Holy cow my party has 3 strikers in it

[Old Gumphrey]

The more I play 4e, the more apparent it becomes that strikers are the best classes in the game, and all other classes are largely unnecessary and only a playstyle choice. Hear me out.

Strikers are, for the most part, as durable as any defender class. They have equal defenses, and although they have less HP, they have tons of immediate interrupt escapes, teleports, free movement, all kinds of ways to get out of harm's way. The presence of a defender makes the defender necessary; it deals less damage, so monsters are around for a longer amount of time, making their marking abilities necessary.

Leaders, with their massive healing and buffing, deal very little in the way of damage. A striker in their place can inflict many times as much damage. This makes healing largely unnecessary, because your enemies are going down so much faster. Leaders make themselves necessary by reducing damage output and increasing the length of the fight. Longer fights = more hits on the party = more healing needed.

Controllers are bad news. They necessitate themselves by spreading lower damage output among multiple targets. They have to hit multiple targets multiple times in order to play their role. If a situation arises where a controller can't hit multiple targets multiple times (which is absolutely FREQUENT in any games I've played) they are equal to roughly 3/4 of a leader or defender, which are already less efficient than just having a striker.

(On a side note: has anyone noticed that a cleric's spells are 5x better at nailing multiple targets than an actual controller? You never hurt your friends, and you usually heal and/or buff them to boot. WTF?)

It's really kind of genius, the way they made classes necessitate themselves. However, if you want a fast combat, you need all strikers. This isn't like 3e, where a party of rogues and sorcerers would get creamed in the first round. Ranger, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and avenger would pretty much ruin any encounter that came up in 4e.

 

[Regicide]

This isn't like 3e, where a party of rogues and sorcerers would get creamed in the first round.

I'd have to disagree, a party of sorcerers and rogues would cream the enemies in the first round.

All classes in 3E were strikers, with the exception of the bard. Poor bard. Clerics were so much strikers that you had to intentionally not be so much of a striker so that the non-casters could get a kill once in a while.

 

[Blackbrrd]

The more I play 4e, the more apparent it becomes that strikers are the best classes in the game, and all other classes are largely unnecessary and only a playstyle choice. Hear me out.

Strikers are, for the most part, as durable as any defender class. They have equal defenses, and although they have less HP, they have tons of immediate interrupt escapes, teleports, free movement, all kinds of ways to get out of harm's way. The presence of a defender makes the defender necessary; it deals less damage, so monsters are around for a longer amount of time, making their marking abilities necessary.

Leaders, with their massive healing and buffing, deal very little in the way of damage. A striker in their place can inflict many times as much damage. This makes healing largely unnecessary, because your enemies are going down so much faster. Leaders make themselves necessary by reducing damage output and increasing the length of the fight. Longer fights = more hits on the party = more healing needed.

Controllers are bad news. They necessitate themselves by spreading lower damage output among multiple targets. They have to hit multiple targets multiple times in order to play their role. If a situation arises where a controller can't hit multiple targets multiple times (which is absolutely FREQUENT in any games I've played) they are equal to roughly 3/4 of a leader or defender, which are already less efficient than just having a striker.

(On a side note: has anyone noticed that a cleric's spells are 5x better at nailing multiple targets than an actual controller? You never hurt your friends, and you usually heal and/or buff them to boot. WTF?)

It's really kind of genius, the way they made classes necessitate themselves. However, if you want a fast combat, you need all strikers. This isn't like 3e, where a party of rogues and sorcerers would get creamed in the first round. Ranger, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and avenger would pretty much ruin any encounter that came up in 4e.

I think you might be right about an all-striker party being better than a mixed party. I am not sure though.

My current party has a Dwarven Battlevigor Fighter and he can soak a LOT of damage.

Your criticism of the controllers isn't quite up to date btw. The Invoker can always hit 2+ targets if there are 2+ enemies. He is partially broken due to this, and regularily does more damage than the strikers. (I have a party with 3 strikers, 1 defender, 1 leader, 1 controller).

I do agree fully that you only need one each of the defender/leader/controller though. The rest of the party should be strikers.

The problem I have in my party is that we have a player with a Barbarian, and he hasn't rolled less than three 20's per session for the lasts 5 sessions. A barbarian that crits goes on a rampage, and then downs something and get another attack and... yeah he does stupendous damage.

(And yeah, he has a high-crit weapon and he is a half-orc so he usually adds the extra [W] damage when he crits, so his "regular" charge does 1d12+1d6+6 damage, but when he crits its 2d12+1d6+6+1d6 = 36+1d6 damage.)

Last session he critted on his daily (I had slowed him to uselessness for 2 rounds, so I guess it was payback time.) He did something like 70 damage in one hit. Then he got a free attack, used an action point and my elite with 180+ hp went from unhurt to bloodied.

The barbarian btw, must be the most fun class to play in the game. If you crit, kill something or get bloodied something fun happens. And you always zip around the battlefield charging as some manic. It is the best incarnation of the barbarian I have seen since I started playing AD&D a long time ago.

A last comment:
I haven't had a single problem with combat dragging on in my game. Combat usually lasts for 4-5 rounds if I am not being really nasty (level 4+ encounters), which is 2+ rounds more than in 3.5. At the same time each round goes really quickly and the fights goes back and forth a bit before the PC's win.

Oh, I threw a nasty encounter at them, that gave them pause:
2x Ghouls
4x Corruption corpses.

The ghouls stopped the barbarian while the corruption corpses kept the ranger from doing anything fun, because he was weakened all the time. After they killed the ghouls the rest of the encounter was easy. (they were level 4)

 

[Lord Ernie]

The more I play 4e, the more apparent it becomes that strikers are the best classes in the game, and all other classes are largely unnecessary and only a playstyle choice. Hear me out.

Strikers are, for the most part, as durable as any defender class. They have equal defenses, and although they have less HP, they have tons of immediate interrupt escapes, teleports, free movement, all kinds of ways to get out of harm's way. The presence of a defender makes the defender necessary; it deals less damage, so monsters are around for a longer amount of time, making their marking abilities necessary.

Leaders, with their massive healing and buffing, deal very little in the way of damage. A striker in their place can inflict many times as much damage. This makes healing largely unnecessary, because your enemies are going down so much faster. Leaders make themselves necessary by reducing damage output and increasing the length of the fight. Longer fights = more hits on the party = more healing needed.

Controllers are bad news. They necessitate themselves by spreading lower damage output among multiple targets. They have to hit multiple targets multiple times in order to play their role. If a situation arises where a controller can't hit multiple targets multiple times (which is absolutely FREQUENT in any games I've played) they are equal to roughly 3/4 of a leader or defender, which are already less efficient than just having a striker.

(On a side note: has anyone noticed that a cleric's spells are 5x better at nailing multiple targets than an actual controller? You never hurt your friends, and you usually heal and/or buff them to boot. WTF?)

It's really kind of genius, the way they made classes necessitate themselves. However, if you want a fast combat, you need all strikers. This isn't like 3e, where a party of rogues and sorcerers would get creamed in the first round. Ranger, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and avenger would pretty much ruin any encounter that came up in 4e.

Eh. While I'm not sure how a somewhat mixed party of strikers would work (say... a melee ranger, a charisma rogue, a warlock, and a sorcerer), in my experience strikers are as they should be: glass cannons.

Our rogue can deal really sick amounts of damage, but he's gone down more times than the defender or any other character, cause any amount of focus fire will knock him below 0 in 1-2 rounds. The fighter, on the other hand, with both higher AC and more HP (not to mention his utilities) can take that and more, and he's the least optimized character in the party. Yeah, a group of strikers would guarantee you a high damage output, but once you knock a guy below zero, good luck at getting him back on his feet.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

I'd have to disagree, a party of sorcerers and rogues would cream the enemies in the first round if they won initiative.

I fixed that for you.

I think you might be right about an all-striker party being better than a mixed party. I am not sure though.

...

Your criticism of the controllers isn't quite up to date btw. The Invoker can always hit 2+ targets if there are 2+ enemies. He is partially broken due to this, and regularily does more damage than the strikers. (I have a party with 3 strikers, 1 defender, 1 leader, 1 controller).

I do agree fully that you only need one each of the defender/leader/controller though. The rest of the party should be strikers.

...

I'm surprised I actually got support on this point. =P

On the invoker, are you talking about Divine Bolts? How the HECK does Divine Bolts deal more damage than a striker? That's absurd. Level 5...2d6 + 14 is still less than 2d10 + 4 + 1d8 or 1d4 + 2d8 + 10...and the striker can still put it all on one target. If anything, I'd say the Invoker is an example of what the wizard shoulda coulda woulda.

If you're not talking about Divine Bolts, I think I misread the class or something...they still suffer the same limitations as the wizard with "you wind up hitting your own guys a lot". Wizards have a feat tax to get around stuff the Cleric gets around for free, with twinkies.

Eh. While I'm not sure how a somewhat mixed party of strikers would work (say... a melee ranger, a charisma rogue, a warlock, and a sorcerer), in my experience strikers are as they should be: glass cannons.

Glass cannons with the same or better defense values as defenders.

Just whipping out my party's level 8 sheets...

Ranger: A 23, F 19, R 23, W 21; Total Values 86
Paladin: A 25, F 22, R 17, W 20; Total Values 84
Warlock: A 22, F 17, R 21, W 23; Total Values 83

All 3 of these characters each have +2 armor and +2 neck slot items. As you can see, their defenses are nearly identical. I'll concede that if the paladin carried a heavy shield, his defenses would look a bit bigger (an extra 4 total defense points, specifically)...but if he was carrying a shield, he wouldn't be smacking people upside the head with 8d6 (brutal 1) mordenkrad damage on that level 5 daily. He's nearly a striker with his damage output, but trades that last bit of damage for piles of healing; which, he would arguably not need if he were hitting as hard as a striker.

My point is that if you build a full tank, you lose a lot of damage output for not a lot of defensive gain. Yeah, the tank protects the strikers...but if he was a striker himself, the bad guys would go down faster, thus eliminating the need for him to be there in the first place.

My OTHER point is that strikers get TRUCK LOADS of ways to GTFO. The ranger, holy hell.

DM: This orc charges you.
Ranger: Oh, really? I shift 4 squares away from him before he attacks.
Next round DM: Ok, this other orc gives you the evil eye from across the glade.
Ranger: No way, I shoot him for 20 damage. He misses.
DM: It's not even your turn...
Ranger: I know, I can only use it when its not my turn. lol

And the warlock just teleports wherever he wants, nobody can threaten him for long. Strikers have great defenses and, if played right, are barely able to be engaged, much less seriously threatened. Unless you're talking Avengers...then instead of 3 ways to just GTFO, you have even higher defenses, and more HP and surges, with ways to spend them in combat.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Ranger: A 23, F 19, R 23, W 21; Total Values 86
Paladin: A 25, F 22, R 17, W 20; Total Values 84
Warlock: A 22, F 17, R 21, W 23; Total Values 83

With a decent Defender, it looks more like:
Ranger: A 25, F 21, R 25, W 23; Total Values 92
Paladin: A 25, F 22, R 17, W20, Total Values 84
Warlock: A 24, F19, R 23, W25; Total Values 89

The mark makes a big difference.
(Of course, my Defender would probably be a Fighter with AC 29. At least that's what my 8th Fighter had at the time. But I wield only a pathetic Longsword. )

But all these are just paper tigers. Try it in game and tell me how it works out.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

This is the sort of tradeoff I'm speaking of. Fighter increases everyone else's defenses by 2 against anything he's marked; but he deals less damage than a striker, prolonging the fight, increasing overall damage taken by the party in total, and begs the question for a leader to be present, further widening the "fast killing" gap.

 

[Pickles JG]

I have been thinking along the same lines as Old Gumphrey for a while. I have played a few LFR sessions with 4 strikers & its fun & edgy.
I have a feeling it works better in smaller parties than bigger ones - the bad guys can focus fire better with more of them which can overload the strikers more. The DM can focus tactically, to drop one guy in a given encounter, or strategically, to drain one guy of surges way before the others - though this is somewhat metagaming.

It takes me back to City Of Heroes days (not that 4e is like an MMO ) where my favourite team was a tank, a leader & the rest DPS.
There were debates in that game on whether a second tanker (4e defender) was ever wanted and if even the first was simply a self fullfilling prophecy.

In that game all defenders (4e Leader) was a viable team as they had massive stacking buffs. It has lead me to look at all warlord parties (who are the most offensive leaders) & they look pretty viable (if really dull & probably broken) too.

 

[Pbartender]

To challenge this group, I recommend Minions. Hordes of minions. Drop 30 figures on the board. On round 2, have one of them bolt out the door hollering for reinforcements, and on round 5 bring in 2 elite artillery with minions in front of them.

Absolutley... Strikers can deal metric -loads of damage, but they still have trouble hitting more than one target at a time. A horde of appropriate level minions backed up by some artillery can overwhelm a group of strikers pretty quickly.

 

[Regicide]

I fixed that for you.

No, all you did was indicate you've never seen either class played very well. Initiative is hardly required, particularly for classes with 9 spell levels, like sorcerers.