Don't need Strikers

[Particle_Man]

Tried a game with no defenders. That didn't go well.

The mostly new party then went defender heavy and we had 2 paladins, 2 fighters, a warlord and a wizard (multiclass cleric). That did surprisingly well so far in the two combats we have had, despite having no strikers.

Haven't tried w/o controller or w/o leaders yet.

Have others? If so, how did it go?

 

[MerricB]

I've had a couple of 3-player games.

Defender (Paladin) + Leader (Warlord) + Controller (Wizard) went well.

Defender (Fighter) + Striker (Warlock) + Controller (Wizard) didn't go so well. The Defender was smashed into the ground by the monsters, which the group couldn't kill fast enough.

Not having a leader really limits how long the group can go. Getting the most out of healing surges is really important.

Cheers!

 

[Terwox]

Heck, the DMG talks about it a bit -- it suggests losing a defender or a leader is the worst. If you're losing a striker or a controller, the other characters can pick up the slack of the missing role a bit easier.

4 defenders is interesting though... must be a lot of marks to keep track of.

 

[jadrax]

Cirtainly the phenomena of the Striker being the least essential Role is somthing many MMORPG players will recognise.

On the other hand they pretty much always do somthing useful, no matter the size of the party and how many other Strikers you already have.

 

[Branduil]

If you had to rank them, I'd say
-Leader
-Defender
-Striker
-Controller
in order from most necessary to least. At the same time, every role contributes to the party in a way the other roles can't.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Strikers are probably the least necessary, but the only reason it isn't controllers is because minion rules exist. If there were a whole bunch of commonly encountered monsters that were obscenely hard for their CR but cried and ran away if you did x damage in a single attack, strikers would be considered much more valuable.

 

[Asmor]

I think that the controller is probably the most readily "losable" class. I'd rather have a striker than a controller in most cases.

 

[Is_907]

My experience has been that Fighters can be defenders who minor in Leader or minor in Striker and Paladins are Defender/Leaders who easily minor in Striker.

My Sunday night game was a nice party of Fighter, Warlord, Rogue, Wizard, until we had a TPK... now we have Wizard, Paladin, Fighter, Cleric, Warlock. The Warlock is the only striker and, to be honest, we could *easily* not have him.

In my other game we have several strikers but only one defender (the pally, me) and it is MUCH harder to keep the strikers up. Better to have more defenders who take longer to make the kill than too many strikers who *might* kill stuff quickly if they can keep out of sticky combat.

 

[ppaladin123]

Strikers are probably the easiest to do without BUT battles against solo-elites will turn into slog-fest wars of attrition without their damage-dealing capabilities. Some of those solos have some serious HP padding.