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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pluto" data-source="post: 6124199" data-attributes="member: 6742987">You aren't wrong that the abilities are very defensively oriented, but the system can manage an offense - just not in the direct way you might expect.Totemists are the easy class - they can get tons of attacks per round (a level 9 totemist with multiattack and double chakra for girallon arms and a bite attack with a one-handed weapon gets a +7/+5/+5/+5/+5/+2 attack routine even before further investments), abilities that standard melee classes would kill for (things like rend, pounce, flight and wolf-style trips are easy to stack up), they can crank just about any number way up with essentia investment whether it's for grappling, skills or attack bonuses, and they also get some unique and very powerful abilities like the shadow mantle's passive blindsight+area of total darkness or phase cloak's ethereal movement.Soulborns are harder on account of their absolute suckage, but it's pretty clear what their offense is based on: the same base attack and smites as a core paladin. Between their two decent soulmelds (the charge damage/stunning boots whose name is escaping me and mauling gauntlets), they can get a bit of extra damage and some sizable bonuses to trip checks, which combo well with Sapphire Smite (a feat probably every soulborn is going to take at some point) and the Awesome Smite feat from complete champion.The straight-classed incarnate is the tricky one where your complaint definitely rings true. There are a few routes they can go on offense, the most reliably powerful being using Necrocarnum Circlet's crown bind to drag around the beefiest necrocarnum zombie available (even if the HD are limited, the template is pretty dang snazzy compared to the usual skeletons and zombies), but there are also some options for Lawful and Evil melee incarnates and Chaotic archer incarnates (both can crank their numbers fairly well - google "Incarnate by the numbers" - but are still going to probably need to get their hands on an aptitude weapon from Complete Arcane and a haste effect from boots of speed or similar, just to keep up in attacks/round). Good Incarnates, with their defensive Incarnate Avatar/Incarnum Radiance bonuses and no access to Necrocarnum Circlet, have some troubles and sometimes just have to grab mantle of flame and a blasting power like lightning armbands or acid spittle, and hope the 1d6+1d6*essentia damage is enough to bait enemies into triggering the mantle's retributive attacks.But even incarnates can shine on offense in a less direct sense, since it's a class that provides lots of numeric boosts that play very well with multiclassing. Even just a 1-4 level dip can give hefty numeric increases and very potent non-numeric abilities to noncasting classes that dip incarnate (by level 18 with improved essentia capacity, that means things like +12 melee damage && all attacks are force effects && immunity to mind control or a +6 weapon to overcome DR/Epic && telepathy && limited flight or Immunity to Nausea && Ignore Concealment && SR 29, all rebuildable on a daily basis, all from 3 or 4 levels), Ironsoul Forgemaster provides a solid platform for Incarnate/melee multiclasses (weaving Incarnate/ISFM with Warblade or Crusader works especially well, as all of the classes involved complement the others very nicely) and midnight augmentation/metamagic combined with the soul caster/sapphire hierarch/soul manifester classes make Incarnate one of the few multiclasses for a caster that isn't an overwhelmingly bad idea.So while you're not wrong that really focusing on the direct offensive effects isn't really effective, and that most of the system is really heavily focused on defensive and noncombat abilities, there are definitely ways to use all of the classes as at least components in plausibly offensive builds. Well, except the Soulborn. Let's just forget about that guy. >_>EDIT:Also maybe worth noting that with feats and incarnum focus items, anybody can hit a 6 essentia capacity by high levels, and the Incarnate and Totemist each have ways of adding an additional 2 to their capacity before considering the temporary effects. So there's a good chance that the numbers you're looking at in each soulmeld are somewhat larger than you're estimating with the 4-5 essentia mentioned in the OP.</blockquote>

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