Just a thought, I can think of no reason I would give up my swift action as an initiator, to remove someones Dex bonus to AC. At higher levels it goes doubly so. Raging Mongoose and such are much better.
I agree fully. Looking at this in more depth, it was a bad idea.
If you were going Swashbuckler, I would replace White Raven (a team-work oriented discipline) with Shadow Blade or Desert Wind, both of which are more disposed to a swashy feel, and just drop Stone Dragon altogether.
I had toyed with Desert Wind, although I wanted to take out the supernatural maneuvers, because I wanted a more "mundane" swashbuckler with some good ToB options. One think I like about the warblade is that it's the only martial adept that doesn't seem to use supernatural maneuvers. So, I looked through both Shadow Hand and Desert Wind and checked out what they offered if I removed any supernatural or [teleportation] maneuvers (oddly enough, the [teleportation] maneuvers aren't explicitly flagged as supernatural).
Shadow Hand still offers some decent maneuvers and stances, espescially from a flavor point of view. Coupled with some other good abilities, it could work nicely. Desert Wind, on the other hand, has exactly four non-supernatural maneuvers ranging from 1st to 6th level. The 6th level maneuver has a prereq of 3 DW maneuvers, so you'd have to take all four of them to get it. This makes me iffy on including it at all. I don't want to allow the supernatural DW maneuvers, because I don't picture swashbucklers running around lighting their blades on fire, unleashing cones of fire, and charging eneimies, leaving a trail of fire behind.
I totally agree with dropping Stone Dragon, and I'm iffy on White Raven. I guess I tend to picture swashbucklers are more of loners, or at least, not battlt tacticians. Dropping both of these and adding in a nerfed version of Shadow Hand would leave me room to simply add in more class features without having to remove too many.
Insightful Strike would be best replacing one of the other +int to X abilities, perhaps Battle Clarity.
I don't remember off the top of my head which ability Battle Clarity is. If I drop both SD and WR, would it be too potent to throw in Insightful Strike at 1st level? I guess I see it as important to get Weapon Finesse and Canny Defense at first level, so adding IS on top of that is probably too much. You get Uncanny Dodge at 2nd level, which is probably good enough on it's own. Perhaps I should follow the CW swashbuckler's lead, and give out IS at 3rd level.
Swashbucklers should also get a good Ref. Save, I feel.
I had thought of this. If I give out a good Reflex save, I'm not sure what to do about their Fort save. Obviously, if they aren't giving something up in return, then I should proabably just swap them, although I don't consider it an even trade. I feel Fort is a much stronger save than Reflex. Although, given an even swap of Fort and Reflex, I feel I could throw Evasion in at a fairly low level (4th or lower) and it would be a fair trade.
Wow. That's a lot more brainstorming that I was imagining. Any thoughts or ideas? With as many changes being suggested, I may just end up reposting this as a new class heavily based on the warblade as opposed to a class variant. We'll have to see how it shapes up.
