LogFAQs > #970950629

averagejoel posted...

the version in the players handbook had some overly circumstantial abilities, but it played fine unless you ignored the spellcasting. Rangers have a great spell list. Monks are much worse in terms of their actual design (they also don't really fit thematically with the rest of the classes but that's a semi-separate issue)

Ranger was usually worse, but that was because most people who picked Ranger picked Beastmaster, which absolutely ruins your Action Economy.

The beast took no action on your turn (except move and dodge) unless you sacrificed one of your attacks to command it. At lower levels that means your entire action. The ranger spell list is good, but the beast couldn't benefit from things like Hunter's Mark, so you were almost always in a situation where plinking things with an arrow was better than getting your beast to help.

And that's before factoring in that you have to beg your DM for spoilers or else Favored Enemy and Terrain run the risk of becoming completely nonfunctional. Monk might not be as skilled as the rogue, nor does it have the same nova potential, and it might fall behind the fighter's dpr, but it at least worked conceptually. Suboptimal sure, but Beastmaster was bordering on unplayable. The other subclasses were outperformed by Fighter with a Bow which is a similar problem that the Monk has. (Ranger does win here though) At least the Monk gets to feel cool and unique thanks to using Fists.

The beast was also kind of shit. Tasha's replaced that whole system with new generic Beasts that work way better, and the beast uses your bonus action or optionally one of your attacks, meaning it no longer clashes with your Action Economy in any way. Beastmaster under Tasha's is quite good, but until then it was easily one of the worst subclasses in the game.

Elemental Monk might have been worse, but few people wanted that class because even to new players it was an obviously bad choice. For some reason Beastmaster Ranger was on every table, optimizations be damned, and they were always miserable because their dog kept dying and doing nothing.