Ranger Conclave: Horizon Walker 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

A guardian of the plane, watching over the woods where the invasion first happened, still marked with the burns of devils that breached through scarred across the stone. They turn their head, catching a scent crossing their nose; something unnatural is about, something not of this world. They draw their bow, slipping up a nearby tree into a canopy, slowly and silently advancing, scouting for signs of invaders coming back to finish the job.

The Horizon Walker is a pretty specific fantasy compared to most other ranger subclasses to me. Gloom Stalker can be applied to most any ranger with a bad childhood. Hunter represents the classic marksman type, but isn’t locked into a big game hunter or precision based huntsman. Even Fey Wanderer and Swarmkeeper, while specific to a kind of creature, leave a lot of room to wiggle for kinds of swarms or kinds of fey. Horizon Walker is really all about one thing: extraplanar detection and threat elimination. Maybe you’ve faced otherworldly horrors, maybe you were born on another world and can sense these bridges, in one way or another a Horizon Walker is going to care about portals. I love that. Unfortunately, I don’t think the mechanics they get support it enough to justify use over most other ranger conclaves.

3rd Level: Horizon Walker Magic, Detect Portal, and Planar Warrior

Horizon Walker Magic empowers you to deal with extra planar threats in style. Protection from Evil and Good is the first free spell you’re getting with bonus spells every spell level you get access to. I have a soft spot for Protection from Evil and Good; it's cheap, effective against a wide subset of monsters, helps protect its own concentration, and can flexibly solve some of said monster’s most troubling abilities. Getting it for free, too, feels a lot better than preparing it and finding out you’re not facing down fey or undead for the week.
Detect Portal is going to either feel like a ribbon feature with next to no applicable uses, a moderately useless ability that points to magical spaces you don’t care about, or a compass pointing directly towards exposition. This variance is something you should consider when picking this up, as it's one of your 3rd level features. If you’re not going to be getting use out of it every adventure, this subclass is going to feel pretty lackluster, especially seeing that Planar Warrior isn’t doing a ton of heavy lifting on its own.
Planar Warrior is about as generic a mark ability you can get with a name that has functionally no relation to the mechanic. It's a bonus action mark that upgrades your hit to force damage, and gives you a bonus d8. A bonus action for a bonus d8 isn’t great. An off-hand attack with Two-Weapon Fighting deals more than that, albeit with the caveat that you hit the 2nd attack. Typically the flexibility of getting the extra attack is a larger payoff, not a drawback. For this to be worth it, you’ll probably be using a two-handed 2d6 weapon or a longbow, and in the case of the longbow, the 30 ft. range is a pretty big nuisance.
Where it excels is in getting around damage resistances, but it eats your entire feature for that upgrade. Compared to a lot of the other new age conclave damage buffs, I’m unimpressed. Bonus actions aren’t free on rangers, and this one is competing to a feature that you can get agnostic of subclass. Not a great place to be.

5th-7th Level: Misty Step and Ethereal Step

Misty Step tends to feel quite a bit worse on 5th level rangers than it does on other characters (specifically the full casters). The bonus action 30 ft. teleport is great when you’ve got buckets of spell slots to spare in the mid to upper tiers, making the cost feel fairly low. Rangers don’t have that luxury. To make matters worse, it competing for your bonus action is worse on this subclass than it is on Fey Wanderer, as Fey Wanderer’s bonus damage doesn’t require your bonus action to get it, making this even harder to fit into your play pattern.
Ethereal Step has so much potential. It sounds so cool- you step onto the Ethereal Plane, navigating about briefly before getting yanked back to the material. This can let you feel like you’re walking through walls, bending physics to your will, disappearing and reappearing in the blink of an eye.
Thematically, I love it. Mechanically, your speed is functionally halved. You need to still give this your action, meaning you can’t even spend your action dashing. You get to move around 15 feet in any direction in most cases. This will end up feeling closer to a once per short rest single person Passwall than Etherealness, and that's not all that much better than Misty Step. I think I’d honestly usually rather just have a bonus Misty Step than this, and this is the 7th level feature. One round just isn’t enough for this to feel like a big, splashy effect, and one use is far too few for this to be worth it.

9th and 11th Level: Haste and Distant Strike

Haste is a pretty potent spell, especially on a character that wants to make attack rolls. The best part about haste tended to be how the caster would support their ally without threatening to lose concentration, though. Melee rangers can’t really get all that much out of Hasting themself without worrying about literally losing a turn in combat when they inevitably take a couple hits. Ranged rangers can definitely get a bit more mileage out of it, but the rest of the subclass doesn’t really care about making more attacks, and that’s more often than not what you’re doing with haste. Its cure that this makes your Ethereal Step a bit better, but not by enough for me to consider it all that impressive.
Distant Strike, all the way at 11th level, is the first big feature where I go “I NEED it!”
The juice of the feature is how it's a big payoff for hitting multiple enemies. Distant Strike with a bow hitting two different creatures will just feel like you’re getting another extra attack, and that’s a pretty massive payoff. Skirmisher melee characters actually get a payoff for hitting a variety of enemies, which is typically suboptimal for maximizing your team’s advantage. Killing one enemy at a time tends to minimize enemy actions fastest; getting a reason to prioritize multiple enemies, that being an entire extra free attack, compels me to bring this fantasy to life. Your group can work with this, too, weaponizing effects like Sleep and other mass damage or health based effects to get the most out of lowering the entire enemy team’s HP simultaneously. It opens up a new approach to combat, which I’m all for, and does so in a way where you’ll feel like a superhero.

13th-17th Level: Banishment, Teleportation Circle, and Spectral Defense

Banishment shows us another small hiccup half-casters face with their spellcasting: saves. Banishment is a save or die, meaning either the creature saves and has a detrimental penalty applied to them, or passes and nothing happens. Rangers being half-casters don’t tend to maximize their Wisdom, meaning their spell save DC isn’t usually particularly high. Having access to this crazy power potential effect is still nice, but knowing it's 10% more likely to miss than if your wizard or cleric used it is a bit of a bummer. Definitely a boon to the sheet, especially given that it doesn’t care how strong the target is making it applicable in all tiers of play.
Teleportation Circle… is just fast travel. That’s what it’ll end up feeling like more often than not, and D&D has no shortage of fast travel, namely: Exposition! Getting Teleportation Circle as your 5th level spell unlocked at 17th level is a joke. It's terrible. Other characters can create Demiplanes or shift the entire party between worlds with Plane Shift, and you’re just now getting access to a network of 9th level wizard nerds’ transit system.
Spectral Defense closes out the subclass, which is about as generic and powerful as you could as a reaction to be. It's a reaction for resistance to all of the attack’s damage, as many times as you want. That’s great. Not all that exciting to pick up this late in the game, especially given that you’re not getting to really interact with portals or teleportation all that much, and this certainly won’t feel like you’re doing that any better. The subclasses is in need of more raw power, though, and I guess this counts!

All Together

While I love the fantasy of Horizon Walker, I don’t think the abilities come together fast enough to get me excited enough to use it over its competition. Planar Warrior and Ethereal Step both have huge problems that make them lackluster abilities within the ranger class. Detect Portal can sometimes be a non-feature, and their spell selection is entirely fine, but still stuck to a half-caster. Distant Strike is an 11th level feature that can be the first time the subclass actually starts to feel like the planar guardian using magical portals in a way that ranger really wants, and 11th level is just too long to wait.

If you absolutely adore the fantasy of the planar protector, this can deliver that fantasy fine enough. I wouldn’t recommend this over most other new age ranger subclasses you can find in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything or Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, though.

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