I'd also considering making a lot of per day abilities per encounter, or having a recharging pool of stuff like ki that replaces each encounter.
I like this idea alot. I might impliment that. Though in some cases, like Barbarian Rage, it seems a bit absurd to be able to do it more than once per encounter (since times per day increases). Might as well just give rage as a permanent stat bonus in that case. I guess it'd have to be only for abilities with a one round or less duration?
Barbarian actually needs the least help in this particular regard. You can easily get enough rages per day, and they tend to last for the encounter anyway. And, a simple potion or two can make up the difference as there's a spell in the SpC that solves this problem.
I can think of 2 big problems that I was aiming at. One is the "kinda neat ability but only once per day" problem. A
lot of classes and especially PrCs have this problem. Giving a low tier character a fancy spell like ability once per day does nothing to really help them, it's not like they can build their tactics and effectiveness around it.
The other problem is just the general mehness of their abilities. They either have a ton of limitations (sneak attack is kind of like this), or they don't do very much that's interesting of flexible. I'd put Barbarian's rage in this category. It's some nice boosts, but ultimately you don't get very much in the flexibility and game changers that define the Tiers system.
Just to keep with the example, the Barbarian gets strong, but he's not strong enough to reshape the battlefield in any meaningful way (he can't knock down walls or trees, etc. easily) or even lift particularly heavy stuff. And, he's still handily outclassed in this department by all his foes.
Contrast that to what he gets as a Frenzied Berserker. An even bigger stat boost, an undying fury, supreme cleave, etc. All that would make the Barbarian feel like he really had a niche, especially if you gave him some mobility abilities, too, like maybe getting a save against no-save mobility resisting abilities or even a Slippery Mind effect for them. I'd also reduce the limitations that rage imposes b/c they seem pointless to me.
One way to go about it is to go about all the various prestige classes and alternate class features and so on that people think bump things up tiers and just throw them into the regular class. JackintheGreen gives you some good examples about what abilities can be potential tier-changers. The pitfall with them is that they can be a big specific -- a dungeoncrashing scary Fighter is a nice upgrade, but it's also a very particular kind of character.
The other thing you'd need to do is figure out what feel you're comfortable with. ToB feels very wuxia (for the life of me, I can't figure out why it's more wuxia than the baseline Monk is, other than actually being able to do things, but whatever, it's not my campaign). But, one of the Barbarian "rage powers" that people like from Pathfinder and that's a little bit of a tier changer is the ability to effectively sunder spells. That might or might not work for you.
Finally, a trick that I think some retroclones do is to combine classes into one, making them archetypes or ACFs or something of each other? If you could build a wilderness warrior out of cherrypicking all of a Fighter's, Rogue's, Ranger's, and Barbarian's abilities (picking one at one level, one at another), maybe that'd be a pretty solid boost? I don't know how I'd go about doing it, but this is the kind of homebrew work that is way out of my ken.
