The Slowknife, the Swiftblade's annoying cousin (3.5 PrC PEACH)

[Thiyr]

Alright. I'll go ahead and say it works with any light melee weapon, but I'll keep the MWP: Kukri in the prereqs because of the intended flavor of the class, as well as to keep the prereqs steep.

Keeping the prereq at that point is just weirder then. Why require a specific weapon if you never need that weapon specifically? And that's not even a steep prereq. A one level dip handles it extremely easily, and that's something that a lot of people will be doing anyway.

The ability is intended to ignore the capstone of the Master of Many Forms prestige class, the Mutable Body (iirc) Changeling feat from Eberron, and etc. Shapeshifter creatures have a few different options that lets them simply ignore transmutation abilities that they don't want to happen. This ability states that those abilities don't apply to slow.

That's...an oddly specific thing to build in as a standalone ability, then. Either one racial feat or one 10-level PrC capstone just don't feel relevant enough to have an ability (the only ability on said level at that) dedicated to stopping. It's honestly something I would expect to see come up in something like maybe one of ten campaigns at best.

I disagree with you on that point.

Any reason why? Or even which part of the point you disagree with? Being able to pretty much no-cost slow every round is a lot better than haste every round, and while it's not necessarily game breaking itself, in combo with everything else, it kinda is.

This class is not better than swiftblade. Swiftblade gets miss chance, AC, two bonus feats, and the ability to cast multiple spells per round while hasted.

Miss chance is quite nice. AC is a fairly low bonus overall, even without considering AC's declining usefulness as levels progress. It gets two bonus feats, one of which is the end of a feat chain you had to take already (and isn't that good), and the other being a a way to slightly reduce (but not really) how bad spring attack is. Multiple spells per round is great, I'll grant you that, though it doesn't work in conjunction with the above bonus feats. You also forgot (Ex) haste, which is good for a class that needs haste active to use most of its abilities.

For comparison, your class gets an extremely high flat damage boost with no activation condition, allows slow to be cast every round, forces constant saves (making the odds of resisting abysmally low in conjunction with the previous point, as it causes a potential 3 save vs slow per round if needed, though that's plain excessive admittedly), and creatures that are slowed can do nothing but run away. Even if they could, though, they're getting a large reduction to accuracy and AC. Additionally, your rogue-types will now be getting free sneak attacks, which can be absurdly painful with only minor additional investment. For by-far easier prerequisites (not needing to take 2 trap feats and not needing to invest skills anywhere specific being kinda a lot easier)

That doesn't make sense to me at all. You can slow time down, so you get a boost to initiative? I'd rather it be more complicated than just flat out incorrect.

It's the same logic that I assume caused you to refer to the slowknife's superior speed in Twist the Knife. Everyone else being slower is the same as you being faster. Heck, same logic as why the swiftblade gets timestop (they're moving faster, so everyone else seems slower.) From the objective viewpoint, they're all slower. From the subjective viewpoint of those slowed by the ability, you're faster.

I appreciate all your suggestions here, but I disagree with all of them.

Okay, then I'll just say that this class is in only one way at all rogue-y, that being its flat-footing of opponents. Otherwise it's a caster-warrior who uses light weapons for little-to-no reason.

This class is based on Dio Brando, from the anime/manga Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure. He stops time. He stabs people with kukris.

I understand that point. Having never seen it, I can't say anything about accuracy, but it seems that you're having trouble separating the class from the character, though. The CHARACTER uses kukri, but from what i know of the anime, the kukri would have nothing to do with the ability to slow time. There's really little-to-no other reason to focus on the kukri at all other than "the character did it so the class must do it", when it's better design to make the kukri an option while allowing other potentially thematically appropriate weapons to work as well. If we're going for accuracy, the moment he stabs something while time is stopped, we're no longer accurate. Though honestly, the suggestion was mostly to bring the character more capacity to be rogue-y instead of just standard-gish-y, while giving it some separation from the swiftblade. That's more a matter of taste, admittedly, but the idea of making it different appeals to me overall.