Points of Clarification: I'm going to reiterate that I'm talking about "mundane" fighters as an archetype, not the build Fighter 20 necessarily. So, guys who hit things and don't cast many spells or use ToB or many spell-like abilities, etc. Also, I want to be clear. I'm not defending the Fighter class or many of 3E's design decisions in any way. I'm just saying there's a bit of charopp orthodoxy that I have a steadily mounting body of anecdotal empirical evidence that contradicts it (see below*).
Any suffiecently advanced optimization is equal to playing a high tier class, then?
Probably. I don't like the tier system, but yeah, sufficient levels of optimization can probably paper over a lot of defects in class design. That's not contentious, is it? It struck me as sort of obvious.
Maybe, there is a play style that REALLY makes a fighter shine. Thats well, thats awesome, but it isn't implicit and I can't give it "much" because there are very few situations in which a fighter would serve your party better than a second cleric filling the same roll.
This is the wrong metric. And, you know it is (you said as much in a post above). The question is whether a given build is viable/competent. If not, then you'll end up in deep TO territory for every character. Sure, that gish is pretty good, but in pretty much every situation a god wizard would be better. Sure, that god wizard is pretty good, but you know Pun-Pun or the Nanobots or the Nasty Gentleman is almost always better ...
I think your point about gear choices being more important than class choices, and the quote from Keldar is wrong. I cannot imagine building a Fighter type where that is the case, and if you look at any good build in any of the handbooks or the charopp favorites, it's not true either. I also found it and the quote from Keldar frankly uncharitable and straw manning.
The fact is that gear is an integral part of D&D characters, so being "gear dependent" isn't a flaw unique to Fighters. It's the rule, not the exception.
For example, this:
You took away class features of the rogue. The skill points thing, and everyone gets feats in some way shape or form. Even without those things. The rogue still might be able to sneak attack an opponent to death.
Is not true. The Rogue would likely have no way to consistently hide (much of that comes from gear) it wouldn't be able to hit the broadside of a barn, and so on. I'm sure we could build a Rogue that could still manage that sort of thing, maybe, but that's us building to a particular challenge rather than considering how a normal optimized Rogue works.
Again, my issue is more one of concept of the fighter: Tied to reality in a highly magical world...
Thats too big a discrpancy w/out some kind off mechanism as to why they become supers later.
*You've made this point a number of times. Here's the thing I was talking about in my earlier post. I don't find the problem of fighting a seraph in space or whatever ever actually hampers a mundane Fighter type. Let me take flight as an example. Charopp wisdom is that this is one of the reasons it sucks to be a Fighter-type. But, no one at my regular gaming tables has ever been stymied by flight. I considered some possible explanations for why that was the case in my earlier post, to wit optimization (e.g., good ranged options, mobility options) or teamwork. Just for reference, I'd peg my group at high practical optimization. If you want to use the Tiers system, there's almost always a Tier 1 or Tier 2 in the party. Representative builds include:
God Wizard/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil
Dragonfire Inspiration, Words of Creation, Doomspeak Bard
Archivist/Anima Mage Gish with persistent divine power and polymorph
Blaster Psion with power point recharge and Synchronicity
so, not the most powerful characters you can imagine, but not low-OP either. Some things, notably polymorph forms, are usually a matter of negotiation.
Provided the Fighter is good at fighting, then that has seemed to work out quite well in my gaming experience. And, I'm not an expert on Frank and K's Tome Series, but their Fighter can't fly or anything, can it? It can, however, beat the hell out of things, even things with supernatural powers (which becomes pretty much everything after a while).
That's really all I was saying in the above post. In practice, I've found that a mundane Fighter-type can be a fun, viable concept, even in high level play (10-25). And, that's despite good reasons -- e.g., poor class design, stupidity of the game designers -- that it shouldn't be.
