Rangers suck but why not right?

Every class is better at being a ranger than a ranger. Yes even wizards. Discuss.

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If we're talking 5e, then yeah, Rangers need help. They don't have much of a class identity, and the one thing they are "known" for, being a pet class, is woefully mishandled. A Fighter with the Outlander background does functionally the same thing. Spend cash on a mastiff and boom. When your class feature can be lampooned for 50g your class has problems.

Have fun with that CR 1/8 pet that receives no scaling bonuses and you have to manually direct with constant Animal Handling checks. Half the sessions would be spent yelling at the dog.

Exactly. You guys get it. You play an outlander fighter or heck, any form of barbarian with survival or nature proficiency and you're a more powerful, more fun version of a ranger.

Oh sorry I forgot to answer this properly. Yeah pets suck for people other than rangers but pets are literally the focus of only one archetype so they're hardly what the class is designed around.

I think one of the problems is that a lot of stuff rangers are good at (tracking, wilderness survival, foraging etc.) are often handwaved by DMs, or else resolved with just a quick Survival roll and not a lot of drama.

Then again, a good DM would give rangers some good wilderness to explore, but I feel like most DMs are more interested with getting you to their next Plot Spot so they just say "You travel for 8 hours and arrive at the ruined temple. An icy and fell wind blows from the doorway..."

Well, looking at several of the new Ranger archetypes in XGtA and UA and whatnot, they are trying to make Rangers into Hunters, basically. Which is fine; the class sort of needs a new identity and Hunter is a decent role to fill. Different archetypes that hate different things (undead, lycanthropes, goblinoids, etc) and has different tricks of the trade for dealing with them that also spill over into other things.

Yeah the mastiff doesn't scale but you get better action economy out of owning one than you get from the Beastmaster pet for a LONG time. And you can always pay more cash for a more exotic domesticated war animal. There are plenty of options. Bears are domseticable, for example. The main point is that the class, at least as a pet class, has a lost identity. Warlocks with advanced familiars get a better deal ffs. It needs something new, which the Hunter thing is trying to accomplish I feel. It's just a shame you have to go outside the core book to get a decent Ranger.

Revised Ranger is stupidly better than what we got in the PHB, and really makes up for it. Unfortunately it looks like we may never see an official release of the full class, but at least we're supposed to get a rework for the Beastmaster archetype this year.

The problem is that D&D is going for the "classes as archetypes" route rather than as literal jobs, I personally like it but it demands an ammount of brainstorming that WotC is incapable of consolidating so they have left the Ranger in a weird spot now.

I get that they are kinda going for a paladin-like angle of a character that is more about "muh land" than "muh oath", the problem is that they have no idea of how to achieve that without getting too much into "muh nature" which is druid territory, so they are left with contrived ideas.

Every class is the best at being that class in 4e. just sayan.