One thing you could try is the
Mind's Eye expanded psychic warrior. There's an alternate class feature there called Soulbound Weapon. The psychic warrior gives up his 2nd level bonus feat to gain what is essentially a better version of the soulknife's signature feature. Doubly so because the soulbound weapon can be of any type (bow, mace, spiked chain, etc). Plus you'd still have the psychic warrior's manifesting ability.
As far as the soulknife directly, one of the reasons the class itself is weak is because the mind blade gains abilities and enhancements at a slower rate compared to the rate another character would be able to afford the same things on a standard weapon. It could be argued then, that taking away that feature and forcing the soulknife to pay gold to have their mind blade enhanced would actually strengthen the class. However, this isn't particularly fun or in keeping with the class's flavor.
Fixes that I'd suggest for consideration to make the soulknife a little sharper (
) would be the following:
- Full BAB.
- Drop charging a psychic strike to a swift action instead of a move action.
- Allow the strike to affect every attack made in a given round (perhaps requiring the soulknife to expend his focus. It'd be good to give him something else to do with it besides sit on it for Speed of Thought). Just be careful of Knife to the Soul interaction here.
- Accelerate the mind blade enhancements by a level or two. We'll probably end up with some dead levels here, but that's not really a big deal.
- As an alternative to full BAB, allow the soulknife to expend his focus on a bonus to hit, or to make an extra attack in a round, or something similar.
I'd probably only use two or three of those, but that depends on how far up you want to pull the soulknife. The class is in the unique position of having a psionic focus without having to worry about manifesting or power points. However, as written, it doesn't really do anything with it besides park it in Speed of Thought. Coming up with a couple of new and different ways to use it adds some strategy that the soulknife otherwise lacks. If you want to lean more heavily on doing that, you can fit Psionic Meditation (become focused as a move action) as an early bonus feat.