[D&D 3.5] Arcane Swordsage adaptation question

[Coidzor]

So, as a fair number of people agree, giving the proposed Arcane Swordsage adaptation in Tome of Battle unlimited spells at will as maneuvers (with or without such spell maneuvers being accessible by anyone using the feat "martial study") is pretty broken.

But a thought just occurred to me when I read this thread on class adaptations and reading Aslancross's post after scrolling past this thread on warlock invocations. Invocations are at-will, considered arcane, and viewed by most to not be broken at all.

So how bad is it for invocations to be used by a swordsage?

edit: and no, no spells available to such an arcane swordsage as I'm positing, just looking at invocations and how bad that would be.

[balistafreak]

Well... without a lot more work than "maneuvers to invocations/spells", a Swordsage1 is going to have 5 different abilities.

FIVE. Not 1, or two, but FIVE. Sure, he can only fire each once before needing to refresh it, but then again, you have FIVE infinite spells.

I'm all for seeing a homebrew fusion of invocations/melee goodness, but it'll take more work than what they gave for Arcane Swordsage to be "balanced". You'd be a preposterous Tier 3 - not Tier 2, because it's doubtful that a Swordsage would ever be allowed the "game breakers", just really good blasting - but more than likely good to the point of obsoleting every other blaster.

Unless I misremember something about the Arcane Swordsage, of course.

[Coidzor]

Well... without a lot more work than "maneuvers to invocations/spells", a Swordsage1 is going to have 5 different abilities.

FIVE. Not 1, or two, but FIVE. Sure, he can only fire each once before needing to refresh it, but then again, you have FIVE infinite spells.

Sorry, meant to posit that spells are a nonentity for this, just the idea of maneuvers to invocations. When invocations are normally freely at-will rather than needing to refresh in order to regain the use of them like maneuvers.

I'm all for seeing a homebrew fusion of invocations/melee goodness, but it'll take more work than what they gave for Arcane Swordsage to be "balanced".

I figured as much. Was mostly wondering how bad it would be compared to the normal swordsage and the zaniness of the arcane swordsage. I figured with the depowered nature of invocations there'd be some competition between maneuvers and invocations.

You'd be a preposterous Tier 3 - not Tier 2, because it's doubtful that a Swordsage would ever be allowed the "game breakers"

I didn't think there were any game-breaking invocations myself. Any come to mind?

Unless I misremember something about the Arcane Swordsage, of course.

Well, I've only read over the Arcane Swordsage in the Tome of Battle once myself, so I'm working off of fragmented memory and forum discussions for what it is.

[true_shinken]

You'd have to give arcane swordsage a lot less invocations than maneuvers, because otherwise it'd be the best invocation user in the game by far, specially considering it could swap all of it's invocations known with Adaptive Style.

Something like invocations = stances could work, maybe.

[Runestar]

Invocations would be pretty weak, IMO, since the swordsage has no EB, and thus unable to augment his melee attacks with eldritch glaive.

[true_shinken]

Invocations would be pretty weak, IMO, since the swordsage has no EB, and thus unable to augment his melee attacks with eldritch glaive.

Not at all. Warlocks need to rely on EB because they get very few invocations, but there are offensive invocations as well. They might not deal HP damage (and some do) but they can win battles by themselves.
Also 5 invocations known at level 1 means Darkness/Devil's Sight becomes very cheap... and you have Hide as a class skill.

Invocations = stances stills sounds better for me. You gain some utility but you still rely on maneuvers for offense. Maybe limit Arcane Swordsage to the more supernatural Desert Wind and Shadow Hand disciplines. Sounds about as powerful as standard Swordsage.

[Runestar]

Not at all. Warlocks need to rely on EB because they get very few invocations, but there are offensive invocations as well. They might not deal HP damage (and some do) but they can win battles by themselves

IMO, that kinda defeats the point of playing a swordsage, which is to hit people with a pointy thing and make melee fun again. So any variant should ideally preserve their ability to physically attack foes for good damage.

Arcane swordsages would achieve this with personal buffs like enlarge person, bull's str, haste and polymorph, as well as touch attacks such as shocking grasp and vampiric touch. Basically some sort of duskblade/psywarrior hybrid. It was deemed potentially game-breaking because it would eventually access 9th lv spells such as timestop and shapechange, as well as retain the ability to buff the entire party for free (at-will spells like bull's str have fairly long durations once you get a few caster lvs under your belt).

What exactly would your invocation-swordsage do?

[Coidzor]

What exactly would your invocation-swordsage do?

I must admit, part of what I was wondering what the more obvious routes by which it would be broken would be. I'm really only familiar with the lowest level invocations, but not quite as familiar with maneuvers, so I'm having difficulty seeing how to link the two together for abuse.

Maybe this is a testament to the two systems? More likely this just highlights my own lack of system mastery...