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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6883756" data-attributes="member: 996">I've heard that logic before, but never found it convincing.  The Defender role in 4e was clearly-defined and played a definite, contributing, role in the party.  Defender features helped allies significantly.  A defender by himself had features that essentially did nothing.  Marking, most obviously.  The same was true of the Leader Role.  The Leader had clear contributions to make that flowed to the rest of the party, by himself, the leader had features that did nothing (many an allies-only buff, most obviously).The Controller role was mostly just a tenuous excuse for grandfathering in more versatile and powerful spells for the Wizard.  The Controller also had no one straightforward function.  He imposed conditions.  He created zones.  He blew up minions and interdicted areas with the mere threat of his powers.  The Controller directly degraded the enemy's effectiveness, a result similar to what the Defender accomplished indirectly, but where the Defender did so by putting himself in harm's way, the Controller did so while simultaneously keeping himself out of trouble.  Those zones and conditions and conjurations all served to keep enemies away from him, to make him a difficult target to engage.  And, perhaps, most notably, the Controller on his own lost nothing.  All his features, all his powers, still worked, very well indeed.  In fact, without a party to get in the way of his target:all-creatures AEs or queer his condition-imposition tactics (charging immobilized enemies, for instance), he was /more/ effective.  The controller was the ultimate 'selfish' role - no wonder it was also the most dispensable.  Nor does melee vs ranged draw the line.  In 3e you could create a 'battlefield control' build that was melee (with reach, but still melee, thankyouverymuch), that swept away swaths of lesser foes, interdicted an area, imposed conditions (mostly prone, but it was a nastier condition in 3e), and did it all while making himself a difficult target to engage - while doing nothing much to defend allies, especially melee allies who were just going to run up to enemies he'd tripped, anyway.  Melee Controller, not Defender.Heartily agree!  Minions are great for what they do, which is the same thing Bounded Accuracy does with modest numbers of lower-level monsters in 5e - have a number of contemptible foes for the heroes to blow through and display their awesome, while still posing a minor threat - but when you cross the line into hordes (dozens, hundreds) of such foes, Swarms work /sooo/ much better.I've certainly done some 'wave' combats, they allow you to use a larger total number of enemies without overwhelming the party, and to reduce the impact of certain player tactics.  They strike me as a good idea in 5e, too, since numbers tell so heavily, breaking them up is even more critical.</blockquote>

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