tales and yeah i had fun playing that character but i almost blamed the role play not the the subclass the subclass offered very little to my monster hunter so i i think i'm leaning towards a c because although i am enjoying the idea of the monster hunter and the abilities all work really well together at doing this kill the big target thing i don't know if it's if it's as good or even has the potential to be nearly as good in the right campaign as other options we've seen one of the things that's also weird about the monster hunter or monster slayer is it monsters yeah the monstrous layer one of the things that i also find frustrating about the monster slayer is the hunter sense power that allows you to use an action to figure out resistances and immunities and vulnerabilities d5e does a really bad job of explaining how a dungeon master is supposed to communicate resistances and immunities and so this ability is one of those things that can be pretty useful or utterly useless depending on your dungeon master and how your dungeon master discloses this information anyways it's it's tough because i see this ability and it's both one of my least favorite abilities in dnd it's similar to the fighter eyeing up their enemy yeah which can give you actually more useful information in that one because it can tell you hit points and things like that but in general these abilities don't interest me they they they're too mechanical and they don't let me feed into the role play which i know we're not rating role playing but like this is a very mechanical ability that gives you mechanical answers that you might or might not be able to use and i could give or take that you can be full disclosure as a dm anyways and the game doesn't suffer from it the other abilities are almost entirely defensive and many of them surround your specific slayer's foe type thing and then there's the counterspell power which i want to like it a lot but i don't think it's as good as counterspell i also don't like the idea of having a spellcaster get to make a wisdom saving throw because spellcasters are generally really good at making wisdom saving throws and your savings throw dc again it's gonna be bad i think there's a build in here that maybe makes it work but at the same time like if you're investing into all these abilities what are what is what's the overall package result in and it comes back to that question of if we try to make the best possible monster slayer is it as good or better at taking down an individual monster as a gloom stalker and the answer is no no it's not as good as the gloom stalker the horizon walker and even if we look beyond combat at exploration and other things like that it's not as good as the other two at that either its spell list is not very great and you brought up a major point that if we look at something like the gloom stalker who has rope trick or disguise self these are spells that you cast on you to benefit the party the horizon walker has haste a spell you cast on yourself rangers who you're either taking dexterity or strength you're probably taking constitution so you have a bit of meat on your bones yes wisdom might be your second or third choice but you're still not going to be the most powerful spell caster i tend to steer towards spells that are going to benefit me and the party not spells that are going to require saving throws because it's not my strongest asset and i mean you've got zone of truth but like even still like that's that's such a weird spell to arrange for a ranger to have so like i i look at all this and i go this looks like a very specialized set of options for the hunter and we gave the hunter a c i'm hard pressed to think of the circumstance where it actually excels i think this is my favorite subclass i don't like i i really like the idea of a monster slayer the abilities speak to that idea really well and they are useful in the idea of slaying your monster but it doesn't have much else going for it where the other subclasses that we looked at today have a lot going for them in a lot of avenues of what dungeons dragons offers which is what we're ranking is this subclass useful in a broad range of applicable situations that come up a lot in dungeons and dragons gloom stalker 100 yes horizon walker definitely most of the time monster hunter sometimes which is better the hunter or the monster slayer i think the hunter's better hunter has the ability to flex to a b or down to a d which is why we gave it a c monster hunter's stuck and i think it's stuck in c yeah too bad too bad so let's take a look at our overall rankings that we gave for the classes quite the spread you know uh a little top little bottom heavy i will say that i think the ones that are good are really good and the ones that are bad are pretty bad yeah yeah kind of disappointing but let's see what our community said so looking at the gloom stalker it is overwhelmingly in agreeance with us with 57.1 percent giving it the s tier then you have 30 giving it the a tier with just under 10 giving it b and a very small amount giving it c and d so unequivocally this is the best ranger subclass yeah yeah this is the highest rank ranked the dominating by far the horizon walker did well bull as well getting 17 percent of the str rankings 37 of the a and 35 of the b rankings with again about 10 giving it either a c or d ranking pretty strong a plus right there or a very solid a like you you see the the flip from a to b there but enough people think it's a really really good s tier even uh that it is worth worthy of that sort of consideration the second highest number of s-tier ranks with the monster slayer we are looking at a little bit of a different spectrum here the s tier is sitting at just 6.5 percent with 35 almost giving it the a tier and 44 just under giving it b tier with 12 giving it c so we can see that the monster slayer actually sits very much in the b spectrum for our community and yeah maybe you and i have looked a little harshly on the monster slayer and the hunter who both were rated more favorably by the community but i think we're just differentiating the ones we love a little stronger i can very much agree with the arguments of these getting a b ranking from the community i see why they would and i actually see a lot of things to enjoy about these subclasses i think we give them a c because we can't see them excelling the way that the horizon walker the gloom stalker do so i'm really interested to see looking forward at the newer subclasses in tasha's and how those affect things but unequivocally i think it's really hard to beat the gloom stalker the horizon walker comes close and the new beast master i think is amazing too as a last look if you look up on the screen right now these are our rankings for all of the ranger subclasses next to that you're going to see the community votes and it's a little bit more of an even spread with the community votes where ours was a little bit more polarizing from the good and the bad but overall i think the ranger presented a situation that needed to be patched up by wizards of the coast when it first came out it came out weaker than several of the other subclasses and it was noticeable to the community i do think that with the additions of things like the gloom stalker and the horizon walker we have seen a better ranger and we're going to be looking at the tasha subclasses in another video and at first glance i think that we continue the look at a better ranger in dungeons and dragons 5th edition and we now are looking at a lot of choices that make a decent and fun character at the table and i would argue even if you choose something like the hunter or the monster slayer they still present a really fun and versatile choice of the table they're just not as strong by a long shot as the best choices for the ranger so this has been our tier ranking of the rangers subclasses part 2 in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about your favorite ranger subclass in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters and we thank each and every one of you from the bottoms of our hearts if you like the work that we do here on youtube and on other platforms please consider joining our patreon community by following the links in the description below you might also be interested to hear that we have a book coming out in 2021 we have partnered with ghostfire games to release dungeons of drakenheim as a module for fifth edition if you want to hear more information about that check out the links down below and if you want to see the world that the book is based on make sure to check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6pm eastern at twitch.tv dungeon underscored dudes you can find all the previous episodes of that show right up over here and we have plenty more rankings for the other subclasses for the other classes in dnd 5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 356,629

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: VwlSDTQq2fM

Length: 36min 45sec (2205 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021