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<blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9325426" data-attributes="member: 6877472"><p>Some people feel that "marking" is somehow magical (actually somewhat true with the Dwarven Dragonmark in 4e Eberron).</p><p></p><p>But the main thing was, people saw that casters had powers, and then they saw fighters had powers- ergo fighter = caster. Like a lot of things in our world, emotion > logic in what people like/dislike far too often.*</p><p></p><p>*I'm not saying there's no logic involved in disliking 4e Fighter design decisions. Just that there are many who have opinions that don't seem to stem from logic.</p><p></p><p>Personally, as a fan of 4e, I'm going to say something that might seem heretical. The 4e Fighter...kind of sucks.</p><p></p><p>First let's look at marking in general. In theory, -2 to hit should always be a relevant penalty. However, not all monsters are created equal. Soldiers could have higher accuracy, and "on-demand" combat advantage wasn't unheard of. So it's not a huge gamble at higher levels to ignore the mark.</p><p></p><p>Then the penalty for ignoring the mark is a regular old attack, and many 4e monsters could have lots of hit points. Plus the attack has to hit.</p><p></p><p>All this to present a rough choice on whether to hit the Fighter or hit someone else. However, if you keep attacking the Fighter all the time, their damage contribution goes down, fights take longer, the Fighter runs out of healing surges eventually and becomes useless.</p><p></p><p>So really, the DM should never target the Fighter...but in that case, you're left with a high AC guy with less damage output and a bunch of half-dead strikers and leaders. Not really ideal either. So the game seems to want you to flip a coin every time you're marked.</p><p></p><p>Then we get to the part that it's really easy to have defenses equal to the Fighter's, and strong hit points isn't hard to get either (especially with later backgrounds like Born Under A Bad Sign). In addition, since the mark takes your reaction, the Fighter is only really good at keeping one thing locked down in general.</p><p></p><p>You can multimark, and there are utilities that debuff a large group for a turn, but after that, no dice, so you're not very useful against a horde. Not to mention being dazed, stunned, or subject to forced movement can also trivialize you.</p><p></p><p>Finally, many of your best moves involve low tier Controller abilities like slow, prone, and forced movement, which most classes can do.</p><p></p><p>The final nail in the coffin was the limits of the Martial power source. Other defenders could do things like teleport, heal, deal energy damage, punish at range, create zones of difficult terrain, you name it. The Fighter had...+1 to hit with weapons (well and a guaranteed good basic attack, which every Defender needed, but not all got).</p><p></p><p>You could replace the Fighter with another role, like a Striker (kill things faster, and if they have to be hard to kill, the Barbarian is in the next book over), Controller (two overlapping zones of control means bad guys go nowhere!), or Leader (twice the heals, twice the buffs, and pacifist powers have good control)!</p><p></p><p>I played a lot of Living Forgotten Realms, and that meant a lot of different group compositions. A lot of monsters seemed custom built to be unfriendly to Defenders, and again, Fighters had the worst toolkit to deal with strange monster abilities.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James Gasik, post: 9325426, member: 6877472"] Some people feel that "marking" is somehow magical (actually somewhat true with the Dwarven Dragonmark in 4e Eberron). But the main thing was, people saw that casters had powers, and then they saw fighters had powers- ergo fighter = caster. Like a lot of things in our world, emotion > logic in what people like/dislike far too often.* *I'm not saying there's no logic involved in disliking 4e Fighter design decisions. Just that there are many who have opinions that don't seem to stem from logic. Personally, as a fan of 4e, I'm going to say something that might seem heretical. The 4e Fighter...kind of sucks. First let's look at marking in general. In theory, -2 to hit should always be a relevant penalty. However, not all monsters are created equal. Soldiers could have higher accuracy, and "on-demand" combat advantage wasn't unheard of. So it's not a huge gamble at higher levels to ignore the mark. Then the penalty for ignoring the mark is a regular old attack, and many 4e monsters could have lots of hit points. Plus the attack has to hit. All this to present a rough choice on whether to hit the Fighter or hit someone else. However, if you keep attacking the Fighter all the time, their damage contribution goes down, fights take longer, the Fighter runs out of healing surges eventually and becomes useless. So really, the DM should never target the Fighter...but in that case, you're left with a high AC guy with less damage output and a bunch of half-dead strikers and leaders. Not really ideal either. So the game seems to want you to flip a coin every time you're marked. Then we get to the part that it's really easy to have defenses equal to the Fighter's, and strong hit points isn't hard to get either (especially with later backgrounds like Born Under A Bad Sign). In addition, since the mark takes your reaction, the Fighter is only really good at keeping one thing locked down in general. You can multimark, and there are utilities that debuff a large group for a turn, but after that, no dice, so you're not very useful against a horde. Not to mention being dazed, stunned, or subject to forced movement can also trivialize you. Finally, many of your best moves involve low tier Controller abilities like slow, prone, and forced movement, which most classes can do. The final nail in the coffin was the limits of the Martial power source. Other defenders could do things like teleport, heal, deal energy damage, punish at range, create zones of difficult terrain, you name it. The Fighter had...+1 to hit with weapons (well and a guaranteed good basic attack, which every Defender needed, but not all got). You could replace the Fighter with another role, like a Striker (kill things faster, and if they have to be hard to kill, the Barbarian is in the next book over), Controller (two overlapping zones of control means bad guys go nowhere!), or Leader (twice the heals, twice the buffs, and pacifist powers have good control)! I played a lot of Living Forgotten Realms, and that meant a lot of different group compositions. A lot of monsters seemed custom built to be unfriendly to Defenders, and again, Fighters had the worst toolkit to deal with strange monster abilities. [/QUOTE]
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