I'm in the process of putting together a Martial Defender who is centered around Shield Combat.
The main stats will be Dex, Con, Wis, Str (in that order... with Str mattering very little honestly).
They don't start with Heavy Armor proficiencies and many of their skills are centered around spear and light blade weapons.
One of the main class features is Shield Mastery - they incur bonuses to AC/Reflex over normal users with Shields and they can actually use Light and Heavy Shields as Weapons in combat (including a +3 prof bonus for light and a +2 prof bonus for heavy). A light Shield does 1d6 and has the Heavy Throw property and a heavy does 2d4 (but can't be thrown). Many of their powers have a new Accessory Keyword Shield and instead of 1[W], you'll see 1.
I don't want to go into too many details so I'll stop there.
What I need help with is the scaling of their Shield Bonuses. As you know, there are no +'s with magical shields in 4e. This makes the scaling of their AC, Attack, and Damage rolls difficult as the characters level.
There are a few possible solutions I've come up with and I wanted to briefly present each one here and then either let people comment or come up with their own for me to consider. Any input or help would be greatly appreciated:
1) Scale automatically with levels. Every 5 levels, scale the AC/Reflex/Attack Rolls/Damage Rolls by +1 for shield attacks. At Paragon level, allow shields to be considered "magic weapons" with regards to creatures that can only be hit by magic or enchanted weapons.
2) Add a field to every shield which would apply to a character with Shield Mastery feature which essentially adds weapon-based effects and bonuses to magical shields.
3) Have characters with Shield Mastery somehow inherit the properties of whatever weapon they are wielding (magical enhancement, elemental, etc).
There are pros/cons to each and, admittedly, none of them are perfect in my opinion. #1 lacks a sense of item progression for this class. It also doesn't allow for magical weapon properties like vorpal, flaming, etc to be applied to shields. #2 would require a ton of work and make life even more difficult for DMs (something I want to avoid).
I'm leaning towards some sort of combination of #1 and #3 but I would like to get input from everyone else.
Oh - just so that everyone knows.... the class is meant to be slightly more defensive-oriented than a Fighter but also slightly inferior to a Fighter offensively.
The main stats will be Dex, Con, Wis, Str (in that order... with Str mattering very little honestly).
They don't start with Heavy Armor proficiencies and many of their skills are centered around spear and light blade weapons.
One of the main class features is Shield Mastery - they incur bonuses to AC/Reflex over normal users with Shields and they can actually use Light and Heavy Shields as Weapons in combat (including a +3 prof bonus for light and a +2 prof bonus for heavy). A light Shield does 1d6 and has the Heavy Throw property and a heavy does 2d4 (but can't be thrown). Many of their powers have a new Accessory Keyword Shield and instead of 1[W], you'll see 1
I don't want to go into too many details so I'll stop there.
What I need help with is the scaling of their Shield Bonuses. As you know, there are no +'s with magical shields in 4e. This makes the scaling of their AC, Attack, and Damage rolls difficult as the characters level.
There are a few possible solutions I've come up with and I wanted to briefly present each one here and then either let people comment or come up with their own for me to consider. Any input or help would be greatly appreciated:
1) Scale automatically with levels. Every 5 levels, scale the AC/Reflex/Attack Rolls/Damage Rolls by +1 for shield attacks. At Paragon level, allow shields to be considered "magic weapons" with regards to creatures that can only be hit by magic or enchanted weapons.
2) Add a field to every shield which would apply to a character with Shield Mastery feature which essentially adds weapon-based effects and bonuses to magical shields.
3) Have characters with Shield Mastery somehow inherit the properties of whatever weapon they are wielding (magical enhancement, elemental, etc).
There are pros/cons to each and, admittedly, none of them are perfect in my opinion. #1 lacks a sense of item progression for this class. It also doesn't allow for magical weapon properties like vorpal, flaming, etc to be applied to shields. #2 would require a ton of work and make life even more difficult for DMs (something I want to avoid).
I'm leaning towards some sort of combination of #1 and #3 but I would like to get input from everyone else.
Oh - just so that everyone knows.... the class is meant to be slightly more defensive-oriented than a Fighter but also slightly inferior to a Fighter offensively.
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