Cadfan said:
Bisquet: The marshall is an ok class, but I believe the lesson from these discussions is that most people judge a class entirely by its offensive powers. The marshall's auras and skills are primarily defensive in nature, or intended for use out of combat, and for most people therefore do not count.
Its their loss.
Its not weak because it lacks offense, its weak because it lacks appreciable value over another support class. Sure, its buffs stack with other things, but unless you're running a 9 person game, another class adds buffs and additional options. If you're running a 5 man game, you add a bard. If you're running a 6 man game, you add a druid. And so on. The marshshall, a buff only class, isnt particularly good enough at buffing (over and above other classes) to make up for its limited scope. Add in that its *boring*, since all you do is fire up your aura and wade around whiffing with your 3/4 bab (and not hurting things when you hit), yields not a lot of fun in combat. Add in lowish skill points, and you've got issues out of combat.
Giving him a few more abilities , a few more active combat options, or more skill points, and the marshall could have been more fun.
Regardless, this thread is supposed to be about the shadowcaster. Someone brought up earlier about how a wizard can be tricksy with the right spell selection, which is a very good point. An arcane trickster has even more potential at the sacrifice of a few spell levels. Given that wizards, druids and clerics can change their spells on a daily basis, its hard to design a 20 level niche base class that one of these 3 cant duplicate or surpass with the right spell selection (and still have the option of changing their spells to fill a different role the next day). When designing a new class that fills a small role, I think a good baseline would be to make the class NOTICABLY superior to a wizard/cleric with proper preparation, then go from there. This is even more important when its a class limited product support. Basically every new book expands the potential for wizard/cleric/druid, yet there the support for new mysteries, invocations, etc are limited. Even if new material is published, the static nature of resource selection of some of these classes limits the usefulness. A new spell or vestige that becomes available is pretty much immediately useful, as the caster/binder can add it the next day. A new invocation adds less to a warlock since they cant easily replace the ones the know.
