Editing Ranger (section)

====Take Four: Class Feature Variants====
The November 2019 UA, Class Feature Variants, gave the Ranger YET ANOTHER go around to try and make it a little less awful to play as. Funnily enough, these optional rules are also compatible with Ranger Revised, so you can assemble a Frankenstein's Monster of a class if you take both of them. The Ranger got the most attention out of any class featured in the UA, putting in several key features that make the 5e Ranger much more palatable.

First off, you can choose to replace Favored Enemy with Favored Foe, trading your somewhat niche tracking abilities for the ability to cast Hunter's Mark for free a number of times equal to your WIS modifier [[Awesome |without concentration]]. That marked foe also counts as your Favored Enemy. That is the kind of trade any vanilla Ranger will take in a heartbeat!

Next, a Ranger can replace Natural Explorer with Deft Explorer, which itself has three options that you can eventually get all of:
* Canny, which gives you proficiency and double prof on Animal Handling, Athletics, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Stealth, or Survival checks.
* Roving, which increases your walking speed by 5 feet and gives you a swimming and a climbing speed equal to your walking speed.
* Tireless, which gives you temp hit points equal to 1d10+WIS mod, can be used WIS mod times per long rest, and eventually lets all of your short rests reduce your exhaustion by 1.

In addition to all of the other Fighting Styles every class gets, Rangers get a special style which lets you nab any two cantrips from the Druid and use them as your own! They get the same Spell Versatility that [[Sorcerer|Sorcerers]] get, letting you swap out one spell per long rest, which makes a little more sense for the Ranger. 

Remember Primeval Awareness, that useless joke of a class feature? You can now swap that out with Primal Awareness, which gives you a boatload of tracking related spells like Speak to Plants, Detect Magic, Beast Sense, and Commune with Nature, and lets you cast them once a day for free! Another trade that any vanilla Ranger will take in a heartbeat, and it's much more flavorful.

The Beast Master Ranger also gets a few new toys, allowing you to take two additional companion template options: the Beast of the Air and the Beast of the Earth. Most notably, both template options can be controlled as a bonus action, which is something that Beast Rangers have been clamoring for since they saw what the [[Artificer]] got.

Finally, they can trade in Hide in Plain Sight for Fade Away. This turns the futzing about with camo and dirt into straight-up magical invisibility as a bonus action once per short or long rest.

All in all, the changes presented in the UA scrapes away most of the useless crap that the vanilla Ranger gets and replaces them with robust options. You might not be the damage-dealing badass you envisioned, but the Ranger is a somewhat respectable class with these changes implemented.

These were all canonized in a way in the splatbook ''Tasha's Cauldron of Everything''. The changes are as follows:
* Favored Foe scales from 1d4→1d6→1d8 as the ranger levels up rather than the static d6 Hunter's Mark provides.
* Deft Explorer is no longer something you can pick and choose for progression. The order is locked to Canny→Roving→Tireless. Canny now gives expertise/double proficiency in one skill and the ability to speak two additional languages, while Tireless heals a bit less.
* The Beast Master gains the ability to summon a Beast of Land, Sea, or Sky (Meaning they effectively have a permanently-cast Summon Beast, a new spell made just for this reason available to both Rangers and Druids), essentially giving more versatility to this feature. The air beast flies, the earth beast charges, and the sea beast swims and grapples when it hits. These pets even scale with the ranger's proficiency bonus.
* Primal Awareness loses a few spells, but are otherwise identical
* Fade Away is renamed to Nature's Cloak and now can be used multiple times per day equal to proficiency bonus.