Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5531950" data-attributes="member: 996">Archer's Challenge is most useful against ranged attackers.  Melee attackers have no particular encintve or dis-encintive to attack this sort of fighter, his purpose is to draw/suppress fire from ranged enemy, and reduce enemy movement options a bit ('stickiness' isn't an option, really, but making enemies think twice about breaking cover or charging allies is comparable).I was actually going for something of an action-movie gun battle feel.  Well, older action movies, where characters took cover more than modern ones where they leap through the air firing two guns in slo-mo.  <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=";)" />Thing is, a wizard or shaman remains ranged because defenders and other melee types are blocking for them.  A ranged defender who could /also/ keep enemies from closing, would be far too powerful, and subsume some of the Controller role.  OTOH, a ranged defender combined with a melee front line including a melee defender, or a strong movement-restricting/barrier creating ranged controller, could work very well.Ultimately, just as a conventional melee fighter suffers a major loss of effectiveness when the combat is all ranged, this take on a ranged defender is going to be compromised when there are no ranged/area attackers among the enemy.  You only get to punish marked targets.  You mark by attacking.  Unless the build's powers include a lot of multi-attacks or Area attacks, it's unlikely to have many (or even more than one) enemies it can punish with it's OA at any given moment.  It's an immediate action, so it comes up, at most, 1/round.  The idea is to encourage enemies to take cover and be less mobile, but it's mainly a /threat/ once one guy makes a move and the archer takes the shot, it's over until his next turn ends.  It's only ever been a vague idea, and marks aren't generally broadly effective or broadly applies.  The kind of ward I'm thinking of would actualy be very broad, since it protects every ally, and punishes ever attacker in the area.  Making it almost controller-like rather than defender-like.  One key thought I didn't mention was that the Ward would have a pool of temp hps, and enemies could, perhaps 'target the ward,' instead of those 'protected' by it.  :shrug:  It's and idea that's never quite jelled.</blockquote>

Verification