Ranger build

[iad514]

What is the best build for a Ranger? What are the most important abilities? I know he'll want Wisdom for spell casting, but what are the other important ones? I've never played a Rangr before.

[Kipi]

POSSIBLE SPOILER



It depends how you are going to use your Ranger. Is it going to be a tank who always is in front line or is it going to be a archer who is going to stay behind tanks using bows/crossbows to kill monsters?

There may be some mistakes in next part because I haven't played IWD II in a long time.
In case of tank: In my opinion you should have quite high Str and Con, because those are what you need in close combat. Also you could think whether you want to dual wield two weapons or use one weapon and shield. In case of tank I would recomend shield-style, but it's totally up to you.

In case of archer: I think Dex is the most important in this case, but I may be wrong. I would use bow as a weapon, 'cause I think it's much easier to find special arrows than other (again, I may be wrong). Also you should consider putting some points to Str and dual wield two short swords or short sword and dagger. I think especially in early game there is some quite useful daggers, but you may want to save those to possible thief, mage, cleric or sorcer. Dual weapons is good if some monsters get past your tanks and your rangers is just forced to go in close combat.

If you are not going to use your ranger as speaker, you could consider dropping ranger's Cha at least a bit, so that you have more points to put in other stats.

Also I have to ask if you are going to add thief in your party? If you are, then skills like sneak/detect trap aren't needed for ranger, but if the answer is no, then you should put some points to these skills. WHen speaking of skills, IMHO Animal Empathy (spelling??) is not needed, so I wouldn't bother putting points to that skill. But if you know that skil usefull, then you should put at least some points to it. You should also put at least some points to Tracking -skill (spelling, again?), because you are going to need it.

I don't know much about ranger's spells, and if you are going to have at least one spellcaster in your party, then IMO you don't have to think those as much, because as far as I know ranger's spell-selection is VERY limited and they get spells quite slowly, so I wouldn't think of spells as much when creating ranger. IMO ranger's spells are more like nice addition, but not so needed. For example the number of times I have used ranger's spells can be counted with fingers of one hand. When needing spells, IMO you should trust more to clerics, wizards and sorcers than rangers.

So, these are the core rules I have used when creating my rangers, and they are based totally on my own game-experience, so everybody can freely disagree with them.

[Kblitz]

One way to use a ranger is as to toughen up your rogue.

A high DEX, medium strength type of fighter character. rangers have class ascess to a lot of rogue skills like hide and seach.

A human makes good sense, you can mix rogue and ranger freely without multi class xp penalties and get extra skillpoints which is nice for a rogue type of character.

With high DEX you should stick to bows or use weapon finesse to fight with shortswords and daggers in melee. Damage will not be impressive - high STR tanks are better suited for this.

As armor in IWD2 generally sucks a lot you can have your mage/sorceror/bard boost the character with Cats Grace and Mage Armor.

Starting stats could be something like (human)

STR 10 DEX 18 CON 14 INT 14 WIS 10 CHA 10

If you want ranger spells u need a highter WIS but then you have to strip Charisma which you may do anyway to power the char up of course.

Pure ranger... i don't know... by the time you get to cast spells they will be so weak compared to clerics and sorcerors that i have always just ignored it. Imo a non-spell caster needs to do some serious melee tanking to be worth his salt and fighters and barbarians just seem better suited for this. You could make a half-orc STR 20 ranger of course... might be a fun idea..

[silverdragon72]

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sad but true: rangers are the worst choice in IWD2!


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[walther911]

I found a fighter 4/druid x was good... If you want a ranger i suppose you can do the same thing... ranger 2 or 3/druid x. You dont need to go very high with ranger class becuase you wouldn';t need the ranger spells, just druid ones!