advice for a human ranger. When do you quit putting ranks in skills?

[huggin]

Hello
I am in my first pathfinder campaign and I have a 7th level human ranger. I am a little unclear when to know you have enough ranks in any given skill
For skills like perception, stealth or survival do you always buy ranks no matter what?

[Temperans]

The advice is typically to always put ranks in perception, and to then put as many ranks as you are comfortable with in other things.

The actual number of ranks you put on skill during actuall gameplay will depend on what you are facing, your vision of the character, and how optimized (how good) you want to be with the skill.

* P.S. how many ranks you get also matters, If you only get 3/lv you may/will need to spread out and get less max skill compared to if you had 5/lv.

[avr]

Survival is not normally an opposed skill, and it's one you may be able to take ten on. You probably stop putting ranks in once you have +10 or so. By 7th level you probably have that.

Stealth is always opposed by an enemy's skill check, perception is often opposed and is the most frequently rolled skill in the game. You never stop putting ranks in them unless you find that stealth as your GM uses it is useless, or something like that.

[Meirril]

You stop putting ranks in a skill when you think the GM isn't going to challenge you on that skill. As you go up in level, perception checks always get harder. You need higher stealth too because as monsters get more powerful their perception go up as well. If all your GM does is make you use survival to find food, not spending points there is fine. But if he is going to have any sort of skill check during an adventure, you need to keep ranking it.

[Mysterious Stranger]

What it really comes down to is, is your bonus high enough to make the roll. Generally speaking skills fall into one of three categories. The first and easiest to figure out are those with fixed DC. Once your bonus is high enough to make the roll you need you are good. The second category is opposed skills. Generally speaking those should usually be maxed out. The last category is skills with variable DC. These are usually due to a combination of changing DC and significant penalties. This is often the most difficult to figure out if you have enough ranks.

Some skills have more than one thing that they can do so may fall into more than one category. Survival is a good example of this. The DC for things like foraging for food, or avoiding natural hazards are fixed and honestly not that difficult. Most of the time you can take 10 on your survival roll, so to do most of these you only need a few points. But survival is also used to track things and the DC to do that can be much harder. For example the DC to track a colossal creature on very soft ground within a day of leaving the tracks is -3, but to track a fine creature, on hard ground, after a 10 days after it has snowed on a moonless night if the creature is hiding its tracks is 59. Obviously both of these examples are extreme cases, but they give you an idea of the range of DC you may have to deal with.

In the case of rangers they get several things that can allow them to track better. First and foremost they get a straight bonus to track of ½ their level. They can also apply there favored enemy and favored terrain bonus to tracking. These can significantly improve a rangers chance to track, but the last two are highly circumstantial and may not always apply.

As far as the skills you mentioned, I would recommend always maxing out perception and stealth. For survival I would recommend maxing it out until at least 5th level. After that I would probably put in at least one point every other level. If I wanted to be really good at tracking I would probably continue to max it out. This of course depends on the nature of the campaign. In an urban campaign you probably won’t need to track that much. But then again in an urban campaign many of the rangers class abilities are less useful anyways.

[MrCharisma]

A general rule for skills is that if you have a (level + 10) modifier in the skill then you're good. For example a level 7 character having a +17 in a skill means it's something they should expect to succeed at most of the time.

If you have more than that you're probbly putting too much into one skill, and you can afford to spend some of those skill points elsewhere. If you have less than that it's something you not expecting to succeed at all the time.

There's a big caveat here though, different skills will have different common DCs at each level. While Perception is something that can never be high enough (well almost), skills like Fly usually have static DCs that you're trying to hit (DC 15 to hover means you won't need more than a +14 if that's all you need it for). So my "level + 10" rule really is a generalisation. As the others have said: Perception and Stealth are likely things you want to keep investing in, but Survival likely depends on how your GM plays it.

The real answer is: How often do you succeed at a given skill? If the answer is "More than 80% of the time" then you can probably spend some points elsewhere. If the answer is "Less than 60% of the time" then you probably want to up your game (this last one is only true of skills you're investing in, it's impossible to succeed at all skills 60% of the time).