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The player cheats/misinterprets the rules, uses the parts of a rule that work for him and changes/ignores the rest. The GM allows this and even appears to defend these actions and then complains that the GM and the other players find this character OP and no fun in the group. No advise seems to be accepted, this is an unfixable problem due to the given GM/player mix.

If the build is right, and in the proper campaign setting, many characters can appear OP. Many people build characters in many ways, poor balance in home games comes up a lot. In these games the GM needs to be on top of the rules, how the characters level and even what gear is spread around the party. Jacking the encounters just to make it a challenge for that OP character just makes it less fun for the guys on the bottom of the curve.

Remember that the goal for the game is for the entire table to have a good time, and if it is not, fix it, don't complain that the game is unfair, you are a GM and in a home game you can just fix obvious problems.

Because we have a barb in the same party, I can tell you that it doesn't matter when your Kensai has an average initiative roll in the 30's. He still goes first, and kills the thing or leaves it standing with 10hp.

Yes - on paper, a barbarian has better damage. But he must make a full round attack to get to do all that damage.

For all of you commenting that this is an old thread, that's true. But I assume that there are others like me out there who haven't really run into this level of pure kill build before. I am not the GM of this campaign, but i can tell you, I will probably never allow this class, or at least this build of this class in any campaign I run.

Magda Luckbender wrote:

Doesn't sound like the Magus is Overpowered, it sounds like the other martial characters are underpowered in comparison. The 9th level version of Magda, a cleric, routinely inflicted over 100 HP of melee damage per round. If the fighter and ranger are doing less damage than a cleric then they probably are not optimized for inflicting combat damage. Two Weapon Fighting is a pretty big handicap compared to using a Two Handed Weapon, and explains part of that disparity.

I've GMd for archers who routinely put the above damage numbers to shame. This problem could be a lot worse: a 9th level level Wizard could be dropping DC20+ Selective Dazing Fireballs.

I know this is an old thread, but I came here looking for ways to coexist with a Kensai Magus in my party and to add my voice and experience for anyone else that hasn't yet run into this class/archetype.

I'm currently in a campaign(we're now level 12) where we had a Kensai Magus inserted midstream and I can honestly say that they're terribly overpowered with the right build and items.

All you have to do is pick up bladed dash, dimension door (with dimensional agility), do the shocking grasp build and have a few pearls of power. You will literally do Fireball-power type damage with a first level spell a huge number of times per day, and you're almost always doing the equivalent of full round attacks. It takes us 7 2-round combats to run the Kensai out of spells.

Add Blend(if you're an elf) and you can kill a big pile of creatures in a surprise round. Plus they have super-high initiative with a decent dex as they get to add their Int bonus. They also get to add their int bonus to crit confirms, which when combined with a 30% crit range weapon is ridiculously OP.

Despite our GM routinely advancing templates and adding extra monsters, he routinely kills or nearly kills boss-level characters in round 1.

This character has literally ruined this campaign for me. I literally can't optimize my current martial character enough to get any significant action in before he kills most everything.

The Kensai is great if you're running homebrew and your DM can adjust accordingly, or if you're running a very high power campaign, or if he's literally your solo front line in a three character group.

It's terrible(group-breaking) in any campaign where optimizing your character is not the prime focus of the group. I would strongly advise against allowing it in any campaign that isn't built to counter its main tactics.