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[Sergarr]

You know what I personally think would improve D&D tactical combat? If Attacks of Opportunity were actually threatening at high levels. I've noticed that while there are feats to increase the amount of AoO you can do, there appears to be no way to actually make them deal level-appropriate damage, or have any interesting effects (which is a general problem with all D&D core fighting classes in general, though). Making AoO actually threatening would give fighters an ability to sort-of-tank people without explicitly forcing them to attack only him with quasi-magical taunts.

Helpful for 3.5.

That's Character Optimization board. It pretty much assumes that your DM holds a post card with "I APPROVE THAT" written on it at all times.

For one, Spiked Chain causes 95% DMs to instantly ban your character.

EDIT: I now really wonder how good would a class based on Hercules and other Greek heroes do in D&D 3.5e.

[Criptfeind]

I would guess pretty poorly, unless it was just generic (but in that case then like... The fighter class. There you go.) Since most fictional characters are actually pretty weekish with sometimes the ability to do some few tricks. This translates poorly since in D&D terms that generally means like a 3-5th level character with some level 15 or thereabouts ability.

Not even getting into that their strength is based purely on plot most of the time.

[Sergarr]

I would guess pretty poorly, unless it was just generic (but in that case then like... The fighter class. There you go.) Since most fictional characters are actually pretty weekish with sometimes the ability to do some few tricks. This translates poorly since in D&D terms that generally means like a 3-5th level character with some level 15 or thereabouts ability.

Not even getting into that their strength is based purely on plot most of the time.

Hercules held up the world (or was it sky?) for a little while. There's no way a Fighter can actually do anything close to this; I'm not even sure if a non-epic, no-wish-chain-exploiting Wizard can do that. And Achilles was powerful enough to single-handedly make the defenders of Troy (who also have had a lot of epic heroes and some god's help on their side) lose their shit.

I'm sure that if we take all feats and abilities of Greek heroes and extrapolate them a little, there would be enough material to make a class which would not be completely useless compared to a full-caster.

[Criptfeind]

That's pretty much exactly what I mean by plot powers. Dude had the strength score to lift the earth and yet his con was low enough for a poison to hurt him? And scaring a bunch of level 1 dudes isn't a epic feat in D&D. Not to mention he died to a single arrow right? Even on a critical hit that puts him solidly in in the level 3ish area. (with bad hp rolls!)

And still, basically, greek heroes are just fighters with some random other abilities, but mostly fighters.

[scriver]

Achilles had magic immunity to all damage except called shots to his heel, so that wouldn't have been a problem.

As for how Greek heroes would do generally... In most stories, or at least many, the heroes succeed by cunning and plot elements rather than... More direct means. So they'd do as good as their players can play them creatively and use the surrounding world to accomplish their goals.  It's a bit hard to make a class out of that.

[Flying Dice]

Taking over for Atlas for a day was probably something along the lines of a homebrew system akin to Inspiration points, if it helps to think of it like that.

On a related note, Odysseus is a prime example of how good roleplay (and perhaps a good CHA score) makes a much more interesting story than any min-maxed creation.

[Sergarr]

1) He probably had a class ability that allowed him to do supernatural feats of strength a few times per day. Which is basically the way to do the Fighter class right - give him ability to do heroic shit comparable in strength to what Wizard gets to do.

So if a Wizard can create a Force Cage which is immune to physical force and Teleport around it, the Fighter should also be able to deal with it and any other magical or non-magical obstacles that can prevent him from reaching his objective. If a Wizard can fly for a prolonged period of time, then the Fighter should be able to leap arbitrarily high and stay there for as long as the Wizard can keep his Flight up. If a Wizard can travel between dimensions, the Fighter should be able to pick up the entire world with his bare hands and literally throw himself off it to the other one.

2) There was a lot of legit heroes on the other side. With god support. In Illiad, Achilles has killed 72 warriors, 23 of them are named characters. Some of them managed to wound him, so it wasn't that easy. By the time he got killed by an arrow, his HP has been worn off by all the fighting. "Critical Existence Failure" is a thing.

And really, if we count all spell Wizards are able to have in their spell-book at the same time, you're gonna find that most of them are pretty random in their area of application, too. A generalist Wizard is a thing that cannot coexist with a Fighter who needs feat chains to literally not suck.

[Criptfeind]

That's a interesting system idea. The book of nine swords does it to some small extent (not nearly as much as you seem to be suggesting). And it reminds me a lot of the game Nobilis.

Although of course they would be a lot stronger then almost any greek heroes.

[Flying Dice]

That's just an element of the way the DnD level system stops reflecting reality accurately past a certain threshold. 20th level characters are (and should be) living gods walking around the material plane for all intents and purposes, but the way the system is set up and interacts with player perceptions, people still act as if their high or epic level characters are the same wandering murderhobos with really high numbers.

Hell, if you created some unholy fusion of DnD and Exalted, the point where you cross over from heroic mortal to the equivalent of an Exaltation likely wouldn't even be after 20th level.

[Sergarr]

That's a interesting system idea. The book of nine swords does it to some small extent (not nearly as much as you seem to be suggesting). And it reminds me a lot of the game Nobilis.

Although of course they would be a lot stronger then almost any greek heroes.

That's why I said "based", not "literally a clone". Greek heroes were not very high-level heroes, but they generally have a much better versatility than Fighters. Taking that idea to the logical extension would give us something that wouldn't suck so bad as Fighters do in 3e.

The only supposed strength of the Fighter in 3e D&D is more feats, which are supposed to give the Fighter some versatility, and it would be okay if these feats were actually "feats of strength/cunning/agility", but instead like half of them are "+1 to some rolls in a specific condition" and most of them have other feats as prerequisites, so, unlike a Wizard, you can't mix-and-match your available array of abilities, but instead are forced into one of the several archetypes, unless you want to become weaker than a summoned creature. 5e seems to have fixed that a little bit, but they're still very low-powered compared to a Wizard's spell list.

And in order to make a game fun for everyone at every level, a level-appropriate challenge should be beatable/passable by every class in the game. One class may do that easier than another, or maybe with less side-effects (like if Fighter throws the world in order to move between dimensions, that's gonna cause some earthquakes to happen), but the core idea should be here. Otherwise we get situations where some groups simply can't pass a level-appropriate challenge or where half of the group cannot contribute to the task at hand in any way.

Given that D&D is generally a high-magic setting and it's magic part is the most well fleshed-out (I'm pretty sure most people still play D&D because of the obscenely huge spell list), it would be easier to rebalance other classes to the Wizard tier than it would be to down-power the Wizard to the other classes tier - and there would be more actual game content left in.

[Bohandas]

The magic-users-are-disproportionately-powerful thing is precisely why you play a paladin or a ranger or a hexblade; when you start approaching the point where non-spellcasters start being less powerful they gain access to a few spells.

[mainiac]

... but they aren't spellcasters, just mediocre fighters with a few spells.

[Sergarr]

The magic-users-are-disproportionately-powerful thing is precisely why you play a paladin or a ranger or a hexblade; when you start approaching the point where non-spellcasters start being less powerful they gain access to a few spells.

Spellcasters are still vastly stronger than all these classes; the access to a few spell makes them a little bit less useless, but a Paladin/Ranger/Hexblade/other-variation-on-a-Fighter are going to have serious problems with solving the "move halfway across the continent in a day" or "get into an other plane" or even "cross a really huge chasm" challenges, while a Wizard needs a 1 (one) spell to instantly solve each of these problems. Fly is a 3nd level spell (5rd Wizard level), Teleport is 5th level spell (9th Wizard level), Plane Shift is 7th level spell (13th Wizard level). Ranger cannot solve any of these, Paladin - only if he abuses his Special Mount to hell and even then it's iffy, Hexblade is not in SRD so IDK but I'm pretty sure he also fails to solve these problems at the levels similar to Wizard's ones.

So in any situation which involves any of these challenges (and many, many more), all group will be twiddling their thumbs waiting for their Wizard to solve it. This is distinctly unfun, and this has to go.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, TBH. If I'm not playing a primary caster or something I enjoy RPing, I'd rather just go for a good old fashioned borderline-abuse martial setup so that I can at least trivially resolve any situation which can be dealt with by hitting a dude really really hard. Charge builds can get up to absurd levels of damage once you start stacking the multipliers, and that's one place (particularly when it comes to sustainable damage) where a well-built martial character can still outshine other things. Even a Mailman will eventually run out of spells, but the charger will never run out of sword and the masochist will never run out of AoO provocation.

[Bauglir]

but the charger will never run out of sword

That's unbalanced! Let's introduce weapon degradation rules. After all, real weapons get chipped and dented all the time. I borrowed a replica and took a few swings at a filing cabinet to simulate hitting somebody in full plate, and now my coworker is mad at me for wrecking his sword!