classdnd-3.5eoptimization
The D&D 3.5e's original Truenamer is considered so badly broken it's nearly unusable, and in the Tier system, it gets pegged at tier 6 or 7, i.e. it is the lowest of the low.
However, the folks on the Giant in the Playground forums have rewritten the class in an attempt to mold the Truenamer into something useful. What Tier is the GitP re-engineered Truenamer in? Does it get bumped up to tier 3-4? Does it make it all the way up to tier 1-2 where full casters sit?
What are tiers?
Tiers are a ranking of how "powerful and/or versatile" the various 3.5 base classes are, with low numbered tiers being considered more capable than high numbered tiers. It's important to remember that certain caveats apply to the rankings:
We frown on link-only answers, so I'll go ahead and summarize the full tier list of all published classes, originally from here. Fuller descriptions of why each class is in its tier can be found here.
Tier 1: Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Archivist, Artificer, Erudite (Spell to Power variant) — Can do anything and everything, often better than lower-tier classes that supposedly specialize in that thing.
Tier 2: Sorcerer, Favored Soul, Psion, Binder (w/ online vestiges), Erudite — As powerful as tier 1, but no one build can do everything.
Tier 3: Beguiler, Dread Necromancer, Crusader, Bard, Swordsage, Binder, Ranger (Wildshape variant), Duskblade, Factotum, Warblade, Psychic Warrior, Incarnate, Totemist — Good at one thing & useful outside that, or moderately useful at most things.
Tier 4: Rogue, Barbarian, Warlock, Warmage, Scout, Ranger, Hexblade, Adept, Spellthief, Marshal, Fighter (Zhentarium variant) — Good at one thing but useless at everything else, or mediocre at many things.
Tier 5: Fighter, Monk, Ninja (both CA & Rokugan versions), Healer, Swashbuckler, Soulknife, Expert, OA Samurai, Paladin, Knight, CW Samurai (with Imperious Command), Soulborn — Good at one rarely applicable thing, or mediocre at one thing, or simply too unfocused.
Tier 6: CW Samurai, Aristocrat, Warrior, Commoner — Objectively worse at their specialty than another (often Tier 5) class, without anything else to show for it.
Tier 7: Truenamer — Apparently received no actual playtesting, mechanics as written simply don't work. See this question for more details.
You're confusing the fluff with the mechanics.
The fluff of the truenamer is awesome, taken from all sorts of stories1
Unfortunately, the Truenamer handbook shows us that this brilliant promise of narrative isn't particularly well supported by the rules, which were likely unplaytested and only lightly edited. This mainly stems from two of the class features which suffer from lack of choice, poor scaling, and a few really horrible class features.
In summary, imagine a warlock with less choices who had to make an increasingly harder roll to contribute minimally throughout the day. Yes, it's possible to make one barely functional, but with the same effort dedicated to any other class, the class can excel in what it was designed to do.
On personal truenames:
What kind of bonus? Well, pg. 200 lists it as untyped, and pg. 196 says it's a competence bonus. Beats me.
This is an easily seen example of the lack of care or editing put into the class.
[Truespeak is] A trained-only INT-based skill that you'll need to keep maxed at all times. Pretty much everything a Truenamer does requires a Truespeak check, and the typical DC is 15 + (2 × CR) of the target. Yes, this means that the typical DC goes up by 2 every level, while you can only add 1 rank every level. This is just as annoying as it sounds, and it means that you'll be spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to boost this check . . . then trying to figure out what to do with the check once you've boosted it.
Therefore, most of the character's resources will be going towards optimising a single skill that, without that devotion, is completely unusable and scales even worse. The fact that it scales with target CR, which tends to be a ... not entirely random number... just compounds the problem.
The "item changing power" also suffers from this odd scaling:
The DC to speak one of these is 15 + (2 × CL), where CL is the caster level of the item. If the item is nonmagical, the DC is a flat 25. Yup, that means that you'll have an easier time affecting the little trinket that the apprentice mage enchanted than the nonmagical thing he started with.
Law of Resistance (LoR): The first Law of WotC Hates Truenamers, this is an annoying little rule that makes Truenaming harder as the day goes on. All those utterance DCs I gave you above are just for the first time you use any given utterance during the day. Each time you succeed, the DC of that particular utterance increases by 2, though (in a rare display of mercy) failing doesn't increase the DC. Yes, this is kind of a pain to keep track of. Anyway, I think this is intended to keep you from just using your utterances at-will, but it basically means that low-level or unoptimized 'Namers will have a hard time doing anything past the first combat of the day, while optimized 'Namers will basically just ignore this until they actually have to roll to Quicken. It's still annoying.
Law of Sequence (LoS): The second Law of WotC Hates Truenamers, this Law will be the bane of your existence. The LoS says that you can only have one "copy" of an utterance active at any given time. This means that if you have, for example, Knight's Puissance active on your Warblade buddy, you can't cast Knight's Puissance again on your Crusader buddy until the first one runs out, nor can you cast Reversed Knight's Puissance on the Bulette you're fighting. If you've never played a Truenamer, you might think that the LoR is worse than the LoS. You'd be wrong. I consider the LoS to be one of the single worst-designed parts of the entire Truenamer chapter, and you can quote me on that.
Thus, in a class designed around a few repeatable effects, every time the class tries again throughout the day, regardless of target the effects are harder to pull off. Think of a psion who has to pay extra power points after the first use of a power in a day. This was intended as a "limitation of spells per day" ... but no evidence is given to show that it actually managed to adventure and contribute in a group.
At the end of the day, there are no workable mechanics for the truenamer, and the truenamers require huge amounts of optimisation to even be "playable." They cannot "do one thing well" and without weapon or armor proficiencies, nor hitpoints nor a good BAB, can they even readily contribute to combat. If, at the end of the day, anything a class may want to do may be done, better, by another class... the class is poorly designed.
Best Answer
The point of TWWW is to remove the parts of Truenaming that don't work, improve the parts that are crappy, and get rid of the parts that are hilariously broken. In general, it seems to have done this, with a few exceptions. There are definitely still some options that are clearly better, and some that are clearly worse, but TWWW is definitely more balanced than the ToM Truenamer.
TL;DR The Truenamer and Lexeme are both Tier 3 until level 16, when they are Tier 2. A high-optimization player can probably get a 15th or lower level Truenamer or Lexeme into Tier 2-like levels of power, though I can't see any obvious ways. If you remove Rebuild the Dweomer and Rewrite the World, then the Truenamer and Lexeme are Tier 3 throughout.
Throughout this post, I will use the term "Truenamer" to refer to the class, and "truenamer" to refer to any character who can make vocalizations. the TWWW glossary doesn't give a good general adjective to describe all truenaming characters, so I'm just going to use a lower-case version of the class name.
The max bonus to truespeak checks is still pretty high
One of the big changes in TWWW is that it's a lot more difficult to gain bonuses to truespeak checks. However, you can still get a bonus of roughly +60 at level 20. There is no mention of removing the Paragnostic assembly, and you can still get a bunch of feat bonuses. In this analysis, I'm assuming that all of the tricks listed in the truenamer handbook work, unless specifically denied. Here's my math for a level 20 Lexeme:
Skill Focus: +3
Illumian Race: +2
Favored: Paragnostic Assembly: +2
Affiliation 23 with Paragnostic Assembly: +10
10 languages known: +5
Confident Speaker: +10
Skill Ranks: +23
Intelligence: +7
Total Bonus: +62
All of these bonuses are untyped, except the bonus for languages known (synergy) and the bonus for Confident Speaker (competence). You can almost certainly find ways to increase it further, but for this analysis, I'll assume a +64 check is doable.
Offensive utterances are largely useless
Offensive utterances are usually really powerful, and are pretty easy to buff to crazy levels, but they have one big problem: the absolute limit. A truenamer has an absolute limit of 1+Cha per level, which doesn't apply retroactively with later Cha buffs. Since Cha is, at best, a secondary stat for truenamers, this is unlikely to be very high. Assuming you start with a Cha around 14 and end around 20, you'll end up with an absolute limit of about 90 by level 20. If you augment the utterance to it's maximum, the limit only goes up to 110. For a level 20 party, 110 hit points is the level where you can pretty easily kill an enemy in one round, if not a single attack. It's going to be very rare that a truenamer will be able to effectively use an offensive utterance.
Buff utterances range from lackluster to powerful
On the low end of power, you have things like the Phrase of Balance, which gives a +4 bonus to bull rush and trip resistance, and can let you stand up from prone as a free action. In the middle, you have things like the Phrase of Perfection (+2 to 9 bonus to one stat), the Phrase of Flight (grants a fly speed (average) that's anywhere from the same as land speed to triple land speed), or the Phrase of Battle (+1 to 11 bonus to melee attack and damage rolls). At the high end, there's the Phrase of Temporal Acceleration (for 5 rounds, the target gets an extra standard or full-round action). There are a few 'utility' utterances that are cool, but hardly game-breaking. The Syllable of Death is a free raise dead without negative levels, xp costs, or material components, and the Syllable of Tesseract is teleport, but with no range limit and the ability to teleport places you've never been. The Phrase of Temporal Acceleration might cause some action economy issues, but there's really nothing here that would break a game in the way that high-level wizards can.
There are two kinds of incantations: interesting, and wish
Most of the incantations give random-seeming spell effects that generally look pretty interesting. There's an incantation that works like passwall, one that's like purify food and drink, one that's like heat metal, and even one that makes it snow in a 10 foot radius. Generally, you get any particular effect either at the same time as a primary caster, or a few levels later.
There are two incantation which break this pattern, Rebuild the Dweomer and Rewrite the World. Rebuild the Dweomer lets you restore a magic item to whatever state it was in 1 round ago. This lets you recharge a wand, undrink a potion, or un-wish a ring of three wishes. I shudder to think of what you could do with a Thought Bottle. With this incantation and a scroll of simulacrum, true ressurection, or wish, you can end up with an unending supply of powerful magic.
The other incantation that breaks this pattern is even more powerful: Rewrite the World. Rewrite the World is a DC 60 incantation that replicates wish, without the normal costs associated with it. Every time you use it, it gives you a -5 to further Truename checks that day. With a +62 to your Truename check, this means that you can have 3 wishes per day before you have to seriously worry about failing a check. If you can get by the 'no magic item or spell bonuses to your truespeak checks', which I'd almost guarantee is possible given the size of the 3.5 ruleset, you can make wishes all day long. This incantation establishes a minimum tier of 2 once the truenamer hits level 16.
Recitations are interesting, cost too much to be game-breaking
Recitations are compared with martial stances from the Tome of Battle, and they work pretty similarly. The one big issue is that you generally can't use other truenamer powers while using a recitation, so even the more powerful ones aren't going to be that great. For example: You need to be a 10th level truenamer in order to learn Recitation of the Untouched Snow (invisibility at DC 25, greater invisibility at 41), which limits how much power you can get out of permanent invisibilty. On of the recitations, the Recitation of the Unclouded Eye, is basically essential (truenamers get it as a class feature, though lexeme's don't). It lets you know the HP of anyone you can see, thus letting oyu know if your utterances are going to work. On of the more interesting ones gives fast healing 5 (up to 10 with augmentation), but that's not enough to make a big difference in combat, so it basically just saves you some low-level healing spells.
To compare the TWWW Truenamer and Lexeme to the original tier system description of Tier 3:
Generally, truenamers are pretty versatile, low-power spellcasters. A creative or optimization-focused player will be able to do some really awesome things, and even a low-op player will be able to make certain expensive tasks trivial. If you were to add a truenamer to an existing party, they would probably gravitate to a support/utility caster role, while still being able to dish out a little bit of damage in a pinch.
This is, of course, assuming that you aren't allowing Rebuild the Dweomer and Rewrite the World. Either of those incantations makes a truenamer an infinite cash factory at level 16, which instantly pushes them into Tier 2, regardless of other factors.