Community designed martial controller

[Quickleaf]

Another concept to potentially consider might be something a bit like a spell book. Except in the case of the Monstru-Waccan it would be sort of an 'encyclopedia'. That would be another way to partly get around the circumstantial aspect of the specificity of knowledge regarding monster types. If he has an entry for 'orc' then he can apply some specific bonuses vs orcs. It would seem to fit reasonably well with the Martial power basis and knowledge based flavor of the character's powers.

That's a great idea, and reminds me of the old Van Richten's guides from Ravenloft. I imagine it could be modelled very closely to the spellbook and work just fine. As we develop the class I'm sure ideas to customize will come up.

Also, I came up with a solution for a low-AC controller wearing only cloth or leather. It's like the avenger's "armor of faith" (?) which grants +3 AC when not in heavy armor or wearing a shield.

Monstrous Savvy: At the start of your round as a free action, gain +4 AC vs. one monster type (e.g. goblins or black dragons) while not using heavy armor or a shield. At the start of each of your rounds you may switch which monster type monstrous savvy applies to.

Btw, what did you think of the two oaths a few posts back?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's a great idea, and reminds me of the old Van Richten's guides from Ravenloft. I imagine it could be modelled very closely to the spellbook and work just fine. As we develop the class I'm sure ideas to customize will come up.

Also, I came up with a solution for a low-AC controller wearing only cloth or leather. It's like the avenger's "armor of faith" (?) which grants +3 AC when not in heavy armor or wearing a shield.

Monstrous Savvy: At the start of your round as a free action, gain +4 AC vs. one monster type (e.g. goblins or black dragons) while not using heavy armor or a shield. At the start of each of your rounds you may switch which monster type monstrous savvy applies to.

Btw, what did you think of the two oaths a few posts back?

The oaths? They sound interesting and workable. Monstrous Savvy sounds pretty good too. The Avenger version of that actually kind of seemed overpowered to me because it applies to any light armor and there are some synergies with pumping secondary stats plus some feats that lets the Avenger's AC get pretty far out of hand (they can credibly be 10 AC points higher than the next best class), so it has to be watched carefully WRT the other ways the PC can up their AC, but it should work fine with that in mind.

Phew, now I'll have to block out some time to go back through all of this and try to write up some of it in more detail and compare the results with some of the other controller classes.

 

[Quickleaf]

Here's all the class features we've proposed so far, plus I took a stab at the spellbook-esque monster encyclopedia concept...

Alchemist
Gain Alchemy as a bonus feat, allowing you to prepare alchemical mixtures. You know 3 formulas at 1st level, gaining an additional formula at levels 5, 11, 15, 21, and 25.

Bestiary
You keep a record of your encounters with monstrous foes, and you are considered trained in all knowledge skills for the purposes of monster knowledge checks. In addition, once per day you may swap a daily power with the “monstrous” keyword, with another “monstrous” daily as a free action. At 11th level you may do this swap twice per day, and at 21st level thrice per day.

Guard
At the start of your turn declare one type of monster you are guarding against (e.g. kobolds or black dragons). You gain +4 AC against attacks from that monster type as long as you are not wearing heavy armor and have one hand free. You may change the type of monster you are guarding against at the start of your turn.

Oath
Choose one of these oaths you have sword yourself to:
Oath of the Hunter: When you push or pull an enemy it provokes attacks of opportunity.
Oath of the Truth Seeker: When you push or pull an enemy it loses any concealment until the end of your next turn.

 

[chronoplasm]

I think what this class needs is weapon talents/styles.

That is, when wielding weapons from certain groups, or wielding weapons in certain ways, you gain additional controllery effects to your weapon attacks.

 

[Drakard]

I'm really into the idea of a Melee Controller, and I personally think the best way is to do a Martial Artist/ Monk type class. I've always been in to martial arts myself, but never played a monk 3rd edition cause they were just too hard hitting, and it didnt flow the way it should. But a 4th edition MC monk would be perfect.

I think that the class would have two play styles. The first would be unarmed. THis style would focus on pushing/sliding/knocking/area sweeps, and above all lots of shifts. The idea would be to have attacks where you could shift say your int or wis and that would eliminate the idea of having to bunch people up and burst. So you could have some sort of knockdown ability, and you can have two targets and the ability to shift X amount of spaces. So start next to one, knock him down, shift to other and knock him down. Something along those lines. I also love the idea of disarms and grabs. This character should grab weapons from people and start using those, or just knock them from people's hands. But I think shifts are this classes friends.

The other branch would be a staff weilding fighting style. This would be your burst version with area affect sweeps, or martial arts displays that make people back away. (example. You shift up next to your friend and then swing your staff in a full circle over head scaring the enemies around him back X amount of spaces.)

This is what I think would work best as a pure Melee Controller. I'll try and brainstorm some lvl 1-3 ideas.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the monk idea is a pretty viable concept too. One note, disarming is a sort of troublesome concept in 4e when used by characters because monsters simply don't generally have any stats for what they would use as an unarmed attack. If you simply say "the monster cannot use this attack anymore" then a lot of monsters are neutered, they just don't HAVE any non weapon attack, particularly lower level monsters. For a homebrew class it isn't a fatal flaw, you can always come up with a suitable ruling, but it does add to the DM workload somewhat.

Other than that I think the monk works fine as you've outlined. It would be pretty much an 'anti-warlord' in game mechanics terms. Arrow breaking would be another fairly iconic fluff you could base some powers on, and there you don't run into the disarming problem.

I'd think you would want a class feature that gave the character an AC and maybe Reflex buff while wearing cloth armor to basically make AC and Reflex on par with other characters wearing hide armor, just so you won't have the oddity of hide armor wearing shield bearing monks wandering around.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

You can treat disarm as in that it automatically gives a penalty on the foe's recharge roll on the D6, or disables an encounter power for the remainder of the encounter. That would work really well.

 

[Quickleaf]

Lots of good ideas. We've got three concepts floating around for an MC, and I like the idea of combining them into a single class:
1. Two-Fisted Vigilante
2. Martial Artist
3. Monster Hunter

As a coherent combination I think of Gregoire de Fronsac from Brotherhood of the Wolf or Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher.

I started working on an "Inquisitive" class which kind of fit the bill, had class features keyed to specific weapons, and a really cool feature called canny positioning. I wonder if adapting some of its features/powers to the community designed MC could work?

The Inquisitive


@ Chronoplasm and Drakard
Great ideas! What sorts of weapons do you see this class being focused with?

 

[chronoplasm]

Here's what I'm thinking...

Vigilante Weapon Talent

• If you hit a target when wielding an improvised or unnarmed weapon, the target takes a -1 penalty to Reflex until the end of your next turn.
• If you hit a target when wielding a light thrown or heavy thrown weapon, the target takes a -1 penalty to Fortitude until the end of your next turn.
• If you hit a target when wielding a bow, crossbow, or firearm, the target takes a -1 penatly to Will until the end of your next turn.

 

[Starfox]

I must say I like a lot of the ideas presented here. I particularily like the weapon style ideas, as they really add flavor. The problem there is that there are so many styles and weapons to cover.

My take is more gimmickry, using things like caltrops and oil slicks to get the work done - or at least I see this as a build option. I doubt all these ideas can fit in one class in the end.

I did a bit of work on something going under the working name of Mastermind, a Dex-based class with three builds - Interaction (Cha), Gadgets (Int), and brute-force martial arts (Str).