With the new update to combat stances(the one that makes them stay active until manually disabled) combined with the update to fighter, Dwarven Defender and Defensive Stance have become rather weak. (Sure an extra 6/- DR and no flanking is nice, but at the cost of up to 2 attack, 2 damage, 6 AC and 5 bonus feats that fighter can give? keep in mind fighters can also get EDR for 9/- pretty easily with those bonus feats that DD doesn't get) That's not to say the class is totally unbalanced, because I don't feel like it's too far off.
Dwarven Defender is still a good class, but the dwarves who would take it, would take it because their character believes in defending others, and the class the class is basically a fighter-like class with abilities focused around this goal. If Fighter can allow the dwarf to protect others even better than Dwarven Defender, odds are they'll go with that one because it's what fits the character most.
My hope is to come up with some ideas that make the class more unique and different from a regular fighter, while providing effective balanced tools to make the character better at defending.
Ideas:
Give regeneration while in defensive stance.
Make Defensive stance have unlimited uses with a cooldown.
Make the first 5(or 10) dwarven defender levels count towards the +1 every 5 levels that fighters get (allowing every DD level to count would probably be a bit unbalanced)
10% movement speed increase
more HP (2 more than fighter isn't that noticeable of a difference)
Increase the number of uses Defensive stance has
Dwarven Defender improvement
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