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PrCs are pretty much worthless in Pathfinder due to archetypes.
An Autistic Analysis on Dungeons and Dragons 3.x Classes
- Thread starter Adamska
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Couldn't agree more. Between most classes' natural abilities and the archetypes letting you play mix-and-match, I wonder why they bothered with PrCs at all.
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Archivist for sure. That class can get stupidly broken if played by a smart enough person.
Kyria the Great
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Quiet certainly a Tier 1 or even Tier 0 class if you have a real pro handling them.
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So, it's been about half a year since the last book was covered, but the thread's back. At least for a little bit. I'll be looking at the classes in Stormwrack along with those from both Sandstorm and Frostburn at some point.
Stormwrack
Stormwrack is a book about water. Very, very large amounts of water. It's the go-to book for any seafaring campaigns. ...the book's pretty straightforward with what it's about, there's really not much to say. It's an unimportant detail, but this also happens to be the book that gave us the hadozee, AKA the monkeys with flying squirrel wings. Just thought I'd point it out.
Well... we're not off to a good start. Here we have a paladin prestige class that doesn't progress any of your paladin spellcasting. It doesn't increase the damage or uses of smite evil, nor does it increase your turning level. But hey, at least it progresses your (extremely weak) lay on hands ability.
In exchange for this you gain some rather mediocre abilities. You can float and swim without penalty while wearing heavy armor. You can spend a turn undead attempt to add a whopping 2d6, or 4d6 at fifth level, to your damage... unless, of course, you're not in a body of water in which case you'll only deal half of that. You ignore penalties for using slashing weapons when swimming wow.
Last but not least, we have the capstone for this class. After taking all five levels of the class, you may also use your turn undead ability on evil water creatures. Additionally, any evil creatures or undead within 30ft take 4d6 damage while good creatures are healed by the same amount, which only works when you and those within range are in contact with the water. Crap.
Not only are they mechanically bland, their fluff is boring as well. Their whole shtick is that they're defenders of the Aventi (basically water breathing humans)... and that's it. Not even the fluff is interesting. As inefficient as it is to take a full 20 levels of paladin rather than multiclassing, it's still better than taking levels in knight of the pearl. Even in the heavily water-based campaigns Stormwrack is based around this class is worthless.
Rating: Garbage
Do you like the idea of a playing a class that is less than average when on board a ship and near useless when not on board one? Do you want to play a somehow worse version of the dread pirate PrC from Complete Adventurer? Do you think that playing a straight swashbuckler with the leadership feat isn't flavorful enough? If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then this is the class for you.
At first glance, you might think the legendary captain has value when you notice the bonuses to your leadership score on the class's table. Then you'll read the description of the feature and learn that it only affects your followers and has no impact on your cohort. Followers are useless for anything beyond flavor. Not extending the bonus to your cohort makes the ability pointless.
Of the two class features that are usable when not on a vessel, you have the bonus to your leadership score for followers and your ability that allows you to re-roll a die you've rolled once a day (twice a day at 7th level). Everything else to do with the class, though? You have to be on a ship to make use of any of it. Yeah... you have to be on a boat to be able to use the majority of your features, most of which seem to be pretty weak anyways.
Examples of the wonderful powers you gain when on at sea include but are not limited to: A bonus to spot checks and profession (sailor) checks, a slight boost to your ship's speed, an extra die to damage with siege weapons (usually meaning something like an piddling 1d6 or 1d8 ) and, my personal favorite, a mass cure light wounds effect for all of your crew that takes 10 minutes, which you get at character level 14 AT THE EARLIEST. The one thing that might be useful is the ability to use your own saving throws against anything that affects your ship, which actually might be quite nifty in the right situation. Not nifty enough to redeem the rest of the ship-based part of class being absolute ass, mind you, but there you go.
Now, even if your captain powers were actually good you'd still lose the means of properly utilizing them the moment you disembark from your vessel. All but two of the features from this class practically cease to exist when you aren't on a boat. No matter how heavily sea-based your campaign is, there will be points where you have to leave your ship. Know that you'll spend many a session being useless while everyone else contributes due to them actually being able to make use of their class features. Whenever you aren't at sea, taking ten levels of legendary pirate is the equivalent to taking ten levels of one of the NPC classes.
You could write up a character that was cursed to never leave his ship and the class still wouldn't be worth it. If you absolutely must prestige into a pirate themed PrC, and I can't believe I'm saying this, you would have a much better time choosing dread pirate.
Rating: Garbage
Leviathan hunter should really be called monster hunter instead as you fight more than just sea monsters despite the name and fluff. It's intended to be taken by rangers, and yet it doesn't advance your ranger spellcasting or your animal companion. Here we go again...
It's limited due to most everything to do with the class only working on aberrations, animals, dragons, or magical beasts. You gain a bonus to knowledge checks regarding the previously mentioned creatures. You can take trophies from creatures and gain a minor bonus to your AC and saving throws (+4 at most) versus the same kind of creature you took the trophy from. Good luck having many encounters with the same kind of creature, by the way.
The main thing you get is a slight boost to damage (+2d6 at most) with every melee attack you make... against a huge or larger aberration, animal, dragon, or magical beast. There's a 2nd level ranger spell called "Fell the Greatest Foe" (thanks, @Dunsparce) that does this better without being limited to certain creature types. Last, but not least, you get what paladins get at 3rd level: immunity to fear. Leviathan hunter doesn't have anything that stands out and honestly seems very "meh."
Leviathan hunter is bad. It isn't migraine-inducing bad like the last two, mind you. Just bad.
Rating: Garbage
Ah... yet another prestige class that is a complete downgrade to the class intended to enter it. Let's say you decided to go rogue 10/scarlet corsair 10 rather than rogue 20. You lose 2d6 sneak attack damage, get 4 skill points less per level and lose three of your special abilities (AKA bonus feats). What do you get in return? +2 BAB, Improved Feint (which you could pick up with a special ability anyways), feinting as a free action every 2d4 rounds (later 1d4 rounds) and a bunch of other underpowered trash.
Other great gems include a minor dodge bonus when on ships and the ability to inflict the very weak "Shaken" condition (which is a –2 penalty to all attack rolls, saves, skill checks, and ability checks for those unaware). The fluff describes scarlet corsairs as violent scumbags who "revel in combat and slaughter." If you want to be a violent scumbag who revels in combat in slaughter, be an assassin instead. Adam covered it already and its way better than this.
I'm aware of a single person who wanted to play this class and he was kicked out of his group for being a sexual deviant. That should tell you all you need to know.
Rating: Garbage
Sea witches are crazy assholes that like to wreak havoc on the high seas by either using water powers or summoning sea monsters. Also, important thing to note is that they can be male or female despite the fact that they're called witches. Wizards and sorcerers both (and sha'irs from the Dragon Compendium too, I guess) can enter the class, though sorcerers are probably a better fit due to the whole "no other class features aside from a familiar" thing.
The entry requirements are easy to meet. You have to be chaotic, be able to cast certain spells and speak aquan. The only real price to pay is that you lose two caster levels, which will still let you gain access to 9th level spells even if you're a sorcerer. You can create giant whirlpools that get bigger and stronger as you level up in the class. Later on, you gain the ability to summon monsters than range from simple things like dire sharks to crazy stuff like scyllans (a scyllan being the creature on the front of the book).
As a capstone, you can conjure up what is pretty much just a straight up ghost ship. Frankly the capstone isn't that useful as you'll most likely have the ability to teleport anywhere you want to go anyways at this point, but at the same time... it's a fucking ghost ship.
Not amazing, but not bad either. You could definitely do a lot worse.
Rating: Decent
Stormcasters like storms. Who would've thunk it? When it comes to the entry it's a pretty similar story to the sea witch, though druids can enter stormcaster as well. Another thing to note is that, though it was most likely unintended, clerics who take the storm domain also technically qualify for the class. Since it doesn't progress your animal companion, wild shape or turn/rebuke undead level it's probably not a good idea to go in as a cleric or druid. Doesn't mean that you can't, just that it's not the most efficient route for the two of them. No such problems with going in with a wizard or sorcerer, though.
Nonetheless, you'll lose a single caster level which is basically nothing. Stormcasters start off quite strong. One of the very first things you can do is force everyone within 30 ft to succeed on a fortitude saving throw or be stunned for one round. At fifth level, any enemy damaged by an electricity spell has to succeed on a fortitude saving throw or be stunned. Stunning's the name of the game with stormcasters. As you level up, you'll gain some minor buffs like resistances and boosts to caster level with certain spells. Eventually, you'll be able to control the winds and storms around you and just completely ignore effects that blow you away or knock you down.
Any spellcasters that want to do more than just blast electricity magic should look elsewhere. Those that do, though, should definitely consider taking this.
Rating: Good
We made it to the last PrC in the book, the wavekeeper. Not much to say about these guys fluff-wise as they're pretty much just druids, and occasionally rangers, that are all about the ocean instead of forests and other land-based biomes. As a side note, I would like to point out that I had to re-write a large chunk of this since I don't know as much about druids or rangers as since I've never played either of them. It's thanks to @Dunsparce that the class's rating is higher than it originally was.
You lose a single level of spellcasting and one level for determining how strong your animal companion is. It's a bit unfortunate that you don't progress your wild shape, but non-wild shape focused druids won't be bothered much by this and rangers won't be bothered whatsoever. The trade off is that you can wild shape into into an elemental (small, medium, and large at wavekeeper 7, huge at wavekeeper 9) much earlier than you could as a straight druid. Rangers don't get the ability to transform into a water elemental even with the wild shape variant, so this pretty damn neato for those guys. There's more going in the class, though that's it regarding wild shape or anything resembling it.
Like the stormcaster the wavekeeper gets nice stuff right up front. At first level you choose from one of four domains (Blackwater, Ocean, Storm, or Water) and then add the chosen domain's spells to your spell list, though rangers won't benefit as much as druids. They aren't the absolute best domains out there. At the same time, you're basically getting a few extra spells for free. You get some less significant additions like swim speeds and water breathing that are rendered redundant to druids because of that whole "wild shape" thing. Doesn't mean that rangers can't make use of them.
You also get some okay abilities where you can control the water around you, letting you mess with water currents and strike enemies with water waves. As a capstone you can summon an elder water elemental. Druids have summon nature's ally IX which kinda' makes this ability pointless. On the other hand, rangers don't, meaning that they'll find this much, much more useful.
Wild shapers should ignore this. Every other druid and ranger that wants to do ocean stuff, feel free to take levels in this.
Rating: Good
Tier List (Stormwrack)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: N/A
Good Classes: Stormcaster, Wavekeeper
Decent Classes: Sea Witch
Playable Classes: N/A
Garbage Classes: Knight of the Pearl, Legendary Captain, Leviathan Hunter, Scarlet Corsair
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): N/A
Like many books in 3.5, Stormwrack has a little bit of garbage and a little bit of gold. It's unfortunate that martials don't benefit much (if at all) from any of these classes, but that's the Monte Cook way. On the bright side Sandstorm and Frostburn did a much better job on helping out martials from what I've read. So, see you then.
Stormwrack
Stormwrack is a book about water. Very, very large amounts of water. It's the go-to book for any seafaring campaigns. ...the book's pretty straightforward with what it's about, there's really not much to say. It's an unimportant detail, but this also happens to be the book that gave us the hadozee, AKA the monkeys with flying squirrel wings. Just thought I'd point it out.
Knight of the Pearl
Well... we're not off to a good start. Here we have a paladin prestige class that doesn't progress any of your paladin spellcasting. It doesn't increase the damage or uses of smite evil, nor does it increase your turning level. But hey, at least it progresses your (extremely weak) lay on hands ability.
In exchange for this you gain some rather mediocre abilities. You can float and swim without penalty while wearing heavy armor. You can spend a turn undead attempt to add a whopping 2d6, or 4d6 at fifth level, to your damage... unless, of course, you're not in a body of water in which case you'll only deal half of that. You ignore penalties for using slashing weapons when swimming wow.
Last but not least, we have the capstone for this class. After taking all five levels of the class, you may also use your turn undead ability on evil water creatures. Additionally, any evil creatures or undead within 30ft take 4d6 damage while good creatures are healed by the same amount, which only works when you and those within range are in contact with the water. Crap.
Not only are they mechanically bland, their fluff is boring as well. Their whole shtick is that they're defenders of the Aventi (basically water breathing humans)... and that's it. Not even the fluff is interesting. As inefficient as it is to take a full 20 levels of paladin rather than multiclassing, it's still better than taking levels in knight of the pearl. Even in the heavily water-based campaigns Stormwrack is based around this class is worthless.
Rating: Garbage
Legendary Captain
Do you like the idea of a playing a class that is less than average when on board a ship and near useless when not on board one? Do you want to play a somehow worse version of the dread pirate PrC from Complete Adventurer? Do you think that playing a straight swashbuckler with the leadership feat isn't flavorful enough? If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then this is the class for you.
At first glance, you might think the legendary captain has value when you notice the bonuses to your leadership score on the class's table. Then you'll read the description of the feature and learn that it only affects your followers and has no impact on your cohort. Followers are useless for anything beyond flavor. Not extending the bonus to your cohort makes the ability pointless.
Of the two class features that are usable when not on a vessel, you have the bonus to your leadership score for followers and your ability that allows you to re-roll a die you've rolled once a day (twice a day at 7th level). Everything else to do with the class, though? You have to be on a ship to make use of any of it. Yeah... you have to be on a boat to be able to use the majority of your features, most of which seem to be pretty weak anyways.
Examples of the wonderful powers you gain when on at sea include but are not limited to: A bonus to spot checks and profession (sailor) checks, a slight boost to your ship's speed, an extra die to damage with siege weapons (usually meaning something like an piddling 1d6 or 1d8 ) and, my personal favorite, a mass cure light wounds effect for all of your crew that takes 10 minutes, which you get at character level 14 AT THE EARLIEST. The one thing that might be useful is the ability to use your own saving throws against anything that affects your ship, which actually might be quite nifty in the right situation. Not nifty enough to redeem the rest of the ship-based part of class being absolute ass, mind you, but there you go.
Now, even if your captain powers were actually good you'd still lose the means of properly utilizing them the moment you disembark from your vessel. All but two of the features from this class practically cease to exist when you aren't on a boat. No matter how heavily sea-based your campaign is, there will be points where you have to leave your ship. Know that you'll spend many a session being useless while everyone else contributes due to them actually being able to make use of their class features. Whenever you aren't at sea, taking ten levels of legendary pirate is the equivalent to taking ten levels of one of the NPC classes.
You could write up a character that was cursed to never leave his ship and the class still wouldn't be worth it. If you absolutely must prestige into a pirate themed PrC, and I can't believe I'm saying this, you would have a much better time choosing dread pirate.
Rating: Garbage
Leviathan Hunter
Leviathan hunter should really be called monster hunter instead as you fight more than just sea monsters despite the name and fluff. It's intended to be taken by rangers, and yet it doesn't advance your ranger spellcasting or your animal companion. Here we go again...
It's limited due to most everything to do with the class only working on aberrations, animals, dragons, or magical beasts. You gain a bonus to knowledge checks regarding the previously mentioned creatures. You can take trophies from creatures and gain a minor bonus to your AC and saving throws (+4 at most) versus the same kind of creature you took the trophy from. Good luck having many encounters with the same kind of creature, by the way.
The main thing you get is a slight boost to damage (+2d6 at most) with every melee attack you make... against a huge or larger aberration, animal, dragon, or magical beast. There's a 2nd level ranger spell called "Fell the Greatest Foe" (thanks, @Dunsparce) that does this better without being limited to certain creature types. Last, but not least, you get what paladins get at 3rd level: immunity to fear. Leviathan hunter doesn't have anything that stands out and honestly seems very "meh."
Leviathan hunter is bad. It isn't migraine-inducing bad like the last two, mind you. Just bad.
Rating: Garbage
Scarlet Corsair
Ah... yet another prestige class that is a complete downgrade to the class intended to enter it. Let's say you decided to go rogue 10/scarlet corsair 10 rather than rogue 20. You lose 2d6 sneak attack damage, get 4 skill points less per level and lose three of your special abilities (AKA bonus feats). What do you get in return? +2 BAB, Improved Feint (which you could pick up with a special ability anyways), feinting as a free action every 2d4 rounds (later 1d4 rounds) and a bunch of other underpowered trash.
Other great gems include a minor dodge bonus when on ships and the ability to inflict the very weak "Shaken" condition (which is a –2 penalty to all attack rolls, saves, skill checks, and ability checks for those unaware). The fluff describes scarlet corsairs as violent scumbags who "revel in combat and slaughter." If you want to be a violent scumbag who revels in combat in slaughter, be an assassin instead. Adam covered it already and its way better than this.
I'm aware of a single person who wanted to play this class and he was kicked out of his group for being a sexual deviant. That should tell you all you need to know.
Rating: Garbage
Sea Witch
Oh thank the lord... something that isn't shit.
Sea witches are crazy assholes that like to wreak havoc on the high seas by either using water powers or summoning sea monsters. Also, important thing to note is that they can be male or female despite the fact that they're called witches. Wizards and sorcerers both (and sha'irs from the Dragon Compendium too, I guess) can enter the class, though sorcerers are probably a better fit due to the whole "no other class features aside from a familiar" thing.
The entry requirements are easy to meet. You have to be chaotic, be able to cast certain spells and speak aquan. The only real price to pay is that you lose two caster levels, which will still let you gain access to 9th level spells even if you're a sorcerer. You can create giant whirlpools that get bigger and stronger as you level up in the class. Later on, you gain the ability to summon monsters than range from simple things like dire sharks to crazy stuff like scyllans (a scyllan being the creature on the front of the book).
As a capstone, you can conjure up what is pretty much just a straight up ghost ship. Frankly the capstone isn't that useful as you'll most likely have the ability to teleport anywhere you want to go anyways at this point, but at the same time... it's a fucking ghost ship.
Not amazing, but not bad either. You could definitely do a lot worse.
Rating: Decent
Stormcaster
Stormcasters like storms. Who would've thunk it? When it comes to the entry it's a pretty similar story to the sea witch, though druids can enter stormcaster as well. Another thing to note is that, though it was most likely unintended, clerics who take the storm domain also technically qualify for the class. Since it doesn't progress your animal companion, wild shape or turn/rebuke undead level it's probably not a good idea to go in as a cleric or druid. Doesn't mean that you can't, just that it's not the most efficient route for the two of them. No such problems with going in with a wizard or sorcerer, though.
Nonetheless, you'll lose a single caster level which is basically nothing. Stormcasters start off quite strong. One of the very first things you can do is force everyone within 30 ft to succeed on a fortitude saving throw or be stunned for one round. At fifth level, any enemy damaged by an electricity spell has to succeed on a fortitude saving throw or be stunned. Stunning's the name of the game with stormcasters. As you level up, you'll gain some minor buffs like resistances and boosts to caster level with certain spells. Eventually, you'll be able to control the winds and storms around you and just completely ignore effects that blow you away or knock you down.
Any spellcasters that want to do more than just blast electricity magic should look elsewhere. Those that do, though, should definitely consider taking this.
Rating: Good
Wavekeeper
We made it to the last PrC in the book, the wavekeeper. Not much to say about these guys fluff-wise as they're pretty much just druids, and occasionally rangers, that are all about the ocean instead of forests and other land-based biomes. As a side note, I would like to point out that I had to re-write a large chunk of this since I don't know as much about druids or rangers as since I've never played either of them. It's thanks to @Dunsparce that the class's rating is higher than it originally was.
You lose a single level of spellcasting and one level for determining how strong your animal companion is. It's a bit unfortunate that you don't progress your wild shape, but non-wild shape focused druids won't be bothered much by this and rangers won't be bothered whatsoever. The trade off is that you can wild shape into into an elemental (small, medium, and large at wavekeeper 7, huge at wavekeeper 9) much earlier than you could as a straight druid. Rangers don't get the ability to transform into a water elemental even with the wild shape variant, so this pretty damn neato for those guys. There's more going in the class, though that's it regarding wild shape or anything resembling it.
Like the stormcaster the wavekeeper gets nice stuff right up front. At first level you choose from one of four domains (Blackwater, Ocean, Storm, or Water) and then add the chosen domain's spells to your spell list, though rangers won't benefit as much as druids. They aren't the absolute best domains out there. At the same time, you're basically getting a few extra spells for free. You get some less significant additions like swim speeds and water breathing that are rendered redundant to druids because of that whole "wild shape" thing. Doesn't mean that rangers can't make use of them.
You also get some okay abilities where you can control the water around you, letting you mess with water currents and strike enemies with water waves. As a capstone you can summon an elder water elemental. Druids have summon nature's ally IX which kinda' makes this ability pointless. On the other hand, rangers don't, meaning that they'll find this much, much more useful.
Wild shapers should ignore this. Every other druid and ranger that wants to do ocean stuff, feel free to take levels in this.
Rating: Good
Tier List (Stormwrack)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: N/A
Good Classes: Stormcaster, Wavekeeper
Decent Classes: Sea Witch
Playable Classes: N/A
Garbage Classes: Knight of the Pearl, Legendary Captain, Leviathan Hunter, Scarlet Corsair
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): N/A
Like many books in 3.5, Stormwrack has a little bit of garbage and a little bit of gold. It's unfortunate that martials don't benefit much (if at all) from any of these classes, but that's the Monte Cook way. On the bright side Sandstorm and Frostburn did a much better job on helping out martials from what I've read. So, see you then.
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In Clown World, the only god is the one who Honks.
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Sorry about the lateness on the comment, but I will make at least a little bit of a defense for the Thaumaturgist. While it's not a good Cleric PrC, there's one class that I feel can make good use of the abilities: the Archivist. Specifically, if you want to play your Archivist as a summoner. The price cuts to planar ally are considerable (which a lot of 3.X games I played did pay attention to these things) and extended summoning is nice. I'd still say it's not worth taking the full five levels, but a situational two level dip is still better than the "fuck, this actively makes me worse" PrCs like Arcane Archer.ThaumaturgistThe Thaumaturgist rounds off the three five level PrCs that were designed for the Wizard, Druid, and in this case the Cleric. And yes, these guys are designed to only be used by Clerics given you need to be able to cast Lesser Planar Ally. The only other class with that spell are Divine Caster bootlegs like Favored Souls, Mystics, and the Knight of the Chalice PrC.
So Thaumaturgists are divine casters that specialize in working with Outsiders, be they good or evil. They form connections and alliances with them where they help each other out for their own gains. They also completely suck cock because 3 or 4 out of the 5 levels in Thaumaturgists might as well be dead levels for all the good that they do.
You see, the Thaumaturgist gains five ways that improve their abilities to work with Outsiders. The first level cuts the price of dealing with a planar ally in half, which is nice if you actually play by the rules. Usually players prefer not to though and just enslave their outsiders with blackmail and threats caused by magic circle and planar binding. Then you get Augment summoning for free… at a level way beyond when you could’ve taken that feat so it is a dead level. The third level is the only ability that’s actually good.
The third level nets you extended summoning, which doubles the time a summon can stay on the field. This actually is pretty damn nice, especially since it works with Extend Spell. Then we’re back to mediocrity with Contingent Conjuration. Sure it’s cool that a divine caster can now use this normally arcane only spell, but Contingency is used mainly as an escape gambit or distraction to run. Summoning doesn’t usually factor into it.
The last ability you get as a Thaumaturgist is Planar Cohort, which works like your standard Cohort but with a planar ally. It’s neatish but not really anything to write home about.
This class is mostly pointless, but normally I’d still say it’d be an alright option if you want to extend your summoning. But then there’s the one thing I’ve intentionally put off telling you: the Thaumaturgist had an HD of 4. Yes, for some fucking reason you get Wizard HD and lose fortitude when you enter this as the d8 HD cleric. Given how little you get out of this class, that takes it into the trash.
Skip it.
Rating: Garbage
I'd also argue that Archmage is still Amazing tier since some wizard/sorcerer builds still end up doing some dips for some High Arcana to round them off but I can understand the feeling that some of the PrCs for arcane casters that came later have a little more to offer.
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I usually help out with other's analysis' in this thread, and for the purposes of rating the classes themselves(Which I will admit I don't agree on some, but I am not the writer of most of them) assume that the whole thing is being taken, rather than a 1-2 level dip. Seems odd to for example rate how good a PrC is by just taking 2 levels and then never touching the other 3 or 8 ever. Even if the later levels suck, it's still part of the PrC and thus should be rated alongside the beginning of it.
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That's fair. I wasn't thinking about it like that with the PrCs. That'll help with reading these write-ups as they keep (hopefully) coming. Thanks!
Kyria the Great
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Races of the Wild
So after being asleep and getting out of laziness hybernation, I have decided to dive right back into another autistic analysis of 3.5 with this time going into another Races of book. This book focuses mostly on Elves, Halfings, and one of the first non-LA adjustment races, the Raptorian. The book also has rules for others such as Centaurs, Gnolls, and the ever strange Killoren. Though the real meat is what they consider prestige and we will see if that is a true statement or not.
Arcane Hierophant -
So it looks like things are off to a good start with what is a fusion of the two heads of the CODzilla with Wizard and Druid fused into one 10 level class of absolute wreck. The requirements are rather fair with only 2nd level arcane and 2nd level divine spells is the hardest, but with the chasis for this build, it shouldn't be a problem. The only other requirement is having trackless step, but again, you won't have a problem if you selected Druid as your divine base.
So what do you get for your 10 levels of investment? For starters, you get a better base than the Mystic Theurge with having a 3/4 BAB, d6 hit die, and having 4+int skill base with a rather solid set of skills. The real pride and joy of this class is the Companion Familiar ability. This gem of a feature makes you give up your previous familiar, but in exchange you get to make your animal companion into your familiar and get to do dual progression of both animal companion and familiar abilities. If you need explanation to why that is so powerful, then you just shouldn't be playing. The other good abilities are the Channel Animal and Channel Plant ability where you can deliver touch spells a certain time a day with any of the two stated above.
I will say this class can get rather disgusting and can have an extremely viable base to have a 9th level Arcane/Divine caster to certainly ruin the action economy in your favor.
Rating: Amazing
Champion of Corellon Larethian-
Have you ever thought that as a rather frail Elf that you wanted to become a front line fighter? Probably not, but if that is what you want and you are that stupid, here is the perfect class for you!!! The weirdest part about this class is that on a basic glace of what they get on a chart, you would expect this to be a prestige class for Fighters, but nope! Instead with having requirements like Diplomacy 4, Knowledge Religion (2) and having strangely enough Combat expertise, dodge, and Mounted combat this is meant instead for Paladins.
The first major problem of this joke of a class is that it doesn't advance spell casting, for Paladins that is terrible, and the pain just doesn't stop there. What is even worse is that nothing of a Paladin is advanced at all, so instead it somewhat advances like a less terrible fighter, but that is little consolation for the sunken costs.
The first feature is Corellon's Blessing which functions exactly like Lay on Hands, cool, but it doesn't stack with Paladin's lay of hands so you in effect will have two different lay on hands that are gimped because they have no higher progression between them than 10. You get bonus feats like a fighter, but only every 3 levels and even more insulting, they must have prerequisites of Combat Expertise, Dodge, or Mount Combat. This last one is rather painful because the class offers no bonuses to a mount.
Getting to something resembling actual features, you get Elegant Strike which grants Dexerity Bonus to damage with Elven type swords, but targets immune to critical damage or sneak attack nulls it, why not just give them the damage? I guess Monte Cook thought that extra +4 damage would have been much too powerful to the Oh so Feeble Wizard.
The Next features gives you more dexterity bonuses for wearing medium and heavy armor which is kinda nice with at 5th level taking no move penalties on armor.
The (capstone) I guess is Corellon's Wrath which gives you a bonus to your weapon and for one round you get to add a whopping +2 to attack and +2d6 to your damage for all attacks. Whoopie!!!! By this time you will be 15th level and there are far better ways to achieve damage than this shitty ability.
Rating: Garbage
Luckstealer-
Oh this class here. This was an attempt to make a caster that is sort of the high stakes riverboat gambler type of mage where he makes his own luck but only sort of. The hurdle and ironically saving feature of this class is advancing Spellcaster levels up to 7th so if you keep down a Wizard or Cleric path you are still in the green for 9th. Its class skill I guess are ok but your BAB is trash as well as your HP is that of a Wizards and they had the gall to offer this to Clerics, funny joke there Wizards of the Coast, funny.
The real reason for this class is the Curse of the Fatespurned which as a move action make them take a Will save or they take a -2 on all checks, saves, and attacks for minute and you gain a luck point which can be spent on a 1 to 1 exchange for checks, saves, and attack rolls, cool but the real crippling part about this is that it only pools for 1 minute. Yeah real use of those 3 sacked spell levels get a bonus that I can't even bank for emergency situations.
The Lucky Magic is actually a solid feature that allows you to reroll any numerical type spell for every five dice, so on a 15d6 fireball, you can reroll three dice and get rid of your 1s. Desparate Recall is an effec t that up to 3/day at max, you can recall any prepared spells that you cast and do them again though you must spend Luck points to achieve that, but this is a problem when you realize that the only real way this works is to steal luck from others and only have the points for a minute. You can also get points by sacking your abilities for a short period but that can bite you.
7th level is Curse of the Black Cloud which allows a mass effect Curse of Fatespurned which almost makes the luck point system work though the Capstone is amazing and shitty at the same time. Fate's Proof for 3/day can allow a reroll of any roll of an opponent so that the DM won't crit you or will be more likely to fail his saves, the critical problem of this? You need 5 Luck points to do this and if you are just fighting one BBEG, you aren't going to be getting more points and seeing as you can't bank them, a real problem arrises.
Though I guess any class that offers real advances to spellcasting will be saved from obilivon
Rating: Playable (if only barely)
Ruathar-
The first real and true flavor class in this book is something of one that I actually like. The flavor is that by being a hero to the Elven people, they reward you with great gifts including abilities of Elvenkind, and yes it even extends to Elves so you can be more Elven than Elven. The Requirements for the class are rather simple with the only challenge being to actually do something of note for either an Elf or Elven community. The Chasis of this class is actually rather good for Arcane and Divine Casters giving full caster progression and Average BAB, and a D6 Hit die.
The first effect give you a word of Friendship with Elves with the Gift of Elves giving you basically a free item worth 2000 gp, which while not great in the long run, it is free magic or free money. 2nd level gives you the lowlight vision and +2 bonus on Spot, Search, and Listen Checks and it stacks with Elven bonuses with those.
The Capstone and real Capstone and not the +1 bonus on saves under stars is the Aravandor's Grace which adds +50% to your Max age and the age to advance into age categories and Elves can get this so you can have your Elf live for an insane 750 years. This doesn't even get into the level of full retard if a Gold Dragon gets this class and lives for a max of over 4000 years. All and All for the cheap investment a rather fun and flavorful choice for a caster
Rating: Good
Skypledged-
For the Harvey Birdmen of the D and D races, a great choice of a class awaits them. The class is a sky and air themed divine caster which basically for cucking to the Air Elementals, you gain some rather powerful abilities. The Skypledge will lock you out of any other elemental type spells that aren't air, with breaking it functioning like breaking the rules of your god as a cleric. The Divine spellpool is an ability which allows you to sack a prepared spell slot to get another spell that is free and floating to cast that scales with the levels.
The class also gets the ability to get an air elemental to change the wind speed and direction to ever scaling levels to at max 4 levels of intensity so that in effect the Air elemental can fart out a tornado in a strong wind situation. The class also grants you a free feather fall for your buddies and gets you a Wind Elemental servant to call on for 1 hour.
The final boon is the ability for 1 minute to assume the form of a Huge Air Elemental to wreck them. The capstone is Cyclonic doom which allows to call the air elementals to have a force of wind around to do deal 15d6 bludgeoning damage to all around you and if you are flying then through them back 2d6x10 feet if they fail their Reflex save. Giving you full caster progression especially with something like Cleric can give you some fun.
Rating: Good
Stormtalon-
It is always nice when after a good class that someone is always thinking of a bland class to put right in front of it. The Stormtalon is the Fighter answer to the chicken men and it is rather bland. The main features allows you to use your talons as weapons to multiattack with that can be good if you can get buffs from the Casters. The class also gives you free Aerial feats which are mostly bad to alright though are certainly better than fighter feats. The class also gives you a scaling Bonus to your flight speed to up to 40 ft bonus. This option is so bland, why are you even thinking of this.
Rating: NPC (Blander than White Rice)
Whisperknife-
The Whisperknife is what happens when a sneaky Halfing decided to become lumberjack and get really good at throwing axes. This class is actually one of the few solid throwing options for Rogues. Though you will dip into Fighter to take it because of the Feat tax to enter it, the chassis is actually rather solid. For this Roguelike class, you get full Bab with 6+int skills.
The class advances your Sneak attack once every 3 levels so less sneak attacks but you will be tougher. The class gives you stuff like Rapidshot, uncanny dodge, and an ability to not provoke attacks of opportunity while throwing in melee. 4th level gives you Close defense that while you are fighting in melee range with Medium or larger creatures of a +2 bonus. 7th level grants you vengeful strike that as long as you know the persons name you can sack a sneak attack to change the strike to be able to stun them for 1d4 rounds. The capstone allows you to flank enemies in range. while nothing too special, for a melee rogue build it isn't a terrible choice.
Rating: Decent
Wildrunner-
With the last class in the book, it is what happens when an Elf goes full autistic shrieking and goes to town on others. To meet the requirements you need to be able to at least have a couple levels of Ranger though afterwords, I strongly suggest Barbarian.
The class gets somes stuff that Ranger and Barbarian gets, but the real treasure is the Primal Scream. This ability is functionally another form of Barbarian rage that doesn't tire you and gives you base +2 Str and +6 to Dexterity along with getting an offhand bite attack. The scream at 4th level can allow you make enemies to be shaken around you if they fail the Will save. 6th level one of the true glories gives you pounce while in this frenzy. 8th level if they fail the will save will cower instead of be shaken making a fear based build viable. The 10th level gives you Fast Healing 5 while in this Primal Scream and this isn't adding the crazy bonuses from rage.
You get Scent so you can be the hunter and other stuff like endure elements so you get some ranger stuff. YOu can also get Hide in plain sight so you can sneak and deep strike rage and ree your enemies into submission. you can at 7th level with Unfettered Stride you are no longer slowed down by nature. 9th level and I guess the Capstone is Feyheart which will give you the Fey type with (Augmented humanoid) with a crummy 2/ cold iron, sad because it really should be at least DR5. Still with a melee Ranger that doesn't give a hoot about spells, it is not a bad choice and I wouldn't feel like an idiot for taking it
rating: Decent
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Arcane Hierophant
Good Classes: Ruathar, Skypledge
Decent Classes: Whisperknife, Wildrunner
Playable Classes: Luckstealer
Garbage Classes: Champion of Corellon Larethian
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Stormtalon
So after being asleep and getting out of laziness hybernation, I have decided to dive right back into another autistic analysis of 3.5 with this time going into another Races of book. This book focuses mostly on Elves, Halfings, and one of the first non-LA adjustment races, the Raptorian. The book also has rules for others such as Centaurs, Gnolls, and the ever strange Killoren. Though the real meat is what they consider prestige and we will see if that is a true statement or not.
Arcane Hierophant -
So it looks like things are off to a good start with what is a fusion of the two heads of the CODzilla with Wizard and Druid fused into one 10 level class of absolute wreck. The requirements are rather fair with only 2nd level arcane and 2nd level divine spells is the hardest, but with the chasis for this build, it shouldn't be a problem. The only other requirement is having trackless step, but again, you won't have a problem if you selected Druid as your divine base.
So what do you get for your 10 levels of investment? For starters, you get a better base than the Mystic Theurge with having a 3/4 BAB, d6 hit die, and having 4+int skill base with a rather solid set of skills. The real pride and joy of this class is the Companion Familiar ability. This gem of a feature makes you give up your previous familiar, but in exchange you get to make your animal companion into your familiar and get to do dual progression of both animal companion and familiar abilities. If you need explanation to why that is so powerful, then you just shouldn't be playing. The other good abilities are the Channel Animal and Channel Plant ability where you can deliver touch spells a certain time a day with any of the two stated above.
I will say this class can get rather disgusting and can have an extremely viable base to have a 9th level Arcane/Divine caster to certainly ruin the action economy in your favor.
Rating: Amazing
Champion of Corellon Larethian-
Have you ever thought that as a rather frail Elf that you wanted to become a front line fighter? Probably not, but if that is what you want and you are that stupid, here is the perfect class for you!!! The weirdest part about this class is that on a basic glace of what they get on a chart, you would expect this to be a prestige class for Fighters, but nope! Instead with having requirements like Diplomacy 4, Knowledge Religion (2) and having strangely enough Combat expertise, dodge, and Mounted combat this is meant instead for Paladins.
The first major problem of this joke of a class is that it doesn't advance spell casting, for Paladins that is terrible, and the pain just doesn't stop there. What is even worse is that nothing of a Paladin is advanced at all, so instead it somewhat advances like a less terrible fighter, but that is little consolation for the sunken costs.
The first feature is Corellon's Blessing which functions exactly like Lay on Hands, cool, but it doesn't stack with Paladin's lay of hands so you in effect will have two different lay on hands that are gimped because they have no higher progression between them than 10. You get bonus feats like a fighter, but only every 3 levels and even more insulting, they must have prerequisites of Combat Expertise, Dodge, or Mount Combat. This last one is rather painful because the class offers no bonuses to a mount.
Getting to something resembling actual features, you get Elegant Strike which grants Dexerity Bonus to damage with Elven type swords, but targets immune to critical damage or sneak attack nulls it, why not just give them the damage? I guess Monte Cook thought that extra +4 damage would have been much too powerful to the Oh so Feeble Wizard.
The Next features gives you more dexterity bonuses for wearing medium and heavy armor which is kinda nice with at 5th level taking no move penalties on armor.
The (capstone) I guess is Corellon's Wrath which gives you a bonus to your weapon and for one round you get to add a whopping +2 to attack and +2d6 to your damage for all attacks. Whoopie!!!! By this time you will be 15th level and there are far better ways to achieve damage than this shitty ability.
Rating: Garbage
Luckstealer-
Oh this class here. This was an attempt to make a caster that is sort of the high stakes riverboat gambler type of mage where he makes his own luck but only sort of. The hurdle and ironically saving feature of this class is advancing Spellcaster levels up to 7th so if you keep down a Wizard or Cleric path you are still in the green for 9th. Its class skill I guess are ok but your BAB is trash as well as your HP is that of a Wizards and they had the gall to offer this to Clerics, funny joke there Wizards of the Coast, funny.
The real reason for this class is the Curse of the Fatespurned which as a move action make them take a Will save or they take a -2 on all checks, saves, and attacks for minute and you gain a luck point which can be spent on a 1 to 1 exchange for checks, saves, and attack rolls, cool but the real crippling part about this is that it only pools for 1 minute. Yeah real use of those 3 sacked spell levels get a bonus that I can't even bank for emergency situations.
The Lucky Magic is actually a solid feature that allows you to reroll any numerical type spell for every five dice, so on a 15d6 fireball, you can reroll three dice and get rid of your 1s. Desparate Recall is an effec t that up to 3/day at max, you can recall any prepared spells that you cast and do them again though you must spend Luck points to achieve that, but this is a problem when you realize that the only real way this works is to steal luck from others and only have the points for a minute. You can also get points by sacking your abilities for a short period but that can bite you.
7th level is Curse of the Black Cloud which allows a mass effect Curse of Fatespurned which almost makes the luck point system work though the Capstone is amazing and shitty at the same time. Fate's Proof for 3/day can allow a reroll of any roll of an opponent so that the DM won't crit you or will be more likely to fail his saves, the critical problem of this? You need 5 Luck points to do this and if you are just fighting one BBEG, you aren't going to be getting more points and seeing as you can't bank them, a real problem arrises.
Though I guess any class that offers real advances to spellcasting will be saved from obilivon
Rating: Playable (if only barely)
Ruathar-
The first real and true flavor class in this book is something of one that I actually like. The flavor is that by being a hero to the Elven people, they reward you with great gifts including abilities of Elvenkind, and yes it even extends to Elves so you can be more Elven than Elven. The Requirements for the class are rather simple with the only challenge being to actually do something of note for either an Elf or Elven community. The Chasis of this class is actually rather good for Arcane and Divine Casters giving full caster progression and Average BAB, and a D6 Hit die.
The first effect give you a word of Friendship with Elves with the Gift of Elves giving you basically a free item worth 2000 gp, which while not great in the long run, it is free magic or free money. 2nd level gives you the lowlight vision and +2 bonus on Spot, Search, and Listen Checks and it stacks with Elven bonuses with those.
The Capstone and real Capstone and not the +1 bonus on saves under stars is the Aravandor's Grace which adds +50% to your Max age and the age to advance into age categories and Elves can get this so you can have your Elf live for an insane 750 years. This doesn't even get into the level of full retard if a Gold Dragon gets this class and lives for a max of over 4000 years. All and All for the cheap investment a rather fun and flavorful choice for a caster
Rating: Good
Skypledged-
For the Harvey Birdmen of the D and D races, a great choice of a class awaits them. The class is a sky and air themed divine caster which basically for cucking to the Air Elementals, you gain some rather powerful abilities. The Skypledge will lock you out of any other elemental type spells that aren't air, with breaking it functioning like breaking the rules of your god as a cleric. The Divine spellpool is an ability which allows you to sack a prepared spell slot to get another spell that is free and floating to cast that scales with the levels.
The class also gets the ability to get an air elemental to change the wind speed and direction to ever scaling levels to at max 4 levels of intensity so that in effect the Air elemental can fart out a tornado in a strong wind situation. The class also grants you a free feather fall for your buddies and gets you a Wind Elemental servant to call on for 1 hour.
The final boon is the ability for 1 minute to assume the form of a Huge Air Elemental to wreck them. The capstone is Cyclonic doom which allows to call the air elementals to have a force of wind around to do deal 15d6 bludgeoning damage to all around you and if you are flying then through them back 2d6x10 feet if they fail their Reflex save. Giving you full caster progression especially with something like Cleric can give you some fun.
Rating: Good
Stormtalon-
It is always nice when after a good class that someone is always thinking of a bland class to put right in front of it. The Stormtalon is the Fighter answer to the chicken men and it is rather bland. The main features allows you to use your talons as weapons to multiattack with that can be good if you can get buffs from the Casters. The class also gives you free Aerial feats which are mostly bad to alright though are certainly better than fighter feats. The class also gives you a scaling Bonus to your flight speed to up to 40 ft bonus. This option is so bland, why are you even thinking of this.
Rating: NPC (Blander than White Rice)
Whisperknife-
The Whisperknife is what happens when a sneaky Halfing decided to become lumberjack and get really good at throwing axes. This class is actually one of the few solid throwing options for Rogues. Though you will dip into Fighter to take it because of the Feat tax to enter it, the chassis is actually rather solid. For this Roguelike class, you get full Bab with 6+int skills.
The class advances your Sneak attack once every 3 levels so less sneak attacks but you will be tougher. The class gives you stuff like Rapidshot, uncanny dodge, and an ability to not provoke attacks of opportunity while throwing in melee. 4th level gives you Close defense that while you are fighting in melee range with Medium or larger creatures of a +2 bonus. 7th level grants you vengeful strike that as long as you know the persons name you can sack a sneak attack to change the strike to be able to stun them for 1d4 rounds. The capstone allows you to flank enemies in range. while nothing too special, for a melee rogue build it isn't a terrible choice.
Rating: Decent
Wildrunner-
With the last class in the book, it is what happens when an Elf goes full autistic shrieking and goes to town on others. To meet the requirements you need to be able to at least have a couple levels of Ranger though afterwords, I strongly suggest Barbarian.
The class gets somes stuff that Ranger and Barbarian gets, but the real treasure is the Primal Scream. This ability is functionally another form of Barbarian rage that doesn't tire you and gives you base +2 Str and +6 to Dexterity along with getting an offhand bite attack. The scream at 4th level can allow you make enemies to be shaken around you if they fail the Will save. 6th level one of the true glories gives you pounce while in this frenzy. 8th level if they fail the will save will cower instead of be shaken making a fear based build viable. The 10th level gives you Fast Healing 5 while in this Primal Scream and this isn't adding the crazy bonuses from rage.
You get Scent so you can be the hunter and other stuff like endure elements so you get some ranger stuff. YOu can also get Hide in plain sight so you can sneak and deep strike rage and ree your enemies into submission. you can at 7th level with Unfettered Stride you are no longer slowed down by nature. 9th level and I guess the Capstone is Feyheart which will give you the Fey type with (Augmented humanoid) with a crummy 2/ cold iron, sad because it really should be at least DR5. Still with a melee Ranger that doesn't give a hoot about spells, it is not a bad choice and I wouldn't feel like an idiot for taking it
rating: Decent
Tier List Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Arcane Hierophant
Good Classes: Ruathar, Skypledge
Decent Classes: Whisperknife, Wildrunner
Playable Classes: Luckstealer
Garbage Classes: Champion of Corellon Larethian
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Stormtalon
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2017
Alright boys, I'm retarded. I originally wanted to do these books in order of release, but uh... I screwed up by covering the most recent of the three books first. So from now on keep in mind that these books will not be covered in order of release due to my incompetence. I also forgot that Dungeonscape and Cityscape were technically part of the environmental series, both of which I'll be covering eventually as well since I now realize this.
Very professional of me, I know.
Anyways, TIME FOR A DOUBLE WHAMMY. TWO POSTS IN A SINGLE DAY, BOYS (and girls).
Sandstorm
Sandstorm (the 2nd book of the series) is basically the same as Stormwrack (the 3rd book in the series), only instead of being all about water it's all about sand. Whether you want ancient Egypt, the wild west, or some entirely original desert type of setting, Sandstorm is there for you.
Mother of god... we have a pure martial class, and a mount focused one at that, that isn't automatically a steaming pile of fuck. Ashworms dragoons are really good at, well, riding ashworms. Ashworms themselves are literally big ass worms that can burrow into the ground. As you'd expect most of your class features revolve around your worm mount. The class doesn't have any spellcasting progression, but that doesn't matter as the class was intended for fighters rather than paladins anyways.
You gain a slightly better version of the paladin's special mount bonuses for your ashworm without needing to be a paladin, which is neat. Other goodies at your disposal are the ability to make a full attack and a move action on the same turn along with an upgrade to your mounted combat feat, which allows you to substitue a ride check in place of your mount's AC anytime rather than just once per round. And that's the tip of the iceberg. I'd argue that this class is solid enough that even the halfling outrider would have trouble matching it... well, at least if the outrider is being played normally without using the "super mount" cheese.
Either way, ashworm dragoon is certainly better than cavalier.
Rating: Decent
These guys are masters of locating sources of water. They also dabble in the elements, likely because the writers realized that playing a class whose only purpose is finding water would be shitty and thus decided to tack other stuff onto it. Taking the class requires 8 ranks of survival, so clerics won't be able to enter until about level 13... unless you decide to pick the travel domain which adds survival to your list of class skills.
So what do you get? The basics are 9/10 spellcasting levels, druid chassis, and water finding powers. Later on, you'll be able to summon water and fire elder elementals and you get access to a pseudo-plane shift, along with a couple of other minor abilities like a 5 foot burrow speed and a scaling attack that does dessication damage. The pseudo-plane shift isn't all that great as it's limited to elemental planes and you can only remain in any of the planes for 1 minute per class level.
For your capstone you can create a permanent portal to any of the elemental planes, but it's limited to a single plane of your choosing, costs 15,000 gp - 30,000 gp and takes 30-60 days to build it. It's less good if you already have plane shift, but it's still decent as it's permanent and there's no chance you'll show up away from where you originally intended to plane shift to. If you're a druid or a ranger, the portal's actually damn good since you don't have any plane shifting powers in the first place. You also aren't restricted to being in a plane for a mere few minutes like your last feature.
The class is alright. If you're feeling thirsty, give it a go.
Rating: Decent
No one makes sand castles better than this class does, and I mean no one. To your average person, sand is just... sand. To a sand shaper, it's their lifeblood. You give a bucketful of sand to one of these crazy bastards and they'll make anything ranging from a simple suit of armor to a living, breathing creature. They also make damn good casters for several reasons that I'll get into.
Some of the best parts of the class are earned at first level. First off, you get a crap load of new spells. Prepared casters will find it to be a nice convenience, though nothing more. Spontaneous casters, on the other hand, will have just gained a bunch of spells that they can now spontaneously cast like any other spell they know or have on their list. You can also make any non-magic item you can think of as long as you have access to an amount of sand equal to the size of what it is you wish to create. You'll eventually learn how to use this same ability to create certain types of animals.
Later on you can regrow limbs or even come back to life by lying down in some sand as long as there's enough to cover your body. By RAI you most likely have to be in an actual desert or similar location for either abilities to work, though by RAW you could simply have a bag of holding full of nothing but sand and pour out enough to cover your whole body when necessary. The best power the class grants you is the ability to apply a handful of specific metamagic feats multiple times a day without increasing your spell level... or it would be the best if you weren't required to be in desert/wasteland terrain to use it.
See, there's a difference in wording between the limb regrowth/resurrection features and the metamagic stuff; the former states you need to "lie in the soil of the waste," while the latter states you need to be "in any sort of waste terrain" while casting a spell. Even if your DM is nice and for reason rules that sprinkling some sand around transforms the area around you into "waste terrain," doing such a thing in combat will make for one hell of a time. If you are playing in a game with lots of sand, you can ignore this last bit and metamagic your heart out.
What you pay for all this is the loss of a mere two spellcasting levels and a feat. Not a bad trade. A little unfortunate that you're unable to use your metamagic stuff outside of sandy places (or some other specific area type if your DM lets allows you to use the suggestions from the adaptation section), but it's hardly a big deal as there are many other good options the class provides for you. Sand shaper is still top tier even without this ability. That's how good it is.
Rating: Amazing
So, um... wow. Sandstorm has its own version of the knight of the pearl, only it revolves around rivers rather than oceans and is ten levels instead of five. Think of scions of Tem-Et-Nu as half river guardian and half swamp hillbilly. Any city slickers that come along to fish in their waters and steal their catfish and/or crawfish are gonna' get fucked up. Here we go again, I guess.
First off, allow me to explain what it does better than knight of the pearl: It adds to your smite evil damage and gives you two extra uses, as well as increasing your spellcasting every even level... and that's it. Now we'll move on to the crap part (AKA the rest of the class). It doesn't progress your mount's abilities. You swim better, can give yourself 5 temporary hit points per class level once per day (maxing out at 50), and you gain a WHOPPING +1 to attack rolls and damage rolls to RIVER-DWELLING creatures.
There are multiple features that are only usable when you are on, submerged in, or adjacent to a river. To make things easy, I'll list them all here: 5 HP healed at the beginning of each turn, water walking, restoration, and an altered version of control water. Once again, these already mediocre abilities are all unusable when there are no rivers nearby.
The saddest, most nonsensical part of this class is that you can eventually cast divine power as a spell-like ability a couple times per day... as a character that already has full BAB. For those that don't know, divine power is a spell that modifies your base attack bonus to be equal to your character level. All I can ask is, "Why?" This feature was probably intended for clerics who take this class, but if you're a cleric and you're prestiging into this you have much bigger problems to deal with than just your base attack bonus.
I'll give knight of the pearl credit for only taking up five class levels. Scion of Tem-Et-Nu is twice as long and twice as trash. Tie some concrete blocks to this class, toss it in a river somewhere, and call it a day.
Rating: Garbage
Yet another class that has flavor with barely any mechanical strength to back up said flavor. Scorpion heritors are rogues that fetishize scorpions because they admire the asshole nature of scorpions. In other words, they're assholes. Aside from the novelty of being able to turn into a scorpion, the class doesn't have much going on.
More than half of your class features revolve around using poison which is apparently quite weak in 3.5. Take my word with a grain of salt though, as I've never played a character who's used anything poison based. At the very least taking levels in this class as a rogue won't hurt you too bad. With the exception of having good Fortitude saving throws rather than good Reflex saves, the chassis is exactly the same as the rogue's.
Not much to say about this class, honestly. It's at least a better rogue PrC than scarlet corsair.
Rating: Playable
I think of walker in the waste as the hipster brother of the dread necromancer and death master. His end goal is to transform into a lich like the two of them, but he doesn't become any regular old lich - he becomes a dry lich. Isn't he special? Before we tackle the obvious, lets quickly go over the other stuff.
The class is neat as it gives an option for both divine casters as well as non-good characters (rather than just any evil characters) to become a lich. Entry into it is super easy and you only lose 2 spellcasting levels throughout. There's some alright stuff and there's some good stuff. You gain a touch attack that deals dessication damage (+1d6 per two class levels), the power to infect people with "The Wasting" by blowing sand dust in their face, and a passive radius around you that greatly raises the temperature to the point of drying up any water sources and/or burning other creatures.
You also learn to construct sand golems and animate mummies, bringing the latter back as "salt mummies." The sand golems are roughly around the same strength as iron golem and only cost about like 1/5 of the xp and salt mummies are arguably better than than any of the best undead you can get from the 8th level "Create Greater Undead" spell.
Finally, you have your long awaited capstone: transformation into a dry lich. Dry liches have multiple differences between them and normal liches. Some examples being that dry liches are restricted to any nongood alignment rather than just any evil alignment and they gain the unholy toughness ability (which allows undead to use charisma in place of constitution to determine health points). The primary difference is that dry liches use canopic jars in place of phylacteries. Canopic jars are functionally the same as a lich's phylactery, only you have five of them rather than just one. If someone manages to find and destroy one of your jars, you'll still have four more.
Walker in the waste is there for anyone who happens to want to be a neutral-aligned, divine-casting mummy lich and thinks that regular lich isn't cool enough... or dry enough I guess. Point is the class is worth a go.
Rating: Good
Tier List (Sandstorm)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Sand Shaper
Good Classes: Walker in the Wastes
Decent Classes: Ashworm Dragoon, Lord of the Tides
Playable Classes: Scorpion Heritor
Garbage Classes: Scion of Tem-Et-Nu
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): N/A
I had a much better experience covering Sandstorm than Stormwrack, I tell you what. It really does help when more than half of the classes in your book aren't garbage tier. Next time I'll cover Frostburn and analyse many great classes, like the cyrokineticist for example... god help me.
Stay frosty.
Very professional of me, I know.
Anyways, TIME FOR A DOUBLE WHAMMY. TWO POSTS IN A SINGLE DAY, BOYS (and girls).
Sandstorm
Sandstorm (the 2nd book of the series) is basically the same as Stormwrack (the 3rd book in the series), only instead of being all about water it's all about sand. Whether you want ancient Egypt, the wild west, or some entirely original desert type of setting, Sandstorm is there for you.
Ashworm Dragoon
Mother of god... we have a pure martial class, and a mount focused one at that, that isn't automatically a steaming pile of fuck. Ashworms dragoons are really good at, well, riding ashworms. Ashworms themselves are literally big ass worms that can burrow into the ground. As you'd expect most of your class features revolve around your worm mount. The class doesn't have any spellcasting progression, but that doesn't matter as the class was intended for fighters rather than paladins anyways.
You gain a slightly better version of the paladin's special mount bonuses for your ashworm without needing to be a paladin, which is neat. Other goodies at your disposal are the ability to make a full attack and a move action on the same turn along with an upgrade to your mounted combat feat, which allows you to substitue a ride check in place of your mount's AC anytime rather than just once per round. And that's the tip of the iceberg. I'd argue that this class is solid enough that even the halfling outrider would have trouble matching it... well, at least if the outrider is being played normally without using the "super mount" cheese.
Either way, ashworm dragoon is certainly better than cavalier.
Rating: Decent
Lord of the Tides
These guys are masters of locating sources of water. They also dabble in the elements, likely because the writers realized that playing a class whose only purpose is finding water would be shitty and thus decided to tack other stuff onto it. Taking the class requires 8 ranks of survival, so clerics won't be able to enter until about level 13... unless you decide to pick the travel domain which adds survival to your list of class skills.
So what do you get? The basics are 9/10 spellcasting levels, druid chassis, and water finding powers. Later on, you'll be able to summon water and fire elder elementals and you get access to a pseudo-plane shift, along with a couple of other minor abilities like a 5 foot burrow speed and a scaling attack that does dessication damage. The pseudo-plane shift isn't all that great as it's limited to elemental planes and you can only remain in any of the planes for 1 minute per class level.
For your capstone you can create a permanent portal to any of the elemental planes, but it's limited to a single plane of your choosing, costs 15,000 gp - 30,000 gp and takes 30-60 days to build it. It's less good if you already have plane shift, but it's still decent as it's permanent and there's no chance you'll show up away from where you originally intended to plane shift to. If you're a druid or a ranger, the portal's actually damn good since you don't have any plane shifting powers in the first place. You also aren't restricted to being in a plane for a mere few minutes like your last feature.
The class is alright. If you're feeling thirsty, give it a go.
Rating: Decent
Sand Shaper
No one makes sand castles better than this class does, and I mean no one. To your average person, sand is just... sand. To a sand shaper, it's their lifeblood. You give a bucketful of sand to one of these crazy bastards and they'll make anything ranging from a simple suit of armor to a living, breathing creature. They also make damn good casters for several reasons that I'll get into.
Some of the best parts of the class are earned at first level. First off, you get a crap load of new spells. Prepared casters will find it to be a nice convenience, though nothing more. Spontaneous casters, on the other hand, will have just gained a bunch of spells that they can now spontaneously cast like any other spell they know or have on their list. You can also make any non-magic item you can think of as long as you have access to an amount of sand equal to the size of what it is you wish to create. You'll eventually learn how to use this same ability to create certain types of animals.
Later on you can regrow limbs or even come back to life by lying down in some sand as long as there's enough to cover your body. By RAI you most likely have to be in an actual desert or similar location for either abilities to work, though by RAW you could simply have a bag of holding full of nothing but sand and pour out enough to cover your whole body when necessary. The best power the class grants you is the ability to apply a handful of specific metamagic feats multiple times a day without increasing your spell level... or it would be the best if you weren't required to be in desert/wasteland terrain to use it.
See, there's a difference in wording between the limb regrowth/resurrection features and the metamagic stuff; the former states you need to "lie in the soil of the waste," while the latter states you need to be "in any sort of waste terrain" while casting a spell. Even if your DM is nice and for reason rules that sprinkling some sand around transforms the area around you into "waste terrain," doing such a thing in combat will make for one hell of a time. If you are playing in a game with lots of sand, you can ignore this last bit and metamagic your heart out.
What you pay for all this is the loss of a mere two spellcasting levels and a feat. Not a bad trade. A little unfortunate that you're unable to use your metamagic stuff outside of sandy places (or some other specific area type if your DM lets allows you to use the suggestions from the adaptation section), but it's hardly a big deal as there are many other good options the class provides for you. Sand shaper is still top tier even without this ability. That's how good it is.
Rating: Amazing
Scion of Tem-Et-Nu
So, um... wow. Sandstorm has its own version of the knight of the pearl, only it revolves around rivers rather than oceans and is ten levels instead of five. Think of scions of Tem-Et-Nu as half river guardian and half swamp hillbilly. Any city slickers that come along to fish in their waters and steal their catfish and/or crawfish are gonna' get fucked up. Here we go again, I guess.
First off, allow me to explain what it does better than knight of the pearl: It adds to your smite evil damage and gives you two extra uses, as well as increasing your spellcasting every even level... and that's it. Now we'll move on to the crap part (AKA the rest of the class). It doesn't progress your mount's abilities. You swim better, can give yourself 5 temporary hit points per class level once per day (maxing out at 50), and you gain a WHOPPING +1 to attack rolls and damage rolls to RIVER-DWELLING creatures.
There are multiple features that are only usable when you are on, submerged in, or adjacent to a river. To make things easy, I'll list them all here: 5 HP healed at the beginning of each turn, water walking, restoration, and an altered version of control water. Once again, these already mediocre abilities are all unusable when there are no rivers nearby.
The saddest, most nonsensical part of this class is that you can eventually cast divine power as a spell-like ability a couple times per day... as a character that already has full BAB. For those that don't know, divine power is a spell that modifies your base attack bonus to be equal to your character level. All I can ask is, "Why?" This feature was probably intended for clerics who take this class, but if you're a cleric and you're prestiging into this you have much bigger problems to deal with than just your base attack bonus.
I'll give knight of the pearl credit for only taking up five class levels. Scion of Tem-Et-Nu is twice as long and twice as trash. Tie some concrete blocks to this class, toss it in a river somewhere, and call it a day.
Rating: Garbage
Scorpion Heritor
Yet another class that has flavor with barely any mechanical strength to back up said flavor. Scorpion heritors are rogues that fetishize scorpions because they admire the asshole nature of scorpions. In other words, they're assholes. Aside from the novelty of being able to turn into a scorpion, the class doesn't have much going on.
More than half of your class features revolve around using poison which is apparently quite weak in 3.5. Take my word with a grain of salt though, as I've never played a character who's used anything poison based. At the very least taking levels in this class as a rogue won't hurt you too bad. With the exception of having good Fortitude saving throws rather than good Reflex saves, the chassis is exactly the same as the rogue's.
Not much to say about this class, honestly. It's at least a better rogue PrC than scarlet corsair.
Rating: Playable
Walker in the Wastes
I think of walker in the waste as the hipster brother of the dread necromancer and death master. His end goal is to transform into a lich like the two of them, but he doesn't become any regular old lich - he becomes a dry lich. Isn't he special? Before we tackle the obvious, lets quickly go over the other stuff.
The class is neat as it gives an option for both divine casters as well as non-good characters (rather than just any evil characters) to become a lich. Entry into it is super easy and you only lose 2 spellcasting levels throughout. There's some alright stuff and there's some good stuff. You gain a touch attack that deals dessication damage (+1d6 per two class levels), the power to infect people with "The Wasting" by blowing sand dust in their face, and a passive radius around you that greatly raises the temperature to the point of drying up any water sources and/or burning other creatures.
You also learn to construct sand golems and animate mummies, bringing the latter back as "salt mummies." The sand golems are roughly around the same strength as iron golem and only cost about like 1/5 of the xp and salt mummies are arguably better than than any of the best undead you can get from the 8th level "Create Greater Undead" spell.
Finally, you have your long awaited capstone: transformation into a dry lich. Dry liches have multiple differences between them and normal liches. Some examples being that dry liches are restricted to any nongood alignment rather than just any evil alignment and they gain the unholy toughness ability (which allows undead to use charisma in place of constitution to determine health points). The primary difference is that dry liches use canopic jars in place of phylacteries. Canopic jars are functionally the same as a lich's phylactery, only you have five of them rather than just one. If someone manages to find and destroy one of your jars, you'll still have four more.
Walker in the waste is there for anyone who happens to want to be a neutral-aligned, divine-casting mummy lich and thinks that regular lich isn't cool enough... or dry enough I guess. Point is the class is worth a go.
Rating: Good
Tier List (Sandstorm)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Sand Shaper
Good Classes: Walker in the Wastes
Decent Classes: Ashworm Dragoon, Lord of the Tides
Playable Classes: Scorpion Heritor
Garbage Classes: Scion of Tem-Et-Nu
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): N/A
I had a much better experience covering Sandstorm than Stormwrack, I tell you what. It really does help when more than half of the classes in your book aren't garbage tier. Next time I'll cover Frostburn and analyse many great classes, like the cyrokineticist for example... god help me.
Stay frosty.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
Oh hey, I'm actually back to write one of my own takes on a book. It's been a good while indeed, so I figured I might as well start off with one of the best books in 3.5:
Tome of Battle:
Tome of Battle, often called the Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic, is one of the last books ever written in 3.5, alongside such other wonders as Tome of Magic and something something Incarnum. This book has a bit of a bad reputation for some reason; I think it's because too many people think that martials can't have nice things. It might also be because since it was so late in 3.5's lifetime, it wasn't out in too many stores.
But you'll now see why my gaming group loves the shit out of this book, even with it's one big wart:
Crusader
The first new base class that the Book of Weeb Fightin’ Magic gives you is the Crusader, which thematically is the bastard spawn of a Knight and a Paladin. They are religious warriors that are bound by their faith and seek to smite evil (or good). Kind of like the Paladin, they get powers from their deity, but unlike the Paladin, they get fighting techniques instead. These fighting techniques mainly give neat bonuses, allow you to counter attacks, and just pile more damage or change things up depending on which of the Schools you get. Crusaders get for example, the Stone Dragon (mainly a mix of damage dice, bypassing armor, and buffs), White Raven (bardish like support abilities for other martials), and Devoted Spirit (pseudo-paladin like abilities that focuses on alignment). I should also explain how maneuvers work.
They’re kind of like spells, in that you can use a higher level one every other level, and only classes in this book get the full monty. But don’t worry friends, if you want to use a maneuver without being any of these guys, you just take the martial study feat this book gives you, and you still get half of your non-ToB levels to calculate your initiator level. So even Barbarians or Fighters (why) would allow you to use up to 5th level maneuvers. Anyway, let’s get back to explaining how the Crusader uses their maneuvers, since they’re unique compared to the other two.
Now how this works is at first similar to the Cleric or Paladin, in that you pray for a bit and get to pick out your abilities. During the fight, when you use them up, you lose them like spells. You also can only use a few of your readied maneuvers at a time, and have to then go on from there with your other readied maneuvers. As you fight on and you run out of the maneuvers you can use, you either die roll or pull cards to determine which maneuvers you get back for the fight. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, it is.
Okay, enough with explaining how you can get your Hijutsu, let’s get into the class’s structure. You get a good d10 HP die, 4+int skills per level, can use all armors, use simple and martial weapons, and you get full attack, good things since you’re a martial. You only have good Fort saves, but that’s not the end of the world since your CHA score (which should be at least a positive number for Crusaders), is added to Will saves like paladins. I will have to note though that out of the three base classes, the Crusader due to for some reason getting their fourth stance (basically a passive bonus or ability) early, means they are locked out of using the maximum level stance. Despite being the only one of the ToB classes to naturally get Devoted Spirit, but they can’t legally get the stance without the Martial Stance feat.
So anyways, abilities. They get a pretty neat two-punch set up of Steely Resolve and Furious Counterstrike. The first ability allows you to hold off some of the damage you gain until the next turn, putting 5 damage into the pain bank until it’s healed or your next turn ends. Furious Counterstrike uses the Pain bank points to improve your to-hit and damage by +1 per five points. Since you get Steely Resolve six times (Every 4 levels), that means you get +6 to hit and damage for each attack. This makes them a good aggro tank that inflicts damage.
At second level, you gain your CHA bonus to Will saves like I mentioned earlier, which is nice indeed since that can bolster the bad save you have there. At third level, you gain the ability to once a day reroll a save roll, which definitely can help with save or suck or mind control spells. By 6th level, you gain an omni smite that doesn’t give a shit about alignment at all that uses CHA to determine to-hit and uses Crusader level for extra damage. You at the end of this journey gain two of the things too.
After a bit of dead levelry, you get Die Hard as a free feat, which is always useful to have since moving while in the negatives is nice. Lastly, you gain the very useful mettle at level 13, the fort/will save version of evasion. It sadly gets a mediocre (compared to the other two base classes) capstone, but a +1 to hit and damage when damaged is still okay at least. It’s better than Rogue.
While it is a bit more annoying to deal with and a bit jankier than the other two classes, Crusaders are a great way to play a fighter who can kind of hang with wizards given they can shrug off more effectively the save or suck spells than others. Their maneuvers also complement this and bolster other martials as well, meaning it’s a great frontliner that helps the other martials keep up. Lastly omni-smite is omni-smite.
Rating: Good
Swordsage
Swordsages are nicknamed Blade Wizards, and there’s a reason for that. They have access to the largest pool of maneuvers out of the three base classes that the Tome of Battle introduces, and they have the most spell like abilities. The maneuvers they get are the already mentioned Stone Dragon. But they also get Desert Wind (quasi-blastcasting with fire and resisting fire), Diamond Mind (using concentration to bypass defenses or shrug off save or sucks), Setting Sun (mainly a mix of counters, tosses, and debuffs), Shadow Hand (stealth and stat damage), and Tiger Claw (a mix of two weapon fighting, jumping on the enemy, and losing AC to do more damage). Yeah, they get a lot of fancy abilities.
Because of that though, they’re noticeably frailer chassis wise; they have a Cleric style chassis, meaning they use d8 for HP, have average BaB, but swapped out good Fort for good Reflex saves. They also have 6+int skill points per level, meaning a better analogy would be they’re like a Bard design.
They start off with Quick to Act, an initiative boosting extraordinary ability that slowly improves throughout the class’ lifespan. It starts with a +1, and then goes up to +5 by the capstone level. You also begin with what’s called Discipline Focus, which is where you pick a particular school that is your focus. You start off with gaining free weapon focus feats for all weapons used by that discipline (so several free feats). You then get new discipline focuses that come in every 4 levels after that, which can allow you to put your WIS bonus into damage for up to two other schools, which alternate with a +2 on all saves when using a stance from up to two other schools. This, combined with some of Diamond Mind’s concentration checks replacing saves, means you can ignore a lot of save or sucks.
At 7th level, you then get the ability to just stare at a weapon to identify its powers, which is neat since you now have a free identify. Sure, it takes longer than the mage’s spells, but it’s free and repeatable. At 9th level, the Swordsage gets evasion, and then they get improved evasion at level 17. Not as good as Mettle obviously, but it’s still pretty nice they can ignore the half damage from save or suck spells. Their last ability is pretty damn good; Dual Boost allows you to essentially use two special techniques with the Boost type at the same time three times a day.
All in all, a very versatile and pretty effective martial that can pile on some supernatural spookery. Last but not least, you basically can just do the Monk’s job for them, since you can play an Unarmed variant that completely blows them out of the water.
Rating: Amazing
Oh hey, it’s the actual Fighter! Not joking; I’ve referenced more than once that the Warblade should be your go-to for Fighter, and now I’ll get into why. So they get Diamond Mind, Stone Dragon, Tiger Claw, and White Raven schools, which I’ve given a brief overview before. But they also get the Iron Heart School, which mainly is an odd mix of Devoted Spirit, Stone Dragon, and Tiger Claw in use, because of the variety of abilities they can pull from. This loadout makes them very effective on the offense. They are also the only base class out of the lot who can use ranged weapons, as they can also use thrown weapons.
So in terms of chassis, it has an amazing d12 HD, full BaB, 4+int per level, and only a good Fort save. So it’s pretty beefy. I will note that they do have the least amount of maneuvers known and readied, but that’s not too big of a deal, since they have some of the best schools out of the book.
At first level, you gain Battle Clarity, which allows you to apply your INT bonus to your reflex saves, so I’d suggest at least having some bonus there. They also get the magical ability to pretty much render a Fighter useless by having Weapon Aptitude, which allows them to pick their weapon and then basically ignore feat requirements for specialization feats for the measly cost of having them always count as two levels lower than a fighter who is taking said feats. It honestly balances out though, since you can use your normal feats more efficiently and some of the bonus feats you get are pretty solid.
I should probably also mention that you get Bonus Feats; you get four of them starting at 5th level, but the list you get is mediocre as a whole. Still, free feats. But that pales in comparison to Warblades getting Battle Ardor. What’s that do? Why it only allows you to add your INT bonus on confirming crits, meaning you’re more likely to crit. Also, let me tell you of the Tiger Claw school’s stance Blood in the Water, which can complement this. You see, Blood in the Water boosts damage and to-hit by one each time you crit. This add on to crit confirmation makes it more viable. This is why my disgusting crit-build uses War Blade and then mixes it with the Disciple of Dispater.
Anyways, you also get Uncanny Dodge and its improved variant, which compliments the schools and HP you will get as a Warblade and allows you to stand on your own and fight back.
The rest of the abilities you get mind you are similar to Battle Ardor, in that all of them use your INT bonus for neat stuff. For example, at 7th level, you can apply your INT bonus to damage. At 11th level, you apply it to oppose any attempts to trip, bull rush, sunder, and feint at you. Then at 15th level, you get Battle Mastery, which allows you to apply it to your to-hit and damage on attacks of opportunity.
The capstone for these guys are pretty hilarious; you have the nasty ability to stack on two stances at the same time. That means at any point you have two pretty good bonuses, buffs, or debuffs against enemies on you at all times.
Like I’ve said in this thread before: why would you ever play fighter when you can just play this guy instead?
Rating: Amazing
Bloodclaw Master
So here’s a fun fact: this is pretty much the first time I ever looked at the PrCs for this book, since the base classes are so good I’ve never actually bothered to read on from there. Turns out most of the maneuver schools have a specialist, and it should be pretty obvious that this one is the Tiger Claw Specialist.
So the Bloodclaw Master’s described as channeling their inner beast into their strikes, and that classes that might want to go into it include the Swordsage, Warblade, Barbarian, or Rogues. The first two because they actually get the school, and the latter two because of a mix of fluff and mechanical reasons. I would disagree a bit for Barbarians, but that’s mainly because I think their fighting styles don’t mesh as well for it. The bar of entry isn’t too bad; you do need three Tiger Claw maneuvers, and a Jump skill of 9, as well as Multiattack or Two-Weapon Fighting.
I should state right now this is a two-weapon fighter PrC, and those are usually shit. But this one… well, this one ACTUALLY ISN’T. How did this happen you may ask? Well, let’s get into their chassis and abilities to find out!
The chassis is good, it’s a five level PrC with a d12 HD with a good fort and reflex save. It does only have average BaB, but you can get your full BaB just by getting a weapon focus feat for any of the average BaB classes you might get into it, and you’ll still have four attacks otherwise. Besides, the class does counter that with their abilities.
Besides giving you a few more Tiger Claw maneuvers and a stance (plus full initiator levels), it starts off by giving you shifting. This ability makes you look a wee bit like the older khajits from Arena and Daggerfall in exchange for a +2 strength boost that works similar to rage; it lasts for your CON modifier plus levels in this PrC per round. I do believe it does stack with rage too, so it’s a neat way to further bolster it. Besides this, you also gain natural weapons in the form of 1d4 damage dealing claws, but I’d imagine this is overshadowed by the ability to use your full strength bonus in your offhand weapon if it’s either a dagger or one of the tiger claw school’s weapons (so kukris, kamas, handaxes, unarmed, or claws).
2nd level is why I think this PrC makes two-weapon fighting good, since it fully removes the penalty you would get for fighting two handed with light weapons. It actually means you get free extra hits, no penalty. This level also allows you to stack either an extra point of AC or +10 more speed when you use a Tiger Claw stance too.
At 3rd level, you gain both low-light vision and the ability to burn a Tiger Claw (strike) attack to hit twice with your best BaB on a charge attack with Pouncing Strike. The next level further augments the stance by allowing you to get a +1 to hit as well, hence why the slight loss in BaB is negligible. The last two abilities you get are a free scent, and the ability to add another 2d6 damage if you hit with your off-hand weapon.
All in all, it’s one of the only good two-weapon fighting builds I can think of, since it’s one of the few that gets rid of the penalties to it.
Rating: Good
Bloodstorm Blade
You ever wanted to have a less grating way to specialize in thrown weaponry, or did you just want to do stupid things like channel your inner Thor and throw your Warhammer to break someone’s face and get it back? Say hello to this class.
The Bloodstorm Blade is the Iron Heart specialist, and this is one of the reasons why I mentioned that Warblades are the only class that can use maneuvers on their thrown weapons. The fluff is mostly right, I would only recommend that Warblades enter this class, since this one doesn’t give you extra maneuvers and you mostly will spend your Iron Heart maneuvers to use it fully. I mean, if you want to do a Monk/Bloodstorm Blade like the fluff mentioned is possible, sure have fun sobbing. But stick to Warblade if you’re going for this. Plus, this way you can more easily get the Balance ranks needed (
for the class. You also need to get Point-Blank Shot for this one too.
Chassis wise, they get a d12 for health and have full BaB, which makes sense given they are an upgrade of sorts to the Warblade. So let’s move onto their absolutely hilarious abilities since that’s what we came here for. First level affirms it’s very much like Warblade, in that you get their weapon aptitude I mentioned earlier. But you also get the Throw Anything feat (meaning you huck stuff at a 10 ft increment for range) for free, as well as the ability to use an Iron Heart strike attack to instead yeet a dude with your main weapon at range and have it come right back. So already at first level, you can Mjolnir the fuck out of people. Want to throw your orcish double axe? Sure. Your urgrash? Why not. Your fucking hookhammer? Go for it says the Bloodstorm Blade.
2nd level is where things get even more insane. You not only gain the ability to hit people with your maneuvers (strikes only) with your thrown weapon, but you can now treat throwing your weapon as a melee attack. What’s that? Chuck your great sword and use that 1.5x STR modifier and Power Attack at the same time as you hit them with a special ability that bypasses damage resistance and adds another 2d6 damage? Yes. Yes, you can do that. The only limitations are you still have the range penalties for hitting into cover and melee, but still. The class takes a slight break to give you a free fighter’s feat before it veers into lunacy again.
The 4th level? This is where the fun begins. You can now get back your weapon as a free action, meaning now you can honest to god make full attacks from range by hurling your spiked doubleclubs into peoples’ faces. 5th level then augments it with Blood Wind Riccochet, meaning you can now hurl Mjolnir into a crowd and have it bounce up to four times into their stupid weeping faces (so long as you hit of course) until it comes back to you. You then get another slight break at 6th level with another fighter feat before the ride continues.
7th level allows you to change your Iron Heart stance into Eye of the Storm, which gives you +4 to AC against ranged attacks and a +2 on reflex saves, while also allowing you to cross counter people trying to make an Attack of Opportunity on you if you choose to Range Attack and they threaten you. So long as you have another weapon you can hit them back as a swift action even as you throw things into the fight. 8th level allows you to take Blood Rain as a stance instead, and while it’s nice to inflict 3 bleed damage a round per dude you hit (it doesn’t stack though), it’s not quite as nice as Eye of the Storm. Still useful though depending on the fight.
Before you get the capstone, the PrC gives you one more free fighter feat. This is because the capstone is fucking nuts and you need the break. You see, you get Blade Storm as an ability so long as you use of an Iron Heart strike. What this hideously powerful thing does is amazing; you can chuck your weapon and have it bounce around the entire field, using your best to-hit modifier to try and hit every enemy on the field at once. You can only hit each guy once with this attack, but you can try to hit every single person there.
If you ever need to specialize in thrown weapons, bring this motherfucker into the group; you’ll find them worth it every time.
Rating: Amazing
AWAKEN LADS! THIS is the true Dwarven Defender and what anyone who wants to play the defensive tank should pick whenever they play a Dwarf. I’ll admit upfront that this and the next class are race specific classes, which is a bit limiting, but I’m perfectly fine with it. The entry bar is a wee bit high, since you need a BaB of 10 and a Balance skill of 13. Why Balance? Because each school has a special skill attached to it, and Stone Dragon (naturally the school this specialist is tied to) is balance. It will actually make sense when I get into their abilities, but before that, let me get into the chassis.
The chassis is a bit weaker than the other PrCs so far, in that you only get a d10 HD and average BaB, but it’s still solidly in the good martial chassis bracket besides the BaB, which isn’t too much of an issue anyway since you usually enter this with a full BaB class anyway.
So the abilities you get, you start off by getting the Mountain Fortress Stance, which allows you to swap a Stone Dragon Stance to it. It works by making a small pillar of rock that you stand on casually and also cause enemies to have to make a balance check (DC 10) or be knocked prone since the squares around you also become difficult terrain due to being sloped like a moat. Stability or having multiple legs do give you a bonus to avoiding the knockdown, but they have to make those checks each time they move. This does the Dwarven Defender’s job just by giving you some terrain control already, since you affect about 15 feet around you, as opposed to just sitting there like a lump. Did I forget to mention you can also fucking five foot step and the pillar moves with you, and that said movement makes more difficult terrain too?
You also gain a spell-like ability version of Passwall at this point too, which has some decent situational uses too.
The 2nd level of Deepstone Sentinel gives you some extra usage of Mountain Fortress, as ending it when you reach this point in the PrC allows you to use Crashing Mountain Juggernaut, a charge attack that not only forces enemies near you to make a DC 15 balance check to not go prone, but also gives you another 2d6 damage on a successful charge attack. Notice how you can actually control movement with this class? It gets better by the way.
At 3rd level, you can also stack another Stone Dragon stance on your pillar, which is pretty nice, since while I don’t think Stone Dragon has the best stances, they do have some good situational value, especially when you can augment it with terrain control. It is however with the 4th level that you will see why I advocate Deepstone Sentinel if you REALLY want to play defensive tank, since this is where you get two really good abilities.
The first is Stone Curse, which allows you to on a successful hit, to force the enemy you hit to make a will save (DC 10+1/2 your level+STR) or be completely paralyzed (barring flying) until the next round. This allows you to kind of do what one of the Monk’s jobs in 5e is, which is stunlocking. You also get the truly nice ability to summon more pillars up to 60 feet away, which can be either 5 to 10 feet. These pillars force enemies you hit them with to make reflex saves (DC 10+1/2 your level+STR) or get knocked prone. Then you TRULY AWAKEN at 5th level.
For you see, at 5th level, you can AWAKEN the Stone Dragon. This ability allows you to once per fight as a swift action induce a 60 ft area earthquake around you that ignores your allies. Enemies stuck in this murderzone must make a reflex save (DC 10+1/2 your level+STR) or take 12d6 damage AND get knocked prone. Even saving against that means you take half damage, and stability does shit all for either effect.
If you want to control a battlefield and not be a Druid or Ranger, this guy is your-go to… just keep in mind you need to be mostly on earth and rock too.
Rating: Amazing
Tome of Battle:
Tome of Battle, often called the Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic, is one of the last books ever written in 3.5, alongside such other wonders as Tome of Magic and something something Incarnum. This book has a bit of a bad reputation for some reason; I think it's because too many people think that martials can't have nice things. It might also be because since it was so late in 3.5's lifetime, it wasn't out in too many stores.
But you'll now see why my gaming group loves the shit out of this book, even with it's one big wart:
Crusader
The first new base class that the Book of Weeb Fightin’ Magic gives you is the Crusader, which thematically is the bastard spawn of a Knight and a Paladin. They are religious warriors that are bound by their faith and seek to smite evil (or good). Kind of like the Paladin, they get powers from their deity, but unlike the Paladin, they get fighting techniques instead. These fighting techniques mainly give neat bonuses, allow you to counter attacks, and just pile more damage or change things up depending on which of the Schools you get. Crusaders get for example, the Stone Dragon (mainly a mix of damage dice, bypassing armor, and buffs), White Raven (bardish like support abilities for other martials), and Devoted Spirit (pseudo-paladin like abilities that focuses on alignment). I should also explain how maneuvers work.
They’re kind of like spells, in that you can use a higher level one every other level, and only classes in this book get the full monty. But don’t worry friends, if you want to use a maneuver without being any of these guys, you just take the martial study feat this book gives you, and you still get half of your non-ToB levels to calculate your initiator level. So even Barbarians or Fighters (why) would allow you to use up to 5th level maneuvers. Anyway, let’s get back to explaining how the Crusader uses their maneuvers, since they’re unique compared to the other two.
Now how this works is at first similar to the Cleric or Paladin, in that you pray for a bit and get to pick out your abilities. During the fight, when you use them up, you lose them like spells. You also can only use a few of your readied maneuvers at a time, and have to then go on from there with your other readied maneuvers. As you fight on and you run out of the maneuvers you can use, you either die roll or pull cards to determine which maneuvers you get back for the fight. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, it is.
Okay, enough with explaining how you can get your Hijutsu, let’s get into the class’s structure. You get a good d10 HP die, 4+int skills per level, can use all armors, use simple and martial weapons, and you get full attack, good things since you’re a martial. You only have good Fort saves, but that’s not the end of the world since your CHA score (which should be at least a positive number for Crusaders), is added to Will saves like paladins. I will have to note though that out of the three base classes, the Crusader due to for some reason getting their fourth stance (basically a passive bonus or ability) early, means they are locked out of using the maximum level stance. Despite being the only one of the ToB classes to naturally get Devoted Spirit, but they can’t legally get the stance without the Martial Stance feat.
So anyways, abilities. They get a pretty neat two-punch set up of Steely Resolve and Furious Counterstrike. The first ability allows you to hold off some of the damage you gain until the next turn, putting 5 damage into the pain bank until it’s healed or your next turn ends. Furious Counterstrike uses the Pain bank points to improve your to-hit and damage by +1 per five points. Since you get Steely Resolve six times (Every 4 levels), that means you get +6 to hit and damage for each attack. This makes them a good aggro tank that inflicts damage.
At second level, you gain your CHA bonus to Will saves like I mentioned earlier, which is nice indeed since that can bolster the bad save you have there. At third level, you gain the ability to once a day reroll a save roll, which definitely can help with save or suck or mind control spells. By 6th level, you gain an omni smite that doesn’t give a shit about alignment at all that uses CHA to determine to-hit and uses Crusader level for extra damage. You at the end of this journey gain two of the things too.
After a bit of dead levelry, you get Die Hard as a free feat, which is always useful to have since moving while in the negatives is nice. Lastly, you gain the very useful mettle at level 13, the fort/will save version of evasion. It sadly gets a mediocre (compared to the other two base classes) capstone, but a +1 to hit and damage when damaged is still okay at least. It’s better than Rogue.
While it is a bit more annoying to deal with and a bit jankier than the other two classes, Crusaders are a great way to play a fighter who can kind of hang with wizards given they can shrug off more effectively the save or suck spells than others. Their maneuvers also complement this and bolster other martials as well, meaning it’s a great frontliner that helps the other martials keep up. Lastly omni-smite is omni-smite.
Rating: Good
Swordsage
Swordsages are nicknamed Blade Wizards, and there’s a reason for that. They have access to the largest pool of maneuvers out of the three base classes that the Tome of Battle introduces, and they have the most spell like abilities. The maneuvers they get are the already mentioned Stone Dragon. But they also get Desert Wind (quasi-blastcasting with fire and resisting fire), Diamond Mind (using concentration to bypass defenses or shrug off save or sucks), Setting Sun (mainly a mix of counters, tosses, and debuffs), Shadow Hand (stealth and stat damage), and Tiger Claw (a mix of two weapon fighting, jumping on the enemy, and losing AC to do more damage). Yeah, they get a lot of fancy abilities.
Because of that though, they’re noticeably frailer chassis wise; they have a Cleric style chassis, meaning they use d8 for HP, have average BaB, but swapped out good Fort for good Reflex saves. They also have 6+int skill points per level, meaning a better analogy would be they’re like a Bard design.
They start off with Quick to Act, an initiative boosting extraordinary ability that slowly improves throughout the class’ lifespan. It starts with a +1, and then goes up to +5 by the capstone level. You also begin with what’s called Discipline Focus, which is where you pick a particular school that is your focus. You start off with gaining free weapon focus feats for all weapons used by that discipline (so several free feats). You then get new discipline focuses that come in every 4 levels after that, which can allow you to put your WIS bonus into damage for up to two other schools, which alternate with a +2 on all saves when using a stance from up to two other schools. This, combined with some of Diamond Mind’s concentration checks replacing saves, means you can ignore a lot of save or sucks.
At 7th level, you then get the ability to just stare at a weapon to identify its powers, which is neat since you now have a free identify. Sure, it takes longer than the mage’s spells, but it’s free and repeatable. At 9th level, the Swordsage gets evasion, and then they get improved evasion at level 17. Not as good as Mettle obviously, but it’s still pretty nice they can ignore the half damage from save or suck spells. Their last ability is pretty damn good; Dual Boost allows you to essentially use two special techniques with the Boost type at the same time three times a day.
All in all, a very versatile and pretty effective martial that can pile on some supernatural spookery. Last but not least, you basically can just do the Monk’s job for them, since you can play an Unarmed variant that completely blows them out of the water.
Rating: Amazing
Warblade
Oh hey, it’s the actual Fighter! Not joking; I’ve referenced more than once that the Warblade should be your go-to for Fighter, and now I’ll get into why. So they get Diamond Mind, Stone Dragon, Tiger Claw, and White Raven schools, which I’ve given a brief overview before. But they also get the Iron Heart School, which mainly is an odd mix of Devoted Spirit, Stone Dragon, and Tiger Claw in use, because of the variety of abilities they can pull from. This loadout makes them very effective on the offense. They are also the only base class out of the lot who can use ranged weapons, as they can also use thrown weapons.
So in terms of chassis, it has an amazing d12 HD, full BaB, 4+int per level, and only a good Fort save. So it’s pretty beefy. I will note that they do have the least amount of maneuvers known and readied, but that’s not too big of a deal, since they have some of the best schools out of the book.
At first level, you gain Battle Clarity, which allows you to apply your INT bonus to your reflex saves, so I’d suggest at least having some bonus there. They also get the magical ability to pretty much render a Fighter useless by having Weapon Aptitude, which allows them to pick their weapon and then basically ignore feat requirements for specialization feats for the measly cost of having them always count as two levels lower than a fighter who is taking said feats. It honestly balances out though, since you can use your normal feats more efficiently and some of the bonus feats you get are pretty solid.
I should probably also mention that you get Bonus Feats; you get four of them starting at 5th level, but the list you get is mediocre as a whole. Still, free feats. But that pales in comparison to Warblades getting Battle Ardor. What’s that do? Why it only allows you to add your INT bonus on confirming crits, meaning you’re more likely to crit. Also, let me tell you of the Tiger Claw school’s stance Blood in the Water, which can complement this. You see, Blood in the Water boosts damage and to-hit by one each time you crit. This add on to crit confirmation makes it more viable. This is why my disgusting crit-build uses War Blade and then mixes it with the Disciple of Dispater.
Anyways, you also get Uncanny Dodge and its improved variant, which compliments the schools and HP you will get as a Warblade and allows you to stand on your own and fight back.
The rest of the abilities you get mind you are similar to Battle Ardor, in that all of them use your INT bonus for neat stuff. For example, at 7th level, you can apply your INT bonus to damage. At 11th level, you apply it to oppose any attempts to trip, bull rush, sunder, and feint at you. Then at 15th level, you get Battle Mastery, which allows you to apply it to your to-hit and damage on attacks of opportunity.
The capstone for these guys are pretty hilarious; you have the nasty ability to stack on two stances at the same time. That means at any point you have two pretty good bonuses, buffs, or debuffs against enemies on you at all times.
Like I’ve said in this thread before: why would you ever play fighter when you can just play this guy instead?
Rating: Amazing
Bloodclaw Master
So here’s a fun fact: this is pretty much the first time I ever looked at the PrCs for this book, since the base classes are so good I’ve never actually bothered to read on from there. Turns out most of the maneuver schools have a specialist, and it should be pretty obvious that this one is the Tiger Claw Specialist.
So the Bloodclaw Master’s described as channeling their inner beast into their strikes, and that classes that might want to go into it include the Swordsage, Warblade, Barbarian, or Rogues. The first two because they actually get the school, and the latter two because of a mix of fluff and mechanical reasons. I would disagree a bit for Barbarians, but that’s mainly because I think their fighting styles don’t mesh as well for it. The bar of entry isn’t too bad; you do need three Tiger Claw maneuvers, and a Jump skill of 9, as well as Multiattack or Two-Weapon Fighting.
I should state right now this is a two-weapon fighter PrC, and those are usually shit. But this one… well, this one ACTUALLY ISN’T. How did this happen you may ask? Well, let’s get into their chassis and abilities to find out!
The chassis is good, it’s a five level PrC with a d12 HD with a good fort and reflex save. It does only have average BaB, but you can get your full BaB just by getting a weapon focus feat for any of the average BaB classes you might get into it, and you’ll still have four attacks otherwise. Besides, the class does counter that with their abilities.
Besides giving you a few more Tiger Claw maneuvers and a stance (plus full initiator levels), it starts off by giving you shifting. This ability makes you look a wee bit like the older khajits from Arena and Daggerfall in exchange for a +2 strength boost that works similar to rage; it lasts for your CON modifier plus levels in this PrC per round. I do believe it does stack with rage too, so it’s a neat way to further bolster it. Besides this, you also gain natural weapons in the form of 1d4 damage dealing claws, but I’d imagine this is overshadowed by the ability to use your full strength bonus in your offhand weapon if it’s either a dagger or one of the tiger claw school’s weapons (so kukris, kamas, handaxes, unarmed, or claws).
2nd level is why I think this PrC makes two-weapon fighting good, since it fully removes the penalty you would get for fighting two handed with light weapons. It actually means you get free extra hits, no penalty. This level also allows you to stack either an extra point of AC or +10 more speed when you use a Tiger Claw stance too.
At 3rd level, you gain both low-light vision and the ability to burn a Tiger Claw (strike) attack to hit twice with your best BaB on a charge attack with Pouncing Strike. The next level further augments the stance by allowing you to get a +1 to hit as well, hence why the slight loss in BaB is negligible. The last two abilities you get are a free scent, and the ability to add another 2d6 damage if you hit with your off-hand weapon.
All in all, it’s one of the only good two-weapon fighting builds I can think of, since it’s one of the few that gets rid of the penalties to it.
Rating: Good
Bloodstorm Blade
You ever wanted to have a less grating way to specialize in thrown weaponry, or did you just want to do stupid things like channel your inner Thor and throw your Warhammer to break someone’s face and get it back? Say hello to this class.
The Bloodstorm Blade is the Iron Heart specialist, and this is one of the reasons why I mentioned that Warblades are the only class that can use maneuvers on their thrown weapons. The fluff is mostly right, I would only recommend that Warblades enter this class, since this one doesn’t give you extra maneuvers and you mostly will spend your Iron Heart maneuvers to use it fully. I mean, if you want to do a Monk/Bloodstorm Blade like the fluff mentioned is possible, sure have fun sobbing. But stick to Warblade if you’re going for this. Plus, this way you can more easily get the Balance ranks needed (
for the class. You also need to get Point-Blank Shot for this one too.Chassis wise, they get a d12 for health and have full BaB, which makes sense given they are an upgrade of sorts to the Warblade. So let’s move onto their absolutely hilarious abilities since that’s what we came here for. First level affirms it’s very much like Warblade, in that you get their weapon aptitude I mentioned earlier. But you also get the Throw Anything feat (meaning you huck stuff at a 10 ft increment for range) for free, as well as the ability to use an Iron Heart strike attack to instead yeet a dude with your main weapon at range and have it come right back. So already at first level, you can Mjolnir the fuck out of people. Want to throw your orcish double axe? Sure. Your urgrash? Why not. Your fucking hookhammer? Go for it says the Bloodstorm Blade.
2nd level is where things get even more insane. You not only gain the ability to hit people with your maneuvers (strikes only) with your thrown weapon, but you can now treat throwing your weapon as a melee attack. What’s that? Chuck your great sword and use that 1.5x STR modifier and Power Attack at the same time as you hit them with a special ability that bypasses damage resistance and adds another 2d6 damage? Yes. Yes, you can do that. The only limitations are you still have the range penalties for hitting into cover and melee, but still. The class takes a slight break to give you a free fighter’s feat before it veers into lunacy again.
The 4th level? This is where the fun begins. You can now get back your weapon as a free action, meaning now you can honest to god make full attacks from range by hurling your spiked doubleclubs into peoples’ faces. 5th level then augments it with Blood Wind Riccochet, meaning you can now hurl Mjolnir into a crowd and have it bounce up to four times into their stupid weeping faces (so long as you hit of course) until it comes back to you. You then get another slight break at 6th level with another fighter feat before the ride continues.
7th level allows you to change your Iron Heart stance into Eye of the Storm, which gives you +4 to AC against ranged attacks and a +2 on reflex saves, while also allowing you to cross counter people trying to make an Attack of Opportunity on you if you choose to Range Attack and they threaten you. So long as you have another weapon you can hit them back as a swift action even as you throw things into the fight. 8th level allows you to take Blood Rain as a stance instead, and while it’s nice to inflict 3 bleed damage a round per dude you hit (it doesn’t stack though), it’s not quite as nice as Eye of the Storm. Still useful though depending on the fight.
Before you get the capstone, the PrC gives you one more free fighter feat. This is because the capstone is fucking nuts and you need the break. You see, you get Blade Storm as an ability so long as you use of an Iron Heart strike. What this hideously powerful thing does is amazing; you can chuck your weapon and have it bounce around the entire field, using your best to-hit modifier to try and hit every enemy on the field at once. You can only hit each guy once with this attack, but you can try to hit every single person there.
If you ever need to specialize in thrown weapons, bring this motherfucker into the group; you’ll find them worth it every time.
Rating: Amazing
Deepstone Sentinel
AWAKEN LADS! THIS is the true Dwarven Defender and what anyone who wants to play the defensive tank should pick whenever they play a Dwarf. I’ll admit upfront that this and the next class are race specific classes, which is a bit limiting, but I’m perfectly fine with it. The entry bar is a wee bit high, since you need a BaB of 10 and a Balance skill of 13. Why Balance? Because each school has a special skill attached to it, and Stone Dragon (naturally the school this specialist is tied to) is balance. It will actually make sense when I get into their abilities, but before that, let me get into the chassis.
The chassis is a bit weaker than the other PrCs so far, in that you only get a d10 HD and average BaB, but it’s still solidly in the good martial chassis bracket besides the BaB, which isn’t too much of an issue anyway since you usually enter this with a full BaB class anyway.
So the abilities you get, you start off by getting the Mountain Fortress Stance, which allows you to swap a Stone Dragon Stance to it. It works by making a small pillar of rock that you stand on casually and also cause enemies to have to make a balance check (DC 10) or be knocked prone since the squares around you also become difficult terrain due to being sloped like a moat. Stability or having multiple legs do give you a bonus to avoiding the knockdown, but they have to make those checks each time they move. This does the Dwarven Defender’s job just by giving you some terrain control already, since you affect about 15 feet around you, as opposed to just sitting there like a lump. Did I forget to mention you can also fucking five foot step and the pillar moves with you, and that said movement makes more difficult terrain too?
You also gain a spell-like ability version of Passwall at this point too, which has some decent situational uses too.
The 2nd level of Deepstone Sentinel gives you some extra usage of Mountain Fortress, as ending it when you reach this point in the PrC allows you to use Crashing Mountain Juggernaut, a charge attack that not only forces enemies near you to make a DC 15 balance check to not go prone, but also gives you another 2d6 damage on a successful charge attack. Notice how you can actually control movement with this class? It gets better by the way.
At 3rd level, you can also stack another Stone Dragon stance on your pillar, which is pretty nice, since while I don’t think Stone Dragon has the best stances, they do have some good situational value, especially when you can augment it with terrain control. It is however with the 4th level that you will see why I advocate Deepstone Sentinel if you REALLY want to play defensive tank, since this is where you get two really good abilities.
The first is Stone Curse, which allows you to on a successful hit, to force the enemy you hit to make a will save (DC 10+1/2 your level+STR) or be completely paralyzed (barring flying) until the next round. This allows you to kind of do what one of the Monk’s jobs in 5e is, which is stunlocking. You also get the truly nice ability to summon more pillars up to 60 feet away, which can be either 5 to 10 feet. These pillars force enemies you hit them with to make reflex saves (DC 10+1/2 your level+STR) or get knocked prone. Then you TRULY AWAKEN at 5th level.
For you see, at 5th level, you can AWAKEN the Stone Dragon. This ability allows you to once per fight as a swift action induce a 60 ft area earthquake around you that ignores your allies. Enemies stuck in this murderzone must make a reflex save (DC 10+1/2 your level+STR) or take 12d6 damage AND get knocked prone. Even saving against that means you take half damage, and stability does shit all for either effect.
If you want to control a battlefield and not be a Druid or Ranger, this guy is your-go to… just keep in mind you need to be mostly on earth and rock too.
Rating: Amazing
Attachments
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
(Sorry for the doublepost, I apparently hit the fucking character limit. Again)
The Eternal Blade is probably the second or third most weeaboo class in this book, and it’s kind of fitting I reckon it goes to the Elves as their race specific class. This is also the part of the book where they start combining school masteries, as the Eternal Blade is both the Devoted Spirit and Diamond Mind Specialist. The bar is somewhat lower than the Deepstone Sentinel’s, you still need a +10 to attack, but you just need weapon focus and a few of the aforementioned maneuvers.
The chassis is pretty solid, you get a d10 HD, a full BaB, and a loadout of maneuvers, more maneuvers readied, and even a stance too.
So onto the class abilities. You start off with a Blade Guide. The best way to describe this is it’s one part dead mentor, one part familiar. It’s basically a member of the Blades who teach and guide you from beyond the grave on how to be the best warrior you can be. It’s main role is to advise you on the field, since it disappears if you don’t keep line of sight with it and it can’t really attack. It also does train you during your meditative state as an elf, which brings me to Eternal Training.
Basically, this ability is like Image Fighting from Dragonball Z, where you and your mentor play out battles in your mind as you are in trance, using their experience, hypotheticals, and so on. This mind training can give you one of two benefits in a fight. The first that you can apply your Int bonus on attack rolls and damage rolls on a specific creature type for that single fight. Humanoids and Outsiders need to be by subtype though. The other option is to ready up a maneuver from the Diamond Mind and Devoted Spirit that you don’t have for said fight. You get the ability to do this every other level too, meaning up to five times a day you can get this bonus in a fight.
At second level, your Blade Guide can give you the enemy’s weak point as an advice, allowing you to bypass DR completely for that turn. This is pretty good, but gets even better when you realize that it doesn’t mention a “per day” or “per encounter”. You can just yeet past the DR so long as your Blade Guide is there. At 3rd level, you also get a free Uncanny Dodge so long as your Guide is there, and you get the benefits even in heavy armor too.
Then at fourth level, you dead mentor can casually teach you some of the skills they have in life. Basically, you pick two skills to start with, and then you gain a bonus to that skill based on your Eternal Blade level and your INT bonus. You gain a new skill every even level after 4th too, allowing you to kind of be a skill monkey.
The next skill is a little bit mediocre, but still fine. Basically at 6th level you can apply your INT bonus to AC on a single opponent so long as your dead mentor is there with you. At 8th level, you also get the ability to hit an enemy and drop their AC by your INT level for a round too.
The capstone though is really good; Island in Time allows your dead mentor to control your body for a bit, allowing you to get a free turn free of the initiative order per encounter. This ability to attack twice is very nice, especially since you can actually use it to cross counter people who might threaten yourself and others in your party.
All in all, a pretty neat Jedi like order, and a solid class if you’re an Elven martial or a ToB class user.
Rating: Good
Jade Phoenix Mage
Given this is a book on martials, of course there was bound to be a gish build at some point, and this one is effectively “The Gish With Weeaboo Fightin’ Magic”. This one is also a bit on the weeaboo side, but it’s arguable if it’s more or less weeb than the Eternal Blade.
This one is a bit of a pick and choose on if you want 9th level spells, or if you want the 4th attack and more feats, since you can’t quite get both either way. At least, if you don’t pick the Abjurant Champion to balance it out a bit. The bar to enter it isn’t too bad, you need to be able to cast 2nd level arcane spells, know some maneuvers, and have a smattering of knowledges and 9 concentration ranks.
From there, you get a slightly frailer Swordsage chassis; makes sense given you are mostly a caster now. You have a d6 HD, average BaB, and you lose two arcane spell levels, and also get a decent crop of maneuvers and stances too. It sounds a bit trash if you want to gish, but bear with me it gets amazing.
Here's one of the reasons why: at first level, you can burn a spell prepared to get a +4 to hit on your next attack or maneuver, and then you also get nd10 extra damage on that attack, the n representing the spell level you burned. So if you decided to use up a 3rd level spell slot, you’d be getting a +4 to hit and 3d10 extra damage on top of what you’re already doing. You also get Rite of Waking, which is also pretty nice since you get a +2 on all knowledges, and then can roll for them even if you didn’t bother to put points into them too.
2nd level then allows you to swap out your stance for the Mystic Phoenix Stance, which boosts your caster level by 1, gives +2 dodge bonuses to your AC, and you can choose to burn spell slots to get DR/evil which is calculated by spell slot level x 2. You can only do this up to 5th level, but being able to ignore 10 points of damage per hit barring anything evil is damn nice for someone who’s a bit on the frail side like you are.
4th level gives you Empowering Strike, which means one time per fight you can hit someone with your weapon and Empower a spell either on the same turn if it’s a swift action spell (or one aided by quicken), or a normal spell the next turn. It’s basically a free Empower feat that doesn’t raise the spell level. Then 6th level gives you another stance shift in the form of the Firebird Stance.
This stance is pretty damn good. It allows you to automatically have fire resistance 10, and boosts your caster level for spell DCs by 3. It also allows you to burn spell slots to do nd6 of spell damage to anyone within 10 feet of you, with the n being the spell level. Half of that is the easily ignorable fire damage, but the other half is untyped, which allows you to bypass a lot of resistances. The DC to take half damage is 14+casting mental stat. You also get a decent fluff ability that allows you to Rite of Waking others who fit the criteria and were Jade Phoenix Mages in a past life too, and detect fellow members of your own order too.
At 8th level, you get the ability once per fight to quicken a spell without raising its spell level or needing to know that metamagic feat either, which means you can hit someone with a maneuver and then douche them with a spell at the same time. But 10th level… ho boy that capstone.
Emerald Immolation is something you can only do once a week. It sounds a bit shit that, but here’s why it’s so infrequent. You can Allahu Ackbar yourself and pile on 20d6 damage on enemies in a 20 foot range of yourself. The reflex DC for this pigshit is 19+your casting stat, and that 20d6 is half fire, half untyped. It also forcibly dismisses all outsiders who must make a willsave if they fail the reflex save at the same number. You then come back 1d6 rounds later, disoriented, but at full health, all of your equipment, and all damages removed. So if you felt like it, you can deepstrike teleport into a mass of Slaads and force them all home with one glorious suicide bombing.
The only reason I can’t quite put it into Tippy tier is it just doesn’t quite break the action economy or world hard enough, but boy does it come close.
Rating: Amazing
Master of Nine
This particular build is pretty simple; it takes the idea that each school’s just part of one true way. Basically, if you want to be the master of using all of those schools and their abilities, this is the class that you pick for it.
The bar of entry is pretty steep; each school as I mentioned has a skill linked to it, and for this one you need 10 ranks in four of them. You also need to know one maneuver from 6 different schools (I WONDER WHICH CLASS THIS IS SUPPOSED TO IMPROVE), and five different feats too. Adaptive Style is pretty solid for maneuver users as it allows you to pick and choose mid-fight, but stuff like Dodge? Ech!
But then you look at what you get. Sure, it’s just the Swordsage chassis, but HOLY SHIT ALL THEM MANEUVERS AND STANCES. It’s a five level class, and yet you learn 8 maneuvers, can ready 5 at a time, and two fucking stances. For those wondering, this is four times as many special techniques you’d get for any other class at this point. It’s nuts already.
As for the skills you get, they’re still really nice. At 2nd level, you gain the ability to use two stances for two rounds per level. Stances tend to be a decent little bonus for you or your friends, and getting two at once is nice for a fight. The next level also boosts the save DC of any maneuver you use by one, which is nice because of how rare this is for maneuvers. Counter Stance, which you get at 4th level is good too; it allows you to change up stances (thus your bonuses) if you use a counter maneuver to hit them back, allowing you to avoid some or add on damage when you do so.
The capstone though is also pretty broken. You gain a +2 to hit for any of your strikes and the damage you pile onto it varies depending on how many maneuvers of the 9 schools you have readied. This means that you can do up to 9 extra damage per hit with a martial strike.
It's probably the simplest class, but damn does it improve Swordsages, who are basically the only class that can take them.
Rating: Amazing
Ever wanted to outdo a paladin by NOT making a pure Martial Cleric? Well, this PrC is open to you so long as you worship Wee Jas, which I understand if you’re not up for that kind of thing.
These dudes are the assassin-paladin order of Wee Jas, and this is reflected in the fact you need to have the ability to turn and rebuke undead, and also have cross class skills in hide (unless you’re a cleric with the Trickery Domain). Barring these items, the bar of entry is reasonable. So what’s the chassis like? Pretty solidly cleric style, given you do get 8 out of 10 levels with divine caster improvement, and a full BaB to boot.
So what abilities do you get besides spell casting and some maneuvers? Well, you can burn a turn or rebuke to get a maneuver back, and if you entered as a crusader you don’t have to deal with card bullshittery either. At 4th level, you can also ignore armor check penalties to hide too, making this class a solid helper for a rogue or stealthy player too since they will certainly be beefier.
At 7th level, you get the ability to burn a turn/rebuke to get a free swift or immediate actions, which give you nice abilities to add another boost attack or to cast a spell as you attack too, as clerics tend to have a lot of swift spells they can use. Then you get a nice ability to convert a turn/rebuke into a quasi-smite that adds +4 sacred/profane bonuses to hit, and does another 1d10 damage. It has no capstones, but hey, you get a maneuver, another BaB point, and a spell level, so it’s fine.
All in all, a good Martial Cleric supplement, or a good way to get some more action economy trickery, or even just have someone who can join the rogue on their magical theft journeys. Very flexible, and a great way to be a That Guy if you know there’s a Paladin in the group and you want to one-up them like some insecure weirdo.
Rating: Amazing
Shadow Sun Ninja
Here we go, the most weeaboo class in this book has arrived and- OH FUCK ME THE SAMURAI/RONIN WRITER ESCAPED HIS CAGE AND FUCKING WROTE THIS! FLEE!
Welp, let’s just look at this… seriously, we were so close to having a book with nothing but good shit why. So the Shadow Sun Ninja in fluff and in mechanics is shit. They are an order of ninjas that use the Setting Sun and Shadow Hand schools to try to do good things from the shadows, or as they call it “dabbling in darkness to imbue light”… I’m not joking. The entire PrC entry has more dark-light edgy teenage metaphors than the Space Wolves have “wolf” in their descriptions. It’s that painful and I at one point was reduced to screaming.
Entering this pile of shit isn’t hard, you just need 8 ranks in Hide, have Improved Unarmed Strike, and know some maneuvers for the class. This is because this clearly was the author, eating paint chips at this point I suspect, thinking Monks needed a class too… forgetting this book made them obsolete already with Swordsage.
But enough bitching, I need to get through this before I tie this noose around my neck from dwelling on this thing for too long. It has a Monk style chassis (1d8 HP per level) and their abilities stack together, so yes, you get those nice abilities like useless arrow catch, selective free fall, -2 to hit with a fucking average BaB. Let’s just get into the abilities now…
The big theme of this class is you have to first perform one action and then you MUST do the second action to counter it, to further keep the stupid fucking duality theme going. The first ability turns an attack you make into a melee touch attack that does negative energy damage equal to your base fist damage + wisdom. That’s not too terrible, but then you can’t do it again until you hit an ally with your fists to discharge that excess positive energy and heal them up by that damage. You have to discharge it all by the fucking way. And no, you can’t do this on the same round because fuck you I guess.
At 2nd level, you gain a super situational cold damage resistance up to 10, so you can fling 2d6 fire damage back at the opponent as a ranged touch attack. It only lasts the turn by the way. At 4th you get the oh so autistically named “Light Within Darkness”, which if you can pull off a hide check, allows you to make enemies who didn’t see you make a Fortitude save (DC 10+1/2 your leve+WIS) or be blinded for the round. It’s okay at best.
Then you get one of the dumbest abilities in the game, and the second half of autism in the form of “Darkness within Light”. What does this fucking pile of shit grant you? Why the ability to get a +4 to hit and damage on blind enemies while you yourself are blinded. Yep, blind yourself to hit another blind person, which is so goddamn situational that it’s a joke.
The 7th level ability is the only remotely good thing you get; Void of the Shadow Sun. This ability gives you an aura that gives you a +2 AC, but if you get hit it dispels. Next turn, you can then douche everyone for 8d6 cold damage in a 30 circle. It’s remotely good because it actually does decent damage. The issue is it takes two turns to set up. Most fights only last about 2-4. See the big problem with this fucking class yet?
Then the 9th level ability is the saddest fucking replacement possible for the stance you choose listed in this book. Instead of just using the better Shadow Hand or Setting Sun stances, why not use “Child of Darkness and Light”? Notice the drooling mongoloid who wrote this can’t come up with a better phrase for this either, like say “Chiaroscuro” or something like that. Anyways, this stance shift is shit; you alternate between goddamn Dazzle, you know that OP fucking cantrip, and darkness, which is a little less shit. No good boosts, no good anything. Fuck this class.
Oh, and the capstone is Mountebank territory “good”. You legit become a Heartless style shadow enemy quasi-undead. Each unarmed attack allows you to enervate, or inflict negative levels, on an opponent and heals you a bit. Then when you shift out of it you take Con Damage equal to the number of hits you land and enervate a dude with. Now, it seems like it’s healable, but it is entirely possible you can get down to 0 on accident. If THAT happens, you dissolve into mist and your party mates need to use True Ressurrection to bring your ass back. If they choose not to do this though, because you were a shit character? Your guy comes back as a vampire, permanently set to evil, immune to sun damage, and is now an NPC. Yeah…
The biggest problem with this class is that you have to waste a turn to do set-ups for all of their abilities. It’s really stupid too, since Setting Sun, while not my favorite school from ToB, has a lot of counters that you can act out instantly. If this class stated you can use said counters to do the second ability in the same turn, can choose to do one or the other first and then use the other to counter, or use swift actions instead, this would actually make the class solid. But no, you don’t get this, you just get weeaboo multistate shittery and chi vampires that can only be fixed by going on a journey to Hell to free your retarded ass. Fuck this class for sullying this book. Fuck the writer for making another weeb class that sucks. Fuck this class.
Rating: Garbage
Tiers (Tome of Battle)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Swordsage, Warblade, Bloodstorm Blade, Deepstone Sentinel, Jade Phoenix Mage, Ruby Knight Vindicator, Master of Nine
Good Classes: Crusader, Bloodclaw Master, Eternal Blade
Decent Classes: N/A
Playable Classes: N/A
Garbage Classes: Shadow Sun Ninja
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): N/A
Besides Shadow Sun Ninja, every single class is perfectly good for you to use. It makes martials viable and effective, and it's just plain fun to play as some of these class. I have almost nothing bad to say about this book to be honest.
I mentioned doing Player's Handbook at some point, but I think I'll cover Tome of Magic so I can suffer harder instead. When will that come out?
Man I don't fuckin' know. Maybe sometime this February, maybe in 2021. We'll see.
Eternal Blade
The Eternal Blade is probably the second or third most weeaboo class in this book, and it’s kind of fitting I reckon it goes to the Elves as their race specific class. This is also the part of the book where they start combining school masteries, as the Eternal Blade is both the Devoted Spirit and Diamond Mind Specialist. The bar is somewhat lower than the Deepstone Sentinel’s, you still need a +10 to attack, but you just need weapon focus and a few of the aforementioned maneuvers.
The chassis is pretty solid, you get a d10 HD, a full BaB, and a loadout of maneuvers, more maneuvers readied, and even a stance too.
So onto the class abilities. You start off with a Blade Guide. The best way to describe this is it’s one part dead mentor, one part familiar. It’s basically a member of the Blades who teach and guide you from beyond the grave on how to be the best warrior you can be. It’s main role is to advise you on the field, since it disappears if you don’t keep line of sight with it and it can’t really attack. It also does train you during your meditative state as an elf, which brings me to Eternal Training.
Basically, this ability is like Image Fighting from Dragonball Z, where you and your mentor play out battles in your mind as you are in trance, using their experience, hypotheticals, and so on. This mind training can give you one of two benefits in a fight. The first that you can apply your Int bonus on attack rolls and damage rolls on a specific creature type for that single fight. Humanoids and Outsiders need to be by subtype though. The other option is to ready up a maneuver from the Diamond Mind and Devoted Spirit that you don’t have for said fight. You get the ability to do this every other level too, meaning up to five times a day you can get this bonus in a fight.
At second level, your Blade Guide can give you the enemy’s weak point as an advice, allowing you to bypass DR completely for that turn. This is pretty good, but gets even better when you realize that it doesn’t mention a “per day” or “per encounter”. You can just yeet past the DR so long as your Blade Guide is there. At 3rd level, you also get a free Uncanny Dodge so long as your Guide is there, and you get the benefits even in heavy armor too.
Then at fourth level, you dead mentor can casually teach you some of the skills they have in life. Basically, you pick two skills to start with, and then you gain a bonus to that skill based on your Eternal Blade level and your INT bonus. You gain a new skill every even level after 4th too, allowing you to kind of be a skill monkey.
The next skill is a little bit mediocre, but still fine. Basically at 6th level you can apply your INT bonus to AC on a single opponent so long as your dead mentor is there with you. At 8th level, you also get the ability to hit an enemy and drop their AC by your INT level for a round too.
The capstone though is really good; Island in Time allows your dead mentor to control your body for a bit, allowing you to get a free turn free of the initiative order per encounter. This ability to attack twice is very nice, especially since you can actually use it to cross counter people who might threaten yourself and others in your party.
All in all, a pretty neat Jedi like order, and a solid class if you’re an Elven martial or a ToB class user.
Rating: Good
Jade Phoenix Mage
Given this is a book on martials, of course there was bound to be a gish build at some point, and this one is effectively “The Gish With Weeaboo Fightin’ Magic”. This one is also a bit on the weeaboo side, but it’s arguable if it’s more or less weeb than the Eternal Blade.
This one is a bit of a pick and choose on if you want 9th level spells, or if you want the 4th attack and more feats, since you can’t quite get both either way. At least, if you don’t pick the Abjurant Champion to balance it out a bit. The bar to enter it isn’t too bad, you need to be able to cast 2nd level arcane spells, know some maneuvers, and have a smattering of knowledges and 9 concentration ranks.
From there, you get a slightly frailer Swordsage chassis; makes sense given you are mostly a caster now. You have a d6 HD, average BaB, and you lose two arcane spell levels, and also get a decent crop of maneuvers and stances too. It sounds a bit trash if you want to gish, but bear with me it gets amazing.
Here's one of the reasons why: at first level, you can burn a spell prepared to get a +4 to hit on your next attack or maneuver, and then you also get nd10 extra damage on that attack, the n representing the spell level you burned. So if you decided to use up a 3rd level spell slot, you’d be getting a +4 to hit and 3d10 extra damage on top of what you’re already doing. You also get Rite of Waking, which is also pretty nice since you get a +2 on all knowledges, and then can roll for them even if you didn’t bother to put points into them too.
2nd level then allows you to swap out your stance for the Mystic Phoenix Stance, which boosts your caster level by 1, gives +2 dodge bonuses to your AC, and you can choose to burn spell slots to get DR/evil which is calculated by spell slot level x 2. You can only do this up to 5th level, but being able to ignore 10 points of damage per hit barring anything evil is damn nice for someone who’s a bit on the frail side like you are.
4th level gives you Empowering Strike, which means one time per fight you can hit someone with your weapon and Empower a spell either on the same turn if it’s a swift action spell (or one aided by quicken), or a normal spell the next turn. It’s basically a free Empower feat that doesn’t raise the spell level. Then 6th level gives you another stance shift in the form of the Firebird Stance.
This stance is pretty damn good. It allows you to automatically have fire resistance 10, and boosts your caster level for spell DCs by 3. It also allows you to burn spell slots to do nd6 of spell damage to anyone within 10 feet of you, with the n being the spell level. Half of that is the easily ignorable fire damage, but the other half is untyped, which allows you to bypass a lot of resistances. The DC to take half damage is 14+casting mental stat. You also get a decent fluff ability that allows you to Rite of Waking others who fit the criteria and were Jade Phoenix Mages in a past life too, and detect fellow members of your own order too.
At 8th level, you get the ability once per fight to quicken a spell without raising its spell level or needing to know that metamagic feat either, which means you can hit someone with a maneuver and then douche them with a spell at the same time. But 10th level… ho boy that capstone.
Emerald Immolation is something you can only do once a week. It sounds a bit shit that, but here’s why it’s so infrequent. You can Allahu Ackbar yourself and pile on 20d6 damage on enemies in a 20 foot range of yourself. The reflex DC for this pigshit is 19+your casting stat, and that 20d6 is half fire, half untyped. It also forcibly dismisses all outsiders who must make a willsave if they fail the reflex save at the same number. You then come back 1d6 rounds later, disoriented, but at full health, all of your equipment, and all damages removed. So if you felt like it, you can deepstrike teleport into a mass of Slaads and force them all home with one glorious suicide bombing.
The only reason I can’t quite put it into Tippy tier is it just doesn’t quite break the action economy or world hard enough, but boy does it come close.
Rating: Amazing
Master of Nine
This particular build is pretty simple; it takes the idea that each school’s just part of one true way. Basically, if you want to be the master of using all of those schools and their abilities, this is the class that you pick for it.
The bar of entry is pretty steep; each school as I mentioned has a skill linked to it, and for this one you need 10 ranks in four of them. You also need to know one maneuver from 6 different schools (I WONDER WHICH CLASS THIS IS SUPPOSED TO IMPROVE), and five different feats too. Adaptive Style is pretty solid for maneuver users as it allows you to pick and choose mid-fight, but stuff like Dodge? Ech!
But then you look at what you get. Sure, it’s just the Swordsage chassis, but HOLY SHIT ALL THEM MANEUVERS AND STANCES. It’s a five level class, and yet you learn 8 maneuvers, can ready 5 at a time, and two fucking stances. For those wondering, this is four times as many special techniques you’d get for any other class at this point. It’s nuts already.
As for the skills you get, they’re still really nice. At 2nd level, you gain the ability to use two stances for two rounds per level. Stances tend to be a decent little bonus for you or your friends, and getting two at once is nice for a fight. The next level also boosts the save DC of any maneuver you use by one, which is nice because of how rare this is for maneuvers. Counter Stance, which you get at 4th level is good too; it allows you to change up stances (thus your bonuses) if you use a counter maneuver to hit them back, allowing you to avoid some or add on damage when you do so.
The capstone though is also pretty broken. You gain a +2 to hit for any of your strikes and the damage you pile onto it varies depending on how many maneuvers of the 9 schools you have readied. This means that you can do up to 9 extra damage per hit with a martial strike.
It's probably the simplest class, but damn does it improve Swordsages, who are basically the only class that can take them.
Rating: Amazing
Ruby Knight Vindicator
Ever wanted to outdo a paladin by NOT making a pure Martial Cleric? Well, this PrC is open to you so long as you worship Wee Jas, which I understand if you’re not up for that kind of thing.
These dudes are the assassin-paladin order of Wee Jas, and this is reflected in the fact you need to have the ability to turn and rebuke undead, and also have cross class skills in hide (unless you’re a cleric with the Trickery Domain). Barring these items, the bar of entry is reasonable. So what’s the chassis like? Pretty solidly cleric style, given you do get 8 out of 10 levels with divine caster improvement, and a full BaB to boot.
So what abilities do you get besides spell casting and some maneuvers? Well, you can burn a turn or rebuke to get a maneuver back, and if you entered as a crusader you don’t have to deal with card bullshittery either. At 4th level, you can also ignore armor check penalties to hide too, making this class a solid helper for a rogue or stealthy player too since they will certainly be beefier.
At 7th level, you get the ability to burn a turn/rebuke to get a free swift or immediate actions, which give you nice abilities to add another boost attack or to cast a spell as you attack too, as clerics tend to have a lot of swift spells they can use. Then you get a nice ability to convert a turn/rebuke into a quasi-smite that adds +4 sacred/profane bonuses to hit, and does another 1d10 damage. It has no capstones, but hey, you get a maneuver, another BaB point, and a spell level, so it’s fine.
All in all, a good Martial Cleric supplement, or a good way to get some more action economy trickery, or even just have someone who can join the rogue on their magical theft journeys. Very flexible, and a great way to be a That Guy if you know there’s a Paladin in the group and you want to one-up them like some insecure weirdo.
Rating: Amazing
Shadow Sun Ninja
Here we go, the most weeaboo class in this book has arrived and- OH FUCK ME THE SAMURAI/RONIN WRITER ESCAPED HIS CAGE AND FUCKING WROTE THIS! FLEE!
Welp, let’s just look at this… seriously, we were so close to having a book with nothing but good shit why. So the Shadow Sun Ninja in fluff and in mechanics is shit. They are an order of ninjas that use the Setting Sun and Shadow Hand schools to try to do good things from the shadows, or as they call it “dabbling in darkness to imbue light”… I’m not joking. The entire PrC entry has more dark-light edgy teenage metaphors than the Space Wolves have “wolf” in their descriptions. It’s that painful and I at one point was reduced to screaming.
Entering this pile of shit isn’t hard, you just need 8 ranks in Hide, have Improved Unarmed Strike, and know some maneuvers for the class. This is because this clearly was the author, eating paint chips at this point I suspect, thinking Monks needed a class too… forgetting this book made them obsolete already with Swordsage.
But enough bitching, I need to get through this before I tie this noose around my neck from dwelling on this thing for too long. It has a Monk style chassis (1d8 HP per level) and their abilities stack together, so yes, you get those nice abilities like useless arrow catch, selective free fall, -2 to hit with a fucking average BaB. Let’s just get into the abilities now…
The big theme of this class is you have to first perform one action and then you MUST do the second action to counter it, to further keep the stupid fucking duality theme going. The first ability turns an attack you make into a melee touch attack that does negative energy damage equal to your base fist damage + wisdom. That’s not too terrible, but then you can’t do it again until you hit an ally with your fists to discharge that excess positive energy and heal them up by that damage. You have to discharge it all by the fucking way. And no, you can’t do this on the same round because fuck you I guess.
At 2nd level, you gain a super situational cold damage resistance up to 10, so you can fling 2d6 fire damage back at the opponent as a ranged touch attack. It only lasts the turn by the way. At 4th you get the oh so autistically named “Light Within Darkness”, which if you can pull off a hide check, allows you to make enemies who didn’t see you make a Fortitude save (DC 10+1/2 your leve+WIS) or be blinded for the round. It’s okay at best.
Then you get one of the dumbest abilities in the game, and the second half of autism in the form of “Darkness within Light”. What does this fucking pile of shit grant you? Why the ability to get a +4 to hit and damage on blind enemies while you yourself are blinded. Yep, blind yourself to hit another blind person, which is so goddamn situational that it’s a joke.
The 7th level ability is the only remotely good thing you get; Void of the Shadow Sun. This ability gives you an aura that gives you a +2 AC, but if you get hit it dispels. Next turn, you can then douche everyone for 8d6 cold damage in a 30 circle. It’s remotely good because it actually does decent damage. The issue is it takes two turns to set up. Most fights only last about 2-4. See the big problem with this fucking class yet?
Then the 9th level ability is the saddest fucking replacement possible for the stance you choose listed in this book. Instead of just using the better Shadow Hand or Setting Sun stances, why not use “Child of Darkness and Light”? Notice the drooling mongoloid who wrote this can’t come up with a better phrase for this either, like say “Chiaroscuro” or something like that. Anyways, this stance shift is shit; you alternate between goddamn Dazzle, you know that OP fucking cantrip, and darkness, which is a little less shit. No good boosts, no good anything. Fuck this class.
Oh, and the capstone is Mountebank territory “good”. You legit become a Heartless style shadow enemy quasi-undead. Each unarmed attack allows you to enervate, or inflict negative levels, on an opponent and heals you a bit. Then when you shift out of it you take Con Damage equal to the number of hits you land and enervate a dude with. Now, it seems like it’s healable, but it is entirely possible you can get down to 0 on accident. If THAT happens, you dissolve into mist and your party mates need to use True Ressurrection to bring your ass back. If they choose not to do this though, because you were a shit character? Your guy comes back as a vampire, permanently set to evil, immune to sun damage, and is now an NPC. Yeah…
The biggest problem with this class is that you have to waste a turn to do set-ups for all of their abilities. It’s really stupid too, since Setting Sun, while not my favorite school from ToB, has a lot of counters that you can act out instantly. If this class stated you can use said counters to do the second ability in the same turn, can choose to do one or the other first and then use the other to counter, or use swift actions instead, this would actually make the class solid. But no, you don’t get this, you just get weeaboo multistate shittery and chi vampires that can only be fixed by going on a journey to Hell to free your retarded ass. Fuck this class for sullying this book. Fuck the writer for making another weeb class that sucks. Fuck this class.
Rating: Garbage
Tiers (Tome of Battle)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Swordsage, Warblade, Bloodstorm Blade, Deepstone Sentinel, Jade Phoenix Mage, Ruby Knight Vindicator, Master of Nine
Good Classes: Crusader, Bloodclaw Master, Eternal Blade
Decent Classes: N/A
Playable Classes: N/A
Garbage Classes: Shadow Sun Ninja
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): N/A
Besides Shadow Sun Ninja, every single class is perfectly good for you to use. It makes martials viable and effective, and it's just plain fun to play as some of these class. I have almost nothing bad to say about this book to be honest.
I mentioned doing Player's Handbook at some point, but I think I'll cover Tome of Magic so I can suffer harder instead. When will that come out?
Man I don't fuckin' know. Maybe sometime this February, maybe in 2021. We'll see.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2013
Almost like this book got the lion's share of playtesting/effort.
In all seriousness, Tome of Battle is a contender for the best 3.5 expansion book. It adds three viable base classes that perform better in their respective roles than the core counterparts, a slew of prestige classes that further bolster the power of martial classes, and perhaps most importantly the new mechanics are fun and easy to understand. Even in campaigns where the DM is very restrictive on what non-core books are allowed, I always see this book listed as an exception. It's just that much of a fix to one of the bigger issues with 3rd Edition.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2017
Crusader isn't rated amazing like swordsage and warblade?
b r u h
They get fucked in the ass by getting their last stance early and not getting a ridiculous capstone like dual stance or dual boost, but that doesn't stop them from fucking shit up. Having access to both Devoted Spirit and White Raven makes them one of the best support/battlefield controllers out there. Even if a crusader somehow don't dish out the same amount of damage as the other two classes, the party will still love him because he'll be forcing enemies to focus entirely on him while simultaneously providing buffs to his buddies.
I'm biased in favor of crusaders. At the same time, though, I'm biased for a good reason.
b r u h
They get fucked in the ass by getting their last stance early and not getting a ridiculous capstone like dual stance or dual boost, but that doesn't stop them from fucking shit up. Having access to both Devoted Spirit and White Raven makes them one of the best support/battlefield controllers out there. Even if a crusader somehow don't dish out the same amount of damage as the other two classes, the party will still love him because he'll be forcing enemies to focus entirely on him while simultaneously providing buffs to his buddies.
I'm biased in favor of crusaders. At the same time, though, I'm biased for a good reason.
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2017
Skypledged does well for a sha'ir, as you can use spells if you get caught with your pants down. I definitely agree with the ratings of Tome of Battle. If only if the rest of 3.5 had the same level of quality as the majority of the classes in Tome of Battle. One guy in my group is playing a dwarf warblade (all of us are dwarfs) and he is doing well. I still wish that the guy playing the monk chose swordsage instead. I plan on playing a warforged warblade soon.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
Don't even start with that Mr. "I rated a class that makes you a pseudo-demilich with divine power and powerful minionmancy only good after much convincing".
I made Crusader only good because compared to the other two, they are somewhat more confusing to use due to the card pulling gimmick, and they are fucked a bit by comparison when it comes to maneuvers due to never getting those great level 8 stances.
And I played Crusader until level 10 that specc'd in White Raven, that path gets screwed if you are the only martial like what became of that guy.
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2019
Fuck yeah! I missed reading your takes on these! Good to see you back to it.