An expansion on my prior berserker variant, based on feedback.
Berserker—Crusader Variant
Many believe berserkers’ fits of rage to be divine blessings—or curses. Even more than crusaders, berserkers follow the whims of fate and are only empowered by dire circumstance.
Alignment: Any nonlawful, including true neutral.
Class Skills: Eliminate Knowledge (history) and Knowledge (religion) from the crusader’s class skills. Add Survival and Tumble to the class skill list.
Class Features
As a crusader of your level, except you do not gain furious counterstrike, indomitable soul, zealous surge, and smite, and Devoted Spirit and White Raven are not berserker disciplines. Instead, you gain the following:
Disciplines: Iron Heart, Stone Dragon, and Tiger Claw.
Berserker Strength (Ex): As the alternate barbarian class feature from Player’s Handbook II, except the activation threshold is based on initiator level (the upgrades at 11th and 20th are still based on class level).
Steely Resolve (Ex): As crusader, except that after 1st, your steely resolve delayed damage pool’s size increases by 5 every even level, instead of every 4th level.
Damage delayed with steely resolve counts towards whether or not berserker strength activates (effectively, while steely resolve delays taking the damage, it does not delay activating berserker strength).
Titanic Resolve (Ex): Starting at 3rd level, you can delay the onset of a disease or poison, a fear attack, an attempt at possession or ongoing mental control (as would be suppressed by protection from evil), or the blinded, confused, dazzled, deafened, entangled, fascinated, fatigued, sickened, stunned, or unconsciousness (including sleep) conditions, until the end of your next turn (just after taking damage delayed by steely resolve). The duration of the effect or condition does not begin until the effect or condition does (the delay does not count against it). Whenever you delay one of these effects or conditions, you also delay 5 damage, which is added to the damage you take from steely resolve at the end of your next turn, but does not count against steely resolve’s limit. Like steely resolve, this delayed damage counts towards activating berserker strength.
Treat conditions separately even if they come from one effect: for example, if you are subject to sensory deprivation (Spell Compendium pg. 182), you can delay both the blindness and the deafness caused by that spell, but you delay 5 damage for each and track them as separate conditions. You can also choose to delay one and not the other, say the blinded condition but not the deafened condition. If you do that, you are deafened, but not blinded, at first, and only become blinded later. Then eventually the deafened condition expires, but the blinded condition still has some duration left to it, so you are blinded and not deafened for a time.
Starting at 7th level, when you would begin a delayed effect or condition and take its delayed damage, you can instead double the damage delayed for that effect or condition, and delay both the damage and the effect or condition for another round. You can delay an effect or condition (and its damage) for a maximum of 2 rounds at 7th, 3 rounds at 11th, 4 rounds at 15th, and 5 rounds at 19th, doubling the delayed damage each time (so 5 damage for 1 round, then 10, 20, 40, and a maximum of 80 damage for 5 rounds).
If you delay an effect, any rounds you delay it count against the maximum number of rounds you can delay any condition it causes. For instance, if you delay drow poison for the maximum number of rounds, you cannot also delay the unconsciousness it causes; you have no rounds left. The rounds delaying an effect do not, however, count for determining how much damage you delay; treat the two as entirely separate for that. So at 11th level, you could delay drow poison 1 round, then take 5 damage and delay the unconsciousness 2 rounds (since your maximum is 3 rounds), and you would eventually take only 15 damage instead of the 20 damage that fully delaying the drow poison for 3 rounds would deal.
Meteoric Resolve (Ex): Starting at 11th level, your titanic resolve can also delay the onset of ability damage, ability drain, energy drain, a mind-affecting ability, or the dazed, exhausted, nauseated, paralyzed, or turned condition. When you first delay one of these effects or conditions, you delay 15 damage instead of 5. The maximum number of rounds you can delay these conditions is 1 round (15 damage) at 11th, 2 rounds at 15th (30 damage), and 3 rounds at 19th (60 damage). Note that if you delay an effect covered by meteoric resolve that causes one or more conditions covered by titanic resolve, you could delay the effect up to your meteoric resolve maximum, and then delay the condition(s) for the remaining time you have in your titanic resolve maximum.
Adamantine Resolve (Ex): Starting at 19th level, you can delay the onset of any effect or condition with titanic resolve. When you first delay an effect or condition that is not listed in titanic resolve or meteoric resolve, you take 30 damage, and such effects or conditions can only be delayed a maximum of 1 round (though you may be able to delay an effect 1 round with adamantine resolve and then delay conditions it causes 2 or 4 more rounds using meteoric or titanic resolve, as normal).
