Power sources vice classes for power selection

[AbdulAlhazred]

Why would a twin striking Dex fighter with a bow be better than a ranger? How would they have "all the advantages of a ranger"? Having more hit points is great, sure. Are fighter feats better than ranger feats for a twin striking bow wielder? Is marking better than hunter's quarry?

I was thinking it would be an interesting way to cherry pick powers to make a given class even better at its role; e.g. a twin striking fighter better than a non-twin striking fighter at fightering. I hadn't thought it would make a given class better at being a different class than the original; e.g. a twin striking fighter better than a ranger at rangering.

I'm interested to hear more of your thoughts if you have time.

- RtC

The potential build space that is opened up is HUGE. Lets imagine a straight 4e FWT fighter with TS and wielding say a pair of daggers or a javelin and a dagger. He can use TS, his attacks are all based on DEX, but he's got all the toughness and defender powers of a fighter. He can obviously still have a very good STR if he's built right, so he can lock people down AND attack at range (and can mark at range as a highly effective attack where the standard fighter does it MAYBE as a sort of fallback measure). He can pick up various feats and etc that will enhance this capability, perhaps MCing into Ranger or some other class to poach a feat or two if needed.

Honestly, I don't have a specific build worked out, you can't do this stuff with CB so its really a bunch of book research with the Compendium. And honestly, I'm not sure which class would be likely to produce the most deadly permutations either. The ranger and rogue obviously have striker dice, which is nice, but striker dice are only a modest damage increase in the grand scheme of things. The gold standard is multi-attacks, and for that looting the Ranger class is going to be a gold mine. Rangers per-se are held in check by lower hit points and just not being able to get every offensive thing they would like AND having a decent defense. A fighter, I believe you will find, can improve on this and will do equally nasty damage in the right build.

I suspect there are some other nasty combos out there too. Avenger for instance is a class that has the potential to really break open, so I'd be surprised if you couldn't exploit that somehow by poaching maybe some paladin or invoker stuff.

Anyway, I'm sure it could be fun. I think you're just really blurring the class boundaries a lot. I approve of anything that is fun though.

I'd have thought that 4e SHOULD have been designed with a power-source based set of power lists myself, in which case they'd probably be done a bit differently than the existing class powers, but maybe WotC tried it and couldn't make it work? I'm not sure...

 

[Jer]

The potential build space that is opened up is HUGE. Lets imagine a straight 4e FWT fighter with TS and wielding say a pair of daggers or a javelin and a dagger. He can use TS, his attacks are all based on DEX, but he's got all the toughness and defender powers of a fighter.

Eh - Dual Strike already exists and gives you most of that for the Fighter. You are restricted to making your dual attacks on two different targets (if use use the most up-to-date errata) or on a single target (if you use the original version) but unless you have a dual-weilding ranger at the table I'm not sure that the difference between a Fighter with Dual Strike and a Fighter with Twin Strike is going to matter much in practice (and then what matters is that the Fighter is stepping on the toes of the Ranger and stealing his schtick). Plus Dual Strike already uses Strength instead of Dex, so it fits the rest of the Fighter dependencies a bit better.

Anyway, I'm sure it could be fun. I think you're just really blurring the class boundaries a lot. I approve of anything that is fun though.

This I agree with - it could be a lot of fun AND you are blurring the class boundaries a lot with this. So you have to be a bit careful as you're considering it. You might be overly worried about things being broken the wrong direction - I think it would be far too easy to come up with characters that are underpowered using this setup. In the worst case people pick powers that sound really cool but don't work together at all.

Best case though is you end up with a situation more like Gamma World, where the boundaries between the roles are a lot more blurred. I'm in favor of this, since I think the distinction between melee Defender and melee Striker is too much in standard 4th edition - I think melee Defenders should do more damage and melee Strikers should be able to take more damage and the line between these roles should be blurred a bit more. (Or perhaps the roles are not quite defined right and melee Strikers and ranged Strikers should be treated differently - even after all these years I'm still not quite sure what I find off about these roles when it comes to melee characters).

 

[Lindeloef]

Twin Strike uses Strength for Melee attacks or Dexterity for Ranged attacks. Dual Strike is melee only. Also I assume we discuss this on the basis that the errata is used, so you don't have the choice of attacking the same target with both attacks on Dual Strike.

The Mark is also better than Hunter's Quarry (which is btw totally crap) cause you now have means for another out-of-turn attack (if someone ignores your mark).
Fighters were always really close to being a striker, they missed mostly the minor action attacks to go nova.

Though you can kinda do it right now if you Hybrid Fighter and Ranger anyways, so I don't see a game breaking problem in this, as you probably want to go tempest fighter to up your damage and have enough Dex to get the 3rd attack on Rain of Blows.

So have fun with it

 

[MoutonRustique]

... (Or perhaps the roles are not quite defined right and melee Strikers and ranged Strikers should be treated differently - even after all these years I'm still not quite sure what I find off about these roles when it comes to melee characters).

I've always wondered why there was a "striker" role at all... Deal lots of damage? How is that a meaningful role?

 

[Lindeloef]

I've always wondered why there was a "striker" role at all... Deal lots of damage? How is that a meaningful role?

A Striker should be able to take out a standard monster in one turn. So a striker does not only "deal lots of damage" he also prevents it (by removing a damage source from the fight)

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

A Striker should be able to take out a standard monster in one turn.

Is this written somewhere? Is there a standard damage per level chart? IME that's only possible if you're using dailies and action points, and you can't do that every round.

 

[Lindeloef]

Is this written somewhere? Is there a standard damage per level chart? IME that's only possible if you're using dailies and action points, and you can't do that every round.

No dailies, Encounter powers and minor actions and maybe an action point, depending on your rolls.

But maybe I was too much in an CharOP state of mind, so everyone take my statement with a grain of salt.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No dailies, Encounter powers and minor actions and maybe an action point, depending on your rolls.

But maybe I was too much in an CharOP state of mind, so everyone take my statement with a grain of salt.

You are talking one of only several of the best striker classes and a good bit of optimization, yes. IME most players that are playing for fun are going to be more like half that or 3/4 of that maybe. I've seen a basically haphazardly optimized rogue at lower levels gank a skirmisher with a single hit using an encounter power and some extra bennies one time when she got some lucky rolls. I've seen it happen a couple times with a daily, and its not hard to do with a nova.

When you get into the higher levels then it can be a little more common, but at the same time most players have even less optimization at that point.

 

[Jhaelen]

I've always wondered why there was a "striker" role at all... Deal lots of damage? How is that a meaningful role?

That's not all there is to strikers. Strikers can (and often are) as much about mobility and reliability (i.e. dealing damage consistently).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Damage dealing is the most meaningful role. Its arguable that the focus on damage in 4e makes strikers overly central to the game, but overall things work well enough as a good mix of roles usually is the most tactically resilient over a wide range of encounters.