A little bit of both! Fighters didn’t really get any support as time went on, and became relegated to the ‘good for one level, maybe’ bin.

As for swarms: Paladins and rangers could more easily escape them by riding their mount or animal companions away and had a few magical options as well, monks could run away at increased speed, dimension door away, or eventually get a flaming fist feat, and both monks and rogues could ‘use magic device’ a wand. Barbarians are in the same boat with the fighters though, as far as I know… unless they took leadership and got a magic using cohort.

I’m glad other people were having fun with them though, and the bad rap wasn’t as all pervasive as I thought!

My experience of 3.0 and 3.5 fighters was mostly DM-side, but I didn’t hear anything like the level of dissatisfaction you’re talking about from the players. Being vulnerable to swarms is basically every weapon-using class – barbarians, monks, paladins, rangers, and rogues have few if any answers to the problem of swarms. Likewise for the full-round-attack issue – yes, there are solutions, but most classes that need them don’t get them.

On the other hand, if your point is that late-stage 3.5 offerings eclipsed major portions of the Player’s Handbook content… yeah, the power creep is real. So very, very real.

The entire class was upstaged by the druid’s animal companion. In fact, one of the things mentioned in the article as being a huge problem was the lack of ability to move and make more than one attack. One of the only ways to get around this was to take a one level dip in Lion Totem Barbarian from Complete Champion to get ‘pounce’… which again was something that a druid can get just by choosing a big cat as a companion.

The only times I’ve seen a fighter played, the players were immediately dissatisfied.

Followers in 3.5 were represented by the Leadership feat, which had problems of it’s own… For one thing, it was partially dependent on charisma, which is not usually a priority for fighters. For another thing, it granted you a cohort, which was basically an entire second character that could be fairly close to you in level, and if you were a fighter, picking almost any other class made your cohort both more powerful and more useful than your original character.

D’Oh! I forgot the feats that everybody earns every 3rd level.

Baseline: Feats at 1, 3, and 6
Fighter: Feats at 1, 2, 4, and 6
Human: 1

My bad, should have said “Fighter 6 = 7 feats, 8 if you’re human.”

Unless I’m missing something, your math is off by 3 feats. Perhaps you meant to write “Fighter 8 = 6 feats”, and accidentally got the numbers switched?

If I had still been playing D&D when 3e dropped (I was too busy in university to find an open group, let alone commit to a regular game) I would have loved it unconditionally. I loved really “crunchy” RPGs, and I would have happily spent ages building characters around all sorts of silly ideas.

I have tried to get someone to play a “punch-n-grab” Brawler Fighter ever since I read about them. But no one seems to want this. I think that since most of my players have come back to D&D after a long hiatus (since prior to 4E, possibly prior to 3.0), they see the Fighter class in 4E as “generic”.

No, it was a little lower level than that. But the Big-Bad was an Ogre, so size Large, with Reach 3 or 4 (I think, it’s been a long time since I played 3.x).

They should be lucky you didn’t also do the Dragon Disciple prestige class and give him a Divine Strength item…unless you did!