Defeating my powergamer Glave master

[w_earle_wheeler]

Skill challenges

Do his opponents snipe him and then jump or climb to higher ground using athletics?

Is he caught in a situation where his only means of survival is diplomacy or an otherwise glib tongue?

 

[dnddays]

Fight fire with fire!

I have had players who optimize their characters. It doesn't happen anymore, because my players know I frequent the Character Optimization boards, but a couple of my guys use to mix/max their characters in abusive ways. I dealt with it by giving monsters classes and mix/maxing them. Having optimized Hill Giant Hulking Hurler builds and whatnot brought players back to playing reasonable classes. 4e isn't as obscene as 3.5 in optimization abuse, but there are worse builds than that polearm fighter, which can be dealt with tactically. You should be thankful he isn't playing a sorc. Have you seen the sorcerer builds, capable of one-shotting Orcus?

 

[LostSoul]

My suggestion would be to target him with controlling effects. Even things like push and slide could work for you. If he's blocking an area, you could try a Bull Rush to open up a path.

 

[gizmo33]

I find the idea of having to choose specific monsters with specific tactics in order to pose a challenge to a character really unpleasant.

I don't consider it some kind of "abusive" min-maxing for a fighter to choose a feat that works well with his powers. The problem IMO is the broken feat, not the player, and IMO it's really cheesy to start throwing powerful monsters at the players until you guilt them back into making sub-optimal choices.

A monster should be a challenge for PCs based on it's level, with some adjustment for tactics and match-ups and stuff. But if power-gaming feat combos start becoming more important than level (ie. a monster who can otherwise challenge a party is a joke when facing someone with polearm gamble), then I think 4E has broken a design goal that I thought it had. IMO game mastery shouldn't be that important to your character's power. You would presume that the fighters of the world have already determined the optimal attack strategies and training. The reason that people don't fight with spoons is because people have already figured out what the better weapons are. I'd rather my players just worry about their characters 'character', and not that they've missed some magic feat combo.

 

[Spatula]

Well, I don't think Polearm Gamble isn't broken or overpowered. It's very good (for a fighter) keeping melee opponents from getting past him, given a choke point - something fighters are already good at. The glaive does poor damage and has average accuracy (2d4, +2 hit), although as a heavy blade it qualifies for various OA feats which work well in conjunction with Polearm Gamble. It's a neat build. With enough feats, the fighter can make OAs with +WIS +2 (Heavy Blade Opportunity feat) to hit against anyone that moves adjacent, stopping their movement, and can use an at-will attack in the process. Uncanny Dodge negates the +2 to hit that the now-adjacent enemies would get against the fighter (from CA).

However, the fighter has no shield and is constantly granting CA to melee opponents. If he's been pumping up his WIS to enhance his OAs, then his Reflex defense is going to be especially poor. The answer is the same answer you have for nearly any fighter - hit him from range or go around. "Go around" is still very possible - Polearm Gamble does not give threatening reach. For example, where "M" is a monster and "F" is the glaive-wielding fighter:

-M---
-----
--F--
-----
-----

the monster can move past the fighter without getting hit at all (by always staying at a range of 2 squares). Polearm Gamble only triggers when an opponent moves next to the fighter.

If the fighter is using the Battlerage Vigor build from Martial Power - that might be the source of the DM's problems, not Polearm Gamble.

 

[gizmo33]

However, the fighter has no shield and is constantly granting CA to melee opponents.

IIRC it's only against those opponents that he uses this against - which means he gets a free attack and if he hits, they go back to the square they started in. It makes it hard for me to see how the fighter is "constantly" granting CA unless he is "constantly" missing, which has not been my experience so far.

If he's been pumping up his WIS to enhance his OAs, then his Reflex defense is going to be especially poor. The answer is the same answer you have for nearly any fighter - hit him from range or go around. "Go around" is still very possible

The solutions are all IMO pretty heavy on the metagaming side. The "answer" now means that the DM is configuring his encounter according to a certain feat that some player has. "Going around" the fighter seems really strange too - now monsters see a man with polearm and suddenly are inspired to attack someone else?

I guess there is some grounds for monsters reacting to the use of this power - but making sure they have missle weapons, reflex attacks, and don't get marked by the fighter first would require foreknowledge - though these things may happen randomly, it's a bit much to presume that they *must* happen or else the fighter keeps getting free attacks and keeps the enemy at bay until he misses, which is how the feat reads to me.

 

[jamesmanhattan]

What really sucks is that the DM feels he has to change and rewrite entire encounters just to handle one player. It signals to me that something is broken. You should have a serious talk with the player and ask him if he too feels like that combo is too powerful and maybe a stretch of the rules.

The DM shouldn't have to re-write a published adventure because one player is messing it up.

If that fails the best advice is to never have any monster ever approach the fighter if possible. Ignore him the best you can. If the fighter ever manages to mark a monster try shifting to be adjacent to him, most board posters have come to the conclusion that shifting prevents all opportunity attacks, even from polearm momentum.

If your guy is knocking monsters prone 1 square away from him somehow, with those polearm push feats, have the monster get up and charge someone else. The defender is failing in his duty, he can only combat challenge attack adjacent guys.

If that fails have all the nothics target him, then have 4 more nothics come from behind them, then have 4 more nothics come up from underwater and kill his freaking character! and take utmost pleasure from it.

 

[Spatula]

IIRC it's only against those opponents that he uses this against - which means he gets a free attack and if he hits, they go back to the square they started in.

Nope, doesn't work like that. Combat superiority stops movement, it doesn't retroactively cancel it, which would be impossible by the rules (since it's not an interrupt - it happens after the target moves adjacent to the fighter). Monster uses move action to close with fighter. Fighter gets OA because of Polearm Gamble but grants CA to the monster. The monster is marked, and if the OA hit, the monster's move action ends. But the monster still has a standard and minor action left, and can use them to beat on the fighter.

The solutions are all IMO pretty heavy on the metagaming side.

"There's a huge guy in heavy armor with a big pointy thing - let's fill him with arrows," is metagaming? It would seem to be common sense to me.

Again, this is an issue with any OA-happy fighter. They're hard to get past. It has nothing to do with polearms.

 

[gizmo33]

Nope, doesn't work like that. Combat superiority stops movement, it doesn't retroactively cancel it, which would be impossible by the rules (since it's not an interrupt - it happens after the target moves adjacent to the fighter).

It would be nice if it worked that way. I'm not sure though. Look at post #8 in this thread. Polearm gamble grants an OA, and OA interrupts the action that provoked it - and so according to what I think is a logical interpretation of the post, you stop the movement before they enter the square. The PHB indicates that an OA occurs before the target "finishes his action" - if he's already in the square next to the fighter, then he's really finished the action before he was stopped.

I much prefer your interpretation. If your certainty is based on something that's clearly in the rules that would be great.

"There's a huge guy in heavy armor with a big pointy thing - let's fill him with arrows," is metagaming? It would seem to be common sense to me.

It's metagaming to start arming your NPCs with bows in a different proportion because of the feat choice of a PC. And if you're a huge guy in heavy armor with a sword and shield then apparently you're foolish for attacking this character? There are sword-and-buckler tactics that are more than sufficient IMO to counter a single pole-arm user - so this quickly lands outside of "common sense" and back to metagaming because it's really the feat, and nothing about the normal capabilities of the weapon that are an issue here.

 

[Deverash]

If you don't want to metagame to defeat this(though honestly most encounter /should/ have ranged attacks of some sort), then have one of them attempt to move up, and get stopped. Then the other can move up to just inside his reach them shift inside it...just like a player would do with threatening reach. A good case could be made, IMO anyways, that the prevention of OAs by shifting would trump the granting of an OA from the feat. It does cost the monster an attack that round(which still makes the build good, I'd think), but doesn't mean he locks down a whole section of the battlefield.