BG2 type classes

[Gimli]

Excellent site! I also had a party once with a rogue-ranger duo (and mine had a monk thrown in), wanted to really push stealth for a change of pace. Made taking out spell casters a breeze. I also found it handy to split the search and disarm traps skills, letting the ranger search and rouge disarm.

[Magness]

Marty4, my modded ranger is a small mod of the semi-official "Monte Cook" D&D Ranger. With my minimal skills, I was only able to modify a few things defined in the the MC Ranger.

1. Slightly improved spell progression
2. 3 Skill points/level instead of the normal 2 defined by IWD2.
3. Bonus feats: My MC Ranger gets bonus feats at level 1, 5, 9, and so on. (This was done this way to marginally parallel a set of feats proscribed for the true MC ranger that I could not implement.)
4. "Tracking": implemented by hardcoding 1 sp in Wilderness Lore and the Forester feat at creation.

This is just a minimal version of the MC Ranger, but does make it nicely playable.

The MC Ranger was also supposed to only get 1d8 HP, not the 1d10 of the current ranger, but this was not implementable. The MC Ranger was supposed to get improved reflex saves, but this too was not implementable. In both cases, the reason for my not being able to implement it was that all of the warrior classes get their data from a the same warrior 2DA files. There aren't seperate data files for each warrior sub-class. Oh well.

MC Rangers were also supposed to not have automatic dual wielding. But since that was hardcoded into IWD2, that's the way it stayed.

It's a nice little mod that I've always used whenever I have a ranger in my parties.

[Magness]

Originally posted by Marty4: The reason that I don't like rangers is probably due to my play style being anything butscout and smash. The most I ever use ranger is adding a level on to a character for dual wielding feats. Still, maybe I'll make a "scout and smash" party some time [img]smile.gif[/img] .

BTW, it was really only my ranger and rogue that were "scout and smashers". The rest were your average pally, cleric, sorc, etc.

As Gimli mentioned, scout and smashers are great for taking out spellcasters before the "party" even starts. This team was great in the ice temple. They'd sneak into some of the rooms and take out a couple of the spellcasters and draw the attention of everyone else while the other 4 members of my party came running thru the door to join the melee.

The one thing that you have to be careful about with a little strike team like this is to NOT try to "hang in there" when there are a lot of baddies in the room. Kill your main 1 or 2 targets and scoot. You don't want to get surrounded, cuz if you do, you're toast.


BTW, I would play always my rangers as max DEX, moderate STR, leather-wearing, stealthy dual-wielding archers. When stealth was not an issue, they'd usually act as the party's primary archer and 3rd tank. I woouldn't put them in the melee wall unless necessary, cuz I'd prefer to let'em pepper the enemy with arrows. While ranged weapons may not be the total death machines they were in IWD1 or BG2, a good archer can still make life miserable for enemy spellcasters. And I would use him as the party's means of adding in that little extra damage to finish off wounded enemies anywhere on the battlefield. A pure ranger can get off a lot of arrows in a round and cause a lot of damage with little risk. OTOH, when required, he could put his bow aside and pull out his 2 short swords and wreak some pretty serious damage if the bad guys were starting to overrun my melee wall.

And having a ranger in my party meant that I had wilderness lore covered for my party.