Tagan: In that case, it's Warshaper that's pretty badass.  However, outside of ToB, the key to most melee classes is to take as few levels in them as possible so that you can take levels in a PrC that doesn't suck.  Though how were you getting into Warshaper through Monk?<br/><br/>And mind, if you put enough work into a melee type even without ToB, you can get something competitive (though usually one-dimensional outside of magic items and easily shut down), but with equal work, mages are gonna end the world.  Which is the entire problem.  Also, if the other party members aren't very good at the game, it's not hard for a well-played but weak class to shine.<br/><br/><br/>TGT: Looking up maneuvers for a Tome of Battle character is little different from looking up feats, or items, or any number of other details.  And in fact, for picking out a Fighter's feats, there are often a thousand options out there across a dozen books, rather than a few dozen in one (particularly since there are hardly any<em>good</em>melee feats in core).  The maneuvers don't contribute one whit to complexity, particularly since you don't need to multiclass to be effective anymore.  The Tome of Battle base classes<em>work</em>, from level one to twenty.  And you don't even need to keep track of many maneuvers.  A level twenty Warblade gets thirteen maneuvers and four stances.  All you really have to go is skim the bulleted list and pick the ones that seem useful.  Tome of Battle is actually<em>simpler</em>for the fact that it works out of the box.