Rangers are certainly something of a niche class.
Heh heh. Funny how starkly that contrasts 3.5, eh? They used to be effectively the meatier version of the Bard.
I remember playing Pathfinder (the same campaign where we whored out the halfling druid, incidentally) and the three of us (split party) were selling some magic item to a junk dealer when, surprise surprise, he fiddled with it and unleashed an ettin in the town's marketplace.
From what I remember, the halfling got owned pretty much straight away, my half orc shot it with a hand crossbow then ran for his life, only to be smacked into unconsciousness with its club and have an entire market stall collapse on top of me. The DM was most amused when I tried to activate Orc Ferocity. >.>
So just the tiefling ranger was left, wielding some sort of detachable dual-bladed glaive-type-thing.
He managed to take down the ettin without a scratch. That was... rather embarrassing. This is the same ranger who later one-shotted a powerful demon just as it was jokingly saying "Let us
negotiate," since our more-or-less good party had charged in and gone straight to fighting as opposed to trying to talk things through as we usually would.
He was known as 'the negotiator' after that.