So, I'm doing something a little unconventional: in a little less than a week, early access for Ravenloft: Horrors Within will open up, giving us access to the new book with its various subclasses, species, feats, etc. Among them is the Hollow Warden Ranger, which leans into a kind of spooky cryptid vibe.
I actually love the idea of a Domain of Dread with a Pacific Northwest vibe - while I'm a New Englander originally, and will always advocate for spooky stories set in the Northeast, I also do love the temperate rainforests and funky monsters of the region.
I'm going to be using the version of the subclass previewed in the recent "State of the Game" video, which should be the final version (barring some digital errata, which is rare).
Ok: Rangers are, unfortunately, generally considered one of if not the weakest class in 5E, and while we saw massive glow-ups for, for example, the Monk (even if the absolute damage output wasn't buffed enormously, their overall quality of life and survivability did get some significant boosts) most argue that the Ranger didn't quite get the love it needed.
I'll confess that it's not a class whose fantasy appeals to me tremendously - but I do think that the vibes on the Hollow Ranger could draw me to it (though I've got a ton of character concepts I'd want to play first).
Still, as I've been doing this series figuring out damage output against a Death Knight, which is a very Ravenloft-appropriate monster (Lord Soth is featured in Horrors Within, and while he's now got a bespoke, slightly-higher-CR stat block, we're on theme), largely going with classes that aren't always known for being the kings of damage output, I figured we should check in with the Ranger. But I'm more excited about this subclass than the others currently available (Gloomstalker is, to be fair, certainly a spooky option as well).
But how will the subclass affect our damage, if at all?
The core feature for the Hollow Warden is Wrath of the Wild, which allows you to transform into a kind of cryptid monster as a bonus action, expending a use of Favored Enemy to do so - notably, this no longer requires you to concentrate on Hunter's Mark (in fact, it uses up one of your free castings of it), though it only lasts for one minute (or if you get incapacitated, die, or end it voluntarily). The transformation increases your AC by 1 (and then 2 at level 11). It also allows you to make an Opportunity Attack when a creature within 5 feet of your deals damage to you or an ally.
Naturally, this latter feature will strongly encourage us to play a melee character, though the changes to Sharpshooter in 5.5 were doing that already anyway.
Still, this is going to be a source of significant extra damage, as we will probably be able to use it every turn as long as we stay glued to the Death Knight.
Finally, Wrath of the Wild lets us impose Frightened on any creatures of our choice within 10 feet who fails a Wisdom saving throw every turn - once when we activate it and again at the start of each turn. The fear effect lasts until the start of your next turn. This is not going to work on the Death Knight, but it's actually quite good generally (and again, encourages us to get into melee).
In terms of subclass spells, Wrathful Smite is the only real damage option we'll have at level 10 - given that I'm going to be building with dual-wielding in mind, we'll probably save this only for crits, as we'll normally just being making an attack with the Dual Wielder feat. (Ranger can go the Strength route and pick up heavy melee weapons, which might work well with this subclass, but I think there are other benefits to going with a Dex build and dual-wielding. Also, going one-handed and taking the Dueling fighting style is actually not a terrible idea here, though I think Dual-wielding will probably wind up doing better - even if we can probably reliably get three attacks per round thanks to those Opportunity Attacks, the benefit won't make up for missing the Dual Wielder feat attack - though a less damage-focused, more tanky Ranger actually makes some sense with this subclass).
At level 7, Hungering Might gives you a bonus to Con saves equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum +1) and also, when you hit a creature with an attack while transformed and you're Bloodied, you regain HP equal to 1d10+Wis. But this doesn't affect our damage output (other than keeping us alive a bit longer).
I actually wrote out the entire 11th-level feature before remembering this was a level 10 build, so we'll stop there.
Ok, so let's talk gameplan:
Weapons:
We're definitely doing a melee build here. Classically, Rangers in melee tend to go with dual-wielding (particularly a shortsword and scimitar). But what about some other options?
You can make a Strength-based Ranger, and I actually think that there are some reasons to consider it in this case: because of the reaction attacks we'll be getting, the harder-hitting the weapon, the greater value that has. If we go with a Greatsword, for example, what would we need for our stat-spread?
Well, I'd want to get a 17 in Strength and then a 16 in Wisdom to start off. We can get these and the Tough feat (which will help us survive in melee a bit better) from the Farmer background, which also feels good for a folk-horror-themed character.
Using Point Buy, we're a little stretched out here given that we want to have a 14 in Dex and then as high a Con as we can get. Grabbing 15s in Strength and Wis leaves us with 9 points left. A 14 in Dex is then another 7, so we're spending our last points just to get a +0 to Con. Not... ideal.
But let's try something a bit more off-beat. If we take the Druidic Warrior fighting style, we can pick up Shillelagh as a cantrip. From there, we'll be able to focus entirely on Wisdom as our primary stat. Now, this won't let us go with Great Weapon Master, but it will let us go with Polearm Master if we fight with a Quarterstaff. The cost is that we have to cast the spell as a bonus action, which does get in the way of getting Wrath of the Wild up.
That said, we might need a good concentration spell at the start of our first turn anyway that takes an action to cast (we'll come to that later). The Quarterstaff has Topple, which could potentially knock our target prone or at least burn through some legendary resistances. The downside is that by picking this, we're not going to get the Dueling fighting style that would complement a single one-handed weapon. Eventually, the higher damage die would make up for this (by the time it's a d12, it's doing as well as a d8 weapon with a +2 bonus).
All that said, I don't think that this is the highest damage option, which means we're probably going to have to go the conventional route and dual-wield. So, yeah, the usual Shortsword and Scimitar combo.
This also means I have to deal with Vex, though I think the math should hopefully be at least similar to what I did with the Rogue.
Feats:
If we're dual-wielding, we'll take Dual-Wielder, though this won't come online on the first turn because we need our bonus action to activate Wrath of the Wild. Indeed, with other bonus actions like Wrathful Smite, we might consider leaving it on the table - though in any fight where we're not burning through all our resources each turn we'd probably want to have this as a free option.
At level 8, I might be tempted to just take an ASI to cap our Dexterity, because if we do go into higher levels, getting higher Wisdom will wind up being pretty useful. So, we'll just assume 20 Dex.
For Fighting Style, we're going Two Weapon Fighting.
Spells:
At this level, we have 3rd level spells. While something like Conjure Barrage will be great in AoE situations, for single-target, I'd suspect that we're going to be best off with Summon Fey. (Spike Growth would be great if we had a lot of pushing and pulling, but that doesn't play super well with our "stay stuck to the target" playstyle.)
Gameplan:
So, here's how we do this:
We start off on turn one closing with the Death Knight, and then we activate Wrath of the Wild. With our action, we cast Summon Fey, probably picking Fuming as the Fey's mood (/mode.)
Hopefully, the Death Knight attacks either us or an ally (though hopefully not our poor Fey because they might die immediately) and triggers our reaction attack.
Then, from turn 2 onward, we make our two attacks and then have our Fey attack if they're alive.
Calculating Damage:
Given that they get to attack first, we'll figure out what the Fey does first.
Our Wisdom is only +3 at this level, so the Fey only has a +7 to hit. Against an AC of 20, that's only a 40% chance to hit. However, because our Fey spirit is fuming, they can start off their turn with a Fey Step to get advantage on their attacks (alternatively, if we want to keep them alive, we might have them Fey Step after their attacks to safely get out of range of the Death Knight's melee, though we lose this advantage).
On a hit, the Fey spirit gets 2d6+3+the spell's level, which can only be 3 at this level. So, it's an average of 13. Then, you add 7 on a crit.
With advantage, they have a 64% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit, so that's 8.32 plus .6825, or an average of approximately 9 damage on an attack with advantage.
Without advantage, for their second attack, they have a 40% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit, so 5.2 plus .35, or 5.55 on average for the second attack.
(Oh, duh: it's a 3rd level Fey Spirit, so it only gets one attack.)
Thus, the Fey is doing, from turn one, about 14.55 damage per turn. (Actually, no, it's just 9 damage)
We assume, then, that we'll get our Opportunity Attack. Here, we have a 50% chance to hit and a 5% chance to crit. We use our Shortsword, which deals 1d6+5 damage on a hit (8.5 average) and 3.5 extra on a crit, so we're looking at 4.25 plus .175 or 4.425 average damage there.
Then, we have our second turn:
We should be able to make full use of our Nick and Dual Wielder off-hand attacks, so this amounts to four 1d6 weapon attacks per turn.
We'll attack with the Shortsword for our two main attacks as part of the attack action. The Scimitar we will only use for our Nick attack, which then allows us to use the Shortsword again for our Bonus Action Dual Wielder attack and then our reaction attack that we can expect to get each round.
Of course, Vex vexes us by making the math far more complicated. But at least we have some precedence with the Rogue, who also had a +9 to hit. Using the math we figured out from that, if we got an opportunity attack between turns one and two, we've got a 62.5% chance to hit and a 7.375% chance to crit. 8.5x62.5% is 5.31 (we're rounding it to the second decimal, which is honestly more generous than we should be) and 3.5x7.375% is .26, giving us 5.57 average damage with this attack.
Then, we have a second Shortsword attack on our turn. Our hit chance overall is now 65.625%, and our crit chance is 7.975%, so that's 5.58 plus .28, or 5.86.
Now, compared to the Rogue, we have one more attack in the middle here, our Scimitar attack. This has a 65.625% chance to have advantage. Again, let's round off for sanity. 66% of the time we're talking a 75% chance to hit and 9.75% chance to crit, and the other 34% of the time, it's 50%/5%. So, 49.5% plus 17% is a 66.5% chance to hit and 6.4% plus 1.7% is 8.1% chance to crit. That's then 5.65 plus .28, or 5.93 with this attack.
Our bonus action attack actually winds up being very simple, as we don't have a source for advantage, so it's just the same as that initial reaction, or 4.425. Then, our next reaction would be like that initial attack on this turn, or 5.57.
Whoops, forgot that the bonus action attack doesn't add our Dex. So it's just 3.5 damage on a hit. Thus, it's actually 1.75 plus .175, or 1.925
Bringing it all together:
On turn one, we only do 9 with our Fey spirit and 4.4 with our reaction attack, for 13.4 damage.
Then, turn two, we'll get 5.57 on attack one, 5.86 on attack two, 5.93 on attack three, and 1.93 on attack four, for a total of 19.3ish. Our Fey spirit then does another 9 damage, so we get 28.3 on our turn.
Then, we get 5.57 with our reaction each round, bringing us to 33.9 damage per round.
Let's talk pitfalls:
The Fey spirit only has 30 HP and an AC of 15, so we might prefer instead to have the Fey swoop in with their movement and then Fey Step away. This takes their advantage away, so they'll only do 5.6 damage per turn, meaning we reduce our total damage done by about 3.4.
Even with 30 feet of clearance, the Death Knight could still choose to go after it - broadly speaking, if a monster diverts away from attacking you or your fellow party members, it's worth it, but the Fey could also get caught in a Hellfire Orb or some such thing as well.
Indeed, with only a single attack, we might actually just go Hunter's Mark. This would have to wait for turn two, though it would let us attack on turn one. We'd still need to worry about maintaining concentration, though we do get a nice bonus to Con saves with the subclass.
I think we can actually figure out how much Hunter's Mark would add (starting on turn two) by simply adding all the hit and crit chances together and multiplying them by 3.5. If I did that right, it's actually adding 9.6 damage per turn, roughly, which outpaces Summon Fey.
Damn it, WotC! You got me to cast Hunter's Mark!
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