First time Dungeons and Dragons

[Duboris]

Ladies and gentlemen, first and foremost I need to point out that I have never, in my life, played a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I have been on these forums the entire time with only pathfinder experience, and I have, quite simply, never had the luxury of playing a game of Dungeons and dragons. I've never played a Module, an AP, any single class, or anything. Generally speaking, I wanna change that, but I don't even know where to begin.

That all well and said, I'm more than interested, and I've always loved fighters more than anything in pathfinder, but what seems really interesting to me as well is a Warlock, but I hear bad things about them from my friends who do play DnD. I was wondering if, at all, there was a way to combine the 2 classes for a prestige class? I only want to use core books, mind you, but I don't really know what that means in regards to dungeons and dragons. Could anyone help me, or give suggestions? I hear the feat progression in DnD is far better, as well, and if I chose fighter I would likely grab the feat that lets me 1 hand a 2 handed weapon, and basically play a well-roleplayed fighter of sorts.

What do you guys say? I just wanna play something that does a lot of consistent, turn-by-turn damage without having to worry about the possibilities of it. Warlock just seems like a consistent blaster of sorts but fighter is just easier to play.

[1pwny]

I feel the need to say this right here: don't play a Fighter. Personally, I love Fighters from PF, but a PF Fighter is far different than a D&D Fighter. PF Fighters have all those nice archetypes and class abilities, while a D&D Fighter basically gets 10 Bonus Feats. If you're looking for a melee beater-upper, I've heard some good things about the Swordsage. You could look into that.

If you want to know where to find some classes, I always go here (http://dndtools.eu/). There's a handy search bar that lets you find anything you need, with buttons to press to filter out classes, feats, and spells.

In fact, just searching "warlock prestiege" will give you a boatload of options to look into. There's the Eunuch Warlock, the Enlightened Spirit, the Eldritch Disciple, the Hellfire Warlock, and, like, 10 more. Check 'em out breifly, and choose your own PrC! Then you can pick the non-warlock class you want to go along with it.:smallsmile:

[Red Fel]

Ladies and gentlemen, first and foremost I need to point out that I have never, in my life, played a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I have been on these forums the entire time with only pathfinder experience, and I have, quite simply, never had the luxury of playing a game of Dungeons and dragons. I've never played a Module, an AP, any single class, or anything. Generally speaking, I wanna change that, but I don't even know where to begin.

That all well and said, I'm more than interested, and I've always loved fighters more than anything in pathfinder, but what seems really interesting to me as well is a Warlock, but I hear bad things about them from my friends who do play DnD. I was wondering if, at all, there was a way to combine the 2 classes for a prestige class? I only want to use core books, mind you, but I don't really know what that means in regards to dungeons and dragons. Could anyone help me, or give suggestions? I hear the feat progression in DnD is far better, as well, and if I chose fighter I would likely grab the feat that lets me 1 hand a 2 handed weapon, and basically play a well-roleplayed fighter of sorts.

What do you guys say? I just wanna play something that does a lot of consistent, turn-by-turn damage without having to worry about the possibilities of it. Warlock just seems like a consistent blaster of sorts but fighter is just easier to play.

Actually, a Warlock is surprisingly easy to play. I'd advise you to look at this guide (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?159708-Shinken-s-Guide-to-Melee-Warlocks) if you want to play a melee warlock, but even if you want to blast, Warlocks are fairly straightforward.

Warlock, as a class, is fairly NAD - stats are mostly irrelevant. You only need Cha if you plan to use invocations that require saves (and not all of them do). That means that, if you choose to focus on melee, you only need the standard array of physical ability scores to operate effectively.

What does a Fighter do in 3.5? Generally, full attack, full attack, full attack. (We're not as flashy as those PF Fighters, y'see.) A straightforward melee warlock could do much the same thing with Eldritch Glaive (or Eldritch Claws if Dragon Magazine is on the table). You can take passive invocations that let you fly, be invisible, and so forth, and then focus on being able to reach out and crush someone.

That said, as far as prestige classes go? What would you be advancing in terms of Fighter? BAB? You gain much more by staying with Warlock, and simply being melee-focused.

[ComaVision]

Playing a Warlock//Fighter gestalt could be interesting, maybe. Use Glaive and bonus feats to make an Eldritch Tripper build.

There are certainly more powerful things but it could be cool to play.

[ThisIsZen]

If you're interested in playing a melee Warlock, I'd look up the Warlock handbook. You don't need to follow the thing to the letter, obviously, but a glaivelock or clawlock puts out tons of damage very reliably at will with their Eldritch Blast. It'll also give you an idea of what invocations you might want vs which invocations you really do not, which is always helpful.

On the Fighter side of things, I'm going to second somebody27else's recommendation. The Fighter in 3.5 doesn't get much in the way of class features from their base class. If you want to play a melee combatant with a lot of strong options, then any of the Tome of Battle Initiators is a solid pick, with Warblade by and large being considered a functional replacement for Fighter.

However, it IS possible to play a decent Fighter, it just requires doing a lot of legwork first, and often relies less on the Fighter than you might think. An ubercharger, for instance, relies on Barbarian levels in order to get access to pounce. There are tripfighters who use chains to get the job done, but that's more of a battlefield control niche than the 'tons of reliable damage' you want. You COULD however try a Dungeoncrasher or Zhentarim fighter, or both, because I've heard good things about them as Alternate Class Features for the Fighter.

My recommendation is still Warblade, but if you're dead set on Fighter, you're gonna need to do some homework.

[bekeleven]

I'm going to disagree with the majority here. While the fighter class itself doesn't do much in 3.5, the ecosystem is far more favorable. A fighter gets more feats in 3.5 (+160% the feats of another class, from 7 to 18, instead of +110%), and get the following:

Tripping requires fewer feats, grants higher bonuses, and is all around more effective. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=17457535&postcount=35) The same is true for other combat maneuvers.
Attack of opportunity lockdown builds work.
Charging can one-shot most things with the correct build.

It's still roughly the same class, it's just competent at a few things. Tome of Battle gives you better bang for your buck.

[Troacctid]

Warlocks are definitely not bad. They're simple and fun to play, they have a decent power level, and they are very good at doing consistent turn-by-turn damage. Not the best, but good.

You don't need to do anything complicated in order to make a competent ranged blaster Warlock. Just go straight Warlock and get yourself some items that buff your eldritch blast damage: Chasuble of Fell Power, Warlock's Scepter, and Gloves of Eldritch Admixture can all be found in the Magic Item Compendium. You'll also want Gloves of Dexterity to boost your attack roll and a Cloak of Charisma to boost your eldritch essence save DCs, as well as the standard items that every character wants, like Vest of Resistance and Handy Haversack.

Sample blasting-focused build:

Warlock 1: Summon Swarm. (Unblockable area damage at will with multiple debuffs attached. Very good early on.) Feats: Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot. (Just your standard feat tax for a ranged attacker.)
Warlock 2: Baleful Utterance. (Just generally powerful and versatile, and one of the best invocations. It's a good source of out-of-combat utility.)
Warlock 3: No new invocations. Feat: Mortalbane. (5/day add 2d6 damage to an eldritch blast that targets a living creature. Nothing fancy, just keeping it simple.)
Warlock 4: Frightful Blast. (Now your blasts have a chance of applying a debuff. Frightful Blast is better than Sickening Blast because the enemies you most care about debuffing are the ones with high HP who won't just die to the damage, and those enemies tend to have high Fortitude, so you want the debuff that targets their Will instead.)
Warlock 5: No new invocations.
Warlock 6: Fell Flight, swap Summon Swarm for Darkness. Feat: Extra Invocation (Beguiling Influence). (Fell Flight is standard issue. Gives you all-day flight and keeps you out of reach of most melee attackers. Summon Swarm has outlived its usefulness at this point, so we trade it for Darkness, which gives anyone attacking you a flat 20% miss chance. Very potent on defense. Finally, we use our feat to grab Beguiling Influence, which provides us with a secondary role as the party face; we don't have Diplomacy as a class skill, but we can Bluff like there's no tomorrow, especially if we can get our hands on a Wand of Glibness.)
Warlock 7: No new invocations.
Warlock 8: Eldritch Chain. (Now Eldritch Blast hits multiple targets, forcing a Will save against fear on each of them.)
Warlock 9: Feat: Extra Invocation. (When in doubt, take Extra Invocation. Good candidates are Call of the Beast to play Dr. Doolittle, Otherworldly Whispers to play Encyclopedia Brown, See the Unseen if nobody else in the party has Faerie Fire or Glitterdust or whatever to deal with invisibility, Entropic Warding if you want to double up on the miss chance against ranged attacks, or Dark One's Own Luck if your saves could use a boost.)
Warlock 10: Brimstone Blast. (Our Eldritch Blast now sets things on fire! It's actually pretty underwhelming, but it's required for Hellfire Warlock, and it's better than Hellrime Blast.)
Binder 1: Bind Naberius. (Here we take a level off before entering Hellfire Warlock in order to gain access to Naberius, the vestige that heals ability damage. This removes the drawback of Hellfire Blast so we don't have to worry about it. It also gives us Disguise Self and Command at will, lets us take 10 on Diplomacy and Bluff checks, and allows Diplomacy checks to be made as a standard action with no penalty. Not too shabby.)
Hellfire Warlock 1: Either Vitriolic Blast or Chilling Tentacles, and swap Frightful Blast for some other invocation. (Vitriolic Blast deals extra damage, but more importantly, it ignores spell resistance, which could otherwise shut us down completely. Chilling Tentacles is very powerful for controlling the battlefield. We want both; I lean towards taking the Tentacles first to expand our options, but if the DM is throwing spell resistance at us, it may be wise to take Vitriolic Blast ASAP. Frightful Blast is obsolete now, so trade it for something else.) Feat: Extra Invocation again. (Extra Invocation gives us Lesser Invocations now, which are way better than Least. We have the main ones already, so take your pick of Charm, The Dead Walk, Flee the Scene, Voracious Dispelling, or Walk Unseen.)

You can probably figure it out from there.

Charisma should be your highest ability score, followed by Dexterity, then Constitution. Intelligence should be at least 12; choose Infernal as your bonus language. Strength can be dumped. Skill points should go towards maxing Bluff, Spellcraft, and Concentration, with enough ranks in Use Magic Device to hit a +10 modifier so we can take 10 to use wands, and enough in Knowledge (the planes) and Intimidate to qualify for Hellfire Warlock.

You could also skip Hellfire Warlock and focus more on save-or-lose effects than direct damage. Charm is excellent for a Lesser, and Noxious Blast is a really nasty one that takes an enemy out of the fight completely if they fail a Fortitude save--all they can do is crawl away and vomit for 10 rounds. In that case, take the Paragnostic Apostle prestige class (from Complete Champion--it's easy to qualify for, full progression, and boosts your save DCs) and replace Mortalbane with Ability Focus (Eldritch Blast).

[Duboris]

ONE particular thing I AM interested in. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm heavily influenced by final fantasy. For those of you that know what this is, I'd be interested. A Dragoon. Someone capable of high jumps and plummeting attacks that do massive damage. I'd assumed that was fighter? I'd like to be a 2 handed Longspear user (Or glaive, or Fauchard, but definitely a piercing weapon that's 2 handed. The longer the reach, the better.) but this involves being able to use minor magic, like Jump, or such.

What would you guys suggest on that? I'm still interested in fighter, but DnD has SO MANY MORE classes to choose from than pathfinder.

[Red Fel]

ONE particular thing I AM interested in. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm heavily influenced by final fantasy. For those of you that know what this is, I'd be interested. A Dragoon. Someone capable of high jumps and plummeting attacks that do massive damage. I'd assumed that was fighter? I'd like to be a 2 handed Longspear user (Or glaive, or Fauchard, but definitely a piercing weapon that's 2 handed. The longer the reach, the better.) but this involves being able to use minor magic, like Jump, or such.

What would you guys suggest on that? I'm still interested in fighter, but DnD has SO MANY MORE classes to choose from than pathfinder.

A Dragoon, you say (http://community.wizards.com/forum/previous-editions-character-optimization/threads/1659301)?

[Troacctid]

There's the Tiger Claw discipline from Tome of Battle, used by the Swordsage and Warblade classes. The style involves leaping into the air and striking at the opponent's weak points from above with claws and claw-like weapons.

[Duboris]

From what I've gathered, all I need are the lunge-based feats, primarily, and if I really needed a jump trait, the +20 from the jump spell wouldn't hurt. I could also take something to treat my main class level as my sorcerer level for the purpose of his spell abilities, yeah? It would also give me access to shield. Only issue is I'd need Charisma on a Strength, Con, and Dexterity focused class... Hooray!

I need to max out my acrobatics, or jump, or whatever DnD has to offer. For now, let's just keep it to core. What do you guys suggest?

[Troacctid]

Core has very little support for Jump--it's basically a worse version of flight. There's the Jump spell, the Ring of Jumping and its improved version, and I guess Mental Leap, if SRD counts. Leap of the Heavens, if you include Player's Handbook II. And anything that increases your land speed gives a bonus too. But there's nothing that really keys off of how well you can jump, besides your basic "You can jump over bigger obstacles."

Outside of Core, you have Leap Attack (http://dndtools.eu/feats/complete-adventurer--54/leap-attack--1741/), which is a pretty good incentive. Combine it with Shock Trooper (http://dndtools.eu/feats/complete-warrior--61/shock-trooper--2614/) and pounce--via the Spirit Lion Totem alternate class feature for Barbarian (from Complete Champion), the Ranger/Druid spell Lion's Charge (Spell Compendium), or the Psychic Warrior (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/classes/psychicWarrior.htm) power Psionic Lion's Charge (SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/psionicLionsCharge.htm))--for best results.

[Duboris]

What class do you believe would be best suited to becoming good at plunging, lunging, jumping and falling?

[Xerlith]

Warblade with Tiger Claw focus.
Ubercharger barbarian with Leaping Strike.
Any charger with Battle Jump.

The most jump-y is the Tiger Claw discipline, I think.

Just play the Hood from the link above, seriously. It's a staple classic.

[Duboris]

I'm just wondering if it would be difficult to get it past a dm is all. There's a lot of crunch there.

[Xerlith]

This is another GREAT difference from Pathfinder. Generally, in PF you want to stick to one class, since it gives you the favored class benefits and more class level-dependent abilities.
D&D on the other hand encourages multiclassing greatly. Really, Prestige Classes are mostly a great improvement for most characters, well, contrary to how Pathfinder works.

A build with two-three base classes and the same number of PRCs is quite common, you see.

[Ivanhoe]

I'm just wondering if it would be difficult to get it past a dm is all. There's a lot of crunch there.

Well, this could be helped (also your OP intention to just use core rules) by the following build:
Barbarian 1/Sorcerer 4/Dragon Disciple 10/anything 5

By level 2, you could then with the spell expeditious retreat have a speed of 70ft, resulting easily in a jump check bonus in the 20s. Use some sorcerer spells for warlock fluff (blasting up to 2nd level spells). Focus on STR, put a 14 in CHR, get a two-handed reach weapon with power attack feat and you are set.
The barbarian and fighting style will also cover a "fighter feel".

[Extra Anchovies]

If you're new to D&D, then Warlock is actually a pretty good class to choose. There's virtually no bookkeeping (all of your primary abilities are at-will, no need to spend the first half hour of every session looking through the spell lists), the list of invocations is short (especially when compared to lists of spells and/or bonus feats) but not overly limiting, and you don't really need to multiclass or take prestige classes to remain relevant (although a dip into binder and some levels of Hellfire Warlock will help you keep up if your party is mid/high-optimization). Also they're just oozing with coolness.

3.5 Fighter has a better feat progression than PF fighter, true. But it's still not enough to save it. If you want an Intimidate-focused build, nine levels of fighter is great (for those Zhentarim Fighter substitution levels), and six levels with the Dungeoncrasher variant is great, but a single-classed fighter is usually outpaced by the other combat classes at the mid/high levels.

[Duboris]

So, if I were to make it a point to play a Warlock with 28 point buy who didn't focus on using a Glave, and just cast his explosions round-by-round, what would the Giant playground suggest I do? I'm not going for Munchkin level death here, but I do want to consistently put out level-appropriate damage. Doesn't matter how simple it looks on paper, I get most of my color out of roleplay, anyway.

[bekeleven]

The only stats you'll need a are dexterity (AC and ranged touch attacks), charisma (invocation save DCs), and constitution. And you can get away without charisma if you want to, say, to have more skill points. Warlocks lack diplomacy but have a number of other good skills, like use magic device and bluff. 16/14/14/14/8/8, for instance, is a good spread for warlock with 8s in strength and wisdom; 16 to whatever other stat you like the most, I'd go with dex or charisma myself.

As for good damage:

Chaucible of fell power (1D6 or 2D6)
Hellfire Warlock (+2D6/level, 3 levels)
Mortalbane (+2D6 5/Day)
You can do a partial skirmish build if you like, since skirmish adds to your blast, but it can get complicated. Generally Chameleon is the only recommended dip for warlock (Warlock 15/Hellfire 3/Chameleon 2 in some order).

When you go into hellfire warlock, spend a couple K on rods of bodily restoration (Magic Item Compendium), or wands/eternal wands of lesser restoration. So long as you don't hellfire blasts a dozen rounds in a row without healing, you'll be fine.

[Troacctid]

Make sure to take Eldritch Chain to hit multiple targets and Vitriolic Blast so that you can bypass spell resistance.

[Extra Anchovies]

Make sure to take Eldritch Chain to hit multiple targets and Vitriolic Blast so that you can bypass spell resistance.

Both very good. Also, avoid Eldritch Cone/Eldritch Line; ranged touch with no save is always better than forcing a save with no attack rolls. Also pick up Relentless Dispelling to shut down enemy defensive buffs.