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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5544401" data-attributes="member: 78116">Or any encounter with those things. It's actually not that easy to be very resistant to forced movement at around level 8. There is a particular reason I keep mentioning that the only Knights that I've ever seen that are worth anything are Dwarf, Defend the Line and World Serpents Grasp: EG heavily optimized. No fighter in my experience falls apart if it doesn't have one particular race, one particular power and one particular feat.This ignores that the PCs having just played the encounter, now know everything about it and have *better* information than they did starting off. In addition the Knight is a very "simple" class to play, it doesn't take a degree from Harvard University to figure out how it works. If you mean "Substantially different tactics" as "Figure out how to work around its completely crippling weaknesses" then I would agree. Except "Completely crippling weaknesses" should be put at character creation: Not on the table. That is in fact my point.Also, crushing your complaint entirely I can remove that fighter and put in a swordmage: No huge disaster. I can take away that fighter and put in a Warden: Once again, no huge disaster. I can take away that fighter and put in a battlemind. Once again, no huge disaster. Actually by using Loadstone Lure the Battlemind actually did the best and he had lightning rush so he was amazing in that encounter. I did not try a paladin, but given I am running the same campaign again in future we will have to see what the defender there is (I suspect it will be a weaponmaster). So I can do precisely what you say I can't and the party doesn't fall apart. Some defenders did plain better!In fact due to the fact I don't always know what my parties are for these things, I use my collection of characters (Some from real players that I have kept and some I made) to test these encounters. So we could try different combinations. At the time my PCs knew everything about the encounter as well, so trying other things is relatively normal and thus far, no other defender struggled anywhere near as much. Of all the defenders we tried only the knight did poorly - I might try that encounter with my friends again later with a paladin (though by this point they are pretty sick of it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). Compared with every other defender in the same situation, some of whom did better than the weaponmaster (in fairness, the Shielding Swordmage and Battlemind were overachievers in that situation. The Shielding Swordmages ranged mark and the Battleminds lightning rush were key to that). So I don't buy your argument here whatsoever.Edit: In fairness, I also think that comparing optimized characters here is missing the point. The Wizard in that game was a Goliath (Staff Implement) with Scorching Burst and Thunderwave. Despite being TERRIBLY optimized I could *not* kill him no matter what I tried (Staff of Defense, Shield, Wizards Escape... so defensive.... Got him eventually though!). Point is that the party was not heavily optimized itself except 1 or 2 characters (of which the original weaponmaster was not one of them). So knowing at the time that I would need a completely optimized Knight just to perform its role as a defender is not something I was aware of. Then again my player built the character and not me. If I had a PC who wanted to play a Knight now, I would immediately set them on being Dwarf (resistance to forced movement right from level 1!), Defend the Line (Slow enemies), World Serpents Grasp (knock slowed enemies prone on a hit, making the OAs bite in particular), Feyslaughter/Aurakiller weapons as treasure for the most part. Of course I know this *now* and when we first did that experiment above I actually did not know any of that. So if you're expecting me to be psychic in the examples I use, I'm afraid that is not possible and again, it merely proves my point.Edit2: I also enjoy the irony of the "simple" essentials martial defender requiring a great deal of system mastery to actually make it function well.</blockquote>

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