Make Fighter PrCs Essential

[God_of_Awesome]

Well, I guess I just kind of listened to everyone else when they said the RoW Fighter was broken. I didn't think it was but I'm not much for judging that. I prefer magic tea party.

[hogarth]

Tell you what. Why don't you try playing Baldur's Gate II (the one game in the list above I've played) with an all-fighter party and then try it again with an all-caster party and see which is easier?

Assuming I can have paladins/rangers/rogues and at least 1 cleric or druid to just heal and otherwise fight then I have done that before and the game is easy with that combination as well.

No, all-fighter parties don't have paladins, rangers, rogues, clerics nor druids in them, just like all-caster parties don't have non-casters in them.

[Kaelik]

Also, Kaelik. That 'broken' and 'overpowered' fighter we talk so much about.... he could "deal" with wall of stone. He had adamantine weapons; and could burrow through solid stone at a rate of 5' per round (dealing the 900-ish damage needed to clear a 5' cube of solid, unworked stone).

JE, stop trying to be retarded.

1) I was talking about 3e fighters/wizards vs 4e fighters/wizards. The point being that 3e fighters suck and can't do anything, and 4e fixes that by making wizards suck and not do anything, Tome material on the other hand fixes it by making fighters awesome and do things. Yes, your Tome fighter is not a 3e fighter and has no bearing on conversations about 3e at all.

2) Yes, Fighters should be able to deal with stone walls, in a way that costs relatively few, but non zero actions. That's a good thing. And totally balanced. That has nothing to do with if your fighter is overpowered.

3) Again with you being stupid. You just admitted that your fighter can cast spells better than a wizard and also do 900 damage a round with full BAB (so better benefits from combat feats) more skill points (so more skills, and more able to spread out skill feats) more HP, better armor, more actions, and foil action to use with those actions if he wants.

And then you turn around and claim he's "not overpowered" because one of the 4 billion things he can do is not broken?

Get this in your head, it's the 900 damage per round + better than Wizard casting +full BAB/proficiencies/skill points/HP/actions/class features that is the problem.

Yes, your stupid as fighter is fucking overpowered. Yes it is. Accept, deal. Stop bringing it up all the time and trying to defend it as not overpowered.

[Judging__Eagle]

And, The Wish, and The Word? Same deal; except they're spellcasters.

That fighter was overpowered b/c that was the goal and the objective of the game and character.

What I'm saying is that an optimized non-caster could be just as broken as an optimized spellcaster. If that's not possible, then something is missing.

Actually, I'm not sure if the 900 damage is a 1 round or 2 round thing.

8 attacks at lvl 16 [tWf]
adamantine daggers [bypass hardness of stone]
magic weapons (+2 min)
combat school (take 10 on attack roll)
combat school (+2 damage)
power attack for max (+32 daamge at 16 bab)
blitz (+16 damage at 16 BaB)
=52 damage per swing*8
=416

so, it takes a 2-3 rounds; less if Str is greater than 10;

Eh, a lot less than the 900 damage per round; closer to 400 before buffs.

Of course, there's seriously an item that lets players do stuff like "burrow" through rock. A pair of items in fact.

Srsly, just allowing a fighter to craft a Mattock of the Titans, Maul of the Titans, or Guantlets of Burrowing would be more balanced. Yet for some reason, that was thought to be "too much".

Since that wasn't possible, I looked for other ways to solve that issue. In this case, it meant dealing enough damage that I could change the terrain.

Some players will do anything to pull off certain things. Sometimes there's an easy way, and sometimes there's a hard way. The hard way usually leads to broken characters in my experience. Almost universally, every single time that I've had a DM tell me that I couldn't do something, I ended up upsetting the balance more, by trying to find other solutions for my problem, that ended up being very powerful, and more powerful than the originally 'denied' solution was.

In my own games, I just flat out ask my players what they want to do; and find them a race, template, class, feat or item that makes it possible. Forcing players to optimize and powergame tends to lead to balance issues regardless of what has been done to make things 'balanced'.

I think that is an issue that should be taken into account.

"If presented with shitty, or no, options, some people will seriously CO their character as much as possible, so that they don't feel like their character is failing to live up to an idea that the player had for their character."

Basically the converse of Frank's statement that "A player who wants to play a grey-skinned character with shark teeth will take any option that the game gives them" (even if it's a shitty one); when discussing "Unusual Races".

This seriously leads to stuff like a CO mindset being used in a game.

[Kaelik]

And, The Wish, and The Word? Same deal; except they're spellcasters.

GARGLARGARGAR!

Yes, the wish and the word are overpowered. That's why no one plays them. And that's also why no one claims that they aren't broken. Even though you just claimed in your last post that your broken ass fighter is not that broken.

That fighter was overpowered b/c that was the goal and the objective of the game and character.

No it wasn't. That was exactly the opposite of the goal of the game. That was so far away from the goal of the game that you yourself all by yourself literally killed that game.

I have a go to broken character that I break out when I want to play a broken character. I also have a secondary broken character for when the first one boars me. I didn't use either of those at all.

I made a normal character who was not even broken a little bit. Just like everyone but you.

That was not the purpose of the game, so what you actually did was make a character more powerful than anyone else and ruin everyone else's day.

Eh, a lot less than the 900 damage per round; closer to 400 before buffs.

Of course, there's seriously an item that lets players do stuff like "burrow" through rock. A pair of items in fact.

Srsly, just allowing a fighter to craft a Mattock of the Titans, Maul of the Titans, or Guantlets of Burrowing would be more balanced. Yet for some reason, that was thought to be "too much".

No... No... No...

It has nothing to do with you burrowing. Your character was not overpowered because it could break walls. In fact, I am 100% certain without even a shadow of a doubt that if you had wanted to have the item that allows you to burrow, and that it is a real item, Uber would gladly have let you have it.

No one cares that you can burrow. The issue is your 400 damage (+32 Con damage) per round, your better everything, your better defenses, your better skills, your better casting than my caster, ect.

That's the problem. It has shit all to do with your fucking burrowing. Stop pretending that you made that character so you could burrow! No one ever stopped you from burrowing.

My character couldn't burrow either, but that didn't mean I went through all the trouble of dancing to infinite CL so I could cast infinite CL Stone Shape. Because when my character can't burrow, and no one stopped me from making a character that can, I don't have to kill the game for a group of people just so I can do literally everything.

Since that wasn't possible, I looked for other ways to solve that issue. In this case, it meant dealing enough damage that I could change the terrain.

It was possible! You could have just said "I want to buy this item that lets me burrow" and Uber would have said "sure" and that would have been the end of it.

The reason you didn't is because being able to burrow isn't good enough for you. You also have to be able to kill every creature in the game in a single round, have more HP/AC/better saves/better immunities than anyone else, and be able to cast any Wizard spell you want on command for it to be good enough.

No one stopped you from burrowing!

[Judging__Eagle]

Actually, I wasn't able to use my classes class features to craft items. So yeah, burrowing was one of several things that the character couldn't do due to resource restrictions; so I tried to sidestep those restrictions by finding methods that didn't cost as much.

As was "wearing armour that is made from spider silk"; "crafting my own weapons"; "crafting my own level appropriate equipment" and a bunch of other things.

The game was called a "CO challenge", and that's what I did as more things were 'not allowed'; I started to dumpster dive, and ended up getting broken combinations of items, feats and spells/buffs.

The original goal was to make the character use the same gear from a previous game, and when most of it was not available, I ended up looking for other sources; which is where, and why, the character became what it was.

Better skills was mostly a result of mixing classes to get every skill as a class skill (rogue, monk, bard, fighter; there's nothing not covered in that range); as well as taking Bard for the boost to several skills at once.

The build pretty much relied on trying to hit a min-max point among several areas.

It was broken b/c of the combination of things; overall, the character didn't outshine anyone at their specialty; but would be able to be a near match for everything it was built to do.

As for "killing every enemy in a single round"; I wish. Your recollections of that are a lot hazier than you think. The character could barely kill one of the 30-something HD elder water elementals after using 13 AoOs in a single round; and that was with popping the 'extra' 5-foot step to keep from being sent hundreds of feet back by the elemental's melee attack.

[God_of_Awesome]

Hey, a big pound of fuck you guys and your vendettas. Argue this over fucking PM.

You know what this thread is about? It's about the merits of using a bunch of PrCs at the point in which the PHB (Please note this) Fighter falls behind the Wizard to make up for the difference.

[Lokathor]

Well the PHB fighter kinda falls behind around level 3 or 5. It's not much worth saving, which is probably why they're not talking about it.

Seriously, the PHB fighter is just bad.

[Kaelik]

Actually, I wasn't able to use my classes class features to craft items. So yeah, burrowing was one of several things that the character couldn't do due to resource restrictions; so I tried to sidestep those restrictions by finding methods that didn't cost as much.

Oh fuck you. I wasn't able to use my class's class feature to craft items either. So what. You were playing a Tome fighter in a non Tome game and you are bitching about the fact that you only had the same amount of wealth as everyone else in the party instead of twice as much money as everyone else?

See what I mean. Everyone else got to choose to spend X money on whatever they want. You did too. The fact that burrow wasn't worth money to you was because it wasn't as important to you as doing more ridiculous damage and buying spells to cast.

As was "wearing armour that is made from spider silk"; "crafting my own weapons"; "crafting my own level appropriate equipment" and a bunch of other things.

Once again. You were playing in a non Tome game with a Tome character, and I have to hear you bitch about how you also didn't get to have spidersilk armor? You didn't get to "craft your own level appropriate equipment" because you already had hundreds of thousands of gp worth of level appropriate equipment, the same as everyone else.

You used a Tome class that has a class feature which doesn't even work the same in Tome games as other games. In a Tome game, that crafting would not result in more total items being used with more total abilities. But in that none Tome game, it would have.

The game was called a "CO challenge", and that's what I did as more things were 'not allowed'; I started to dumpster dive, and ended up getting broken combinations of items, feats and spells/buffs.

1) CO means character optimization, it does not mean "break the game" we all know how to do that. We choose not to. Characters can be optimized within bounds, you just explicitly choose to break any bounds that are ever set on you by, for example, the general area of your party.

2) The reason the DM kept trying to limit you was because he, as a person well versed in D&D, recognized that the shit you were asking for is way out of line with the rest of the party, and was you trying to be much better than everyone else in the party because you are a dick. Your response to the DM trying to keep you in line with the party was to literally say to yourself "Screw you DM! I'm going to be be more powerful than everyone else in the party combined, no matter what I have to do to get it." Then you dug up a bunch of community feats that the DM had never heard of, so that he wouldn't have time to analyze it for synergies, and you could slip shit by him and be more powerful than everyone else.

Better skills was mostly a result of mixing classes to get every skill as a class skill (rogue, monk, bard, fighter; there's nothing not covered in that range); as well as taking Bard for the boost to several skills at once.

Why do you always do this like a retard? I know why it had better skills. Pro tip: It would have had better skills even if it were just Fighter 16, because fighters get 8 skill points per level and have the best possible list in the game.

overall, the character didn't outshine anyone at their specialty; but would be able to be a near match for everything it was built to do.

You are fucking retarded. Yes, it did outshine everyone in their specialty, because everyone's specialty was either: Preventing opponents from taking actions, or killing bitches. And your character was better at both of those than any other character.

As for "killing every enemy in a single round"; I wish. Your recollections of that are a lot hazier than you think. The character could barely kill one of the 30-something HD elder water elementals after using 13 AoOs in a single round; and that was with popping the 'extra' 5-foot step to keep from being sent hundreds of feet back by the elemental's melee attack.

You are just fucking retarded. You got two AoOs one each elemental. And the game ended before you ever took your turn. You literally never full attacked, even though that would have been what happened the next round.

You would have immediately killed at least 2 of them in your first round.

[Kaelik]

Hey, a big pound of fuck you guys and your vendettas. Argue this over fucking PM.

You know what this thread is about? It's about the merits of using a bunch of PrCs at the point in which the PHB (Please note this) Fighter falls behind the Wizard to make up for the difference.

Look, discussing this with JE is entirely unproductive, because he is so crazy he will claim that a Tome fighter in a non Tome game who also casts as a level 15 Wizard is not broken, while bragging about how he thwarted the DM to be more powerful than any character ever, and compare himself to the wish and the word in the same post.

Yet I would still rather argue that with him than talk about your idea, because your idea is actually not an idea at all.

Characters in a class based game are largely defined in mechanical abilities by their class.

If you say "Fighter types have to mandatory PrC out after level X" What you are actually saying is "You are not a Fighter if you are above level X."

You might as well just fucking rewrite the Fighter class and call it "Fighter" instead of rewriting the Fighter class and calling it "Definitely For Sure Not Fighter, But PrC that Fighters must take!"

The only difference is that you 1) Are making the game more confusing to people too stupid to figure out what you are doing (a category that apparently includes you). 2) prevent yourself from giving fighters useful or cool abilities at all the levels before mandatory PrCing.

Long story short, if you are inventing a new class to make fighters not suck. Why not just name that new class "Fighter."

[ubernoob]

JE, Kaelik (as hardcore of an optimizer as you or me) chose to play a beguiler. Not a "Destroy the game with infinite swift action cantrip 100% real miracles" beguiler, but an actual beguiler. Everyone else followed WBL (it does work pretty ok and BoG would have meant I would have had to insert even more arbritratum to allow people to do "cool stuff that my class doesn't give me outright" and that was too much fucking work) and you wanted DOUBLE WBL.

So yeah, let's take a look at this in an intellectually honest manner:
1) Kaelik is playing a class significantly less powerful than a core wizard.
2) A TOME Barbarian is pretty much fine being in the same party as a well played core wizard (core wizard gets to kill people in three seconds, barbarian gets to kill someone in six and also gets the perk of being pretty much invulnerable).
3) TOME Fighter takes TOME Barbarian out back and rapes it. No lube. Prison style. Even the ears.
4) You played a TOME Fighter.
5) You then proceeded to ask for MORE "HOLY SHIT, I BETTER BE PLAYING WITH THE TWICE BETRAYER OF SHAR" shit to stack on top of that.
6) Your PC was literally so hard to fight that I could not think of anything that could challenge him at all without using pure DNS or TPKing the rest of the entire party.

Yes, JE. You singlehandedly ruined everyone's fun. Stop bragging like it is a good thing.

I'm going to put this very clearly, JE:
If I ever see another post by you on TGD referencing your specific fighter in any way, I am putting you on ignore. Permanently. I'm tired of you wanking to ruining everyone's fun back before I could design a class in my sleep.

Are we clear, JE?

[RandomCasualty2]

Long story short, if you are inventing a new class to make fighters not suck. Why not just name that new class "Fighter."

Yeah pretty much.

There's no reason to have a class with 20 levels that isn't playable through all 20 levels. At that point, why waste your time writing a newbie trap class.

[Username17]

You should see the kind of shit K and I got for straight up telling people that the Knight Class was only 10 levels long because it required a Prestige Class to even make sense in the high level environment.

And you totally can, because that shit be archived.

-Username17

[souran]

Tell you what. Why don't you try playing Baldur's Gate II (the one game in the list above I've played) with an all-fighter party and then try it again with an all-caster party and see which is easier?

Assuming I can have paladins/rangers/rogues and at least 1 cleric or druid to just heal and otherwise fight then I have done that before and the game is easy with that combination as well.

No, all-fighter parties don't have paladins, rangers, rogues, clerics nor druids in them, just like all-caster parties don't have non-casters in them.

Ok, then no you cannot even play the game like that. BGII doesn't have enough fighter npcs to fill out a party. So its a moot point. Whats more, an all wizard party would be equally as fail because it fails to include anybody who can heal.

Now lets actually talk about something functional. A healer, and then a party of beat sticks. That both can be done and is easy.

[Kaelik]

Ok, then no you cannot even play the game like that. BGII doesn't have enough fighter npcs to fill out a party. So its a moot point. Whats more, an all wizard party would be equally as fail because it fails to include anybody who can heal.

Now lets actually talk about something functional. A healer, and then a party of beat sticks. That both can be done and is easy.

You can create a multiplayer game and make your own 6 fighters if you need to. Have fun.

But yes, I have played multiplayer (with some friends) and we had one sorcerer and 5 wizards. Still no problem. You can easily play wizards so that you never get hit. Not to mention things like Wishing yourself a full nights rest or the ridiculous abundance of healing potions (for people who get hit once every 8 or so fights, probably not for a whole party of people who lose half their HP in every tactics fight.)

[Judging__Eagle]

Actually, Kaelik.... you're overblowing and overstating how powerful that character was.

Casts like a 15th level spell caster (in a 14th level game):

He could use caster level 7 scrolls; initially. That got ramped up to a whopping ability to use caster level 9 scrolls after 'breaking' the character.

That's... uhm. Well, he couldn't ever cast spells. Let alone cast "as a 15th level spellcaster". Seriously, you're over dramatizing his ability to Use Magic Device. Something that he had to lose a point of BaB to get via a level of Rogue. Something that restricted his BaB, and combat feat access as well.

Dozens of broken homebrew feats:

For his "snuck past" 'homebrew' feats.

Well, he only used RoW feats.





srsly.

Not a single home-brew feat was used in the character for that game. I asked about one of them. Was denied, and then used Weapon Finesse instead of Intelligent Fighter.

When I redid the myth-weaver's char sheet for Koumei's game, she said "go nuts (but I use hard caps)" and let me use Int Fighter and other crazy feats she and I had written up (Survivor Against the Odds, Counter Attack; Mental Weaponry, Painmonger). Meaning that my mythweaver's sheet is now a lot different.

The feats that 'that' fighter had were seriously this boring:
* Danger Sense
* Great Fort
* Iron Will
* Subtle Cut
* Combat School
* TWF, for... TWF
* Blitz
* Horde Breaker
* Weapon Finesse
* Whirlwind

Not a single one was ever a homebrew or non Frank & K feat. So, I never tried to "sneak" any unbalanced feat past Ubernoob, ever.

Enough Damage to kill every enemy in one round:

His damage ability was... 3d6+36 +3 con damage; twice it would hit AC 31; and four times it would hit AC 29; 6 attacks total. At level 14, I dunno, I thought that it seemed like a decent amount of damage to start with (216 + 18 con damage; the "900" damage build was achieved with a level 20 character for sure; and this character was never able to deal 20+ or even 30+ con damage in a round).

Seriously, 200 damage and 18 con damage, at level 14. Golems or undead laughs at con damage. I actually thought that this was a nerf to the character that would make the character limited in that they could kill living things, but not completely suck ass.

His total AoOs were 3 + 3 [twf] + 5 [Hordebreaker] for 10 AoOs.

Broken items, like silksteel armour:

Really, most of the stuff that made the character more powerful were things like how... Mithral Breastplate is better than Silksteel armour if you're a scout/stealth character (no penalty, and no restriction on speed vs a -4 penalty and a 30% reduction on speed).

Millions of Skill points:

Also, fighters are 6 + int mod; and don't have Hide on their class list; nor do they have spellcraft, or UMD. Meaning that dipping rogue, monk, bard or something will need to be done if you want to round out the skills into being class skills (remember, non-class are capped a 1/2 your max ranks, even if you pay 1 for 1).

---

Also, Ubernoob, you never once actually talked to me about my character being a problem while I was making the character, discussing what I wanted on the character, or running material and ideas by you. Kaelik did, but his assessments were as conflated then as they have grown even more so now. I spelled out specifically in the OOC threads my own reasons for doing what I could to crack out the character (I think that I spelled out several times that I didn't want my character to be a liability, or a hinderance on the party by being a non-caster in a group of casters, which is why I went about rounding out the character's abilities, skill points and gave them the ability to deal a large amount of Con damage to deal with enemy creatures).

Instead of explaining that I didn't need to do so (or just placing hard or soft caps on stuff like spell DCs and damage) you threw 48 HD creatures, with 24 Con, against a character that did con damage as their main source of damage. >_>

My intention never was to ruin the game, but since I wasn't informed (ever) of the expected power levels of the PCs, or the expectations from the PCs (I never even had ballpark numbers, for anything, I just ran things by the DM, and they approved, or banned them); I just tried to make the best non-caster that I could try to make. Even then, I actually felt that the fighter I made was possibly weaker than it could have been. That's mostly b/c I was seriously holding up my character to other CO builds, using things like the Chrono-Legionnaire and Roland, Bear of the North as my standard. Something that I think I mentioned in the creation of the character, and since it was not mentioned as being a bad idea, I thought I was working towards accepted power goals.

Honestly, I'm more upset that you weren't able to just say "you know, you don't need to powergame your character; what flavour do you want them to have, and let's see what we can do?" and instead went on some quest to bring out monsters that seemed almost tailored to be killed by my PC (48 HD creatures, with Con scores under 30). Like you were trying to prove that my character was unbalanced, or something. ._.

---

link to that character's sheets. Along with every other character from that game's sheets.

[Kaelik]

Enough Damage to kill every enemy in one round.

His damage ability was... 3d6+36 +3 con damage; twice it would hit AC 31; and four times it would hit AC 29; 6 attacks total. At level 14, I dunno, I thought that it seemed like a decent amount of damage to start with (216 + 18 con damage; the "900" damage build was achieved with a level 20 character for sure; and this character was never able to deal 20+ or even 30+ con damage in a round).

You know what, you are right. I did shut you down like hell when you tried to use "Fencer" on a TWFing character, so you didn't get the basically double attacks.

But let's try this again: Here are some CR 14 enemies:

Astral Deva 102HP AC 29
Trumpet Archon 126HP AC 27
Mature Adult Black 253HP (Con damage of 18 results in loss of 198HP) AC 29
Adult Copper 210HP AC 28
Nalfashnee 175Hp AC 27
Young Adult Gold 230HP (loses 180 from Con damage) AC 27
Werewolf Lord 160HP AC 26 at highest form.
Nightshade 144HP AC 30.

You literally autohit all but one enemy, and you automatically double kill any CR 14 enemy with a single full attack. But because I wasn't breaking the game, they would fail my saves only 40% of the time.

You have a 100% success rate of killing any CR 14 enemy in the game in a single round, and you are claiming that's "not alot of damage"?

24 Con is higher than any CR 14 on that list. The fact that not even counting your 200Hp damage guaranteed every round, you still one round most CR 14 enemies on Con damage alone.

You are fuckin retarded. That is the only possible answer. Ever. Only a contemptible retard could think that 200Hp damage + 18 Con damage per round on guaranteed autohits on anyone within 90ft of him in addition to everything else was "weak."

His total AoOs were 3 + 3 [twf] + 5 [Hordebreaker] for 10 AoOs.

It doesn't matter what your total AoOs were. You only got two on each elemental that approached you. The following round of course, you would have moved and full attacked killing 2-3 of them, but whatever.

Broken items, like silksteel armour:

Really, most of the stuff that made the character more powerful were things like how... Mithral Breastplate is better than Silksteel armour if you're a scout/stealth character (no penalty, and no restriction on speed vs a -4 penalty and a 30% reduction on speed).

Once again, didn't say broken items like Tome Armor, though of course, Tome Armors come with abilities and cost literally zero Gp, but whatever.

You got an entire 14th level WBL, the fact that you wanted free Armors in addition to that, that are better than the one you had to spend money on because they come with abilities. Yes, that was dumb.

My intention never was to ruin the game, but since I wasn't informed (ever) of the expected power levels of the PCs, or the expectations from the PCs (I never even had ballpark numbers, for anything, I just ran things by the DM, and they approved, or banned them); I just tried to make the best non-caster that I could try to make. Even then, I actually felt that the fighter I made was possibly weaker than it could have been.

You know what one method of determining what an acceptable power level is? Having a brain. Failing that, you could compare yourself against the other characters in the party. Failing that, you could recognize that you are playing a Tome character in a non Tome game, and so are by default more powerful than everyone else already.

Honestly, I'm more upset that you weren't able to just say "you know, you don't need to powergame your character; what flavour do you want them to have, and let's see what we can do?" and instead went on some quest to bring out monsters that seemed almost tailored to be killed by my PC (48 HD creatures, with Con scores under 30). Like you were trying to prove that my character was unbalanced, or something. ._.

I know you are retarded, but this is just silly. They weren't designed to prove how fucking broken you are, they were designed specifically to counter you.

1) The forced your character away, to limit his ability to AoO all of them twice every round.
2) There were lots of them, which is a requirement, since you can literally one round anything of even remotely close CR.
3) They had bitching Fort saves to compensate for you forcing 6 bullshit save v stuns each round with successive penalties to Fort saves.
4) They had higher Con than anything of even remotely similar CR.
5) They had most of their HP from HD, not Con, to make up for the fact that they needed tonnes of HD to have enough HP to survive a single round.

The only way something could be more tailored to defeat you is a Lich with Persistent Delay Death in an AMF like the Twice Betrayer of Shar, because you also dispelled on every hit.

[God_of_Awesome]

You should see the kind of shit K and I got for straight up telling people that the Knight Class was only 10 levels long because it required a Prestige Class to even make sense in the high level environment.

And you totally can, because that shit be archived.

-Username17

Where?

[Roy]

Without being able to fly out of range, or teleport away from attacks or quickenspell insta kill spells and what not, without the bag of tricks a million gags deep, then wizards are just good dpsers. If you make 3e wizards just play blasters they are good but hardly better than a well placed raging barbarian.

Is this idiot serious? I think he is unfortunately.

[Quantumboost]

And you totally can, because that shit be archived.

-Username17

Where?

I imagine that would be in either the Races of War thread on the Wizards boards, or the Races of War thread here.

[God_of_Awesome]

Look, this idea is based on two things. One, the 'Weaning People Of Martial Powers' which more or less combines all the suggestions, make Martial More Powerful, not exactly but it a PrC with a supernatural origin gives a Fighter as good a reason as any to become Superman or Captain Marvel, Make Fighters Eventually Spellcast, SU and EXs wold obviously get involved, and Make Magic Items A Class Feature, their was a paladin PrC that involved killing a Red Dragon to gain the favor of Bahamut and magic platinum armor was a class featue, IIRC. Same principle.

Two, when you see magic powered 'Fighting-Men' in fiction their not all the same are they? No, you got evil demon swordsman, holy swordsman ala paladins, your odd some other theme swordsman, yatta, yatta, yatta. I wouldn't want them to be the same. That'd be boring. I trully like the idea that if you have a party of all Fighters, by level 11 they are each something wildly and colorfully different. You can have Dark Avengers who have bathed in the blood of demons, Elemental Lords who have had friendly contact with Elementals, Angelic Swordsman who have sold their souls to goodness, Shadow Duelers who have walked in the valley of the shadow of the death, Primal Stalkers who beat up a thirty dire bears in one go, etc, etc. Because RAW Fighter only works by itself for so many levels until something else needs to be added on.

However, if you think the Fighter class should be reworked or even ditched, yeah sure, god bless.

[Lokathor]

Some Base Classes are Short

Some characters can go on forever within the same milieu. A wizard can continue mastering more and more powerful magics, poring over strange and cryptic books and learning the arcane secrets of the universe without end and still be basically the same person he was when he was a bumbling apprentice whose spells dazzled and delayed onrushing orcs to buy his compatriots some time. A Monk can master more and more impressive Kung Fu indefinitely off into Epic level and still be the same unruly child from the Shaolin monastery. But some characters really can't do that. By the time a Knight hits 10th level, he's already probably riding around on a winged steed and wielding a sword made out of fire, and let's be honest – he's barely recognizable as the ogre challenging lancer from the beginning of the campaign. And that's fine, but it means that writing levels of Knight past that point is an exercise in futility. We can't really predict what your Knight will be doing at 10th level so it would be folly to pretend that there was a "normal" line of advancement for a Knight after that point. Characters need to get level appropriate abilities from 11th level on, but the D&D gameworld does not actually have any 13th level Knights in it. It has Death Knights, and Dragon Riders, and Knights of the Chalice, and Brazen Serpent Knights, and a whole bunch of other things that have Knight levels and are CR 13+, but every one of them has a Prestige Class. That's no accident, by the time you get to that point in your character's life, the direction your character is going to take should be fairly clear, and you will take a Prestige Class. That's fine, and for the short classes we encourage that sort of behavior.

[God_of_Awesome]

Some Base Classes are Short

Some characters can go on forever within the same milieu. A wizard can continue mastering more and more powerful magics, poring over strange and cryptic books and learning the arcane secrets of the universe without end and still be basically the same person he was when he was a bumbling apprentice whose spells dazzled and delayed onrushing orcs to buy his compatriots some time. A Monk can master more and more impressive Kung Fu indefinitely off into Epic level and still be the same unruly child from the Shaolin monastery. But some characters really can't do that. By the time a Knight hits 10th level, he's already probably riding around on a winged steed and wielding a sword made out of fire, and let's be honest – he's barely recognizable as the ogre challenging lancer from the beginning of the campaign. And that's fine, but it means that writing levels of Knight past that point is an exercise in futility. We can't really predict what your Knight will be doing at 10th level so it would be folly to pretend that there was a "normal" line of advancement for a Knight after that point. Characters need to get level appropriate abilities from 11th level on, but the D&D gameworld does not actually have any 13th level Knights in it. It has Death Knights, and Dragon Riders, and Knights of the Chalice, and Brazen Serpent Knights, and a whole bunch of other things that have Knight levels and are CR 13+, but every one of them has a Prestige Class. That's no accident, by the time you get to that point in your character's life, the direction your character is going to take should be fairly clear, and you will take a Prestige Class. That's fine, and for the short classes we encourage that sort of behavior.

THIS

[Orion]

God of Awesome:

The PHB Fighter is acceptable for seriously 4 levels. MAYBE. Level 5 is an irredeemable suckfest and while characters with 6 or 8 levels fo fighter may be able to pull their weight in some circumstances, that doesn't give Fighter 5 the right to exist.

Honestly, you get so little from basing your progression of the PHB Fighter, I'd advise you just to write new fighting base classes.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Or take advantage of the ridiculous number of fightan classes already available. Tome stuff can easily be tweaked into being something lower in power if the balance point it uses is too high for a given game.