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Message: <blockquote data-quote="comrade raoul" data-source="post: 3180402" data-attributes="member: 554">That's part of the motivation for the bonus feats: you can emulate lots of those abilities with feats like Improved Initiative, Mobility, or Spring Attack. Sure, you can't get Acrobatic Charge, but maybe it would make a good new feat. I don't agree with you about Elaborate Parry, though: I think it's just a badly designed ability, in the context of the class--it's an awesome ability, but it's like the only awesome ability the duelist gets, which means that when the duelist hits seventh level he basically takes a big jump in power. (Wow, now I can take a -4 attack penalty for a +9 to +12 boost to my AC, depending on my level!) Part of the reason improved dodge is there is to emulate much of the defensive power of elaborate parry in a more gradual, thematically focused way.The big motivation for the redesign, though, is that I wanted the duelist to retain the fighter's characteristic ability to model all sorts of different approaches to combat. I want the duelist prestige class to satisfy a large range of people who want to play a skillful, lightly armored fighter; and I think hard-wiring the mobility benefits that the core duelist gets unnecessarily limits the range of archetypes the duelist can and should be able to model.Here's another way to put it: you're (I mean this in the sense of the impersonal "you," not you, Quartz) trying to capture a fine balance. You want a class that accomodates a lot of variations of light fighters--ideally you want to capture the whole range of light fighters that people might want to play--but you don't want to do it by just taking the fighter, figuring out what, mechanically, he loses by giving up heavy armor and his shield or two-handed weapon, and just boosting certain values to compensate, so that he plays just like a heavier fighter but looks a little different. I think the image I described above captures the heart of what most people want from their duelist, so I made sure to model that with the improved dodge and riposte abilities, and then tried to accomodate variations within that theme by including the bonus feats.</blockquote>

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