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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 5803135" data-attributes="member: 53980">To the best of my knowledge, you're the only one holding that opinion. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The players don't change their powers in response to the encounter. They create their characters in response to the DM. If this is the type of campaign the DM chooses to run, then that's how you create your characters to compensate.I mean, if the PCs are encountering something like this once per tier, who cares? If they encounter it several times an adventure, then they need to build with that expectation in mind. And that's true of any edition.I've played defenders. You can make it very hard for anyone to escape you. You just have to play smart and pick powers to make you sticky. I'm a Swordmage player (it's my friend who prefers Fighters, though fwiw I'd say he's better at defending than I am). Just for example (since one of your complaints was that CAGI is 7th level), here are the 1st level powers I prefer:Aegis of Shielding: So what if it allows conditions through? It still takes a large chunk out of that enemy's damage, and gives them a -2 penalty to hit. If they charge to lessen the penalty, they typically can't use their encounter power attacks (because those usually aren't basic). After Aegis penalties are factored in, I wouldn't be surprised if the Wizard can survive longer than the Swordmage can. Seriously, do you expect it to julian fries too? It's one tool in a larger arsenal.1st level at wills: Booming Blade is an at will that can make it a bad choice for enemies to shift and charge (automatic damage if they move away from you). Luring Strike can allow you to pin an enemy against a wall if you position yourself intelligently, preventing them from leaving you without an OA.1st level encounter: Foesnare immobilizes a target, negating their option to walk away completely. 1st level daily: Dance of the Sword is a close burst 2 that prevents targets from making OAs or shifting, making it so that they can't shift and charge, and even if they walk away from you, you're teammate can just walk away from them.And it's not just up to me to keep enemies on me. The wizard can use Grasping Shadows (Burst 1 that creates a slowing zone) or Phantom Chasm (immobilizes and knocks targets prone) to keep targets closer to the Swordmage and further from the Wizard. That's the point of playing a controller. Action denial. Deny them the action to attack you, if your defender fails to do so. If they've slowed and you're standing 6 squares away, I'm pretty sure the creatures will attack the defender rather than just wasting a round moving closer to you.Strikers and Leaders also have potential options along these lines. Even when they aren't, Strikers kill things so that they can no longer be a threat, and Leaders have good mitigation, making it effectively so that enemy attacks never happened.Every character type has a weakness in 4e. Fighters tend to be poor against either Reflex or Willpower. So on and so forth. So what if the wizard has a weakness too? Is it that some people are too used to layering on spell after spell until they had no weaknesses left? 4e doesn't let anyone do that. The wizard isn't being singled out.Look man, I'm not going to dig through all those posts to figure out the specifics, but from what I could gather this is an atypical fight if I ever saw one. This sort of thing is exactly why I specified a typical fight. It's not that there's anything wrong with the challenge that an atypical fight provides, except that those types of fights don't often accurately correspond to their supposed difficulty level.(This reminds me a bit of the time I was trying to explain to an old DM that the wealth guidelines in 3e were what the system assumed. His response was to create a pair of goblin rogues with our level in wealth of consumable potions. Hence, when we came upon the tree where they were hiding, they were invisible and buffed out the wazoo. They then proceeded to one shot a party member each, and took the rest of us down without much trouble. He then tried to use that to explain to me that the wealth guidelines were completely broken, and became quite irate when I explained to him that WpL was not intended to be used that way. A +1 sword is not the same as half a dozen potions.)It consists (as far as I can tell) of 1 high level controller, 2 artillery, and a long dark corridor. That's pretty nonstandard when compared to a straight up fight (which the majority of combats fall into).Firstly, ranged enemies are the hardest for a defender to manage, because they can't reach them. Secondly, it sounds like the party was suffering significant impairment from darkness penalties, yet it took them a long time to think to bring out a light source. Mistakes are one thing but come on! Even on a slow day my group would have had a light source out by round two.Also, what the heck caused the fight to continue for 12 rounds when the monsters were outnumbered 2 to 1!? As I said, I didn't read through the whole thing, but that alone is a pretty big "something is amiss" flag for me.</blockquote>

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