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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StreamOfTheSky" data-source="post: 5690752" data-attributes="member: 35909">The Completes are mostly good, though Divine was kinda meh, Champion has some very big (how do you feel about everyone who wants it having Pounce as early as level 1, for example?) power boosts, and Psionic is a blight upon existence and should never be read. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  My favorite Completes are probably Adventurer, Mage, and Warrior.Magic Item Compendium is an amazing book.  A few items you might want to nerf or ban (the 3000 gp amulet to hit touch AC on the next attack as a swift action 3/day comes to mind...), but overall very balanced and I really like the redefined body slots and such rules included.  It also has extensive treasure tables incorporating the DMG items for ease of reference / random rolls.Spell Compendium has lots of great new spells and again, despite the plethora of new options, few are unbalanced compared to core (a few are very unbalanced though, like Wraithstrike).  It could be argued that just giving casters more options is a big power boost, though, if class imbalance is a major issue for you.Tome of Battle does wonderful things to allow for skirmisher and mobile type combatants and to accomplish fancy sword fighting / cinematic wire fu / crazy anime stuff.  Its best parts are the things to broaden the scope and abilities of what a warrior can do, like turning anything into a lethal weapon, shrug off status effects, hadoken things, and manipulate the battlespace around you.  Its worst parts are where its just boringly ramping up the damage you can dish out, to the point where it makes non-ToB melee classes feel pretty worthless.  All IMO.  Overall a great book well worth buying.The Races books are alright, not essential.  I think Races of Stone is the most interesting of the lot.  Destiny has some cool bits but a lot of vanilla.  I wanted to love Races of the Wild, but much like the Elf race I also want to like, they made it suck mechanically, overall.  Races of the Dragon has probably the most amount of broken/overpowered crap of any 3.5 splat book.  It's not all like that, but if you buy it, be VERY wary of crap like Power Word Pain, Wings of Cover, Wings of Flurry, etc...  Races of Eberron is solid also, albeit setting-specific.Dungeonscape is a fun book with a cool new base class, worth it for $10, IMO.For monster books, Lords of Madness is bar none my favorite.  Great rules crunch, and also an enjoyable read.The environmental books (Sandstorm, Stormwrack, Frostburn) are all decent but you can definitely live without them.I hope I didn't make the books sound bad by mentioning that they have some bad parts.  A lot of the books are still very much worth it (except C.Psionic, seriously, don't touch that with a 10 ft pole held by a mind controlled human puppet).  Nothing's perfect, I'm just trying to give a balanced (though brief) review. <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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