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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1489282" data-attributes="member: 8158">You can basically think of the good Reflex save as a trade-off for losing the ability to turn undead. It's not overly powerful as far I've seen. I allow it in my campaign, but since I've now made clerics into spontaneous casters as well (using Unearthed Arcana optional rules), their niche is gone. Favored Souls probably are better than Dragonlance mystics, but if so that's because the mystic is underpowered. Healers are not combatants. If that equates to weak, then weak they are. They are balanced, but unappealing. There are some pretty bad design elements with this class. First off--and if there are any lurking WotC staffers out there, take notes--if you're going to design a class that's an ultra-specialized uber healer that can't fight it's way out of a soggy paper sack, then give that class some ability to heal at range. At the very least, the class should gain the ability to cast cures without provoking an AoO at 1st level (rather than gaining it at a point where a cleric can easily cast spells defensively). Secondly, I would consider the virtues of re-envisioning the basic concept for this class, perhaps thinking in terms of "empath" rather than "healer", which is not only a label with more flavor (and have no doubt that means something to a lot of people) but it opens up the alignment restrictions a bit more. An empath could be neutral, or even corrupt and evil (think Raven from the Teen Titans during her darker days).  He's a different kind of buffer. It sort of makes you the Captain Picard of the group. Good skill list. He does out-buff the bard at higher levels--he'd darn well better, as that's pretty much all he does. Note that these are not morale bonuses though, and they do stack with the effects of bardic music. I play one in a Dragonlance campaign and enjoy it quite a bit. I'm thinking about making him a Tactical Soldier (also in the Mini Handbook). My only real beef with them is that some of the auras are just flat-out better than others, which makes designing a marshal rather homogenous.  Sure it has limitations. It is very limited, in fact. I play a 13th-level Warmage in one campaign, and I'm thinking about replacing him with a sorcerer. You really only need so many ways to dish out damage. The people who are agog at his spell list need to notice there's no read magic anywhere on there. That kinda takes scrolls off the menu. He also can't benefit from wands like a sorcerer can. And wearing armor means not wearing mage robes. Btw, the Warmage Edge ability is pretty dumb ("excuse me Mr. DM, add another 2 points of damage to the 131 I just did with disintegrate--I forgot about my mighty warmage edge!"). You asked how he learns spells. The warmage knows all the spells that he's able to cast. That's a lot compared to a sorcerer, a scant few compared to a wizard. What are you considering a vanilla D&D game? The warmage is expressly intended for campaigns that are little more than a Games Workshop tabletop skirmish game (although he does get Intimidate as a class skill, which is kinda cool). OTOH, if your campaign has a lot of noncombat elements like and roleplaying and investigation, the healer and marshal should work into the mix pretty well. Some might feel that there shouldn't be classes that don't have offensive capability, but in movies and literature (and d20 modern for that matter) those types of characters abound. I say more power to'em (or is that less power to'em? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )</blockquote>

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