Wow. Well, I'm back from vacation and had about three pages of progress to read through. I haven't been able to get to everything, but I'll touch on a few points that stood out:
Something I've been thinking is after reading OWA's Paladin, its extemely lazy of us to say "Play warblade insted of fighter" I have a fighter fix somewhere that SquirrelLord made that isn't a re-write but more an add on, barring that we should use the zhentarim soilder and the Generic warrior for a base of what fighter needs to be.
The generic everyman/ fully customizeable.
It is lazy to say play a Warblade instead of a Fighter, but I do think that a Warblade is a good thematic fit for the role, and even more customizable. The easy route is for me to keep the Fighter as-is, pirmarily as a dipping class. Another is to try and fix it. Ideally, I'd like something relatively simple, without a full rewrite, but that's lower on my priority list right now. I had a fix I posted at gleemax about a year ago, but I think the post is archived. I'd want to do some retooling before I posted it again.
Shock Trooper wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the methods in which damage stacks and is multiplied. Take away charge multipliers with weapons, double Power attack with TH weapons, and the effects of Valorous, and Shock Trooper is just a nice way of hitting someone and getting slammed back in return. You dish it out, and you take it. With things as they are now, the 'sacrifice' aspect is lost entirely. Heck, with Wall of Blades, the sacrifice to AC becomes entirely moot for at least the first reprisal attack...
One reason I'd never want to get rid of the 2:1 ratio for a two-hander is that it unfairly favors TWF then. All you need is the Oversized TWF feat, and you can effectively get a 2:1 ratio by Power Attacking with a full attack. It's partially offset by the -2 you take while TWF, but once you get pounce, you'd be just as deadly a charger.
Right then Moving on... away from the elephant, I have a proposed diplomacy fix.
Diplomacy.
Funtions off the same opposed roll as Intimidate you cannot advance someones role more than two steps with a single check but multiple checks can be allowed in the course of conversation.
Even a friendly, person will not do something that vastly differs from thier original intent or alignment.
I like a lot of what I've seen from Rich Burlew at GiantITP. Here's a link to his diplomacy fix.
Warblade is more customizable because it's got 43 feat equivalents, and a minimum of 81 exclusive new manuvers/feats to look through for Kewl Stuff. Give a Fighter 43 feat equivalents, and 81 feats to pick through that actually scale with level or are appropriate for level, and he'll shine, too. They just didn't want to have to rewrite all the core feats, so they made a new system instead.
It's a lazy fix, not a lazy choice. They didn't want to fix the system. And it was so bad they didn't even try to do so in 4E.
Power Attack is not unfairly biased towards ANYTHING if you just restrict the Power Attack bonus to the primary weapon. This instantly puts everyone's damage on an even footing. It's when you apply Power attack to every weapon, and try to balance that out between single hand, two weapons, and THW, that the imbalance occurs.
Just restrict the Power Attack bonus dmg to the primary weapon, keep the -TH for all weapons, and you're golden. Damage lines right up equally and falls into place.
That's also basically how you 'fix' the Str/dmg imbalance for TWF vs THW. Only apply Str on the primary hand attack. For off hand attacks, you just get base weapon...I'd option enhancements, but never 'extra effects', like wounding or flaming, or whatnot.
THW does more dmg becuase it has a bigger weapon. There ya go. No extra feats needed.
SAB does less dmg because it has a smaller weapon, but it gets a better AC out of it. There ya go. Dmg dif? 2-3 pts.
TWF would do what primary weapon dmg is, + weapon + enhancement of off-hand, if it hits. I wouldn't let anything beyond weapon+ enhancements apply....even spec and such feats apply only to the main attack, or you unfairly bias towards one or another style.
If you allow the weapon to keep enhancement damage, consider it a 'reward' for the extra feats that a TWF has to spend to get his shtick. He'll end up doing slightly more DOT then the other styles, if he keeps raising the enhancement bonus on his weapon, but he spent the feats, so that's fair. He's also got two weapons, and he can switch primary hand from one to the other to 'trade off' special effects. Maybe against living things he wants the Wounding effect of one weapons, and then against Undead and Constructs his off hand weapon is built especially for them.
THW guy comes out of this with a little dmg edge over SAB, and he gets his Uber Weapon the fastest, becuase he is not spending on a shield or second weapon.
SAB comes out of this with the best AC of the three, but doing slightly less dmg and having to spend gold on a shield.
TWF comes out of this with the best DOT, but pays for it in feats and having to spend gold on a second weapon. Where a THW guy would blow 200K on a greatsword to get +10, the same amount of money gets a TWF guy 2 +7 weapons, so he's going to have to be choosy about special effects of weapons.
balance for Str and Power attack was thrown off by favoring THW, not solved by it!
the current system of Spend no Feats, get an animated shield, get the uber weapon, and get the highest dmg/blow so blatantly flavors THW it's not funny. At least if the styles all get the same str/PA dmg, the AC discrepency is paid out in gold, and the dmg dif is not so extreme.
Das Bier!