The combat form/style feats are a very good option. These feats allow you to adopt stances that grant you bonuses and can be used a number of timer per day according to the number of feats you devote to those stances. I think they are listed in complete adventurer, but can't remember. Someone help me pointing the right source please.
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Combat Focus feats were in Player's Handbook II.
I wouldn't mind seeing some feats that allow fighters to do more depending on the weapons they are wielding (like dazing or crushing armor for bludgeoning weapons), but I don't want it going too far into Book of Nine Swords/4th Edition territory with fighters getting wierd supernatural powers that are beyond the realm of typical fantasy (so no magic DR, no regeneration, etc).
Aaaah...combat focus feats! Jeps that's right. I think the PHII added a lot to the fighter, like the weapon mastery feats and lots of more powerfull combat-related feats. They made my fighters look foward to aquire new feats beyond 12th level.
Adding more of these CF feats and a proper "instructions/suggestions" to build up a fighter with combat styles and specific "strikes" based in these styles could add a lot of flavor to the fighter while changing nothing to the class. More flavor, choices and "guidelines" could do the trick.
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Aaaah...combat focus feats! Jeps that's right. I think the PHII added a lot to the fighter, like the weapon mastery feats and lots of more powerfull combat-related feats. They made my fighters look foward to aquire new feats beyond 12th level.
Adding more of these CF feats and a proper "instructions/suggestions" to build up a fighter with combat styles and specific "strikes" based in these styles could add a lot of flavor to the fighter while changing nothing to the class. More flavor, choices and "guidelines" could do the trick.
While I agree, I don't think we need a heap of that stuff in the core PRPG. Paizo could do an entire book like Bo9S (but done right, in the flavour of medieval fantasy) just for fighters with the number of potential options.
I'll just leave with this for now:
Wizards have hundreds of spells to choose from. Fighters have less than a hundred feats to choose from. For a class that is built around fighting, that doesn't give them many options. 3.0 introduced Feats, 3.5 cleaned it up some, PRPG should put them equal to spells in terms of the resource they provide (with the understanding that feats are always in effect).
The Bo9S was a great addition to "fighters" yet actually the whole sense of clean/pure-fighting style, good-old.fighter way was totally lost. Personally I liked it but felt it a completely different approach and a tad overpowered.
I would love to see a book dedicated entirely to combat focus feats and styles, which could be very well applied to Monks and Rangers combat styles. I already worked on several "combat style feat chains" for alternate choices for monks and rangers, yet nothing new yet.
A pretty simple option could be to make single-strike feats that have a special effect. There are already some feats that make this yet some are too simple or too complicated; like the feat that grant you reach for an attack or those feats that grant you three -very specific- maneuvers. Both interesting but maybe still in the need of some polish.
I saw a book by Monte with a different combat approach but never got to see it. Maybe that one could bring lots of good stuff to the 3.5 Ftr!
The Book of Iron Might also had a lot of space dedicated to "maneuvers," but not quite in the same way BONS did it. Most of the maneuvers had hellacious negatives, such as -20 to the attempt, but if you accepted various penalties (taking an AoO if you try the maneuver, having a successful AoO negate your ability to make the attack, etc) you could get your penalties down to a more manageable level.
I didn't hand it out to the players and tell them to use it, but I kept it handy in case they wanted to try something out of the ordinary to give me some guidelines as to how it should work.
In my opinion, the PH2 introduced one of the best things I ever saw about fighter bonus feats: Good feats, only for fighter, to high level fighters. Now you can be just a fighter and get some good powers at high levels.
And someone said about the weapon style feats. In my campaign world I tried to make more combat style feats and weapon style feats, by region and groups. I can say it went pretty well. Only one player ever got one of those feats, because of the many other feats necessary for them, but the players, and the characters, can recognize npcs from around the world that use different styles. No power, fire dance, mystic dr, time stopping blood spilling "blade magic" of Book of Nine Swords. Just plain sword (or other weapons) figthing.
Now the characters keep sharp when they see a Elf with a kind of exotic sword make some moves: They know he is trained in one kind of style they are not.
I would like to see this kind of thing in pathfinder. More weapon style feats, and more combat style feats.
I'd like to see fighter feats that allow more mobility on the battlefield. Maybe something that allows a second 5ft step, or maybe a 5ft step as an immediate action to cut someone off. I find martial characters end up sitting in one spot too much to try and take advantage of full attacks. So I'm all for giving fighters other things to do than basic attacks and sitting in one spot.