Fighter: Still the King of melee?

[Barzhac]

I have not yet experimented with the rogue, cleric and warlord. I am surprised to hear the rogue may be as good as you say, since on paper he looks flimsy (and most of his powers are with a lightblade, not quite a match with a greataxe you know)

I've played a rogue for one fairly long session. I spent a feat to get rapier, precisely because of the small damage die of the rogue weapons. We leveled. I retrained and got rid of it.

The +1 to hit with dagger, frankly, made more of a difference. I built my rogue with a high dex and a high Cha, and used sly flourish and peircing strike. When hitting was hard, I used piercing strike and did 3 points less damage, but hit more often. When hitting was easy, or big damage was required, I broke out sly flourish and did 1d4 +7. Toss in backstabber and a little flanking, and the extra damage from the rapier was really redundant.

Plus, the dagger, and these powers, can be used at range.

 

[RefinedBean]

I think someone already mentioned it, but the melee ranger NEEDS to be running around, ducking and weaving, all that fun stuff. Just standing there toe to toe, yeah, bad stuff will happen.

I tried to do this with my first Ranger, and I got hosed. Never again...

(really, just have to learn that every other round, there's nothing wrong with taking two moves to re-position yourself effectively)

 

[erik_the_guy]

I play a rogue in my group, a striker very similar to a ranger. I can kick some major ass when there is a fighter in the group. At the end of the combat I have usually dealt the most damage (unless the wizard nuked a group) and I almost always have dealt the most damage to a single target. It's great to have a fighter distracting the enemies.
On my own I'm as useful as 0.5 PCs, and with a fighter in the group I'm as useful as 1.5 PCs.
So yeah, the classes work great, but 1 on 1 the fighter would destroy me.

 

[Victoly]

He never said PvP.

...purely optimized fighter vs optimized ranger meleeduel would result in the fighter being victorious.

Sorry if I misinterpreted, but "fighter vs ranger meleeduel" sure sounds like PvP to me. I realize that his main example was of each versus a single foe, but I inferred that he meant to compare their PvP ability as well.

Regardless, I think it's an inappropriate way to try to gauge class balance. As I stated earlier: The game is designed around a group of player characters working together to defeat their foes. (Is that not a "valid" point?) If you were able to show some math pertaining to the classes - like how the Fighter's +1 to hit over the ranger equals disproportionately more damage in the long-run, that might be worth seeing. But disregarding the intended mechanics (i.e. group combat; teamwork) for a statistically small number of test runs doesn't really seem like a good test to me.

Furthermore, the discussion of the Fighter's "reliable" daily seemed to totally disregard the fact that the melee ranger's daily does half damage on a miss - which, all things considered equal, is at least as good as the "reliable" trait, if not better - and this led me to believe that you weren't looking at the Ranger's abilities as closely as you perhaps should have. Either that or you came up against some really flukey rolls that skewed your results.

Either way, my main contention is that the premise here isn't valid - the fighter and ranger do totally different things in the group and don't need to be compared in this way. The suggestion that the fighter's self-healing exploits somehow give him an edge over the ranger baffles me, since that seems to neglect the very significant difference between the defender and striker roles.

Sorry if I offended - that wasn't my intention - but the original post seemed like it was ignoring a lot of the fundamental elements of 4E design and was making a strange comparison because of it.

And again, for the record - I said I made "several" good points, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize that some of what I wrote was also tongue-in-cheek.

 

[Cactot]

For each class it heavily depends on race/build and on what level they are encountering each other. Another rule of thumb is that in 1v1 combat, self healing is AMAZING. The dynamics change a ton once you have someone else that can heal while you are doing your damage.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

A melee ranger is still supposed to be an agile fighter, but that doesn't mean much 1v1. If you don't have a defender to stand in front of the monsters, your hit and runs abilties become strongly devalued since your enemy will usually be able to move in contact with you every round even if you disengage.

I don't expect a lone rogue would do much better. He can manage to generate a handful of sneak attack on his own, but just not enough and his AC is too low.

It's normal that 1v1, the fighter will usually do better than other classes against most monsters (Obviously, agile ranged attackers are a particular problem).

The reason is that if you are fighting alone, sooner or later you have a monster in your face, focusing all his attacks on you. Only the fighter/paladin were designed to take that.

Defenders are like the offensive line in football. With a top notch offensive line but a crappy quarterback, you'll lumber on throughout the season, losing most of the time and saving a few game here and there. But with a superstar quarter back and a crappy offensive line you'll get crushed every time and your poor star quarterback is likely to be out on the wounded list before the end of the second game.

It's not so much that the offensive line is more important than the quarterback or receivers, it's just that tactics starts with them doing their job. Without them, you got no game.

4e is like that. Without a tough as nail fighter or paladin in the face of the monsters, the other classes don't get to show the full extent of their skills. They get sacked.

 

[Surgoshan]

Yeah, one on one isn't the way to go.

10 rangers vs 10 fighters. Now that's combat!

 

[hamishspence]

Lemmings terms

Rangers and Rogue are Bashers, Fighters and Paladins are Blockers