… force seven Fort save-or-die's per round. That works out to, what, a 30%-ish minimum chance every round of instantly killing what I'm attacking?
The ability does say that any given creature is only subject to it once in any 24-hour period. As written, it could be construed as once per each of the 3 selectable effects, but I assume it's meant to be once for the ability as a whole.
Bow of the solars (Book of Exalted Deeds) makes every arrow it fires into a slaying arrow of any type the wielder chooses. Using the splitting property (Champions of Ruin) and either haste or the speed property, you can potentially hit a target with 10 arrows per round, resulting in a 40% chance to roll a 1 on at least one of those saves.
Ah, I misread that.
That's not a bad ability.
I guess I'd still wind up stuck on the fact that it's simply a flat out superior chassis to every other melee class out there.
Unless you had a very specific reason, such as qualifying for a Prestige Class, there would be no reason whatsoever not to play this class as a base.
I don't think this point is necessarily wrong but I think it is worth noting that most mundanes have terrible chassis, even though their classes are entirely their chassis. Maneuver users still are better because they have an ability set beyond their class stats.
However, I think that this build in general falls into the same trap that most homebrew fixes of mundanes falls into, which is that it is a top-down approach of trying to stick mechanics onto a preexisting chassis. Instead one should be using a bottom up approach of asking "what does this class need to do to maintain relevance over the level span of D&D" and "what methods will it use to achieve this?"
I talked about this in another thread but the problem with warriors is that people get caught up in the mundanes shouldn't have nice stuff thinking even when they are trying to give mundanes nice stuff. This is because they look at the class top-down and are trying to do things by simply improving numbers instead of providing actual abilities.
For a tongue-in-cheek example at level 20 if we assume a warrior is relevant alongside a caster then the following things should be able to occur:
An Adult Red Dragon breaths fire at party. Warrior looks over to wizard (who has immunity to fire) and asks, "hey is it warm in here?"
Seeing his breath is inneffective the dragon begins to retreat. The warrior decides, "hey, I would really like to suplex a dragon" so he jumps up, grabs dragon and does so.
Party is ambushed by Hobgoblin NPCs. Warrior picks up nearest heavy object (Hobgoblin A) and uses it to beat the rest of the hobgoblins to death. Wizard bitches about noise waking him up.
Demonlord Evildude Badguy is on the ropes so he tries to planeshift outta there. Warrior uses manly strength to hold open the planeshift so party can follow.
Etc.
At high levels warriors should be doing the same kind of ridiculous things that casters are doing, just doing them in their own idiom. Maneuver users are good at this, which is why they are tier 3. They can IHS outta damn near anything, stop time for a round, dance fight the enemy like a Westside Story reject or trip harder then Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Other mundanes should be doing similar things but should use different mechanical approaches (which there are tons of) to accomplish this.
