User talk:Ghostwheel/Broken Blade (3.5e Prestige Class)

Ratings
==Blegh== You asked me to take a look at this, so here you go. The header should give you a sense that this is not going to be a positive review, as I think there's a lot to dislike about it at present.

I'm not really sure why you're using that damage setup. If you went into this as a 6th level fighter and decided to TWF (which I'm not even sure you can do), you get up to 8 attacks in a round. If all of them hit for all of the rounds that your ability is active, you get up to a maximum bonus of +23 dice. Which is an impressive thing to end on, but it also means that you're hitting for an average of +11.5 bonus dice of damage per hit. If you tack on the 4th round of not attacking you need to recharge your ability, that average drops to +8.7 dice. Which is decent, but it's also your absolute best case and not really much better than a 16th level combat rogue is throwing down. If you just take out 2 hits per round, which doesn't seem unlikely given tertiaries, you're down to +6.4 dice over the 3 rounds your ability is active and +4.8 over the 4 rounds you actually need to spend to use it. And if they can't TWF, it's not even that high. In short, it's somewhat obnoxious multi-round tracking for something that is basically weaker than your alternatives.

Which brings me to the recharge. Full round action? WTF? You hate the swordsage recharge mechanic, why would you do that to someone else? What about reach and miss change reduction (which are admittedly nice) and the mediocre bonus damage justifies having to spend the 4th round of combat taking a breather? For someone who's all about decrying unfun aspects of a game, that seems a huge departure in design.

Other stuff... recall the breaking should just be part of the soul edge ability. Seriously. This class is already super weak against disarm (and apparently strong against sunder, which is all kinds of weird from a metagame standpoint), but setting them up so that if they lose their weapon in a fight or get robbed that they lose all of their class features until they gain a level is just mean. So is the concentration to keep the blade in an AMF thing. You're asking them to roll 50/50ish (assuming similar CRs) checks with a skill that they probably didn't have before they started taking levels in the class, and if they fail one they lose most of the class abilities. They already don't get it for very long, you may as well let them have it for the whole time.

I honestly don't see how this class is rogue level. It looks like you took a fighter and gave them a couple of thugy things in exchange for all of their bonus feats, and like they didn't make out particularly well in the trade. The teleport blade and teleport to blade abilities are interesting (and should maybe be (Su)), as are the aforementioned miss chance reduction and reach, but they're not enough. If it's just supposed to stand there and hack at people, it needs more damage or some combat options (like it would have sort of gained from the lost feats) or something. Something to do if they don't feel like spending the really long recharge action or lose their weapon before they can summon it back (or it gets taken out of range) would be a really nice thing. It's just way too dependent on a weapon that isn't even all that impressive as it stands. - Tarkisflux Talk 03:48, 19 March 2012 (UTC)