Quote Originally Posted by Snowbluff View Post
As for buying wizard services, that's not the ranger winning. We know this.
Fine, he buys cleric services. At 20th level it's about your treasure and initiative bonus anyway.

For the numbers game thing, I don't know about optimizing wizard AC. I know he can match all but ~12 of the ranger's dex. He can carry all the same items for init, too. Wearing some armor with reduced ASF (Arcane Armor Training? Maybe), using Limited Wish to buff the AC of the Buckler and Armor. When all is said and done, the Ranger shouldn't have 100% to hit.
It is unlikely that an optimized wizard will use ASF, because it requires a swift action to use meaning no quickened spells. You put on bracers of armor and a ring of protection and that's about all you get. It's not very high. Exactly where it is depends on how much you want to spend on what is usually irrelevant protections. It is possible that the last arrow has a reasonable chance of missing. However, I was also not considering critical hits in that calculation. That's probably a wash since he'd be using a 19-20/x3 weapon and will almost certainly confirm any earlier crits.

Hammer the Gap is actually a seperate argument. If you want, I can crunch the numbers and give a numerical objective level of how good/bad it is. 18+10+6= 34 dex, with a 14 bonus, 20 BAB, +5 from weapon sounds good, right?
Not really much of a point. It's widely regarded as extremely feat efficient because it's a fair bit of extra damage that costs nothing but a feat. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 is still +15, even if the last hit misses--which is really the only one likely to miss.

The problem here is that it's not actually required for this scenario. Even if you didn't take hammer the gap, even if you don't have favored enemy bonuses, even if you haven't boosted your strength with tomes, even if you use a ****ty +2 speed bow, it's still doing enough damage to kill a wizard who started with 16 con (who has a +6 con item), on average. Rangers aren't even particularly good archers in PF without their favored enemy bonus, and even a bad archer is enough to kill a wizard with optimal HP at the level. Admittedly, if it was another class, the initiative would be a problem--the wizard would be able to flee or wind wall to save himself. But the particular case given here--a pathfinder ranger with Warden faces a pathfinder wizard (diviner) without anything but very long term buffs up... the ranger has good odds of being able to win that combat. Because he's probably going to edge out the wizard by +1 or +2 init and can throw enough damage to win. It is possible that the last shot misses, in which case the wizard will likely be able to turn that around on the archer.

Even being generous here, that wizard can easily get rocket tagged in this encounter. It's not a slam dunk victory as was originally portrayed. Absolutely the wizard has more options on how to deal with this or avoid it--that's the point of a wizard. But they certainly are not the kings of the combat numbers game.