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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6643942" data-attributes="member: 2011">There is no doubt that an offensive buff will help more times for a fighter.But, you are only looking at the strengths of fighters and ignoring weaknesses. For example, a rogue can attack from range with sneak attack. All he needs is to be able to hide first, or to have a single engaged PC anywhere on the map. The fighter, not so well. Fighters typically have low Dex and using bows or hand axes is not exactly awesome at long range for them.So yes, when one sets up an encounter where the fighter is able to immediately get into combat and shine, then yes, the fighter can nova and be buffed and do more damage due to multiple attacks per round. When one sets up an encounter where the party is 200 feet away from the fight, the rogue can do 60 points of damage before the fighter even gets into range. When one sets up an encounter in the dark, the rogue often shines.When one sets up encounters like the 4E paradigm of "We go to the castle. We go to 30x30 room one. We kill the monsters. No other monsters anywhere else hear us. We go to 30x30 room two. Rinse and Repeat.", where nearly every room is a small area where the fighter can get to a foe every single round, then of course the fighter is going to do better. It's the nature of the encounter.A lot of this is group dynamics, DM preferences, etc. For a DM like myself who likes to focus on each player at various parts of a session, I go out of my way to try to create encounters that some PCs do better than others (likely PC ambush sites where the rogue in our group gets to set up traps or surprise sneak attack, undead ones where the Cleric get to turn undead, large numbers of foe ones where the Bard can cast Hypnotic Pattern or Fireball and the Wizard can cast Web, etc.). A third tier Evoker can do twice as much damage as a Fighter if every encounter is 50 Orcs coming at the party and he can Fireball the snot out of them. But that is an optimal situation for a Evoker. Just like close range encounters are optimal situations for Fighters.When doing damage calculations, it is assumed that the fighter is in an optimal close range situation and can attack every round. That is not always the case at the table. Rogues are better at long range than Fighters. Fighters are better than Rogues at short range. Give the PCs 3 short range encounters and 3 long range encounters in a day, the Rogue will probably do as much or more damage than the Fighter and the other PCs will sometimes buff the long range specialists, not the short range one.</blockquote>

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