Warblade

Warblades are fighters with Fightan Magic. Most common user of Iron Heart Surge.

Playing a Warblade

This class is a thinking man's Fighter and is very nearly broken:

Where the Fighter PC class gets bonus feats every other level allowing you to customise it to your whim, the Warblade gets a much smaller selection of bonus feats, but in return gets better skills, use of the Fightan Magic, Uncanny Dodge, and some class skills which really benefit from decent intelligence scores (therefore MORE skill points) and make the class behave like an up-rated Rogue in the party.

These bonuses work on a variety of things such as confirming critical hits, extra damage while flanking or sneaking, more accuracy on attacks of opportunity and insight bonuses on most combat tricks like bull rushing, tripping or disarming opponents.

Put together with the addition of the choice of stances and maneuvers means you get a much more versatile combatant than most other PCs.

However, the most broken thing about this class is the feature it gets at level 1: Weapon Aptitude: This is what counts your Warblade levels as a Fighter levels albeit at -2. Meaning you can eventually trick him out with the exclusive feats (like weapon specialisation). But it ALSO lets you change the weapon designation you have on already selected feats. So if you had Weapon Focus (Greatsword) you could change it to Focus (Longsword) the next day. It even works on Exotic Weapon Proficiency, meaning you never ever have to suffer from non-proficiency penalties.

This means the class really messes with your GMs Metagame. Since your character can legitimately call dibs on any weapon-loot that he presents to the group, and you can reasonably be expected to be better with that weapon than any other member of the group unless they are dedicated Fighter-class characters WITH that weapon.

Even if you don't want to take the class to its full progression, it works really well as a filler level for any PC that fancies gaining some combat clout: One/two levels of Warblade offers considerably more than just one/two levels of Fighter, since the low level stances often remain effective no matter what your primary class is and Weapon Aptitude means you can pick up and use just about any piece of equipment as if it were your primary weapon, too.