I'm playing in a very small (2 PCs), roleplay-intensive Eberron game. My character recently acquired a pet warforged fighter, and when I reach 6th level and take leadership he's going to be my cohort. This makes incredible sense in game logic, but it turns out my pet fighter is rather suboptimal. I'm going to try and talk the DM into a rebuild quest for my cohort, and I was hoping for some suggestions for what would mesh well.
The two PCs are a 5th-level warforged artificer (my character) and an elven rogue 3/master inquisitve 2 with Mark of Shadow. There is some combat, so we need something that will help pound things but still has a lot of flavor.
My soon-to-be cohort is currently a tower shield/long spear phalanx specialist, which is pretty useless for us.
LN Warforged fighter 3
S 18
D 11
C 17
I 8
W 6
Ch 6
Weapon Focus: longspear
Weapon Focus: slam
Improved Natural Attack: slam
Adamantine Body
I was thinking maybe going for a dragonfire adept tank, since we have NO ranged combat, and he can take the 24-hr invocations to deal with the spell failure... or dragon shaman could work as well (giving up on touch of vitality). However, the best idea is probably crusader, if I can convince the DM to let me swap the Cha-bonus to saves for Con-bonus to Will saves, a la the warforged paladin racial sub. Or, I could go barbarian.
Ack! Too many choices! Help!
Even if you can't get a rebuild quest, you should be able to make use of retraining to pick better feats. In 3 levels, you could have all those weapon-specific feats converted to, let's say, charging feats. You could do worse than 4 levels of fighter leading into crusader or warblade. At least you get to jump in with 2nd level maneuvers.
It is not absolutely clear whether the Quest has to be solo or not.
Similarly if it should be ~level +3 of You, or the whole party.
Solo = brutal = Gimli says: Certainty of death, *small* chance of success... What are we waiting for?
If you assume (and why not) the party can come along and participate,
and the "level" of the quest is based on the Cohort, this shouldn't be so hard.
Don't forget a level 1 to 5 character, only rebuilds 1 level.
Fighter 2 / Something 1 is most likely better than Fighter 3.
Retraining as MM said = good stuff too.