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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crothian" data-source="post: 2454807" data-attributes="member: 232">Heroes of Battle[imager]http://www.rpgnow.com/products/product_5037.jpg[/imager]    Sometimes I just get a book and I shake my head.  It might be a fine book but for some reason it just does not strike a cord with me.  Or I read about a book and I expect some thing and the book delivers on something quite different.  It can be hard to write a fair review when a book does this, so consider yourself warned.  I will cover the book and explain what it is and what it does.  And along the way I will also mention what it is I just am not all that happy with.      Heroes of Battle is another PDF by EN Publishing.  If you do not know who they are then you need to look at the website you are reading this on.  En World and EN Publishing are a division of one another and EN Publishing is one of the leaders in the PDF publishing.  This PDF is twenty four pages in length.  It is well laid out and I like the look of that although I am not happy with the art.  What appears on the cover is also what is inside and it just does not look that good to me.  I think they would have looked better in black and white as the coloring just seems a little off to me.  The book is well book marked, comes in a print and read on screen format, and even has the cover as a separate PDF file.  These are nice options to give the reader and user of the book.    The book starts with a nice message from I think the author, Marcin Adamczyk.  In it he says the purpose of this book is to basically give alternate core classes that are more flexible.  In it he makes two points that I disagree with and this starts me on the path to not liking the book.  He says the core classes “are rather stiff and hard to customize” and that this “makes entering prestige classes a thing of the past”.  I disagree with both those finding that experienced people with the game have found the core classes to be really flexible and that after reading through these classes I see no reason why these classes would make prestige classes a thing of the past.  They have more options but the options do not change the focus of the base class.  Prestige classes have the ability to change the focus and offer something different.  I see nothing here that does that.      The first class is the Knight.  The background of the class is exactly what one would expect when they thing of a knight.  The mechanics though make the class a little to good.  One goal of the book is to make the classes more flexible allowing for more choices.  More flexibility does also add more power to the class.  The closest core class that this compares to is the Fighter.  The Knight gets more skills and skill points, less feats, but more options.  The more options come in the special abilities and frankly these read like feats under a different name.      The Paladin is next and like the Knight it offers more then it probably should.  The class gets more skill points and even a good will save unlike the core Paladin.  They have taken some of the Paladins abilities away and made them a choice so it is not like this is a pure Paladin plus.  The paladin gets special abilities like the Knight but the list is unique to the class.  They still feel like feats though.  The class also gets a Focus of Good.  These are five paths that the Paladin can have so that the Paladin has some direction I guess but the real reason seems to define certain abilities the class gets.  One thing that is nice and also of course has a complaint from me is that each class has an epic progression.  I like when I see epic support from publishers.  But in this case it does not seem like it is done with the proper strength that such high level gamers have.  The paladin continues to gain something based on the Focus of Good.  The smiting focus gets the ability to smite once more per five levels.  There is a none epic feat called extra smiting that allows the character to smite twice more per day.  So it seems odd that one has to gain 10 levels as a Paladin to gain the ability of a non epic feat.      The last class is the Scourge.  I never saw the use for a class like this.  It is a Paladin that is evil.  Seems to me someone can easily just make a note in the paladin class for some easy changes to make the class evil based, or lawful based, or chaotic based.  Seems that in a book that is all about options that making the Paladin class work so that different alignment focus option would be obvious.  The class is the Paladin above with evil based abilities and of course evil sounding names for the abilities.      Then there are a bunch of feats.  The feats are basically builds of off the abilities the classes have.  It is nice to see that the writer did include class specific feats but I would have liked to see some of the requirements less class ability specific so they could be taken by people not using classes in this book.  There are prestige classes and other core classes out there that give similar abilities that these feats might be useful for.      The book has its uses and there will be people out there that like it.  I just thing that the classes are really not that needed and really do not offer something all that new.  There is also a more mechanical approach to many of the abilities; they seem to be a lot more about the numbers then other books I have read.  Again, that will appeal to some people out there.  I am just not one of them.</blockquote>

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