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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TKDB" data-source="post: 5866386" data-attributes="member: 6690697">Worse than paladin, certainly not bad. The paladin gets his Cha bonus to all saves, whereas the crusader only gets the bonus to Will, plus the paladin has an added incentive to put a few extra points into Wis, which further boosts the Will save. But yeah, crusaders still have pretty good saves, and Zealous Surge and Mettle definitely help in that regard.I imagine if your group's ok with you using a homebrew PrC you shouldn't have any issues with non-core classes like crusader, but if your group's policy is core classes only then yeah, cleric's the way to go. As for how to play it as a tank, Dandu basically has it right -- buff up and go to town. Doesn't have to be with a mace, of course <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />One thing to note is that "tanking" in the typical MMO sense -- get the enemies to focus on you and just soak the hits -- doesn't really tend to work as such in D&D 3.x. It's really hard to get AC to scale as much as attack bonuses do, and there are very, very few ways to "pull aggro". The knight class from PHB2 is about the only way I know of, but that would lock you into a lawful alignment. An AoO-tripper build with reach can more or less accomplish the goal of controlling enemy movements, but only for certain types of enemies; flyers and big enemies will just laugh at you. Stand Still (a feat from XPH) helps, but still only does so much. Of course, there are plenty of ways to be tough, but that's about as far as "tanking" goes in 3.x. Ultimately, the best defense is a good offense, especially at high levels. Being able to avoid getting hit due to high AC and/or miss chance (a cloak of displacement is pretty much a must at higher levels) is good, but if you're really wanting to prevent damage to the party the best way to do it is to kill the enemy. The fewer turns it's alive, the fewer chances it has to hurt you, and the math generally favors the offensive approach rather than the defensive or healing-centered approach.Especially the latter. Healing in-combat should generally be an emergency "stabilize the guy who's bleeding out" sort of thing; save the topping off for when you get a breather between fights to sit down with a wand of Lesser Vigor or CLW.</blockquote>

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