Fighter Alpha 2 - Page 18-19

[DeadDMWalking]

I think the Alpha 2 Fighter is a noticeable improvement from the Alpha 1 Fighter.

1) I really like that Armor Training appears to apply to all armor types, not forcing the fighter to simply choose 1. Thus, if the fighter has scale mail at 5th level, but gets full plate at 8th, he doesn't have to 'lose' the +1 bonus he already spent. This is a good change, since it allows a fighter character to use this ability throughout their career without 'regretting' using it on the wrong armor type.

2) Weapon Training is also better for the same reason. The 'primary' group is going to be at +4, the second group at +3, the third at +2 and the fourth at +1. One quibble - again, at 1st level you might start play with a longsword, but at 6th level you find an axe that for various reasons (some story, some mechanical) is a better fit for your character. Since you've already spent your +1, I understand not getting the +1 with the axe until 9th level. I'm okay with that part. But just as the ranger can choose to 'start a new favored enemy' at +4 instead of increasing his existing bonus to +4 when adding a new favored enemy, I think that the fighter should be able to choose which weapon group gets a +2. I would phrase it almost exactly like the Ranger ability. I don't know if that makes sense, and I don't know how to phrase the ability, but I definitely would like something like that better. I'll keep thinking about it, but I'm open to suggestions.

3)This is just a nitpick. The section on bonus feats is poorly phrased. Specifically, the note regarding a fighter getting a bonus feat every level. Obviously a Pathfinder character gets a bonus feat ever odd level (1st, 3rd, 5th, etc). A 5th level fighter gets at least one every level (2 at 1st, fighter bonus at 2nd, normal at 3rd, fighter bonus at 4th, normal at 5th). However, a Rogue 1/Ftr 4 (for instance) will not get one feat a level.

They'll get a feat at 1st (normal) 2nd (ftr 1) and 2 at 3rd (normal and ftr 2), none at 4th, and 2 at 5th (normal and ftr 4). Obviously it works out the same way, but the way it is phrased, it sounds like a fighter should get a feat every level, instead of two feats at some levels as is possible with a multiclass character or a creature with odd racial HD.

4) The weapon groups are better too.

All in all, I like it. I do hope these minor points that I bring up can be addressed.

[Ghenesh]

I'm with you on the armor training, I really like that feature cause it's just like I houseruled the Fighter in my 3.5 campaigns, a competence AC bonus when wearing armor (+1 at 3rd, +2 at 9th and +3 at 15th), I did also gave him a little bonus on one Saving Throw (+1 at 5th, +2 at 11th and +3 at 17th) at player's choice and a competence bonus to attack rolls made with weapons (+1 at 7th, +2 at 13th and +3 at 19th).

I soon find out that the AC and the save bonus really helped to bring the fighter to where it belongs, as a tank it became better, the issue was with the attack bonus, a +3 at 19th level doesn't look like much, but when stacking bonuses you can really get to the roof, I know that pathfinder is gonna make base classes more powerful, but you know... when things are not broken... and I think that a Fighter's attack bonus is just fine.

What I really miss on this fighter rewrite is more skill points and a better skill list. In my 3.5 houseruled fighter I gave the class 4 + Int mod skill points per level (x 4 at first level), and two extra class skills at player's choice... worked really fine. This is because the Fighter as a class cover the most broad concept of character, you should be able to be an army commander, a skilled swashbuckler, a diligent soldier, a perceptive guard, or whatever you feel your fighter should be... so, wouldn't your commander need diplomacy and knowledge (history)? wouldn't your swashbuckler need tumble and bluff? wouldn't your soldier need concentration and survival? wouldn't your guard need listen and spot?

I think this at least should be done.

[DeadDMWalking]

I fully agree with the 4 skill points. Though that's a discussion that I'm trying to keep on the Skills & Feats section of the board. A place for everything and everything in its place.

[forbinproject]

A further though regarding weapon training.

If the bonuses from Weapon Training also applied to CMB it would give the Fighter wider options in combat while still making them easy to play.

[Arne Schmidt]

I agree that the weapon training should be selectable in the same fashion as the ranger's favored enemy. It has the advantage of keeping the ability at maximum play throughout their career.

I also like the idea of applying that bonus to their CMB.

I don't like the idea of 4 skill ranks per level. 2 is plenty, especially with condensced skill choices and an auto +3 to class skills.

[Tarinor]

I like where the fighter is going but it still a boring and inferior class compared to the rest. Lets be honest non spell casters are simply outclassed by the spell casters and have far fewer options available to them, the fighter being the worst of the lot. Spell casters, especially at high levels can be good at anything they want. The sheer volumes of spells available to them make them the best thieves, best spies, best fighters, best healers, best controllers, best defenders, best information gathers, best charmers… whatever the need there is a spell that can meet that need. I think the fact the paladins and rangers have to have spells to make them more viable proves this case even more. I mean when was the last time you saw Aragon cast a spell?

The other day the 10th wizard in my group, who was severely weakened and down to about 1/3 of his spells ended up in a situation where he was forced to take on four 15th level fighters on his own. He mopped the floor with them in about 5 rounds and he didn’t even use any “boom” spells.

So I think things like better fighting and defense abilities and 4 skill points are a good start but not enough. I would go far as to add Spot and Listen as class skills as well. I mean fighters are all about military and doing things like protecting and guarding people and things, yet they can’t even spot or listen out for sneaks and would be thieves… heck even a merchant (supposedly inferior NPC expert class) is better a noticing thieves and could himself sneak right past the very people he has hired to guard his goods.

Then let’s not forget that fighters are meant to be war leaders and generals. Kings in the days of old were fighters who used to wisely rule their people and lead them into battle. Battles are won on wisdom and out smarting your opponents. Wars are won on the same and more, requiring you have loyal followers who will follow to hell and back. Yet fighters have no such skills or abilities. Imagine William Wallace without the ability to inspire his mean with rousing speeches, or out smart the English with ingenious battle tactics and tricks. With that in mind even 4 skill points a level starts looking bleak, especially if you want to choose wisdom or charisma based skills.

So I would suggest looking at something like the warblade as a guideline. The warblade gains access to fighter only abilities, gets bonus feats like a fighter, gets other “fighting bonuses”, has 4 skill points per level, d12 HP, he can “relearn” his weapon specific feats every day, not limiting his use of weapon feats the +1 longsword he picked up 17 levels ago and rounds off with having fantastic combat stances and maneuvers that he can swap out every few levels.

Now a fighter could use his fighter feats to learn combat maneuvers and stances of his own, but the feat limits maneuvers learnt to a maximum of 3 and besides that he would need 17 feats just to learn the same maneuvers and stances a warblade has, never mind all the other bonus feats and fighting class talents a warblade gets. Clearly the warblade with all these benefits and choice of different maneuvers round by round is simply just more fun to play than the fighter whose majority feats are static and stagnant at higher levels.

[The Bibliophile]

I'm interested to hear from folks who say that fighters suck compared to spell casters if they've really playtested the Pathfinder Fighter or going off 3.0/3.5 "common knowledge."

I've yet to do a full campaign with Pathfinder (though I have a group forming - yay!) but a buddy and I have been playing with the Pathfinder character classes, looking at ideas and bouncing things off one another. Part of this has been making test characters and putting them through some scenarios to see how some abilities play out and we've been pretty impressed with the new fighter and have seen it do well in scenarios that the 3.5 figher certainly failed at.

Now, I'm not saying they're perfect. I think they still need a little something to bring them on par with rogues though I don't actually think its damage. I'm ok with fighters being a heavy armor tank class. In fact that's what I think they need, some ability to help them wrangle opponents and manipulate (to use a MMO term) aggro. This would let them help control the fight. This is a tough balancing act of course, go too far and it becomes a tactical game at the expense of other elements but the figher is a tactical class and I think we need to see a bit more of that in combination with the weapon skill and heavy armor use.

I would like to echo the request for the fighter to have an expanded skill list and 4+ points per level though to flesh them out.

[Tarinor]

That battle with the 10th level wizard vs. 4x 15th level fighters was with this revised fighter and the old wizard. (I don’t feel that the wizard needs too much more tweaking, especially with such a large volume of spells and feats to choose from). In the end the extra damage and amour protection were useless in that battle. One spell to conceal the wizard, one spell to summon an undead to bypass armor, another to cause fear, one to paralyze and another to dominate and the fighters’ lousy saves did the rest. The wizard's versatility won the day.

But of course we haven’t really played that version of fighter for an entire campaign. But in the end extra protection and more damage doesn’t make him any more versatile when compared to a rogue or spell casters.

The fighter we are using now is that fighter plus:
• 4 skill points and 2 extra skills and he/she can refocus her feats like weapon focus or improved critical onto a new weapon every morning by spending and hour training.
• I allow all classes to choose any class skill they want. So if you want to play a fighter who grew up in the woods, you can choose more woodland skills, or fighter who grew up in the streets can have more stealth skills, or a fighter at court could have more charisma based skills.
• In addition the fighter has 1 wild feat +1 per five levels that he/she can retrain or swap out every morning during this training time for something new.
• I also allow combat maneuvers and stunts from the book of Iron Might or Quintessential Fighter to be used… but those are not really being used as they are too much of an effort for the player to work out at this point.

This fighter is being played along side a warblade, wizard, cleric and revised bard so it will be interesting to see how he fairs over the next few levels.

[Ridolfin]

Tarinor wrote:

The other day the 10th wizard in my group, who was severely weakened and down to about 1/3 of his spells ended up in a situation where he was forced to take on four 15th level fighters on his own. He mopped the floor with them in about 5 rounds

This type of things never happened to me in years of play. IMHO a Wizard is almost a Dead man walking when left alone in a battleground of its level and with no option to flee. A well equipped band of fighters was the fate of many arcanists in our stories.

For sure in a one to one arena combat you can imagine a lot of trouble for the fighter in a mano a mano with a wizard. But, really, is a wizard coming in a gladiator circus something serious outside of the WoW plane ? ;-))

SOOOO, about the topic: Fighter are cool and powerfull enough to my taste. I will even certainly nerfed them with house rules if I come to the point to use PFRPG. Problems is not fighter indeed but that 10 feats from levelling - I prefer 5, to keep it short.

Be creative

[Tarinor]

Ridolfin wrote:

This type of things never happened to me in years of play. IMHO a Wizard is almost a Dead man walking when left alone in a battleground of its level and with no option to flee. A well equipped band of fighters was the fate of many arcanists in our stories.
For sure in a one to one arena combat you can imagine a lot of trouble for the fighter in a mano a mano with a wizard. But, really, is a wizard coming in a gladiator circus something serious outside of the WoW plane ? ;-))

SOOOO, about the topic: Fighter are cool and powerfull enough to my taste. I will even certainly nerfed them with house rules if I come to the point to use PFRPG. Problems is not fighter indeed but that 10 feats from levelling - I prefer 5, to keep it short.

Be creative

Exactly - the wizard was creative - that's the whole point. If spell casters in other campaigns cant pull this type of feat off then I question if they are truly playing spell casters to their full potential. That’s the whole point of magic!

Give me a high level spell caster of any type and I'll take on just about anything you can throw at me and get out of or around any situation. At the end of the day, you can be as creative as you want with a fighter, but all it takes is one failed Will save.

But that is not the point. Of course this not an every day occurrence and was a forced situation as it was a plot element that created this “magical arena” forcing the wizard to prove himself in order to get the next clue in the a personal sub quest. This player knows his wizard. He has been playing him for over 4 years. So I would expect him to be able to pull off a stunt like that.

But the issue is not that the fighters were so easy to beat. It’s that they are boring to play with limited options. If a barbarian can choose different things to do every round with his rage power, why cant a fighter also have more options. After all, its options that allowed the wizard to do what he did. If it was a 10th level fighter and not a wizard that was facing off against 4x 15th level fighters the outcome would have been very different.

[Ridolfin]

Tarinor wrote:

Exactly - the wizard was creative - that's the whole point.

And what about your four 15th level fighters ? They can be also a little bit much that stupid cows ?

Spoiler:

I'm not willing to start any discussion but my friends will be very happy to know they are not able to play correctly their arcanists after 30+ years in the RP games.
Next time I will throw on one of them four 15th level bowmens with +2/+4 magic composite longbow and 4 adamantine arrows each. If he's not able to survive he will be pleased to know the challenge of dealing with a possible 1d8+8 by 16 attacks = 256 damages in the first round was fair.

It was not my intention to bait you but just to point out that, depending of a lot of parameters, and yes, also of the DM will and experience, a wizard is not always a super super hero and a fighter a super super lamer. And even when playing the 3.5 core rules (I don't care of prestige classes here).

Let's roll the thread.

Be creative

[Paul Watson]

This is a completely unthought through and certainly not tested in any way. In fact, it's still barely coherent, but that's never stopped me before, and it won't now

What do people think of the option of giving Fighters "Combat Points" similar to the Barbarians rage points. These could power things like enhanced feats (such as allow Dodge to work on two opponents), to get feats temporarily (spend combat points to gain improved disarm when you really need it) or to do impressive things or suppress the rules temporarily, such as allowing two combat feats to be used in one round.

Obviously this will need a colossal amount of work to be of actual use (how many points do you get per level, how much does each ability cost, just what can you do with these things any way, and I'm sure a dozen other complications), but it would allow Fighters to do cool things like the other classes without making them overpowered, although it would make them slightly more complicated to run.

Any thoughts on this vague idea?

[Tarinor]

Ridolfin wrote:

Tarinor wrote:

Exactly - the wizard was creative - that's the whole point.

And what about your four 15th level fighters ? They can be also a little bit much that stupid cows ?

** spoiler omitted **

It was not my intention to bait you but just to point out that, depending of a lot of parameters, and yes, also of the DM will and experience, a wizard is not always a super super hero and a fighter a super super lamer. And even when playing the 3.5 core rules (I don't care of prestige classes here).

Let's roll the thread.

Be creative

Firstly there are a so many spells a wizard could use to counter that picture you just painted in your spoiler and truth be told any wizard that allows himself to become a pin cushion shouldn't really make it past apprentice.

But this post is about the opinions of changes to the fighter. I gave mine, you gave yours. So let's write the rest of to different styles as the picture you painted is a perfect example of the style of game my group steers clear from.

[Tarinor]

Paul Watson wrote:

This is a completely unthought through and certainly not tested in any way. In fact, it's still barely coherent, but that's never stopped me before, and it won't now

What do people think of the option of giving Fighters "Combat Points" similar to the Barbarians rage points. These could power things like enhanced feats (such as allow Dodge to work on two opponents), to get feats temporarily (spend combat points to gain improved disarm when you really need it) or to do impressive things or suppress the rules temporarily, such as allowing two combat feats to be used in one round.

Obviously this will need a colossal amount of work to be of actual use (how many points do you get per level, how much does each ability cost, just what can you do with these things any way, and I'm sure a dozen other complications), but it would allow Fighters to do cool things like the other classes without making them overpowered, although it would make them slightly more complicated to run.

Any thoughts on this vague idea?

Now that's exactly what I am talking about. I think that would be a brilliant idea.

[sysane]

Personally, I shudder at the thought of multiple classes following the barbarian route with having point based class abilities.

[SneaksyDragon]

...then give the point based system to the Fighter, and not the Barbarian.
The barbarian has enough to play with out of combat that in combat they could be pretty simple and still work.

It just suck to be a fighter and have nothing really to do out of combat...and nothing to think about IN combat! to power attack or not to power attack, that is the ONLY question. honestly I think the current fighter is decent, a definite improvement. They, however, are still not FUN.

[lastknightleft]

sysane wrote:

Personally, I shudder at the thought of multiple classes following the barbarian route with having point based class abilities.

agreed, I don't mind a single class having the mechanic, but I don't want every class using the same mechanic if they aren't the same thing (i.e magic users are okay with the mechanic, but not fighters)

[sysane]

lastknightleft wrote:

sysane wrote:

Personally, I shudder at the thought of multiple classes following the barbarian route with having point based class abilities.

agreed, I don't mind a single class having the mechanic, but I don't want every class using the same mechanic if they aren't the same thing (i.e magic users are okay with the mechanic, but not fighters)

To be honest, I'm not to sure how I feel about Barbarians have rage points. Its just doesn't strike me as being very "barbariany" to have to decide how to spend points each round.

[SneaksyDragon]

i TOTALLY agree that the Rage points dont seem very barbaric. it seems just to strategic. I never liked that the barbarian could chose when they raged. it should be triggered by something. I personally love the PHB2 Barbarian variant where they range once under roughly half hit points. so much more dramatic then just using it up before you rest >P

[Callous Jack]

Hmmm...I kinda like Combat Points, especially if used to manipulate combat feats.

[SneaksyDragon]

I concur

[mike smith 853]

What about improving the Fighter only Feats? Something like what the Book of Iron Might did, but go further with it? Not to mention the Combat Maneuvers.

That way the class isn't radically changed but the options for fighters increases.

In that book they had (I don't have it in front of me, so I might get some of this wrong)

Arcane Battle Feats: sort of fighter/mage type actions.

BattleMind Feats: sort of warrior monk type actions

And Fighting Style Feats: Each feat created a bunch of different abilities that you could pick from every +5 base attack.

Frankly there are lot of fighter prestige classes with class abilities that could easily become Feats. Defesive Stance from the Dwarven Defender for example. It's fairly powerful, but it's so limited by the lack of movement.

Most fighter feats are the same basic thing over and over, it would nice to have more options with each feat. Like a feat that offers at least two combat options, or even some non-combat options.

Also, I'd like to cut the amount of semi useless feats that are needed to take other feats, such as Weapon Focus. With the new Weapon Training ability, it seems really pointless for a fighter. Don't get me wrong, I like a +1 as much as anyone, but aren't more interesting things that I could be doing?

And I don't really think that a Fighter should have all the options of say a wizard, because there is a feeling that comes from playing a Fighter. A fighter with boots of flying, swords of fireball shooting, and shields of stoneskin is a wizard. If I could swing my sword and hit 20 orcs I'd feel a little odd.

The book of nine swords has some interesting stuff in it, but I was hoping for more things for the fighter.

Options. Not new classes.

And yeah 4 skill points and Perception added. Maybe the ability to move with Acrobatics too.