How To Beat Mephistopheles as a Ranger

In the spirit of my Champion of Torm guide, I've written this guide for players new to 3rd Edition D&D rules who want play Hordes of the Underdark as a Ranger, but have had difficulty standing up to the tough bosses waiting in the third chapter. While it's true that you don't have to fight Mephistopheles to win the game, to me it's the most satisfying scenario. To that end, I've been trying to figure out the best way to play each character class, keeping the ultimate goal of winning the final fight against Mephistopheles in mind. This is the build I've come up with to do just that as a Ranger.

Playing as a Paladin with this strategy in mind, I learned that one of the keys to maximizing the efficacy of the particular class you are playing is finding out how he differs from the other classes, what strengths and weaknesses that entails, and how the developers made up for the weaknesses to ensure that beating the game was actually possible with that class. That way, you know which attributes, skills, and feats to focus on instead of picking feats you've read are good even though they don't really help your character.

Rangers, concept-wise, are stalkers and hunters that prefer to be in the great outdoors. They are good fighters, but are more interested in using their skills against a specific racial enemy than in training to fight anything that comes at them. They are good at stealth, are good with animals, and can cast divine spells like a druid. As such, their special abilities include Trackless Step (which doesn't help much in HotU), Favored Enemy (+1 bonus to physical damage against that enemy being the most important), Dual Wield (automatically gives you Ambidexterity and Two-Weapon Fighting), and Animal Companion.

Now, many people who want to play Rangers prefer to use them as archers. If you are one of those people, I should warn you now that I used missle weapons very infrequently in this build. My theory was that because Rangers are given Dual Wield, but no archery related feats, they are meant to primarily be melee fighters, who make up for their lower strength by using two weapons at once and hitting with them more often. I was also unwilling to (to my mind) waste a level to bard, sorcerer, or wizard just to get the spurious benefits of the Arcane Archer.

Anyway, since Dual Wield and Favored Enemy are the two big bonuses, I went into character creation with the idea that my ranger would use his bow when he could, but would primarily wield two swords. I felt that in order to minimize the penalty for dual-wielding, I would need to focus mainly on dexterity when choosing attributes. I chose Elf as my race for the DEX bonus and went with:

STR 14 (2)
DEX 18 (4)
CON 12 (1)
INT 10 (0)
WIS 14 (2)
CHA 8 (-1)


As a bit of explanation, since Ranger spells are Wisdom-based, I didn't worry about CHA at all and found no reason to later on. I went for 14 WIS, because I wanted access to all the available spells. I was worried about being able to damage Mephistopheles so I felt that 14/18 was a good balance with STR and DEX and plaaned to augment my strength with items and my dexterity with items and attribute bonuses at level-up.

I don't think the skills I chose helped much at all, except for Discipline. Animal Empathy was pretty much useless, but I figured Ramgers were supposed to have it. Spot and Search helped me to find secret doors, but not much else. Dual-wielding meant that I had to use up extra feats improving the critical threat range of a second weapon. Basically, I don't think feats are as important to this build beyond those that give you bonus attacks to your two weapons.

Choosing the favored enemies is very important, though. I would suggest choosing undead, outsiders, dragons, dwarves, and elves. This will ensure you are dealing the most damage to the worst of the bosses. Maybe humans instead of elves if you are more worried about the Order of the Long Death than the Valsharess, but definitely the others. When you go Epic and get the opportunity, take the feat Bane of Enemies to make your weapon deal even more damage to these particualar groups.

I may as well mention here that in preparing for this build I did a bit of investigative work by opening up the character file on Mephistopheles in the Aurora Toolset so I could find out where the chinks in his armor were. I found that he has less of a resistance to piercing and slashing weapons and while he is highly resistant to cold, fire, and electrical damage, he has no resistance to acid. I also found out that his attacks deal piercing damage as well as cold and fire. Armed with this knowledge, I planned to upgrade both of my swords to carry acid damage, and to wear the belt that gave me +10 to STR when it became available (instead of the one that adds +10 to DEX) so I could beat his Damage Resistance.

So, moving on to my choice of weapons, I knew that I wanted to use Enserric the Talking Sword to get the benefit of his vampiric regeneration and I knew that I would have to use him as a shortsword to minimize the dual-wield penalty. I decided that I would use a rapier in my left hand, because rapiers can get a better critical threshold (this won't help against Mephi, but it will with other enemies). When I came across the Rapier of the High Road, I stuck with it since it already dealt acid damage. I eventually upgraded both swords to +10 enhancement, made them both keen, made one of them haste me, and one of them grant me spell resistance. I also added acid damage to Enserric by the time I fought Mephi.

I won't give a level by level account of my decisions, but I will provide a snapshot of my character as he was during the final battle against Mephistopheles, to give you some idea of what to work towards.

My level 27 Ranger:

STR: 26 (8)
DEX: 36 (13)
CON: 14 (2)
INT: 12 (1)
WIS: 16 (3)
CHA: 4 (-3)

Main Weapon: Enserric the Shortsword
Attack bonus: +49/+44/+39/+34
Damage: 1-6 +8 (Critical 15-20 / x2)
+2d6 Acid Damage
+10 Piercing Damage
+3 Bludgeoning Damage

Offhand Weapon: Rapier of the High Road
Attack Bonus: +49/+44
Damage: 1-6 +4 (Critical 12-20 / x2)
+1d6 Acid Damage
+10 Piercing Damage
+3 Bludgeoning Damage

Fortitude: 19

Reflex: 24

Will: 15

Base Attack: 24

Spell Resistance: 20

To get my stats to this level, I wore Padded Armor +6 (the best armor I could find that would allow me a 13 DEX modifier), a belt of Storm Giant Strength (buy from Gru'ul), the Crown of Thorns (buy from Gru'ul), Bracers of Dexterity +7 (buy from Gru'ul), the Shroud of Kings (enter the place where you got the Sleeping Man's Ring after you have the Demon Grappling Hand to find it), Dragon Slippers (found numerous places), the Epic Amulet of Health (loot off one of the Order of the Long Death), the Ring of Power (ditto), and the Ring of Major Fire Resistance(ditto, I think). I also had the benefit of Deekin's bard song and the Cat's Grace spell.

I had absolutely no problem with Mephistopheles and only had to heal myself three times (twice with Potions of Heal and once with a Potion of Cure Critical Wounds) during the fight. He barely damaged me at all in the first and third rounds, because he mostly used fire spells, to which I was resistant. The physical damage from his melee attacks during the second round did take their toll, but after healing I was able to send him to his corner quickly.

Overall I was pretty happy with this build. I wasn't able to dominate every boss, but I was able to dominate Mephistopheles, which was my goal from the start. I hope that this guide has been informative to anyone wanting to role play as a Ranger, but still go toe to toe with Mephistopheles in the end.

Submitted By: Baedden