Baldur's Gate 3 - Ranger Class Guide

The Baldur's Gate 3 Ranger class offers solid options in both melee and ranged arenas, as well as decent versatility with spells, abilities, and pets. Our guide discusses what you can expect if you choose this class for your campaign.

Baldur's Gate 3 Ranger class guide overview

Our Baldur's Gate 3 Ranger class guide acts as an overview of its strengths. We also take note of ideal options during character creation. Once you're finished with our overview, we suggest visiting our best build guide for this class.

Ranger Class Summary

Rangers are versatile damage dealers and utility characters who have a variety of skills, abilities, and spells, many of which are useful in and out of combat. They can speak to animals, summon additional animal helpers in combat, have extensive knowledge of nature and beasts, and are ready to deal damage either from melee range or from a distance with spells and projectile weapons.

Ranger Class Features

Rangers have the ability to call animals, beginning with the Find Familiar spell, which is flexible and allows you to bring

Proficiencies

Rangers begin with Proficiencies in Simple Weapons, Martial Weapons, Light Armour, Medium Armour, and Shields. Whatever other Proficiencies you get will be determined by your race,

Ranger Subclasses

The Baldur's Gate 3 Ranger subclasses aren't available at character creation, so keep them in mind for when you hit Level 3.

Beast Master

This is my top recommendation. You have a very flexible spell, Ranger’s Companion, which can summon one of a wide spread of creatures to do everything from tank to deal damage, harass enemies, and a whole lot more.

Gloom Stalker

The Gloom Stalker subclass turns the Ranger into a very Assassin-like, Rogue-flavored character. If you want to do Rogue-y things, but still want a pet, this isn’t a bad way to go.

Hunter

If you are all about the archery and tracking element, this is the one for you. You’ll be able to give yourself a specific type of bonus, like Horde Breaker for crowd control and multi-target damage, Colossus Slayer for single target damage, and Giant Killer, which is allows you to attack as a Reaction to being targeted by creatures of Large size (or bigger).

Character Creation Picks

Best race and sub-race

Elf (Wood Elf sub-race) is the best pick for Ranger, with starting bonuses to Longbows, Shortbows, Longswords, Shortswords, and more, which include most of the things you’ll be using in the early game. Choosing Wood Elf also gives you better movement, which is good for Rangers, who will be moving around a lot, either to get close to enemies (melee build) or getting far away (ranged builds). A good runner-up is Drow for the Hand Crossbow proficiency, but sub-races for Drow are mostly for flavor, not combat.

Forest Gnome is a decent pick as well, for Speak with Animals and Darkvision, and Half-Orc is a decent pick if you are sure you’ll go for a melee Ranger build, but Elf is still the best choice here.

Best Natural Explorer perk

Natural Explorer and Favoured Enemy are important choices in character creation, so we recommend Beast Tamer as your Natural Explorer benefit, which lets you cast Find Familiar as a cantrip, letting you save your spell slots for other things.

Best Favoured Enemy perk

For Favoured Enemy, I recommend Bounty Hunter if you are going to run with a tankier character in your party (think Fighter, Paladin, etc.) so you can reliably debuff enemies to make them easier to take down. If you want to be able to use Heavy Armor and do a bit of tanking, go with Ranger Knight.

Best background

Folk Hero is the best background, with +4 bonuses to both Animal Handling and Survival.

Best abilities

The default Ranger stat spread is pretty solid. You want Dexterity to be 17 for Rangers, and if you are at all interested in Ranger spells, you should bump up Wisdom as well. Charisma is always a tricky proposition for classes that don’t normally benefit from it, so if you want to smooth talk your way out of things, you’ll need to take a few points away from Wisdom, Strength, or Constitution, but that will likely force you into being a pure ranged attacker, because you’ll be about as fragile as a Wizard otherwise. Not a bad decision, but an important one.

• Strength: 12
• Dexterity: 17 - You can gain another bonus ability point by defeating Auntie Ethel
• Constitution: 13
• Intelligence: 8
• Wisdom: 15
• Charisma: 10

Select +2 to Dex and +1 to Wisdom as your bonuses.