- Joined
- Nov 8, 2017
Some chucklefucker took the time to fix the steaming pile of goatshit known as the Truenamer, and you know what, it actually looks playable.
https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Truenamer,_Rebuild_(3.5e_Class)
An Autistic Analysis on Dungeons and Dragons 3.x Classes
- Thread starter Adamska
- Start date
https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Truenamer,_Rebuild_(3.5e_Class)
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
That which is dead may never die, and I've finally gotten off my ass and started to read books again. I'll give you a hint; the next book drove me stark and I was reduced to mental exhaustion due to how bad most of the classes in it are.
Anyways enough of that, here's the third and final part of:
Complete Warrior (Pt 3)
We're in the back half of the Complete Hit With Stick Book. As you may know, this was the very first "Complete" book that WotC made, and was the first expansion after the threefold release of the Player's Handbook, the DM's Guide, and the Monster Manual.
Given this was early in 3.5's development, a lot of classes were underpowered or really shit, and this last third of the book was no exception. Not joking when I say that my job was only half the reason this took so long. Anyway, let's just strip the bandage off so I can amputate this foot. Let's do this:
Occult Slayer
Well hello there attempt to make a caster-killer martial class, nice to see you. Also nice to see that you’ll be completely ineffective too. So this class is one of those that you’ll see quite a bit for those GMs or Players that are legitimately insane. They will attempt to find a way to kill a caster over and over again when in reality the only real solution is to be a caster.
This is because the things magic can do render most martials noneffective when you crack into higher levels, since a decent caster can impede movement, hurl minions at you, fling damage, render themselves unhittable, and so on. So trying to build something like the Occult Slayer will not work, especially since this PrC is pretty bad.
The fluff already is bad since basically it plays them as psychotic mage hunters who just try to weaponize hate to defy magic. It gets worse when the book flirts with but doesn’t quite try to say that every class would want to be one of these guys. The worst part is when you look at the entry bar to get into this class.
The entry bar requires you to blow your skill points into cross class skills, needing both Knowledge (Arcana) and Spellcraft at 4 and 3 respectively. This is pretty steep given that most martials choose not to get a lot of skill points due to INT not being a priority. Hell, the game then punishes you for picking this class because it also forces you to have almost no skills to put points into. It’s a bit too high for what you get, since most of what you get is anemic and not very effective if you really want to geek the mage.
The “best” features of the class are its magic defense and capstone skill. You only get a +3 to save or suck spells, which while nice you can do better with race and magical items. The capstone allows you to ignore mind altering effects, which in theory sounds nice, but here’s the thing: I can make a better Occult Killer by just doing one simple thing at 1st level. The trick is to make a Dwarf Barbarian.
See that has the resistance to magic AND immunity to mind altering effects due to raging. The other items they give you are pretty pointless. Weapon Bond only adds a single 1d6 to hitting casters. Vicious Strike? Hahaha this is countered with a five foot step, because you have to READY the action first for it to work. The only other cool feature is you can bounce back spells with effectively spell turning but you at best get 10th Caster level for it and you can only do it twice. So in higher levels, it ain’t happening.
Seriously, if you want to geek mages just be a mage. Or a Dorf Barbarian with a ring of teleport.
Rating: Garbage
This is one of those classes I dislike on every level possible. From the fluff and to the crunch, the Order of the Bow finds a way to fail hideously and annoy me in the process.
Fluffwise, they try to be all deep and Zen about the art of just shooting people in the face with arrows. They read off like they are the Special Ed kids that were booted out of the Kensai School for being too special. They literally answer “What is Truth?” by shooting a bow and proclaiming the shot as that. Zen does not work with this shit; they should’ve just been an elite band of archers or something, not that it’d help them.
This is because you get almost no skills to use and the features you get are pretty fucking shit. You legitimately only get like 3/5ths of the Fighter’s skills, which means out of combat you are pretty much worthless. In combat though? Well, you get pretty much nothing that you’d want to use.
The big thing that the Order of the Bow gives the player is a thing called ranged precision. This in theory would be pretty good, in that it adds d8 damage dice every other level in the class. The thing that ruins them is that the Order of the Bow can only do this if they are within charging range (less than 30 ft), and they give up all of their attacks but one to do this. Oh, and you can’t get this bonus on Oozes, Plants, Constructs, some Aberrations, Undead, and anything with fortified on it. Fun fact; you will on average hit more and do more damage by just attacking more than once.
The other items you get are just forced feats of minimal value, and that reminds me: the entry bar is bullshit from a feats standpoint. You can only manage to make it into this PrC as a human, a fighter, or an archery focused ranger based on them. The feats you need? Point-Blank Shot (shit), Precise Shot (useful), Rapid Shot (just play Ranger), and weapon focus. The feats you get? Close Combat Shot (which you should never be in), Sharp Shooting (which minimally reduces cover’s bonus), and that’s it.
This PrC has no value unless you for some reason are an Archery focused fighter, and even then? Just. Play. Ranger.
Rating: Garbage
Did you know that this PrC was outclassed by just multiclassing? Yeah, the Purple Dragon Knight was made obsolete by being a Bard/Crusader combo of some sort with Song of the White Raven. Hell, the feat Smite to Song allows a normal Paladin to do what these guys do better. So the Purple Dragon Knight has been made obsolete, but let’s see how it stands anyways.
So in terms of Fluff, these guys for some reason are designed to be non-specific, but are the commanders of a group known as the Purple Dragons. Also, I want to execute the writer that keeps trying to say all classes want to be a PrC right now via scaphism.
Mechanically, the class is only a bit annoying to get into, since you have to join the Purple Dragons to be one of these guys and they’re limited by alignment. But other than that you get okay abilities. For one thing, they can give a +4 bonus to AC by helping another. They also get a somewhat worse elation that cannot stack with Inspire Courage due to affecting the same thing.
This is unfortunate, since the Purple Dragon Knight gets Inspire Courage as well, meaning you can’t really get maximum effect out of it like a Bard could. They also get Fear, which is decent, but easily removable. Oath of Wrath gives a decent personal bonus while fighting an enemy, and Last Stand can at times be useful.
At the time this was written, I’d have said it’s an okay five level class for the right martial, but it’s outshone now by a fucking feat.
Rating: Playable
So remember how the Lifedrinker nearly got me to have a stroke due to its stupid as shit capstone? Well, looks like Complete Warrior did and decided to try and make a better version of that. How? I don’t know how the fuck they did it, but the book did it.
The Rage Mage is a caster who basically said fuck learning, and decided to splice in a Barbarian’s rages into their casting. The lore tries to pretend this is an interesting twist, but I just see it as this one That Guy who @Dunsparce gamed with who was too retarded to read a couple of pages of the Player’s Handbook. When asked to, he chimped and screamed “NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT TO READ!”, and ran away forever. Anyways let’s get into the class’ crunch.
To become a Rage Mage, you have to be an Arcane Caster 3/Barbarian 1 at least, which is anti-smart in totality given that both options cripple the other. This seems to be the case too, since the Rage Mage is out five of their spell levels beyond the one they already lost as a Barbarian, which should knock it into the trash. But there are some weird things that make it a bit less shit than I thought.
Surprisingly, the book does a decent job with Spell Rage. It helps to counter the lost spell levels whenever you enter it by having spells from abjuration, conjuration, evocation, necromancy, and transmutation’s DCs and pools be based on your character level instead of caster level. Given these are the best schools of magic, this is actually very nice.
The Rage Mage also gets a slight bonus against Arcane Spell Failure chances if wearing light and medium armor too, meaning they can actually wear a bit of the stuff. They also get extra rages, and can quicken and up the DC of their spells too while raging. The capstone itself is pretty damn nice too, since it’s Tenser’s Transformation which adds +4 to all Physical stats, +4 AC, +5 to Fort saves, and proficiency with simple and martial weapons, with BaB at your level… but it does this while still being able to cast and its free.
I don’t know how they fucking did it, but they made this class work… how. HOW.
Rating: Decent
A better name for this PrC is the Gangsta, since this is just a medieval equivalent of a gangbanger. They are divine warriors of Erythnul who pillage, loot, and rape people, and have initiate rights like your average gang.
In terms of getting in, the two worst items you need are Improved Sunder and a few ranks in Knowledge (religion). You do need to survive a goonswarm as well for a few rounds, but once you do, you’re in. So, what do you get when you enter the most holy band of soccer hooligans?
For one thing, you get to place pain on people with a pain touch that eventually adds 1d4+10 per use of it, and you get up to 3 uses a day. You also get basically an Aura of Despair as well, meaning you debuff enemies to saves, which is mediocre. The best item you get for the Ravager is their Cruelest Cut technique. This is because doing ability score damage to CON is a decent way to cripple an enemy with a lot of HP.
The capstone is kind of shit, since Phantasmal Killer requires two saves and just doesn’t do all that much to be honest. This PrC is an okay one, but just a bit on the plain side for me.
Rating: Decent
Fun fact: the original name for this class was the Silent Penetrator. Fun fact: no, it wasn’t and I’m just a crazy fucking liar. The Reaping Mauler is an interesting PrC since if you combine it and the Sword Sage, you actually get a better monk than the Monk.
This is because you can do some fun unarmed shenanigans as Sword Sage if they go unarmed gain the ability to add their Wisdom to AC like the Monk, and the Reaping Mauler actually adds some nice bonuses to grappling. Getting into it is a bit of a pain though, since you do need to beat up a few big guys with your fists before you can enter it, but it’s doable with the right set up.
The way these guys work is that they primarily focus on grappling and doing damage that way, as evidenced by their gained abilities and the fact that the example given wears spiked armor, which does damage while grappling. Their first couple of levels are mediocre, but do give decent bonuses to grapple in the form of free feats (Improved Grapple/Mobility) and Adept wrestling. But the last three levels are what make this class fun.
At third level, you gain the ability to counter grappling twice by being able to use either grapple or escape artist as a free action. You also gain a save or suck ability that forces the enemy to fall unconscious if they fail. Fourth level improves the Adept wrestling bonus, but 5th level is nuts. If you can hold a grapple for three rounds, then the enemy must save vs. fucking death.
Like I said, this class is kind of neat if you want to specialize in a grappling build or make a wrestler build.
Rating: Decent
Ronin
You know what’s worse than being a Samurai in 3.5? How about being able to be its version of Blackguard? Yes, for some hideous reason, Wizards of the Coast decided to make a fallen Samurai prestige class. I have no words for this, I can only wheeze in laughter at its existence.
So the Ronin happens when a Samurai falls and they decide to find the one way to make their character worse. Yes, this is the only way humanly possible to make the worst martial class worse. How you may ask, why let me go into painful and agonizing detail so I can fuck the pain away.
The very first thing that this class does that ruins your experience at playing DnD is it gives you Infamy. Yes, your fuck up by playing Samurai was so noteworthy that a DC 10 gather information check is all that’s needed for an authority figure to realize just how fucking stupid you are. This drops their attitude (how they feel about you) by one and you now have -4 penalties to diplomance them that cannot be fixed.
From there you get sneak attack for some fucking reason. I get that this is because the Blackguard also gets that, but I don’t get why the shit either of them get these, since they aren’t suited at all to use it. Fluffwise, I think it’s to highlight that they have no honor, but crunch wise, it just doesn’t work for either class and they’d have needed a new mechanic for dirty fighting. Actually… I think that sneak attack was literally given to the Ronin because the mongoloid who wrote this couldn’t think of shit to give them since they’d have nothing but dead levels otherwise.
I’m not kidding; there’d have been six dead levels without sneak attack, and even with it they still have three dead levels somehow. Fuck this writer.
The only unique ability they get is Banzai Charge, which in theory sounds interesting in that you sacrifice defense for damage if you hit. The problem is that you render yourself open to all hits and you at best just add 20 to your damage. The fucking ravager does more than that with their pain touch to give you an idea.
The last thing that this hideous hideous PrC gives you is a pair of Bonus feats. Now at first you might think this is nice, since the Samurai forced you to take a shitton of feats you may not have wanted. Then you read the available feats and nearly die laughing.
This is because all of the feats available to you are designed to either improve archery or mounted combat, neither of which were things that the Samurai (ie You) ever focused on. This stupid pile of shit couldn’t even be FUCKED to give you something that might actually help what you already have.
I actually forgot you get to keep some of the Samurai abilities as a Ronin, but do you really want to keep the shittastic staredown and the worse two-weapon fighting feat? Do you really want that shittier smite? I don’t think you do. I think you would just want the sweet embrace of death.
Fuck Samurai, Fuck this Writer. Fuck Ronin. Fuck Complete Warrior. I hope all of them die in a Banzai Charge.
Rating: Truenamer
Interesting; I did not expect to run into a prototype of the Duskblade in this book. So the Spellsword is one of the dozens of gish builds that 3.5 made that includes the Suel Arcanamach and the Space Junkie. These guys also very clearly the working prototype of the Duskblade, given both can wear fullplate and cast, both can channel, and both get full BaB.
Since this is the prototype, you see some features that are better or worse than the final product. For example, rather than getting Armored Mage, they slowly lower their Arcane failure penalty every other level starting at the 1st level. Their channel is also both better and worse than the Duskblade.
Unlike the Duskblade, the Spellsword can channel any spell through their blade at the cost of a move action. Admittedly this is a bit annoying but if you’re in combat it’s not too much of a detriment. This can lead to some disgusting moments like a Disintegrate Sword or a Baleful Polymorph Sword. The weakness is unlike the Duskblade, the Spellsword can only do this up to five times a day and then must cast like a normal wizard instead.
The capstone they’re granted is a bit weak. This is because while you can technically double cast two spells, it means you have to hold onto those spells for two rounds and it eats up two channelings doing so.
There’s a reason why I consider the Duskblade a better build, but you can do some pretty cheesy things with this PrC if you just take a four level dip into it.
Rating: Decent
The best way to describe this PrC is that it’s a more coherent but as a result far more bland Space Junkie. Not joking there, since this Dwarf PrC requires you to ingest 1k of gems after sitting in the dirt and talking to rock people for a while. They are effectively a fighter with a bunch of strange abilities that tries to make them a little more interesting.
An example of this is at level one, where the Stonelord gets a very slightly better Cure Light Wounds that that they can use once a day. This may have been good if you could heal others with it and got it more times a day as they progressed, but nope. The second level and every other level allows you to pick what weird earth related power you will be able to do once per day like you’re a 10th level caster.
Some of them are actually pretty decent. The slow and summon elemental powers aren’t too shabby, and neither is the free Bull’s Strength. However a lot of the powers granted are situational, and the Stoneskin one for some reason requires spell components.
Besides these, the Stonelord gets once a day Stone Shape, Meld into Stone, Stone Tell (speak with rocks), and the powerful Earthquake Spell.
These are nice fluff bonuses, but the one-off nature of all of them kind of limits the Stonelord by my reckoning. It feels a bit incomplete due to the utter lack of any scaling powers. You also have to know exactly what you want to do with their stone powers since they are half of what you get in this PrC.
Rating: Playable
The Monk as we all know is not a well-constructed class to play. You need four good stats to really make it work, you have trouble hitting things due to their BaB, and to top it off half the skills you get suck shit. So how do you make it better? Not with this class that’s for sure.
Tattooed Monks are Monks with magical tattoos that give some bonuses that allow said Monk to feel like a caster. I would like to note that fluff wise these guys are hermits that speak in riddles, which means you can go right on ahead and punch them until they stop using metaphors since a Monk won’t stop you from punching them. Monks are way too shit to stop anyone from punching them.
It is always interesting to find a PrC with so many dead levels, since the thing about the Tattooed Monk is they have five of them. That already makes it worse than the Drunken fucking Master, but don’t worry, they found a way to get worse, since forcing you to take a couple of shit feats like endurance weren’t quite enough.
You only get two things with the Tattooed Monk; it’s almost like Wizards was running into a deadline and was getting sick of writing this shit up. The two things you get are Tattoo options and you keep Monk abilities you already have.
Now the way that the tattoos work are they each have a different power of varying usefulness. Most of these uses are shit, like a bad heal, or a bolster to the stats based on how much ink you already have. There are in fact only about five or six tattoos that are not shit, meaning that anyone who is stupid enough to play as a Tattooed Monk will use them.
It really says a lot that this PrC has to steal things from the Paladin and then try to pretend it’s unique. Even worse given that this PrC is even worse than Drunken Master, which at least could be entertaining.
Rating: Garbage
Thayan Knight
Gotta love those forced setting classes! This is a Faerun exclusive class, and are the bodyguards to the Red Wizards of Thay, who are also a PrC locked in the DM’s Guide. I will give the writer of this one this: they did not stupidly try and argue that anyone could be a Thayan Knight, and I’m actually fucking grateful this happened.
So entering into this class isn’t too bad, you really only have to be a human who takes Iron Will and has a Longsword as a weapon. It isn’t ideal, but it does mean you don’t have to panic about feats or skills like a lot of the PrCs in this book. Now as for whether or not they are a good PrC to play, well… no.
They suck balls to play and I’d rather be anything else. One thing that you get for deciding to be an idiot and playing a Thayan Knight is a +2 bonus on fear and +1 bonus on charm effects. This is pretty shit given that both options are pretty easily negated with magic items or just playing a Barbarian. From there you get a mind control tattoo that gives a slight bonus to reflex saves. You also get a minor bonus to BaB when attacked or if the Master is attacked… which is boring.
At 3rd level, you just get fighter feats. Nothing special, just a fighter feat. 4th level has them steal from the Purple Dragon Knight with Last Stand, and the last level gives you another Tattoo that gives a once a day +2 bonus to a saving throw.
The dickholes who then wrote this PrC then tries and fails to rationalize why they chose to keep the Red Wizard in DM’s Guide and the Thayan Knight as they were in Faerun. In reality it’s because the writer is a faggot that likes the setting, and this is just the piece of shit justifying why these needed to be written. Because of that and how they are clearly only here for NPC usage, fuck you book. Also fuck you writer, I hope you cut yourself on the Thayan Knight’s edge.
Rating: NPC (Would be Garbage)
This is the point that the book officially stopped giving a shit. For you see, this is where Complete Warrior’s editor did a flip and embraced sweet oblivion. What do I mean by that? The writers cared so much they’re letting typos through now.
So anyways, War Chanter is basically the Seeker of the Song in that you give up your casting in order to bolster performances. The annoying thing about this though is that the book also lies to you again when they say that Barbarians can join in. You can’t really; you need ranks in perform to make this fucking work. And again, YOU SHOULD NOT FUCKING DO THIS HOW MANY TIMES DO I-
No. No… I’m not letting this book win. So what do you get for picking this pile of malodorous fucking trash?
Your first fucking song only gives AT BEST 20 temporary hitpoints to all allies. False Life does the same thing but better by the way, since False Life implies you have magic that does more than that.
Then they give you the fucking Banzai Charge ability of the Ronin as a song. You heard me right: the fucking retard who wrote this shitstain of a PrC thought that the only unique thing the Ronin had was GOOD. THEY THINK THIS IS GOOD. HOW-
*deep breaths*
Not letting you win book. So the only difference I will give this is it’s hilariously a bit better than the Ronin’s charge. It adds your missing AC to the BaB at least, meaning at least you’re guaranteed to hit the enemy… even as you get smashed in the process.
Did I forget to mention there are four dead levels in this PrC? Because there are four dead levels too. The only good ability from War Chanter you get is you can splice two songs together and get the benefits of both of them. The midpoint is this classes high point… I’m gonna have a stroke. I can feel it.
So anyways, the next song can be dismantled by remove fear, a level one spell, since Inspire Awe (the song you get) is based on fear effects. There’s a chart that describes the fear effect but fuck you book; the song is dismantled by raging barbarians or a simple fucking spell. I HATE.
You then get mass Bull’s Strength for at best five rounds… and there goes my sanity with it. Stop thinking brain, you’re going to hurt yourself.
The capstone is pretty decent, but the nine levels to get to it make me want to slaughter. To murder. To marmalize. I only feel hate now. But the capstone is good; it gives the best BaB in the party to everyone. But the problem is your sanity will be gone way before this point. I think I lost mine at level three.
The only reason this isn’t Truenamer level is because I academically know that what you get isn’t that fundamentally shit. But I’m just so angry I’m about to transcend into a Frenzied Berserker and cleave this hideous world in twain. My only joy is there’s one more class after this besides the overhaul to Paladin and Ranger.
Rating: Garbage
Warshaper
So the Warshaper is pretty much a worse version of the Shaper of Form from the Dragon Compendium. How is it worse? Well for one thing it’s only a five level PrC and you have one less spell level than the Shaper somehow. The Shaper can also do things like Shape Objects too. That’s not to say that the Warshaper is bad.
The first level alone is pretty nice, since you gain immunities to crits or stunning attacks due to reshaping your body. You do also get the ability to manipulate natural weapons, but you will need to crank out the Monster Manual to really understand what the fuck you’re doing.
Each level afterwards gains more and more interesting features, such as the ability to gain extra reach and gain boosts to STR and CON. Another decent ability is they have fast healing 2 and can regain 10 HP per round if they focus on healing.
They also have a really damn good capstone: Flashmorph/Multimorph. This allows the Warshaper to shift between forms rapidly, letting them warp between bullshit forms as needed. Flashmorph eats a move action, and Multimorph lets a caster change shape each round.
I am so happy to finally see a good PrC again… I was drowning in garbage.
Rating: Good
Overall Tier List (Complete Warrior)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Bear Warrior, Halfling Outrider
Good Classes: Warshaper, Hunter of Dead, Knight of the Chalice
Decent Classes: Swashbuckler, Dark Hunter, Darkwood Stalker, Eye of Grummsh, Hulking Hurler, Master Thrower, Nature’s Warrior, Rage Mage, Ravager, Reaping Mauler, Spellsword
Playable Classes: Hexblade, Purple Dragon Knight, Gnome Giant-Slayer, Stonelord
Garbage Classes: Bladesinger, Chevalier, Dervish, Drunken Master, Exotic Weapon Master, Invisible Blade, Kensai, Knight Protector, Master of the Unseen Hand, Occult Slayer, Order of the Bow Initiate, Tattooed Monk, War Chanter
Truenamer Class: Samurai, Ronin
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Frenzied Berserker (IT IS UNRATABLE) , Justicar (Would be Decent), Mindspy (Would be Garbage) Thayan Knight (would be Garbage)
Jesus Christ did this one take a lot of effort to do. I legit wrote a novella's worth of words just telling you that a lot of the book's PrCs are mediocre to awful. Sure you have a few really good classes, especially the Knight of the Chalice and Hunter of Dead, but there's also the avalanche of weebshit that was just embarrassing.
Anyways, I can say more good news. I did finish reading the DM's Guide, had my seizures already as I wrote my thoughts and agony into words, and am ready to do Libris Mortis as a palate cleanser before I do Complete Mage. The next book should be in sometime next week... or whenever I'm done having brain hemmorhages.
Anyways enough of that, here's the third and final part of:
Complete Warrior (Pt 3)
We're in the back half of the Complete Hit With Stick Book. As you may know, this was the very first "Complete" book that WotC made, and was the first expansion after the threefold release of the Player's Handbook, the DM's Guide, and the Monster Manual.
Given this was early in 3.5's development, a lot of classes were underpowered or really shit, and this last third of the book was no exception. Not joking when I say that my job was only half the reason this took so long. Anyway, let's just strip the bandage off so I can amputate this foot. Let's do this:
Occult Slayer
Well hello there attempt to make a caster-killer martial class, nice to see you. Also nice to see that you’ll be completely ineffective too. So this class is one of those that you’ll see quite a bit for those GMs or Players that are legitimately insane. They will attempt to find a way to kill a caster over and over again when in reality the only real solution is to be a caster.
This is because the things magic can do render most martials noneffective when you crack into higher levels, since a decent caster can impede movement, hurl minions at you, fling damage, render themselves unhittable, and so on. So trying to build something like the Occult Slayer will not work, especially since this PrC is pretty bad.
The fluff already is bad since basically it plays them as psychotic mage hunters who just try to weaponize hate to defy magic. It gets worse when the book flirts with but doesn’t quite try to say that every class would want to be one of these guys. The worst part is when you look at the entry bar to get into this class.
The entry bar requires you to blow your skill points into cross class skills, needing both Knowledge (Arcana) and Spellcraft at 4 and 3 respectively. This is pretty steep given that most martials choose not to get a lot of skill points due to INT not being a priority. Hell, the game then punishes you for picking this class because it also forces you to have almost no skills to put points into. It’s a bit too high for what you get, since most of what you get is anemic and not very effective if you really want to geek the mage.
The “best” features of the class are its magic defense and capstone skill. You only get a +3 to save or suck spells, which while nice you can do better with race and magical items. The capstone allows you to ignore mind altering effects, which in theory sounds nice, but here’s the thing: I can make a better Occult Killer by just doing one simple thing at 1st level. The trick is to make a Dwarf Barbarian.
See that has the resistance to magic AND immunity to mind altering effects due to raging. The other items they give you are pretty pointless. Weapon Bond only adds a single 1d6 to hitting casters. Vicious Strike? Hahaha this is countered with a five foot step, because you have to READY the action first for it to work. The only other cool feature is you can bounce back spells with effectively spell turning but you at best get 10th Caster level for it and you can only do it twice. So in higher levels, it ain’t happening.
Seriously, if you want to geek mages just be a mage. Or a Dorf Barbarian with a ring of teleport.
Rating: Garbage
Order of the Bow Initiate
This is one of those classes I dislike on every level possible. From the fluff and to the crunch, the Order of the Bow finds a way to fail hideously and annoy me in the process.
Fluffwise, they try to be all deep and Zen about the art of just shooting people in the face with arrows. They read off like they are the Special Ed kids that were booted out of the Kensai School for being too special. They literally answer “What is Truth?” by shooting a bow and proclaiming the shot as that. Zen does not work with this shit; they should’ve just been an elite band of archers or something, not that it’d help them.
This is because you get almost no skills to use and the features you get are pretty fucking shit. You legitimately only get like 3/5ths of the Fighter’s skills, which means out of combat you are pretty much worthless. In combat though? Well, you get pretty much nothing that you’d want to use.
The big thing that the Order of the Bow gives the player is a thing called ranged precision. This in theory would be pretty good, in that it adds d8 damage dice every other level in the class. The thing that ruins them is that the Order of the Bow can only do this if they are within charging range (less than 30 ft), and they give up all of their attacks but one to do this. Oh, and you can’t get this bonus on Oozes, Plants, Constructs, some Aberrations, Undead, and anything with fortified on it. Fun fact; you will on average hit more and do more damage by just attacking more than once.
The other items you get are just forced feats of minimal value, and that reminds me: the entry bar is bullshit from a feats standpoint. You can only manage to make it into this PrC as a human, a fighter, or an archery focused ranger based on them. The feats you need? Point-Blank Shot (shit), Precise Shot (useful), Rapid Shot (just play Ranger), and weapon focus. The feats you get? Close Combat Shot (which you should never be in), Sharp Shooting (which minimally reduces cover’s bonus), and that’s it.
This PrC has no value unless you for some reason are an Archery focused fighter, and even then? Just. Play. Ranger.
Rating: Garbage
Purple Dragon Knight
Did you know that this PrC was outclassed by just multiclassing? Yeah, the Purple Dragon Knight was made obsolete by being a Bard/Crusader combo of some sort with Song of the White Raven. Hell, the feat Smite to Song allows a normal Paladin to do what these guys do better. So the Purple Dragon Knight has been made obsolete, but let’s see how it stands anyways.
So in terms of Fluff, these guys for some reason are designed to be non-specific, but are the commanders of a group known as the Purple Dragons. Also, I want to execute the writer that keeps trying to say all classes want to be a PrC right now via scaphism.
Mechanically, the class is only a bit annoying to get into, since you have to join the Purple Dragons to be one of these guys and they’re limited by alignment. But other than that you get okay abilities. For one thing, they can give a +4 bonus to AC by helping another. They also get a somewhat worse elation that cannot stack with Inspire Courage due to affecting the same thing.
This is unfortunate, since the Purple Dragon Knight gets Inspire Courage as well, meaning you can’t really get maximum effect out of it like a Bard could. They also get Fear, which is decent, but easily removable. Oath of Wrath gives a decent personal bonus while fighting an enemy, and Last Stand can at times be useful.
At the time this was written, I’d have said it’s an okay five level class for the right martial, but it’s outshone now by a fucking feat.
Rating: Playable
Rage Mage
So remember how the Lifedrinker nearly got me to have a stroke due to its stupid as shit capstone? Well, looks like Complete Warrior did and decided to try and make a better version of that. How? I don’t know how the fuck they did it, but the book did it.
The Rage Mage is a caster who basically said fuck learning, and decided to splice in a Barbarian’s rages into their casting. The lore tries to pretend this is an interesting twist, but I just see it as this one That Guy who @Dunsparce gamed with who was too retarded to read a couple of pages of the Player’s Handbook. When asked to, he chimped and screamed “NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT TO READ!”, and ran away forever. Anyways let’s get into the class’ crunch.
To become a Rage Mage, you have to be an Arcane Caster 3/Barbarian 1 at least, which is anti-smart in totality given that both options cripple the other. This seems to be the case too, since the Rage Mage is out five of their spell levels beyond the one they already lost as a Barbarian, which should knock it into the trash. But there are some weird things that make it a bit less shit than I thought.
Surprisingly, the book does a decent job with Spell Rage. It helps to counter the lost spell levels whenever you enter it by having spells from abjuration, conjuration, evocation, necromancy, and transmutation’s DCs and pools be based on your character level instead of caster level. Given these are the best schools of magic, this is actually very nice.
The Rage Mage also gets a slight bonus against Arcane Spell Failure chances if wearing light and medium armor too, meaning they can actually wear a bit of the stuff. They also get extra rages, and can quicken and up the DC of their spells too while raging. The capstone itself is pretty damn nice too, since it’s Tenser’s Transformation which adds +4 to all Physical stats, +4 AC, +5 to Fort saves, and proficiency with simple and martial weapons, with BaB at your level… but it does this while still being able to cast and its free.
I don’t know how they fucking did it, but they made this class work… how. HOW.
Rating: Decent
Ravager
A better name for this PrC is the Gangsta, since this is just a medieval equivalent of a gangbanger. They are divine warriors of Erythnul who pillage, loot, and rape people, and have initiate rights like your average gang.
In terms of getting in, the two worst items you need are Improved Sunder and a few ranks in Knowledge (religion). You do need to survive a goonswarm as well for a few rounds, but once you do, you’re in. So, what do you get when you enter the most holy band of soccer hooligans?
For one thing, you get to place pain on people with a pain touch that eventually adds 1d4+10 per use of it, and you get up to 3 uses a day. You also get basically an Aura of Despair as well, meaning you debuff enemies to saves, which is mediocre. The best item you get for the Ravager is their Cruelest Cut technique. This is because doing ability score damage to CON is a decent way to cripple an enemy with a lot of HP.
The capstone is kind of shit, since Phantasmal Killer requires two saves and just doesn’t do all that much to be honest. This PrC is an okay one, but just a bit on the plain side for me.
Rating: Decent
Reaping Mauler
Fun fact: the original name for this class was the Silent Penetrator. Fun fact: no, it wasn’t and I’m just a crazy fucking liar. The Reaping Mauler is an interesting PrC since if you combine it and the Sword Sage, you actually get a better monk than the Monk.
This is because you can do some fun unarmed shenanigans as Sword Sage if they go unarmed gain the ability to add their Wisdom to AC like the Monk, and the Reaping Mauler actually adds some nice bonuses to grappling. Getting into it is a bit of a pain though, since you do need to beat up a few big guys with your fists before you can enter it, but it’s doable with the right set up.
The way these guys work is that they primarily focus on grappling and doing damage that way, as evidenced by their gained abilities and the fact that the example given wears spiked armor, which does damage while grappling. Their first couple of levels are mediocre, but do give decent bonuses to grapple in the form of free feats (Improved Grapple/Mobility) and Adept wrestling. But the last three levels are what make this class fun.
At third level, you gain the ability to counter grappling twice by being able to use either grapple or escape artist as a free action. You also gain a save or suck ability that forces the enemy to fall unconscious if they fail. Fourth level improves the Adept wrestling bonus, but 5th level is nuts. If you can hold a grapple for three rounds, then the enemy must save vs. fucking death.
Like I said, this class is kind of neat if you want to specialize in a grappling build or make a wrestler build.
Rating: Decent
Ronin
You know what’s worse than being a Samurai in 3.5? How about being able to be its version of Blackguard? Yes, for some hideous reason, Wizards of the Coast decided to make a fallen Samurai prestige class. I have no words for this, I can only wheeze in laughter at its existence.
So the Ronin happens when a Samurai falls and they decide to find the one way to make their character worse. Yes, this is the only way humanly possible to make the worst martial class worse. How you may ask, why let me go into painful and agonizing detail so I can fuck the pain away.
The very first thing that this class does that ruins your experience at playing DnD is it gives you Infamy. Yes, your fuck up by playing Samurai was so noteworthy that a DC 10 gather information check is all that’s needed for an authority figure to realize just how fucking stupid you are. This drops their attitude (how they feel about you) by one and you now have -4 penalties to diplomance them that cannot be fixed.
From there you get sneak attack for some fucking reason. I get that this is because the Blackguard also gets that, but I don’t get why the shit either of them get these, since they aren’t suited at all to use it. Fluffwise, I think it’s to highlight that they have no honor, but crunch wise, it just doesn’t work for either class and they’d have needed a new mechanic for dirty fighting. Actually… I think that sneak attack was literally given to the Ronin because the mongoloid who wrote this couldn’t think of shit to give them since they’d have nothing but dead levels otherwise.
I’m not kidding; there’d have been six dead levels without sneak attack, and even with it they still have three dead levels somehow. Fuck this writer.
The only unique ability they get is Banzai Charge, which in theory sounds interesting in that you sacrifice defense for damage if you hit. The problem is that you render yourself open to all hits and you at best just add 20 to your damage. The fucking ravager does more than that with their pain touch to give you an idea.
The last thing that this hideous hideous PrC gives you is a pair of Bonus feats. Now at first you might think this is nice, since the Samurai forced you to take a shitton of feats you may not have wanted. Then you read the available feats and nearly die laughing.
This is because all of the feats available to you are designed to either improve archery or mounted combat, neither of which were things that the Samurai (ie You) ever focused on. This stupid pile of shit couldn’t even be FUCKED to give you something that might actually help what you already have.
I actually forgot you get to keep some of the Samurai abilities as a Ronin, but do you really want to keep the shittastic staredown and the worse two-weapon fighting feat? Do you really want that shittier smite? I don’t think you do. I think you would just want the sweet embrace of death.
Fuck Samurai, Fuck this Writer. Fuck Ronin. Fuck Complete Warrior. I hope all of them die in a Banzai Charge.
Rating: Truenamer
Spellsword
Interesting; I did not expect to run into a prototype of the Duskblade in this book. So the Spellsword is one of the dozens of gish builds that 3.5 made that includes the Suel Arcanamach and the Space Junkie. These guys also very clearly the working prototype of the Duskblade, given both can wear fullplate and cast, both can channel, and both get full BaB.
Since this is the prototype, you see some features that are better or worse than the final product. For example, rather than getting Armored Mage, they slowly lower their Arcane failure penalty every other level starting at the 1st level. Their channel is also both better and worse than the Duskblade.
Unlike the Duskblade, the Spellsword can channel any spell through their blade at the cost of a move action. Admittedly this is a bit annoying but if you’re in combat it’s not too much of a detriment. This can lead to some disgusting moments like a Disintegrate Sword or a Baleful Polymorph Sword. The weakness is unlike the Duskblade, the Spellsword can only do this up to five times a day and then must cast like a normal wizard instead.
The capstone they’re granted is a bit weak. This is because while you can technically double cast two spells, it means you have to hold onto those spells for two rounds and it eats up two channelings doing so.
There’s a reason why I consider the Duskblade a better build, but you can do some pretty cheesy things with this PrC if you just take a four level dip into it.
Rating: Decent
Stonelord
The best way to describe this PrC is that it’s a more coherent but as a result far more bland Space Junkie. Not joking there, since this Dwarf PrC requires you to ingest 1k of gems after sitting in the dirt and talking to rock people for a while. They are effectively a fighter with a bunch of strange abilities that tries to make them a little more interesting.
An example of this is at level one, where the Stonelord gets a very slightly better Cure Light Wounds that that they can use once a day. This may have been good if you could heal others with it and got it more times a day as they progressed, but nope. The second level and every other level allows you to pick what weird earth related power you will be able to do once per day like you’re a 10th level caster.
Some of them are actually pretty decent. The slow and summon elemental powers aren’t too shabby, and neither is the free Bull’s Strength. However a lot of the powers granted are situational, and the Stoneskin one for some reason requires spell components.
Besides these, the Stonelord gets once a day Stone Shape, Meld into Stone, Stone Tell (speak with rocks), and the powerful Earthquake Spell.
These are nice fluff bonuses, but the one-off nature of all of them kind of limits the Stonelord by my reckoning. It feels a bit incomplete due to the utter lack of any scaling powers. You also have to know exactly what you want to do with their stone powers since they are half of what you get in this PrC.
Rating: Playable
Tattooed Monk
The Monk as we all know is not a well-constructed class to play. You need four good stats to really make it work, you have trouble hitting things due to their BaB, and to top it off half the skills you get suck shit. So how do you make it better? Not with this class that’s for sure.
Tattooed Monks are Monks with magical tattoos that give some bonuses that allow said Monk to feel like a caster. I would like to note that fluff wise these guys are hermits that speak in riddles, which means you can go right on ahead and punch them until they stop using metaphors since a Monk won’t stop you from punching them. Monks are way too shit to stop anyone from punching them.
It is always interesting to find a PrC with so many dead levels, since the thing about the Tattooed Monk is they have five of them. That already makes it worse than the Drunken fucking Master, but don’t worry, they found a way to get worse, since forcing you to take a couple of shit feats like endurance weren’t quite enough.
You only get two things with the Tattooed Monk; it’s almost like Wizards was running into a deadline and was getting sick of writing this shit up. The two things you get are Tattoo options and you keep Monk abilities you already have.
Now the way that the tattoos work are they each have a different power of varying usefulness. Most of these uses are shit, like a bad heal, or a bolster to the stats based on how much ink you already have. There are in fact only about five or six tattoos that are not shit, meaning that anyone who is stupid enough to play as a Tattooed Monk will use them.
It really says a lot that this PrC has to steal things from the Paladin and then try to pretend it’s unique. Even worse given that this PrC is even worse than Drunken Master, which at least could be entertaining.
Rating: Garbage
Thayan Knight
Gotta love those forced setting classes! This is a Faerun exclusive class, and are the bodyguards to the Red Wizards of Thay, who are also a PrC locked in the DM’s Guide. I will give the writer of this one this: they did not stupidly try and argue that anyone could be a Thayan Knight, and I’m actually fucking grateful this happened.
So entering into this class isn’t too bad, you really only have to be a human who takes Iron Will and has a Longsword as a weapon. It isn’t ideal, but it does mean you don’t have to panic about feats or skills like a lot of the PrCs in this book. Now as for whether or not they are a good PrC to play, well… no.
They suck balls to play and I’d rather be anything else. One thing that you get for deciding to be an idiot and playing a Thayan Knight is a +2 bonus on fear and +1 bonus on charm effects. This is pretty shit given that both options are pretty easily negated with magic items or just playing a Barbarian. From there you get a mind control tattoo that gives a slight bonus to reflex saves. You also get a minor bonus to BaB when attacked or if the Master is attacked… which is boring.
At 3rd level, you just get fighter feats. Nothing special, just a fighter feat. 4th level has them steal from the Purple Dragon Knight with Last Stand, and the last level gives you another Tattoo that gives a once a day +2 bonus to a saving throw.
The dickholes who then wrote this PrC then tries and fails to rationalize why they chose to keep the Red Wizard in DM’s Guide and the Thayan Knight as they were in Faerun. In reality it’s because the writer is a faggot that likes the setting, and this is just the piece of shit justifying why these needed to be written. Because of that and how they are clearly only here for NPC usage, fuck you book. Also fuck you writer, I hope you cut yourself on the Thayan Knight’s edge.
Rating: NPC (Would be Garbage)
War Chanter
This is the point that the book officially stopped giving a shit. For you see, this is where Complete Warrior’s editor did a flip and embraced sweet oblivion. What do I mean by that? The writers cared so much they’re letting typos through now.
So anyways, War Chanter is basically the Seeker of the Song in that you give up your casting in order to bolster performances. The annoying thing about this though is that the book also lies to you again when they say that Barbarians can join in. You can’t really; you need ranks in perform to make this fucking work. And again, YOU SHOULD NOT FUCKING DO THIS HOW MANY TIMES DO I-
No. No… I’m not letting this book win. So what do you get for picking this pile of malodorous fucking trash?
Your first fucking song only gives AT BEST 20 temporary hitpoints to all allies. False Life does the same thing but better by the way, since False Life implies you have magic that does more than that.
Then they give you the fucking Banzai Charge ability of the Ronin as a song. You heard me right: the fucking retard who wrote this shitstain of a PrC thought that the only unique thing the Ronin had was GOOD. THEY THINK THIS IS GOOD. HOW-
*deep breaths*
Not letting you win book. So the only difference I will give this is it’s hilariously a bit better than the Ronin’s charge. It adds your missing AC to the BaB at least, meaning at least you’re guaranteed to hit the enemy… even as you get smashed in the process.
Did I forget to mention there are four dead levels in this PrC? Because there are four dead levels too. The only good ability from War Chanter you get is you can splice two songs together and get the benefits of both of them. The midpoint is this classes high point… I’m gonna have a stroke. I can feel it.
So anyways, the next song can be dismantled by remove fear, a level one spell, since Inspire Awe (the song you get) is based on fear effects. There’s a chart that describes the fear effect but fuck you book; the song is dismantled by raging barbarians or a simple fucking spell. I HATE.
You then get mass Bull’s Strength for at best five rounds… and there goes my sanity with it. Stop thinking brain, you’re going to hurt yourself.
The capstone is pretty decent, but the nine levels to get to it make me want to slaughter. To murder. To marmalize. I only feel hate now. But the capstone is good; it gives the best BaB in the party to everyone. But the problem is your sanity will be gone way before this point. I think I lost mine at level three.
The only reason this isn’t Truenamer level is because I academically know that what you get isn’t that fundamentally shit. But I’m just so angry I’m about to transcend into a Frenzied Berserker and cleave this hideous world in twain. My only joy is there’s one more class after this besides the overhaul to Paladin and Ranger.
Rating: Garbage
Warshaper
So the Warshaper is pretty much a worse version of the Shaper of Form from the Dragon Compendium. How is it worse? Well for one thing it’s only a five level PrC and you have one less spell level than the Shaper somehow. The Shaper can also do things like Shape Objects too. That’s not to say that the Warshaper is bad.
The first level alone is pretty nice, since you gain immunities to crits or stunning attacks due to reshaping your body. You do also get the ability to manipulate natural weapons, but you will need to crank out the Monster Manual to really understand what the fuck you’re doing.
Each level afterwards gains more and more interesting features, such as the ability to gain extra reach and gain boosts to STR and CON. Another decent ability is they have fast healing 2 and can regain 10 HP per round if they focus on healing.
They also have a really damn good capstone: Flashmorph/Multimorph. This allows the Warshaper to shift between forms rapidly, letting them warp between bullshit forms as needed. Flashmorph eats a move action, and Multimorph lets a caster change shape each round.
I am so happy to finally see a good PrC again… I was drowning in garbage.
Rating: Good
Paladin: Complete Warrior introduces a Paladin that does not have magic. Instead, they get spell like abilities that replace a few of the spells they would naturally get, like Heal Mount, characteristic boosts, and Bless Weapon. The problem is you now have less utility and are just a fancier fighter who can be a worse Cleric when it comes to Turn attempts.
Don’t bother.
Ranger: Like the Paladin, the Ranger has a non magic variant too. And just like the Paladin, the Ranger is worse than if they actually kept the magic. This is because you’d have more options and I forgot to mention in Paladin that you get the spells earlier than they give you the abilities.
Again, don’t bother.
Don’t bother.
Ranger: Like the Paladin, the Ranger has a non magic variant too. And just like the Paladin, the Ranger is worse than if they actually kept the magic. This is because you’d have more options and I forgot to mention in Paladin that you get the spells earlier than they give you the abilities.
Again, don’t bother.
Overall Tier List (Complete Warrior)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Bear Warrior, Halfling Outrider
Good Classes: Warshaper, Hunter of Dead, Knight of the Chalice
Decent Classes: Swashbuckler, Dark Hunter, Darkwood Stalker, Eye of Grummsh, Hulking Hurler, Master Thrower, Nature’s Warrior, Rage Mage, Ravager, Reaping Mauler, Spellsword
Playable Classes: Hexblade, Purple Dragon Knight, Gnome Giant-Slayer, Stonelord
Garbage Classes: Bladesinger, Chevalier, Dervish, Drunken Master, Exotic Weapon Master, Invisible Blade, Kensai, Knight Protector, Master of the Unseen Hand, Occult Slayer, Order of the Bow Initiate, Tattooed Monk, War Chanter
Truenamer Class: Samurai, Ronin
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Frenzied Berserker (IT IS UNRATABLE) , Justicar (Would be Decent), Mindspy (Would be Garbage) Thayan Knight (would be Garbage)
Jesus Christ did this one take a lot of effort to do. I legit wrote a novella's worth of words just telling you that a lot of the book's PrCs are mediocre to awful. Sure you have a few really good classes, especially the Knight of the Chalice and Hunter of Dead, but there's also the avalanche of weebshit that was just embarrassing.
Anyways, I can say more good news. I did finish reading the DM's Guide, had my seizures already as I wrote my thoughts and agony into words, and am ready to do Libris Mortis as a palate cleanser before I do Complete Mage. The next book should be in sometime next week... or whenever I'm done having brain hemmorhages.
DDBCAE CBAADCBE
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2019
Y'know some days I wonder where I went wrong in my life. I think to myself "My Dad must be so disappointed in me." Then I see this and by comparison I don't feel nearly as bad.
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2019
Apologies for the delay, had some things to do and was pretty tired until now. So let's finally get down to writing about the eternal nightmare of:
Complete Warrior (Pt 1)
This book has taken ages to get through. This is because unlike the other books I've gone through so far, this fucker has twice the content in terms of PrCs, since there's over 30 of them to go through. The big problem is that Wizards of the Coast still were not aware that Martials were not as strong as they thought, since they still weren't sure about their balancing. As a result a lot of these classes are underpowered and outdone by classes in either core or the other splat books they wrote since. Still this book has a few gems, and I'll point them out as they come along.
Also it has the worst Martial class in the book. You fuckers know what I'm talking about. As usual, classes that are just bolded in their titles are base classes while if they're italicized they're PrCs. Anyways, let's dig in:
Hexblade
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Oh boy, the unmodified Hexblade. For those not in the know, this class is a little bit infamous in that it is one of the few classes that the creator apologized for making, and made a revised version for free.
The idea of a hexblade, along with quite a few others you’ll see in this book due to it being a big wad of “hits thing but does X”, is it splices arcane might with martial prowess. In this class’ case, it clearly steals the Paladin’s formula (right down to having a full BaB too) but replaces remove disease and smite with curse. What is curse you may ask?
Well curse is an interesting debuff that inflicts penalties on saves, to hits, and checks in general. It basically is a somewhat nicer ability to curse on the fly that gets nastier with level.
At first the class seems pretty good, but there are three things that really cripple it. The first is that they can’t quick cast like the Paladin can; this sucks given that most of the Hexblade’s spells aren’t able to be cast as a swift action like the Paladin can with their Battle Blessings. This seriously limits the type of casting that you can do in a fight.
The second item that hurts the class is that it suffers arcane failure chance with no reduction beyond light armors, making it not as good for fighting like the Duskblade or Arcanamach, who can fight in medium armors too. The third is you lose the curse chance if the enemy succeeds its saving throw, which also sucks given that you at best have five tries by the time you hit the capstone.
The fixed version resolves all of these issues, and I’d recommend it if you want an Arcane Paladin, but not want to play something like a Duskblade, which I do want to say is better. But as it stands in this book? It’s at least playable.
Rating: Playable
Samurai
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Oh boy, we’re at one of the worst classes in the game! It’s very fitting that a weeaboo bait class is probably the worst Martial class in existence, and I can feel the souls of a thousand sobbing Katana Myth believers shattering like their shitty Steel/Iron swords. Let’s go here we go.
Even the flavor of the Samurai is hideous given how hard the writer of this trash fire wanted to emphasize how ONURABRU the class is. Why not just tell me that the class requires you to be lawful due to the code you follow? Probably because the writer thought Japan could win World War 2 if they made more Katanas. But I need to move on, because each item merits commentary.
Now the fucked up thing is that the skeleton for the class is pretty much spot on; I’d have given the Sammies a good Will save and a 4+INT skill pool, but it’s mostly fine. But then you get into your skills. Let’s start with the first item; Daisho Proficiency. This skill just gives you proficiency with bastard swords, which is okay for the purposes of wanting to use a two-handed sword in one hand, but fucks you later because of the SECOND LEVEL forced feat.
For some ultra-exceptional reason, you gain the ability to duel wield your fluffed bastard and short sword in a two weapon fighting style worse than normal two-weapon fighting styles. Now this is one of the weaker styles of fighting, since you are automatically taking -2 penalties to get a second hit early and then a few more swings later on, but only if you stick with the class. You would honestly be doing more consistent two-handing a Katana since at least that gets you bonus STR damage and doesn’t weaken your to-hit. But it is then made worse because you don’t get an Epic variation of the Sammy’s two weapon fighting style, making you somehow worse than a fighter already. How. How. HOW.
Then you get a far shittier Smite the next level. This shitty smite only gives you a bonus to attack and damage based on your CHA. The issue is a Paladin does this better because your damage also takes your Paladin level Too.
And now we get to why the Complete Warrior Samurai is a hot mess; getting Iaijutsu Master. Now, the Oriental Adventures Samurai got Iaijutsu focus, which adds pure d6 damage to your hits based on if you catch the enemy flat-footed. You can also duel enemies where your checks add to initiative, allow you to then geek them with the D6s. This cheese is a source for making Savants suck less, AND THE COMPLETE WARRIOR SAMURAI DOESN’T GET IT!
Nope, tough shit Yajirobe, you aren’t getting the thing your ADnD class was built on! You just get a fucking Quick Draw feat for your two shitty swords… when the feat works better with throwing weapons. I’m now beginning to suspect that my hypothesis on this guy being a weeb is wrong; he probably hated the bastards and made this.
The next level just gets you a slightly better version of skill focus (Intimidate) feat, but worse because you only apply it in combat rather than times it’d be useful. Fun fact: there’s a fighter variant that does this but better too. The stupider thing is that Hexblade I mentioned? He could get a feat like that AT LEVEL ONE. The stupidestest thing is that if you’re like me, then you can see the class is just a worse fighter that doesn’t get to pick their feats, and fuck that.
So anyways, this staredown becomes mass and can be improved to the point where the enemy can become panicked for several rounds. The problem is you’re getting this garbage at level 20, and everything I mentioned can actually be done better by a FIGHTER.
The best/worst thing about this shit class? Did you know you can fall like a Paladin and you can’t take it again like monk? Ironically you can argue that’s an improvement due to how bad this is, but fuck that it can dick you over. When the fighter can outmatch you by level 2, then you need to commit Sudoku.
Rating: Truenamer
Ever want to play a Bard or Rogue but without the things that they can do? Well good news friend, let me tell you about the Swashbuckler. The Swashbuckler is probably one of the better pure Martial classes that were made in my opinion, and this is because you actually have a decent skill set and have a decent skill point per level to use it.
They work quite differently from the majority of Martials we’ve seen so far, in that they benefit more from DEX than STR, similar to bowman-built Rangers. This is because you get Weapon Finesse as a starting feat, which subs your DEX for STR in terms of BaB.
After that, you get a mix of weak to nice items, and quite a few dead levels too. For example, the next level of Swashbuckler gets you a slight bonus to reflex saves that is similar to the mediocre Barbarian’s Trap Sense. But then you get Insightful Strike, which is a very nice damage booster that lets you add your INT bonus to damage, which helps quite a bit in balancing out your focus on DEX over STR. Other neat abilities is ignoring difficult terrain while charging, a class specific boost to AC that stacks with Dodge, damage to attributes via criticals, and other nifty items.
It does have some dead levels, but I’d always suggest a Swashbuckler over Fighter given you have agency outside and inside combat. You still mostly hit with stick, but you have things you can do involving them.
Rating: Decent
Bear Warrior
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Welcome to the Prestige Classes, and say hello to the first of over thirty variations of “Hit things this way” and why this book took so long. The Bear Warrior is one of the more interesting PrCs that Complete Warrior has, and is as a result is one of the better ones.
The Bear Warrior is clearly tailored for the Barbarian given you need Rage or Frenzy and takes its theme from the Norse Berserker myths, where brotherhoods of drugged up lunatics could shapechange into the form of a Bear. As a result, this PrC is at least interesting in that you essentially can wildshape and add some nice boosts to STR, DEX, and CON by becoming a bear. You later on get to turn into increasingly stronger bear forms, which culminates in a hideous +20 to STR when you can turn into a Dire Bear.
The book almost made me want to say that the Bear Warrior was worse than straight up Barbarian, but I was reminded of Lords of Madness. You see, that book has what are known as Mouth Pick weapons. They work for characters that cannot use normal weapons (like the Beholders who were given these) but have a bite attack. This means that the Bear Warrior can now do full attacks with that ludicrous strength and get a pair of claw attacks or a grapple.
Without the book, it’d still be decent, but with Lords of Madness you have sheer pigshit in character form.
Rating: Amazing
Bladesinger
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Oh boy, another attempt to try and make a gish build. So the Bladesinger’s idea is if you threw a Fighter, a Wizard, and a Bard into a blender to try and make something amazing. But like the actual results (mangled corpses and gurgling screams of those still living), the final result is shit.
So let me explain: you need to waste four feats, have two perform skills, fucking Tumble, and a level dip in an arcane caster. This makes the class have a pretty high bar to jump over to qualify for it. Technically you can do this with a Bard, but haha no don’t do that since you have Sublime Chord or the Troubadour of Stars.
What you get in terms of item is okay at best; you gain a boost to AC based on INT, but only when you single hand rapiers. You gain some weak quicken abilities on spells, and lastly can do a weaker version of the fucking Monk’s Flurry of Blows. You only get half caster levels too, which gimp most arcane spells and forces you to at best cast as a 15th level caster.
This gish build is just plain overshadowed by literally every other one I can think of… except MAYBE Space Junkie.
Rating: Garbage
Cavalier
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Why hello there trapped PrC, nice to see you. This is another major theme of the Complete Warrior book; many of the classes on a surface level look useful, but in practice tend to suck due to quirks in the class.
The Cavalier is your eponymous knight in shining armor, related to the Paladin but serves an Earthly lord rather than a heavenly one. The PrC focuses clearly on mounted combat, given that it gives you some solid bonuses to hit with Lances and Swords, boosts the hell out of charge damage on mounts, and even full attacks while on horseback. Combine this with a little bit of boosts to Ride and Knowledge (Noble) and it just breaks my heart to ding this PrC.
This is because this class by its nature is flawed, like the rapidly going senile and delusional Don Quixote. The Cavalier does advance mount levels, but the problem is that it doesn’t provide bonuses to a Martial that enters the PrC. If you go into this as a normal Martial like Fighter (why), then you only can use your shit war horse stat forever and gripe as it dies instantly from Ettins to Otyughs.
The Cavalier also isn’t ideal for Paladins too, since you gain no caster levels with the class, and Paladins critically need their spells for support and for the purposes of resisting said spells.
It is so close to greatness that a simple fix would have been that your mount becomes like the Paladins or improves to match the Paladin’s quickly… but without this, then the Cavalier just has to ride in the sunset, off for his last Joust.
Rating: Garbage
The Dark Hunter is a flavor PrC pretty much designed around Underdark settings or if you play a Dwarf. Dark Hunters are people that specialize in keeping the labyrinthine Underdark safe for travelers by learning to hunt the monsters that lurk in it.
This is a five level PrC with a lot of requirements, ranging from needing a craft (trapmaking) to getting Blind-Fight. It’s weird in that the class seems designed for ranger, but you get more out of it if you’re a Dwarf or a Rogue. The first bonus is that you get the Stonecunning of the Dwarves, but you get a better version if you are a Dwarf already, which is pretty much the only time you can do that. Then you get a sneak attack die and a +10 to hide if you’re along rocks or dirt and a Death Attack like Assassin.
It’s really weird, situational, and the class that best uses it would most likely be a Dwarf Rogue… which is weird to say the least. It actually makes me want to try that build now: Dylan Pursesnatch, the Dwarven Thief… oh God.
Rating: Playable
Darkwood Stalker
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You remember when I talked about the Seeker of the Misty Isle? Well, I can already state that this is its prototype. The Darkwood Stalker has a titanic hate boner for the Orcs, and have channeled it into the purely normal and not at all due to any form of creepy attachment to it act of murdering them.
The bar is reasonable to enter, especially for the Elf/Half-elf Ranger, but besides the one item this class gets it’s utterly forgettable. You get uncanny dodges, a race specific death attack, some sneak attack dice and some darkvision. The one item that really highlights the massive throbbing murderection towards the Orcs is Ancient Foe.
Ancient Foe is fucking hideous as an ability, since it is a scaled up favored enemy (Orc) that stacks with other favored enemy bonuses. That means that after a certain point you can just gib Orcs… and that’s a problem. You see, you can really only marmalize Orcs and jizz into your pantaloons at the slaughter you’ve committed. If it ain’t an Orc, then you’re just a slightly fancier Ranger.
Honestly, unless you’re making a revenge character against a DM that has an Orc fetish, then just skip it and do something more disgusting… like Mystic Ranger Stormlord with the Glove of Infinite Javelins… or the Mystic Ranger/Suel Arcanamach.
Rating: Playable
Dervish
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Neat, it’s the Sufi Monastic Class. Dervishes are based clearly on the famous Whirling Dervishes that practice dancing to reach Allah via religious ecstasy caused by said dance and prayer. In this world though, they are tribesmen who practice the art of the Dance to murder things.
This PrC has an annoying entry bar in that you need a truly stupid amount of feats to get into as well as things like Tumble and so on. It really feels like you need to be a Fighter that dips into Bard to make this class work. And what you get is a steaming pile of garbage that is absolutely Haram.
You get a weak AC boost if you just wear light armor, which several classes can do already like Moon-Warded Ranger and Swordsage. Then you get to the main meat; the Dervish Dance. This ability at first seems decent; you can move and still make a full attack so long as you dance around for the tiles and use tumbles to avoid attacks of opportunity. This could have made the class decent for Battle-dancer or even a Swashbuckler, but there are problems with it.
The first is you need to max out your perform (dance), since every two ranks gives you one more round to dance. The second is you get exhausted afterwards, which is lethal in a fight and you can’t avoid this until near the capstone level.
The sad thing is like Chevalier, the Dervish is almost good. But the prerequisites and the slow gain of the Dervish dance, and the mediocre abilities gained until 4th or 5th level kills it. What would’ve been a great PrC for a Dex based fighter (like the criminally undersupported Battle Dancer) is ruined. The only change it’d need is replace the feats with some skill focus feats for Tumble and Perform and swap Tireless Dance (9th level) with Death Dance (free cleave you get at 4th level). The Sufis weep.
Rating: Garbage
Drunken Master
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This PrC can only be entered as a pure Monk. Ignore the fluff and the requirement pretending you need improved unarmed strike for it is fucking lying to you. You need Flurry of Blows, meaning you at minimum need one monk level, and usually you want to max out Monk levels to at least seven since you need to have Evasion and at least a scaled fist damage too.
The only other option at the point this shit heap was written was if you did Monk 1/Rogue 2 (for the required Evasion) and then whatever else you want, but at that point you’re making a far worse character than if you just mono-classed. Once you realize the lie, then you realize the class fucks you over as a Monk.
One of the few good things Monks can do rely on Wisdom, and what does this PrC do? Give you a shittier rage that penalizes WIS when you booze up. Fun fact: this makes it so that you usually cannot benefit from the full booze effect by 5th level in Drunken Master. This is because on average you won’t boost INT, or actually have it be lower than 10, and the effects stack. This means you can drink yourself to mindlessness if you don’t pay attention, and then just shit yourself spasming on the floor for the next few rounds.
Then you just get free 1d4 damage if you use improvised weapons and the ability to make non-linear charges and only need one DC 15 Tumble check to avoid all attacks of Opportunity during said charge. Then you get a not-quite replacement for your WIS based armor that you lose by chugging.
That’s the thing about this weird as shit class; you get quasi nice abilities while crippling yourself. I’m saying this because you get the very tempting Jackie Chan Ladder-fu ability at level 5 that then does up to a free 1d12 damage die. But through this class, you do not improve any monk abilities at all, meaning you just have your 1d6+STR+1d12 as a guide at worst.
The capstone ability is shit; 3d12 fire damage at near the end of your 1-20 game. Fuck you Wizards. Fuck you.
This class is a mess, and needs to sober up.
Rating: Garbage
Exotic Weapon Master
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There’s really not much to say about this PrC other than you can use it to get a variety of mediocre stunts that allow you to do some fancy tricks with exotic weapons.
The problem is this is already useless because you need to be proficient in the exotic weapon first and you get nothing but shit in return, meaning you wasted a feat for that proficiency in exchange for effectively nothing. The best item on this list is beaten by a fighter variant called Exoticist that gives you special bonuses to exotic weapons anyway.
Skip.
Rating: Garbage
Eye of Grummsh
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Why hello there lie in the fluff and hello there inferior Blessed of Grummsh PrC that @Dunsparce talked about. This is again another PrC that Complete Warrior made that on the surface looks quite nice for Barbarians, but again is actually overshadowed by other options, even in terms of worshiping Chaotic Evil Orc gods.
So the idea is an Orc Barbarian rips out his right eye and succeeds in the test of not making a sound when doing it. In exchange you gain some very mediocre abilities. You can boost other Orcs by +2 on Will Saves, gain a bit of cheap AC, a slight STR bonus on other Barbarians without feats, and the ability to sense things blindly and vomit at people to blind them.
The problem is that the Blessed of Grummsh beat them with this one simple item: you gain up to 10 free AC by the time you finish the PrC. The Blessed can also do some gaze attacks and one a day abilities that gives them options in combat. You also are not restricted by class and can be Neutral as a Blessed. Even the normal Barbarian is a bit better since those bastards get more rages.
It’s telling when you get worse taking this class as an Orc and something exists that beats it as a concept.
Rating: Playable
Frenzied Berserker
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Ah… the Yang to the Apostle of Peace’s Yin has arrived. The Frenzied Berserker is the OTHER class that the group as a whole has to agree on before being played. This is because these bastards are a common source of TPK style shenanigans.
You see, the Frenzied Berserker has a unique quirk: Frenzy. This disgustingly horrific ability adds +6 to STR and Con and drops your AC by 4. This stacks with the improved Rages you have to get to qualify for this class. If this sounds disgusting, then don’t worry: it gets far worse.
The Berserker also gets a super version of Die-Hard, a Cleave that moves, a better Power Attack, and it just culminates in slaughter… of your party. For you see, the Berserker’s Frenzy cannot tell who is friend or foe, and they will keep murdering until the Frenzy ends. This means you if the fight is over and there is nothing else to satiate the desire to marmalize things, the party’s on the chopping block.
But can’t you snap out of it with a Will save, you may ask? Well yes, you can… as a DC 20 check. Oh, and fun fact: You also need to will check every time you get damaged and still have Frenzies left over. The DC for them is 10 + Damage… and the Berserker has a poor Will Save.
So when faced with this bullshit in a can that will not die when mutilated to shit and back and who has turned on you and you cannot fix via mind effects, what can you do? Your only hope is Save or Die effects. Yes. If you play with a Berserker you must at all times have something like Disintegrate, luck with Prismatic Spray, or Power Word: Kill to save the rest of the gang when there’s nothing left.
This PrC is a horror story generator and so fucking insane I actually can’t rate it in a sane manner. What it does is disgustingly good, but the uncontrolled nature utterly ruins its utility. I can therefore only put it into NPC, for I cannot comprehend the true form of where to put this atrocity.
Rating: NPC (UNRATABLE)
Tiers (Part 1)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Bear Warrior
Good Classes: N/A
Decent Classes: Swashbuckler
Playable Classes: Hexblade, Dark Hunter, Darkwood Stalker, Eye of Grummsh
Garbage Classes: Bladesinger, Chevalier, Dervish, Drunken Master, Exotic Weapon Master
Truenamer Class: Samurai
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Frenzied Berserker (IT IS UNRATABLE)
Yeah... a lot of the classes in this book kind of suck dick. Yeah, you have the Bear Warrior so far, and the Swashbuckler and the revised Hexblade are still fun to play, but most of the classes are very situational or just plain outshone due to this being early in DnD 3.5's shelf life. Still, there's another way too many to go and I already feel my head hurting now.
Expect another write up sometime next week or so.
I'm in tears, rolling on the floor in amusement, because it's incredible at how poorly done samurai are written in Dungeons And Dragons. Looks like the writer just skimmed over Miyamoto Musashi's Book of the Five Rings, watched one too little samurai movies, talked to his weeaboo relative that was too much into anime in the 1980s who made up anything about samurai off the top of his head, played Wizardry one too many times, and never touched indepth sources on samurai history or Japanese history in general.Made a promise to update today, and update I shall:
Complete Warrior (Pt 2)
In most books, this would be the end of the PrC horde... but nope. Due to this being WotC's first big book of x, this group has about 50% more PrCs to cover than the other ones I've looked through so far. This would be nice, and I will actually show off some nice classes today, but the big issue is that you still can only hit with effect so many times before it gets old. Not gonna lie, this was where I floundered the most, so let's dig in to see why:
Gnome Giant-Slayer
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So remember how the Darkwood Hunter has a hideously murderotic obsession with killing and learning how Orcs work? Yeah, this is pretty much the same class for Gnomes, but their chosen fetish for slaughter are giant creatures in general. The fluff tries to make them out as amazing heroes that defend the little guy, but they went a bit too far and it just becomes comical. I just now see angry manlets who rather than submit to their macrofetish just murder them.
So besides my continual bawdy jokes, what can I say about this class? I can say that this class is a bit of a pain in the ass to get into for one thing unless you go fighter. This is because it needs three feats, two of them being kind of shit, to get into. Anything that requires Dodge and Mobility will suck… except for maybe two classes that I can think of that use it.
Besides this, it’s still pretty easy to get in. As for their features, they’re slightly better in some ways but worse than others compared to the Darkwood Stalker. For one, the Giant-Slayer has a better HD than the Orc Murderer, a d10 rather than d8. Another positive is their favored enemy bonuses apply to all giants, giving them a slightly wider advantage since there’s several creatures that can be counted as giant.
The Giant-Slayer also has a couple of decent abilities too; they gain AC bonuses against Giants and a lesser but still decent bonus against creatures two size categories bigger than them. That’s pretty nice. They also get to use their PrC level as a bonus to get out of grapples with two size larger creatures and can move past them too. But I do have to state that they’re not really worth playing as a whole.
Why? Because they’re stuck with worse weapons than your average Martial. Remember, Gnomes (which you have to be to make this PrC) are Small sized creatures. This means that their weapon dice are worse than mediums. An example is that their greatsword does 1d10 damage as opposed to 2d6 of a Medium sized weapon. It sounds like not much, but it does hamper them a bit.
There’s also the matter that their remaining features and just nature in general are overspecialized and mediocre as a whole. Giants do appear, but not all the time, so your best bonuses don’t apply. Then you get a shit capstone where if a hit from a giant knocks you to 0 and you can move, you take half damage with a reflex throw. What a fucking joke.
It’s not too bad, but I have to say it’s not worth really playing when there are usually less restrictive options. Plus taking Fighter levels to get the class early? Eew.
Rating: Playable
Halfling Outrider
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Oh wow, this book is trying to pretend that a Wizard would want to become an Outrider. I kind of hope whoever was the writer of this, who I also suspect wrote the fluff for Drunken Master and Eye of Grummsh, got fucking fired. Because this is clearly a martial class and it’s actually pretty good for something like a Halfling Paladin or Ranger.
Now usually I don’t like that option, because I usually argue that having more magic in general is the better option. But there is something absolutely hideous you can do with this PrC. You have to jigger a lot of shit together to make it work, and you need several books to make it work, but you can make your mount basically the equivalent of an 18th level Druid companion and 18th level Holy Mount.
If you think that’s insane, and I do, you can do something that’s a lot easier and makes your character useful still, since most supermount builds don’t do that. The trick is just take Ranger 4, Paladin 6, have Devout Tracker as a feat, and then start taking Outrider levels. You get all the Paladin boosts to the War-Animal, and 14 levels of Ranger to add on to that. That’s kind of hilarious, given how much beefier your Animal bro will be. And since this is a Halfling, I envision it to be a Celestial War-Corgi.
But anyways, you get a lot of awesome mount related bonuses too, ranging from a free boost to ride based on Outrider level to being able to full attack and charge through allies safely with ride checks on the latter. It’s kind of funny, because if the Chevalier had this ability too, then it would’ve been far more often picked, due to more races being eligible for the cheese. As it stands, If you want to focus on mounted combat and fight on a Corgi, this is a great option and a bright spot for this book.
Rating: Amazing
Hulking Hurler
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This is better used if you also take War Hulk levels for maximum hilarity. This short PrC only has three levels, but it’s a fun gimmick that allows you to take maximum advantage of just throwing heavy shit at people to hurt them. As stated, it’s probably smart to qualify for War Hulk first, since you get everything but Point Blank Shot that way.
So the first thing a Hulking Hurler can do is throw pretty much anything that counts as their light load, which means that if you go War Hulk too, you can just throw 5d6 damage all day every day… or even more if the DM is insane.
The last two levels just allow you to specialize how your throws work, whether or not they have knockdown, AoE effects, Ranged Power Attack, and so on. It’s a nice little side PrC to pick up if you’re already going to go War Hulk is all I’m saying.
Rating: Decent
Hunter of the Dead
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This is what the Skullclan Hunter wishes it was. The Hunter of the Dead is a PrC where this Book again lies about how all classes can and are drawn to becoming one under the right circumstances. I guess idiot writer was not fired, much to my disappointment.
Regardless, this is clearly more a Paladin or maybe Cleric (if you’re insane) build than anything else. The entry fee is not too bad if you go for it with either other than you need to get hit with an ability draining spell or an enervate first to meet the requirement. You have a mediocre HD, full BaB, and scaling similar to a Ranger based on these details.
You get the very nice ability to smite undead that uses WIS and adds up to 10 extra points of damage to a dead creature. You can also use Smite Evil still if you get this as a Paladin. Other neat features is adding WIS to saving throws when faced with undead casting magic, permakilling the dead you hit, and even a 10d6 positive energy burst that only costs a turn attempt.
The capstone and spell list is nice too. The capstone level gives you immunity to enervate and energy drain in general. The spell list is a mix of Paladin and Cleric spells that has some utility (though focuses on fighting undead) and even includes the fairly potent cure Critical Wounds.
This class is shockingly nice and I was not expecting to see a perfectly good Paladin PrC pick in this morass.
Rating: Good
Invisible Blade
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The fluff for this PrC is a complete and hideous lie. If you read the fluff and thought you got something as neat as an assassin, then the shitstain that wrote this PrC fooled you. The Invisible Blade is actually one of the shittiest classes in this book so far.
The idea behind this class is you become a very technical and canny fighter that focuses on critical blows with their knives. And yes, you can only use knives, kukris, or punching daggers for your abilities to work. You also have to kill a “worthy” opponent using these weapons first to even qualify for the PrC after wasting a shitload of feats on point-blank and far shot too.
So what do you get? You get 3d6 sneak attack (which does not stack onto anything but those three weapons I mentioned), the ability to cause bleeding wounds, and your last two levels give you bonuses to Feint. To give you an idea, no one I’ve ever seen has used feinting, so when 40% of this five level class specializes in it you know they fucked up. The only thing remotely good in this trashfire is you get to add your INT to AC… but you only get max bonuses to it by sticking to this shitshow of a PrC. Rogues, hell, any Martial in general that plays canny can do better. Fuck this.
Rating: Garbage
Justicar
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This PrC is the Judge Dredd class. Nope, not screwing with you; these guys’ jobs are to enforce the law, and that means serving as essentially the Medieval Police. Now, I do love their fluff, but mechanically they are pointless it’s sad to say.
The Justicar’s main focus is doing non-lethal damage with no penalties at all. They get to stack on damage with non-lethal strikes (fancier sneak attacks), get bonuses to gather information, and the ability to rope people while grappling them.
The problem is that the Justicar is outdone already by this point. It was an early class and their main schtick was taken over already by Merciful Weapons, which do the same non-lethal damages. Honestly, you can just have a Lawful Rogue with saps or a Merciful weapon do what they do. You could just hog-tie everyone as a Justicar, but honestly this just feels like an NPC class more than anything else.
Still kind to want to play it though, since I do like the fluff.
Rating: NPC (Would be Decent)
Kensai
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My first experience with the Kensai was listening to the tale of Tandem the Spoony beating one of these guys, and I thought they were supposed to be pretty damn good. My next experience was in 5e, as I’m playing one there, and they aren’t too bad but not the greatest thing ever. This is my first time reading them in 3.5… and I hate them. I hate them a lot.
The fluff reads like a bad BDSM request by the writer, as they highlight how any of the Kensai have this compulsion to bend over and fervently serve their lords. The only thing I can say that I like is that Complete Warrior had at least the respect of not trying to pretend that every class could benefit from it. This is clearly for the Monk based on its average BaB and slightly improved HD (1d10 compared to 1d.
The features for this class are essentially stretched out in a hideous manner to hide how little there is to the fucking class. The author spergs on and on about how you can meditate under the lotus tree until you get a +5 weapon at 5th level and a bunch of neat shit to add on since they didn’t want you to go full epic at 10th level. Problem is that this costs a lot of EXP, and you don’t want to be behind your other party members.
Then you get hypothetically nice temporary boosts to STR and diplomancy checks, but this is crippled by them lasting only half your level (rounded down) rounds, meaning they burn out too quickly to really use unless you go full in.
The other options you get are shit. You get the ability to give someone else your BaB for a round and you also get what is equivalent to a level 2 maneuver from the Tome of Battle at a far higher level. The capstone you get is anemic too, as you get the ability to make other Kensai respect you by being a “Ki Warlord”, which sounds absolutely fucking moronic. It’s basically like the ADnD getting a Lord title, but more limiting.
Oh and did I forget to mention you also have three dead levels? Because the masturbating weeaboo that wrote this felt the need to bloviate about what is essentially a C- in giving you shit to do. He should have maybe not wasted his time in writing the Oath of BDSM and maybe instead wrote about how you can do weeaboo attacks instead.
The writer for this was probably the guy who wrote Samurai, and he just needs to neck himself. Or drink bleach. I don’t care, I just don’t want him alive anymore.
Rating: Garbage
Knight of the Chalice
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This PrC is actually pretty similar to the Hunter of the Dead, only they focus on Outsiders, not Undead. Like the Hunter, it’s very much a Paladin PrC, to the point that Complete Warrior wasn’t quite senile enough to claim all classes were good. I think their math was a bit off, since they think you need a dip in Ranger, but nahh… level 8 Paladin’s got this.
The Knight of the Chalice has a pretty good spell list that is pretty comparable to the Hunter of the Dead. The Knights focus more on summoning and buffing, while the Hunters get damn good healing instead. Both have items the other wants, so you don’t lose with either of them.
The Knight has some very good abilities on top of their spell list too. They for one thing gain damage dice and competence bonuses to hit Evil Outsiders, which especially is useful at this point given how often they appear. This also stacks with smite too, so you just pile on that damage.
Don’t feel like fighting a demon or devil? Just Censure them. Yes, like the Apostle of Peace, the Knight of the Chalice can essentially turn outsiders. This gives you as the party a free action to smash them, and if you’re lucky not have to fight as they are sent screaming down to the Lower Planes.
They also have a very nice scaling boost called Heaven’s Courage, which eventually spreads to the whole party. The Knight also gets a +2 boost to their Caster level and Spell DC as a level 9 option, making their spells harder to shrug off for evil outsiders. Their capstone is to just cast Holy Aura, a level 8 spell, as a Spell like ability.
A very nice option for Paladins, even in this early stage of DnD.
Rating: Good
Knight Protector
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It’s Tactical Soldier II: Electric Boogaloo people! The Knight Protector is basically the Neckbeard PrC. They scream that chivalry is dead, look for people to protect, and are an embarrassment as a whole. Only thing it really is missing for the full picture is a fedora to tip.
Nothing this class gets can be considered remotely good; you boost your allies by +4 against fear effects so long as you’re standing, you get a +4 bonus on one skill check a day, and you also get forced to take Iron Will as a feat and this is considered good. One other stupid thing you’re forced to get is basically a free combat reflex, which is situational given how rarely Attacks of Opportunity is brought up since it’s punishing enough to avoid usually.
There are two abilities they have which helps a bit. The first is they get the Frenzied Berserker’s enhanced Cleave ability, which allows them to move a bit after killing a guy. The second is a stupidly situational Smite that only works when you’re losing a battle since it requires party members to be rendered helpless or dying. So really when I say it helps a bit it’s like sticking your dick into an oven fire to piss it out.
It’s made all the more insulting that it’s a fucking nightmare to get into. You need a shitton of feats to get into this PrC, restricting you to either Human, or take Fighter dips to get into it. You then need an INT of at least 12 to get this going and a good CHA too. Why? Because the only ability worth a shit needs a good Charisma bonus.
I’ll leave off the class with this: @Dunsparce made this joke as I went through this class “Now you too can be a Dwarven Defender without being a Dwarf”. When the Dwarven Defender is brought up as a comparison, then you KNOW you fucked up.
Rating: Garbage
Master Thrower
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It’s actually pretty rare for there to be something that supports throwing weapons at all in 3.5, as ranged weapons were criminally undersupported in the game. Bows at least had Ranger Spells and a few extra feats to fix them a bit. So these guys already have some utility as it stands since you’re fucked if you spec in throwing knives or shuriken without all that you can get.
The class itself isn’t too bad if you REALLY want to specialize in throwing weapons. The first level gives you Quick Draw as a free feat and allows you to pick the first of your three Weapon Tricks, similar to the Exotic Weapon Master. The difference is there’s a few pretty decent options to pick, with the best one being Dead-eye shot since it ups the crit multiplier, and you need that to really get working.
You get some ho-hum things like Evasion and Snatch Arrows, but then you get a very nice ability called Weak Spot. It’s nice because it turns all your thrown weapon attacks into a Ranged Touch Attack.
This now means I could suggest a Mystic Ranger/Stormlord/Master Thrower for maximum Javelin spam and vomit at what was made. This class is very niche, but if you are sticking to range, you NEED it.
Rating: Decent
Master of the Unseen Hand
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So this class was designed for the guy who just wants to play a psion but is too stubborn to play one. This PrC is somewhat similar to the Argent Adept in that you focus on one aspect of magic above all others. The difference is that the Argent Adept was good, and this PrC can suck my mind balls.
The Master of the Unseen hand sacrifices every caster level in its five level progression, meaning that it already was skating on thin ice. That it does so for Telekinesis, probably one of the most confusing spells to ever use in the Vancian casting system makes it already garbage. To clarify, Telekinesis has three completely different rule sets to juggle, which is about two too many for most players.
But there’s more for me to describe why this class is shit, so buckle up. The first is that this shitty class makes Telekinesis even more painful to figure out how to use since you now have to splice in your INT/CHA bonus, your caster level, and then deal with the weird BaB fuckery that the spell uses to calculate DC and successes. It makes actually casting magic more annoying.
It then gets worse, since you get a variety of telekinetic poor-man’s ability ranging from Fly, a poor-man’s Spiritual Weapon, a poor-man’s fighter in the form of multiple hits with said weapon, and the worst thing of all the capstone.
The capstone can be matched by a party at least seven levels lower; not fucking with you. The Fling Upward ability does allow you to do massive fall damage, but honestly? You just do more damage with a normal caster and party than that. Hell, if you’re playing pathfinder or the DM homebrews it, you can do it lower level anyway.
Just play Psychic Warrior if you REALLY want to do this…
Rating: Garbage
Mindspy
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This one was seemingly designed to be an NPC class given how the fluff writer heavily pushes that you need detect thoughts active as often as possible as a spell like ability. Jokes on them, you can just buy a Helm of Telepathy to get the same effect. Even then, why on Earth would you want to play this?
Like the Master of the Unseen Hand, this class tries to sell itself to casters, mainly Sorcerers. Problem though; they also get no advancements to caster levels at all; not even caster levels for their mind spells. They also seem to advocate that this should be a Martial build with the BaB and character image… but as a squishy caster. That’s already having it hang by a thread over Garbage, so let’s go over why it’s falling in and going to drown under everything else but Samurai.
The first level abilities are trash; the only passive bonus is to your AC, which is where the Detect Thoughts come in. So long as you have that going you get up to 5 AC based on your Charisma modifier and level. As for the rest of the class? Fucking garbage that only tweaks how long, how many, and the shape of your fucking detect thoughts work.
This class is utterly useless in every way possible. It actually is probably the second worst class in the book… so far. I’ve never seen such a bland and piss worthless load of five levels.
Rating: NPC (Would be Garbage)
Nature’s Warrior
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So 2/3rds of the way in the Book, and Wizards of the Coast just remembered that Druids exist, and so this PrC was made. Fluffwise, they’re all disgusting Otherkin with animal souls. I’m being hyperbolic, true, but this still is close to the truth. Essentially, a Murder-Hippie is a Druid that realizes they like their animal form more and so stick to it for a lot longer, fucking with their Druid casting in their native form.
This PrC is the first in Complete Warrior that advances the casting level for all spells, in this case you at least as a Druid keep two casting levels. Thankfully this means you do still keep 9th level spells on hand, but you do lose some caster bonuses and spell slots in the process.
In exchange you get to customize your wildshapes with Nature’s Armament, a variety of buffs to certain forms. There are an assortment of Elemental boosts and natural critter boosts. They’re modest, but some winners are Nature’s Weapon (which magics your natural weapons), Armor of the Crocodile (+5 AC that stacks with enhancements by magic), and Water’s Flow (free movement where you can’t get hit).
Honestly, this isn’t a bad option. There are better options in the world, but the Nature’s Warrior is one that you can take and feel fine with it.
Rating: Decent
Tiers (Pt 2)
Tippy Tier: N/A
Amazing Classes: Halfling Outrider,
Good Classes: Hunter of Dead, Knight of the Chalice,
Decent Classes: Hulking Hurler, Master Thrower, Nature’s Warrior
Playable Classes: Gnome Giant-Slayer,
Garbage Classes: Invisible Blade, Kensai, Knight Protector, Master of the Unseen Hand
Truenamer Class: N/A
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Justicar (Would be Decent), Mindspy (Would be Garbage)
Like I said, this part was a bit rough to go through. The best/worst part is there's worse than things like the fucking Knight Protector coming up. Also finally decided that I will in fact go on to DM's Guide next so I can get that car wreck out of my life too.
Enemies need to be flatfooted for effects to work? Daisho proficiency? Iaido proficiency penalties that the savant gets less of? And to Kensei, shit about loyalty to lords, hot shit air abilities with "Ki Warlord" title waving, and bullshit about honor code? This sounds so outdated and underwhelmingly bad and at the same time so chalk full of stereotyping it's sounds obviously weeaboo made. I'd rather play a samurai class that was weeaboo pants cumming bullshit with learning ki attacks, blade beams, unleashing the soul of the sword like from Final Fantasy Tactics, learning how to accelerate to a foe's blind spot, learning how to project emotional ki to halt and intimidate foes as a support ability, and even to cutting through most unenchanted metals, and I'm not even getting into how D&D doesn't include shit like Ki dynamics to help truly expand their oriental settings and allow even classes that aren't samurai nor oriental based to utilize these dynamics. There's not even classes that are even more pragmatic than what "honor honor and honor" stereotypes the writer has about samurai, to the idea of hitokiri (literally samurai assassins) or actually putting in an actual Miyamoto Musashi expansion/advanced class that could be called Kensei.
On another note, enjoy this fan made class that blows the official classes out of the fucking water. Edit: Enjoy a prestige class too.
EDIT: I didn't even get to the ronin yet when I wrote this. What the shit.
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- Jun 25, 2019
Really, truly, this thread has awakened me to why one should stop playing D&D.
It's because the designers seem so entranced on making magic obscenely powerful and can't wrap their mind around the idea that it takes years of study and practice, as in an actual education, to study swordsmanship, but don't actually give a solid reason for why anyone would ever spend years learning anything BUT magic given that it does everything.
They also seem to never wrap their heads around the idea that if magic is a thing that can actually be studied and logic'd out in-universe, then you'd need to actually get into brass tacks of how it works and thus why someone that spent their lifetime studying illusions can drop an actual, non-illusory meteor then actually non-illusorily fly away.
It's because the designers seem so entranced on making magic obscenely powerful and can't wrap their mind around the idea that it takes years of study and practice, as in an actual education, to study swordsmanship, but don't actually give a solid reason for why anyone would ever spend years learning anything BUT magic given that it does everything.
They also seem to never wrap their heads around the idea that if magic is a thing that can actually be studied and logic'd out in-universe, then you'd need to actually get into brass tacks of how it works and thus why someone that spent their lifetime studying illusions can drop an actual, non-illusory meteor then actually non-illusorily fly away.
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- Nov 8, 2017
The Pathfinder version of Samurai completely blows the 3.5 version out of the water, and the sword saint archetype allows you to make sonic booms by drawing your weapon. The rage mage is the prototype of Pathfinder's bloodrager and 3.5 is where Monte Cook's magic fetish got really out of control, to the dismay of Skip Williams and his warrior fetish.
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- Jun 4, 2018
Not surprising, as the samurai in PF is basically a slightly tweaked Pathfinder cavalier (a solid class in its own right).
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- Oct 28, 2017
Cavalier is a good class (saying this as someone who has played Cavalier before), but can also fall into the trap of being highly situational, since the base class and most of the archetypes count on you riding your mount, and since this is Dungeons and Dragons, time you won't be able to ride your mount are actually pretty likely to occur. It isn't enough to make the class unplayable though, and there are archetypes that forego the mount entirely to focus on the "knight in shining armor" aspect. The samurai isn't as mount focused, depending on the archetype, so its more viable than Cavalier in some ways. But Cavalier and PF Samurai are still leagues better than the nadir of the 3.5 era and anything in the 4.0 era.
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- Sep 3, 2014
You should feel bad though; you were still sad enough to read this.
In 3.5's defense, all of what was written about the oriental classes were very early in their splatbook years, back when they were still terrified of making martials strong and still believing casters were pretty weak. All of this was after all written maybe two or so years after the Player's Handbook came out, so it wasn't like they found their feet at this time.
I however will forever state that the creator of all of these classes (since I suspect it is all one person) is an imbecile though. He forgets to give the Samurai their ADnD abilities that made them work well, made them fight in one of the worst styles possible, and then basically gave them dead levels. Honestly, the sheer amount of dead levels around all of the classes are one of the most damning faults with them. Also it is funny they did not make a Ki system; I guess after Psionics they didn't want to do another point based system.
Yeah, the writers never did realize that when played RAW, 3.5 would create what is commonly known as the Tippyverse, a nightmare setting where eternal wizard kings break reality all the time and do everything. Basically just imagine a world populated by dozens of Elliminsters and wannabe Elliminsters and you're on point.
They also really overestimated feats, since they didn't start making good martial ones until a good way in DnD 3.5e.
The most hideous thing? Monte Cook still wasn't happy with the balance, since he thought that wizards were still a bit underpowered compared to the martial. Also had a hideous aversion to making Archery worth anything too.
The worst part is that the DM's Guide is actually the recordholder for worst classes after reading them. Will get into why tomorrow when I feel less corpsy.
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- Jun 4, 2018
And that right there is proof that Monte Cook is hilariously overrated as a game designer. Jesus Christ.
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- Nov 8, 2017
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- Dec 7, 2018
Question: if I want to play a martial in D&D which edition is best and what's the best tabletop game overall for taking down mages as martials?
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- Sep 3, 2014
5e, no exceptions. 4e is too samey and wargame like, and unless the player is really stupid you should never be able to kill a wizard with a martial beyond an assassin doing a coup de grace in 3.5e.
Kyria the Great
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 2, 2017
I will 2nd that as 5th edition you can actually open up several cans of whoopass on mages as martials, including Monks who are actually pretty good and with my Half-Orc monk was able to chain about 5 attacks at level 6 where if they all landed I was doing about 30-50 points of damage easy, on top of throwing a stunning strike on top of that too
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2015
Yeah, each of the classes in 5e has some nice variety.
Be a fighter and be a weapon master, or magically stab people!
Be a fighter and be a weapon master, or magically stab people!
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- Sep 3, 2014
I've gotten a decent lunch, had some time to write up most of Player's Handbook II, and have recovered from this book damaging my mind. So under these circumstances:
Dungeon Master’s Guide
The DM's Guide was one of three books that were released at the same time when 3.0 was updated to 3.5. The other two items were the Player's Handbook as well as the first Monster Manual. This book has a variety of good tips, tricks, ideas, and other items that a new DM and even old DM's should look through. It also introduces the concept of Prestige Classes to 3.5, and provides a wide assortment of them, most of them being ripped from 3.0 or AD&D. Sad to say that most of them are shit or were made obsolete, as if they weren't my mind wouldn't be comprised of broken shards of screaming jelly.
Let's dive into the Mouth of Madness and smell purple people:
Oh god no, this PrC is trying to be another Gish Build! The Arcane Archer is among one of the first ever PrCs made, as the Dungeon Master’s Guide was the first book to really make any for you to take. The problem is that makes this PrC complete and utter shit.
The fluff tries to tell you they’re an elite archer found in elven kingdoms, but the problem is they are worse than Rangers in every way. For one thing, the bar of entry for the class is a bit garbage. You see, you have to take a single arcane caster level as well as have +6 to hit and three feats as a non-human. So you can really only start on this journey of fail at 7th level.
The Arcane Archer has a pretty weak skill set too, focusing solely on being a weird hermit that hides and poops in the woods. You can really only get skills that help out in the wild to a degree, and I consider what you get as limited as a fighter, but worse. Mainly because at least outside of battle a fighter can spook people with intimidate.
So on to the mechanics of the class, which are a mess. For some reason, these guys can use tower shields SOMEHOW… this is shown by the lack of the words “except tower shields” for what they can equip.
The Arcane Archer opens up with the first of many “traps”, abilities that some bad PrCs have that at first glance make them look good to the uninitiated. In this case, they can enhance arrows. What does that mean? Well it means that the arrows are treated as a magical weapons.
At first this might be seen as awesome, and a player might think that the bonus would stack with their bow. But it doesn’t. You see, the writers when lifting this class from 3.0 didn’t edit anything to make it fit 3.5 better. Case in point, you cannot stack these bonuses, and so you render this ability useless the moment you get a magical bow. So fuck this trap.
The big ability that the Arcane Archer gets is the embue arrows. The idea is that you can enchant your arrows to shit out an area effect spell on your foes from a distance. The problem is that they forgot that spells increase in range the more caster levels a player has. A wizard for example can throw most of his magic at bow range by the time an Arcane Archer appears. The only spells worth using with this would be the close ranged spells… but why bother when this PrC doesn’t boost caster level at all?
So if you are stupid, you at best can shoot fireballs because you only have access to third level magic at best… at Epic Levels.
The other abilities are kinda pointless too. The seeker and phase arrow ability is kind of cool, but they’re too deep in the class and you can only do them once a day anyway. Hail of Arrows instantly loses to the Ranger’s Arrow Storm, since that Ranger spell would’ve been there earlier and it can hit more targets by that point. Lastly Death Arrow is a flat dc 20 save or die fort save. At level 17 this save is semi-beatable even for characters with a shit fort save.
For fuck’s sake, a Bone Knight has a better version of this. The fucking Assassin has a better version of that.
This class needs to do as the elves do and die off.
Rating: Garbage
I’m laughing so hard right now because of one single line: “Assassins occasionally opt in this class, but only if they already have Wizard or Sorcerer levels”. I’ll get into Assassins later, but just imagine the dumb motherfucker who decided to do this while every one else was going into their Epic class levels. That guy was probably just sitting there weeping at his mistake.
So the Arcane Trickster is actually a complete pile of dickpain to enter. This is because there are two sets of requirements that make it take forever to get into. One requirement is the ability to cast third level spells. That sounds okay, just take Rogue to get your sneak attack die and then take five levels of Wizard, right?
That’s where you have trouble, since it requires seven ranks of Disable Device and Escape Artist, meaning you have some skills to cross class or alternatively give up 9th level spells to save on skill points with another rogue.
So what do you get? Well, I’ll give the Arcane Trickster this; you keep caster levels through the whole ride. That does make it not the worst thing in the world. It also gives you 4+Int skill points and a wide skill pool, which is nice given you’ll be an INT based caster. It’s d4 HD though is very concerning given you are still designed to be able to do rogue things.
The ranged legerdemain skill’s actually kind of neat. You use Mage Hand to basically pickpocket people and pick locks. It also does scale a bit, allowing you to do this thrice a day by the end of it. You also get to mostly keep your rogue sneak attack dice too, getting +5d6 to the dice pool by the end of the road.
The last ability it gets is that you get the ability instantly turn a normal attack into a free sneak attack, and you can do this twice a day by the end of the class.
If I have to be honest, the Arcane Trickster is not a great PrC. It loses out to a pure rogue or a pure wizard. But in terms of fluff and switching up a playstyle I’d say it’s fairly worth it.
Rating: Decent
So the Archmage is a bit of an odd duck by the standards of PrCs, since you at minimum you need to be at level 13 (or 14 as a Sorcerer) to be able to enter this one. This makes it akin to the Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil in a way, in that it’s a late game caster. Because it’s late game though, it does only give you five decent levels, since you do keep all your caster levels too.
So what does it really do? It’s big thing is called High Arcana. The way it works is you get to pick a supernatural ability that augments your spells. Sounds good, right? It is, but you have to sacrifice some of your decently high spell slots, which hurts quite a bit given those are where some of the best spells in the game are.
Some of the High Arcana abilities are amazingly shit, like the Arcane Fire that basically can at best waste a 7th level spell slot for the ability to douche enemies with (level)d6+(spell wasted)d6 fire damage. It’s okay and has a big range, but it is not fucking worth it.
Others are mediocre, like the Range increase for touch attacks. It’s okay in that you can make a touch attack have a range of 30 ft. Another candidate for this would be the Shape Mastery, which was basically rendered obsolete courtesy of the sculpt spell metamagic feat.
But some are pretty good, like Elemental Mastery, which allows you to swap out elemental damage to your spells. So if you wanted to you can make Ice Storm do Acid Damage, or make Fireball Sonic you can do it.
The class was pretty good meta wise, but notice that past tense descriptor. This PrC was great for its time, but what happened was that Wizards of the Coast made new splats. Those new splats (Like Complete Arcane) made it mostly obsolete. As it stands, it’s still not a bad option, but you will feel the missing spell slots.
Rating: Good
Assassin
Ahh yes, the most popular PrC from this book and one of the ones that got some players butthurt because of alignment requirements. The Assassin is a stone cold killer who works by contract. In casual terms, they’d slit their mama’s throat for a nickel.
They’re dirt simple to get into if you play a rogue or a monk. I would however really enjoy seeing a fallen Paladin or Barbarian/Assassin build since the fluff mentions those existing. Good fucking luck on getting the eight ranks in move silently and hide. Same to any caster who chooses to murder their character’s entire career.
The Assassin’s abilities really compliment the Rogue’s, which really shouldn’t be too surprising. You get 5d6 sneak attack dice throughout the whole arrangement, which means you do lose two sneak attack dice, but it’s not that bad.
The big thing the Assassin gets is the Death Attack. This is actually not as good as players sometimes think. For one thing, you have to wait three turns to initiate it. The second problem is that you have to be able to hide from the enemy during this time or not be seen as a threat.
In return, it is scalable since the DC v. Death/Paralysis is 10+Assassin Ranks+Int. That makes it a lot better than the Arcane Archer’s Death Arrow. It also will still be used as a sneak attack if the attack fails too, which is nice. This makes it mainly a way to try and cheese bosses or to get rid of someone you need to in a more intrigue based game. It’s very situational.
You do get poison use as a free feat at 1st level, which is pretty nice too. This is complimented by getting some bonuses against poison too, which is okay mechanically, but nice fluffwise. You do get Uncanny Dodge and its Improved version, which is okay… but nothing amazing.
It’s coolest ability though is just the ability to hide in plain sight. It allows the Assassin to just ooze into the backdrop so long as there’s shadows nearby. It’s the ability that makes Death Attacks feasible inside of combat.
The Assassin spell list is small and very specialized, but it has some gems. In particular, glibness’ bluff bonus, freedom of movement, dimension door, cat’s grace, and spider climb are some good picks. They also got some support in their splat books courtesy of being a core PrC, which is a nice bonus. In fact, the one thing I’ll give kudos to WotC is that all casting PrCs in this book get support in splats.
In short, it’s a great next step for evil rogues and monks, and a hilarious option for a Paladin. Speaking of that as a joke…
Rating: Good
Blackguard
This class was clearly designed to be what a Paladin becomes when they fall and choose to go evil instead. This is because while you get some features and abilities by entering as anything else, you don’t get the full features unless you were a Paladin at one point. The fluff really tries to hype these guys as one of the better BBEGs to throw at a party too, or a very powerful and evil warrior who consorts with the lower planes for power.
The truth is… well, laughable. Entering Blackguard as a Paladin is spiritually the equivalent of finding your pet cat eaten by vultures; a spiritual drain on the soul that isn’t fun in the slightest. This is because you need five ranks in Hide, meaning that you can’t get it until you get up to level 7 minimum after wasting 10 skill points since it’s a cross class skill. So you have to waste a fairly precious resource to get to the minimum.
From there? You basically end your Paladin’s career as a useful character. If you’re wondering why, let’s go through what the Blackguard gets.
They start off getting an anti-Paladin set of abilities, so an Evil Aura, Detect Good as an at-will spell like ability. They also get the ability to use poisons as well, mainly for fluff reasons to highlight how dishonorable they are. At second level, they get the Paladin’s ability to apply their CHA bonus to saves and Smite Good, a worse version of the Paladin’s Smite Evil.
Now why is this worse? You’d think it’d be as good as the Paladin’s, but that’s wrong. It’s because unlike the Paladin’s Smite Evil, Smite Good only operates on the Blackguard levels you get, meaning at best you will get half the effectiveness of a Paladin when it comes to using it. This is not a good thing, and I’m baffled on why this PrC does not factor in fallen Paladin levels either.
The base spell list the Blackguard gets is okay, but nothing super special. They get access to healing, summoning evil monsters, and some buffers. Their big weakness is they operate just like a 10 level PrC does, which means they have a painfully small spell slot pool, especially compared to just staying a Paladin… you’ll hear me say this a lot too since this is the Blackguard’s big problem.
At 3rd level, the Blackguard gains an aura of despair and gets the ability to command undead. There’s a problem though with the latter; you can only get this command ability up to an 8th level caster’s level, since AGAIN, this class for some reason doesn’t count Paladin levels for the calculation. Have fun summoning trash that dies instantly to the Beholder mage.
4th level just gives you a sneak attack, which is… well okay. It’s not particularly great for a martial build like the ex-Paladin or whatever you spec in, but it’s not the worst thing. 5th level gives you your evil variant of a mount/familiar. The thing about this option is you can make it a mount, or you can make it a familiar. Mechanically it’s closer to the latter, meaning that should your Fiendish Servant die, then you wait longer than the Paladin does for theirs to come back. Thanks WotC, this class is so good…
What makes this war crime of a PrC even better is that three of the levels are completely dead. As in the only thing that advances are your spell slots and BaB. This is basically 70% of a finished class idea, a C- to an already shit class. Given this is a PrC, this is FUCKING INEXCUSABLE.
So the thing about this class is it gives special features to ex-Paladins like I’ve said. The first two levels of Paladin nets you another Smite Good. No bonuses based on having these levels, just the extra smite. Three to four levels give you lay-on-hands and I’ll give the class this; at least it includes level in general instead of just fucking Blackguard levels, which still makes it an okay Emergency Heal.
The next tier of ex-Paladins level just gives you another d6 for sneak attack and another smite with no bonuses beyond the ones you get… Jesus how lame. Oh wait, the next tier’s even lamer; Fiendish Summoning is a once a day Summon Monster I spell… YOU DO KNOW THAT AT THIS POINT YOU’RE LEVEL FUCKING 10 AT MINIMUM RIGHT?!
The last tier worth a shit is the 9th-10th level fallen paladin, which gives you a second fiendish servant that’s either a skeleton or a zombie. Anything over this just can be translated to free Blackguard levels that just replace useless Paladin levels.
Because the thing is you have to wander around as a worse Fighter variant before you get the full bonus, unless you start at 10th level or so. This is because you will not really be able to play a paladin in an all evil party, but you only get the full class by being a former paladin of that age. In short, you actively have to hurt yourself in a game like this before playing a worse paladin.
Before I go, I’ll just reference a far better Fallen Paladin class, the Bone Knight. Every single weakness of the Blackguard compared to a Paladin is taken care of by the Bone Knight being able to count Paladin levels for spell slots, abilities, mounts, and said class only loses smiting, a single caster level, and detect evil. It’s so much better than the Blackguard, that you can choose to enter it as a PrC and not fall as a Paladin.
This class is useless to me… I shall knock it down.
Rating: NPC (Was Garbage)
To those furries, err, scalies rather who play DnD, this PrC is perfect for you! The fluff behind these guys are that they are weirdoes who becomes completely obsessed about their 1/1024th Draconic ancestry and so sperg and study their ways to activate that legacy.
The fluff also lies to your face about how martials tend to become a Dragon Disciple, saying they dabble in sorcery. This hints at the truth: you actually NEED to be a spontaneous caster to enter in this class. You also need eight ranks in Knowledge (Arcane), meaning that the fluff of martials becoming these guys doesn’t make sense.
I’ll be perfectly honest, this class is like furry community in general; it’s a complete shitshow that does nothing right. You get the Barb’s d12 HD, which sounds fucking amazing for a caster and nice for a martial. It is, but then the other features start revealing themselves. For one thing, you don’t get a single caster level, making it a complete pile of shit for a caster who will only have at best 5th level spells on hand.
Instead, you get the Wonder Worker’s free spell slots, which hypothetically makes it a decent option for after you finish a PrC and want to expand your fairly limited spell slots if they have spells. Then you realize that this too is a 10 level PrC that doesn’t boost caster levels, and thus not really suitable for any dips as a caster at all.
From there, you mostly just get buffers to your stats. You gain +3 natural armor, 4 Str, 2 Con, and 2 Int throughout this PrC. While it is true they stack with other items, losing caster levels or a good BaB to get these items just isn’t worth it. And a shitty claw damage of 1d4 and bite of 1d6 can’t make this up. Keep in mind that by the time you can enter this class your martials are doing a fuckton more damage than this, and the casters even more so.
Your breath weapon is shit. Yeah, you do up to 4d8 elemental damage of whatever lineage you pick, but this is the time period where you could’ve douched the Bebelith in Prismatic Spray or something actually good. You get blindsense, which may be the only item you get that isn’t shit… but you’re in too deep when you get it.
I think the two biggest fuck yous are the wings and getting the half-dragon template as a capstone. The former is because you actually learn the Fly spell BEFORE EVEN ENTERING THE CLASS. The latter is because you have to take all ten levels of this festival of failure to get it, and that is not worth it.
This class cannot do anything right. You need to be a caster to enter this, but you get no caster levels and only slots for your four or so spell levels. It gives bonuses to your attributes that favor martials, but then you get an average BaB and worse natural weapons. You also have to heavily cross-class skill to get into this as a martial, meaning you sacrifice other skills to make your character be able to do things out of fights.
It literally makes anything that enters it worse than before they entered the class, regardless of what you started as. Fuck this class.
Rating: Truenamer
Why hello there complete superfluous class, why do you exist? So the Duelist is a PrC that was made completely obsolete by Swashbuckler, which was written maybe a year later when Complete Warrior was written. This already makes the class a hard sell, since to play a Duelist you need to meet PrC requirements while the Swashbuckler is right there at the start.
As for said requirements; they’re kind of annoying given you need to waste two feats on Dodge and Mobility and cross class skills into perform. In return you get to play some wet tissue paper disguised as a character, since you can’t walk around with armor to take advantage of their abilities.
Canny Defense for example is designed to give you some AC via any Int bonus you have. The problem is you only get as much of that bonus as your Duelist level, and the classes that can enter it easily don’t focus on Int so the bonus is minimal, if not at all. Absolutely lovely.
The next feature they get is Improved Reaction, which is just a free +2 to initiative each time it’s forced on you. It’s… well, it’s better than nothing. Then you get my least favorite ability in this book so far, Enhanced Mobility.
This fucking thing I at first thought as I read this gave you a flat +4 AC bonus if you go unarmored, which would help a lot. Then I noticed that it only works on AoOs. So… what this means is that you only get it by risking a gibbing. You will on average have an AC of maybe 15 – 17 depending on your stats while the other martials are at least in the high teens/low 20s due to magic armor coming in at this point. You are basically choosing to be a squishy wizard to do fucking rapier damage.
And that’s a thing I have to highlight, it only works if you use a one-handed weapon AND YOU’RE BUCK NAKED, meaning you don’t do that much damage and ARE getting hit. And then you get grace, an even worse version of the Lightning Reflexes feat since it only works when you’re naked.
From there, you get Precise Strike, a slightly better sneak attack. This would be okay, but you only get 2d6 worth of it. Even the Blackguard gets more sneak-attack dice than this, THE FUCKING BLACKGUARD! And sneak attack can be done on flanking anyway, so it’s only MARGINALLY BETTER. I think I just had an aneurysm, since I can smell blue and hear butter.
The best ability it gets is Elaborate Parry, and that’s damning with faint praise given it’s stuck to the PrC. It gives you up to +10 AC if you go the distance, which takes you from utter trash AC to subnormal at the point you’d finish Duelist off. This would be good on literally every class BUT the one it’s stuck to. Fuck this class.
The last two items of note are the Acrobatic Charge ability that Swashbucklers also get and the worst Monk ability in 3.5, ie Deflect Arrow.
This PrC is so fucking awful that it was made obsolete by the third ever splat made by Wizards, since only Unearthed Arcana and the Minis Handbook are older than Complete Warrior. Liberate tutume ex inferis.
Rating: Truenamer
Dwarven Defender
This PrC is what I consider the exemplar of a trap. This is because at first glance you might think it’s an excellent PrC for martials who want to focus on their AC and tankiness. Dwarven Defenders are effectively a weird Pseudo-Paladin order who protect the Dwarven way of Depression, Alcoholism, and Yellow Bile.
The first signs of this PrC not being as good as previously thought lies in its prerequisites. On the surface, it’s pretty easy to slip into by level 8. But the feats you need to take actually are all bad. Dodge is mediocre at best given it is more of feat designed to take for a PrC than one you want. Endurance is just worthless and gives you +4 to skills you’re already filling in due to the dearth of martials with good skills. And Toughness… I just die inside that it’s required. Waste a feat for 3 HP just to play this.
The second clue for your character getting ready for a Baaaaad time? The fact that you only get four skills to play with as class skills. The Dwarven Defender is so hideously autistic they can only spot, listen, sense motive, and craft shit. When the Fighter has more skill options than you, something is hideously wrong with you.
So the Dwarven Defender starts off by giving you an AC bonus, which does sound nice given that it does stack with most things… even your Dodge feat! And it’s actually pretty nice, but you can just get an amulet of Natural Armor, or an item that boosts Dodge bonuses.
Then you get to the moldy bread and rancid butter of this PrC: their Defensive Stance. You just decide to be a fat lump and sit there, gaining +2 str, +4 con, +2 to saves, and +4 to AC. This idea does sound pretty bitchin’, you get to do a defensive style rage and essentially be a wall to defend your buddies.
Then you get to the negatives of this ability. For one thing, once you pop the stance, you can’t fucking move at all. If you move, you lose the bonuses and take a -2 to your Str until you recover. This is not good given how often you will actually need to move in an actual fight in most cases.
For example, a rape goblin will probably not mindlessly kill themselves on the Dwarven Defender; they will gun for the Squishies while he’s stuck there. Hell, they can still beat him actually. They can group up and slowly push a boulder until it crushes Durin Axebeard the Dwarven Defender. You heard me right, a bunch of CR 1/8th mentally challenged goblins can stomp this class.
The other big weakness is you can only go into this stance at most five times a day, meaning you cannot scoot over to defend your buddies without factoring in that limit. Oh, and since it’s not clearly explained, the -2 to Str may or may not stack depending on DM interpretation.
Besides this, the Dwarven Defender just gets hand-me-down Barbarian feats in the forms of Uncanny Dodge and Trap Sense. The last item they get is a pity prize in the form of being able to 5 ft step option while going in the stance.
This class just doesn’t work for a tank build, and I can name at least two options superior to it. The Bone Knight for example rewards you with resistances and gives you options. The Defender of Saltiel also is a superior version given their resistance to mind effects and some good spells to support and heal allies. The latter option is even comparable in time period given the Book of Exalted Deeds, while published later, was originally a 3.0 book.
In the words of a famous Dwarven Defender: “Seriously?”
Rating: Garbage
This was very much the original gish build, and it’s still required if you want to make the full gish experience of four attacks and ninth level spells. At least without being That Guy the DM hates that uses a lot of books to do this with since fuck that. Their fluff is pretty basic; they’re mercenaries who are flexible with their approach. To them, magic is a tool to bypass defenses and weaponry is there to geek mages.
The Eldritch Knight is a supremely simple class to get into as well; you just need martial weapons and 3rd level spells. It’s not really too much of an issue, since you just need to take a dip in Fighter or Ranger and then go full wizard to reach it.
Structurally, the Eldritch Knight is also very simple. You lose a single caster level, but you get full BaB and a free feat to replace them. The class really doesn’t have any fancy features or anything, it’s just a fairly solid chassis. The only gripe that I have is that the HD is a bit too low for you to wade into combat, but that’s more the early 3.5 mindset of the writers than anything else.
This is one of those classes that aged very well as the edition went on; probably because it’s upfront with what it does and very friendly for players that wanted to just be both a caster and martial. Honestly recommend it for a player wanting to dabble in fighting but without the tedium.
Rating: Good
Who dragged this mummy out of its fucking coffin? The Heirophant is an old AD&D title that Druids got that allowed them to go beyond 7th level spells. It was an artifact of the time where your level determined your title, similar to how you didn’t become a Thief until you got to higher levels.
This explains why you need to be at least a 12th level divine caster to enter the class. The requirements for being a Heirophant are very low in this respect, though I find it weird that the skill needed is Knowledge (Religion) rather than (Nature) given its origins. Either way, fuck this class.
Now why am I saying this so early in the review of it? Because the table upfront shows you do not get a single caster level in this class. The text goes further into this, stating that the only time Hierophant levels count as caster levels is on the DC for it. At that point, why in the fuck don’t you just make it count then?
Instead, they get to pick a Supernatural ability or render their 0th to 7th level spell load out as a Spell-like Ability instead. The options you get are fairly similar to the Archmage in that respect, though I’d argue they’re kind of worse.
For example, at first glance, having free Maximizes on healing or harm spells sound nice. Then you realize that it does not beat 9th level spells and metamagic feats. Then you further realize that it being limited by sharing or opposing alignments really makes those shit.
The other options aren’t much to write about either, mostly being ways to boost caster level for calculating DC or dice pools. The only other noteworthy ability is that Druids who enter this PrC can share their abilities with other players or whoever they select. But honestly, why do that when you could’ve had the 8th and 9th level Druid spells.
I honestly don’t know why they dug it up. And I really don’t know why they made it worse than its AD&D version.
Rating: Garbage
Horizon Walker
The legitimate Murder-Hobo class, the Horizon Walker is an itinerant who just autistically wanders the lands in an aimless sense for adventure. They pretty much have seen everything and due to their travels seem to adapt to the terrain in a way.
These guys are in a way a Martial version of Final Fantasy’s Geomancer. The difference is these guys are far worse. Why is that? Mainly because it’s a class that expects Bards and Rangers to enter it, but then doesn’t advance a single item that they have.
Structurally, they’re a solid Ranger style chassis; they get full BaB and a d8 HD. The bar of entry is not too bad, but having to blow a feat on Endurance is kind of annoying. But what you get out of them is very mediocre and not worth losing the feat or the abilities of the classes able to become a Horizon walker easily. You see, they gain a variety of bonuses on certain terrains and occasionally special abilities depending on what terrains you pick.
The problem is their bonuses are very mediocre, mostly just being a +4 competency check on certain skills. The two biggest middle fingers are the Mountain and Aquatic terrain attunements. Those are supposed to improve your swim and climb speeds, but you don’t have those unless you’re playing something with them, which at this time meant you were dicking about in the Monster Manual.
The Planar Attunements are little better; the best option out of the lot is likely the Shadow Plane where you can Dimension Door as a spell-like ability, but you need to take 6 levels of this class to get there.
This class has the nucleus of a neat idea, but then it decided fuck that and wandered away. I hope it got eaten by a grue.
Rating: Garbage
I hereby dub thee Dumpy Grimbo! The Loremaster, besides having the pudgiest art I’ve seen in a while, is designed to be THE information specialist. They delve deeply into lost secrets and are willing to spend good coin for old lore or legends that they can research. Essentially they’re even nerdier wizards, and I do mean wizards.
Before I get into that, let me get into the bar of entry. Becoming a loremaster has a highish bar to enter, given you need two knowledge skills ranked at 10, and four feats, with three of them being metamagic. The fourth feat needs to be a skill focus on one of your knowledges too. This is another clue that you need to be a wizard to really play this class.
I say this because despite the fact that you can enter this as any caster that has a respectable array of divining spells, INT based casters are really the ones that benefit becoming a Loremaster. This is because the Loremaster’s main schtick uses INT plus Loremaster levels to determine a feature of theirs.
This feature is called Secret. There are ten of them, and some of them are shit. The worst item on the lot is the 2nd item, which is basically toughness. Other shit secrets includes a free +4 to a skill and a +1 on attack rolls. The other secrets, especially the last two, are beautiful; they give you another 1st and 2nd level spell slot, regardless of your ability modifier.
The other major feature you get is Lore, which expands into Greater Lore. Greater Lore also counts as a free Identify. The last variation is treated as a free Legend Lore or Analyze Dweomer once a day.
Besides this, you get a few bonus language feats for free. All in all it’s a pretty good option for wizards who decided to focus on Divining spells; it’s a surprise of a gem to be honest.
Rating: Amazing
The Mystic Theurge is similar to the Eldritch Knight in that it is a straightforward hybrid class. The idea behind them is that they blend the line between arcane and divine, essentially learning the secrets of both as they continue their studies.
I feel like this writer also wrote the Eldritch Knight, since this class is very straightforward and simple to get into. You just need 2nd level divine and arcane spells, and a few ranks into knowledge (religion) and (arcane). What you get is very simple too; you get both caster levels improved but have the chassis of a wizard.
It’s honestly a solid pick, and it’s actually another way you can get dual 9th level spells. The trick there is to pick wizard, take a dip in cleric to get Ur-Priest, take a two level dip in it, then go Mystic Theurge and then Wizard for the remaining levels. This pushes it into broken tier, but only with this specific build.
Any class that can let you do that and still meet the two-book requirement (DM’s guide is core and they don’t count actually) is amazing in my book. Also their art (not shown here: this is it) is pretty bad ass with that coat of stars.
Rating: Tippy
A faerun specific PrC in a core book? Fucking really? Even in this early stage you can tell that there was someone from WotC who was rocking a stiffie for the Forgotten Realms setting.
So the Red Wizards are the evil ruling class of the realm of Thay, basically they indulge in slavery and tattoos. They also like to hide about in other realms like cancer because even they don’t like Thay. This PrC is fucktardedly specific, in that you specifically need to be from Toril and need to take a tattoo feat and specialize in a school.
So the class itself… did you know that as soon as you become a Red Wizard you throw out 3/8th of your spell list? Because you chuck out three of your potential schools to be one of these fuckers. Admittedly that’s still a decent amount of variety, but it does lead to trouble down the road. To give you an idea on why this is pain, whenever I specialize as a wizard (fairly often), I tend to find that I sometimes had trouble finding spells to fill in my spots for my specialized school. Now imagine that and also struggling to fill in your non specialized spells too.
So what do you get in exchange for this? You get the ability to boost your caster level up by five by the end of the class. This is completely ludicrous, given that usually just being able to boost the spell’s DC by 2 is amazing as it is. Technically it’s more like +6 since you need to be tattooed first, which gives you a bonus to DCs as well. You also get a +4 bonus to your resistances to spells that you specialize in, which is similarly nice.
The Red Wizard also gets the Faerun specific feat Scribe Tatoo for its 7th level, meaning you can give the +1 to caster level calculations to other casters. This is designed to go in tandem with the Circle Mastery.
What is Circle Mastery? Basically, it’s like how the Spirit Bomb works in DBZ. You get a bunch of your caster buddies to spend their spells to boost the circle leader’s own power to cast a spell. The Red Wizards can lead this along with other tattooed casters and basically can cast up to 60th caster level spells with metamagic feats if the circle is big enough and the casters strong enough.
But this is really situational and really only for certain items given it takes an hour to do this and it pisses away the other casters’ spell slots.
Honestly, the class itself is solid, but I legitimately cannot stand it due to it being a forced advertisement of the Faerun setting that you can’t really use outside of it. It also is slowly made obsolete by the other Arcane PrCs that were made, that tended to be less difficult to get in and did not remove three schools to give their bonuses.
I’ll admit; I’m probably being petty when I put this into decent, since it’s one of the best options in boosting spell damage and save DC out there. But I just can’t brook this shilling a setting shit when everything else is not setting specific.
Rating: Decent
Shadow Dancer
Oh hey, it’s that writer that likes to pretend that every class could find interest in the Shadow Dancer. This means that I suspect that the class is going to be shit, because every time I’ve read this type of crap in the fluff, that’s what the class is usually rated.
So fluff wise, Shadow Dancers are the Armenians of the world of Oerth, which means you can’t fucking trust them at all. They wander about, plying their trade of dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight to entertain the commoners and then do other tricksy shit. It is noted that they can be either good or evil, and that their fluff reads like a bad fanfiction.
My expectations are further cratered when I get into the prerequisites for this class. Their requirements are actually HIGHER than the Assassin’s. You need more ranks in hide, need perform (dance), and then as an added finger you need Dodge and Mobility.
So what do they get out of it? Well a good portion of their stuff is defensive in nature, and unfortunately are basic things that you should have as a character by this point anyway to some degree. A Rogue trying to enter this would already have Evasion AND Uncanny Dodge. Barbs would have the latter, and Slippery Mind is something that you may have by that point. They also get the failtastic Defensive Roll, which is retardedly specific and not worth it due to you needing to be low HP to use it anyway.
Their specialty items are also not much to note. The best thing they have is they get the Assassin’s Hide In Plain Sight at 1st level rather than 8th level. After that? Well, they also get Darkvision, which by this point as a character isn’t a thing needed.
Later levels net them a way too late by this point once a day Ghost Image… and then you get Summon Shadow. Summon Shadow is basically a free Familiar that the Shadow Dancer gets, but it’s worse in every way. Mainly because you can’t improve it to more than 6 HD and you can’t cast anything with it. It is just there so you can lose 2000 exp per time it dies.
Their last item of note is Shadow Jump. At first this might sound cool, since you can teleport around from the shadows as a martial. But then you read that the distances listed as the Shadow Jump limit is the maximum amount you can jump to per day. So rather than being able to teleport say 40 feet per jump at a higher level, that’s instead the most you can do a day. So you’d be stuck jumping 40 ft or doing smaller jumps of 20 or 10 feet. Keep in mind that its range is shorter than a Dimension Door at the level you get this.
In conclusion, my gut instinct was right, and this class benefits no one who chooses to enter it. It has a few unique qualities to it, but like the Horizon Walker they are not worth it at all.
Though at least with the Horizon Walker, you got unique bonuses per level…
Rating: Garbage
The 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
Tier List (Dungeon Masters Guide)
Tippy Tier: Mystic Theurge
Amazing Classes: Loremaster
Good Classes: Archmage, Assassin, Eldritch Knight
Decent Classes: Arcane Trickster, Red Wizard
Playable Classes: N/A
Garbage Classes: Arcane Archer, Dwarven Defender, Heirophant, Horizon Walker, Shadow Dancer, Thaumaturgist
Truenamer Class: Dragon Disciple, Duelist
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Blackguard (was Garbage)
So yeah, most of the classes were pretty damn bad. Hell, this book had TWO Truenamer tier piles of shit, and the effort of transcribing the awful caused a case of brain drain.
Still, it's behind us now, and I can happily palate cleanse with Player's Handbook II. That one will come out whenever I get out of being lazy and finish the variant features for the classes they introduce.
Dungeon Master’s Guide
The DM's Guide was one of three books that were released at the same time when 3.0 was updated to 3.5. The other two items were the Player's Handbook as well as the first Monster Manual. This book has a variety of good tips, tricks, ideas, and other items that a new DM and even old DM's should look through. It also introduces the concept of Prestige Classes to 3.5, and provides a wide assortment of them, most of them being ripped from 3.0 or AD&D. Sad to say that most of them are shit or were made obsolete, as if they weren't my mind wouldn't be comprised of broken shards of screaming jelly.
Let's dive into the Mouth of Madness and smell purple people:
Arcane Archer
Oh god no, this PrC is trying to be another Gish Build! The Arcane Archer is among one of the first ever PrCs made, as the Dungeon Master’s Guide was the first book to really make any for you to take. The problem is that makes this PrC complete and utter shit.
The fluff tries to tell you they’re an elite archer found in elven kingdoms, but the problem is they are worse than Rangers in every way. For one thing, the bar of entry for the class is a bit garbage. You see, you have to take a single arcane caster level as well as have +6 to hit and three feats as a non-human. So you can really only start on this journey of fail at 7th level.
The Arcane Archer has a pretty weak skill set too, focusing solely on being a weird hermit that hides and poops in the woods. You can really only get skills that help out in the wild to a degree, and I consider what you get as limited as a fighter, but worse. Mainly because at least outside of battle a fighter can spook people with intimidate.
So on to the mechanics of the class, which are a mess. For some reason, these guys can use tower shields SOMEHOW… this is shown by the lack of the words “except tower shields” for what they can equip.
The Arcane Archer opens up with the first of many “traps”, abilities that some bad PrCs have that at first glance make them look good to the uninitiated. In this case, they can enhance arrows. What does that mean? Well it means that the arrows are treated as a magical weapons.
At first this might be seen as awesome, and a player might think that the bonus would stack with their bow. But it doesn’t. You see, the writers when lifting this class from 3.0 didn’t edit anything to make it fit 3.5 better. Case in point, you cannot stack these bonuses, and so you render this ability useless the moment you get a magical bow. So fuck this trap.
The big ability that the Arcane Archer gets is the embue arrows. The idea is that you can enchant your arrows to shit out an area effect spell on your foes from a distance. The problem is that they forgot that spells increase in range the more caster levels a player has. A wizard for example can throw most of his magic at bow range by the time an Arcane Archer appears. The only spells worth using with this would be the close ranged spells… but why bother when this PrC doesn’t boost caster level at all?
So if you are stupid, you at best can shoot fireballs because you only have access to third level magic at best… at Epic Levels.
The other abilities are kinda pointless too. The seeker and phase arrow ability is kind of cool, but they’re too deep in the class and you can only do them once a day anyway. Hail of Arrows instantly loses to the Ranger’s Arrow Storm, since that Ranger spell would’ve been there earlier and it can hit more targets by that point. Lastly Death Arrow is a flat dc 20 save or die fort save. At level 17 this save is semi-beatable even for characters with a shit fort save.
For fuck’s sake, a Bone Knight has a better version of this. The fucking Assassin has a better version of that.
This class needs to do as the elves do and die off.
Rating: Garbage
Arcane Trickster
I’m laughing so hard right now because of one single line: “Assassins occasionally opt in this class, but only if they already have Wizard or Sorcerer levels”. I’ll get into Assassins later, but just imagine the dumb motherfucker who decided to do this while every one else was going into their Epic class levels. That guy was probably just sitting there weeping at his mistake.
So the Arcane Trickster is actually a complete pile of dickpain to enter. This is because there are two sets of requirements that make it take forever to get into. One requirement is the ability to cast third level spells. That sounds okay, just take Rogue to get your sneak attack die and then take five levels of Wizard, right?
That’s where you have trouble, since it requires seven ranks of Disable Device and Escape Artist, meaning you have some skills to cross class or alternatively give up 9th level spells to save on skill points with another rogue.
So what do you get? Well, I’ll give the Arcane Trickster this; you keep caster levels through the whole ride. That does make it not the worst thing in the world. It also gives you 4+Int skill points and a wide skill pool, which is nice given you’ll be an INT based caster. It’s d4 HD though is very concerning given you are still designed to be able to do rogue things.
The ranged legerdemain skill’s actually kind of neat. You use Mage Hand to basically pickpocket people and pick locks. It also does scale a bit, allowing you to do this thrice a day by the end of it. You also get to mostly keep your rogue sneak attack dice too, getting +5d6 to the dice pool by the end of the road.
The last ability it gets is that you get the ability instantly turn a normal attack into a free sneak attack, and you can do this twice a day by the end of the class.
If I have to be honest, the Arcane Trickster is not a great PrC. It loses out to a pure rogue or a pure wizard. But in terms of fluff and switching up a playstyle I’d say it’s fairly worth it.
Rating: Decent
Archmage
So the Archmage is a bit of an odd duck by the standards of PrCs, since you at minimum you need to be at level 13 (or 14 as a Sorcerer) to be able to enter this one. This makes it akin to the Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil in a way, in that it’s a late game caster. Because it’s late game though, it does only give you five decent levels, since you do keep all your caster levels too.
So what does it really do? It’s big thing is called High Arcana. The way it works is you get to pick a supernatural ability that augments your spells. Sounds good, right? It is, but you have to sacrifice some of your decently high spell slots, which hurts quite a bit given those are where some of the best spells in the game are.
Some of the High Arcana abilities are amazingly shit, like the Arcane Fire that basically can at best waste a 7th level spell slot for the ability to douche enemies with (level)d6+(spell wasted)d6 fire damage. It’s okay and has a big range, but it is not fucking worth it.
Others are mediocre, like the Range increase for touch attacks. It’s okay in that you can make a touch attack have a range of 30 ft. Another candidate for this would be the Shape Mastery, which was basically rendered obsolete courtesy of the sculpt spell metamagic feat.
But some are pretty good, like Elemental Mastery, which allows you to swap out elemental damage to your spells. So if you wanted to you can make Ice Storm do Acid Damage, or make Fireball Sonic you can do it.
The class was pretty good meta wise, but notice that past tense descriptor. This PrC was great for its time, but what happened was that Wizards of the Coast made new splats. Those new splats (Like Complete Arcane) made it mostly obsolete. As it stands, it’s still not a bad option, but you will feel the missing spell slots.
Rating: Good
Assassin
Ahh yes, the most popular PrC from this book and one of the ones that got some players butthurt because of alignment requirements. The Assassin is a stone cold killer who works by contract. In casual terms, they’d slit their mama’s throat for a nickel.
They’re dirt simple to get into if you play a rogue or a monk. I would however really enjoy seeing a fallen Paladin or Barbarian/Assassin build since the fluff mentions those existing. Good fucking luck on getting the eight ranks in move silently and hide. Same to any caster who chooses to murder their character’s entire career.
The Assassin’s abilities really compliment the Rogue’s, which really shouldn’t be too surprising. You get 5d6 sneak attack dice throughout the whole arrangement, which means you do lose two sneak attack dice, but it’s not that bad.
The big thing the Assassin gets is the Death Attack. This is actually not as good as players sometimes think. For one thing, you have to wait three turns to initiate it. The second problem is that you have to be able to hide from the enemy during this time or not be seen as a threat.
In return, it is scalable since the DC v. Death/Paralysis is 10+Assassin Ranks+Int. That makes it a lot better than the Arcane Archer’s Death Arrow. It also will still be used as a sneak attack if the attack fails too, which is nice. This makes it mainly a way to try and cheese bosses or to get rid of someone you need to in a more intrigue based game. It’s very situational.
You do get poison use as a free feat at 1st level, which is pretty nice too. This is complimented by getting some bonuses against poison too, which is okay mechanically, but nice fluffwise. You do get Uncanny Dodge and its Improved version, which is okay… but nothing amazing.
It’s coolest ability though is just the ability to hide in plain sight. It allows the Assassin to just ooze into the backdrop so long as there’s shadows nearby. It’s the ability that makes Death Attacks feasible inside of combat.
The Assassin spell list is small and very specialized, but it has some gems. In particular, glibness’ bluff bonus, freedom of movement, dimension door, cat’s grace, and spider climb are some good picks. They also got some support in their splat books courtesy of being a core PrC, which is a nice bonus. In fact, the one thing I’ll give kudos to WotC is that all casting PrCs in this book get support in splats.
In short, it’s a great next step for evil rogues and monks, and a hilarious option for a Paladin. Speaking of that as a joke…
Rating: Good
Blackguard
This class was clearly designed to be what a Paladin becomes when they fall and choose to go evil instead. This is because while you get some features and abilities by entering as anything else, you don’t get the full features unless you were a Paladin at one point. The fluff really tries to hype these guys as one of the better BBEGs to throw at a party too, or a very powerful and evil warrior who consorts with the lower planes for power.
The truth is… well, laughable. Entering Blackguard as a Paladin is spiritually the equivalent of finding your pet cat eaten by vultures; a spiritual drain on the soul that isn’t fun in the slightest. This is because you need five ranks in Hide, meaning that you can’t get it until you get up to level 7 minimum after wasting 10 skill points since it’s a cross class skill. So you have to waste a fairly precious resource to get to the minimum.
From there? You basically end your Paladin’s career as a useful character. If you’re wondering why, let’s go through what the Blackguard gets.
They start off getting an anti-Paladin set of abilities, so an Evil Aura, Detect Good as an at-will spell like ability. They also get the ability to use poisons as well, mainly for fluff reasons to highlight how dishonorable they are. At second level, they get the Paladin’s ability to apply their CHA bonus to saves and Smite Good, a worse version of the Paladin’s Smite Evil.
Now why is this worse? You’d think it’d be as good as the Paladin’s, but that’s wrong. It’s because unlike the Paladin’s Smite Evil, Smite Good only operates on the Blackguard levels you get, meaning at best you will get half the effectiveness of a Paladin when it comes to using it. This is not a good thing, and I’m baffled on why this PrC does not factor in fallen Paladin levels either.
The base spell list the Blackguard gets is okay, but nothing super special. They get access to healing, summoning evil monsters, and some buffers. Their big weakness is they operate just like a 10 level PrC does, which means they have a painfully small spell slot pool, especially compared to just staying a Paladin… you’ll hear me say this a lot too since this is the Blackguard’s big problem.
At 3rd level, the Blackguard gains an aura of despair and gets the ability to command undead. There’s a problem though with the latter; you can only get this command ability up to an 8th level caster’s level, since AGAIN, this class for some reason doesn’t count Paladin levels for the calculation. Have fun summoning trash that dies instantly to the Beholder mage.
4th level just gives you a sneak attack, which is… well okay. It’s not particularly great for a martial build like the ex-Paladin or whatever you spec in, but it’s not the worst thing. 5th level gives you your evil variant of a mount/familiar. The thing about this option is you can make it a mount, or you can make it a familiar. Mechanically it’s closer to the latter, meaning that should your Fiendish Servant die, then you wait longer than the Paladin does for theirs to come back. Thanks WotC, this class is so good…
What makes this war crime of a PrC even better is that three of the levels are completely dead. As in the only thing that advances are your spell slots and BaB. This is basically 70% of a finished class idea, a C- to an already shit class. Given this is a PrC, this is FUCKING INEXCUSABLE.
So the thing about this class is it gives special features to ex-Paladins like I’ve said. The first two levels of Paladin nets you another Smite Good. No bonuses based on having these levels, just the extra smite. Three to four levels give you lay-on-hands and I’ll give the class this; at least it includes level in general instead of just fucking Blackguard levels, which still makes it an okay Emergency Heal.
The next tier of ex-Paladins level just gives you another d6 for sneak attack and another smite with no bonuses beyond the ones you get… Jesus how lame. Oh wait, the next tier’s even lamer; Fiendish Summoning is a once a day Summon Monster I spell… YOU DO KNOW THAT AT THIS POINT YOU’RE LEVEL FUCKING 10 AT MINIMUM RIGHT?!
The last tier worth a shit is the 9th-10th level fallen paladin, which gives you a second fiendish servant that’s either a skeleton or a zombie. Anything over this just can be translated to free Blackguard levels that just replace useless Paladin levels.
Because the thing is you have to wander around as a worse Fighter variant before you get the full bonus, unless you start at 10th level or so. This is because you will not really be able to play a paladin in an all evil party, but you only get the full class by being a former paladin of that age. In short, you actively have to hurt yourself in a game like this before playing a worse paladin.
Before I go, I’ll just reference a far better Fallen Paladin class, the Bone Knight. Every single weakness of the Blackguard compared to a Paladin is taken care of by the Bone Knight being able to count Paladin levels for spell slots, abilities, mounts, and said class only loses smiting, a single caster level, and detect evil. It’s so much better than the Blackguard, that you can choose to enter it as a PrC and not fall as a Paladin.
This class is useless to me… I shall knock it down.
Rating: NPC (Was Garbage)
Dragon Disciple
To those furries, err, scalies rather who play DnD, this PrC is perfect for you! The fluff behind these guys are that they are weirdoes who becomes completely obsessed about their 1/1024th Draconic ancestry and so sperg and study their ways to activate that legacy.
The fluff also lies to your face about how martials tend to become a Dragon Disciple, saying they dabble in sorcery. This hints at the truth: you actually NEED to be a spontaneous caster to enter in this class. You also need eight ranks in Knowledge (Arcane), meaning that the fluff of martials becoming these guys doesn’t make sense.
I’ll be perfectly honest, this class is like furry community in general; it’s a complete shitshow that does nothing right. You get the Barb’s d12 HD, which sounds fucking amazing for a caster and nice for a martial. It is, but then the other features start revealing themselves. For one thing, you don’t get a single caster level, making it a complete pile of shit for a caster who will only have at best 5th level spells on hand.
Instead, you get the Wonder Worker’s free spell slots, which hypothetically makes it a decent option for after you finish a PrC and want to expand your fairly limited spell slots if they have spells. Then you realize that this too is a 10 level PrC that doesn’t boost caster levels, and thus not really suitable for any dips as a caster at all.
From there, you mostly just get buffers to your stats. You gain +3 natural armor, 4 Str, 2 Con, and 2 Int throughout this PrC. While it is true they stack with other items, losing caster levels or a good BaB to get these items just isn’t worth it. And a shitty claw damage of 1d4 and bite of 1d6 can’t make this up. Keep in mind that by the time you can enter this class your martials are doing a fuckton more damage than this, and the casters even more so.
Your breath weapon is shit. Yeah, you do up to 4d8 elemental damage of whatever lineage you pick, but this is the time period where you could’ve douched the Bebelith in Prismatic Spray or something actually good. You get blindsense, which may be the only item you get that isn’t shit… but you’re in too deep when you get it.
I think the two biggest fuck yous are the wings and getting the half-dragon template as a capstone. The former is because you actually learn the Fly spell BEFORE EVEN ENTERING THE CLASS. The latter is because you have to take all ten levels of this festival of failure to get it, and that is not worth it.
This class cannot do anything right. You need to be a caster to enter this, but you get no caster levels and only slots for your four or so spell levels. It gives bonuses to your attributes that favor martials, but then you get an average BaB and worse natural weapons. You also have to heavily cross-class skill to get into this as a martial, meaning you sacrifice other skills to make your character be able to do things out of fights.
It literally makes anything that enters it worse than before they entered the class, regardless of what you started as. Fuck this class.
Rating: Truenamer
Duelist
Why hello there complete superfluous class, why do you exist? So the Duelist is a PrC that was made completely obsolete by Swashbuckler, which was written maybe a year later when Complete Warrior was written. This already makes the class a hard sell, since to play a Duelist you need to meet PrC requirements while the Swashbuckler is right there at the start.
As for said requirements; they’re kind of annoying given you need to waste two feats on Dodge and Mobility and cross class skills into perform. In return you get to play some wet tissue paper disguised as a character, since you can’t walk around with armor to take advantage of their abilities.
Canny Defense for example is designed to give you some AC via any Int bonus you have. The problem is you only get as much of that bonus as your Duelist level, and the classes that can enter it easily don’t focus on Int so the bonus is minimal, if not at all. Absolutely lovely.
The next feature they get is Improved Reaction, which is just a free +2 to initiative each time it’s forced on you. It’s… well, it’s better than nothing. Then you get my least favorite ability in this book so far, Enhanced Mobility.
This fucking thing I at first thought as I read this gave you a flat +4 AC bonus if you go unarmored, which would help a lot. Then I noticed that it only works on AoOs. So… what this means is that you only get it by risking a gibbing. You will on average have an AC of maybe 15 – 17 depending on your stats while the other martials are at least in the high teens/low 20s due to magic armor coming in at this point. You are basically choosing to be a squishy wizard to do fucking rapier damage.
And that’s a thing I have to highlight, it only works if you use a one-handed weapon AND YOU’RE BUCK NAKED, meaning you don’t do that much damage and ARE getting hit. And then you get grace, an even worse version of the Lightning Reflexes feat since it only works when you’re naked.
From there, you get Precise Strike, a slightly better sneak attack. This would be okay, but you only get 2d6 worth of it. Even the Blackguard gets more sneak-attack dice than this, THE FUCKING BLACKGUARD! And sneak attack can be done on flanking anyway, so it’s only MARGINALLY BETTER. I think I just had an aneurysm, since I can smell blue and hear butter.
The best ability it gets is Elaborate Parry, and that’s damning with faint praise given it’s stuck to the PrC. It gives you up to +10 AC if you go the distance, which takes you from utter trash AC to subnormal at the point you’d finish Duelist off. This would be good on literally every class BUT the one it’s stuck to. Fuck this class.
The last two items of note are the Acrobatic Charge ability that Swashbucklers also get and the worst Monk ability in 3.5, ie Deflect Arrow.
This PrC is so fucking awful that it was made obsolete by the third ever splat made by Wizards, since only Unearthed Arcana and the Minis Handbook are older than Complete Warrior. Liberate tutume ex inferis.
Rating: Truenamer
Dwarven Defender
This PrC is what I consider the exemplar of a trap. This is because at first glance you might think it’s an excellent PrC for martials who want to focus on their AC and tankiness. Dwarven Defenders are effectively a weird Pseudo-Paladin order who protect the Dwarven way of Depression, Alcoholism, and Yellow Bile.
The first signs of this PrC not being as good as previously thought lies in its prerequisites. On the surface, it’s pretty easy to slip into by level 8. But the feats you need to take actually are all bad. Dodge is mediocre at best given it is more of feat designed to take for a PrC than one you want. Endurance is just worthless and gives you +4 to skills you’re already filling in due to the dearth of martials with good skills. And Toughness… I just die inside that it’s required. Waste a feat for 3 HP just to play this.
The second clue for your character getting ready for a Baaaaad time? The fact that you only get four skills to play with as class skills. The Dwarven Defender is so hideously autistic they can only spot, listen, sense motive, and craft shit. When the Fighter has more skill options than you, something is hideously wrong with you.
So the Dwarven Defender starts off by giving you an AC bonus, which does sound nice given that it does stack with most things… even your Dodge feat! And it’s actually pretty nice, but you can just get an amulet of Natural Armor, or an item that boosts Dodge bonuses.
Then you get to the moldy bread and rancid butter of this PrC: their Defensive Stance. You just decide to be a fat lump and sit there, gaining +2 str, +4 con, +2 to saves, and +4 to AC. This idea does sound pretty bitchin’, you get to do a defensive style rage and essentially be a wall to defend your buddies.
Then you get to the negatives of this ability. For one thing, once you pop the stance, you can’t fucking move at all. If you move, you lose the bonuses and take a -2 to your Str until you recover. This is not good given how often you will actually need to move in an actual fight in most cases.
For example, a rape goblin will probably not mindlessly kill themselves on the Dwarven Defender; they will gun for the Squishies while he’s stuck there. Hell, they can still beat him actually. They can group up and slowly push a boulder until it crushes Durin Axebeard the Dwarven Defender. You heard me right, a bunch of CR 1/8th mentally challenged goblins can stomp this class.
The other big weakness is you can only go into this stance at most five times a day, meaning you cannot scoot over to defend your buddies without factoring in that limit. Oh, and since it’s not clearly explained, the -2 to Str may or may not stack depending on DM interpretation.
Besides this, the Dwarven Defender just gets hand-me-down Barbarian feats in the forms of Uncanny Dodge and Trap Sense. The last item they get is a pity prize in the form of being able to 5 ft step option while going in the stance.
This class just doesn’t work for a tank build, and I can name at least two options superior to it. The Bone Knight for example rewards you with resistances and gives you options. The Defender of Saltiel also is a superior version given their resistance to mind effects and some good spells to support and heal allies. The latter option is even comparable in time period given the Book of Exalted Deeds, while published later, was originally a 3.0 book.
In the words of a famous Dwarven Defender: “Seriously?”
Rating: Garbage
Eldritch Knight
This was very much the original gish build, and it’s still required if you want to make the full gish experience of four attacks and ninth level spells. At least without being That Guy the DM hates that uses a lot of books to do this with since fuck that. Their fluff is pretty basic; they’re mercenaries who are flexible with their approach. To them, magic is a tool to bypass defenses and weaponry is there to geek mages.
The Eldritch Knight is a supremely simple class to get into as well; you just need martial weapons and 3rd level spells. It’s not really too much of an issue, since you just need to take a dip in Fighter or Ranger and then go full wizard to reach it.
Structurally, the Eldritch Knight is also very simple. You lose a single caster level, but you get full BaB and a free feat to replace them. The class really doesn’t have any fancy features or anything, it’s just a fairly solid chassis. The only gripe that I have is that the HD is a bit too low for you to wade into combat, but that’s more the early 3.5 mindset of the writers than anything else.
This is one of those classes that aged very well as the edition went on; probably because it’s upfront with what it does and very friendly for players that wanted to just be both a caster and martial. Honestly recommend it for a player wanting to dabble in fighting but without the tedium.
Rating: Good
Heirophant
Who dragged this mummy out of its fucking coffin? The Heirophant is an old AD&D title that Druids got that allowed them to go beyond 7th level spells. It was an artifact of the time where your level determined your title, similar to how you didn’t become a Thief until you got to higher levels.
This explains why you need to be at least a 12th level divine caster to enter the class. The requirements for being a Heirophant are very low in this respect, though I find it weird that the skill needed is Knowledge (Religion) rather than (Nature) given its origins. Either way, fuck this class.
Now why am I saying this so early in the review of it? Because the table upfront shows you do not get a single caster level in this class. The text goes further into this, stating that the only time Hierophant levels count as caster levels is on the DC for it. At that point, why in the fuck don’t you just make it count then?
Instead, they get to pick a Supernatural ability or render their 0th to 7th level spell load out as a Spell-like Ability instead. The options you get are fairly similar to the Archmage in that respect, though I’d argue they’re kind of worse.
For example, at first glance, having free Maximizes on healing or harm spells sound nice. Then you realize that it does not beat 9th level spells and metamagic feats. Then you further realize that it being limited by sharing or opposing alignments really makes those shit.
The other options aren’t much to write about either, mostly being ways to boost caster level for calculating DC or dice pools. The only other noteworthy ability is that Druids who enter this PrC can share their abilities with other players or whoever they select. But honestly, why do that when you could’ve had the 8th and 9th level Druid spells.
I honestly don’t know why they dug it up. And I really don’t know why they made it worse than its AD&D version.
Rating: Garbage
Horizon Walker
The legitimate Murder-Hobo class, the Horizon Walker is an itinerant who just autistically wanders the lands in an aimless sense for adventure. They pretty much have seen everything and due to their travels seem to adapt to the terrain in a way.
These guys are in a way a Martial version of Final Fantasy’s Geomancer. The difference is these guys are far worse. Why is that? Mainly because it’s a class that expects Bards and Rangers to enter it, but then doesn’t advance a single item that they have.
Structurally, they’re a solid Ranger style chassis; they get full BaB and a d8 HD. The bar of entry is not too bad, but having to blow a feat on Endurance is kind of annoying. But what you get out of them is very mediocre and not worth losing the feat or the abilities of the classes able to become a Horizon walker easily. You see, they gain a variety of bonuses on certain terrains and occasionally special abilities depending on what terrains you pick.
The problem is their bonuses are very mediocre, mostly just being a +4 competency check on certain skills. The two biggest middle fingers are the Mountain and Aquatic terrain attunements. Those are supposed to improve your swim and climb speeds, but you don’t have those unless you’re playing something with them, which at this time meant you were dicking about in the Monster Manual.
The Planar Attunements are little better; the best option out of the lot is likely the Shadow Plane where you can Dimension Door as a spell-like ability, but you need to take 6 levels of this class to get there.
This class has the nucleus of a neat idea, but then it decided fuck that and wandered away. I hope it got eaten by a grue.
Rating: Garbage
Loremaster
I hereby dub thee Dumpy Grimbo! The Loremaster, besides having the pudgiest art I’ve seen in a while, is designed to be THE information specialist. They delve deeply into lost secrets and are willing to spend good coin for old lore or legends that they can research. Essentially they’re even nerdier wizards, and I do mean wizards.
Before I get into that, let me get into the bar of entry. Becoming a loremaster has a highish bar to enter, given you need two knowledge skills ranked at 10, and four feats, with three of them being metamagic. The fourth feat needs to be a skill focus on one of your knowledges too. This is another clue that you need to be a wizard to really play this class.
I say this because despite the fact that you can enter this as any caster that has a respectable array of divining spells, INT based casters are really the ones that benefit becoming a Loremaster. This is because the Loremaster’s main schtick uses INT plus Loremaster levels to determine a feature of theirs.
This feature is called Secret. There are ten of them, and some of them are shit. The worst item on the lot is the 2nd item, which is basically toughness. Other shit secrets includes a free +4 to a skill and a +1 on attack rolls. The other secrets, especially the last two, are beautiful; they give you another 1st and 2nd level spell slot, regardless of your ability modifier.
The other major feature you get is Lore, which expands into Greater Lore. Greater Lore also counts as a free Identify. The last variation is treated as a free Legend Lore or Analyze Dweomer once a day.
Besides this, you get a few bonus language feats for free. All in all it’s a pretty good option for wizards who decided to focus on Divining spells; it’s a surprise of a gem to be honest.
Rating: Amazing
Mystic Theurge
The Mystic Theurge is similar to the Eldritch Knight in that it is a straightforward hybrid class. The idea behind them is that they blend the line between arcane and divine, essentially learning the secrets of both as they continue their studies.
I feel like this writer also wrote the Eldritch Knight, since this class is very straightforward and simple to get into. You just need 2nd level divine and arcane spells, and a few ranks into knowledge (religion) and (arcane). What you get is very simple too; you get both caster levels improved but have the chassis of a wizard.
It’s honestly a solid pick, and it’s actually another way you can get dual 9th level spells. The trick there is to pick wizard, take a dip in cleric to get Ur-Priest, take a two level dip in it, then go Mystic Theurge and then Wizard for the remaining levels. This pushes it into broken tier, but only with this specific build.
Any class that can let you do that and still meet the two-book requirement (DM’s guide is core and they don’t count actually) is amazing in my book. Also their art (not shown here: this is it) is pretty bad ass with that coat of stars.
Rating: Tippy
Red Wizard
A faerun specific PrC in a core book? Fucking really? Even in this early stage you can tell that there was someone from WotC who was rocking a stiffie for the Forgotten Realms setting.
So the Red Wizards are the evil ruling class of the realm of Thay, basically they indulge in slavery and tattoos. They also like to hide about in other realms like cancer because even they don’t like Thay. This PrC is fucktardedly specific, in that you specifically need to be from Toril and need to take a tattoo feat and specialize in a school.
So the class itself… did you know that as soon as you become a Red Wizard you throw out 3/8th of your spell list? Because you chuck out three of your potential schools to be one of these fuckers. Admittedly that’s still a decent amount of variety, but it does lead to trouble down the road. To give you an idea on why this is pain, whenever I specialize as a wizard (fairly often), I tend to find that I sometimes had trouble finding spells to fill in my spots for my specialized school. Now imagine that and also struggling to fill in your non specialized spells too.
So what do you get in exchange for this? You get the ability to boost your caster level up by five by the end of the class. This is completely ludicrous, given that usually just being able to boost the spell’s DC by 2 is amazing as it is. Technically it’s more like +6 since you need to be tattooed first, which gives you a bonus to DCs as well. You also get a +4 bonus to your resistances to spells that you specialize in, which is similarly nice.
The Red Wizard also gets the Faerun specific feat Scribe Tatoo for its 7th level, meaning you can give the +1 to caster level calculations to other casters. This is designed to go in tandem with the Circle Mastery.
What is Circle Mastery? Basically, it’s like how the Spirit Bomb works in DBZ. You get a bunch of your caster buddies to spend their spells to boost the circle leader’s own power to cast a spell. The Red Wizards can lead this along with other tattooed casters and basically can cast up to 60th caster level spells with metamagic feats if the circle is big enough and the casters strong enough.
But this is really situational and really only for certain items given it takes an hour to do this and it pisses away the other casters’ spell slots.
Honestly, the class itself is solid, but I legitimately cannot stand it due to it being a forced advertisement of the Faerun setting that you can’t really use outside of it. It also is slowly made obsolete by the other Arcane PrCs that were made, that tended to be less difficult to get in and did not remove three schools to give their bonuses.
I’ll admit; I’m probably being petty when I put this into decent, since it’s one of the best options in boosting spell damage and save DC out there. But I just can’t brook this shilling a setting shit when everything else is not setting specific.
Rating: Decent
Shadow Dancer
Oh hey, it’s that writer that likes to pretend that every class could find interest in the Shadow Dancer. This means that I suspect that the class is going to be shit, because every time I’ve read this type of crap in the fluff, that’s what the class is usually rated.
So fluff wise, Shadow Dancers are the Armenians of the world of Oerth, which means you can’t fucking trust them at all. They wander about, plying their trade of dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight to entertain the commoners and then do other tricksy shit. It is noted that they can be either good or evil, and that their fluff reads like a bad fanfiction.
My expectations are further cratered when I get into the prerequisites for this class. Their requirements are actually HIGHER than the Assassin’s. You need more ranks in hide, need perform (dance), and then as an added finger you need Dodge and Mobility.
So what do they get out of it? Well a good portion of their stuff is defensive in nature, and unfortunately are basic things that you should have as a character by this point anyway to some degree. A Rogue trying to enter this would already have Evasion AND Uncanny Dodge. Barbs would have the latter, and Slippery Mind is something that you may have by that point. They also get the failtastic Defensive Roll, which is retardedly specific and not worth it due to you needing to be low HP to use it anyway.
Their specialty items are also not much to note. The best thing they have is they get the Assassin’s Hide In Plain Sight at 1st level rather than 8th level. After that? Well, they also get Darkvision, which by this point as a character isn’t a thing needed.
Later levels net them a way too late by this point once a day Ghost Image… and then you get Summon Shadow. Summon Shadow is basically a free Familiar that the Shadow Dancer gets, but it’s worse in every way. Mainly because you can’t improve it to more than 6 HD and you can’t cast anything with it. It is just there so you can lose 2000 exp per time it dies.
Their last item of note is Shadow Jump. At first this might sound cool, since you can teleport around from the shadows as a martial. But then you read that the distances listed as the Shadow Jump limit is the maximum amount you can jump to per day. So rather than being able to teleport say 40 feet per jump at a higher level, that’s instead the most you can do a day. So you’d be stuck jumping 40 ft or doing smaller jumps of 20 or 10 feet. Keep in mind that its range is shorter than a Dimension Door at the level you get this.
In conclusion, my gut instinct was right, and this class benefits no one who chooses to enter it. It has a few unique qualities to it, but like the Horizon Walker they are not worth it at all.
Though at least with the Horizon Walker, you got unique bonuses per level…
Rating: Garbage
Thaumaturgist
The 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
Tier List (Dungeon Masters Guide)
Tippy Tier: Mystic Theurge
Amazing Classes: Loremaster
Good Classes: Archmage, Assassin, Eldritch Knight
Decent Classes: Arcane Trickster, Red Wizard
Playable Classes: N/A
Garbage Classes: Arcane Archer, Dwarven Defender, Heirophant, Horizon Walker, Shadow Dancer, Thaumaturgist
Truenamer Class: Dragon Disciple, Duelist
NPC Class (Fuck you Book): Blackguard (was Garbage)
So yeah, most of the classes were pretty damn bad. Hell, this book had TWO Truenamer tier piles of shit, and the effort of transcribing the awful caused a case of brain drain.
Still, it's behind us now, and I can happily palate cleanse with Player's Handbook II. That one will come out whenever I get out of being lazy and finish the variant features for the classes they introduce.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2019
I was 100% certain there was a specific book that detailed how a ranger could take other humanoids as preferred foes, without the faggotry of "Urban Warrior", or whatever that lame-ass prestige class is.
Dragon Disciple
The only way dragon disciple is good is if you play a kobold, and if you're going to play a kobold, just play as Pun-Pun.
Pun-Pun - 1d4chan
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
No DM worth a shit would accept Pun-Pun as a character, because that relies on intentionally using the RAW without any RAI to back it up. And no. Dragon Disciple is and will never be good; I've read its improved version the Dragon Shaman and it's still bad.The only way dragon disciple is good is if you play a kobold, and if you're going to play a kobold, just play as Pun-Pun.
Pun-Pun - 1d4chan
1d4chan.org
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2017
The Dragonfire Adept is better since you can cover your foes with a sticky flaming bukkake with a single feat. It's also pretty decent all around, with a d8 and a breathe weapon that caps at 9d6, and two good saves, along with a free feat in Dragontouched.
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2018
What I find hilarious is that Pathfinder clearly cribbed off the Dragon Disciple, rolling a number of its abilities into the draconic bloodline for sorcerers -- and then went ahead and added a Dragon Disciple PrC anyway.
Why? Who knows.
Why? Who knows.