Hunter's Mark Rework

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# Hunter's Mark Rework

#### Hunter's Mark
*1st-level divination, replaces the original Hunter's Mark*
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- **Casting Time:** 1 bonus action
- **Range:** 90 feet
- **Components:** V
- **Duration:**  Concentration, up to 24 hours
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You choose a creature or its tracks that you can see within range and mystically mark the creature as your quarry. Until the spell ends, you have advantage on any Wisdom (Perception) or Wisdom (Survival) check you make to find it. If the target drops to O hit points before this spell ends, you can mark a new creature with no action required.

You also gain a pool of 2d6 Huntsman dice. For the duration of the spell, after you make an attack roll or damage roll against the target, you may expend any amount of Huntsman dice from your pool and add the roll(s) to the result. You can expend and roll each Huntsman dice before deciding whether to use the next one.

***At higher levels.*** When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd Level or higher, the pool of Huntsman dice increases by 1d6 for each slot level above 1st for a maximum of 5d6.

**What about this alternate version?:** Change the Huntsman dice pool to use d4's instead of d6's. The dice can only be added to attack rolls. However, if any combination of the dice sum to exactly 20 (before modifiers), the attack would count as a crit.
 
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### Master Huntsman
*2nd-level Ranger feature, removes Tasha's Ranger's Favored Foe*

At 2nd level, you learn the Hunter's Mark spell. It does not count against your number of spells known. Once per turn, you can cast Hunter's Mark with no action required. The spell does not require concentration for you. You can still only have one Hunter's Mark active at a time.

### Improved Hunter's Mark
*11th-level Ranger feature*

By 11th level, you have learned to deliver each strike with relentless focus. Whenever you hit a creature under the effects of your Hunter's Mark, you deal an additional 1d6 damage.

> ##### Credits 
> Ullr by *Wayne Wu* (Art)\
> Rework by **u/PhDpwnerer**
> ##### Inpiration
> The spell is heavily inspired from **u/SamuraiHealer**'s Deadeye Focus spell. I made a few tweaks and combined it with Hunter's Mark. If you like my Hunter's Mark, make sure to visit the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDHomebrew/comments/j5y79u/a_few_ranger_spells/">source of the inspiration</a>.

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# Appendix: Design Notes

## Why the Rework?

The purpose of the rework is to turn Hunter's Mark into the Ranger's signature combat ability (akin to Divine Smite for Paladins). To do so, I wanted it to be fun, concentration-free, bonus-action-free, and scalable throughout the Ranger's entire career using spell slots.

One of the Ranger's problems is that it lacks a signature combat ability. Other classes get signature combat abilities by level 2 (i.e. Action Surge, Sneak Attack, Rage, Divine Smite, etc.), but the Ranger does not have any. Many would agree that Hunter's Mark is the Ranger's unofficial signature ability. Unfortunately, the original Hunter's Mark did not work well as a signature class ability, since it required concentration, was boring to use, and did not scale past Ranger level 5.

### Providing Interesting Choices

Vanilla Hunter's Mark does not offer any interesting choices during gameplay. Players tend to just pop it at the start of an encounter and call it a day. The rest of the combat plays almost exactly the same as it would have if Hunter's Mark was not there. The new version gives the players more agency. They get to decide whether to use how many dice for each attack and damage roll. The players are not told whether the added bonus of their rolls will be enough to turn a miss into a hit. They have to be alert throughout combat to estimate the enemies' AC to maximize efficiency of their Huntsman dice.

### Making It Scalable

The original Hunter's Mark scaled to the number of attacks, not to the level of the spell slot (which is very weird for a spell). As a result, the spell did not scale past Ranger level 5. Not ideal for what we want as a class' signature ability. This new version scales to the slot level, similar to Divine Smite.

### Making It Concentration-Free

Signature abilities should by definition be designed for the players to use often. If that ability requires concentration, then, by definition, all other spells that require concentration would be likely shut down by the class' main feature. This is especially worse for the Ranger, since around half of its spell list requires concentration. We want to have synergy between class features, not the other way around.

### Making It Bonus-Action-Free

Many of the Ranger's core abilities require bonus actions already. For a similar reason why we do not want concentration, we don't want Hunter's Mark to depend on bonus actions, or else it makes the class a bit too clunky to use.

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### Potential For Synergy

This new spell combos well with other Ranger spells that require an attack roll. Wouldn't it be nice to have a have way to ensure that your Lightning Arrow actually hit? to ensure that it is not wasted?

### Why not just make the original Hunter's Mark concentration-free? Also, why not rename my spell to something else and keep the original Hunter's Mark in the game?

The main problem was that the original Hunter's Mark was too powerful for a level 1 spell. It can provide up to +10.5 expected DPR every round for level 5 Rangers, which made them surpass other classes in DPR by a wide margin until level 10. For instance, ignoring accuracy, at level 5, the Ranger with TWF, Colossus Slayer, and Hunter’s Mark can consistently deal 3 x (1d6 + 4) + 3d6 + 1d8 which averages at 37.5 damage per round. This damage increases to 40.5 at level 8 with the second ASI. These numbers are similar to the 40 average DPR that a GWF fighter would get from level 11 to 19, and come at the very cheap cost of a 1st-level Hunter's Mark which lasts a long time.

As such, it was necessary to impose a concentration requirement to tone down its power at early levels. The problem was that players typically circumvented it by simply recasting Hunter's Mark (since it's so cheap anyways). The result was that other concentration spells scarcely saw any use, and the bonus action for Rangers was often being hogged up.

I chose to remove the original Hunter's Mark completely to encourage combat diversity. My playtests indicate that as long as Hunter's Mark is available, Rangers would end up spamming it at the detriment of its other spells, even if it wasn't a class feature. Neverthless, I believe that a concentration-free vanilla Hunter's Mark is balanced once the Ranger reaches level 11+. As such, that ability is actually available to the Ranger implictly through the *Improved Hunter's Mark* feature.

### Why make it a spell at all? Just turn it into a feature.

I wanted it to be compatible with Oath of Vengence Paladins.