Quote Originally Posted by Morph Bark View Post
It is a decent healer too, yeah, but healing isn't that big of a deal in 3.5 and damage is easy to do well with nearly all classes of Tier 4 and up. It can go into melee, but the abilities it gets for that seem to be more abilities that are useful to make sure you don't become a target if you accidentally end up in melee, not an incentive to actually go into melee. The feature that adds fire damage to a weapon also seems like it would be much better on a ranged weapon, especially since you're supposed to keep Dex your secondary high stat and Str is dump-worthy.
True, it doesn't actually do those things as well as other classes. But here's the difference between tier 3 and tier 4:

Tier 4: I'm awesome at this one thing!
Tier 3: I'm awesome at this one thing!....plus I can do a couple other things semi-decently

Hence why I made the case for it being a tier 3 or tier 3-4 borderline.