3.5e: The Prestige Classes of the Complete Warrior
The Complete Warrior was a book of all time. All the Complete books had their virtues and their vices, but the Complete Warrior was one of the first attempts by the designers in the lifespan of 3.5 to try and introduce some juice to the least powerful part of the game that was also, fundamentally, the most vital and popular. People love their human fighters, they love swords and they love archery and they love doing the cool fantasy things that wizards donβt do.
The Complete Warrior was a book that brought with it tools for the non-spellcaster, and how good or bad a job it did of it notwithstanding, one of the things it brought was a host of prestige classes. A prestige class is something like a Paragon path, but more retrictive and harder to implement. You need to fulfill requirements to get into it, and then each one gives you powers or benefits at irregular intervals.
I thought itβd be fun to look at them.
And then I found there were 30 of them.
Be pretty silly to look at all 30 of them, right? Pretty silly to take all these dusty archaic game pieces and one-by-one them to a general audience and discuss their design limitations or the idea of class fantasy, right?
Have to be a bit of a goober for that?
Bear Warrior
A barbarian whose rage is so potent they turn into a bear.
The Bear Warrior is a great place to start the list. It is 100% perfectly fine; you give up late-game Barbarian perks, your skills arenβt quite the same, and in exchange you get to do something that is new and cool but builds on what you were already going to do. Anything you ask a Barbarian to do, a Bear Warrior can do probably do about as well, but, and this is important, the Bear Warrior gets to transform into a big fighting bear.
Class fantasy fulfilled, mechanically reasonable, and doesnβt demonstrate an ignorance of the game rules.
Bladesinger
An artful melee spellcaster who can cast spells while fighting.
3.5 D&D had a longstanding puzzle for optimisers about how to make a type of character we called a βgishβ β a fighting spellcaster that could cast high-level spells, and fight in combat. The idea was a novel one that still appeals to me, since the power to do either side is going to be consumed by the things you need to feed the other half. The Bladesinger is one of many, many prestige classes in this tradition, and itβs actually decent.
This fulfills the class fantasy of being an elf, with a sword, casting spells and fighting at the same time. The name βBladesingerβ has some truly broken history (back in 2e it was amazing), and this version carries that name, doesnβt make unreasonable demands of you to get access to it and delivers on the theme.
I kind of think of the Bladesinger now as a sort of robust middle-of-the-road gish class. It will do everything you need, it wonβt ask you to do anything weird to get it, and while thereβs more powerful and more flexible versions, thereβs nothing wrong about using it and you get to do something most other gishes donβt (cheat the action economy).
Cavalier
A mounted knight who is good at being a mounted knight.
Hereβs where we begin one of the first real drive-into-a-ditch problems of the Complete Warrior. See, Paladins are appealing to people who want to fight in melee, and that means there are some prestige options here for improving Paladins. This one, the Cavalier, is really only good if you are a Paladin, because mounted combat without a Paladinβs special mount options involves transporting around a mundane animal with maybe thirty hit points that can be crisped by a fireball.
What you get out of this class when you jump into is, uh, being a good mounted combatant. Like Paladins mostly already are. I want to give this modest praise for specialising, but the problem is, the Paladin who doesnβt take this route eventually gets Holy Sword, which is really amazing for charging cavalry Paladins, and this class doesnβt get Holy Sword.
It can get Holy Sword through wands I guess?
Dark Hunter
A hunter, but roguey.
Hey, hang on, hold this for a second.
Darkwood Stalker
A rogue, but huntery.
Alright, back. The Darkwood Stalker and Dark Hunter are close to each other in both what theyβre doing and how worthless they are. They are both melee combatants that want to be good at stealth and reward that stealth with combat options that make you better from stealth, using the time honoured tradition of Sneak Attack. Know what else gets Sneak Attack? The Rogue, and the Rogue is a standard class that doesnβt need prestige class requirements. Itβs also really good. In fact if you want to, taking a Rogue and specialising to make it tougher and better at melee will yield a better version of both of these prestige classes than sticking them onto a Ranger or Fighter or whatever ever could.
Oh, and the Darkwood Stalker brings in race-specific combat abilities, which is uh, bad. It gets a death attack which is terrible since it requires three turns of anticipation, only targets orcs, and gives a save-or-die. It is an ability whose upside is probably not as good as three multi-turn attacks, and itβs your capstone ability for donβt bother.
Bonus: When you get it, wizards have already had access to a spell that can save-or-die any target, even if itβs not an orc, and they get it at level nine.
Dervish
A fleet-footed combat dancer who moves through a battlefield to a rhythm that makes them untouchably dangerous.
The Dervish is a really cool class fantasy, it lets you specialise in something most fighters want, and it presents you with an interesting puzzle to solve if you want to use it well. Basically, you can attack and move, and you can do more attacks and more moves, but you have to be able to move into a new square every time, and you canβt move back into the last square you were in.
To maximise your Dervishing you need to map through a combat and the result is both effective and satisfying. Amazing class, absolutely worth the effort to get into it, and it makes you good at either enormous targets with uncomplicated terrain around them (like giants and dragons) or really widely spread out weak targets. Thing is, thereβs a lot more than just those two options, and it gives you room to screw up and get yourself put somewhere really dangerous if youβre reckless.
Shame about the slightly racialised name.
Drunken Master
Youβve seen that guy in a Jackie Chan movie? Yeah, like that!
Oh boy, speaking of racialised names.
The Drunken Master is a monk prestige class that gives the monk the ability to fight with improvised weapons. This is something that the monk could already do through narrative description (hitting people into things like benches, tables, and ladders) but donβt worry, the Drunken Master is here to let you do that exact thing, but not as well.
This class is fine, but itβs not better than the base class it comes from.
Exotic Weapon Master
Well you tell me I shouldnβt pick up three exotic weapon proficiencies, but what if I did, mom?
This class is a big pile of special options but isnβt worth it. Nothing it unlocks is as good as you can get from other prestige classes that are less demanding. Exotic weapons are, largely, not worth using, since they are weapons and therefore they are all balanced around not making longswords and two-handed swords redundant, and that means that the best you can do is the Jovar or Bastard Sword, which are the same thing but slightly better. All the other fancy cool looking weapons fall behind on the math, and in some cases by a lot.
Remember, the tonfa is a club and itβs an βexotic weaponβ in this system.
This is a bunch of feats that arenβt good enough, in a trenchcoat, and should have been a modal feat instead.
Eye of Gruumsh
Hating elves and depth perception is a personality.
Stick your eye out! Become an Eye of Gruumsh! Get the special powers of Being Good At Fighting, which you already were!
Look, sometimes something exists to be a flavour option and then the designer gives up on making it so thereβs any reason to want that flavour. This is what sometimes gets called an NPC prestige class; something that only exists so NPCs can take it to make them more interesting or specific as a combat encounter for players. You have to play a bad heritage to get into this class, then you have to focus on a bad weapon, and then you have to impose a material penalty on yourself, and then with all that, you get a perk thatβs not useful as a player.
Bonus, the class is racist. Its bonuses are focused on being better at fighting elves.
Frenzied Berserker
The fantasy of raging so hard you hit teammates with an actual payoff.
The first big flaring red light of βthis is a problemβ class in the book, though not necessarily for reasons you might imagine. The Frenzied Berserker is an extremely strong melee combatant whose drawback is that other players who donβt respect what you do can get hurt.
This is a bummer.
For them.
This is a rare example of a prestige class that is, ostensibly, delivering on what it promises and what it delivers is worth waiting for. Itβs for people who want to play an out-of-control rager who is a danger to themselves and others. Where it gets weird is that by ignoring death rules, it can do some odd things with a bucket of water if youβre the kind of DM who doesnβt hold the reigns tight enough to say βI know the rules say you can return to 0 hp by sticking your head in a bucket, Dave, but we both know you know thatβs stupid.β
Gnome Giant-Slayer
How do we compensate gnomes for being awful at fighting the things they should want to fight all the time?
Structurally, it is weird that the Complete Warrior got this when the gnome handbook, Races of Stone could have used it more. Then again, saying anyone could use this is overstating it, because nobody needed it. This is a prestige class about making one specific type of small character better at fighting big things, which seems a skillset that should be generalised and not at all related to a specific heritage.
This is also something like the fourth prestige class so far that wants the feat Spring Attack. Itβs almost like thatβs the only thing fighters can do that the designers can point to as a desireable prerequisite.
Halfling Outrider
The triple union of horse girl, good boy, and hobbit superiority.
Iβve written about this one before! The Halfling Outrider is part of the Supermount design, which didnβt exist until after this book was made. Itβs a perfectly good class without that, and it does something the Cavalier doesnβt do β in that itβs something you can get into from multiple points and provides a reason to do so.
Hulking Hurler
Want to throw things at people? Like, really big things?
Okay, deep breath.
The Hulking Hurler is one of the most broken things in this book, and I mean broken as in βrules donβt work this way normally.β The Hulking Hurler gets the ability to throw objects as improvised weapons, which then deals damage based not on the objectβs design, but rather based on the objectβs weight, and thatβs a stat that scales up.
A 400 pound object, when flung, deals 5d6 damage. If itβs sharp, like a stalactite or jagged rock, itβs doubled, meaning that youβre flinging 10d6 damage at level 7. For a Hulking Hurler to fling one of those you need a strength of around 23, and it goes up from here. There are magic items for improving your carrying capacity, and for storing large items. Thing is, this number here is where the normal table maxes out, and carrying capacity and object weight damage do not scale up in the same way. When your strength goes 10 times over the cap in the book (so if you can hit 39), your carrying capacity quadrouples, and the damage goes up by 1d6 per 200 pounds. You start needing to do algebra homework on your damage dealing.
This gets ridiculous combined with the War Hulk prestige class from the Miniatures Handbook, but itβs worth remembering that even without that combo, this is still introducing into one whole combat economy (hit points and strength mods) another unrelated one (weight capacity).
Hunter of the Dead
A holy warrior that casts spells and purges the undead. Paladin? No, shh.
Sometimes a prestige class has a clear conceptual flavour but not a good way to deliver on it. This, for example, should probably just be a Paladin variant.
Invisible Blade
A sneaky stealthy fighter who fights with two daggers.
Thereβs a body of classes that are about giving you an existing feature, but worse. In this case, the class gives you sneak attack, but only with daggers, and then a way to surrender that sneak attack for a worse effect. Cool idea, but piss-poor execution meaning itβs just not worth it to care. Giving up 1d6 sneak attack for 1 point damage over time effect means that you have to wait 3 rounds to, on average, catch up with just sneak attacking.
Also, the Invisible Blade can add its intelligence to its AC, but that bonus is capped by its class level.
Essentially, this class has some cool ideas (bleeding sneak attacks and nimble defenses) but made sure to make them suck in case people got too eager to play with them. After all, this is the fighter book, not a wizard book.
Justiciar
Youβre a fucking cop.
The ability to deal nonlethal safely (kinda nice, maybe worth a feat with some other perk), and then improvements to tying people up mid-combat, presenting a unique form of control that trades turns of damage knocking someone out for a few turns of grappling them in the hopes they then wonβt escape artist or strength their way out of your restraints.
Itβs a gimmick.
Itβs probably a gimmick for an NPC.
If youβre really into the idea of dealing nonlethal damage, unarmed combat has plenty of support. The sap isnβt terrible. Hell, know how else you can do nonlethal damage? With the Merciful Enchantment from the Dungeonmasterβs Guide, which lets you inflict nonlethal safely and freely. and you can just buy it with gold.
Crippling strike is cool, but itβs not worth the investment of this class. A point of stat damage is also, something you can put on a weapon enchantment.
Also youβre a cop.
Kensai
Spiritually attuned weapon masters who want to express a really cool element of their weapon.
Itβs kind of embarrassing how mystical this one has to be to justify what it is.
The Kensai is good at their weapon. Itβs not always a sword, but this is 3.5, if you care about weapons, you care about swords. The Kensai is overwhelmingly going to be about doing a good job with its sword. The Kensai can spend experience to improve their sword, customising it without ever having to hand it to a wizard, and, spent right, this can be useful to bust through economy barriers. Depends on how your DM wants to handle XP I suppose.
Anyway, the Kensai also gets some cool abilities like using a concentration check to improve their body or transfer perks to allies, or do cool things with their attacks. Itβs a good system and it casts its shadow onto 4th editionβs encounter and daily combat powers, which of course, nobody before 4e knew anything about.
Knight of the Chalice
A holy warrior that casts spells and purges demons. Paladin? No, shh.
Sometimes a prestige class has a clear conceptual flavour but not a good way to deliver on β hey wait I said this already. But itβs true! Itβs a more specialised Paladin that doesnβt pay out worth the effort.
Look, demon hunting Paladin wannabes. If you want to attack outsiders, if you want your powers to be better at hurting outsiders, donβt look at your shitty spellcasting. Get a weapon and cast Holy Sword on it.
Knight Protector
A knight, who tries to protect people.
This is largely just alright, but it is important that this class is trying out ideas for aggro management that would become important in 4e when they were put in place more structurally.
Master Thrower
A thrower who is good at it.
Absolute piss.
This is here to make throwing weapons good, because throwing weapons are good in fantasy fiction because throwing weapons looks cool in fantasy movies. But the game system is not set up for that, because throwing weapons arenβt one of the chosen good types of weapons to do, like a longsword.
If you want to attack things at range, a lot, with a cool weapon nobodyβs noticing, play a cleric, get into archery, and make your weapon invisible. The class fantasy here is obvious, and the delivery is terrible, but donβt worry, the alternative is also bad.
Master of the Unseen Hand
The powerful urge to use telekinesis to smash people into walls like a big splatty hand.
Hello, wizard prestige class, what are you doing here?
Well I know what youβre doing here, youβre trying to make something wizardy that feels fighty. The Master of the Unseen Hand gets to use the Telekinesis power and use it like a weapon at range. Thatβs really cool, and lets you do things like pick people up and throw them out of combat so hard they leave their boots behind (as per the class fantasy art). The way it works is a bit wonky, so talk to your DM ahead of time about whether it works the way it states it works or the way it seems to want to work.
You can even do something cool with this one! You wanna know how? It involves your character taking on levels of Savage Progression as a ghost.
Want to be good at this prestige class? Just die!
Mindspy
A spy, for minds, because high concept is hard.
What the hell is this doing here.
The Mindspy is an inexplicable rogue class sitting in the fighter book because I guess we needed some good space filler, to go along with the Cavalier, Hunter of the Dead and Knight of the Chalice.
Natureβs Warrior
A dangerous form-shifting warrior that stalks the woods and uses the forms of animals to attack its foes.
A class for augmenting wildshape, one of the best and most broken abilities the Druid has access to. Druids advance their wildshape by levelling up as Druid, and doing so also brings with it all the Druidic spellcasting and the other class abilities they get, which is pretty good and cool, even if you donβt get more base attack bonus. You have to ask yourself if youβd rather iterate one attack or get the full monster attack pattern that a bear or smilodon gets.
Point is, if you can wildshape, you wanna stay in the best class in the game for wildshape.
Still, itβs potentially useful for a ranger that wildshapes.
Occult Slayer
Wizards hate him, because of this one weird trick.
Noticing that wizards were better than all melee combatants, some classes were designed like competing organisms in an ecosystem. This is a fighter who is meant to be better at fighting wizards, which would scare wizards a lot if they had to ever care about things that made saving throws when they could just impose a bunch of negative levels with a level 4 spell.
Itβs very hard to compete with an apex predator because theyβre apexes for a reason. What a fighter could do is tackle a wizard with a grapple, but that might not work more than once. Youβd need to be really good at grappling.
Order of the Bow Initiate
A kind of archery monk.
One of many classes that imagines swapping multiple attacks for single bigger attack is good. Since it doesnβt use skirmish or sneak attack (which both can be multiplied), and its overall damage output is extra d8s instead of extra d8s+all bonuses, itβs only good for overwhelming enormous damage resistance, which doesnβt exist in 3.5.
Unless youβre trying to shoot your way through something with hardness.
Basically, this is the class for shooting a castle wall to death, and that would be cool as hell, but nobody wants to do that. Itβs a perfectly reasonable tool for a bad job.
Purple Dragon Knight
A refugee from the world of Faerun, with the knights of Cormyr, whose lore is large and tedious.
Novelty here is that thereβs the dawn of another 4e mechanic (a challenge). Otherwise it gets to live alongside the Cavalier, and the other Knights, just generic mish-mash of βkinda a Paladin, but not as good.β
Rage mage
You wouldnβt want me to cast spells when Iβm angry.
Know what spellcasters love? Losing spellcaster levels.
What the Rage Mage does as a class fantasy is be able to rage and also to cast spells. This is a thing that is perfectly reasonable to want to do and a novelty as a class, but doing so involves splitting your focus to get into the class and then making your execution of that class role worse, because youβre giving up spellcaster levels to do it.
Terrible idea, back to the drawing board, fix all.
Ravager
Servants of a god of pain that get to be good at inflicting and sharing pain.
I suppose the best I can say about the Ravager is that it lives up to its class pitch. Itβs just a class whose prestige ability is βdo a bit more damage.β Itβs another class that doesnβt compare well to (say) sneak attack, which is a repeating theme in this book of how many of these prestige classes could be replaced by just multiclassing rogue a little.
These four level classes are really bad.
Reaping Mauler
A grappling specialist.
Oh hey, itβs that thing that the Occult Slayer wishes it could do. The Reaping Mauler is straightforward, focused, and good at what it wants to do. Weird name, considering it neither reaps nor mauls, but what are you going to call some kind of specialist at wrestling and grappling? Thereβs no good word for such a thing, right?
Ronin
Samurai have codes of conduct; what if they fail to live up to them?
A samurai prestige class, which is to say, letβs take a piss-bad class and give it a weak prestige class that doesnβt improve its biggest problems. It does follow neatly in the tradition of the samurai, which is worse than a fighter, by giving it a prestige class thatβs worse than a blackguard and worse than just multiclassing rogue.
Werenβt we just talking about that?
Spellsword
A wizard, a sword, some armour.
Hey, remember that Gish discussion from all the way up in the Bs, with the Bladesinger? Yeah! This is another example of a gish, trying to fix the 3e prestige class of the same name. Sadly, the Spellsword kind of sucks compared to even its most mundane competition, the Eldritch Knight in the Dungeonmasterβs Guide.
The evolution of this class fantasy in 3.5 is fascinating. By the end of the gameβs life there was a core class that did this β full base attack bonus, full spellcasting, in armour, from day 1, and what they used to balance that class was its access to spells. Seems like the obvious way to do it in hindsight.
Stonelord
Dwarf fighters that lean into the aesthetic of being all about stone and rock.
One of the failures of imagination in 3.5 was that when you had to ask how to expand the fighter, you just gave it spells, and those spells replaced being a fighter. The Stonelord surrenders the feats of a fighter in the name of having access to a bunch of spells, which is something you could do with multiclassing into any number of casters, or even just buying magical items. Hell, you could multiclass rogue again, get Use Magic Device and skirt all this nonsense.
Tattooed Monk
A monk who uses tattoos to enable a host of interesting powers.
The way the Monk interacts with iterative attacks created a problem for potential multiclasses; you really needed to hit your +3 attack every 4 levels, which started at 0; that meant that youβd go 0-1-2-3, then, 3-4-5-6. That meant that if, say, you jumped into a Monk prestige class at level 6 (when most people were jumping into prestige classes) youβd get your 0-1-2-3, 3-4-4-5. Because of the special way monk attacks iterate, being at +5 at level 8 means that youβre behind on your Flurry of Blows progress, which feels weird as a way to handle that.
Anyway, yeah, itβs a monk, with tattoos. Those tattoos are cool magical abilities. Personally, Iβd handle tattoos as magical items, the way that the game eventually did, but yβknow, sure. Itβs not like a class that gives you a bunch of magical items effects is uncommon.
Itβs not good, but oh well.
Thayan Knight
A Red Wizardβs personal bodyguard.
The coolest looking class in the book, this is blatantly an NPC class. Itβs not worth taking as a player, but its abilities are really annoying to deal with when youβre fighting an enemy red wizard with one of these as a cohort. Should just be some monster abilities.
Itβs a dumb design, and a waste of book space. It tells DMs that this is how complicated and fiddly monsters need to be and that slows DMs down and makes the process harder to manage.
War Chanter
A bard whose focus shifts from generalised spells to highly effective combat buffing.
The War Chanter is a rarity in that itβs a thing that pulls you away from a spellcaster class, into a melee class and makes the transition worth it. Now, the caster class it draws from is the bard, a class whose spellcasting is usually an afterthought (or at least, a mid-thought), but the War Chanter really lays out the red carpet for the alternative. You get the full base attack bonus, better hit dice, and immediately get a way to toughen up in combat. Also, the requirements are positively reasonable.
Essentially, this lets you play a bard who fights, and sings as they fight in a way that everyone who hears it appreciates it or fears it. You get better songs than default bards, and you get to benefit from it yourself, and you get to mix and match them together as you level. Hell, the final ability is incredible, letting you turn a gaggle of nobodies into characters who fight as fighters of your level, making them amazing for amplifying pets and cohorts as well!
Warshaper
A shapeshifter who practices ways to make their body warping more powerful.
What the fuck is the Natureβs Warrior doing in this book when the Warshaper is here.
The Warshaper is a short class, which breaks the trend for those in that itβs good. It improves your ability to shapeshift, but it lets you access that shapeshifting in a variety of ways. That means your wildshape forms are stronger but if you say, are a character with inherent Alter Self or some kind of Polymorph effect, that counts too.
Look, the Warshaper isnβt good enough to stop a Druid, I donβt think, but itβs still good enough for anyone else who shapeshifts to at least think about it.
Conclusion
This was stupid and fun. I shouldnβt try and do something comprehensive like this again.
β¦ though there are other Complete booksβ¦
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
