Ranger Conclave: Swarmkeeper 5e
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Have you ever looked at a termite mound and thought “golly, those bugs sure are good at what they do! I wish I could be part of a hivemind!” Have you ever walked up to a hornets nest just to stare in awe at the intricacies of their craftsmanship until they chased you away under threat of horrible pain? Do you like keeping bees?
If any of these are true, the Swarmkeeper ranger fantasy is right up your alley. Out the gate you’ll get a lot of what you want, and at the end you’ll be delivered a superb capstone feature. In between is a bit rough, though, and might encourage you to explore other class options.
3rd Level: Gathered Swarm and Swarmkeeper Magic
Swarmkeeper Magic is similar to most modern ranger subclasses' expanded spell options, opening up a free bonus spell known you get just by taking the subclass and fresh new spells known any time you get a new spell level. Out the gate you start with two bonus spells known: Mage Hand, an absolute all-star of a utility cantrip, and the lackluster Faerie Fire.
Mage Hand is a free new tool you have to engage the world with. This is a big bump up for a low tier ranger, and one major contributing force to this subclasses lower tier performances. Faerie Fire can have a few moments of shining, but most often you’ll opt to cast your other learned 1st level spells over it, but that’s okay. Mage Hand is more than enough for this level.
Gathered Swarm is where the meat of the subclass is. You get a swarm around you while your conscious of bugs, blights, birds, or pixies, who offer no unique effects by your chosen thematic type, but all instead offer one of three boons whenever you hit something once on each of your turns: 1d6 bonus damage, a 15 ft. shove on a failed Strength save, or a free 5 ft. forced move. At minimum, this is a free bonus d6 damage any time you hit a creature, regardless of whether it was from long distances away or right up in their face. In addition, getting a free at will shove ability attached to your attacks is great in a handful of niche scenarios, and a free 5 ft. forced move means you can freely disengage without worry. All in all, a great suite of tools for a ranger to get access to. While you’re probably going to default to dealing a bonus d6 damage a round, that’s a perfectly fine starting place, and having the other two modes when you need them will genuinely be useful.
5th-7th Level: Web and Writhing Tide
Web is the next free spell offered by your Swarmkeeper Magic feature, and while yes, getting a 2nd level spell at 5th level will be challenging to get excited over, Web is a banger of a spell, and frankly a complete failure of flavor to appear on the sorcerer and wizard spell lists instead of the druid and ranger. Beyond having the flavor homerun of a swarm of bugs creating your magical web, the Web spell offers you an amazing area control tool that can be ignited later. A 20 ft. cube of restraints is a huge area to affect. Beyond the restraint, it's also difficult terrain, meaning it’ll often eat more than one action in forcing creatures to break free of the restraints and then dash to get to you. When you’re peppering them with two attacks a round with a bonus d6 damage to one of them, or better yet pushing them back into the webbing they just broke free of, you’re set up to do some serious lockdown.
Writhing Tide is the Swarmkeeper 7th level feature, and it's pretty poor. A fly speed is a fly speed, for sure, and hovering is a nice upgrade over some non-hover based flying options, but it being limited to 10 ft. and only lasting a minute severely hampers the actual use cases it has. Sure, conceptually having a swarm of birds or bees lift you to the skies is pretty sweet, but with how slow you’re going I have a hard time seeing a lot of value here when far better fly speeds have been accessible to so many other character options way earlier than this. If nobody in your group is flying around at all, this can feel decent, but if you’re playing a Swarmkeeper, this isn’t a main reason why.
9thand 11th Level: Gaseous Form and Mighty Swarm
Gaseous Form is your free 3rd level spell obtained at 9th level. It's a bit less synergistic than Web is, and definitely is coming late enough in the game other players have already gotten access to tools to do what it does better. This will feel perfectly reasonable if nobody else is flying around or sneaking through doors and windows, or if teleportation isn’t super common. You can definitely get some use out of casting it, but it won’t be as major a player as Web can be.
Mighty Swarm is the much needed upgrade for your Gathering Swarm feature, but doesn’t upgrade it enough to really get me excited. Going from a d6 to d8 on bonus damage is comparatively tiny when you consider you’re not getting to make more attacks like a fighter, nor are you getting bonus scaling damage like a rogue.
Knocking a creature you’re shoving prone is cute, as it’ll often force a creature to use all of its movement just to get up and reengage you. If you move at all, that can force it to dash, which can be excellent in long, drawn out duels. Half cover is also a pretty cool upgrade, offering you a +2 AC and +2 to Dexterity saving throws if you want to play more defensively.
The core issue I have with it is the damage upgrade isn’t really enough to justify sticking around in the class for this long when so many higher damage options are so easily accessible by just dipping a level or three into rogue, fighter, or other classes. The fact that you have to forgo the bonus damage entirely to get the upgraded other effects makes it harder and harder to justify doing in the upper tiers to the point where I don’t really think the bonus to AC or shove can be all that worth it when you’re giving up 4d8 damage over the course of a fight and getting no other bonus damage from the subclass. You’ll still be doing the basic ranger bonus damage with stuff like Hunter's Mark, but what makes many stellar ranger subclasses stellar is their expanded tools to engage fights alongside empowered damage numbers. This makes you choose one or the other every time, and doesn’t improve the damage numbers by much at all.
13th-17th Level: Arcane Eye, Insect Plague, and Swarming Dispersal
Arcane Eye and Insect Plague both majorly suffer from the same problem: their mid tier spells unlocked in the upper tiers, and neither are particularly efficient nor exciting for their level as is. Insect Plague is 4d10 damage in a 20 ft. radius area every turn that eats your concentration and can’t be moved or interacted with after its placement. Sometimes you’ll still want 4d10 damage in an area over attacking, but not often. Arcane Eye has it worse, given that a lot of what it does can be achieved easier with familiars or similar espionage abilities. As a ranger, you’re pretty great at hiding and listening in, especially with access to Pass without Trace, and while I can’t say it is unusable, you’ll probably find other spells you’d rather be spending your precious few 4th level slots on.
Swarming Dispersal is the capstone feature Swarmkeepers get, giving you a sweet new reaction to get resistance to damage on command and teleport to a new spot within 30 feet. But that on its own wouldn’t be enough, not once. Getting 5-6 uses per long rest: now THAT is a capstone feature. Swarming Dispersal is a genuinely compelling reason to stick with ranger, as not only is it cool as hell and delivers on the “one with the swarm” fantasy beautifully, it plays well with everything rangers like to be doing in a powerful way. Even the basic exploration utility this offers by pricking yourself with a knife to get the teleport is a pretty great floor, and in complex encounters you can be flying all over the place while shrugging off enormous amounts of damage.
All Together
The bulk of what makes Swarmkeeper great is contained in the 3rd level feature. Writhing Tide, Mighty Swarm, and most of their bonus spells are fairly unremarkable, making this a subclass that can be excellent to dip into for a few levels, but not something I’m crazy about sticking with. If you do commit for 15 levels, though, Swarming Dispersal is a phenomenal top end fantasy feature to end on, and while it won’t make up for rangers other top end problems, will definitely feel superb to use.
If you like conceptually the Swarmkeeper fantasy, I’d try out 5 levels of it and switch to multiclassing druid, warlock, or rogue after. All three of those classes can scale your damage better, have great potential expansions in utility, and can offer some really fun directions to expand out the character. If you don’t mind the lackluster upper tier spells and mid tier features, Swarmkeeper does have a pretty sick finale that can be worth playing towards.
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