I'm not sure if you can use Ranged against the Balrog at all actually. Because The Balrog doesn't say "only the first player can declare attacks" it says "only the first player can declare attack ers ". The wording is a bit ambiguous in a rules sense since 'declare' is generally used just to refer to initially declaring the attack, but linguistically, if the first player declares an attack and you say your Ranged character will participate, you are declaring that character to be one of the attackers.

Dang, good catch. You might be right.

Yup, it is definitely ambiguous. I tried finding something in the FAQ and rules that would tell me what the correct interpretation is, but there's nothing in either of those sources that confirms it for me (at least not that I could find).

my fault .. the german translation of The Balrog says: "... und nur der Startspieler kann Angriffe gegen Der Balrog erklären."

in english: ".. only the first player can declare attacks against The Balrog." .. this is why i tried to clarifiy if participating is equal to declaring. :-/