What's so special about a ranger / cleric?

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Because that's how slings work, both in real life and in PnP...

 

Nah, slings work by transferring part of the force generated by rotating the sling to the actual throw. This is why young people and children use them.
Adding more force to the rotation of the sling would severely decrease it's accuracy (imagine trying to throw something that's spinning like crazy), which (according to game lore) is why the Sling of Seeking is unique - its design allows it to beat this limitation.

 

The force of the projectile is directly proportional to the force you impart to it and the speed of the rotation. Accuracy has jack shit to do with it, since you don't spin the sling like an idiot before you release it. Whether you spin it gently or put everything you have into it, the accuracy is pretty much the same if your technique is good.

Also, I've never seen a kid actually use a sling. Maybe they're more popular in other parts of the world. Historically, slings were weapons used by both hunters and soldiers and you needed to put a fair bit if strength into it in order for it to be effective on a battlefield. The upside was that most battlefields allowed for less accuracy, so some techniques which do allow for more force and less accuracy were likely used in such situations.

 

I thought it was only once the Ranger started getting his own spells.

Clubs too.

I know one of the fixpacks or tweakpacks fixed it in the original games. I don't recall which.

True, it seems a poor class for the game mechanics.

Agreed, the benefits may be minimal, but the ranger kits aren't really that great when multiclassing due to the drawbacks.

So does fighter/cleric, so there is no advantage here.

I thought it was only for the first four spell levels, missing out on Insect Plague, but you still get ironskins and summon woodland creature (one 4th level spell gives you a nymph that can cast a bunch of useful spells. Almost as good as Wondrous Recall but several levels lower)

I don't know about EE, but I swear one of the fixpacks or tweakpacks fixed it. I don't recall what did it, but I can put 5 pips into slings with an archer.

 

I don't recall slings for archers being fixed in the standard G3 tweak- or fixpack, or I should have it installed, I think.

 

I played with slings and slingshots as a kid, it's a simple device. These and boomerangs were all the rage back in the early 90s, though AFAIK they still sell slings/slingshots in many souvenir shops in Texas when we passed there last year.

Accuracy is everything with a sling since there's zero reference point to work with (no pistol front sight, no arrow shaft). You don't so much throw something using a sling as finesse a bullet at your target, using the rotational movement to add power to your "throw", though you can argue that explosive body movement can be a factor in throw strength. Which doesn't have anything to do with the weight lifting/wild animal wrestling kind of strength associated with the strength stat in AD&D.
I guess you can compare it to pitching in baseball. If perfect pitching required someone to bulk up like Conan, then more pitchers would look that way.

As kids we used slings because the rotational motion allowed us to impart more power to our throws, allowing the projectile to hit harder than if we used our bare hands. Too much rotation = imprecise throws, and there was very little strength involved with the whole thing.
We quickly switched to slingshots though, then plastic BB guns at some point. The internet as we now know it didn't exist yet.

 

It could be aTweaks or Ding0's Tweaks but I don't see it mentioned with a cursory glance at the readme files.
I highly recommend some components of both mods, especially Ding0's ability to remove the summoning limit, which gets really annoying when certain glitches come into play. Also Ding0's Goodberry mod makes the spell actually worth a second level slot.

I thought that, and either Baldurdash and ease-of-use or G3 Tweaks and Fixpack (can't recall if I upgraded when I had to replace the hard drive in my old computer. I'm almost certain I did when I reinstalled everything) were some of the few mods I have installed that could have done it.

 

And spear throwing. It's more about speed than strength. Unless you're throwing a really heavy bullet, more analogue to hammer throwing, I suppose.

Pretty sure it's not mentioned in the G3 tweak- and fixpack readme's either. And I would've installed that if it was available, I'm sure. I know I tried to make an archer specialised in slings a few years ago, but I couldn't put more than one or two pips in slings.

 

Who knows, maybe I did it myself with one of the 2DA editors out there, NearInfinity, or just Notepad.
It's very easy to do, just open up weapprof.2da in the override folder, find the line that says "feralin", find the column for slings, and change the number to a 5.
You might have to turn UAC off if you are using Vista or later.

 

Slings and slingshots, despite the name, are two wildly different things. One is a weapon of war used since ancient history and the other is a fairly accurate and modern implement used primarily as a kid's "toy" or at best a hunter's weapon for hunting small game.

Then I'm sad to inform you that you were doing it wrong. OTOH, you were kids, most likely slinging rocks around, so there can't have been much accuracy or technique involved anyway.

If you do it right, then the amount torque shouldn't affect your accuracy. What it does affect is the force/speed/range of the the bullet.

Except D&D stats are compound stats. Just because you use Strength to bench press tarrasques, doesn't mean finer facets of muscle strength aren't part of it.

 

Actually, the finer facets of muscle movement fall under dexterity rather than strength, which I think was what he was alluding to.

 

I disagree. Dexterity is reflexes, hand-eye coordination, balance, etc. So yes, muscle movement, but not the power of the movement. That simply doesn't fall under agility.