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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Veep" data-source="post: 6707833" data-attributes="member: 6793297">Battlemind StrategiesI highly recommend reading AlphaTheGreat's Ultimate Defenders(x) thread for a more thorough overview of the general principles of defending, but to quickly summarize: the defender's role is to put enemies between the devil and the deep blue sea.  The enemy can choose one of three options: to attack an ally, to attack the defender, or to avoid the defender's trap altogether.  It is the job of the defender to make sure that whatever the enemy chooses, it is a bad choice.  This means trying to strike a balance between the counters to the three options: that is, to improve the defender's stickiness (forcing the enemy to abide by the rules of the trap), his mark punishment (punishing a decision to attack an ally), and defences (punishing a decision  to attack the defender).In this section I'm going to try to sketch out how the battlemind deals with those three tasks and ways in which performance can be improved.  In prioritizing the aspects to perform, keep in mind that the critical element in making build decisions is to make focus on penalizing whichever of the three choices your DM is most likely to pick.  It is no guarantee that what your DM chooses is the choice he should make from an optional perspective, so make your decisions based on your play experience.StickinessIf you cannot keep your enemy within the range of your mark punishment, then he has no unpleasant choice to be making.  Because an enemy can shift and then charge, this means that keeping them next to you requires being able in the same round to punish or prevent shifts and walking/running/charging.  For battleminds, this boils down to Blurred Step and opportunity attacks.Blurred Step in principle allows you follow enemies through shifts.  However, to make this work, the number of squares in Blurred Step's shift needs to be roughly equivalent to the number of squares the enemy shifts (slightly less if you are good with positioning), and monsters tend to get longer range movement at higher levels.  Unfortunately, there are very few ways to increase the shift distance of Blurred Step: Blurred Speed and Long Step, multi-classing Rogue for Risky Shift, being eladrin, taking the Unbound Nomad paragon path, your choice of two light armors, and Harrying Step.  Of all these, only Harrying Step provides unbounded range, and it requires only your choice of study and a single feat, which is why the Persistent Harrier option is rated so highly in this guide.Opportunity attacks are a domain in which battleminds are absolutely horrible.  Without investment, you quite literally provide no reason at all for monsters to not simply walk away from you.  Within the class, the tools provided are at-wills with Augments that allow the power to be used as an OA (Twisted Eye, Ego Crush, and Cage of Cowardrice), and daily powers that put you in a stance that gives an opportunity attack.  The latter are generally a terrible option: you can only have three such powers (four if you choose from a very small number of paragon paths), and many of the available powers are actually quite poor.  The OA augment powers are much more viable, particularly Twisted Eye, though they will be a major drain on your power points, especially in Heroic.  Another possibility is to spend feats.  Heavy Blade Opportunity is a good solution, though unfortunately not until paragon, and it requires a lot of otherwise unnecessary stat investment. The state of Melee Training means the damage is too low to be a real discouragement, but combined with OA or MBA enhancement feats from other classes like Sudden Roots (warden) or Hindering Shield+Lashing Flail (fighter) provides a measure of control.(Note that OA stance powers aren't very good as a substitute for opportunity attacks, they still have a niche.  Because they are not opportunity attacks (which as of the Rules Compendium is a very specific thing, and not just shorthand for "attacking off an opportunity action), but instead opportunity actions triggered on movement which grant an attack, there are a number of monsters (usually skirmishers) with powers (usually named something like "Mobile" or "Flyby") that don't trigger opportunity attacks, but will still trigger the OA stance powers.  It's not a complete panacea -- teleporting doesn't provoke any sort of opportunity action, the OA stance powers won't trigger on ranged attacks, and there are a few monsters that avoid provoking "opportunity action attacks," but there's still a space of about 60 or 70 monsters that the OA stances will help you deal with.)Finally, one way to bypass all of these concerns is to use powers to provide your stickiness instead.  Lodestone Lure, for example, renders all of the above moot by simply requiring the enemy to stay adjacent.  More subtly, since the issue is not keeping the enemy adjacent, but keeping the enemy within the range of your mark punishment, powers that effectively extend the range of your punishment -- most notably Lightning Rush -- also render you more sticky.  Once again, however, this solution tends to be power point intensive.Mark PunishmentThe class feature for mark punishment is Mind Spike.  It has good points: auto-damage which is typed but that only a single creature in the game (the Godforged Colossus) resists, and it works in a way to discourage the selection of the target's most damaging powers.  Unfortunately, Mind Spike is very difficult to improve upon.  The feats that benefit it do not help you in any other way, and the majority of those feats are terrible.  There are only really three good three feats to bolster Mind Spike: Lure of Iron (adds forced movement), Prescient Retaliation (make it an interrupt) and Rapid Mind Spike (make it a free action once per round).  Of those three, only Lure of Iron is available before epic.  Frankly, the best policy is not to invest any feats in Mind Spike.  Either it works for you as is, or you need to look at improving mark punishment through powers instead.  While this includes supplemental powers such as Conductive Defense, what the power approach really means is the use of Lightning Rush not to supplement Mind Spike but to replace it.DefencesThe rule of thumb for defences for a defender is that you should aim to have your AC be at level+18 and your best NAD about level+16.  Keeping your AC that high is going to require investing in either Armor Specialization (scale) or Armor Proficiency (Plate), so make sure you will end up with either a Strength or Dexterity of 15 at some point (probably paragon).  For your NADs, battleminds tend to have two well-rounded NADs rather than one very good one, so hitting that peak of 16 may prove to be difficult.  However, with just Improved Defences you should have two NADs near level+14; investing in Superior Will or Fortitude plus some other item that boosts the relevant defence should put you in a good spot.  In addition to all this, the battlemind has a good selection of powers, paragon paths, and epic destinies that provide defence boosts or damage resistance.  If you find that you are attracting enough attacks that even with your target defences met you're taking a lot of damage, you have lots of tools to improve your situation.However, the ideal improvement on the defensive side is actually offensive, where the marked target will take damage regardless of whether he attacks an ally or the defender.  Forceful Reversal makes this one of the battlemind's strengths: no other defender has an in-class option for at-will counter-attacking.  If you find yourself in a situation where the target defences don't seem to be enough, the first thing you should look towards is Forceful Reversal.</blockquote>

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