Ranger Spell Tier List – The Best Ranger Spells
This will be a deeper dive and analysis on why spells have their tier ranking on the Ranger spell list.
Like other half-casters, Rangers get their spells later and less frequently than full casters making general utility more important than it would be for full-casters.
As a final note, any hyperlinked spell is a spell from the Player’s Handbook while non-linked spells are from supplementary materials.
Tiers
I do a standard S-F tier ranking and here’s how I categorize them:
S Tier – The absolute best of the best. These options can even broach into unfair territory and may be subject to being banned at certain tables. If you’re looking for power level alone, there’s functionally no reason not to use these.
A Tier – While not as broken as the S Tier options, these are as good as you can get without broaching into unfair territory, although some of them may be strong enough to feel unfair!
B Tier – These will not be as inherently powerful as A Tier options, but are still quite strong in their own right. These are likely a bit more situational or slightly weaker than the A tier options, but still very good.
C Tier – Decent options, but likely not overtly strong. These options don’t offer too much or may just be a bit too situational to be ranked higher, but are still options you should consider as this will be the average power level.
D Tier – While not completely useless, these options are either very weak or very situational so are unlikely to be used, but unlike F tier, these aren’t completely unusable or actively detrimental.
F Tier – Either so weak or so situational that these should functionally never be taken or considered unless in the most niche of circumstances.
1st Level Spells
S Tier
Entangle – This is almost a strictly better Web, which is an incredible second level spell already. The only downgrade to this spell compared to Web is the 1 minute duration, but it’s very rare you’d ever need the full hour duration.
A Tier
Absorb Elements – Getting resistance from an elemental type for a round can do a lot of heavy lifting in certain encounters, and if you happen to be making melee attacks too, you get a bit of extra damage on top of it which is a nice bonus.
Goodberry – This is a very powerful spell that doles out ten berries that each satiate someone’s hunger for a full day (no more rations) and heals for 1. While the effect seems small, you’d be surprised how effective this could be as this is a surrogate both for food and a health potion if you need to revive a downed ally (feeding this to an ally is not an official rule, but allowed by most DMs). Furthermore, if you want to be cute, you can multiclass into a Life Domain Cleric to get the Disciple of Life feature which will let your Goodberries heal for 4 each rather than 1. While this seems not intuitive, it does actually work within the confines of the rules so go nuts if you’re interested in doing this.
Hunter’s Mark (Always Prepared) – With a bonus action to cast, your Concentration not likely being used elsewhere, and an extra 1d6 damage per hit, this is probably the most popular level one spell for Rangers. The advantage to Perception and Survival don’t matter much, but 1d6 damage every turn over the course of a longer fight is going to add up, and being able to mark a new creature every time you fell the old one puts this over the top. Furthermore, most of the Ranger abilities now revolve around this, so you have more incentive to cast this than ever.
B Tier
Cure Wounds* – While not nearly as good as Healing Word, this is the best way a Ranger can pick up a downed ally, and since it’s been buffed, this is a lot more effective than normal.
Detect Magic – A great spell, but with so few prepared spells your team is likely better served by having someone else pick this up
C Tier
Alarm – Normally an ok spell, but considering Rangers get so few prepared spells this is probably not what you want.
Ensnaring Strike – A solid spell early, but giving the target so many tries to resist it, only really working on Medium or smaller creatures, and using Strength as the saving throw does mean this scales pretty poorly. That said, this will be solid in the early game for locking down one enemy.
Fog Cloud – If you need a lot of heavy obscurement, this is a fine way to get it. The issue with this spell is keeping enemies inside of the Fog Cloud, but if you/your team have ways to make that more tenable (combining this with other CC like Entangle or Web), then this spell can be quite potent.
Hail of Thorns – While not super exciting, this does an ok job as an AOE damage spell in the early game.
Jump – This is substantially stronger than the 2014 version as you now have 20 more feet of movement and it’s much more versatile as it’s a jump rather than just flat movement. The only issue that comes up with this spell is that you may not want to use all 30 feet of jumping movement as that could be inconvenient in some scenarios, but realistically, if you’re casting this spell, you want the big jump.
Speak with Animals – A surprisingly good spell. This is good at smoothing over encounters with wildlife or general information gathering. It’s hard to justify taking this with so few slots, but if you’re going to be in nature a lot, this could be useful.
Zephyr Strike – This spell does a lot of things, but none of them are that high impact. However, if an enemy is getting too close for comfort, this is the closest you’re going to get to teleportation at this level.
D Tier
Animal Friendship – This does make being friendly with animals much easier if you’re struggling with your Animal Handling check, but as a Ranger, your Animal Handling check is likely pretty high, so it’s unlikely you need to use one of your spell slots on this.
Snare – Not bad if you need to spring a trap in a tight hallway or you’re trying to protect yourself a little bit before sleeping, but this will not buy you much time and is pretty situational.
F Tier
Beast Bond – It’s hard to say why you would need a telepathic bond with a creature without charming it as the animal has no reason to necessarily listen to your commands.
Detect Poison and Disease – It is very hard to say why you would ever need this, but maybe you can find a use for it eventually.
Longstrider – Unlike Baldur’s Gate 3, Longstrider does not last particularly long. May be useful on characters that can really utilize that extra speed, but very niche, especially with so few spell slots and spells known.
Searing Smite – This isn’t a bad spell, but there’s functionally no reason to ever use this over Hunter’s Mark.
2nd Level Spells
S Tier
Pass Without Trace – If you have someone in heavy armor in your party, you pretty much have to give up any hope of ever being stealthy. Even with Invisibility (which is generally the best stealth spell in the game), heavy armor will still make a lot of noise making the Invisibility potentially useless. This spell fixes all of that. A +10 to stealth checks is incredible and even really bad rolls have a solid chance of succeeding. Finally, for Rangers who don’t get a lot of spell slots, high impact effects like this are even more valuable which makes this a near auto-include for most Rangers.
Spike Growth – A 150 foot range, a large AOE of difficult terrain, and anyone who moves inside of it take 2d4 damage (an average of 5) every FIVE FEET THEY TRAVEL. Not move, travel. While that may seem like there’s no difference, travel means literal space traversed rather than someone actively moving themselves. That means them being pushed or pulled deals additional damage. If you can cast this under a group of enemies (which should be easy to do), you’ll massively stymie their movement and deal a bunch of damage in the process. An absolutely excellent spell.
A Tier
Aid – A spell that can be cast well before an encounter, doesn’t require concentration, and has a pretty solid effect of five hit points for three people at level two which increases by five by spell level (so 15 total) which is pretty strong.
B Tier
Barkskin – While the previous iteration of this spell was very disappointing, casting this as a Bonus Action, lasting an hour, and getting a flat 17 AC is pretty solid overall before you have the strongest armor for your build.
Darkvision – Assuming you aren’t already a Gloom Stalker with a massive amount of darkvision, getting 150 ft of darkvision is pretty nice as you’ll be able to see further than anyone else in the dark.
Enhance Ability – Unlike using other charming abilities that risk the target getting mad at you afterwards, giving yourself advantage on Charisma checks is substantially better and will make your Charisma caster trivialize any social scenario. That said, you also have FIVE other options for this spell as well making this very versatile for many situations.
Lesser Restoration – This may not come up often, but curing a disease or a good amount of conditions is quite strong, especially with a Bonus Action cast.
Silence – Most spellcasters are reliant on verbal components as most spells require it. If you pop this on a caster and keep them locked in that sphere, they’re going to be pretty helpless.
Summon Beast – While this is better on Druids as they get this earlier when it’s higher impact and they can upcast it faster, this is still a pretty solid summon all around if you’re in the market for that.
C Tier
Locate Object – A decent spell that can help you find something specific, like a precious, or something more general like a tripwire in a dungeon, a hidden door, etc. A bit situational, but solid.
Protection from Poison – If you believe you’re going to be fighting a lot of poison enemies, this will be good. Furthermore, despite the name, this also cures poisons so it can be relevant after the fact as well.
D Tier
Beast Sense – This isn’t a bad scouting option if you have an animal willing to help you, but you will have to set this up in some way to get that willing animal. The problem is you would likely need to also have Speak with Animals to make this work, so this is a bundled package.
Cordon of Arrows – This is a weird area protection spell as it doesn’t really protect an area, doesn’t make noise like other alarm spell options, and doesn’t even deal much damage even if all the projectiles hit. Not terrible, but hard to justify for a second level spell.
Gust of Wind – It’s not going to be often that you’re going to use this, but it is a pretty unique effect if you are trying to lock down a long, enclosed space for whatever reason.
Healing Spirit – This is a bit difficult to use in combat as you can’t guarantee that you can effectively move the spirit into your players or vice versa, you can’t heal multiple people quickly, and this takes up your concentration, so this is mostly going to be out of combat healing. The amount of times it can heal weren’t initially capped, but it got nerfed very shortly after printing so it is limited in how many times it’ll heal someone. Being able to share a bit of healing amongst multiple players isn’t bad, but the amount is so small that this is very hard to justify.
Magic Weapon – While this spell no longer requires Concentration, the primary use case of why you’d want to cast this (overcoming non-magical damage resistance/immunity) seems to have been eliminated in One D&D. Without that, this already unexciting spell is even less exciting, but it isn’t completely unusable.
F Tier
Animal Messenger – A neat spell if you don’t have any party members with Sending. This spell does necessitate knowing where the recipient is which is a major limitation as well as the time requirement needed to get that message there, but for a ritual, this is definitely reasonable. Furthermore, with so few spells known and spell slots, it’s pretty much impossible to justify taking this.
Find Traps – On first reading, this spell seems niche, but reasonable. Knowing the location of any trap within 120 feet can be invaluable in dungeons as, even if you don’t know how to disarm them, you can much more easily avoid them. However, this only tells you if there are traps there, not where they are. Very helpful, thank you.
Locate Animals or Plants – Just way too situational to be helpful unless the story calls for finding a very specific animal or plant.
3rd Level Spells
S Tier
Revivify – An absolute necessity for at least one person in a party to have. Hopefully someone else in your party has this by level 9, but if not, you’re taking it.
A Tier
Dispel Magic – An absolute necessity for every party, even if it may not come up too often. Ideally you’d want a different spellcaster to take this, but if you want it to be safe or you’re the only one who can take it, you’re not going to regret having it.
B Tier
Conjure Animals – With the changes received in the One update, this functions pretty similarly to a remote controlled Spirit Guardians that you can move around when you move. It is a bit awkward as it’s a Concentration spell in a class so reliant on Hunter’s Mark, but it’s still pretty strong!
Plant Growth – This is pretty crazy as this spell can target any amount of plants you want in an 100 FOOT RADIUS to make them so overgrown that it takes 4 foot of movement to move 1 foot. The average person, while dashing, will only be able to move three squares when they’re stuck in this area. If they don’t want to dash and only have 30 movement speed, they’ll only be able to move a single square as that’s 20 feet of movement, and they’ll have 10 feet they can’t use. Furthermore, this isn’t a concentration spell nor does it have a duration, you just do it and it’s done. On top of that, this doesn’t even count as difficult terrain, so you can technically add difficult terrain on top of this, but it’s very unclear on how that would work in practice. Ask your DM as this can be interpreted as functionally restraining creatures or it’s intended to take the stronger effect rather than stacking both this and difficult terrain. The downside to this spell is that you do need plants to make this work, but as long as you’re outside and not on sand, this should be useful.
C Tier
Conjure Barrage – Now that it’s gotten buffed, Conjure Barrage is decent AOE damage spell that’ll do less than a Fireball (which full casters get many levels before), but a 60 foot cone is a pretty massive area which does give this spell some weight in a combat with an egregious amount of enemies.
Lightning Arrow – Not the worst AOE spell Rangers could have access to, but certainly not a great spell anyway. The damage is pretty low as well as the range, but if you really need more AOE damage, you could do worse.
Nondetection – It’s rare that you’re going to have to worry about enemies using Divination to discern your location, but if that does happen, then this can be great at catching the enemy by surprise. A really nice example of this is being invisible and countering an opposing See Invisibility as that’s a Divination spell.
Protection from Energy – If you know you’re going into a fight with a lot of elemental damage of one specific type, this isn’t a terrible use of a spell slot, but this isn’t that much better than Absorb Elements which is a first level reaction spell.
D Tier
Daylight – Worse than Darkvision, but it does now count as sunlight to hurt Vampires. Still this is pretty niche and not something I would be looking to prepare unless I know there may be Vampires involved.
Elemental Weapon – This isn’t a terrible spell, but pretty middling for this late in the game. If somehow one of your party members still has a regular weapon and you’re going to face something with resistance, then this could be effective. Better yet, if you’re fighting something that you know will have a damage vulnerability, this could end up being pretty strong.
Speak with Plants – Plants aren’t the most intelligent or well traveled beings around, but this can be helpful in niche scenarios like you need to know what happened there in the past day or you need to change the terrain of plants. It is sad how you can’t ask a very old tree for a lot of history, but you may also be there awhile so it could be for the best.
Summon Fey – For a third level summon, the health, AC, and damage are all pretty decent, but that’s about all this spell offers. The different options are all pretty much the same power level as none of them have a stand out effect. This isn’t bad if you care about damage over utility, but this is far from exciting.
Water Breathing – I would never use this unless you know you’ll have to go on an underwater adventure soon. If you do though, this is hard to replace.
Water Walk – If you need to traverse bodies of water often, this will work. That said, since it’s a ritual spell, it will take ten minutes per cast so this may not be effective with big parties.
Wind Wall – Despite saying it’s a wall, it really isn’t a wall as it can just be walked through (although they’ll take some damage). The best use of this is to block enemy arrows and small flying enemies, but that causes a weird scenario where you want to put this near your enemies for the damage, but near yourself to block arrows or small flying enemies. This makes it pretty situational and just not great all around.
F Tier
Flame Arrows – While technically 12d6 damage is actively good for a third level spell, the fact that this eats your concentration and you’re only getting that damage if you can afford to concentrate the whole time it takes for all 12 arrows to be shot and every arrow you imbued hits its mark.
Meld into Stone – Sometimes you just want to take a stone nap, but it’s hard to know when you’d need to do this.
4th Level Spells
S Tier
None
A Tier
Conjure Woodland Beings – Very similar to a fifth level Spirit Guardians as you get the same damage and you can Disengage as a bonus action, but you get less range, enemies don’t have reduced movement in the area. While a fifth level Spirit Guardians is stronger than this, this is a fourth level spell so you shouldn’t expect it to be as strong as an upcasted version of an excellent spell. All that said, this is quite strong in its new form and melee Rangers will be super interested in using this.
B Tier
None
C Tier
Freedom of Movement – This is a unique spell as you have to anticipate coming across difficult terrain or effects that may paralyze or restrain which can be normally hard to predict. That said, since many of your best spells create difficult terrain and this spell doesn’t require Concentration, you can get either yourself or a party member mobile again through that rough terrain. On top of that, this also does work to free someone from non-magical shackles or even move freely underwater, so you have some versatility.
Grasping Vine – Decent damage alongside decent CC and AOE makes this a decent spell all around. This is much better when you’re working with other casters to drag enemies into harmful effects and I would likely not use this unless your team had those effects to synergize with this.
Stoneskin – The buff on this spell is pretty good, but comes with a few issues. First off, a 100gp consumable component is definitely annoying to cast this spell, and while 100 gold may not be a big deal at level 11, it is still something you have to consider and keep track of. In a similar vein, you may be limited in how many of the spell component you can find making the spell unreliable in some campaigns. Second, you probably don’t want to use this spell on yourself unless you like getting into melee range often. It’s a concentration spell so you lose out on all the other concentration options while this is up (and you’d hate to drop it prematurely as this is both a valuable spell slot and required a component to use). Finally, at level 11, you’re more likely to be dealing with enemies that have magical attacks which this doesn’t help against (admittedly it still isn’t super common at this point, but it’s still a consideration). If you can be ok with all that, this is a very solid buff for someone who likes getting into melee range as resistance to non-magical damage is quite strong and it lasting an hour means you may get multiple fights out of this.
Summon Elemental – While the AC and abilities on the elementals leave a bit to be desired, the damage, resistances, condition immunites, and mobility are all solid. It’s not easy to justify using this over upcasting a third level summoning option, but if you need a particular damage resistance or immunity, this can do the trick.
D Tier
Dominate Beast – Charming an animal is not bad, especially as this charm lets you control the animal rather than other charms which may not offer that. That said, there are very few strong beasts that you could even dominate. To make matter worse, the duration is only a minute and they get additional saving throws every time they are damaged which can make the duration of this spell super unreliable.
F Tier
Locate Creature – If you’re pursuing a creature, this does avoid a litany of ability checks (that you’re probably good at), but this is pretty niche. This also doesn’t work if the creature has changed its form in any way or any amount of lead is blocking a direct path between you and the target making it somewhat easy for targets who don’t want to be found to just wear lead lined clothing.
5th Level Spells
S Tier
None
A Tier
Swift Quiver – If you’re using a bow, you’re using this spell. The only annoying thing about this is the bonus action timing so it eats into your potential to use or move Hunter’s Mark which is extremely annoying, but you should still take this spell if you’re an archer.
B Tier
Steel Wind Strike – While you do need a weapon and the range is pretty short, this is a solid damage option that will always avoid friendly fire and can give you some teleportation as needed. You’ll probably only be using this if you like getting into melee, but this is great if you do.
C Tier
Commune with Nature – This spell is pretty niche, but it can get you more information than it may seem; prevalent people or powerful extraplanar threats covers a large swath of potential enemies that you can now ask a bunch of questions about.
Greater Restoration – This is a solid healing spell, but what it heals can be a bit situational and consuming 100 gp worth of components is a bit annoying as well. This is solid though, so if you have no other healer, this may be a useful pick eventually.
D Tier
Conjure Volley – While the AOE is pretty good, for the level, the damage is absolutely terrible. Use if you must, but this is not a spell you should ever be happy casting.
Wrath of Nature – This is an incredible spell if you’re in a forest, but this won’t do anything unless you’re in a forest making this really difficult to use. If you are constantly in the wilderness or you know you will be for an extended period, this can be a great pickup, but I would never use it otherwise.
F Tier
Tree Stride – Not terrible if you’re in a forest, but this is so specific that it’s very hard to use.
