If we gave the 3e fighter the 5e solution , how would it help in the standings?

[CyberThread]

I know fighter is pretty much not loved, other then swinging a sword and all the lovely feats the class is rather bland and lacks some very fundamental abilties without degrading the other martial classes abilties, if we kept the rule that +20 bab is the highest that can go through class leveling and we increased the number of swings the class gets instead of decreasing how many other classes get would it let the fighter be a more specialized role?



Class Ability :Blades of the trained : At 6th ,12th , 18th, the fighter may take one extra attack with no BAB penalty, this option may only be used with a full attack option.




So here is what am looking at. Most full BAB classes get the extra swing going on at around 6th, 11th, 16th this would shadow a bit different as going about the problem of making it a class ability instead of a full blow problem .


So with the class ability a fighter would be looking at a full attack option being

6th : +6/+6/+1
12th : +12/+12/+12/+7/+2
18th : +18/+18/+18/+13/+8/+3



I fully understand this would make the class really hard up on the, I swing a sword and do nothing else problem, especially with the skill set but if the fighter is really going to be the trope of just being a fighter. It should get that weapon advantage outside of just being able to chose more feats then other classes get as often.

[TheIronGolem]

Some builds might make the jump from tier 5 to low Tier 4. Other than that, nothing would change fundamentally.

[Troacctid]

If you're using the 5e solution, why did you limit it to full attacks?

[OldTrees1]

If you base Fighter around the Full Attack then you need 4 things that scale with level
1) Ability to Full Attack(you will notice a Full Attack is merely a Standard Action in 5e) this means reaching your target with enough time left to make a Full Attack.
2) The number of attacks
3) The versatility of a melee attack(Clarification: the kind that can be used in a full attack)
4) Who can be affected by the effects of a melee attack

Now it is already possibly to make Fighters that get enough attacks per round. That is the easy part, the hard part is the versatility of a melee attack. Without much thought I can name: damage, trip, knockback, grapple, cower, daze, nauseate, and stagger. While that is more versatility than is usually assumed, it is not enough.

However that, if successful will be capped at Tier 4. For Tier 3 Fighter will need something for each non combat situation(skills can help here but not with the current list/number).

[CyberThread]

If you base Fighter around the Full Attack then you need 4 things that scale with level
1) Ability to Full Attack(you will notice a Full Attack is merely a Standard Action in 5e) this means reaching your target with enough time left to make a Full Attack.
2) The number of attacks
3) The versatility of a melee attack(Clarification: the kind that can be used in a full attack)
4) Who can be affected by the effects of a melee attack

Now it is already possibly to make Fighters that get enough attacks per round. That is the easy part, the hard part is the versatility of a melee attack. Without much thought I can name: damage, trip, knockback, grapple, cower, daze, nauseate, and stagger. While that is more versatility than is usually assumed, it is not enough.

However that, if successful will be capped at Tier 4. For Tier 3 Fighter will need something for each non combat situation(skills can help here but not with the current list/number).



A tier 3 fighter would need a better skill selection with the possibility of throwing some non-combat spell utility, at that point you may as well just create a new class.

[OldTrees1]

A tier 3 fighter would need a better skill selection with the possibility of throwing some non-combat spell utility, at that point you may as well just create a new class.

I noticed you didn't mention the meat of my post. If your goal is merely Tier 4, then that section was highly relevant.

[Morty]

More attacks is the one thing fighters do not need.

[BowStreetRunner]

What hurts fighters most in the optimization tiers is not their ability to do damage (which more attacks would help) but rather their ability to be useful in a wide range of situations (which more attacks does nothing to resolve). Personally, I always found this to be a particularly annoying representation of the 'warrior' types throughout history. Most had a wide range of martial skills that had nothing to do with swinging a weapon but would come in handy in other situations. Areas of knowledge such as Logistics, Signal, and Engineering/Siege-craft were widely understood by a broad range of military units, and most had sentries who could easily manage their spot/listen checks even against a skilled rogue!

[CyberThread]

What hurts fighters most in the optimization tiers is not their ability to do damage (which more attacks would help) but rather their ability to be useful in a wide range of situations (which more attacks does nothing to resolve). Personally, I always found this to be a particularly annoying representation of the 'warrior' types throughout history. Most had a wide range of martial skills that had nothing to do with swinging a weapon but would come in handy in other situations. Areas of knowledge such as Logistics, Signal, and Engineering/Siege-craft were widely understood by a broad range of military units, and most had sentries who could easily manage their spot/listen checks even against a skilled rogue!



Such things like the samauari, historically would be more a ranger then any sort of fighter.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Such things like the samauari, historically would be more a ranger then any sort of fighter.
See, that's the issue right there. The Fighter doesn't lack the ability to kill things (I mean, it's not so hot, but it works pretty well at all but high optimization tables), he lacks everything else. Why? Because as soon as someone comes up with something the Fighter could, potentially, they or someone else say "oh, that's really more of a [other class] thing."

[OldTrees1]

See, that's the issue right there. The Fighter doesn't lack the ability to kill things (I mean, it's not so hot, but it works pretty well at all but high optimization tables), he lacks everything else. Why? Because as soon as someone comes up with something the Fighter could, potentially, they or someone else say "oh, that's really more of a [other class] thing."

Well it is lacking some in that area too even at mid optimization tables(has to reach the target first which is sometimes difficult and then relies on Combat Reflexes or Pounce since it can't get a full attack in otherwise).

But you are right about the everything else.

[DMVerdandi]

Op, Honestly... One level dip of Barbarian for pounce is so much more valuable.

Secondly, as everyone said, fighter blows because not only can he be superseded by a lot of other classes in what he does best, but outside of that, it is a poor representation of someone with martial training.



Wanna make a better fighter without relying on TOB[Because the better fighter was already made, and it's called warblade]?



Take Barbarian Hit die, Pounce and Ferocity(from Cityscape)
Take Rogue Skills and skill points, Sneak attack, and trap finding,
Take Chameleon Bonus feat. Give it at level 1, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20.

Either remove the classes, or don't allow it to take levels in barbarian, fighter, or rogue.
Finished.

That thing would be a monster, and honestly, even so, barely scratches T3.
The problem is that the fighter was written as some kind of man-at-arms without any actual ability.
That^ That is a killer of things. Which is what the fighter should have been in the first place. An expert in the art of murder and war. And to excel at those things, you have to have skill, drive, and guile.
The sad thing was all the tools were right in our faces the whole time, they were just separated into three classes.
The thing is, the sum is greater than it's individual parts. You mix Barb/Rogue/Fighter together into one cohesive class, and by god... Didn't need to home-brew any new abilities or nothing. Just mash pre-existing ones together and it is good.


For all those uneducated simple stick-swingers, those are Warrior NPC's.
Fighter should have been ELITE from the jump. It should essentially be a super soldier, not just a regular one.

[Psyren]

See, that's the issue right there. The Fighter doesn't lack the ability to kill things (I mean, it's not so hot, but it works pretty well at all but high optimization tables), he lacks everything else. Why? Because as soon as someone comes up with something the Fighter could, potentially, they or someone else say "oh, that's really more of a [other class] thing."

I agree, and that leads to another question in my mind. I often see Warblade mentioned as the Fighter fix, and it's indeed much better at fighting, but it seems to me they are just as subject to the above as Fighters are; they're really good at killing things and lack everything else. Okay, they get more skill points and probably get a little more Int, but if that's all it took we could just have Fighters budget for a headband of intellect and call it a day.

[atemu1234]

It makes them better, but probably not enough to increase tier.

[Taelas]

The primary ways to make the Fighter more relevant is to give it more survivability options and expand its skill selection.

Up its HD to d12, give it good Reflex and Will saves on top of its good Fort save, and give it Spot and Listen as class skills (also, increase its skill points from 2+ to 4+).

Evasion/Improved Evasion probably wouldn't hurt, either. They would even fit as Fighter-only feats (though making more of those is problematic in and of itself).

Last, let it make a Full Attack as a standard action, and at the end of a charge.

This is probably not enough to make it to tier three, but in my opinion, it's closer to what the Fighter ought to be.

[137beth]

It would not help at all.

You've just made the fighter better at dealing hit-point damage. Dealing damage, especially on a full attack, is the one thing fighters can already do really well. Being able to deal even more damage won't help them ('really dead' is no different form 'dead').

You need to improve their versatility to improve their tier.

[Emperor Tippy]

More attacks isn't a solution in and of its self. More rounds of actions does a lot more because in addition to being extra attacks it is extra movement, extra skill uses, extra magic item use, extra delayed actions, extra specialized attacks, etc.

And in my experience, even giving a Fighter as many rounds of actions per turn as he has Fighter levels still isn't really enough for him to solidly punch through the Tier 3 border. To reach that point I've found that as many extra rounds of actions per turn as he has Fighter levels needs to go along with the ability to just outright negate/ignore something that would effect him a number of times per encounter, relatively decent DR /-, a relatively minor Fast Healing ability, a lot of extra sensory abilities (tremorsense, blind sight, scent, dark vision, etc.), the Monk's Purity of Body and Diamond Body, and an extra ability point every level for the Fighter to assign however he would like (so 20 extra ability points at level 20).

All of that makes a Tier 3 Fighter. At least when combined with reasonable feat and item selections.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Take Barbarian Hit die, Pounce and Ferocity(from Cityscape)
Take Rogue Skills and skill points, Sneak attack, and trap finding,
Take Chameleon Bonus feat. Give it at level 1, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20.
I've toyed with the idea of gestalting it with Factotum, and then taking away the magic to give you a Batman-style master of the mundane. Fighter gives the Factotum the (non-Iajatsu Focus) offensive punch it needs, while Factotum gives the Fighter all the out-of-combat utility it needs.

[Inevitability]

In 3.5, the main problem with fighters is not 'being useless in combat'. Fighters can outperform many other classes in direct combat, especially with standard WBL in gear.

Giving fighters more attacks but changing nothing else would do two things:

-Make new players think 'ZOMG this class is crazy good' and making them play a still awful class.
-Make fighters slightly more interesting in combat-focused games, although they'd still be useless outside of them.

[Morty]

Fighter, as a class, shouldn't exist. It had a place (maybe) when the only other ones were Magic-User, Thief and Cleric, but now it doesn't. If you make a heroic fantasy game based on classes, it's not a good decision to make a class whose only defining feature is that there's nothing special about it.

That said, a better class would also need a functional combat model and a system that doesn't trip it up at every turn.

[pwykersotz]

The 5e fighter works better because of the 5e paradigm of how magic works and how classes scale. In my opinion it would have no significant benefit being migrated to 3.5 without also bringing the other system modifications, at which point the whole game changes.

Other than that, what the others said above.

[Psyren]

Fighters don't need to be T3. T4 is fine for a martial-focused class. Presumably, the guy playing Fighter (or Barbarian for that matter) picked such a class because they want to be the group's bruiser and don't actually care about all the skill and face crap. Otherwise they'd be like, a diplomatic Paladin or a combat-heavy Bard or something.

I think they should be bumped up to 4+Int just so they can fit in all the traversal-type skills with a small amount of Int (Climb, Acrobatics, Swim, Perception etc.) and they should have more interesting choices to make round-to-round than "I charge," "I full attack" and "I try to trip him" - but you can give them all those things and still have them be T4. Barbarian is already most of the way there just with rage powers.


Fighter, as a class, shouldn't exist. It had a place (maybe) when the only other ones were Magic-User, Thief and Cleric, but now it doesn't. If you make a heroic fantasy game based on classes, it's not a good decision to make a class whose only defining feature is that there's nothing special about it.

The problem isn't so much the fighter as it is the combat feats. They are pretty dull and the vast majority don't offer any meaningful scaling.

Fighter's concept - a blank slate class that can be customized into all kinds of martial prowess - could actually work well in the game: a stalwart defender, a precision archer, a savage gladiator, a tactical soldier, a whirling dervish etc. Or you can blend two or more of these styles into something very unique that is all your own.

The problem is that it's mediocre at all of that, even doing damage due to action economy, and the feats are watered down out of the necessity of keeping other classes from being better at fighting (which they manage to do anyway.)

I think a secondary system, that lets Fighters get more mileage out of combat feats than anyone else, would be the key. PF's Stamina system is a step in the right direction but I don't quite think it went far enough.