Making Rangers Work in 5.5

 The Ranger has been in a kind of sad position for much of 5th Edition. As I've examined the class, I've found that the real power of the class comes from its subclasses, and the first two - the Beastmaster and the Hunter - were not quite powerful enough to pull the Ranger up out of the muck.

But I think the other issue was always that the two level 1 features, Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer, leaned too heavily into flavor and not heavily enough into mechanics. For a class that was likely to have low or even negative intelligence modifiers, getting advantage on checks to recall information about particular creature types is pretty underwhelming.

They also were two features that only did anything some of the time - if you had a ranger who was really good in swamps, you got nothing when your party found itself in the desert.

Now, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything made some big changes, creating alternatives to these features that were more broadly useful. Natural Explorer can be swapped out in favor of Deft Explorer, which gives you much more broadly applicable skills like increased movement speed, a climb and swim speed, expertise in a skill, and a way to avoid exhaustion, regardless of what environment you were in.

These replacement features are mostly very good, and I think almost pull the Ranger out of its pit.

However, the central one - the one that I think is most crucial to rehabilitating the class, which swaps Favored Enemy for Favored Foe, is underwhelming.

Favored Foe reads (italics are my own)

When you hit a creature with an attack roll, you can call on your mystical bond with nature to mark the target as your favored enemy for 1 minute or until you lose concentration.

The first time you on each of your turns that you hit the favored enemy and deal damage to it, including when you mark it, you can increase that damage by 1d4.

You can use this feature to mark a favored enemy a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus and regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

The extra damage increases to 1d6 at 6th level and 1d8 at 14th level.

My issue with this is that it basically recreates a worse Hunter's Mark. Unlike, say, a Monster Slayer's "Slayer's Prey," this can never stack with Hunter's Mark (because of concentration) and so by level 2, when you pick up the spell that basically all Rangers are going to get, this feature becomes useless. (Yes, it upgrades to 1d8 at level 14, but it's still only for one attack - 1d8 is definitely less than 2d6 - and by that level you've probably got better spells to concentrate on).

So the first problem with Favored Foe is that it's just bad.

The second problem is that it removes all the flavor of the original thing it was meant to replace.

What, after all, is the fantasy of a Ranger?

To me, it's someone who is a master of surviving in the wild. Part of that survival is being able to fight well, but the Ranger is not a Fighter. The Ranger's whole deal is knowing what is out there, and being ready for it. They're the person you want to have in your party who will be able to tell you what is safe to eat, but also what that freaking monster you're facing is.

So let me propose something very different:

And to be clear, this is a first draft of the ability. What I want to capture is the notion that the Ranger can, with enough preparation, get a significant edge against their foes.

Let's name it:

The Hunt:

At 1st level, thanks to your experiences traveling the wilds, you can call upon your wide breadth of knowledge of monsters to prepare yourself mentally and physically to face certain kinds of foes. When you finish a long rest, you can choose aberrations, beasts, celestials, constructs, fey, fiends, monstrosities, oozes, plants, or undead. You can also choose a type of humanoid (such as orc, goblinoid, or human).

Until you finish your next long rest, when you hit a creature of the chosen type, you deal additional damage equal to your proficiency bonus.

    Naturally, this might be subject to tuning, but I think it's within the realm of what is reasonable. One option to change it would be to make the damage equal to your Wisdom modifier, which would be more flavorful (reflecting your familiarity with the foe) though it would scale up slower.

This would help make all that investigating and identification of monsters play a real part in increasing the party's effectiveness (so often intelligence checks wind up basically being "cool, there's a bunch of mind flayers here. We'll proceed exactly as if we had no idea.")

I honestly think this one change could make the Ranger a far more appealing class. They need something big to make them keep up with the other martial classes, and I submit this concept as one that is in keeping with the flavor of the class.