It wasn't all that hard though to make a pretty much Striker fighter. Ironically it is actually, in most cases, a BETTER defender than ever! I mean, what's better than "punish the bad guys even harder", eh? Past a certain point they will, of course, simply never provoke, but that's some pretty awesome lockdown! I mean, there IS a point where your defense is neglected enough that you might go down too fast, but Rogues and Rangers cope with that too... At least you have defender hit points/surges! GW fighter, go for a low accuracy weapon, pump STR and WIS, dig up every multi-attack you can, or go crit fishing. Yes, a fully optimized Rogue/Ranger/Warlock will be ahead of you some, but you last longer and are STILL a really solid defender without even trying.
Obviously, but then the Ranger basically does NOTHING else except spam TS, or one of its even better encounter/daily cognates, and then maybe take off-turn reaction/OA stuff. Its nothing but spamming as many arrows downrange as possible in the shortest time you can, while staying the heck out of reach. I remember we had a guy that would play about half the time in our 2nd campaign, IIRC. He was playing a BA, and it was just stupid how much damage he could do, but he clearly was bored to death of it, at least in combat. Outside of combat he was a lot of fun.
I just played tactically and in accordance with the monster's nature. There's times when they provoke, and times when they don't... Obviously a fighter that is clearly geared up to smack you super hard will get less provokes, but that's OK. I had a guy with that PC in a campaign, the monsters were all standing around going "holy crud! I gotta keep parrying this guy every second, he's got me pinned!" LOL. Then there was a dwarf that was a real tank. Monsters would sometimes figure out that they could try to go around him. OTOH if he got himself in a chokepoint then it was all over! Both were effective and fun.
The way I see it the fighters ability to hit someone when they shift away is not something the npc knows (the mark is what is affecting them so they know about that and lots of characters mark and npcs that mark are not generally a duplicate of any given defender power, and I consider it consistent an enemy doesn't magically know when they ignore the Swordmages mark he will be teleporting to smack them either). So you can expect if they would be frustrated by missing or simply want to kill those obviously deadly others or the guy who keeps healing others or whatever reason like they have a good charge they want to use, shifting then doing the charge is the order of the day. The defender of whatever stripe I would say gets at least one provoke possibly per enemy.
Beastmaster with a Warhorse for beast, and the Chevalier Theme ... or the Calladyr Dragoon Theme are some of the ingredients you could use to make the Ranger even more obviously fighter, the Assyrian Archer horseman work relatively well as a real world style too.
Eh, yeah, frankly I figure there's real world explanations for all the things that are going on, like being able to use CS and CC. While not every monster may know the details as if they were a player, they surely know they're under threat! However, a lot of monsters are dumb and hungry, and foolish enough not to figure out the best strategy. Or it may BE the best strategy in a given situation to put paid to that wizard, damn the consequences! So, yeah, I never saw the 'nothing ever provokes' problem. It always seemed like a bit of a spherical cow...
I like it when my DM forgets about my Combat Challenge...
