Fighter striker variant: Gladiator

[brehobit]

Here's a quick-and-dirty variant for moving a fighter from a defender to a striker. I'd appreciate thoughts on balance and other ideas.

Remove:

• Combat Challenge
• Combat Superiority

Add:

• You gain a bonus to opportunity attacks equal to your Wisdom modifier.
• You gain a bonus to the damage rolls of martial powers and basic attacks equal to your Dexterity modifier. The bonus increases to your Dexterity modifier + 2 at 11th level and your Dexterity modifier + 4 at 21st level.

Entirely loses the "sticky" part (well the AoO bonus helps a bit) but provides a reasonable striker's bonus.

 

[brehobit]

Updated version:

Remove:

• Combat Challenge
• Combat Superiority
• Scale Proficiency

Add:

• You gain a bonus to the damage rolls of martial powers and basic attacks equal to your Dexterity modifier. The bonus increases to your Dexterity modifier + 2 at 11th level and your Dexterity modifier + 4 at 21st level.

In addition pick one of the following two benefits:
Arena Warrior You understand the ebb and flow of combat like few others. You can move with this flow in unexpected ways, but woe to those who try to do the same to you. You gain a bonus equal to your Wisdom modifier to all defenses against opportunity attacks. In addition, you gain a bonus to opportunity attacks equal to your Wisdom modifier.

Arena Showman Through your mastery of combat you can inspire your friends, intimidate your foes and amaze onlookers. When you bloody a foe, all allies within 5 squares of you gain an damage bonus equal to your Charisma modifier until the start of your next turn when rolling damage against that foe. In addition, once per encounter, when you drop an opponent to zero or fewer hit points, you may immediately make an intimidate check as a minor action.

 

[circadianwolf]

Fighters already make great strikers (much of their stickiness is in the threat of their high damage), but if you're going to do this, you really really need to knock down the HP/surges as well. Arena Warrior is also very powerful (and keeps some of the fighters' stickiness by threat), and Arena Showman uses an off-stat. (Presumably this fighter variant's primaries are STR and DEX, which leaves CHA as the distant third.)

Also a damage bonus without a 1/round limit is open to intense multiattack abuse.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Fighters are already at the top of the pile in terms of who does damage. Anything that adds more damage to them (even if surges and hitpoints are adjusted downwards) will only be bad for the game.

 

[Garthanos]

Fighter in older versions of the game reallly just means Martial in the new version.

For Strikers
Brutal Scoundrel build rogue with Versatile Duelist (he was raised on the streets before entering the arenas or has escaped from the arenas and has to hide and steal for survival)

If your Gladiator uses a War Dog then Ranger Beast Master

For Defenders
Battlerager / Tempest / Spear and Board with the right weapons and cool feats make all the difference and has been noted ... the fighter starts shifting into striker in terms of damage anyway... and gladiators are not necessarily that mobile.

 

[brehobit]

Thanks for the feedback folks.

I am looking to create a gladiator for Dark Sun and I don't think the defender role fits that class. I'm also trying to be lazy and not create a whole class from scratch (I'm needing to do that for the elemental clerics already).

I don't think a rogue would work as a gladiator needs to be effective solo.

I think I'm going to go with it as written, given everything else I'm tweaking, it will be hard to know what broke things when they break...

Thanks!

 

[Siberys]

The Dark Sun setting book coming out will have what is essentially heroic-tier paragon paths. One of them is Gladiator. They did the work for you.

 

[Garthanos]

The Dark Sun setting book coming out will have what is essentially heroic-tier paragon paths.

Details?
I always felt like paragon paths were very very character defining and only having them suddenly kick in at paragon level was rather artificial...

 

[Siberys]

They're called 'Themes'.

These are the DDXP pregens;
D&D XP 2010: Dark Sun Characters : Critical Hits

Notice how they each have an extra Encounter power? They get that from their theme.

The Goliath (read: Half-Giant) and Mul even have the Gladiator theme;
http://critical-hits.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_0008.jpg
http://critical-hits.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_0010.jpg

Veiled Alliance, Gladiator, Templar, Wilder - and those are only the ones on the pre-gens!

 

[Stalker0]

For Arena showman, instead of giving your allies a bonus, I would give the fighter the bonus damage.

Giving your allies the bonus is more of a leader thing, and actually more powerful in general. Keeping it with the fighter makes it more strikerish and tones it down just a bit.