Avowed might be one of the best wizard games around, with exciting, strange spells translated from Pillars of Eternity into a zoomed-in, action format. It's hard to pass up stuff like Pull of Eora, a souped-up Mass Effect Singularity that yoinks enemies into an anti-gravity whirlpool. But I've been on a ranger kick lately, and something inside me yearned to be a pistol-slinging, Skyrim stealth archer-adjacent, Age of Sail NCR Ranger. At 45 hours and counting, I'm happy to report that not only is this playstyle viable in Avowed, it's been fun as hell on the game's max-out "Path of the Damned" difficulty.
Stealth is even less fleshed-out in Avowed than it is in The Elder Scrolls or 3D Fallouts, and I never found it feasible to quietly pick guys off from afar like in those games. It's always nice to start a fight with extra sneak attack damage, but overall, an Avowed ranger build feels a bit like an Infiltrator from Mass Effect or a Nightstalker from Destiny, using an on-command invisibility power to get out of a hairy situation or line up extra damage.
