Granted basic attacks, rolled by the granter rather than the grantee

[Aristotle]

So my group has a warlord. The group clearly needs a leader, and with a rogue and a paladin in the party the warlord seems like a solid choice. The group is still learning to stay close enough to benefit from his abilities, but he has still been frustrated with how much of a support character he is and how ineffective he is if he is split from the group by more than a couple of squares.

Upon reaching 2nd level the warlord retrained one of his at-wills to the one that lets him grant an ally a melee basic attack (sorry I don't remember the name and don't have my books with me). I've been letting him roll the extra healing dice when he uses his heal, so I decided to let him roll to hit and damage with this power even though it was the other character's attack. It's pretty easily his best standard action right now, and it keeps him active and rolling dice. The rogue hasn't minded so far, and I made sure he understood that his character has the right to choose to not make the attack, not apply sneak attack damage, etc..

I'm hopeful that Martial Power will have options that make the Warlord more robust, and the character can easily multiclass into Fighter (or any other Strength or Charisma based class) in a couple of levels to pick up some added damage capability; but (short of paragon multi-classing) what he really lacks is a beefy at-will that isn't so situational.

 

[cmbarona]

It honestly sounds like your friend just doesn't want to play a Warlord. I play an Inspiring Warlord myself, and I fully understand that it is not my job to acheive victory in combat, but to enable it. That's just what Warlords do. They are D&D 4E's quintessential team player, even more so than the Cleric, who has some controllerish powers. If he wants higher damage output, he should play a striker (and if he wants some healing, multiclass to Cleric or Warlord). But deciding to be a leader of any sort means that your allies are your top priority. If you want him to roll more dice, then I'm not going to stop you, but it sounds like the problem at hand runs a little deeper than that.

EDIT: I don't know if this will at all help, but if the problem is in the swinginess of using At-Wills frequently, I should mention that this becomes less and less of a problem the more he will level up. With a nice handfull of Encounter powers, he will be using Commander's Strike noticeably less.

 

[Aristotle]

I agree on all counts. I don't think he fully wanted to play a warlord, or didn't understand what they do, but the 4 players sort of decided to each pick a role. He is usually the striker type character, so he took the leader this time. I almost think he would have been better off with the cleric.

Letting him roll the attacks/damage from commander's strike seems to have alleviated some of the problem for now. He is pretty sure he wants to multiclass out, and I'm tempted to offer him a conversion to another class entirely at 4th level, with multiclassing into warlord to keep the general feel of the character.

I keep telling him that he'll get some cool abilities as he levels, but leveling is going slow at 2 sessions a month and about 3 encounters per session.