The Gaming Den

On WotC, they overwhelmingly love this book.

I want to hear you guys' opinions to balance it out before I buy it.

Heading to the shop today to apply for a job, ill be sure to read it over. I've read rants on the wotc board, but I don't trust the majority of them to form opinions about anything.

I ended up breaking down and buying it anyway.

I like it. It's one of the better quality WotC products lately.

But I'm going to be honest, I suck at giving descriptions and crap. But I can answer questions pertaining to said book.

misread the title, ignore the post

josephbt, that sounds like heros of battle. Tome of battle is a book with 9 different fighting styles and different fighting moves that behave a lot like spells.

I can say this though:

The Warblade is so close to what I envision as a fighter as to make me wish the fighter either didn't exist, or was some bullshit PrC like the prestige paladin and prestige bard in Unearthed Arcana.

(Prerequisites: Weapon focus, +4 BaB. 5 levels, each giving a bonus feat. And I doubt many would take all 5 levels even then.)

Here is the warblade

ah, forgot about that. thanks.

Thats a nice chassis, how do the manuvers stack up to spells?

They are worse than spells of a similar level. That's appropriate given that the classes that offer manuvers are mechanically superior to more traditional casters. From what I've seen the abilities can scale pretty well up until 6-7th level, then they seem a to be a little too weak. The cool thing is that it seems like their abilities are budgeted out by encounter (the warblade can refresh himself in one round if he does nothing or nothing but an attack). I'd go so far as to say it would be almost entirely balanced if the party was forced to face 4 encounters per day. It's not quite there yet but it is easily the best that WOTC has done and I'm not going to let good be the enemy of perfect here. They've made the fighter obsolete and created some martial classes that can stay very competitive over levels 1-14 and more importantly they've given enough tactical options to make playing one of these characters seem fun.

I'm not wild about so many int-based powers and it could at least use a bonus feat at every "dead" level there, but it is quite close to what I've been asking for: a fighter with spell-like fighty manuevers.

Well, I'd say that many are just plain aweful, a few are pretty nice, and there's a few gems left over.

The PrCs are uninspired, in my opinion, but I'm not a fan of PrCs anyway, I much prefer just altering a class to do waht you want in the first place, without taking Skill focus: Anal Choir.

THe warblade, while better than the fighter, has a major downside. It gets few maneuvers, and it's maneuvers are much weaker than spells. For example, at level 5 (3rd level maneuver), the Warblade gets a maneuver that is -4 attack roll, save for half, as a standard action. Compare to the level 1 Wizard spell Ray of Enfeeblement.

And the class that gets the most manuevers? 3/4 BAB >< They're better, but... uhm, well. Not enough.

EDIT: fixed the maneuver

Well, it depends on the encounters per day.

the more encounters per day you have, the better the warblade looks, and the worse a normal spellcaster will look, as the warblade's few maneuvers are refreshed with a standard action.

This is, of course, assuming two moderately min-maxed characters, as an expertly min-maxed spellcaster still wins by sheer amount of options. The more options you give someone, the more likely they'll come up with something that pwns your face.