D&D 3E/3.5 (3.5) The Paladin Sucks? Also, how to fix it?

[Alexander123]

How do you fix the fighter?

I know you know this but my suggestion would be a Bo9S classes as a substitute.

 

[kitcik]

Not great stuff in comparison, maybe not enough to bring into parity with wizard or sorcerer. But with action points in use, fighters are made a bit better.

Just taking the last bit of this post on fixing the fighter - maybe making the fighter (and monk) the only classes with access to action points would work? At some level of action points, they could get to an appropriate tier. I don't think it's in any way necessary to make every class the same tier, as there are RP and campaign-based reasons to play different classes, but something plain vanilla like the fighter could be boosted to a decent tier this way.

 

[Rhun]

Give the fighter a bonus feat at every level, and you'll see that actually goes a long way toward fixing them.

 

[Icyshadowlord]

I would have wanted to discuss the Paladin further, but I guess talking about giving fixes to Fighters works just as well. Anybody here familiar with some kind of homebrew stuff called Races of War? It seemed to have somekind of huge upgrade/boost on the Fighter, but no boost to Paladin (unless I missed something from it).

And yeah, after reading a LOOOONG thread concerning Pathfinder, I became convinced that 3.5 was for the best and now I returned to my rightful place. XD

 

[Dandu]

Give the fighter a bonus feat at every level, and you'll see that actually goes a long way toward fixing them.

It has been tried. It doesn't work. There aren't enough good feats to make up for the lack of actual class features.

 

[Celebrim]

It has been tried. It doesn't work. There aren't enough good feats to make up for the lack of actual class features.

What Dandu says is true. However, pretty much anything that is a class feature can be made into a feat quite easily and there are a lot of feats out there to consider if you are willing to move beyond WotC. Generally speaking, you are going to need to create 'awesome' for the feats available that are limited to +15 BAB or higher. Exactly how you go about doing that in an interesting way is another question. A lot of different approaches have been tried, and you'll have to select the approaches that suit what feels like a 'fighter' to you. You also have to avoid creating single trick ponies, which means higher level feats need both breadth and depth.

I think the relative paucity of feats is one of the more minor problems with this approach. The bigger problem is that if you only try to fix the fighter by uplifting the fighter's abilities, you might be able to bounce the fighter up one tier (at most). But compared to a build that is 'tier one', you still won't seem fixed. So the concept of uplifting the fighter has to go hand in hand with addressing at least some of the flexibility and power of the tier one classes.

Simply put, the problem with the fighter isn't the fighter alone - it's also CoDzilla, etc.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Okay, I couldn't help but notice this being said here and there while I surfed around the internet, but I can't keep it out of my head now that I have seen it: The paladins in 3.5 suck, they say.
And now I ask: How much do they exactly suck? Are they on the Monk's level of fail?

I don't know how some people judge these things. I and people I've gamed with have always found the paladin a fun class to play. Some good powers, excellent role playing potential, should have nice campaign hooks.

The spell list is nice, the one thing I'd change is make caster level = Paladin level -3 rather than half Paladin level.

FWIW I've also seen some effective and fun monks in play too (mostly strength based monks), just using Core.

If you wanted a large scale change to the Paladin, I think that the best looking option that I've seen is the Champion from Arcana Unearthed, but you might have difficulty finding it nowadays.

Cheers

 

[steenan]

When I was running a 3e campaign, we used scaling feats as a way of powering up martial classes and especially fighters. Many fighter feats were changed in such a way that they gave additional bonuses when BAB hit certain thresholds.

It solved what we perceived as the biggest problem with fighter, that is, not having any "good enough" feats to choose at higher levels. With scaling feats, even these rather weak normally became useful later. In effect, fighter became "quadratic" class instead of a "linear" one. It didn't give him casters' flexibility, but made really dangerous in high level combat.

As most of the feats were scaled in such a way that they got the normal effect at BAB 3 or 5 and were weaker before that, this change also weakened the martial classes a little at lowest levels, improving the balance in this range, too.

The only problem with this approach is that it's awful lot of work. We only played with a few books, and it took some time to choose feats for the rewrite and change them in a balanced way. I can't imagine how it could be done in a game that allowed all the books.

 

[kitcik]

Forget, for a moment, the current use/definition of action points.

If a fighter got 1 "action point" per encounter per level, and action points could be used as follows:
1 - extra immediate action, swift action or AoO*
2 - extra move action
4 - extra standard action
No more than 4 action points can be used in a round.
(*1 extra AoO, not a Combat Reflexes "reset")

Would the fighter be:
A) Better, but still nowhere near a caster,
B) Near a caster, or
C) Broken.

 

[Dandu]

So you're effectively giving them abilities similar to that of a Belt of Battle as a class feature?