3.5 Private Sanctuary released a podcast regarding rangers recently. After listening to it I've decided to play a ranger for the first time. I've always kind of ignored them in lieu of the more exotic classes, but now I've felt I need to rectify that.

I've always been up on the Swift Hunter information from Wizard's boards and found it interesting, but a lot of work. Well, now I want to try one, but I've run across a problem.

Pathfinder made Rangers really, really good. I'm now debating whether or not swift hunter is even necessary in power comparison. Let me get this straight, I'm purely looking at this from a mechanics point of view. I know the flavor I want for my character and have his back story in mind. I just want something that goes along with it.

Swift hunter states that if you have 4 Scout class levels then your ranger and Scout levels stack for various things, like Favored Enemy and Skirmish. I've never really liked Skirmish because it forces you to move at least 10 feet (or 20 with Improved Skirmish), and thus giving up your line of attacks from BAB and rapid shot, etc. The trade off was using Manyshot to get your many attacks even though you moved.

Now that Pathfinder has changed Manyshot, I'm not sure the best route.

Has anyone made a Swift Hunter or ranger archer and have any advice? I'm really interested.

Nobody?

Swift Hunter all the way. The suggested builds are Ranger 16/Scout4 or Ranger 17/Scout 3. Which one is better probably depends on how you play.

With the change to Manyshot, the Swift Hunter (specifically, skirmish) can only *really* function if you do two things:

1) Dip Cleric 1 and pick up the travel domain.
2) Using the Complete Champion, you are allowed to abandon your domain abilities in place of the [domain] Devotion feat, which means you can trade it in for the Travel Devotion feat.

The beauty of the Travel Devotion feat is that you can, once per day, gain the ability to move your full move speed as a swift action for a full minute. Consider that combat is roughly a minute long (10 rounds), and that's ALL of combat. By dipping cleric you save yourself a feat & gain access to the ever-coveted 3.5 gold: channel energy. With a charisma of 12 you'll have 4 channel energy uses to turn into travel devotion for a total of 3/day.

You'll probably want to go with Ranger 16 / Scout 3 / Cleric 1, but in the end you'll be much more powerful than a Ranger 20. Plus, 1 level of cleric casting will net you some groovy spells to back up your mediocre ranger casting.

I somehow missed the end of your post and assumed you were still using the 3.5 version. Sorry about that

Cool. Thanks for the tips. I figured I'd have to do something similar.

I have played a scout/ranger and at first I was pleased and impressed by his performance. Then I found the errata in complete adventurer that states that you must move 10 (or 20) feet AWAY from your starting spot.

This combined with the 30 feet skirmish max range can be very very annoying, especially in dungeon crawling situations.

Since the ranger gains new stuff every level and also has a not so useless animal companion maybe you should avoid going with the scout route.

Also maybe you can use the improved manyshot feat from complete psionics. Which allows you to use a standard action to make 2-4 attacks (depending on your BAB). Precision based damage applies to every attack.

Is there a commonly used scout conversion for Pathfinder? I would like to know what a scout-heavy swift hunter build looks like.

I've made a scout in PF by allowing the ranger to replace any given combat style feat with +1d6 of skirmish instead. With that small change, a straight ranger makes a combat scout, and a ranger/rogue makes an excellent stealthy trapfinding scout.

There will be a variant Pathfinder Ranger class in the upcoming issue of Kobold Quarterly (Issue #11) that I think some of you might like quite a bit, based on what has been discussed in this thread ...

There will be a variant Pathfinder Ranger class in the upcoming issue of Kobold Quarterly (Issue #11) that I think some of you might like quite a bit, based on what has been discussed in this thread ...

Kobold Quarterly 11 is now available. You can pick up the print version or PDF at the KQ web site or right here at Paizo.

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/

Thanks!