I find NPCs to be most enjoyable. Homlet alone has pretty much everything you need in that regard. There's Ronald the Cleric, Meleny the Druid, Furnock the Locksmith,Spugnoir the Sage,a sorceress,an evil monk and barbarian and of course Elmo the Arm at Mans. Not a complete list but most of the classes are covered. One class in particular appears not to be represented. The mysterious and skillful Ranger. I think the area around Homlet can benifit from his talents. Certainly there's a strong need. Have you seen all of the bandits and monsters around the roads? Maybe he's so skillful he can't be found. Or maybe we can make one available. The obvious choice would be Black Jay. Or one that just pops up out of nowhere like Zaxis.A hirerable Ranger would be a warmly welcomed addition to any party.
Elmo was actually a Ranger in the original module. They probably changed him to a pure fighter for simplicity. Also, as mentioned in the Survival thread, since an NPC's Survival skill isn't used for the actual internal survival check, any NPC Ranger will be stripped of one of their useful function. If you really want an NPC Ranger, you can always make a change to one of the existing recruitable NPCs using World Builder, turning them quickly into a Ranger. Or even add a new NPC Ranger from scratch and just spawn them in the Inn. You could also recruit someone like Elmo or Fruella or even Kobort and level them up as a Ranger as the adventure goes on.
Ronald would be a decent choice as a Ranger, iirc. I levelled him up as a monk for one game, but Ranger (favoured enemy: orcs, naturally) would fit nicely.
Interesting, a ranger/cleric. I would choose a different diety if I were building him from the ground up. Still a viable option as is since he's first level and available immediately.
Reminds me of the old D&D game that used to be played on AOL (Ravensloft maybe?). Since you had to have gold to train and raise levels (and since the amount of gold needed to train would overburden you) a lot of players- myself included- made ranger/cleric characters as the cleric could cast Bull's Strength while the ranger part gave you decent fighting abilities...
I remember Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 had a notorious bug with the ranger/cleric multiclass which was kind of funny. Instead of getting ranger spells at level 6 and the regular cleric spell list, ranger/clerics were able to choose any spell from both the druid and cleric spell lists at 1st level onwards. For some reason, Bioware never fixed it, and Beamdog only recently enabled you to turn that off in BG1:EE and BG2:EE. Any form of druid (including fighter/druids) were pretty much inferior to a ranger/cleric as a result. Fortunately ToEE doesn't have that problem! I tend to build all my rangers as pure archers in ToEE anyway. I've never tried a ranger/cleric or ranger/druid build actually, or any multi-classed rangers for that matter.
I like the Ranger/Rogue Half-Elf or Human archer primary. Good skills and by going later in the turn with precise shot you can fire into combat with the sneak attack addition
