Saeviomagy
Adventurer
Of course he's making a fair tradeoff there. Like I said, you're unlikely to have ALL high stats. If you can say "well, I can get away with a lower dex", then you're boosting con and survivability. Hell, you could even put that 24+ into strength, and look at a strength bow (which are now unlimited in the amount of bonus they can have)Fedifensor said:Standard 25-point array is 15,14,13,12,10,8. With a 15 in Dex, and 5 stat bumps over 20 levels, that's a Dex of 20 without magical assistance. Assuming the archer has reasonable equipment for his level, Dex can rise to 24+ easily. Even if the archer wants a high Strength to use with composite bows, an 18+ in both Strength and Dexterity is normal at 20th level when you add in stat bumps and magic items.
Opposed checks are the standard mechanic for comparing two individuals performance at something. I can think of any number of situations where a gm might call for an opposed ride check.
I'm not sure where "at least" comes into play. You can make a Ride check once per round with the Mounted Combat feat, and that's it.
The ride check is an opposed roll means that 23 ranks could potentially be outdone by someone with +3 to hit.With 23 ranks in Ride and a high Dex, the only thing that has a chance of exceeding your Ride check is a warrior-type of your level or higher. In that case, if they want your mount dead, their other three (or more) attacks are going to do the job rather quickly. High-level archers are particularly deadly to mounts.
IF you have a regular horse, it will get smacked down by an archer. Which is why any character who's really into mounted combat doesn't ride a normal off-the-rack horse, and that means they need to train something else.
Do your friends regularly carry you around on their backs all day? Would you expect to be able to use a "helpful" NPC as a mount? Would you expect said NPC would immediately pick up the art of responding quickly to your control?
It's Diplomacy for animals. This means the animal will be friendly to you.
No. Didn't think so. If it's in handle animal, and you don't have handle animal, you can't do it.
Which still doesn't help you if you have no ranks. Handle animal is ALMOST a trained-only skill.
The only thing it doesn't cover is tricks, and I imagine a good reaction from your mount would give a circumstance bonus to learning from you.
You're the one who started out comparing apples to oranges.
Also, with the extra skill points from Ranger, it's a lot easier to keep Handle Animal ranks maxed out...rendering the whole argument about Wild Empathy moot.
I don't know about you, but my 3.5 SRD has rules for prices and training of the following creatures in the MM:
So all 20th level fighters ride dragons? That depends on the campaign. Maybe your statement is true in the Forgotten Realms, but not every campaign has fighters with a menagerie in their pocket.
Giant eagle
Griffon
Hippogriff
Howler
Giant Owl
Pegasus
Spider eater
Furthermore, handle animal specifies any creature with an int of 1 or 2 may be trained using the skill, albeit at a penalty of +5 to the DC. That gives you quite a wide range of possible mounts.
Any DM who says "no - horses only" is, quite frankly, being an ass.
Sure, if a fighter specialises in a weapon, he's a specialist. Did that really need saying? However he's not nearly as much a specialist as most of your PrC's. If you're only willing to pursue one tree of feats, then of course you're going to run out of things to spend your feats on. Just like if you don't see a point in combat feats at all, you're not going to want to play any of the combat classes.
Er, no. A generalist will be beaten by a specialist in his area. Plus, most fighters are by definition specialists - Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization make them dependent on a single weapon that can be disarmed or sundered. Weapon Specialization is the only fighter-specific feat chain, which means any fighter without it loses a class-specific ability. It takes 4 feats to get to Greater Weapon Specialization...very, very few people will do that for more than one weapon.
Fighter = combat generalist. Noone else does combat generalist as well as he.