comrade raoul
Explorer
When people post about "fixing" high-level fighters, lots of experienced and astute posters suggest that the real solution is to design better high-level feats. I don't think this is the right solution, and what follows is an attempt to explain why. (This was originally going to be a comment on Terraism's new thread, but was general enough such that I thought it merited a new one.)
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I think the view that high-level fighters can be best balanced with high-level feats is appealing in principle but problematic in practice. Presumably, you want to ensure that (a) fighter levels have an increasing marginal utility (have an incentive to stick with the fighter class rather than taking levels in barbarian, rogue, or some prestige class), (b) high-level fighters have multiple viable choices when selecting bonus feats, and (c) high-level fighters can viably develop a broad range of combat styles. However, I think it's difficult to preserve all of these desiderata if you try to design a number of high-level feats targeted at the fighter. The best way to see this is to consider how the putative high-level feats would actually be designed.
More specifically, when one considers how to set the prerequisites for such feats -- and accordingly limit access to them -- one realizes that there are no really good answers. If you simply require a high base attack bonus, you give up (a) -- there's nothing especially good about having lots of fighter levels, as a high-level barbarian or paladin could pick up a few fighter levels and potentially have as many super-feats as a dedicated high-level fighter. (In fact, the value of new fighter levels would depend here on your total character level, rather than your total fighter levels.)
So suppose you threw out that option. You might instead require lots of (specifically) fighter levels, as with the Weapon Specialization chain. To begin with, this seems a little weird, conceptually -- what's so special about your new feats that makes them signature to fighters? But suppose we ignored this consideration (we might not care about conceptual weirdness, or think it's weird, or be able to give a good answer, anyway); we're still faced with a deeper problem: high-level fighters now have a big incentive to ignore the multitude of feats available to them and just take the super feats. Essentially, it's as though fighters have to sets of bonus feats available to them: one for low-to-mid levels, and one for high levels, and a high-level fighter who takes feats from the former list does so at his own peril. The experienced swordsman has a strong incentive to take high-level feats that improve his swordsmanship, rather than taking low-level feats like Point Blank Shot or Rapid Shot that would allow him to branch out into archery. Or, the same swordsman can't flesh out his fighting style with a broad array of relatively basic feats: the rules would instead encourage him to take the newer, higher-level ones. Moreover, unless you design a wide range of interesting high-level feats (which would be hard, but possible), you're also probably dramatically reducing a fighter's options -- there might just be a small number of feats that would really be interesting to the sort of fighter he'd want to be. So, it seems to me as though this solution gives up desiderata (b) and (c).
Now let's consider a third solution -- suppose our high-level fighter feats had a lot of *feat* prerequisites; they may or may not include lots of fighter levels. This has advantages over the prior two options -- not all super feats would be available to all fighters, and in order to select more than one or two super feats, you'd probably need to have a lot of fighter levels. The problem with this is that you probably shoehorn fighters into specific archetypes: in order to take the Whirling Tornado of Iron Death feat, you might need to have eight feats as prerequisites. Here, I think, you're still giving up on the possibility of a fighter class that encourages multiple, viable choices -- you're instead encouraging fighters to fit the cookie-cutter builds that enable them to select the super feats they'll eventually want.
Accordingly, I think the best solutions don't involve designing more feats, but instead giving the fighter benefits orthogonal to his feat progression. I already linked to Terraism's interesting solution; I posted my pass at one a little while ago. I'll leave you with two others that might be worth thinking about:
-- Boost the fighter's feat progression to one feat per level at some appropriately high level. I think 13th level seems like a good place to start, but there might be a case for 11th or 15th.
-- Give fighters combat rites (from Arcana Evolvedhttp://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mpress_MCAE) at high levels, as though they were warmains. I think this will actually be the solution I favor for my "Eberron Evolved" pet conversion project, if I ever get around to implementing it.
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I think the view that high-level fighters can be best balanced with high-level feats is appealing in principle but problematic in practice. Presumably, you want to ensure that (a) fighter levels have an increasing marginal utility (have an incentive to stick with the fighter class rather than taking levels in barbarian, rogue, or some prestige class), (b) high-level fighters have multiple viable choices when selecting bonus feats, and (c) high-level fighters can viably develop a broad range of combat styles. However, I think it's difficult to preserve all of these desiderata if you try to design a number of high-level feats targeted at the fighter. The best way to see this is to consider how the putative high-level feats would actually be designed.
More specifically, when one considers how to set the prerequisites for such feats -- and accordingly limit access to them -- one realizes that there are no really good answers. If you simply require a high base attack bonus, you give up (a) -- there's nothing especially good about having lots of fighter levels, as a high-level barbarian or paladin could pick up a few fighter levels and potentially have as many super-feats as a dedicated high-level fighter. (In fact, the value of new fighter levels would depend here on your total character level, rather than your total fighter levels.)
So suppose you threw out that option. You might instead require lots of (specifically) fighter levels, as with the Weapon Specialization chain. To begin with, this seems a little weird, conceptually -- what's so special about your new feats that makes them signature to fighters? But suppose we ignored this consideration (we might not care about conceptual weirdness, or think it's weird, or be able to give a good answer, anyway); we're still faced with a deeper problem: high-level fighters now have a big incentive to ignore the multitude of feats available to them and just take the super feats. Essentially, it's as though fighters have to sets of bonus feats available to them: one for low-to-mid levels, and one for high levels, and a high-level fighter who takes feats from the former list does so at his own peril. The experienced swordsman has a strong incentive to take high-level feats that improve his swordsmanship, rather than taking low-level feats like Point Blank Shot or Rapid Shot that would allow him to branch out into archery. Or, the same swordsman can't flesh out his fighting style with a broad array of relatively basic feats: the rules would instead encourage him to take the newer, higher-level ones. Moreover, unless you design a wide range of interesting high-level feats (which would be hard, but possible), you're also probably dramatically reducing a fighter's options -- there might just be a small number of feats that would really be interesting to the sort of fighter he'd want to be. So, it seems to me as though this solution gives up desiderata (b) and (c).
Now let's consider a third solution -- suppose our high-level fighter feats had a lot of *feat* prerequisites; they may or may not include lots of fighter levels. This has advantages over the prior two options -- not all super feats would be available to all fighters, and in order to select more than one or two super feats, you'd probably need to have a lot of fighter levels. The problem with this is that you probably shoehorn fighters into specific archetypes: in order to take the Whirling Tornado of Iron Death feat, you might need to have eight feats as prerequisites. Here, I think, you're still giving up on the possibility of a fighter class that encourages multiple, viable choices -- you're instead encouraging fighters to fit the cookie-cutter builds that enable them to select the super feats they'll eventually want.
Accordingly, I think the best solutions don't involve designing more feats, but instead giving the fighter benefits orthogonal to his feat progression. I already linked to Terraism's interesting solution; I posted my pass at one a little while ago. I'll leave you with two others that might be worth thinking about:
-- Boost the fighter's feat progression to one feat per level at some appropriately high level. I think 13th level seems like a good place to start, but there might be a case for 11th or 15th.
-- Give fighters combat rites (from Arcana Evolvedhttp://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mpress_MCAE) at high levels, as though they were warmains. I think this will actually be the solution I favor for my "Eberron Evolved" pet conversion project, if I ever get around to implementing it.
