Defenders that actually defend

[sfedi]

The shielding swordmage's mark is great because it says, "Go ahead and attack my buddy. With my mark on him, the damage you will do is negligible. Sure he's easier to hit, but you still can't hurt him."

Yep, only enemies that put conditions have some incentive to ignore the Aegis.

The fighter's class ability says, "Just try and leave my side. I'll simply knock you right back to where you started, and you wasted a move action. Your fighting me buddy, just live with it."

Mmm, not always.
If the enemy can shift and then charge another (squishier) party member, then it's usually better to do that.

The other defenders don't have it as easy. There main incentive is "Hit me, or take some damage." Unfortunately since monsters tend to have a lot of hitpoints, that's not that much of an incentive.

You think?
You're promoting the defender's damage to striker damage if you do that.
I'm sure the enemies don't want another striker in the party

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I have a Warden in the game I am running and he is nasty. It is not his mark that does the most damage, but it's the Warden Forms that do it. When he creates difficult terrain around him, enemies have a hard time getting away without being whacked. The Warden also is very durable, so even focusing fire on him doesn't help you much. Your best guess is to attack his weaker defenses and daze or stun him. That requires monsters that can actually do that, of course.

Aside from this, not all Defenders play the same.
The Fighter and the Warden are typically the type of defender that move to their foes and then keep them there, be it with their mark abilities or with their powers.
But beware: If the enemies somehow gets away, don't stand around complaining, follow them and keep them busy. It doesn't hurt to stay close to your weaker allies, if there are no obvious bottlenecks that you can defend.

The Swordmage is typically a lot more mobile. His mark usually works best if he engages one foe and marks another. Basically the enemy has to follow the Swordmage or suffer the consequences of the mar.

The Paladin basic mark has the big advantage that it is automatic damage - no actions, no attack rolls, it just hurts the foe. A fighter still has to hit and needs immediate actions or opportunity action to work his shtick. Sometimes that's easy, sometimes it is not. It doesn't hurt to boost the damage of your Divine Challenge, obviously, especially for Strength-focusing Paladins. But a lot of other defender abilities for the Paladin come from his powers, and there the devil is in the detail. (More so than for the Warden, by the way. The Forms are pretty much like the Barbarian Rages, a lot more straightforward).

Lay on Hands is a defender feature for the mark in two ways - for one, he can compensate other allies getting hit when he "fails" (or the enemy choses to ignore him). If the enemy focuses on him, he can help himself.

An important part for a Defender is to identify the threats that hurt the party most. That is often a Brute, but sometimes keeping a Soldier busy is really useful to the rest of the party, too - because then they are free to attack the targets that really inflict the damage. Skirmishers and Artillery monsters are probably hampered the most by a defender, but Artillery is often hard to catch when the enemy can establish a front line of melee focused creatures. Lurkers typically have too many "get-out-of-jail" cards, but they can be the right target for a Swordmage or Paladin, who can work their mark at range.

Most defenders need to team up with party members that are also good in melee and stay close. It doesn't matter if the enemy can walk around the fighter if he still has to stay within 2 squares of him to strike one of his allies. The Fighter (or Paladin, or Warden) can shift to him, mark him, and now the enemy is locked down. (The Swordmage doesn't need or want to shift, probably.)

 

[webrunner]

Marks are, at their core, the monster having some reason to attack one person over the other: A magical compulsion, them being in their face, them making faces, singing off key, whatever. There can be other reasons to attack OTHER people who outweigh that of the mark, but in most cases the monster is ANGRY at the defender, or annoyed, or something, and wants to get through that plate armor if they can. There is a point where it's foolhardy, but marks are meant to mess with otherwise tactical decisions.


Your average monster who hates the defender over the squishy, isn't going to rationalize "Well I can't defeat the defender so I'll go after the squishy". If the squishy is back there hurling lightning bolts then the monster might thing "Lightning man is making it harder for me to focus on metal man! MUST KILL LIGHTNING MAN"

There's lots of ways to rationalize both as a DM, saying one is wrong or the other is just folly.

That said, combat challenge and it's ilk, you actually want to break it sometimes. You want the defender to feel like that entire section of their character sheet has meaning. Give them the extra attacks, give them the radiant damage, even do it when the monster would die and make the action moot. You're not there to try to beat the PCs, and there's plenty of believable ways to not act like that.
A really smart, or calm enemy could say something like "Hah, you think your goading will distract me from the true threat?".

How many times in a movie did you see the monsters go for the tough guy? Usually they throw themselves at the tough guy 1 or 2 at a time, and then a few minutes into the fight there's a tense scene where the weak guy is about to get attacked, so the tough guy rushes in to stop the attacker. This has happened a lot, the average mook doesn't usually run past Schwarzenegger even if it's tactically sound to do so.

 

[KarinsDad]

Your average monster who hates the defender over the squishy, isn't going to rationalize "Well I can't defeat the defender so I'll go after the squishy". If the squishy is back there hurling lightning bolts then the monster might thing "Lightning man is making it harder for me to focus on metal man! MUST KILL LIGHTNING MAN"

There's lots of ways to rationalize both as a DM, saying one is wrong or the other is just folly.

I don't think it is a matter of rationalizing both.

I think the DM should often run monsters to attack the biggest threat at the moment.

The Fighter is closest at first, he is the biggest threat. The Fighter marks the foe, he again is the biggest threat. The monster attacks the Fighter. The Rogue comes up and does Sneak Attack and is successful, he is now the biggest threat. The monster switches to the Rogue and attacks him. The Fighter gets a free attack. If he hits, he is the new biggest threat. If he misses, he is not really the biggest threat again and the Rogue still is. Etc.

In other words, monsters should both pay attention to marks and ignore marks depending on the outcome of the encounter.

The monster has the Fighter bloodied and is starting to win and the Cleric heals the Fighter? The Cleric is now the biggest threat. The monster needs to kill the Cleric so that he can yet again, go kill the Fighter.

And, this is a bit nebulous and each DM might rule differently.

The point is to allow each player's PC to shine. The Fighter shined early on by marking foes and keeping them there. The Rogue shined by doing a lot of damage. The Fighter shined again by getting the free attack and the monster responded by turning its attention back to the Fighter again. The Cleric shined by healing the Fighting and then the Fighter shined again as the monster ignored him for the Cleric.

Defenders don't only shine by keeping foes attacking them. They also shine by getting free attacks or doing damage or whatever to monsters that ignore their marks.

Both should occur in the game since both abilities are in the game system.

It's the extreme POV that shouldn't occur. The monsters should never "always ignore the mark" or never "never ignore the mark". They should be played somewhere in between and "sometimes ignore the mark". But, it should be based on what is happening around the monster and not just based on the DM's knowledge of the AC of other PCs. There should be incentives in both directions for the monster to make its decisions, but usually that incentive should be based on what appears to the monster to be the biggest threat. Now, that doesn't mean that the monster cannot decide to take care of the nuisance threat first if it thinks that this is better overall (one foe is often better to fight than two), it just means that the monsters thinking should not be to either attack the squishies every time, nor to pay attention to the mark every time.

A balance should be maintained by the DM.

 

[Turtlejay]

DM's should try to avoid DMing like they are running an MMO. Just because something is grabbing aggro from a target doesn't mean the enemy has to engage it. There is much more than the immediate actions each party is taking.

At it's most basic level, the DM needs to make sure that the mark is not ruining anyone's fun, including his. If he is frustrated that to his eyes, the only good option is to attack the fighter, he is not having fun. It is time for him to mix things up and throw some enemies that shrug off marks or ignore them entirely.

If the fighter is not having fun because the DM runs roughshod over his marks and perhaps uses underhanded tactics to evade them (dazed fighters cannot OA or take Immediate actions, and are next to useless) the DM needs to include the mark more in his encounter planning.

On the player side, it is not just the defender's job to keep the party safe. If you are a ranged character, then stay at range. If the party can limit the options for a monster to take, then the defender looks like a tastier target. If you are a melee striker, then work with the defender to create opportunities for his mark to be meaningful. For example, my paladin ally would mark an enemy adjacent to me, a fighter, and put him in a predicament. He gets swung at no matter who he goes for. Defenders are great at setting up dilemmas like this.

And sfedi, I don't think you understand how sticky fighters are. You cannot just shift away from a fighter. Shifting, moving, attacking, these things trigger the fighter's extra attacks. This is why he is sticky.

Jay

 

[HP Dreadnought]

We have a fighter and a paladin in our party - and stuff rarely gets by us. Come and Get it is critical. . . as is good tactical positioning. I view our role as stopping the big stuff. The smaller things that die easily can be handled by the back rank, but is the real tough bruisers that we are there to keep tied up. For my fighter especially there are enough burst or two-attack powers available to keep the attention of several things at once.

If the party defenders aren't doing their jobs, the party is in for a world of hurt unless the DM doesn't know what he is doing. Sometimes protecting the "squishies" doesn't mean staying in a fight until the opponents are dead. You sometimes have to move to engage new enemies that are trying to manuever. Don't let them "lock you down" if you need to be fighting somebody else. Just suck it up, take the AoOs and do your job - the party leader should be doing his job and keeping you from going down, so let him do his, while you concentrate on yours.

In 4th edition the classes are designed with roles in mind. If you don't do your job, the party suffers, and if the job your class is designed for is not one you like. . . you REALLY need to be playing some other class with a role you do like.

Example of defending in action:
The party was getting hosed in a fight we really shouldn't have gotten into without resting. After the third round of getting torn up and seeing where things were headed, I called for a general retreat. At that point - everyone started moving their characters towards the exit. My job wasn't killing enemies - so much as it was manuevering and picking my targets to allow the rest of the party to escape without getting nailed on the way out. As the party's primary defender, it was my job to be last out the door and soak up as much attention as I could.

The party managed to get away. . . but for a few rounds though it looked like I was going to get killed in the process of getting everybody else out. The defender has to be willing to do that sort of thing. If you are not willing to do that, you shouldn't be playing a defender at all.

 

[eamon]

Post-divine power, I've got to say that low level paladins are really nasty. The mark is easily superior to that of the fighter; partly just because (at low levels) the damage isn't insignificant; it's quite comparable to a weak hit - but, unlike the fighter, it's guaranteed to work, and it'll even work at range (so no weird movement power will get you out of that one).

Also, post DP, the paladin has divine sanction, including fairly large bursts, which are simply awesome - this is a mark that causes mass damage should they ignore it, and there's just not that much they can do about it.

Also, post DP, str-paladins finally get a decent mark, but better yet, cha-paladins get a melee basic at-will (no need for melee training), so their at-wills can actually matter.

Finally, a paladin in one of my games has two lay-on-hands buffing feats; this means that he can heal surge-value +10 hitpoints several times a day, which makes him a real boon to party-solidity: when the fighting gets tough, this guy heals more than the leader since lay-on-hands isn't limited to only twice per encounter, and since +10 to healing is about as good as a heal-optimized cleric gets at low levels.

So, at low levels, where the fighter's CC is unlikely to do much more damage than the paladin's DC, there's no doubt that the paladin has a far more effective mark. We've had several fighters, and the only one to really compare was the battlerager with a bloodclaw weapon, who was a target mostly because of the terrible danger he poses and low AC.

The (shielding) swordmage has seen only a few sessions of play; he was exceptionally effective - vs. one target. But, he doesn't have a viable OA (without a feat, which is a very limited resource at low levels), and if there are several opponents, well, he's not doing much but just keeping one busy.

The warden's player isn't the most tactical of sorts, so I can't really say how effective a warden might be.

In our games then, at low levels, the ranking of defenders would have to be:

1. Paladin (by a large margin)
2/3. Fighter (when played as a striker - shield push looks neat but somehow seems circumventable in many cases)
2/3. Swordmage (brilliant in smaller parties vs. smaller number of foes, not so good otherwise)
4. Warden (but this might not be a fair assessment due to player-issues).

Oh, and a very lame defender replacement/enhancement turns out to be the shaman: at low levels it's really rare to see the spirit destroyed, and even if it is, it barely hurts the shaman; so his spirit companion can block entire passageways for a while or strategically force the enemies past the defender. I shudder to think of a party with several; this could really become unplayable.

 

[ValhallaGH]

I'm not sure what the deal with all of the incredulity. The fighter's combat challenge can hose the bad guys up, but all it takes is a 4-square wide passage to bypass oppies. Divine challenge is just a weak deterrent (5 points of damage can't be ignored?).

When I've Divine Challenged 18 different creatures to death because they chose to ignore it (over 5 levels), I'm cool with Divine Challenge.
Best of all, you can maintain it with any attack, including throwing a knife at the bad guy. Which I have used to great effect.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Mmm, not always.
If the enemy can shift and then charge another (squishier) party member, then it's usually better to do that.

Really? When the Fighter gets to smack you for shifting? Wild.

 

[Oompa]

My current group contains of a fighter, cleric, bard and a ranger..

The fighter takes up the front, sword and board type.. the cleric sticks to him and backs him up.. the ranger is the back up of those two and go's to the bard's side if needed.. the bard is ranged so he oversee's it all and manages the fight.. he yells stuff and heals first..

A good team work and the fighter takes the lead.. defending to his best..