| It's no problem having fun playing a ranger.
The difference in power between a ranger and a paladin,fighter or barbarian is only about as high as the difference between halfling and dwarf, but many have fun playing a halfling. Minmaxing or taking a caster class will make a far bigger difference, but not many play a party consisting of 1 cleric and 5 sorcerers just because they are far more powerful.
If you take a ranger instead of another warrior class he won't be really weaker during the game, weapon distribution and other things play a much bigger role.
Soloing a ranger is far easier than soloing a fighter or paladin btw.
Some spells like sunscorch, entangle, storm shell and call lightning can also be quite useful, especially if you don't have a druid.
So playing a pure ranger is no problem unless you're an ultra powergamer.
If you want the benefits from the other warrior classes without editing you can just mix in a few levels of other classes. 1 level adds already most paladin bonusses, 3 nearly everything, 4 fighter levels allow weapon mastery which is the only noteworthy fighter bonus, ...
Since the gap to the other classes isn't that big giving free "rapid shot" and bow mastery at the start in order to simulate manyshot will be enough to make the ranger "cool" compared to the other pure class warriors.
Making simple composite bows buyable in Targos will improve this even more and change the ranger into a cool sniping machine with some spells in the opinion of most players.  |