Summary
- Monk capstone in 2024 Player's Handbook improves Dexterity & Wisdom, while Ranger capstone focuses on hunter's mark, leading to underwhelming results.
- The Monk capstone grants a similar advantage to the Ranger capstone while offering a lot of other benefits on top.
- 2024 Rangers can still be fun, but the final feature feels inferior to what other classes get at level 20.
As the most notoriously underwhelming classes in book maintains backward compatibility with the past ten years of DnD material, it's making a lot of changes, and fixes for the Monk and Ranger are some of the most long-promised and necessary ones. Overhauls were tested across a number of playtests before arriving at their final iterations in the Player's Handbook, but even at the end of that long road, it still doesn't feel like everything is perfect.
When it comes to the Monk, it's hard not to be excited about the 2024 Player's Handbook overhaul. If anything, the new iteration might be slightly over-tuned, cleaning up virtually all of the Monk's most notorious weak points aside from their fragile nature, which is part of a balanced glass cannon concept. The Ranger's situation is slightly more complicated, however, and comparing the capstone feature that Monks get at level 20 to what Rangers receive in the same slot clarifies the most frustrating weak point that 2024 Rangers face.
D&D: Powerful & Essential Items Every Monk Needs
Monks in Dungeons & Dragons are agile combatants who are masters of ki and martial arts, and a few items do a better job than most to them.
D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook Monk Capstone Is Great
More Dexterity & Wisdom Goes A Long Way
As the final unique reward for leveling, capstone features are meant to be exciting buffs to every DnD class, and the 2024 Player's Handbook generally focuses on highlighting that excitement. In the 2014 Player's Handbook, Monks' capstone feature focused on making sure they always had a few ki points available, a useful fallback that wasn't all that thrilling to acquire. Bard and Sorcerer also featured similar resource restoration features, and although the Sorcerer's was arguably the best, they all failed to inspire.
Ki points, renamed to Focus Points in the 2024 Player's Handbook, can be used for Monk features like Stunning Strike and Flurry of Blows.
In the 2024 Player's Handbook, a slightly reworked version of the old Monk capstone is moved to a level 15 feature. The capstone slot is taken by a new feature called Body and Mind, which grants Monks a +4 to both Dexterity and Wisdom scores up to a maximum of 25. It's a noteworthy boost to two very useful DnD stats, giving them a greater opportunity to all kinds of relevant checks in general DnD play and significantly increasing their baseline AC.
D&D: One Fighter Feature Can Do Way More In The 2024 Player's Handbook
Fighters are getting some interesting changes in D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook, and one feature overhaul gives them a lot more options than before.
Rangers, on the other hand, get a capstone that's a lot more situational in the 2024 Player's Handbook. At level 20, Foe Slayer ups the damage die for hunter's mark to a d10 rather than a d6, raising the average roll from around a 3.5 to a 5.5. Unlike the Monk feature, it's only applicable to exactly one spell in the Ranger toolkit. The 2014 Player's Handbook capstone (also called Foe Slayer) was even more frustratingly situational, granting bonuses only against a Ranger's favored enemies, but a lackluster choice in the past doesn't excuse making another that's still seriously underwhelming.
D&D's New Ranger Capstone Is Just Worse
The Monk Capstone Wins A Head-To-Head In Every Way
In a vacuum, it would be possible to accept the Ranger capstone as just a bit disappointing, but the Monk's Body and Mind rubs salt in the wound by doing everything the Ranger capstone does and more. At all levels, Monks have a Dexterous Attacks property that allows them to use their Dexterity modifier for attack and damage rolls with Unarmed Strikes or Monk weapons when they aren't using armor or shields. A +4 to Dexterity at level 20 means they get a +2 to all of those attacks, the same differential between hunter's mark damage before and after the Ranger capstone.
Which D&D Subclass Has Been Changed The Most For The 2024 Player's Handbook Revealed By Jeremy Crawford
During GenCon this year, Jeremy Crawford has revealed which D&D subclass has been redesigned the most extensively for the 2024 Player's Handbook.
The decision is part of a larger choice to heavily emphasize hunter's mark in the new Ranger design, which has met with some contention among the DnD community. Hunter's mark now shows up several times throughout Ranger progression, starting with the Level 1 feature favored enemy that makes it more easily available than other spells. Level 13 makes it so that taking damage doesn't break Concentration on hunter's mark, and level 17 adds Advantage against creatures marked with the spell.
Concentration can only be applied to one spell at a time, so although a few other Ranger spells have had their Concentration requirement removed, the need to dedicate it to hunter's mark to make use of so many Ranger features can be intimidating. The trade-off will definitely be worth it a lot of the time, but it still feels like it falls apart a bit at the capstone. Monks have to make no such decisions to get basic utility out of their capstone, even if they don't lean into Dexterous Attacks to consistently take advantage of the +2 on attacks.
Every D&D Ranger Spell That No Longer Requires Concentration In The 2024 Player's Handbook
A lot of Ranger spells still require Concentration in D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook., but a few have received tweaks that make them easier to use.
There's More To 2024 Rangers Than Just A Bad Capstone
It's Not The End Of The World, But It's Disappointing
The old joke about bad capstones is that a player can always get a better one by simply taking a level in another class instead, and for any Ranger who isn't in love with focusing on hunter's mark, that might just be the more exciting option. The 2024 Player's Handbook is full of exciting level 20 options, however, so it ultimately just feels frustrating that Rangers received something so obviously limiting in comparison. When every other martial class is getting a bigger boost to their basic battle capacities, it's hard to understand the rationale behind the decision.
For anyone who doesn't mind using hunter's mark a lot, the new Ranger definitely seems like it should be viable in general, and the capstone is only one part of the big picture. It's also easy enough to change, and homebrew alternatives will no doubt end up making their way to plenty of game tables. Straight out of the 2024 Player's Handbook, though, Monks prove just how underwhelming the final feature for Rangers is, and the comparison shines a spotlight on what might be one of the weirdest Dungeons & Dragons design decisions in years.
- Franchise
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Original Release Date
- 1974
Dungeons and Dragons is a popular tabletop game originally invented in 1974 by Ernest Gary Gygax and David Arneson. The fantasy role-playing game brings together players for a campaign with various components, including abilities, races, character classes, monsters, and treasures. The game has drastically expanded since the '70s, with numerous updated box sets and expansions.
- Publisher
- TSR Inc., Wizards of the Coast
- Designer
- E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson
