Dungeons & Dragons Classes: Other Third-Edition Classes / Characters

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This is the character sheet for the other classes Dungeons & Dragons introduced during its 3rd Edition. Go to Dungeons & Dragons Classes if you want to check out the classes introduced in other editions.

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Archivist

Introduced in Heroes of Horror, the Archivist is a kind of mix of Cleric and Wizard, seeking to uncover truth and knowledge at any cost. They cast using a prayerbook in which they inscribe countless divine spells, and gain many abilities relating to their esoteric discoveries. Their most notable feature is that, while they only automatically gain Cleric spells, any divine scroll can be added.

Awesome, but Impractical: An Archivist can potentially be the most powerful caster in the entire game by scribing scrolls from domain spells, divine variants of arcane classes, and classes that get their spells at earlier levels, but that's dependent on the scrolls you can find or buy. Most DMs will at least give you domain spells and Druid spells, but the stingiest might not let you go past your core Cleric list, basically making you a lamer Cloistered Cleric. As a full caster, the Archivist is basically always going to be powerful, but how powerful can vary heavily between theory and execution.
Awesomeness by Analysis: Dark Knowledge allows an Archivist to make a Knowledge check and instantly divine an advantage against his foe.
Badass Bookworm: Archivists add spells to their prayerbook from divine scrolls, and can learn any divine spell in the game, giving them the most versatile spell list around.
Disc-One Nuke: Some casting classes have a slow progression, and learn high-level spells at a lower level than normal... which you can then copy and use several levels early. For instance, the Disciple of Thrym prestige class learns Summon Giants, a 8th-level Cleric spell that does exactly what it sounds like, as a 4th-level spell. If your DM is stupid enough to leave a scroll of it lying around, you can conjure up a trio of fiendish hill giants at a level where the wizard's lucky to get one dire wolf.
Loophole Abuse: A smart Archivist will take heavy advantage of what can be called a divine caster. Paladins learn Lesser Restoration at first level, you say?
Recycled In Space: They're Divine Wizards, as evidence by them needing Intelligence and prayerbooks to cast divine spells in similar ways to Wizards and their Arcane spells.
The Red Mage: An Archivist can be this role too. Besides buffing and healing spells from the Cleric spell list, they can get summon spells (Summon Monster and Summon Nature's Ally), battlefield control (the druid spell Entangle) and direct attack spells (Produce Flame, Sunbeam, etc), though the latter options are nowhere near as expansive as an arcane caster.
The Smart Guy: Like the Wizard, half the power of his spells comes from Intelligence. The other half comes from Wisdom.
Squishy Wizard: A consequence of being Divine Wizards; the only divine class with worse combat stats is the Healer. Of course, since Divine Power is on the Archivist spell list, this usually isn't as big a problem as it could be.

Ardent

Introduced in Complete Psionic, the Ardent serves as a kind of psionic equivalent to the Cleric, gaining their power through their fascination with specific philosophies and concepts that they choose to study and embody, such as Time and Justice. They are restricted to a small number of Mantles that give them their powers.

Bad Powers, Good People: An Ardent's mantles have no alignment requirement, so you can absolutely have an Ardent with the Pain, Evil, Destruction, and Death mantles while still being Good-aligned—after all, an Ardent can be intrigued by these concepts without endorsing them. In fact, it's claimed that there are Ardents with contradictory mantles such as Good and Evil, similar to how a real philosopher might research opposing belief systems.
Loophole Abuse: Unlike any other class in the game, the highest level of powers they can learn is based only on Manifester Level (i.e. the strength of their ardent powers), rather than their number of levels in ardent and Prestige Classes that advance its abilities. This makes the Practiced Manifester feat (which allows four of your levels in other classes to count towards your manifester level) extra-useful for them. Granted, this mechanic is a bit less useful than it would be on a spellcaster, since many basic psionic powers can already be cast at higher cost to produce higher-level effects if your manifester level is high enough.
Recycled In Space: Between their Wisdom-based casting, fighting style, and mantles, an Ardent is clearly meant to call to mind a psionic Cleric.
Warrior Poet: An Ardent's power comes from his philosophies and personal conviction in the primal truths.

Artificer

Introduced in the Eberron Campaign Setting, Artificers provide a vital cog in Eberron's Dungeon Punk setting by being a class specialized in magic item creation. Though not traditional casters, they serve a similar role, being able to create almost any item and wield it in battle, as well as using temporary "infusions" for helping their allies on-the-fly.

Cast from Experience Points: Played With. In 3.5e, where creating magic items normally includes an XP cost, artificers gain a "Craft Reserve" pool at each level containing virtual XP which can be expended in its place (unexpended points are lost whenever they level up). They can also dismantle an item to recycle the XP from its creation into this pool.
Clothes Make the Superman: Artificers cast spells indirectly by enchanting equipment. In other words, they can't fly, but their boots just suddenly sprouted little wings.
Crazy-Prepared: Being only as good as the stuff they carry, experienced artificer players will have whole manifests of stuff they have in their interdimensional storage spaces. And if they don't have the exact right thing, their Infusions (at higher levels) can make a stick into a Holy Orc-bane Stick of Impact.
Difficult, but Awesome: Artificers require a massive amount of bookkeeping — keeping track of all of their magical items, how much XP was lost in creating all of them, how many charges each magical weapon has, how many Action Points they have at any given time — but when pulled off, they are awesomely powerful.
Discard and Draw: A major trait of Artificers is their ability to break down an item and convert it into stored XP, giving them room to craft another. This allows them to take gear that nobody wants and turn it into more useful items.
Gadgeteer Genius: For that player who wants to craft their own equipment, this class can create almost any kind of magic item for lesser costs than normal and add additional abilities to weapons.
Item Caddy: Their infusions can grant temporary powers to an item, or even change the type of bonus they grant so that they're easier to stack with other items.
Item Crafting: 3.5e Artificers are the ultimate specialists in this; they gain every Core item creation feat around the level it first becomes available, can craft items even if they don't meet the normal requirements,^note do not suffer from XP expenditure to the same extent as normal crafters, and can lower an item's Caster Level by 2 below its normal minimum in order to create a weaker and cheaper version of it (effectively letting them create many items two levels ahead of schedule). They also get a choice of bonus feats at every 4th level which can be used to reduce item creation costs, wear more magic items at once, etc. Finally "infusions", their equivalent of spells, function by creating impromptu magic items that last for a short time.
The Medic: Downplayed. Some of their infusions can mend damage to Constructs (including warforged party members and their own creations), on which traditional healing magic has little or no effect. Less directly, they can always pull out a temporary healing wand in a pinch.
Our Homunculi Are Different: Gain the ability to craft a homunculus even if they can't create Constructs of other types, and can also upgrade its stats to help it keep up at higher levels (moreso if they have the Improved Homunculus feat). A few alternate types of homunculi are introduced alongside the class, most famously the Dedicated Wright (a tiny dwarf-like creature which can work on your crafting projects while you're away) and the Iron Defender (a combat model resembling a spiky mechanical hound).
Required Secondary Powers: The virtual XP provided by their Craft Reserve allow them to create large numbers of items without falling behind the party in level.
Science Hero: Their focus on magic items and a very business-like, scientific approach to magic certainly provides that vibe.
Science Wizard: The Artificer has this trope as a fundamental part of their class, combining arcana with applied science to make magic-infused constructs and gadgets, as well as magic items and potions.
Tim Taylor Technology: Their "Metamagic Spell Trigger" class feature lets them apply metamagic feats to the spells contained in a spell trigger item (i.e. a wand or staff), at the cost of expending additional charges from that item on each use. At higher levels "Metamagic Spell Completion" lets them do this even with single-use magic scrolls, though only a limited number of times per day.
Utility Belt: 4e makes them Arcane Leaders... which still works somehow, when they have the gadget for just the occasion.

Battle Dancer

Introduced in Dragon #159, updated for 3.5e in the Dragon Compendium, the Battle Dancer is an agile warrior who uses a combat style focused on dance. They function similarly to Monks but based on Charisma rather than Wisdom, with a greater focus on mobility and the ability to use a variety of dances to increase their combat prowess.

Fragile Speedster: Very fast, Dexterity-focused, and with a combat style that requires you to move around a lot. Also, bad AC and saves and mediocre HP.
Invulnerable Knuckles: Like Monks, they have a steadily-increasing damage bonus when fighting unarmed, and can eventually treat their knuckles as a specific type of metal.
Walk on Water: Battle Dancers gain the ability to do this over limited distances.

Beguiler

Introduced in Player's Handbook II (3.5e), the Beguiler is a focused caster that specializes in the Illusion and Enchantment lines, while backing it up with a fairly extensive list of skills and similar abilities to the Rogue. They focus on waylaying the opponent through their many disabling abilities, and are silver-tongued and stealthy even without magic.

Back Stab: Their "Cloaked Casting" class feature is a magical version of this, making their spells harder to resist if the target is caught by surprise.
Charm Person: One of the most important spells a beginning beguiler has.
Expy: Borrows the Warmage's system of casting, but for illusion and mind-control spells instead of blasting.
Guile Hero: With their high social skills and spells based on misdirection, they tend to fill this role excellently.
Invisibility: One of their principle abilities.
Magic Knight: Magic Rogue, more like. Unlike Rogues or Bards, though, Beguilers are pretty terrible at melee combat, and work best as controllers.
One Stat to Rule Them All: Intelligence. A Beguiler's spellcasting depends entirely on it, and it nicely complements their large amount of skills.
Stealth Expert: Easily so, between a wide skill set and many illusions. They even gain advantages for surprising the opponent, similar to Sneak Attack.
Trap Master: Can disarm exceptional traps, in the same way Rogues can.

Binder

Introduced in Tome of Magic, the Binder can summon vestiges, spirits of long-forgotten beings, and make pacts that temporarily bind the vestige to their own soul. This allows them to gain the abilities of the vestige in question, letting them access a wide variety of abilities, and tends to make them pariahs among other groups for their dubious methods. They function as a versatile class with many potential focuses.

Anti-Magic: Karsus provides increased resistance against magic. Ironically, Karsus was a powerful archmage in life. The goddess of magic just refuses to go anywhere near him, after the small event known as Karsus' Folly.
Combo Platter Powers: The many abilities vestiges provide can easily generate this if mixed together. Even a single vestige's abilities can cause this by being too spread apart in theme. For instance, Haagenti gives proficiency with axes and shields, immunity to transformation effects and a confusing touch ability, none of which work well together.
Compelling Voice: Naberius provides you with one, though he also makes you sound all scratchy.
Continuity Nod: Some of the Vestiges are based off of characters from events in previous editions of D&D that, due to how they died or were destroyed, have slipped outside of the normal order of existence.
Dark Is Not Evil: Though some of the vestiges were evil in life and the Binder's methods seem a bit unsavory, the class has no alignment requirement whatsoever. Not even to bind Tenebrous, the shadow-powered castoff undead remains of a Demon Prince. Tell it to the Seropaenes, though.
Dance Battler: Paimon makes you one of these, granting high Dexterity and the Dance of Death ability.
Deal with the Devil: While there are plenty of innocent or neutral vestiges, the whole process is considered unnatural. In the default setting, expect at least three Law-aligned deities demanding your head on a plate at any given time. The WoTC message boards used to have an epic thread of fan-made vestiges. Many of these were also pop-culture icons, for those players who want to channel Ghost Rider or Homsar.
Discard and Draw: One of the things that makes Binders unique is their ability to swap their abilities on a regular basis, as a pact only lasts one day, it doesn't take long to make a new pact, and the Expel Vestige feat allows you to get rid of active vestiges if they're not working out for you.
Hero with Bad Publicity: Mainly among the religious, as mentioned, or the upper classes. A Binder requires very little training, knowledge, or equipment to become a potential threat, which means that even if you don't think Binders are selling their souls, you still aren't interested in seeing them stick around. Common people tend not to see the distinction between them and Druids or Clerics, and simply welcome the ones with Healing Hands and drive off the ones with horns.
Instant Armor: Savnok gives you a nifty set of full plate.
Jack of All Trades: Given the massive variety of vestiges and their ability to switch to new ones regularly, a Binder can serve just about any role you can think of: scout, tank, skirmisher, archer, blaster, healer, buffer, debuffer, minion-maker, party face, battlefield control... They can't do all of this at once, and they generally have to specialize to excel at any one thing, but they can at least make an attempt at most paths.
The Medic: Buer fulfills this role, providing her channelers a small Healing Factor, Healing Hands, and an immunity to poisons and disease that can be shared with nearby allies.
Red Right Hand: Shows up when channeling — sometimes it is a literal deformity, other times it is a personality quirk like being unable to lie.
Stock Shout-Out: Many of the vestiges are named after demons from The Lesser Key of Solomon.
This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Several examples, given that vestiges can have very situational abilities.
- Though Shax and Focalor do give you some nifty tricks with lightning and other abilities, they're clearly designed so that the Binder can help out in a water dungeon (Shax grants a swim speed, Focalor underwater breathing).
- Primus is only truly useful against chaotic outsiders.
- Most of Desharis' abilities only work within cities, meaning that it's the perfect vestige for urban adventures.
- The main reason you'll want to bind Kas is to use it against undead creatures.
Unequal Rites: Oh, yes. Most Clerics and Paladins view Binders as unwitting dupes at best and abominations to the natural order at worst. Wizards find their method to be a bumpkin's magic, since binding doesn't take much training.
Willing Channeler: Binders channel vestiges, gaining their abilities entirely at their own will.
Working-Class Hero: They often act as this, according to their lore, as it requires relatively little training and many Binders are rejects from society, making them common in its lower rungs. In fact, given the existence of the Bind Vestige feat, it's possible for a commoner to access a limited form of soul binding.

Crusader

Introduced in Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, the Crusader occupies a similar role to the Paladin as a holy warrior, using the book's stance and maneuver system as a substitute for magic. In combat, it operates as a tank class, being able to soak up damage and heal it back, while locking down enemies and aiding their allies with their tactical abilities.

Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Pretty common; the class is essentially a Paladin 2.0 with the Tome Of Battle rules, and renowned for being so.
Combat Medic: The only Tome of Battle base class which gets access to Devoted Spirit by default — the only discipline with maneuvers which can heal other (by making attacks which inspire nearby allies to keep fighting).
Counter-Attack: Their Furious Counterstrike class feature grants them bonuses on attack and damage rolls based on the current size of their delayed damage pool (see Time-Delayed Death below).
Determinator: Their Indomitable Soul class feature provides a bonus on saving throws similar to the Paladin's Divine Grace, except that it only applies to Will saves. Added to that, their Mettle class feature allows them to completely negate effects which allow a Fortitude or Will save for reduced effect. And their automatic maneuver recovery mechanic makes them the only initiator class that never has to pause for rest in drawn-out combats. Just for good measure, they get Diehard as a bonus feat at higher levels (which allows them to fight without penalty while dying).
Extra Turn: The White Raven discipline, based around teamwork, has a few maneuvers which grant free attacks to nearby allies, or free movement which doesn't provoke attacks from nearby enemies (the better to escape danger or set up flanking maneuvers). Most famously the 3rd level maneuver White Raven Tactics allows a nearby ally to act immediately after you, granting them an extra turn if they have already acted in this round.
Fantastic Fighting Style: Crusaders select their maneuvers and stances from a scant three paths of the Sublime Way, consisting of Stone Dragon (see Swordsage below), White Raven (see Warblade below) and one other.
- Devoted Spirit (exclusive to Crusaders) is a fighting style which channels the user's zeal, having maneuvers for fighting foes of opposite alignment, punishing foes for attacking your allies, and healing yourself and your allies as you attack. It also has a small number of techniques for using shields.
Fight Like a Card Player: Plays the most strongly to this out of any of the Tome of Battle classes, by having a "hand" of maneuvers which are added to randomly each turn. While Tome of Battle itself never uses the word "card" when describing this mechanic, the parallels are obvious, and a set of printable maneuver cards was even made available as a web supplement. Most groups will strongly recommend using cards of some kind rather than trying to keep track of things in your head.
Game-Breaking Bug: The "d2 Crusader" combo, which requires the Crusader to either have a Cleric ally with the Luck domain, or take a level of Cleric themselves. Combining the Luck benefit of the Imbued Healing feat (whenever a creature you healed rolls a 1 on a damage die, they roll again and replace the result) with the Crusader's Aura of Chaos stance (whenever you roll maximum on a damage die, roll again and sum the results) means that if the Crusader ever attacks with a weapon which deals 1d2 damage, it triggers an infinite loop which effectively "crashes" D&D, forcing DM intervention before the game can continue.
Heavy Equipment Class: In addition to heavy armor, Crusaders are one of the few classes to gain proficiency in tower shields.
"Instant Death" Radius: The Thicket of Blades stance, largely exclusive to them, means that an enemy cannot withdraw safely from a Crusader's range without risking an attack. This means that once an enemy is in range of a Crusader, they're likely not going to escape until the Crusader is dead.
Last Chance Hit Point: Immortal Fortitude, the ultimate stance of the Devoted Spirit discipline, allows a Crusader to potentially survive any attack with 1 hp. However, this requires a successful Fortitude save with a difficulty based on the strength of the attack, and the stance ends automatically after three attacks have been negated (leaving the Crusader temporarily defenceless until they can enter the stance again).
Made of Iron: Damage taken can be delayed up to one round, and the Crusader can heal that damage before it happens (or use the Stone Power feat to negate it outright).
Mighty Glacier: They are typically heavily armored, and do not possess the mobility-boosting maneuvers that their fellow martial adepts can offer. However, since they can heal back damage by attacking through Devoted Spirit maneuvers and their maneuvers replenish automatically, a Crusader can essentially keep fighting forever, while also hitting hard with Stone Dragon and certain Devoted Spirit tricks.
Religious Bruiser: The "strength of conviction" and "bursts of inspiration" which fuel their abilities are by default tied to religious faith. However, the association is looser than that of outright Church Militants like the Cleric or Paladin — e.g. rather than a Smite Evil attack they get a generic Smite ability which has fewer uses but functions against anyone.
Stance System: Like all initiator classes, they learn a number of stances as they level up and may only gain the benefits of one at a time.
Strategy, Schmategy: Their unique recovery mechanic causes them to unlock their readied maneuvers at random over the course of a battle, with even the Crusader not knowing which ones will be available next.
Technician Versus Performer: Out of the ToB classes they fall on the "Performer" end — they have abilities themed after strong convictions, and their techniques are effective but they don't have total control over when they can use them.
Time-Delayed Death: Their "Steely Resolve" class feature allows them to delay the onset of (some) damage for 1 round, which can sometimes result in them receiving a lethal blow but staggering around for a turn before they actually fall over dead. It's also possible to cancel out the delayed damage if the Crusader receives immediate healing before it has time to kick in.
When All You Have Is a Hammer…: The famous "Idiot Crusader" build lowers the Crusader's available maneuvers below the minimum size of their "hand",^note meaning that they automatically deck-out at the end of each turn and receive the same (small) set of maneuvers each time.

Death Master

Introduced in Dragon #76, updated for 3.5e in the Dragon Compendium, the Death Master is a purely necromancy-focused class with an overtly evil feel.

Bad Powers, Bad People: Death Masters must be evil.
Blood Magic: By sacrificing an intelligent creature to Orcus, they can collect vials of blood which can be used as a substitute for a spell's normal Magical Gestures (allowing them to be cast in armour without difficulty).
Bond Creature: Orcus provides them with a special undead companion which gains some additional bonuses and doesn't count against their control limit. Unlike most similar creatures, since it exists partly to keep an eye on them, if slain it returns within 24 hours without any effort on the Death Master's part (reduced to 1 hour at higher levels); they can also swap out for different companions fairly casually.
Necromancer: A lot of the Death Master's spells are geared toward creating undead, and they get them sooner than other spellcasting classes.
Our Liches Are Different: Similar to the later Dread Necromancer class, they gain some Undead traits at 15th level and finally transform into a lich at 20th level.
Vancian Magic: They learn and cast spells using a Spell Book in the same way as wizards, albeit from a smaller list.
You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Their "Sustenance of the Dead" ability, gained at 10th level, allows them to destroy one of their undead minions in order to gain a pool of temporary hit points for 1 hour.

Divine Mind

Introduced in Complete Psionic, the Divine Mind operates similarly to the Ardent but with a more direct divine inspiration and a greater focus on melee combat and auras to boost their allies.

Anti-Magic: The aura of the Corruption and Madness mantle prevents enemies within its radius from using magic and psionics unless they succeed on a Will save with each attempt.
Aura Vision: The aura of the Death mantle grants you and your allies the benefits of a deathwatch spell when observing other creatures within the aura.
Elite Tweak: Despite being a very weak class overall, some of their auras grant unusual benefits which are hard for other classes to replicate, including a damage buff which affects things other than attacks, and an aura which causes Constructs to regenerate health.
Gradual Regeneration: The aura of the Natural World mantle causes creatures of the Animal, Fey or Plant types to slowly regenerate hit points (starting at 1 per hour, eventually reaching 1 per round). More interestingly, the Creation aura does this for creatures of the Construct type, which normally cannot recover health by resting.
Power-Up Letdown: Some of the alternate auras provided by mantles are very weak - e.g. the Pain and Suffering aura grants a fixed +1 bonus on damage rolls when using a weapon to attack a wounded foe... when the basic Attack aura already grants a +1 bonus on all attack and damage rolls regardless of situation, and grows stronger as you level. The other abilities of these mantles (which are the same that an ardent gets) can still make them worth taking, however.
Recycled In Space: Much like Ardents are essentially psionic clerics, the fluff shows Divine Minds as essentially psionic paladins... though their aura class abilities make them resemble psionic marshalls, instead.
Stance System: Begins play with three auras which it can switch between, boosting the attack, defense or sensory abilities of itself and nearby allies. Each mantle also adds another aura to its selection, and the number of auras it can use at once increases at 10th and 20th levels. Unlike other similar abilities, these auras are initially tiny (making it hard to affect allies) and take an entire hour to swap between, only gaining the convenience of a Marshal or Dragon Shaman at high levels.
Telepathy: The aura of the Communication mantle allows allies within its radius to communicate telepathically.

Dragon Shaman

Introduced in Player's Handbook II (3.5e), the Dragon Shaman worships specific dragons in a totemistic fashion, and so emulate their powers. Dragon Shamans boast an eclectic mix of abilities from their totem dragon, most notably a Breath Weapon, and project auras that increase the abilities of those around them.

Breath Weapon: Dragon theme includes breathing fire or lightning or whatever.
Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Dragon Shamans must choose a type of dragon as their totem and must adhere close to that type of dragon's alignment.
Healing Hands: The Touch of Vitality ability allows them to heal wounds by touch (unlike many similar abilities, it has no effect on undead), with the healing point pool eventually being usable to remove various negative conditions.
Master of None: Dragon Shamans are just about passable in a number of things (tanking damage, healing, buffing allies, blasting enemies), but most of their abilities are undertuned compared to specialists or even jack-of-all-trades classes.
Status Buff: The "shaman" part of the class manifests in part through its auras. It works in a way similar to the Marshal, but with a smaller area and more overtly magical.

Dragonfire Adept

Introduced in Dragon Magic, the Dragonfire Adept makes bargains with dragons to access a similar casting system to the Warlock, wielding powerful invocations that are never exhausted with use. Most of their abilities focus on maximizing the effectiveness of their Breath Weapon and changing its properties, as well as utility tricks like flight.

Breath Weapon: While other characters can pick one up through spells, feats, items, and class features down the line, the Dragonfire Adept is the only class that gets a breath weapon at level 1. Unusually, they don't have the "once per 1d4+1 rounds" Cooldown normally associated with breath weapons, which makes them one of the most popular users of the Entangling Exhalation feat^note.
Expy: Uses the same casting system as the Warlock, with its Breath Weapon taking the place of Eldritch Blast.
Magic Knight: Has a higher hit die value than most "full" casters like the Wizard and Sorcerer, although still lacking any armor proficiencies or more than simple weaponry.
Squishy Wizard: Downplayed: Dragonfire Adepts have the same hit die as a Cleric and benefit from high Constitution for their breath weapon, but unlike Clerics they have the same spell-casting penalties as Wizards and Sorcerers when wearing armour.

Dread Necromancer

Introduced in Heroes of Horror, the Dread Necromancer is a purely necromancy-focused casting class that knows its entire available spell list automatically. It backs this up with a large number of abilities that improve necromancy, including creating stronger undead, terrifying those around them, channeling negative energy, and slowly gaining undead traits such as resistance to certain attack forms.

Bad Powers, Bad People: Downplayed, as while they are clearly meant to be a malevolent class, their requirement is only "Nongood," meaning that neutral Dread Necromancers are fairly common.
Black Magic: Most spells available to them involve death, destruction, evil, fear, and not much else.
Bond Creature: They don't start with a familiar like Wizards do, but at 7th level they gain an Improved Familiar from a short list (Imp, Quasit, Vargouille, or Ghostly Visage).
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Dread Necros have a limited spell list, drawn nearly exclusively from the Necromancy school.
Expy: Borrows the Warmage's system of casting, but for necromancy spells instead of blasting.
Healing Hands: Can expel negative energy at a touch. Infinite healing for any undead (or rare living being healed by negative energy), including themselves with the right options.
Horrifying Hero: Only natural, given the book they were introduced in. Alignment restrictions aside, a Dread Necromancer slowly turns into a Lich as they climb up the levels, gaining the immunities and traits of one as they go on, alongside several fear-based abilities. It's common to base entire builds around fear effects.
Necromancer: Most of their spells are necromancy, and most of their abilities focus on raising the dead.
One Stat to Rule Them All: Charisma powers everything the Dread Necro needs to do.
Our Liches Are Different: The Dread Necro's level 20 class feature is an automatic transformation into a Lich, complete with the obligatory Phylactery. They even get Craft Wondrous Item as a bonus feat to construct the phylactery, in case they didn't already have it.
The Red Mage: The class utilizes spells taken from both the Wizard and Cleric spell-list, but cast as arcane spells, and spontaneously, like a sorcerer. Since the classes' spell list is fixed and automatically known when a character obtains access to a new spell level, this allows them a measure of versatility within their thematic.
Simplified Spellcasting: Much like a bard, a Dread Necro can cast spells while wearing light armor without fearing a chance of failure. This makes them more resilient and melee-prone than other casters.
Spiritual Successor: To the Death Master class (see below), sharing some of its abilities but having a more distinct identity and less setting-specific description.
Squishy Wizard: While only slightly less squishy than normal casters in theory, their infinite healing makes them fairly tankish at times. (For comparison, even the Monk's Healing Factor is limited to twice the Monk's class level per day.)
Turn Undead: They can rebuke undead in the same way an evil Cleric can.
Useless Item: WotC's Customer Service system has infamously claimed one of their class features does absolutely nothing beyond give them a box. This is one of the more frequently cited reasons why no one uses their rulings.

Duskblade

Introduced in Player's Handbook II, the Duskblade competently combines sword and sorcery, using a large number of touch-based spells that they can channel into their attacks while backing it up with magic that can be cast at rapid speed. While they never reach the level of power sorcerers and wizards can reach, they do gain several very powerful offensive spells.

Chain Lightning: One of the strongest offensive spells in the their repertoire.
Defense Mechanism Superpower: Several of the spells a Duskblade can learn are purely defensive... and can be cast as an Immediate Action, meaning on the opponent's turn.
Elemental Punch: a couple of the Duskblade's spells effectively function as this, as they are touch spells that deliver damaging elemental attacks.
Full-Contact Magic: Duskblades are explicitly designed to be capable of this, delivering their spells through their swords or other weapons.
Genius Bruiser: An Intelligence-based caster who has all Knowledge skills as class skills. Plenty of them also pick up Knowledge Devotion to do this even more efficiently.
Glass Cannon: A Duskblade is limited to d8 Hit Dice and can't wear armor lighter than medium. By the time they've learned to channel spells into a full attack, though, they can certifiably murder everything.
Lethal Harmless Powers: The Duskblade also has a few spells that in and of themselves can do a person no harm, yet can still prove deadly used correctly. Dimension Hop, for instance, is a touch spell that a Duskblade can delivery through a Melee strike, that teleports the target up to 5ft per 2 caster levels to an unoccupied space with line of sight... including out into the middle of empty space past the edge of a cliff, or into the range of a devastatingly powerful spell or ability...
Life Drain: Vampiric Touch, often considered a Duskblade's bread-and-butter attack.
Magic Knight: The best single non-Prestige class example.
Magikarp Power: They start to fall behind when full attacks become more common — but at 13th level, they gain the full-attack-channel, which handily combines the two.
Simplified Spellcasting:
- Duskblades can cast while wearing armor and shields with no chance of spell failure. This is an incredibly potent ability as it gives very high AC, something most arcane casters don't have.
- Their Arcane Attunement ability gives them extra daily uses of a handful of 0-level utility spells like dancing lights. These count as spell-like abilities, meaning they do not require Spell Construction.
- As they gain levels, they also gain the ability to Quicken a spell (casting it instantly) a limited number of times per day.
Spell Blade:
- Their "Arcane Channeling" ability allows them to deliver spells with a range of Touch through any weapon, not just a punch. At higher levels they can use this ability as part of a full attack in order to affect multiple targets with the same spell.
- Due to their unusually generous number of spells per day, they also make excellent users of the Arcane Strike feat from Complete Warrior, which allows the user to sacrifice a spell slot in order to empower their weapons for 1 round.
Unskilled, but Strong: On the magical side, while they only go up to 6th-level spells, they have an unusually large number of spells per day at each level (capping at 10 where most casters have 4 or 6), as well as a class feature which lets them use 0-level spells more often. Also like the Bard but unlike previous Magic Knight classes, their caster level progresses at full speed, allowing them to make use of existing damage-dealing spells rather than needing ones tailored to them.^note

Erudite

Introduced in Complete Psionic, the Erudite is essentially a variant of a Psion, with the main difference being that instead of automatically learning powers and dedicating themselves to a discipline, Erudites study specific powers and gain them one by one in a similar fashion to Wizards.

All Your Powers Combined: Unlike standard Psions, Erudites can learn powers from all six psionic disciplines. Even more so with the Spell to Power variant, that allows the Erudite to learn arcane spells. These include wizard, bard, assassin and wu jen spells, making the Erudite even more diverse in repertoire.
One Stat to Rule Them All:The Erudite's Intelligence score determines the amount of power points, the maximum level of powers mastered and how hard they hit, as well as governing most of their skills.
Power Crystal: All Erudites can create a psycristal companion, a small construct that serve the same purpose as a sorcerer/wizard's Familiar.
Secret Character: The Erudite was hidden away in one of the last pages of Complete Psionic, segregated from the other three classes introduced in that splatbook. Consequently, a fair number of people don't even know it exists. ^note

Factotum

Introduced in Dungeonscape, the Factotum is a class designed for dungeoncrawling with an incredibly wide variety of abilities. Using their Inspiration ability, they can temporarily mimic various tricks, and are capable of using every skill in the game. They tend to operate as a skill-focused class, able to find traps and use stealth, but can also fill combat and spellcasting roles.

Badass Bookworm: A Factotum can supplement an attack or damage roll with their Intelligence modifier, but only a limited number of times per encounter. Also, they gain the ability to constantly apply their Intelligence modifier to Strength and Dexterity-based checks. Not to mention careful (ab)use of the Iaijutsu skill...
Iaijutsu Practitioner: While definitely Not the Intended Use, their access to every skill in the game makes them one of the best users of the otherwise-obscure Iaijutsu Focus skill from Oriental Adventures, which grants them a decent damage bonus when attacking after drawing a weapon.
Jack of All Trades: This is what a Factotum is made to be. They have access to all skills, have some limited spellcasting abilities, have proficiency with all simple and martial weapons, and as noted, have access to limited Healing Hands and Turn Undead.
One Stat to Rule Them All: Intelligence underpins their attack rolls, damage, spells, Iaijutsu and other things.
Revive Kills Zombie: Possible using Healing Hands.
Simplified Spellcasting: Their Arcane Dilettante class feature lets them "conjure up something that looks like a spell" a limited number of times per day, with the description making it clear that they're just going through the motions without really getting how it works. These function as spell-like abilities rather than true spells, meaning that no actual Spell Construction is required (among other things, the Factotum can cast them while wearing armor).
Turn Undead: A Factotum gets this ability. Rebuking doesn't work for a Factotum though, even an evil one.
Trap Master: A Factotum can disarm exceptional traps, in the same way Rogues can.
Unskilled, but Strong: Normally classes which don't specialise in spellcasting can only access up to 4th or 6th level spells, sometimes at a penalty to caster level. Via Arcane Dilettante, the Factotum can cast a 7th-level spell at full caster level and minus some of the normal restrictions, albeit only once per day.

Favored Soul

Introduced in the Miniatures Handbook, and introduced again in Complete Divine, the Favored Soul operates as a divine equivalent to the Sorcerer — while Clerics are devoted to their gods, Favored Souls are simply blessed by them, granting them casting abilities that are restricted to a list of known spells. As they grow stronger, they also gain access to some divine abilities, such as resistances or wings.

The Chosen One: Your deity talks to you directly. Don't expect much vacation time.
Power Gives You Wings: At high levels, a Favored Soul grows either angelic or bat-like wings, depending on alignment.
Recycled In Space: The Favored Soul is the Divine counterpart to the Sorcerer because they can spontaneously cast spells instead of preparing at set times and they may have an Unequal Rites thing with clerics because they don't have to be formally ordained or anything to use divine magic.
Weapon Specialization: Automatically proficient with their deity's favored weapon, even if it's an exotic weapon. They also gain the Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization feats in this weapon as they gain levels, albeit slowly enough that it doesn't have much impact (a Fighter can have Weapon Specialization at lv4, while a Favored Soul has to wait until lv12).

Healer

Introduced in the Miniatures Handbook, the Healer is a pure White Mage class — while most divine casters focus on support in general, healers focus entirely on curing injuries and maladies, with some defensive spells backing them up. They are known for their strong oaths and dedication to peace, and as such are poor fighters, but little can match them in getting someone back on their feet.

Crippling Overspecialisation: The Healer is an incredible healer, but healing (and some slight buffing) is all it can do. Unless your characters are wounded or suffering from something, the healer basically only takes up space.
Healing Hands: Aside from healing spells, this is also the name of one of their main abilities, able to significantly boost the power of healing spells.
Revive Kills Zombie: Without Sanctified Spells, this is probably the only reasonable way a Healer can fight until they get their Celestial Unicorn companion.
Unicorn: The base companion for a Healer is a Celestial Unicorn.
Virgin Power: Averted; there is nothing in the rules saying a Healer has to be a virgin to keep their Celestial Unicorn companion.
White Magic: The class specializes in healing spells.

Hexblade

Introduced in Complete Warrior, the Hexblade is a magically-inclined warrior who carries a general feel of unluck and unease. Rather than boosting their own combat skills, Hexblades attempt to weaken their enemies through a variety of curses, while backing themselves up with limited casting prowess, resistance to magic, and their familiar.

Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Designed to avert this, being an arcane equivalent to the divine Paladin and Ranger (warriors who can cast 4th level spells), with the Bard's ability to cast arcane spells in light armor. After the release of the Duskblade (a similar class with access to medium armor and 6th level spells) the devs admitted that Hexblade had been left undertuned because they were worried that casting arcane spells in armor would be overpowered.
Bad Powers, Bad People: Cannot be outright Good, as a consequence of how their powers center on cursing others.
The Beastmaster: The most popular Hexblade builds tend to focus on abusing its familiar. Since a familiar's HP is half that of its master's, a Hexblade's familiar is typically going to be far tougher than a Wizard's and inherit the Hexblade's better attack bonus. Some go so far as to trade the feature for Dark Companion (itself an arguable example) and then take a feat to regain a familiar. Plenty of them add Improved Familiar for good measure, swapping out their cats and owls for winter wolves.
Curse: Their "Hexblade's Curse" is their signature ability, inflicting penalties on an opponent for 1 hour.
Magic Knight: A Hexblade has access to both arcane spells and the full Base Attack and high HD of a warrior class.
Master of None: They have almost no melee combat abilities outside of their chassis, and their spellcasting is scarcely better than a Ranger's.
Overshadowed by Awesome: Compared to the Duskblade or a multiclass character, they're not as powerful. The Hexblade does have some neat tricks, including the Mettle ability and an altogether good spell list (though its casting ability remains limited), but compared to the raw power of a Duskblade or the greater versatility of an Eldritch Knight, the class ends up looking pretty iffy.
Took a Level in Badass: The designers did some work to bring the hexblade up a notch, with its creator releasing an unofficial fix that placed the Hexblade more on the Duskblade's tier. These days, the Duskblade focuses on raw damage, while the Hexblade focuses on debuffs and melee support.

Incarnate

Introduced in Magic of Incarnum, the Incarnate is the "generic" user of incarnum, a magic system that channels Soul Power to conjure items that grant them unusual abilities. They dedicate themselves to a specific alignment axis, such as Good or Law, and can fill almost any role due to the versatility of incarnum, using its power to make up for their apparently-weak chassis.

Difficult, but Awesome: Playing an Incarnate requires juggling points between a wide variety of abilities practically on-the-fly, selecting between a massive number of potential options regularly, and figuring out the rules properly. Once you've learned how to play the class, you are incredibly versatile and able to manage almost any skill. Incarnates are capable of utilizing defenses that are normally reserved for spellcasters/manifesters, and are numerically capable of covering any of the four standard roles. What's more, an Incarnate can change their entire build within 9 hours' time.
Diverting Power: As an incarnum class, they can increase the power of their abilities by investing them with essentia chits, which can be reallocated from turn to turn.
Guide Dang It!: The Incarnate was introduced in a book that wears the title of Most Confusing Splat EVER. Very few people have the know-how to play the class, even on the most popular forums like GiantITP.
Jack of All Trades: Given that soulmelds cover a lot of focuses and can be swapped out, and Incarnates get the widest variety, you can build an Incarnate in just about any fashion; a party of four Incarnates is entirely feasible.
Made of Iron: Thanks to having a huge amount of defenses and being focused nigh-exclusively on Constitution, an Incarnate is very durable. Only the Totemist and Crusader (and, to a lesser extent, the Barbarian) are comparable out of the non-casters.
Soul Power: Draws on the essence of souls from the past, present, and possibly those who have yet to be born to create pseudo-magical items for a variety of effects, most of which are passive bonuses.
Squishy Wizard: Zig-Zagged. They have the same chassis as a wizard (d4 Hit Dice and poor BAB) and can appear like this at first glance. However, they receive various combat and especially durability buffs which push them out of this territory.
Vancian Magic: Mechanically, soulmelds are prepared at the start of the day in the same way as a Cleric preparing spells. However, they are automatically "cast" as part of preparing them, and last until dismissed or dispelled.
Wrong Context Magic: In 3.5e, supernatural and spell-like abilities are distinguished mainly by supernatural abilities bypassing spell resistance. Soulmelds are supernatural abilities but can be negated by spell resistance.

Jester

Introduced in Dragon #60, updated for 3.5e in the Dragon Compendium. The Jester is a semi-caster similar to the Bard class, except that their use of the Perform skill is limited to Perform (comedy).

Catch and Return: Gains Deflect Arrows and Snatch Arrows as bonus feats, explained as a product of their skill at juggling.
Draw Aggro: Their Taunt performance forces an opponent who fails their Will save to take a penalty to Armor Class and spend some of their actions moving towards the Jester each turn (making a charge if possible).
Fighting Clown: Well, it's a court jester in an adventuring party, what do you think?
I Shall Taunt You: The Jester weaponises various forms of taunts, mockery and distracting behaviour, using mechanics similar to the Bard's bardic music.
Let's Mock the Monsters: The "Bone Rattler" class feature, gained at 10th level, allows a jester's taunts to affect even undead creatures (who are normally be immune to mental influence) as long as they're not mindless.
Power Nullifier: Their Vexing Dialogue performance disrupts a target's concentration as if they'd taken damage equal to the result of the jester's Perform (comedy) check -10, making it harder for them to use spells and similar abilities.

Knight

Introduced in Player's Handbook II (3.5e), the Knight fills the classical Knight in Shining Armor role while lacking the Paladin's overt supernatural skills. Their signature ability is Knight's Challenge, which allows them to designate targets to duel and force them to attack the Knight, giving them something of a "tank class" role, and maintain a code of conduct in battle.

Anti-Escape Mechanism: Their "Bulwark of Defense" causes an enemy who begins their turn within the Knight's melee attack range to treat the entire radius as difficult terrain (which slows movement and prevents them from using certain actions like running or charging). Meanwhile, "Vigilant Defender" inflicts penalty on Tumble checks made to move out of a square in the Knight's reach without reprisal.
Defend Command: The Shield Ally class feature allows them to target an adjacent ally as an immediate action, absorbing half of the damage they take from physical attacks for 1 turn. Improved Shield Ally upgrades this to fully absorb damage from the attack it's used in response to.
Determinator: A knight can continue to fight, even when they should be dead. Even when they ARE dead. Unusually for a martial class, their best saving throw is Will rather than Fortitude.
Draw Aggro: The intended role of a Knight, with Test of Mettle forcing the opponent to attack the Knight if they fail a save, and Bulwark of Defense making it much harder to withdraw.
Duel Boss: Their "Fighting Challenge" class feature allows them to expend a use of Knight's Challenge to single out a powerful opponent and gain bonuses while fighting them; they cannot challenge another opponent as long as the first is still present.
Faster Than They Look: Their Armor Mastery class feature allows them to ignore the speed penalties for wearing medium and later heavy armour.
Honor Before Reason: Every time the Knight violates their code of conduct, such as making surprise attacks, or striking a defenseless foe, they lose uses of their Knight's Challenge for the day. Violating their code when out of Knight's challenges applies a morale penalty to them for the rest of the day, and only gets worse from there.
Horseback Heroism: They don't gain any kind of Cool Horse Bond Creature like a Paladin or Ranger can, but they do gain Mounted Combat as a bonus feat.
Knight in Shining Armor: They're certainly meant to invoke this image, given the "always lawful" alignment requirement and code of conduct.
Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Their Shield Block class feature increases the Armor Class bonus of any shield they wield.
Time-Delayed Death: Their capstone ability, Loyal Beyond Death, allows them to survive at negative hit points by expending one use of Knight's Challenge each turn. This allows them to withstand any amount of damage short of complete disintegration, though the lower a Knight's HP drops into the negative the harder it is for allies to heal all their wounds before time runs out.

Lurk

Introduced in Complete Psionic, the Lurk is more or less a psionic equivalent to the Rogue. Aside from low-level psionic abilities that relate to stealth and subterfuge, Lurks have access to the Lurk Augment to empower a single strike.

Back Stab: Though they need to be psionically focused to do it, and need to spend power points to do it well, they do get a version of this.
Psychic Powers: Focused on mobility, stealth, awareness, and trickery.
Recycled In Space: A psionic version of the assassin. Also available in psionic ranger and psionic rogue variants.
Stealth Expert: While their mundane skills are limited compared to others of this role, they can make you forget they were ever there...

Marshal

Introduced in the Miniatures Handbook, the Marshal is a strategist and military commander with a focus on static party buffs by projecting a variety of auras. They can be seen as an early equivalent to classes like 4e's Warlord.

The Face: They have a Charisma focus, an aura that boosts Charisma checks, decent skill points, and free Skill Focus (Diplomacy). They're very good at this.
Frontline General: They're not as good in combat as fighters or barbarians, but between their auras and their statline, they can usually handle themselves, and their auras require them to be fairly close to the frontline anyway.
Promoted to Playable: In an odd way, it can be considered one for the aristocrat; they have the same overall statline (average Base Attack, good Will save, four skill points, weapon and armor proficiencies), similar flavor, and a similar set of class skills. It's really not hard to stat out a more active king or noble as a marshal.
Status Buff: The class's main specialty is its auras, a means of buffing one's allies just by being there.
The Strategist: In-lore and in-game, this is their intended position, being battlefield commanders.

Mountebank

Idea suggested in Dragon #65, introduced in the Dragon Compendium. Not to be confused with the prestige class of the same name in Complete Scoundrel. The Mountebank is a sort of Rogue/Sorcerer/Warlock hybrid - a skill-focused class which draws their power from an infernal patron, gaining a limited number of spell-like abilities and something similar to the Rogue's sneak attack.

Back Stab: Of a sort. A Mountebank's Deceptive Attack deals bonus damage against opponents whom they successfully feint against or teleport behind, OR whom they have beguiled or otherwise lulled into a false sense of security. While only about half as strong as the Rogue's sneak attack, it functions on all enemies even if they lack targetable weak points.
Confusion Fu: Capable of changing their appearance and apparent alignment, teleporting around (optionally turning invisible and leaving behind an illusion of themselves), and hypnotising or confusing enemies.
Deal with the Devil: The literal, sell-thy-soul-for-power kind. Not even a minion either, but a bonafide demon prince or a Duke of Hell.
Greed: Whether for power, wealth, or the grim satisfaction of watching the world burn, Mountebanks tend to be big on the greed.
Humanshifting: Their Infernal Guise class feature allows them to use alter self as a spell-like ability.
Hypnotic Eyes: One of the class' earliest abilities, which naturally works rather well with their Deceptive Attack feature.
Manipulative Bastard: The class' modus operandi when there's no fighting going on.
Your Soul Is Mine!: Regardless of your quality of service, at level 20, your infernal patron gets impatient and comes to collect his payment.

Ninja

Introduced in Complete Adventurer, the Ninja is a classical pop-culture ninja with all that implies. Functionally, it works as a mix between Monk and Rogue, with less focus on skill points and a Wisdom-dependency that allows it to access ki-related tricks such as invisibility.

Awesome, but Impractical: Unfortunately, most of their cool ninja tricks are pretty easy to copy with magic items, and come at the cost of being worse than the rogue in many areas.
Back Stab: Their Sudden Strike ability is identical to the rogue's Sneak Attack... except that having one of your allies flank the target isn't enough to pull it off, forcing a Ninja to use the less reliable setups of stealth or feinting.
Individualism vs. Collectivism: The basic philosophical difference between Rogues and Ninjas - where Rogues rely on teamwork and the products of civilisation, Ninjas train to be self-sufficient. Both can access magical abilities, but Rogues do so by wielding magic wands (usually to make energy-based sneak attacks or heal their allies between fights) while Ninjas do so by refining their stealth and agility to impossible levels. Rogues wear light armour, while Ninjas go unarmoured. The rogue's form of Back Stab can be set up easily by flanking with an ally, while the ninja's cannot.
Ninja: No, really, take a guess.
Stealth Expert: Clearly designed as this, with all the classic stealth skills and the ability to become invisible or even ethereal. Pushing this further is Sudden Strike, which requires the Ninja to strike a flat-footed target to get its damage boost, unlike Sneak Attack, which can trigger over the course of ordinary combat.
Trap Master: Like the Rogue, they possess Trapfinding and Disable Device.

Psion / Psionicist

Introduced in the Psionics Handbook and revised substantially in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, Psions are the "generic" wielders of Psychic Powers. Similar to the Wizard, they are an Intelligence-based Squishy Wizard that tend to focus on a specific "path" of powers, such as telepathy or shaping ectoplasm, though they simply "know" powers in the same fashion as Sorcerer.

Alpha Strike: The Tim Taylor Technology nature of the psionics mechanics means that it's possible for Psions to burn through all their resources very quickly by spending all of them on heavily-augmented powers.
And I Must Scream: Psionic powers can be nasty.
Back from the Dead: There are a couple of ways to go at it, some more complicated than others.
Elemental Powers: The energy line of damage-dealing powers allow the user to choose between blasts of fire, cold, electricity or sonic energy each time the power is used, with each having slightly different properties. This makes Psions very good at targeting elemental weaknesses, somewhat compensating for their lack of automatic damage scaling.
Magical Sensory Effect: Many Psychic Powers cause synaesthetic side effects like an indescribable but familiar odour, a low droning sound, a telepathic chime, or something more exotic. A psion can concentrate to suppress these effects for subtlety's sake.
Mana: Called Power Points, but function as a mana meter, in contrast to normal Vancian Magic casters.
Mind Rape: In several delicious flavours. Injecting an enemy's mind with a second, simultaneously-functioning personality that hates them is only one example.
No Self-Buffs: Inverted. Compared to traditional casters, a Psion's ability to create lingering effects on anything other than their own body is severely limited (the astral construct power, their equivalent to Summon Magic, being the most notable exception). Flavourwise this is because a Psion fuels and controls their powers entirely manually, without the benefit of a spell formula or Background Magic Field to anchor things to while they're absent.
Psychic-Assisted Suicide: A normal Charm Person spell specifically cannot do this. A Psion can develop a power that specifically can.
Psychic Powers: It's their thing.
Psychic Nosebleed: The Overchannel Feat allows the Psion to increase their manifester level beyond their character level at the the cost of hit points. Given that everything about a psionic power's effect is dictated by manifester level, this is incredibly powerful.
Tim Taylor Technology: Psions learn fewer powers than Sorcerers learn spells, but most powers can be "augmented" to a stronger effect by expending additional power points, as long as the total cost is no higher than the Psion's manifester level. As a downside, their damage-dealing powers don't become any stronger as the Psion increases in level, and must be heavily augmented in order to stay relevant.
Your Head Asplode: Decerebrate is not quite this, but comes close. You teleport part of the target's brain out of his head.

Psychic Rogue

Introduced in the Wizards of the Coast's Mind's Eye articles

Back Stab: Much like their nonpsionic cousin class, Sneak Attacks are part of the deal. Psychic Rogues get a slower bonus damage progression, but can potentially reinforce them with psychic power.
Magic Knight: Very similar to the standard Rogue class, but with added Psychic Powers in exchange for slight nerfs to its other abilities.

Psychic Warrior

Introduced in the Psionics Handbook and revised substantially in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, Psychic Warriors distinguish themselves by focusing on pure combat. Instead of mental attacks, they use their psychic powers to shift and modify their own bodies, granting them limited shapeshifting and substantial stat buffs that they back up with reasonable martial skill.

Empathic Healer: Psychic Warriors can donate their hit points to their teammates, and later learns to drain enemies for quick healing.
Empathic Weapon: The Soulbound Weapon alternate class feature gives you one; it's considered a better soulknife than the actual soulknife.
Life Drain: Several of their abilities are based on this, most famously the King of Smack build.
Magic Knight: The psionic version thereof.
Nigh-Invulnerable: At mid-level, with the Vigor power, a psychic warrior can take dozens of points of damage before even cutting into their actual hitpoints. With the right combo of feats, you basically become immortal.
Poor, Predictable Rock: Subverted: most of their attack spells do acid damage, but how many stock Monster Manual creatures resist acid?
Psychic Powers: An odd variant, in that their abilities focus mostly on pure physical combat.
Sizeshifter: One of the first powers they can pick up is Expansion, which doubles their size. With further investment, it becomes more efficient, faster, and even potentially lets them double their size again.

Samurai

Introduced in Oriental Adventures (3.0), revised and reintroduced in Complete Warrior (3.5), the Samurai is intended as an Eastern-flavored equivalent to classes like Paladin and Knight. The two classes are radically different, however, with the Oriental Adventures version focusing on links to various clans and the Complete Warrior version being a melange of Samurai traits.

Ancestral Weapon: The Oriental Adventures version had this as a feature. It allowed the Samurai to start off with a Masterwork weapon (typically a katana or bastard sword), and enchant it by offering monetary sacrifices and meditating and praying to their ancestors
Dual Wielding: Part of the Complete Warrior version, they receive Two-Weapon Fighting as a bonus feat, but it only applies when using a daisho (wakizashi/shortsword and katana/bastard sword).
Iaijutsu Practitioner: Both versions. The Oriental Adventures version can invest in a skill called Iaijutsu Focus, which allows them to do bonus damage on a surprise round if they could draw their weapon and attack in the same round. The Complete Warrior version, however, is toned down, and only provides the Quick Draw feat for their daisho.
Lawful Stupid: The initial 3.0 version had a lot of stereotypical Bushido stuff that limited its actions or caused penalties.
Terror Hero: The Complete Warrior version has various abilities related to intimidating their enemies, including the ability to do so faster or against multiple targets at once. In fact, the most popular tier list for 3.5e classes (in which Samurai is normally fairly low) declared that it rises an entire tier if it has access to the Imperious Command feat (which causes intimidated opponents to lose their next turn).
The Theme Park Version: It's often observed that most of the abilities of the Complete Warrior version don't really match up with a samurai, such as a focus on Dual Wielding, using katanas in battle, and very low social skills.

Savant

Introduced in Dragon Compendium, the Savant is a Jack of All Trades similar to the Bard and Factotum. They can use all simple & martial weapons; all skills are the Savant's class skills; plus they get the Rogue's Sneak Attack, Academic Lore (identical to Bardic Knowledge); and both a handful of arcane & divine spells at higher levels.

Badass Bookworm: The whole point. They get all skills as their class skills, get a few magic spells and have random knowledge like a bard but also can use most weapons as well as light armor and shields.
Glass Cannon: While getting a Sneak Attack like the Rogue and being able to use any simple or martial weapon, they can't use medium or heavy armor; also they only get eight-sided dice for hit points. A Savant will never be able to match the combat ability of a Fighter, Barbarian and so on.
Knowledge Broker: Like the bard, Savants get Academic Lore which allows them to roll to recall any pertinent information about a location, historical event, monster, etc.
Jack of All Trades: Similar to the Bard and plays like a scaled-down version of the Factotum.
Trap Master: Savants get trapfinding just like the Rogue.

Scout

Introduced in Complete Adventurer, the Scout functions as a kind of hybrid of Rogue and Ranger, with a strong wilderness theme to their abilities and a focus on movement. They distinguish themselves from Rogues due to the Skirmish ability, which increases their damage and AC while moving, regardless of whether they've surprised the opponent.

Fragile Speedster: Significant speed boosts and a combat style that requires them to move regularly means that they're quite quick on the move, but their durability is average at best and they have to wear light armor.
Kiting: The class's specialty through the Skirmish ability, which boosts their damage and AC if they've moved some distance during that turn.
Stealth Expert: Not to the same extent as the Rogue, since its Skirmish ability doesn't rely on surprise like a Rogue's Sneak Attack, but Scouts are still good at remaining unseen.
Took a Level in Badass: On its own, the Scout class isn't particularly impressive. However the Swift Hunter feat, available to Scouts with at least one level in Ranger, allows them to stack their levels in both classes for determining the strength of their Skirmish and Favored Enemy class features respectively,^note making for a solid build. Scouts can even select Swift Hunter as one of their bonus feats, making it especially easy to access.
Trap Master: Only rogues are allowed to have any chance of successfully disarming exceptionally difficult traps amongst the core classes, but scouts are one of a few other bases classes to have the same ability.

Shadowcaster

Introduced in Tome of Magic, the Shadowcaster is the most traditionally caster-like of the three classes introduced there, being a mage who draws their strength from the Plane of Shadow. Its defining trait is its Mysteries, which require a somewhat slow and cumbersome advancement and a devotion to a single path but grow progressively more simple and powerful with time.

Casting a Shadow: While not all their abilities are based on this, it should perhaps not be surprising that they make use of it regularly.
Dark Is Not Evil: Shadowcasters are not inclined toward evil any more than other classes. The fluff does say good shadowcasters are exceedingly rare pretty much because of Dark Is Evil, but exceedingly rare is explicitly not the same as non-existent (the class has no alignment restrictions), and there is nothing suggesting evil shadowcasters are any more common than neutral ones.
The Needless: They gradually become this, decreasing how often they need to eat and drink and how much sleep they need (for health and sanity; they always need at least 8 hours of rest to renew their mysteries) over the levels until at level 20 they neither need breath nor food nor sleep.
Simplified Spellcasting: The main mechanical thrust of the class. Their fundamentals (the equivalents of the spell level 0 cantrips and orisons for other casters) start out as supernatural abilities, their mysteries move from being cast as spells to being cast as spell-like abilities to being supernatural abilities depending on the tier and level, none of their mysteries have verbal or material components (or foci) in the first place, and they have a feat available that allows them to cast all their mysteries without gestures.
Squishy Wizard: Slightly downplayed, relative to actual wizards. Shadowcasters have the hit points of a sorcerer, but good fortitude saves, are a single feat from not having to worry about spell failure from armour at all (though they still don't have proficiency with armour, so only the lightest armours are worth it) and eventually can maintain a constant small deflection (meaning it applies against everything) bonus to AC.

Shaman

Introduced in Oriental Adventures. The Third Edition Shaman is a combination of the Cleric with elements of Druid and Monk; they get healing spells, can turn undead, get animal companions and can even fight unarmed.

The Beastmaster: Shamans get up to two animal companions (with a total Hit Dice limit), and can easily charm other animals into helping out in a pinch. The 3.5 update makes their animal companion the same as the Druid's companion.
Invulnerable Knuckles: Like Monks, they get Improved Unarmed Strike allowing them to fight barehanded and even get bonus feats to improve their unarmed combat ability.
I See Dead People: Shamans gain the ability to see ethereal creatures, such as ghosts that are not currently manifesting in the Material Plane (a manifested ghost would be visible to everyone). To a Shaman, ethereal creatures are visible, but appear translucent and somewhat indistinct.
Turn Undead: They get this power like Clerics but not until third level. Like the Paladin, they are weaker overall at turning undead, treated as a Cleric of two levels lower.
The Red Mage: Shamans get healing and buffs much like Clerics but also get Druid spells such as Summon Nature's Ally. Shamans can select up to three domains too; depending on what domains they choose, they can get offensive spells not normally on their spell list.

Shugenja

Introduced in Oriental Adventures, reintroduced in Complete Divine, the Shugenja serves a cleric-esque role in those settings, casting through ofuda instead of scrolls or spellbooks. They are also capable of wielding the power of the classical elements, with the element of choice being a large factor in their abilities.

Elemental Powers: Its spell list consists of Cleric and Wizard spells re-flavored as elemental spells.

Soulborn

Introduced in Magic of Incarnum, the Soulborn is meant to function as the warrior class of incarnum-users, backing up acceptable combat skill with the ability to use soulmelds to enhance their skills. Unlike Incarnates, they must possess one of the "extreme" alignments - either Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good or Chaotic Evil.

Discard and Draw: Soulborns can prepare soulmelds at the start of each day which grant various abilities, to a maximum of one per four class levels. The list they can select from is similar to the Incarnate's, but with a few unique options.
Kung-Fu Sonic Boom: Their Thunderstep Boots soulmeld adds bonus sonic damage to their attacks when making a charge. Binding it to the Feet chakra also forces your attack target to make a Fortitude save or become stunned for 1 round.
Loophole Abuse: A Chaotic Evil soulborn gains "immunity to any penalty, damage, or drain to [their] Strength", which theoretically applies even to things like a Tibbit's Strength penalty when they turn into a housecat. Albeit this is usually more funny than useful.
Magic Knight: Except with incarnum. Without it, they're just Fighters with Smiting but without most of the bonus feats.
Master of None: They receive fewer bonus feats than a fighter but their access to soulmelds is also very limited, to the point where a Fighter can achieve similar results by using some of their spare feat slots to take the Shape Soulmeld feat multiple times.
Super-Strength: Their Mauling Gauntlets soulmeld grants a sizable bonus on Strength checks (e.g. attempts to push an opponent around or break free of binds). Binding it to the Hands chakra also allows them to apply this as a damage bonus when punching.
No-Sell: The Incarnum Defense class feature, their equivalent to the paladin's Aura of Courage, grants immunities of various types dependent on the Soulborn's alignment. Lawful Good gets fear immunity like paladins, Lawful Evil cannot become exhausted, Chaotic Good are immune to paralysis, and Chaotic Evil cannot have their Strength score lowered. At higher levels they can touch another creature to share this defence with them for a short time.
Omniglot: Their Soulspeaker Circlet soulmeld allows them to understand one or more spoken languages of their choice, with the Crown bind also allowing them to speak those languages. The Throat chakra bind upgrades this to short-range Telepathy.
Smite Evil: Their "Smite Opposition" ability is broader in effect than its Paladin counterpart, affecting creatures who oppose either portion of the Soulborn's alignment - e.g. a Lawful Good soulborn's smite would harm both evil creatures and chaotic ones.
Terror Hero: Their Fearsome Mask soulmeld grants a bonus on Intimidate checks (albeit lower than that of some other soulmelds) and potentially a fear-inducing gaze attack.

Soulknife

Initially introduced as a Prestige Class in 3.0 and upgraded to a full class in 3.5, the Soulknife is a psionic class that is capable of conjuring a weapon from pure psychic energy and wielding it in combat. It functions as a kind of oddball warrior class, focusing on the enhancement of its Mind Blade and the ability to charge it with extra strength.

Awesome, but Impractical: There are three phases of learning about the Soulknife. Phase 1 is "Sweet, lightsabers!" (Alternately, "Psylocke!") Phase 2 is "What, average BAB? No heavy armor? Crappy skills? Mind Blade kinda sucks as a weapon? What a ripoff." (Phase 3 is learning about the Soulbow.)
Charged Attack: Their "Psychic Strike" class feature lets them charge their mind blade with energy, inflicting bonus damage to the next living, non-mindless creature they hit with an attack.
Dual Wielding: Starting at 5th level they can manifest two mind blades at once, at the cost of reducing their individual power.
Energy Bow: The Soulbow Prestige Class transforms their main weapon into this. It's notably much more useful than the original, since it adds the user's Wisdom modifier to damage (which, with Zen Archery, lets you focus entirely on Wisdom) and the remaining levels of the Soulbow class continue to advance your Soulknife abilities but on an improved chassis.
Flechette Storm: Their "Bladewind" class feature is described in this way, though its actual effects are identical to the Whirlwind Attack feat (letting them attack each target in melee range once each).
Laser Blade: The Soulknife's signature weapon is his Mind Blade, a glowing shortsword (and later potentially a longsword or bastard sword) formed from psychic energy. Unfortunately, it's not particularly strong compared to regular equipment of the same level.
Morph Weapon: A very slow version — the Soulknife can change their mind blade between a few types of swords by spending their entire turn in concentration. For contrast, there are enchantments for normal magic weapons which let them turn into any weapon with just a swift action. The Soulknife is also capable of changing their mind blade's magical properties, but only by concentrating continuously for 8 hours (and the small list of properties they can select from doesn't give them much ability to tailor it to different situations).
One Stat to Rule Them All: A Soulbow with Zen Archery basically has no reason to advance anything but Wisdom.
Overshadowed by Awesome: The Psychic Warrior's "Soulbound Weapon" alternate class feature grants them a weapon similar to a mind blade, except that it may have different enchantments each time it's summoned (without the Soulknife's restrictions, allowing them to always make it a Weapon of X-Slaying against their current opponent). It does this while retaining all of the Psychic Warrior's normal abilities, making them better at using the weapon as well.
Required Secondary Powers: Since having your main weapon stop existing while inside a field of Anti-Magic is a pretty big weakness, Soulknives have the ability to temporarily shield their mind blade against such effects with a successful Will save. Interestingly, this makes them the only magic weapons that can function inside an antimagic field (barring weapons that have been temporarily enchanted by a Cleric with the Initiate of Mystra feat).
Soul-Cutting Blade: Their "Knife to the Soul" class feature, gained at high levels, evokes this at least in name. It lets them sacrifice Psychic Strike damage dice in order to inflict minor damage to one of the target's mental ability scores.
Throwing Your Sword Always Works: "Throw Mind Blade" is a class feature gained at 2nd level, and the Soulknife's default option for ranged combat. It's not an amazing option, especially at low levels when you need to spend time recreating your mind blade after each throw, but it has fairly long range for a thrown weapon (comparable to a javelin).

Spellthief

Introduced in Complete Adventurer, the Spellthief is a rogue-esque class that trades off in skills and combat through its titular ability to steal the magic from casters upon a successful Sneak Attack. It backs up this ability with minor spellcasting of its own, as well as being able to counter magic by other means.

Anti-Magic: Spellthieves have a natural spell resistance to offset the inherent danger of their profession. At higher levels, they are absorbing fireballs like some sort of fire sponge.
Back Stab: Gets the Rogue's sneak attack ability, though at half the normal strength. Most of their stealing abilities trigger when the Spellthief makes a successful sneak attack against their target.
Impossible Thief: Specializes in stealing units of Vancian Magic from spellcasters. Later branches out to stealing innate spell-like abilities and elemental resistances from monsters.
Obvious Rule Patch: The "Master Spellthief" feat is presented as being for Spellthieves who multiclass into an another arcane spellcasting class, but can also be selected by a single-classed Spellthief.^note Among its benefits, it extends the Spellthief's "cast spells while wearing light armor" ability to also function with spells they have stolen.
Required Secondary Powers: If the Spellthief knows that their target has the ability to cast a spell, then they can choose to specifically steal that spell rather than one chosen at random. At high levels, this is assisted by the Discover Spells class feature — after stealing a spell, they automatically learn the names of all the target's spells of the same level.

Spirit Shaman

Introduced in Complete Divine, the Spirit Shaman is a divine casting class that venerates and deals with spiritual entities, whether to protect them or force them into line. Though the majority of their abilities focus on this, their casting is based on the Druid, with a unique-for-3.5 system where it prepares a limited number of spells and casts them spontaneously.

Banishing Ritual: Most of their class features revolve around harming or interacting with "spirits" — a category including things like ghosts, fey, elementals, and spells which create a creature-like magical force. At 20th level they become a spirit, which amusingly makes them vulnerable to banishing by lower-level Spirit Shamans.
Difficult, but Awesome: About as good as you'd expect a Spontaneous Druid to be, minus the Wildshape and Animal Companion. Still relatively good, and is the only Spontaneous Caster capable of completely rewriting its own spell list every 24 hours.
Discard and Draw: Their spellcasting mechanic is a hybrid of the Wizard and Sorcerer classes. Like the Sorcerer they have a limited number of spells known, combined with a large number of spell slots, and can cast the same spell repeatedly. However, they can change their spells known each time they rest.
Intangible Man: Their "Spirit Form" class feature lets them turn intangible a limited number of times per day.
Spirit Advisor: Instead of a familiar or animal companion, Spirit Shamans have a spirit guide. Since it hangs out in their mind it does not have actions of its own, but it can give a second chance at resisting mental manipulation or handle concentration on an already cast spell.
Touch the Intangible: Their "Ghost Warrior" class feature bestows the ghost touch property on any weapons or armor they wield.

Swashbuckler

Introduced in the Complete Warrior/Adventurer books. A combat class modeled after the famous archetype, Swashbucklers focus on a Weak, but Skilled fighting style involving the use of Weapon Finesse and maximizing the damage of relatively light weapons, while also aiming to be far more mobile than their competition.

Awesome, but Impractical: Awesome, you get to pull off all of your favorite Flynning and Swashbuckler tropes and you're more skillful than a fighter! Except, most of your damaging abilities, including Intelligence to damage, only work against foes not immune to sneak attacks or critical hits which is a problem at higher levels. Fighters can have enough feats, they'll be content to get a reach weapon with the ability to trip opponents with it, improved trip for the bonus attack after a trip, and then power attack for massive damage. Barbarians can just rage and pump their Strength stat enough to smash anything that gets in their way to a pulp. And the swashbuckler still lacks important skills and class features like the rogue's ability to find and disarm traps, the ranger's tracking skills, or either's actual good Reflex save or Evasion.
Flynning: Acrobatic Charge lets the Swashbuckler leap down from a balcony, run down stair cases, or tumble over tables to charge at their opponent. Also because of the Swashbuckler's focus on Weapon Finesse qualified weapons, they tend to end up using a rapier as their main weapon.
Genius Bruiser: Swashbucklers can apply their Intelligence to their damage when using certain weapons, but only when unburdened.

Swordsage

Introduced in Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, the Swordsage functions as a kind of alternative to the Monk. It is the most diverse of the three martial adepts in terms of its selection and abilities, and the most overtly supernatural, but trades off by being relatively weak and frail, forcing greater reliance on their unusual tricks.

Bare-Fisted Monk: The Unarmed Swordsage variant gives them the unarmed strike damage of the Monk class, in exchange for preventing them from wearing armor.
Casting a Shadow: The Shadow Hand discipline is chock-full of shadow and darkness-based attacks.
Charles Atlas Superpower: These guys can teleport without using a spell or any sort of supernatural ability. And if they are using supernatural abilities, hoo boy...
Fantastic Fighting Style: Learns maneuvers from six of the nine paths of the Sublime Way, as codified by an ancient warrior named Reshar.
- Desert Wind (exclusive to Swordsages) emulates the movements of fire, focusing on mobility and dazzling opponents. It also includes Supernatural Martial Arts techniques for channelling fire through attacks, leaving behind a trail of fire when you move, or gaining Not Quite Flight.
- Diamond Mind focuses on patience, perceptiveness, and manipulating the action economy. Many of its maneuvers allow the user to make a Concentration check in place of some other roll, allowing them to deal high burst damage or briefly boost one of their saving throws to No-Sell levels.
- Setting Sun (exclusive to Swordsages) focuses on turning the opponent's strength against them, including a number of judo-style throwing techniques, Schmuck Bait tricks, and abilities which swap around the roles of Strength and Dexterity for themselves or their opponent.
- Shadow Hand (exclusive to Swordsages) is the discipline of deception, including many techniques for performing a Back Stab, making foes drop their defenses against one, or inflicting Status Ailments. It also has some Supernatural Martial Arts techniques like minor illusions and short-range teleportation.
- Stone Dragon evokes the toughness and immovability of stone, with techniques for toughing out attacks or slowing the foe's movement, as well as the Mountain Hammer line of strikes which ignore Damage Reduction and hardness. Uniquely these maneuvers can only be used while in contact with the ground, and its stances additionally function only while standing still.
- Tiger Claw is an aggressive discipline with "savage" techniques based largely around Deadly Lunge or Dual Wielding, rounded out with things like sharpening the user's senses or gaining bonuses after slaying an opponent.
Flaming Sword: The Desert Wind school is full of techniques that do this.
Flash Step: The non-supernatural teleports from the Shadow Hand school.
Fragile Speedster: High armor class despite light armor (thanks to dodging), very high initiative, techniques to improve their base speed... pretty low HP for a frontliner.
Full-Contact Magic: The Game-Breaker "Arcane Swordsage" variant lets them learn and cast Wizard spells using the rules for maneuvers in place of Vancian Magic.
The Grappler: Has access to the Setting Sun school of maneuvers, many of which are grapple based.
Playing with Fire: Their blades aren't the only thing Desert Wind swordsages light on fire...
Spoony Bard: A Swordsage actually has some trouble finding a role in a small party. They're too fragile to fit the Fighter's shoes, can't heal like a Cleric, lack many of a Rogue's crucial skills such as trapfinding, and although they can debuff and serve as a good secondary melee.
Stance System: Like all initiator classes, they learn a number of stances as they level up and may only gain the benefits of one at a time.
Weak, but Skilled: The most fragile, least accurate, least armored Tome of Battle class; also the ones with the most skill points, most maneuvers, and the most evasive.
Well-Trained, but Inexperienced: Learns more maneuvers than any other Tome of Battle class, and also has the largest range of disciplines (including exclusive access to Supernatural Martial Arts like teleportation and setting their attacks on fire). However, their attacks are less accurate and they have by far the worst recovery mechanic — whereas Warblades can regain all their lost momentum just by making a normal unmodified attack, and Crusaders slowly recover maneuvers automatically, a Swordsage needs to spend their entire turn doing nothing just to recover even one maneuver.

Totemist

Introduced in Magic of Incarnum, the Totemist is an incarnum-using class that, rather than venerating an alignment, venerates magical beasts. Through this, they can unlock a special "totem chakra" that allows them to gain the attributes of those beasts by altering their own bodies. Totemists function primarily as melee fighters, but can heavily shift their focus depending on totem.

Difficult, but Awesome: As with everything Incarnum-related, this class takes a lot of effort to learn. Thankfully, the payout is worth-while.
Diverting Power: As part of their incarnum mechanics.
Gaia's Vengeance: Basically a Druid that focuses on Magical Beasts and can't cast spells.
Idiot Hero: Thanks to Never Learned to Read, as well as the fact that Totemists aren't incentivized much to put points in any mental stats.
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Via the Girallon Arms soulmeld, which can give a Totemist several extra attacks and a bonus to grappling.
Nature Hero: Of a different flavour to Druid — largely ignoring normal animals and plants, and focusing specifically on emulating the traits of D&D monsters of the Magical Beast type.
Partial Transformation: Have unique access to the Totem chakra, which causes a soulmeld to fuse with their body and (usually) grant some of the attacks of the creature it's based on.
Soul Power: As standard for incarnum. The totemist specifically focuses on the souls of various magical beasts, with their soulmelds taking the form of masks, pelts, etc. worn on their body which grant some of their power. Think Silva from Shaman King and you're 90% of the way there.

Truenamer

Introduced in Tome of Magic, the Truenamer is a wielder of Truespeak, where the Truenamer learns something's true name through skill checks and so becomes able to alter it in various ways, such as strengthening or weakening it. It is one of the most infamous classes in the game, due to the... interesting design of the Truespeak system.

Broke the Rating Scale: Famously did this to the writers of the tier system, because the issues cause its power to fluctuate massively depending on build and level. Eventually, it got two tier placements: if it can consistently make Truespeak checks, it's about level with the monk, if it can't, it's about level with the aristocrat.
Difficult, but Awesome: Downplayed, sadly; it's more like "Difficult But Functions." If you can get your Truespeak check high enough to stay ahead of the Game-Breaking Bug (an Item Familiar, for instance), then it ceases to be a problem and you can use your utterances basically all day. Some of them are even fairly decent... but they're still limited in usage, lacking in flexibility, poorly designed, and generally not very strong.
Empty Levels: This class is beaten senselessly with this. Since you'll always be behind in checks there's not much you can do besides keep struggling...or change to a new class if you can.
Game-Breaking Bug: Due to the way Truenaming checks scale compared to levels (the DC of the checks scales twice as fast as a character can acquire ranks in the skill), the Truenamer gets worse as it levels up. It also has key information missing for an entire set of class features in initial printings.
I Know Your True Name: As the name says, this is how Truenamers do their magic.

Warblade

Introduced in Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, the Warblade is the most straightforward of the martial adepts, functioning similarly to the Fighter. Warblades focus the most on relatively "mundane" maneuvers and pure weapon-focused combat, but can manage a wide variety of focuses depending on their discipline of choice.

Anti-Debuff: The Iron Heart Surge maneuver allows them to immediately end a negative condition affecting them, also gaining a small morale bonus on their attacks until the start of their next turn.
Badass Normal: Lack any real supernatural abilities by default, but fairly useful despite this.
Blood Knight: According to fluff text, warblades really love fighting. It's notable that they have the most agency in how they recover maneuvers out of any the three ToB classes — Crusaders randomly refresh maneuvers over time, and Swordsages need to step out of the fight entirely in order to refresh even one, but Warblades can refresh all of their maneuvers whenever they make a standard (non-maneuver) attack or even just a dramatic flourish with their weapon.
Calling Your Attacks: Not technically part of the mechanics, but almost inevitable when playing with the Tome of Battle maneuver system.
Charles Atlas Superpower: Though Swordsages share several disciplines with them and Barbarians are more adept at raw damage, Warblades are capable of some really outrageous moves, like deal dozens of attacks in a single round, boost the abilities of other allies in melee and shake off negative effects with sheer willpower.
Close-Range Combatant: Unusually, their proficiency with martial weapons extends only to melee martial weapons, excluding things like bows. This is backed up by the maneuver system's relatively poor support for ranged combat in general. Presumably this is because ranged combat isn't as thrilling.
Dual Wielding: Some of them are capable of using a weapon in each hand with extreme ease. These typically invest in the Tiger Claw discipline, which is all about this trope.
Extra Turn: The White Raven discipline, based around teamwork, has a few maneuvers which grant free attacks to nearby allies, or free movement which doesn't provoke attacks from nearby enemies (the better to escape danger or set up flanking maneuvers). Most famously the 3rd level maneuver White Raven Tactics allows a nearby ally to act immediately after you, granting them an extra turn if they have already acted in this round.
Fantastic Fighting Style: Warblades can select maneuvers and stances from five paths of the Sublime Way - Diamond Mind, Stone Dragon and Tiger Claw (shared by Swordsages above), as well as two others:
- Iron Heart (exclusive to Warblades) is the "pure swordplay" discipline, including many effects which are Call Backs to Core feats like Power Attack, Cleave and Whirlwind Attack, or else which evoke Heroic Spirit or Flynning.
- White Raven is a "leadership" discipline focused on charging into battle, granting bonuses or extra actions to your allies, and negating foes' attacks of opportunity so that your team can move around safely.
Finishing Move: An actual manuever by the same name can be learned by them. As the trope implies, it deals much more damage if the enemy is at half his health or less; at any other state of health it only deals unremarkable damage.
Genius Bruiser: Most of their class features apply their Intelligence score to different combat tactics.
Made of Iron: Despite not being as focused on defense or Constitution as a Crusader, Warblades actually get a larger amount of base hit points, comparable to a Barbarian's.
Simple, yet Awesome: The Warblade-exclusive Iron Heart discipline bases itself on this. It's not flashy or cool like more supernatural martial disciplines. It's not good for utility, and it carries no Death or Glory Attacks like others, either. What it gives is things like being able to redo an attack after missing or getting extra attacks when fighting multiple foes, which are still pretty practical, if not amazing. This culminates in the level 9 manuever of the discipline, which adds 100 damage to a single attack — nothing extraordinary at the level you can obtain it, but not something to be ignored, either.
Spin Attack: The Mithril Tornado and Adamantine Hurricane maneuvers they can learn is all bout spinning around and striking all surrounding enemies with one or more attacks.
Stance System: Like all initiator classes, they learn a number of stances as they level up. Their capstone ability allows them to maintain two stances at the same time.
Time Stands Still: The capstone maneuver of the Diamond Mind discipline bears this name, quite aptly — it allows one to do two full-round attacks in a round instead of only one. With certain builds this means easily dozens of attacks in one go.

Warlock

Introduced in Complete Arcane, Warlocks draw their abilities from pacts with demonic entities, enabling them to wield invocations. Their invocations lack the punch of similarly-leveled spells, but compensate through entirely unlimited usage. They can also generate blasts of eldritch energy for offensive use, and slowly develop demonic traits with time.

Ascended Extra: This is the one non-core base class to appear in Neverwinter Nights 2 without mods or expansions.
Bullying a Dragon: Due to the source and nature of their powers, warlocks get this a lot. Arguably, this is even dumber than persecuting a sorcerer. An inexperienced sorcerer will swiftly run out of spells to hit you with. A warlock will not. (And one of their "spells" is an energy blast with a range that can bypass armor and shields.)
Dark Is Not Evil: A warlock does not have to be evil (they can be chaotic instead), despite often getting their powers from fiendish sources.
Deal with the Devil: The ultimate source of a warlock's power, although it may not have been the warlock himself who struck the deal.
Ironic Name: the literal etymology of the word "warlock" translates to "oathbreaker." In Dungeons & Dragons, maintaining one's pact is crucial to the class' power.
Mage Species: Can have inherited their powers and contract from an ancestor who made a Deal with the Devil instead of making it themselves though the powers will usually have been dormant for a few generations.
Unequal Rites: Warlocks get no respect at all.
Words Can Break My Bones: One-word invocations include Baleful Utterance, Weighty Utterance, and Word of Changing. An epic-level warlock can also qualify for a feat that allows them to use all three of the Power Word spells at will.

Warmage

Introduced in the Miniatures Handbook, and introduced again in Complete Arcane, the Warmage is a caster built for the battlefield and the most laser-focused of the specialist casters, with a fully-known list based on pure damage and augmented further by class abilities. Warmages are masters of blasting, but can struggle when it's not required.

Black Mage: Spell list is filled with offensive magical damage with the occasional bad status inflicting attack thrown in.
Elemental Powers: Fire, cold, acid, electricity, sonic, and force.
Elite Tweak: Warmages benefit more than normal from mechanics which expand a character's spell list, since unlike most spontaneous casters they automatically know all spells on their list rather than having a limited number of spells known (and the narrow focus of Warmage spells means that any extra options are appreciated). Most famous of these is the capstone ability of the Rainbow Servant prestige class, which adds the entire cleric list to your spell list; for a Sorcerer it's average, but for a Warmage it's a monstrous increase in versatility which completely changes how the class is played.
Fireballs: Blasting things is their intended purpose. Blasting isn't very good in 3.5, though.
Poor, Predictable Rock: An arcane caster with only damaging spells, lacking in debuffs, buffs, and utilities. Unless you have large hordes of easily disposable cannon fodder Zerg Rush you, the Warmage's utility is fairly limited.
Training from Hell: Warmage schools are described to be run in a boot-camp fashion. Aspiring warmages have their spells drilled into them while wearing heavy, cumbersome garments and attempting to cast spells beyond their level.

Wilder

Introduced in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, the Wilder is a kind of psionic equivalent to the Sorcerer, an untrained psychic whose abilities manifest in strange and unpredictable ways. They lack the more focused disciplines of the Psion, but compensate through being able to use the Wild Surge, which supercharges their abilities at the cost of potential self-harm.

Alpha Strike: Like the Psion, they can do this through the Tim Taylor Technology manner of their powers. Due to their increased manifester level, however, they can burn through energy even more quickly.
Power-Strain Blackout: The Wild Surge power, which can boost Psychic Powers above their current level, but with a risk of causing a "psychic enervation", which daze them for a full round afterward and cost more power points.
Tim Taylor Technology: A Wilder can put MORE POWER into their psychic... powers... by adding more power points, but doing this too much or too often can have consequences.

Wu Jen

Introduced in Oriental Adventures, updated for 3.5e in Complete Arcane, the Wu Jen functions as a Wizard-esque class deriving its inspiration from the wu of Chinese history. Wu Jen are reclusive and secretive, living their lives through unusual taboos, but wield powerful magic based in the elements and strengthened by their deep knowledge.

Animate Inanimate Object: Two exclusive Wu Jen spells in 3E are terra cotta warrior and terra cotta lion, both of which turn a small statuette into an animated object to attack enemies, the latter being a huge creature. They also get a handful of lv1 spells (shared with Druid) which animate masses of a specific element.
Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Perhaps the most famous Wu Jen spell is giant size, a spell that makes the caster grow to Kaiju size. The spell is notoriously difficult to cobble into another build, being too high level (seven) for wands or other tricks.
Awesome, but Impractical: The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Wu Jen perform magic by Casting from Hit Points... except it only starts with 1d4+1 hit points meaning there is 50% chance of getting a Wu Jen that can't cast magic.
Came Back Wrong: Their reanimation spell restores a dead creature to a semblance of life for 1 day/level. In this state they cannot recall their past life unless exposed to restoration magic, and are absent-minded and tend to slur their speech; in addition they have only 1 hit point and are limited to a single move action each turn (which for most characters makes them helpless in combat). The main use of this spell is as a stopgap until the party can find proper resurrection magic, since it lacks any costly material components and allows the body and soul to stay "fresh" for a while longer.
Cast from Hit Points: The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition version of the class, instead of having spell slots, would spend 3 hit points per level of the spell when casting.
Difficult, but Awesome: Being native to a supplement, Wu Jen received few new spells over the course of 3.5 Edition (compared to anything using the Core Class spell lists, which are expanded in almost every supplement). That said, a caster is a caster, and the spells they have are far from bad.
Doppelgänger Attack: Another Wu Jen-only spell of note is body outside body, which creates a few clones of the caster. Those clones have limited power since they have less Hit Points, can't cast spells and their gear is non-magical, but if the caster is a Kung-Fu Wizard it can get interesting.
Elemental Powers: Wu Jen spells are associated with one of the five Chinese elements (Earth, Fire, Metal, Water, and Wood), with a handful of Non-Elemental spells that count as belonging to all elements simultaneously. At 6th level they pick one element to specialise in, gaining increased caster level with those spells and a better chance of resisting their effects.
Evolving Attack: The Spell Secret class feature, gained at every 3rd level except 6th, permanently applies a minor upgrade to one of their spells known - either doubled range, doubled duration, removing its gestures, or removing its incantation. The same spell can be upgraded in this way multiple times (but not in the same way more than once).
Flying on a Cloud: The 8th level Water spell cloud chariot lifts the caster and their allies onto a cloud for 10 minutes, allowing them to fly up to 100 miles away.
Last Stand: The 9th level Wu Jen spell transcend mortality grants the caster Nigh-Invulnerability for 1 round per caster level, then kills them when the duration is up.
Loophole Abuse: Various spellcaster-oriented Prestige Classes can combo with the spell transcend mortality (become nigh-invulnerable for a while, then die) in order to escape its drawback. A Jade Phoenix Mage (Tome of Battle) can use Emerald Immolation to kill themselves before the spell does (they respawn afterwards), while a Spellguard of Silverymoon (Player's Guide to Faerun) can cast it on other people, turning it into a Touch of Death spell with No Saving Throw.
Master of Threads: Their Metal element includes a few spells which involve enhancing a scarf and throwing it at a foe, with effects scaling from damage to entangling to decapitation.
Secret Art: While very similar to the Wizard, they have a different (shorter) spell list including many spells unavailable to any other class. Their Spell Secret class feature also evokes this.
Spider-Sense: "Watchful Spirit", their equivalent of a Wizard's familiar, lets them 1/day roll twice for Action Initiative and take the better result. There are a series of feats which each grant +1 daily use of this ability, as well as a bonus in encounters where it's used: Defending Spirit helps them dodge attacks better, Vengeful Spirit causes the first creature who damages you to take half that much damage in return, Hasty Spirit lets them take an extra move action 1/encounter, and Guardian Spirit lets them reroll a saving throw 1/day.
Your Normal Is Our Taboo: A key part of the Wu Jen is that they must abide by various taboos to maintain their magic power. A lot of these can sound bizarre to others but are taken seriously by the Wu Jen. Examples of taboos can be no consumption of meat or any animal products, not wearing certain colors, not bathing at all (or bathing way too much) and so on. Penalties can vary for violating any taboo; in 2E, it was possible for a Wu Jen to die for breaking any taboo while 3E simply has them lose their magic for 24 hours.

Characters / Dungeons & Dragons Classes: Other Third-Edition Classes

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