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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Runestar" data-source="post: 4645719" data-attributes="member: 72317">For tome of battle, I particularly liked the recharge system (or rather, the fact that there was a provision for you to regain expended powers, however inefficient it may be). This way, in a battle, I can opt to spend precious time to regain the use of an expended maneuver that proves to be very effective, or continue fighting with possibly sub-optimal maneuvers. Not to mention that adaptive style allowed me to ready a custom array of maneuvers tailor-fit to a particular encounter (very neat when you have many more maneuvers than slots readied). But I can't ready the same maneuver more than once, so combat is rarely repetitive.The encounter-based nature of maneuvers was nice, but because I found that my warblade was slightly out-damaged by a well-built fighter, I tend to view them as more or less being analogous to full-attacking. ToB mechanics permeates quite a lot of my games. Just about every monster can be expected to have access to at least a maneuver or 2 via martial study/stance or lvs in martial adept.<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=":)" />It is true that vancian casting had the potential of going nova and making a joke out of your DM's best efforts at crafting a challenging encounter, but because my party never really knows when they will next get to rest, we find our casters having a tendency to want to conserve their spells for rainy days that may or may not ever come. It helped that our DM has shown his willingness to push our party onwards even after the casters have expended most/all their spells. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Never really liked sorcs (though I profess to having a soft spot for spontaneous casting). Then came complete mage with that darnable focused specialist variant and specialist mage prc, which blurred the lines between vancian and spontaneous casting (because wizards had access to fewer schools, but more slots). I cannot picture myself playing anything except a focused conjurer with abrupt jaunt and tossing sculpted glitterdusts now.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />Warlock was a disaster. At-will abilities are great in theory, but I find them too weak in combat past lv7 (when enemy hp starts scaling way faster than +1d6 every other lv). And eventually, even the hardiest of fighters have to rest because the party is out of curative magic. I have never tried the warlock in a party with an infinite source of healing though (binder binding beur, or ghaele PC past ECL8), so maybe the warlock could be an asset in a party with effectively unlimited resources. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />I have heard a lot of nice things about incarnum, but have not actually tried one yet (this is not reflected in the poll above). Maybe one day, I might actually get around to rolling up a totemist....</blockquote>

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