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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ifni" data-source="post: 4613535" data-attributes="member: 67339">The only pure noncaster I played in 3.5 was a dervish. He had far less tactical options than my spellcasters, but he was extremely mobile and could go nearly anywhere on the battlefield. He had to make decisions about where and how to move every round - which can be nontrivial when you have both Cleave and Acrobatic Strike and there are multiple monsters on the battlefield - as well as deciding on Power Attack (his optimal PA was normally pretty high, as he had a very high attack bonus). He frequently used Jump to clear difficult terrain or obstacles, exploited flanking and higher ground obsessively, and sometimes used his adamantine weapon on walls/floors/ceilings as well as enemies (useful in dread wraith fights, if you have an idea where they are). He also had a lot of swift-action magic items (mostly from the MIC) that expanded his capabilities significantly. I think he had about the same variety of tactical options as a high-level 4e ranger, though - nothing close to my 3.5 casters. I like complex characters. My dervish was too simple for my taste, but when he got too boring for me, I would just take a break from playing him for a while, and play my sorcerers or cleric instead (these were all Living Greyhawk characters). You might expect sorcerers to have a spam-the-same-action problem, but mine never felt that way, at least past the low levels. Some tactics I used repeatedly, sure, but the situations that came up in gameplay were normally varied enough to let my sorcerers use a wide variety of tricks. Just in my last game at L15 for example... there was a fight I won solo in the surprise round with a pair of empowered moonbows, there was a fight which consisted almost entirely of both sides throwing piles of GMWed weapons at each other telekinetically, there was a fight where our usual tactics didn't work too well and we resorted to a lot of area spells, wall spells and readied actions, there was a fight where I delayed and watched happily while our fighters splatted the dumb assassins... and none of these matched the most common pattern of that group's combats, where mobility magic is used to move the superbuffed frontliners into place and then they shred the flatfooted opposition. The reason I didn't use the same tactics in every fight was that they wouldn't have worked, or at least would have been very inefficient (only one combat in the game wasn't immune to electricity, only one fight had low enough ACs to make Telekinesis worthwhile, etc). One other comment: I like complex characters and get bored even with PCs like my dervish (who was relatively versatile for a pure meleer), but not everyone feels that way. I have friends who are perfectly happy to play Grog the Int-6 half-orc barbarian whose combat options are "charge!" and "full attack!", so long as Grog is good at what he does - they just want to roll dice and smash things, and not have to think about it. (Grog, incidentally, was VERY good at what he did - friends with more system mastery helped his player with the build, and provided a table of optimal power attack values as a function of AC.)</blockquote>

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