Author Topic: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?  (Read 67760 times)

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oslecamo

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #120 on: April 28, 2011, 05:32:00 PM »
When you need to make complex decisions AT the table, you have a problem. A well designed encounter is already multifaceted and generally pretty complex, if you need to decide what prereqs you're gonna change as you dock out half dozen feats and load a new set in, people are going to balk.

So what do you do when the wizard doesn't get out from his personal plane whitout doing half a dozen of optimizations and an overdose of personal buffs, not to mention the half hour of picking prepared spells, like a lot of people claim it's the "right" way to play wizards? :p

veekie

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #121 on: April 28, 2011, 05:38:45 PM »
That would be one of them things the wizard needs fixing from his end, yarr?
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Rejakor

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #122 on: April 28, 2011, 06:28:20 PM »
Rejakor: You may be interested on this then. It basically allows the fighter to pick and use "strategies", wich range from hiting stuff hard, recruiting powerfull minions, making nearby people scared, following teleports and a bunch of other stuff. Never completed tough.

Meh it looks alright but doesn't really have a coherent flavour and the VP system is a bit.. wonky.  I get the general idea, you want to give the fighter VPs for fighting, but why not just give him some at the start of every fight that has a chance of hurting him (CR-2 or better)?  Or give him a bunch to use at the start of the day and he gets more by winning rolls(special attack actions), being in combat, taking damage, and dealing damage?  It's a bit more flavourful but you end up with fighters trying to do stuff for metagame reasons (i'll get 10 VPs!) rather than in-game reasons, which leads to stupid things like ignoring the casters getting eaten in order to take a meaningless random overturned cart by killing the kobold standing on it.

Also, that fighter still gets 1hitKO'd by most spells that don't target hp.

And he has to spend feats on power attack or size categories or multiclass for precision damage in order to do 'damage people care about'.  I've seen nearly all the fighter fixes.  The one that uses to-hit as a mechanic.  The one that uses Gambits.  BWL's Art of War fighter.  Even the Tome fighter is meh.  People just DO NOT KNOW what a fighter is or does.

Well, looking at the historic things, my take on the fighter is this;

Primary:  The Goddamned Fighter is Hard To Stop.  Conan ducks the sorcerer's lotus powder.  Hercules shrugs off deific curses and giant snakes.  Rasputin gets shot, stabbed, burned, and poisoned.  Despite enduring things that any amount of lesser men would have instantly died from, they somehow get out of it, live, and turn the tables.  That's the Goddamned Fighter right there.

Secondary:  Has cool goddamn toys.  Thor has a flying chariot, immortal goats, a hammer that is a lightning bolt, a belt and gloves of strength, various doodads in his adventures, and a pile of golden super-apples that give him superpowers.  'Yeah, but DnD has magic items' I hear you say!  Yeah, but while wizards use their powers to scry through crystal balls and are constantly making magic items that they then use to put people to sleep or take their hearts or whatever, MYTHOLOGICAL FIGHTERS SPECIFICALLY GET LARGE PARTS OF THEIR ABILITIES THROUGH MAGICAL DEVICES.  And it makes a REALLY great excuse for all the gygax-worshiping weapon-focus loving DMs out there to keep thinking in their black little hearts that Fighters are still just Mundane Real Fighting Men Who Are Realistic if some/lots of their more esoteric powers come from magical items, plus, it makes a lot more sense to idiots who don't understand that Not All Monks Are The Same Monk if different fighters have different abilities if their abilities come from stuff they carry instead of stuff they can just do.  You could totally have a list of various effects and then you'd roll on a table to see what the item was called and what it looks like, ... gurps?... I want to say rolemaster... style!

Secondary:  Can Do Stuff.  Power-eating, power-baking, power-lifting, power-sleeping!  The Goddamned Fighter can do stuff normal people can do, but he does it AWESOME.  He doesn't craft mundane swords for peasants, he goes off and wraps himself in bull-hide under a waterfall for 2 years and then makes a sword that can ONLY BE USED TO SLAY GODS.  Why?  BECAUSE HE'S THE GODDAMN FIGHTER.  He CAN leap that chasm that no-one else can.  He DOES know how to block that sword.  Maybe he's half-god.  Maybe he studied under malayan martial artists.  Maybe he's been in the military for 15 years.  Maybe he's a super gladiator.  Maybe he's a peasant farm boy with a natural talent and more luck than a god of luck and ravens.  I DON'T KNOW.  The point is that he can, and has, in mythology and fiction, and WILL, do these things.  Most of these things are skills.  So he needs to be able to do, at least, martial lore stuff, forging stuff, physical stuff, and leading stuff.  Not every fighter.  Not all at once.  But the Fighter class needs to support those archetypes.

Tertiary:  And of course, like EVERY OTHER DND CHARACTER, a fighter needs to be able to affect combat!  He does so by soaking damage/spells/effects through being goddamn obdurium, and he does so by MAIMING PEOPLE.  Now, as tests have shown, maiming isn't the most effective way to affect the battlefield, so, perhaps, some options to affect things in ways other than hp damage would be a great addition to the Goddamned Fighter.  Why yes, I agree, that would be a great idea!  Thanks for bringing it up!


Also veekie, I really have absolutely no idea what you're arguing.  Complex decisions at the table?  What?  How are my suggestions changing anything at the table?  Where did I advocate giving the fighter floating feats?

Oh, and, your 'styles' idea?  Yeah, that's been tried.  When it wasn't just stupidly underpowered (worse than vanilla fighter), it was, again, BORING AND WEAK.  Being able to move and full attack is not a goddamn t3 class ability, people!  Otherwise the barbarian would be t3!  Whirlwind attack is not a t3 ability!  Otherwise the dervish would be a +2 PrC and fighter/dervishes would be worth a damn!

Also, I don't really understand why 'hard to kill' isn't a central concept.  Or for that matter how wizards have a central concept, since their entire class is 'pick some wildly varying stuff off this list!'.

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #123 on: April 28, 2011, 06:43:41 PM »
Hercules shrugs off deific curses and giant snakes. 

Nitpick: Herakles died because of poison. From something that was all ready dead. It wasn't even a direct dose either (it had been through a centaur's blood stream). And Rasputin died of hypothermia. And Rasputin didn't "turn the tables" on anyone after they started trying to kill him. He kinda just tried to lay low, and failed miserably (considering they kept trying to kill him).



Neither of them are good choices for Fighter examples either. Same deal with Conan (he's more a Warblade than a Fighter or Barbarian).


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Takanaki

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #124 on: April 28, 2011, 06:44:52 PM »

Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with your ideas, do you feel like you could present them in a format that is fit for table? The ideas themselves are wonderful notions, but when it comes down to it i'd like to see how it'd be worded as the proof tends to be in the fine print.

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #125 on: April 28, 2011, 06:49:47 PM »
Moving and full attacking is definitely tier 4 material, but it is a good starting point.

Point systems don't usually fly in normal play, as evidenced by most DMs banning Psionics and Factotums.  So I don't know if a fighter using HPs as fuel is a good idea.  I think the fighter can be raised to tier 3 by using passive abilities derived from existing feat mechanics, but that surpass those feats and scale with level.

How's about minor shapeshift reserve feat's ability to give you temporary HPs as a swift action?  How can I apply that to the fighter?  You get your class level in temporary HPs, and can refresh it by using a swift action.  That would be a good ability to gain at a level, and that level should include a combat feat as well.  So now they can either move and full attack, or stand there and take it.

These kinds of abilities can make the fighter tier 3 without excess note taking, at least in the lower levels.  The appeal of fighter for those who play it is the one character sheet only aspect.  I would never play a fighter because I like having a million things to track, but some players don't like that.

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #126 on: April 28, 2011, 06:52:40 PM »
Moving and full attacking is definitely tier 4 material, but it is a good starting point.

Point systems don't usually fly in normal play, as evidenced by most DMs banning Psionics and Factotums.


Most DMs who ban Psionics need to either read the effing book better or get their heads out of their asses.


Most DMs who ban Factotums have never read the class. Seriously, it's in an obscure little corner of DnD called Dungeonscape's first chapter, an odd place to put a new base class (why they didn't move it into Chapter 2 is beyond me).


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veekie

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #127 on: April 28, 2011, 07:05:30 PM »
Rejakor: You may be interested on this then. It basically allows the fighter to pick and use "strategies", wich range from hiting stuff hard, recruiting powerfull minions, making nearby people scared, following teleports and a bunch of other stuff. Never completed tough.

Meh it looks alright but doesn't really have a coherent flavour and the VP system is a bit.. wonky.  I get the general idea, you want to give the fighter VPs for fighting, but why not just give him some at the start of every fight that has a chance of hurting him (CR-2 or better)?  Or give him a bunch to use at the start of the day and he gets more by winning rolls(special attack actions), being in combat, taking damage, and dealing damage?  It's a bit more flavourful but you end up with fighters trying to do stuff for metagame reasons (i'll get 10 VPs!) rather than in-game reasons, which leads to stupid things like ignoring the casters getting eaten in order to take a meaningless random overturned cart by killing the kobold standing on it.

Also, that fighter still gets 1hitKO'd by most spells that don't target hp.

And he has to spend feats on power attack or size categories or multiclass for precision damage in order to do 'damage people care about'.  I've seen nearly all the fighter fixes.  The one that uses to-hit as a mechanic.  The one that uses Gambits.  BWL's Art of War fighter.  Even the Tome fighter is meh.  People just DO NOT KNOW what a fighter is or does.

Well, looking at the historic things, my take on the fighter is this;

Primary:  The Goddamned Fighter is Hard To Stop.  Conan ducks the sorcerer's lotus powder.  Hercules shrugs off deific curses and giant snakes.  Rasputin gets shot, stabbed, burned, and poisoned.  Despite enduring things that any amount of lesser men would have instantly died from, they somehow get out of it, live, and turn the tables.  That's the Goddamned Fighter right there.

Secondary:  Has cool goddamn toys.  Thor has a flying chariot, immortal goats, a hammer that is a lightning bolt, a belt and gloves of strength, various doodads in his adventures, and a pile of golden super-apples that give him superpowers.  'Yeah, but DnD has magic items' I hear you say!  Yeah, but while wizards use their powers to scry through crystal balls and are constantly making magic items that they then use to put people to sleep or take their hearts or whatever, MYTHOLOGICAL FIGHTERS SPECIFICALLY GET LARGE PARTS OF THEIR ABILITIES THROUGH MAGICAL DEVICES.  And it makes a REALLY great excuse for all the gygax-worshiping weapon-focus loving DMs out there to keep thinking in their black little hearts that Fighters are still just Mundane Real Fighting Men Who Are Realistic if some/lots of their more esoteric powers come from magical items, plus, it makes a lot more sense to idiots who don't understand that Not All Monks Are The Same Monk if different fighters have different abilities if their abilities come from stuff they carry instead of stuff they can just do.  You could totally have a list of various effects and then you'd roll on a table to see what the item was called and what it looks like, ... gurps?... I want to say rolemaster... style!

Secondary:  Can Do Stuff.  Power-eating, power-baking, power-lifting, power-sleeping!  The Goddamned Fighter can do stuff normal people can do, but he does it AWESOME.  He doesn't craft mundane swords for peasants, he goes off and wraps himself in bull-hide under a waterfall for 2 years and then makes a sword that can ONLY BE USED TO SLAY GODS.  Why?  BECAUSE HE'S THE GODDAMN FIGHTER.  He CAN leap that chasm that no-one else can.  He DOES know how to block that sword.  Maybe he's half-god.  Maybe he studied under malayan martial artists.  Maybe he's been in the military for 15 years.  Maybe he's a super gladiator.  Maybe he's a peasant farm boy with a natural talent and more luck than a god of luck and ravens.  I DON'T KNOW.  The point is that he can, and has, in mythology and fiction, and WILL, do these things.  Most of these things are skills.  So he needs to be able to do, at least, martial lore stuff, forging stuff, physical stuff, and leading stuff.  Not every fighter.  Not all at once.  But the Fighter class needs to support those archetypes.

Tertiary:  And of course, like EVERY OTHER DND CHARACTER, a fighter needs to be able to affect combat!  He does so by soaking damage/spells/effects through being goddamn obdurium, and he does so by MAIMING PEOPLE.  Now, as tests have shown, maiming isn't the most effective way to affect the battlefield, so, perhaps, some options to affect things in ways other than hp damage would be a great addition to the Goddamned Fighter.  Why yes, I agree, that would be a great idea!  Thanks for bringing it up!
Try something like this for high level dodging, it'd be fun. Or this for mid level feats of athletics

As for the equipment stuff, really, don't bother with CRAFTING them. Make the weapons and armor part and parcel of the class features like the Soulknife(I know, unfortunate comparison) and Kensai. The rest can be external magic, but the weapon at least, is integral.

Quote
Oh, and, your 'styles' idea?  Yeah, that's been tried.  When it wasn't just stupidly underpowered (worse than vanilla fighter), it was, again, BORING AND WEAK.  Being able to move and full attack is not a goddamn t3 class ability, people!  Otherwise the barbarian would be t3!  Whirlwind attack is not a t3 ability!  Otherwise the dervish would be a +2 PrC and fighter/dervishes would be worth a damn!
Example style(for clarifications), you'd get one every 3 levels or so:
Two Weapon Fighting
1: Combined Attack - As an attack action, add your off hand weapon damage to your primary weapon attack. You cannot attack with your off-hand weapon while using Combined Attack.
3: Blade Wall - Treat your off-hand weapon as a shield(AC +2), apply any weapon enhancement bonus as an enhancement bonus to shield AC from that weapon. You must be able to attack with that weapon and not have used it to attack this round.
5: Two-Weapon Flurry -  When you make a Combined Attack you can substitute an attack to target a 5ft square for a Reflex save (DC 10+1/2level+Dex) to halve the damage.
7: Blade to Every Side - Uncanny Dodge.
Higher than that would require actual effort to come up with though :P

Quote
Also, I don't really understand why 'hard to kill' isn't a central concept.  Or for that matter how wizards have a central concept, since their entire class is 'pick some wildly varying stuff off this list!'.
Indeed they don't, thats why they're a strong class, not a good class.
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oslecamo

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #128 on: April 28, 2011, 07:07:12 PM »
Rejakor: Then you missed Turnabout Technique, wich blocks pretty much anything. As for how you gain VP, the problem is basically geting something that isn't "disguised spells", neither is easily spammable (tie up troll and beat him as much as needed). If you have any better idea by all means write something concrete instead of loose ideas.

Speaking of wich...

Hercules shrugs off deific curses and giant snakes. 

Nitpick: Herakles died because of poison. From something that was all ready dead. It wasn't even a direct dose either (it had been through a centaur's blood stream). And Rasputin died of hypothermia. And Rasputin didn't "turn the tables" on anyone after they started trying to kill him. He kinda just tried to lay low, and failed miserably (considering they kept trying to kill him).

Then we also have:
-Heracles had to do all the 12 labors stuff because his Will save sucked so much he was charmed into slaughtering his own family.
-Acquiles, greatest greek fighter of them all, running from a wimpy water elemental, and eventually being killed by an arrow from coward wimp.
-Lu Bu, greatest warrior of the Three Kingdoms, leting himself be cornered like a rat and then either betrayed by his own men or got himself so drunk he was easily captured.
-300 heroic spartans slaughtered because they were... outflanked.

Really, mythological fighters had it pretty hard. They weren't really hard to kill. They actually burned out quite fast compared to magicians who knew how to bide their time or rogue-types like Odysseus who knew when to run and when to put other people between them and danger (sacrificed all of his companions, but hey, managed to return home alive!)

King Artur was awesome, but when all was said and done, Merlin was both long before and long after him. Not to mention Artur basically got gibbed because he insisted on geting laid with every woman he found.

Saxony

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #129 on: April 28, 2011, 07:18:17 PM »
I like hard to kill and I like trading debuffs for HP damage. I really do. That sort of idea could be a great class.

Unfortunately that's pulling class features out of the void and then slapping "Fighter" on it, while it has nothing to do with the actual Fighter class in the PHB. Thus, as has been said before, if you're going to start from scratch, why not just Warblade?

We're given the task of taking some bonus feats and vague fighting capabilities and turning them into Tier 3. Because we could make an arbitrary amount of Tier 3 classes that do "fighting things" and then label them "Fighter" but it's unsatisfying.

I don't think the Fighter class, as presented in the PHB, is scalable up to Tier 3 while remaining recognizable. We headed into swappable feats territory and then the relevant bookkeeping point was brought up, so swappable feats doesn't work. What else can be done with the bonus feats? Perhaps just handing out free Exotic Weapon Proficiencies (plus the bonus feats) would also be good.

I think the whole point of the PHB Fighter is to be incredibly bland and vague. You take the class if you want to be good at fighting. That's it. Giving you "Fighting related" feats is how the PHB Fighter class makes you good at fighting. The PHB Fighter class is only supposed to make you good at fighting. I don't mean to say Wizards of the Coast fucked up and we were supposed to have Hercules or Goku and instead got Soldier Dude because it was designed poorly. I think Wizards of the Coast actually designed the class to be Soldier Dude and nothing else. Take another class if you want to do something other than fighting.

My guess is nothing can be done to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class while remaining recognizable to what the PHB Fighter is... Soldier Dude, not Legendary Fighter from Mythology, just Soldier Dude. Soldier Dude is not Tier 3.

Thoughts? You only have to respond to the bolded parts.
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Mixster

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #130 on: April 28, 2011, 07:28:05 PM »
What if you essentially just gestalted Paladin, Fighter and Ranger into one class? Wouldn't that sort of solve the problem?
Monks are pretty much the best designed class ever.

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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #131 on: April 28, 2011, 07:34:48 PM »
What if you essentially just gestalted Paladin, Fighter and Ranger into one class? Wouldn't that sort of solve the problem?
Or maybe just add fighters bonus feats to the other mundane classes and scrap fighter?
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Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
« Reply #132 on: April 28, 2011, 07:40:52 PM »
The Fighter isn't supposed to be a guard or a wrestler - he's supposed to be The Goddamned Fighter.

He's Conan, and Hercules, and Gilgamesh, and he's all of those goddamn things before he hits level 20, because comparable Wizard figures from mythology, Merlin, Ahriman, etc, with a few exceptions, rarely seem in DnD terms to get above 12th level.

Here's what the Fighter needs to do in order to fulfil that archetype.

1.  He needs to be immune to things.  Iron Heart Surge-like effect comes online at level 3, because that is when Wizards get wide-area save-or-sucks and individually targeted save-or-dies.  He needs to be immune to SO MANY THINGS.  He needs to be able to turn being blinded into hp damage, and rip through motherfucking illusions with his BARE HANDS.

2.  He needs to be able to monkeywrench things.  Spellcaster's whipping out components?  NONE OF THAT.  Beholder is trying to disintegrate the rogue?  NONE OF THAT.  Sea monster's eating his girlfriend?  NONE.  OF.  FUCKING.  THAT.

3.  He needs to have magic items.  Not buy them.  Have them.  Does he forge them?  Does he steal them from gods?  Do people just literally HAND him stuff?  I don't know!  But he needs to be handed items, or possibly pick them off some sort of list, that give him things like luck bonuses to saving throws, flight, etherealness, burrowing, insight bonus to AC, Fireball as a swift action str+con mod times per day, energy immunity, planar bound servants, and EVEN MORE FUCKING IMMUNITIES.

4.  He needs some Goddamn skillpoints.  A Goddamned Fighter is specifically and explicitly a master of physical movement, a student of war, a tactical genius, knowledgeable about monsters, and either knows enough about weapons and armour to clean them properly, or enough to forge ILHAROS, HAMMER OF THE GODS, using only random rocks and sheer CHUTZPAH.

5.  Hit points.  He not only needs more of them than ANYONE ELSE, he needs to both regenerate them and use them as a resource.  Blinded?  Nope, that's 10hp off.  Petrified?  Nah-ah, that's 20hp off.  Frozen?  Immune.  Dazed?  Hah, as if.  5hp.  Power attack for 500hp?  Weapon damage only, i'm afraid.  So that's 6hp.  So, what, you're going to attack the buffed wizard for some piddly damage and miss anyway?  Nope.  10hp to ignore miss chances, 20hp to ignore magical sources of AC, 30hp to add my level to damage twice... yep.  Your GODDAMN WIZARD IS DEAD.  'CAUSE I'M THE GODDAMNED FIGHTER, BITCH!

* (The barbarian has a bit less hp, but regens it REALLY FAST.  He's basically a Troll.)

6.  Leader of Men.  You can take your Goddamned leadership feat and SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS.  A Goddamned Fighter not ONLY can gather a large army from seemingly NOTHING if he has some kind of goal that NEEDS an army, he gives that army all KINDS of STUPID bonuses.  A troop of twenty crossbowmen on a hillside can't even SCRATCH a dragon, but a troop of twenty crossbowmen with a GODDAMNED FIGHTER in charge can not only feather that goddamned dragon from it's scaly nose all the way to it's scaly arse, they look GODDAMNED STYLISH doing it!



So for the love of pete.  Please stop arguing about whether you should be giving the fighter a +2 or a +4 bonus on special attack actions.  Because GIVING A MINOR NUMERICAL BONUS TO THE FIGHTER CLASS DOES NOT AND WILL NOT FIX THE BASIC DESIGN FLAWS INHERENT IN IT'S DESIGN.

Oh, and also.

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #133 on: April 28, 2011, 07:41:22 PM »
    Getting back to the original question:

    It would take feats that are as good as class features and fighter only.  Then we are talking about a fighter with class features, which kind of turns the whole class on its ear.

    Example:  Dungeon Crasher is a reason to take fighter beyond 2nd level.  Dungeon Crasher is a class feature, not a feat.

    At some point, it stops being a fighter, so Saxony and many others hit the nail on the head.

    I personally feel that the designers were going for a class that Joe Schmoe, my friend who doesn't play rpgs, could make in a minute and play.  This is evidenced by the sucky vanilla feat support.  The designers actually felt the need to limit your feat choices, as a means to this end.

    That said, I still think that the Fighter concept could be made a Tier 3 with simple passive scalable class features derived from existing feat mechanics, in addition to the feats it already gets.  Someone proposed the idea of swappable feats.  I would like to discourage that to, because it requires effort on the part of the player to track those feats.  This new Fighter class should be easy on the brain and the paper.

    veekie

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #134 on: April 28, 2011, 07:49:06 PM »
    What if you essentially just gestalted Paladin, Fighter and Ranger into one class? Wouldn't that sort of solve the problem?
    Might not, the Paladin can stand on its own, conceptually speaking, as a martial bent of the cleric. The Ranger likewise as a martial bent of the druid. You'd wind up with Paladin, Ranger and Random Mook #892
    The mind transcends the body.
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    Please get it a blanket.

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    [/spoiler]

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    Bester

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #135 on: April 28, 2011, 07:59:25 PM »

    I do whatever I just did to fuck you again.  Now, Mr. Fighter, please use iron heart surge again...oh you can't!

    3. Get a feat out of your many to get an ancestral weapon feat or item familiar feat. Add a legacy weapon. Result: a total +10 weapon with all kinds of added goodies and intelligent item abilities. Rejoice.
    I only have 6 Character Feats.  The rest are fighter feats.  SUNDER SUNDER SUNDER CATS HO!  Expect the DM to have to coddle you if you take this route.


    I only have 6 Character feats.  You are requiring me to pick up all these feats.  knowledge devotion + 2 Skill points + MAD must dump INT= lame.


    I want to play a fighter, a base core class.  We are trying to make it Tier 3 out of the box, No?

    THE FIGHTER IS JUST FINE AS IT IS, ABLE TO PROVIDE ANYTHING YOU NEED FOR WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO.

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    Provided you have every splat book and are an optimizer.  Therein lies the problem.

    oslecamo

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #136 on: April 28, 2011, 08:08:50 PM »
    What if you essentially just gestalted Paladin, Fighter and Ranger into one class? Wouldn't that sort of solve the problem?
    Might not, the Paladin can stand on its own, conceptually speaking, as a martial bent of the cleric. The Ranger likewise as a martial bent of the druid. You'd wind up with Paladin, Ranger and Random Mook #892

    What about fighter, CW samurai, swashbuckler, monk and Soulnkive? You get your auto-leveling weapon, plenty of feats, all good saves, can fight if you're fully equiped or caught naked and a bunch of other random abilities that are still fighterish.

    Sinfire Titan

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #137 on: April 28, 2011, 08:11:43 PM »
    Then we also have:
    -Heracles had to do all the 12 labors stuff because his Will save sucked so much he was charmed into slaughtering his own family

    To give the guy credit, his aunt hated him. And by aunt, I mea Hera.

    Quote
    -Acquiles, greatest greek fighter of them all, running from a wimpy water elemental, and eventually being killed by an arrow from coward wimp.

    No argument here.

    Quote
    -Lu Bu, greatest warrior of the Three Kingdoms, leting himself be cornered like a rat and then either betrayed by his own men or got himself so drunk he was easily captured.

    And his card sucks.

    Quote
    -300 heroic spartans slaughtered because they were... outflanked.

    Well, them and about 6000 other Greek soldiers.

    Quote
    Really, mythological fighters had it pretty hard. They weren't really hard to kill. They actually burned out quite fast compared to magicians who knew how to bide their time or rogue-types like Odysseus who knew when to run and when to put other people between them and danger (sacrificed all of his companions, but hey, managed to return home alive!)

    And Circe out-lived even Odysseus, didn't she?




    Case and point: Mythical heroes are bad role models.


    [spoiler][/spoiler]

    veekie

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #138 on: April 28, 2011, 08:15:02 PM »
    Could be a fairly usable T4. Would need some fluff work to stitch it all together though.

    As for heroes, most of them don't really survive to old age unless they're caster types. Even demigods. Heck, ESPECIALLY demigods(thats what you get for being half god when gods are screwing around).
    The mind transcends the body.
    It's also a little cold because of that.
    Please get it a blanket.

    I wish I could read your mind,
    I can barely read mine.

    "Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. At 2:15, it begins rolling up characters."

    [spoiler]
    "Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~"
    -Ibuki Suika, on overkill

    To sumbolaion diakoneto moi, basilisk ouranionon.
    Epigenentheto, apoleia keraune hos timeis pteirei.
    Hekatonkatis kai khiliakis astrapsato.
    Khiliarkhou Astrape!
    [/spoiler]

    There is no higher price than 'free'.

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    snakeman830

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    Re: What would it take to make the Fighter a Tier 3 class?
    « Reply #139 on: April 28, 2011, 08:20:04 PM »
    Quote
    -Lu Bu, greatest warrior of the Three Kingdoms, leting himself be cornered like a rat and then either betrayed by his own men or got himself so drunk he was easily captured.

    And his card sucks.
    Although to be fair, nowadays it might as well be a 4/3 unblockable with haste.  A little overcosted at 6 mana, but not too badly.
    I am constantly amazed by how many DM's ban Tomb of Battle.  The book doesn't even exist!

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