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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8632566" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Yes the Swordsage had Desert Wind maneuvers that could do fire damage, and I know they had some teleport moves.  The mere existence of the Swordsage made a lot of people immediately dismiss the whole book out of hand as being "magical anime nonsense" without realizing the Warblade does not natively have access to these moves.While the Warblade does have a few things that push the boundaries of what 3.5 era players believed was possible without magic, like ignoring DR/Hardness or ending any sort of negative condition they had been slapped with, most of the Warblade's abilities, especially the White Raven maneuvers, were things that most people attribute to the Fighter in past editions (being a leader of men and a tactician) but other than the ability to raise a small army if they have a Keep, they didn't have (outside of Battlesystem, Dragon Kings, and maybe Birthright- I can't recall atm).But one thing was true, and is one of the few complaints I will accept about the Bot9S.  Without an insane degree of splatbook diving, Fighter > Warblade.This wasn't a problem for me and my group, we accepted that the Warblade was the improved Fighter.  But others did not accept this, they didn't feel it was fair to "replace" a core class instead of fixing it's woes- despite the fact that this very behavior was WotC's status quo (and still is, to a degree).I've used the various "gish" classes and prestige classes as an example- it's obvious the Hexblade was trying to be a 20 level Eldritch Knight, but wasn't magical enough, so it was later replaced by the Duskblade.  There were several attempts to "fix" the Fighter and the Rogue- Swashbucklers, Samurai, Knights, Marshals, Ninjas, Psychic Warriors, Scouts (a personal favorite), Spellthieves, Factotums, Lurks, and even Beguilers fall into this category.They did the opposite as well, rather than try to balance Clerics, Druids, and Wizards, we soon got Warmages, Shamans, Shugenja, Dread Necromancers, and Favored Souls- most of these had limited spell lists, and required more than one ability score to effectively use their magic!Of course, they also made improved versions of classes that didn't need improvement, like the Archivist or the Erudite...but I'm pretty sure they at least thought these classes were balanced in some way.We see this now with subclasses, but WotC's approach is "unbalanced?  just add magic!".  We're not going to see another Warblade, because there is still a loud and vocal part of the community that neither wants nor needs it.You want to play a better Fighter?  Magic is about the only solution on the table, because pushing the envelope of what non-casters can do has proven to cause WotC more trouble than it's worth to them.</blockquote>

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