Quote Originally Posted by Wargamer View Post
Not all of us believe D&D is about trying to produce the most obscenely overpowered build possible, using every possible splatbook to munchkin one's build.
Completely random statement, but I'll humor you. If you don't care about building optimized characters, why do you care about whether or not homebrew is balanced?

Compared to the Fighter, which is a CORE class, this class is vastly superior in every way. In terms of raw combat potential, I'd argue this class beats out the Ranger and Barbarian, especially if you play as Human and take the right Feats.
Your mistake here is thinking that core is balanced to begin with! Sure, this class is probably better than a fighter almost outright, but fighters suck even in comparison to most core classes, and this class was designed, as the OP said, to be T3, which is supposed to be stronger than a fighter. It would be comically missing the design intent to make a class that is significantly worse than the fighter.

My suggestions were based on a very reliable rule of homebrew; nobody complains about underpowered house rules. Better to make it too weak and power it up than make it overpowered and have to compromise.
That isn't a tenant of homebrew at all. In all my time judging homebrew here and elsewhere, that has never been the prevailing design philosophy. If you're aiming to hit T3 in balance, the correct thing to do is not to design to be sub T5 and then ratchet it up; it's to aim at T3 and then change things either way. Intentionally making a class unbalanced one way or another just ensures it won't see play.

On the DR front, the Barbarian gets DR earlier, but they are a class limited in terms of available armour. The Storm Trooper is a tank; someone who is meant to be packing epic AC from the get-go. Throwing DR on top of a character who is supposedly hard to hit in the first place is less balanced; DR is inherently more valuable to a class that has other means of avoiding or negating damage.
Barbarians DR is absolutely irrelevant and you could remove it from them without appreciably harming anybody who takes the class. So having weaker DR than "irrelevant" isn't great. Not only that, but tanking in D&D doesn't work how you think it does, mostly in that tanking in D&D simply doesn't exist. This guy is supposed to be a frontline fighter who can take hits (which does exist in D&D), but the "tank" style character with a ton of HP, armor, and no threatening abilities doesn't work.

So yes, I do not buy the notion that "Balanced" means "should be able to pump out the same DPS as a 20th level optimised Wizard." Balanced means that it should be as useful as the nearest equivalent official classes. That means the Fighter.
I disagree on the latter and agree on the former, but since nobody was arguing for the former to begin with, it's a bit of a hollow endorsement.

Classes should be balanced towards where you want them to be balanced, and while I assume that most martial characters are shooting for T4 or T3, and most casters are shooting for T3 or T2, if the design explicitly says what it's aiming for, they should be balanced around that. You don't balance around something that isn't your design intent.