Min/Max Boards

Now that you've clarified that your party does have more melee characters, plus possibly summons or undead, I have some more comments on maneuver and stance choices.  One cautionary note is that undead and plants are immune to morale effects so won't benefit from inspire courage and some White Raven maneuvers.  Having allies who benefit makes tactics of the wolf that much better.  Leading the charge is also a good stance for some parties.  Does your DM allow White Raven maneuvers that apply only to "allies" to affect you?  Tactics of the wolf definitely increases your own damage, but leading the charge only refers to allies.  The best maneuvers for boosting your allies' damage are flanking maneuver, swarming assault, and war master's charge. Clarion call can also be useful but is situational.  Leading the attack and lion's roar both have the problem that they're morale bonuses and don't stack with inspire courage, but at low levels leading the attack might still be worthwhile.  I'd move the best of those up above some of the other maneuvers you have and the others you mentioned.

I'm not convinced that assassin's stance is that great in the grand scheme of things.  There's a fair argument that it's one of the better stances available to a swordsage, or a character dipping swordsage, but you're a warblade and have better options.  You should be inspiring in every battle (see below), so wolf fang strike ought to be better than rabid wolf strike, especially once you get tactics of the wolf.  I don't know how your DM handles iron heart surge, but it takes a standard action to initiate and there are an awful lot of conditions that don't allow you to take a standard action after you fail a save against them.  The ability to preempt SoDs is better than the ability to recover from them.

The swift action activation of inspire courage from Song of the White Raven is the best feature of the feat.  Why wouldn't you use it?  What does that have to do with the number of uses of bardic music you get? The bonus from inspirational boost is not a worth a standard action.  Anyway, only having four uses of bardic music is a problem that I noticed but didn't address in my last post.  You really need more.  I'd aim for eight a day so you can use inspire courage and Snowflake Wardance in all encounters in a typical day.  You could get those from taking Extra Music once or taking more bard levels.  Are you playing in Eberron?  Song of the Heart is in ECS, and there's also a rule (34) that lets you take it instead of a bardic music ability.  Does your DM allow that?  This might be another reason to take more bard levels.  Weapon Finesse could still be useful for your character, there's no such thing as having too high an attack bonus, AC, or initiative in general.

There's no reason to max Perform unless you're taking more bard levels, or you have some other ability that depends on Perform.  I can see the argument for taking 10 ranks in Perform (dance) for Snowflake, but there's really no reason to have multiple Perform skills.  You should definitely put enough points in Jump to make sudden leap useful.

With the surge of fortune spell, you can force a critical.  Isn't there an ability that can let you use smites at range somewhere out there?  If you could stack the spell with a boosted critical multiplier on a bow, some large critical confirmation bonus, and a ranged smite, you should be able to get reasonably high damage.

The basics of your build (Dragonfire Inspiration, Song of the White Raven, TWF, Snowflake Wardance, etc.) are fine so I'm going to focus on the other elements.

What level are you starting at?  Song of the White Raven is a bit late if you're starting below 6th given how important it is.  Why you are taking four levels of bard right at the start?  You might want two for sure for inspirational boost (note that you can't use a swift action to activate inspire courage with Song of the White Raven and benefit from inspirational boost), but it's not clear to me that you want more bard levels right then, and taking bard 2/warblade 1 would let you get Song of the White Raven with your 3rd-level feat. I support the idea of taking more bard levels in general, bard has a much better skill list than warblade and spellcasting so will improve your out-of-combat utility a lot, and you may even want more than four levels in the long run, depending on what level you expect the campaign to end at.

Who else is in your party?  Should you be focusing more on maneuvers that increase your allies' damage?  I can't figure out from your choices whether you do or don't have a lot of melee allies who would benefit from White Raven maneuvers.  You have quite a few White Raven maneuvers, but your choices aren't optimized for supporting a melee party.  You're also ignoring the extremely powerful high-level maneuvers that Diamond Mind gets.  Time stands still, stance of alacrity, quicksilver motion, and moment of alacrity (if you're breaking the action economy, which you are, a lot) are all very strong.  I would rebalance your lower-level choices so you have the ability to pick up those and look again at some of the higher-level Iron Heart choices.

For specific maneuvers, I think you can make some better choices in general.  There's no reason for anyone with TWF and Tiger Claw not to take wolf fang strike as their zero-prerequisite Tiger Claw maneuver, the ability to move and still attack with both weapons is invaluable. You can swap it out later when you need more than two attacks if you're allowed.  You should grab mountain hammer at some point for carving through walls and similar, probably instead of tactical strike or douse the flames.  Fountain of blood is not very good in general, and you don't have enough of a fear focus to make it worthwhile.  (I question whether it's useful even for fear-focused characters.) Lion's roar would be better, and it's not great unless you have allies that benefit.  There are lots of other better choices, in particular lightning recovery, wall of blades, or any of the Diamond Mind counters that replace saves with Concentration checks.  Covering strike is very underwhelming for its level, if you need another White Raven maneuver for prerequisite purposes, lion's roar is also underwhelming but you can take it earlier so you can take a higher-level maneuver from another discipline at 13th level.  Better yet, consider taking a White Raven stance (see below).  You shouldn't trade out sudden leap at any level, there is never a point where the ability to move as a swift action isn't amazing for melee characters. Warmaster's charge and mountain tombstone strike aren't terrible choices, but I think that the Diamond Mind, Iron Heart, and Tiger Claw 9th-level strikes are better.

For stances, punishing stance is a bad choice for a 1st-level stance because 1d6 doesn't matter much in the long run.  Absolute steel is a bad choice because it can be replaced with a 5.5 kgp core magic item. Press the advantage is underpowered for its level, an extra 5' step simply isn't that valuable in general, and likewise so is swarm tactics, as by the time you get it, tactics of the wolf will probably do more for you.  The 1st-level stances warblade gets mostly don't age well except for hunter's sense, which is also a decent out-of-combat stance.  I'd take that over punishing stance.  If you do have melee allies, leading the charge is also a reasonable choice.  Tactics of the wolf is one of the top stances for damage and much better than punishing stance provided you have anyone to flank with, even animal companions or summons.  If you think you won't be able to get flanking, maybe pearl of black doubt?  Tactics of the wolf is really quite good, though.  For 5th-level stances, there are fewer compelling options, though hearing the air and dancing blade form are both reasonable.  The warblade's best 8th-level stance is stance of alacrity, though wolf pack tactics isn't terrible.  None of the others compare.

For feats, everything looks good, up to the order you take them in, until 12th level.  You might be able to get your hit chance high enough to make Greater TWF useful, but if you aren't hitting 50% or better with -10 to attack, it's probably not worth it.  White Raven Defense and Clarion Commander are not good feats, I'd rather dump the warblade bonus feats into Blind-Fight, the save feats, or Quick Draw, none of which are particularly compelling for your character.  Blade Meditation is also an okay choice, and you have that.  Lingering Song is bad in general for bardblades, once you activate inspire courage you don't have any reason to stop singing, and particularly useless at 18th level since by then combats will be so short.  Look at Martial Study and Stance, those feats taken at high levels on TB characters will do more than almost any other feat because high-level maneuvers are better than almost all feats.  The only other feat I'd look at taking early is Weapon Finesse, because it would let you drop Str to 10, so you could then swap the 14 to Int to use your warblade features and get some more skills, and focus all your money and level-based boosts on Dex, getting higher AC and initiative.  Edited to add: I didn't realize this was point-buy, that makes Weapon Finesse a stronger choice since you can reallocate your initial point distribution to get a high Dex.

For itemization, you have a big damage bonus from Dragonfire Inspiration, and tactics of the wolf if you take that, so you want to boost your attack bonus to compensate.  Thus, you want straight pluses on your weapons and the martial discipline mod for whatever stance you expect you'll spend most of your time in.  Your other items mostly look fine, assuming you're spending the rest of your money on the standard bonuses to stats.  The only comments I'd make are that you should ditch fearsome, you're not a fear-focused character, and make sure to pick up boots of speed at some point.  Slippers of battledancing are really not that good for most characters, they only work if you move 10' with a move action, and the only way your character can take advantage of them is with quicksilver motion, which will be very very late.

The arcane disciple cleric gets vastly more for giving its up turn undead, domain powers, and domain spells than the benevolent.  The ability to dumpster-dive the sor/wiz spell list for the best spells is really, really good and fixes the only deficiency that clerics have, that their spell list isn't quite as good as the sor/wiz list, and this is particularly true if you're allowed to sift through all the splatbooks looking for the craziest sor/wiz spells you can find.  The feats are only icing on the cake.  As I said in my first post, I think a better approach to your problems is to prevent things from going pear-shaped in the first place rather than try to pick up the pieces after they already have, so going for an I-can-do-everything cleric is a sound plan.  Unless your rogues are good optimizers, they won't be contributing much to general problem solving, and your fighters won't be contributing much even if they are.

If you want to stick with maxing out your healing, your build sounds fine, though I'd still suggest that Imbued Healing ought to be in there at some point.  Why do you think you need Rapid Spell?

There's a handbook on what maneuvers you can use with ranged weapons: http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=11233 .  Bloodstorm blade is a natural PrC for any thrower/martial adept, though.

Why doesn't the benevolent impress? You get all the cures, plus prayer, aid, bless, restoration, and more. That's way better than just cure by itself. Domain feats aren't exactly banned, but rather limited. If you don't have the domain, you can't take the feats. Again, I don't understand why combat cleric is so terrible and a basic cleric is better? A standard cleric doesn't get evasion, mobility, bonuses to defensive casting, or reflex saves.

All clerics that channel positive energy can cast the cure spells spontaneously.  Benevolent gets spells added to that list, but not many of them are actually good, and fewer are helpful for your situation in particular.  Meanwhile, you pay a high upfront cost for that ability, because you lose domain powers and access, turn undead, and worst of all your domain slots, so you get fewer spells/day than a standard cleric, which means less healing.

Combat medic's abilities are weak.  Sanctuary is only useful if the target doesn't attack, which presumably your allies are going to need to be doing.  The Reflex bonus is okay, but it's the least important save and from your description, you're getting killed by melee damage and Will SoDs.  Aid is the best of the abilities but 13 HP at 10th level isn't much.  Defensive casting is something you shouldn't have trouble with, in general, especially if you have Combat Casting.  Using Heal in combat is something you should rarely be doing.  Benefitting from evasion would require wearing light armor when heavy armor would give you much more protection against melee threats.  You can get spontaneous heal from benevolent or the alternative class feature I mentioned.  Combat medic also gets slightly less HP than a standard cleric and worse save progression, since generally Fort and Will are individually more important than Reflex.  Finally, it has two prerequisite feats that are terrible, Dodge and Combat Casting.  You'd do better to put those feats towards making yourself a better healer.

But yes, it's mainly damage. The fights that take us out are the ones where the enemy has high strength and is using a weapon two-handed. Taking 15 damage when you've got 16, and spellcasters with higher save DCs for sleep or hold person, make things rather difficult. Especially when your enemies coup-de-grace you. We have no "per day" abilities. Just the spellfire channeling. There's no access to wands of cure or lesser vigor, and MIC isn't allowed this game. The module is core-only as it's 3PP so we only have access to what's available to us at the time. We're on our own for making stuff. At least for now. It's assumed that this will change as the module progresses, but there's no guarantees. We have no casters, only fighters and rogues. No one wanted to be the healer or arcanist, and we're paying for it. If I'd known ahead of time, I'd have played a healer from the start.

Okay, this clarifies what's killing you.  You're having problems with high damage melee builds and Will-based SoDs?

I'm a bit confused about sourcing.  "The module is core-only as it's 3PP so we only have access to what's available to us at the time."  Do y ou mean that the only items you can get without making them yourself are core?  What can you make?  What books do you have access to?  How does your DM handle setting-specific material?

Most of the best options for healing depend on having domains, turn undead, or both, so don't work with benevolent.  There are some other PrCs that give healing-related abilities, but for my money the best is also the most basic, the radiant servant of Pelor (CD). The free Empower and Maximize will increase both your burst healing and your endurance, which will be important since you're the only caster, and you only have to waste one feat to get in.   Of course, if you can get the free Maximize from Mastery of Day and Night, you don't need the 6th-level ability.  There are a couple of other PrCs you might consider dipping.  Paragnostic apostle (CC) has an ability that can add +1 to your caster level for conjuration (healing) spells.  Divine oracle (CD) has an evasion-like ability that works in heavy armor.  Contemplative (CD) is a good choice for caster clerics in general.  Hierophant has some strong abilities but the lack of spellcasting progression at that level is terrible.

I think the best feat for your character is going to be Imbued Healing (CC).  It gives benefits in general that are far better than combat medic's healing kicker.  The best for your situation might be the Law domain's +4 bonus on saves against mind-affecting spells and SLAs, if those continue to be a problem, but many of the others are also quite good.  You don't need Draconic Aura (vigor) and Touch of Healing both, they both do the same thing, heal the party up to half HP outside of combat.   If you take the former, you might consider Mitigate Suffering (CC) for the +1 competence to your conjuration (healing) caster level, if you think ability damage is likely to become a problem in the future.  Augment Healing (CD) is an obvious choice and will help most at low levels.  Healing Devotion (CC) would let you convert turn undead uses into more healing, particularly if you go the RSoP/Extra Turning route.  If you can craft items, in the longer run Craft Wand will help take the out-of-combat healing burden off your spell slots .

This has turned out to be a big mistake as my character's been slain, and after being brought back to life was nearly slain again in the same encounter. We've also had a few PCs nearly get killed off in various bad ways. The adventure is a pregen module, and it's seriously deadly. We've even encountered a hydra at this level.

You haven't given me the blow-by-blow of your combats, but my first thought in this situation is not that you need healing, you need more offense, more ability to pick your encounters, and more ability to run away.  That said...

I was planning on going Benevolent 8/Combat Medic 4. Don't know what I'd take after this. Combat Medic 5 doesn't give me anything extra that the benevolent won't already give me for spontaneous casting. The Hierophant looks terrible due to the lack of spellcasting, but the ability to have all of my touch divine spells affect someone 30-60 feet away almost seems worth it if I take Practiced Spellcaster.

For feats, I've already reserved Combat Casting, Dodge, and Touch of Healing. For spells, I've bookmarked the Cleric Handbook.

I'm not impressed by benevolent.  What does it do that taking spontaneous domain casting (PH2 37) with the Healing domain or some other appropriate domain won't do?  And then you still get another domain and turning, not that that will do much for you with divine feats banned.  I assume that domain feats (CC) are banned too?  I'd rather play a normal cleric as a healer than a benevolent.

Combat medic is a terrible class with terrible prerequisites.  You'd be better off taking straight cleric.

I can't give much more in the way of advice without some more information about what's killing you and how.  What are you fighting?  Are you running out of resources and having to fight at low HP and with per-days used up?  If so, you need to maximize the efficiency of healing/slot.  Is it simply big hits that are killing you?  Then you need to optimize for burst healing.  From what you said, I assume it's HP damage that's the problem, but I really don't know.  A hydra isn't something you can expect to melee and win at 3rd level, not with any amount of healing.  Can you make or buy wands of CLW or lesser vigor (SC 229, CD 186)?  What about healing belts (MIC 110)?

What do you want to do with your spells?  I assume you want to do damage with a melee weapon.

Technically, I think both of those interpretations are correct.  Keep in mind that WotC writers aren't, in general, familiar with their own rules, much less the details of those rules, so it's almost 100% certain that the writers of those feats didn't realize the implication of feats being picked after skills. 

Your build is fixable, your DM is not fixable.  Your DM is power-tripping at your expense, and given how they're jerking you around right now, I'd expect more of the same in the future.  If you don't want to walk, the only thing worth having from Order of the Bow Initiate is close combat shot, and that's a reasonably useful ability.  Never take more than two levels in the class, though.  After that, you need to chase damage because archery doesn't get much by default with smaller dice than are available with melee weapons and no 1.5 Str to damage.  Swift Hunter, Greater Many Shot, and straight ranger after the necessary scout levels is definitely the most straightforward approach.  Spellcasting is one of the strengths of rangers with Swift Hunter, a lot of ranger spells are very helpful for archers.  It won't be as good as if you'd built for it from the beginning (the fighter levels in particular will hurt) but it will probably be adequate.   Other than that, you're looking at more exotic options.  Aside from skirmish, most of the abilities that give damage for melee don't work with archery at all, and the major remaining one, sneak attack, is hard to pull off at range because you can't generally flank with ranged weapons.  The reason that casters make good archers is that there are buffs that apply to attacks with bows that can serve as a damage source.  There are some archery-specific classes that add damage like arcane archer and soulbow, but since your DM is a jerk I don't know if they'll allow them since they will require picking up arcane spells or pisonics.  Other people in the thread have covered some of the more baroque combinations for adding damage.