Ranger

The ranger is one of the player roles in NetHack. Rangers can be either neutral or chaotic, and can be humans, elves, gnomes, or orcs.

Rangers can get expert in dagger, sling, dart, boomerang, javelin, bow and crossbow, and also in divination spells. Rangers can not use two-weapon combat.

Rangers have the searching intrinsic right from the XL 1. They get stealth on XL 7 and see invisible on XL 15.

Strategy

Rangers get an extra bonus shot when using any at range weapon. So their best weapons are thrown daggers and bows and arrows.
Rangers can throw 4 daggers at once giving them on an average 2.5 times the damage as attacking with a single weapon in melee. They should use this facility as much as possible.
Elven and Orcish Rangers can fire up to 5 arrows at once, if they are using their racial bow and arrows. But in any case they would be able to fire up to 4 arrows at once. Since the arrows have a tendency to disappear, they should only be used as secondary weapon after thrown daggers. Arrows are much lighter than daggers, so the bow can become a primary weapon when luck is at least very high and the arrows are blessed and enchanted to at least +2.
Rangers should try to maintain a distance from their opponents and should not let them come near, as they are more effective from a distance. Their starting cloak of displacement helps them with this strategy. Elven rangers are handicapped as they start with an elven cloak.

Elven and orcish rangers start with racial equipment (elven dagger or orcish dagger instead of dagger, etc.). Elves get an elven cloak instead of a cloak of displacement and lembas wafers in the place of cram rations. Orcish rangers get orcish bow and orcish arrows but still get a cloak of displacement. Chaotic rangers also have a small chance of their starting arrow stacks being generated poisoned.