Design notes

Thank you for taking the time to go through my version of the ranger class, I haven’t been a player that long and this is the first homebrew I've made so please let me know what you think!

I tried to mix both the PHB ranger and Revised Ranger (RR) since i though that RR was a little too over tuned in a couple areas. Here’s my reasoning for the different changes and add-ons in this ranger revision:

Proficiencies I automatically gave the ranger nature and survival in order to help make it better at tracking and exploring then a rogue or bard with expertise.

Natural Explorer, Favored Enemy and Favored Terrain They are essentially the classes core abilities, and while I love them for the customization you can give to your ranger, they were useless unless you’re in that specific terrain or fighting that specific enemy. For favored Enemy I took the PHB version and added the RR bonus to damage but changed the damage from to match your wisdom mod. Since the PHB gives 3 favored enemies instead of the 2 RR gives you, I figured it would be better the spread out the damage increase a bit instead of a +2 then a +4 at level 6. Other than that, I couldn’t find another way to improve it without completely rewriting how it worked or removing it all together. For natural explorer, I think RR was going in the right direction, but all those effects all time was a bit strong in my opinion. So instead I kept the PHB effect for all terrains and added the new effects from the RR to the favored terrain mechanic. That way you have the best of both worlds. For natural explorer specifically, I gave automatic expertise in nature and survival since this is suppose to the rangers bread and butter, it would be sad if a bard or rogue did its job better, also I changed the last effect so that you actually have to roll to discern enemy info instead of the DM just giving it to you. With expertise and advantage, you still have a very high chance of getting the info but now its not just free info.

Honed Skills I saw some other ranger builds incorporate a special ability based on your favored terrain. I thought that it added an early level uniqueness to the ranger without having to ask the DM what terrains are going to be featured or the DM having to rewrite the campaign to include more of the rangers favored terrain. I still kept the combat abilities for favored terrain since it makes sense, its the terrain you've honed your skills in, thus you should kick butt in it. I also kept the ability to gain more favored terrains as you level up but for only the Combat abilities, not the unique skills. I'm not sure if I want to keep this but I liked the original Favored Terrain systems concept and I still want to apply it if I can. If the campaign changes location fairly often then the additional favored terrains might not be a problem.

Fighting style I added Great Weapon Fighting. I don’t really see why they didn’t give it to the ranger in the first place.

Vanish Basically, it took way too long to get this ability, so I put it with lands stride at level 8. I was also thinking of putting it at level 7 or 9.

Feral senses Same issue as Vanish, it’s a cool ability but how many games get to 18th level? So I put it at 14Th were Vanish was.

Foe slayer Good ability but terrible capstone, so I moved it down to 18th level.