Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AllisterH" data-source="post: 3620536" data-attributes="member: 51325">Staying power. The thing about a warblade is that it is flashy. It does have lots of move and "insert name here of high level manoeuver" that can do damage, but the thing is, if you have a decent selection of splatbooks (PH2 + Complete Warrior + Any other melee book including Tome of Battle), and a halfway competent reader (don't even need to be an optimiser) most barbarians and fighters can do as much damage as well. The crusader though, is more subtlely powerful. Even if you factor out the cheese that is White Raven Tactics, a crusader makes the ENTIRE party more powerful. Sure, the crusader isn't going to be the one who did the most damage compared to the warblade or even the swordsage in an encounter, but a well-built crusader will most assuredly be the last man standing. This is what a lot of people don't realize as it isn't that obvious on paper. If the crusader only say does 10 pts of damage compared to a barbarian or fighter or warblade doing 20, at first glance, it would appear the crusader is weaker but a lot of people forget that the crusader was I) probably responsible for about 5 pts of the other guy's damage AND II) the crusader is probably at near max HP while everyone else might be near death.It pretty much is impossible to take a crusader down via the HP route thanks to having the usual d10 warrior HD but throw in Devoted Spirit discipline AND steely resolve AND the Die hard feat means that beating the crusader the HP route is an exercise in frustration. It also has the standard Good Fort save meaning just like regular old fighter, it isn't bending over to poisons and spells like that.What truly makes it powerful though is that even though it has a "weak" Will Save, trying to actually target that is ALSO a waste of time. (You got to get past the boost from their Divine Grace ability, plus the ability to re-roll once per day PLUS Mettle, good luck there).Throw in their "don't need to waste time recovering manoeuvers" and you get what many of the *players* (not just people that read the text and optimise on paper) think is the strongest martial adept class by far.Someone said it best on the WOTC's boards. You know that old "paladin in hell surrounded by dead demons with more coming" picture? That was no paladin. That was a crusader.</blockquote>

Verification