Re: Fighter A Go-Go

[cavalier973]

Re: Fighter A Go-Go

I was perusing the boards over at WoTC, and there was an article describing how difficult the designers of the new version found designing the fighter to be.

The big question (which they put into a poll) boiled down to: should a fighter be specialized or versatile? The goal was to allow the fighter class to maintain its status as the "entry level" class for people who haven't played much or at all.

The author described his fondness for the 3rd edition fighter, which could "fire off a few shots" with his bow before drawing a melee weapon and charging. He contrasted that with the 4e fighter which was very much melee focused. There is also the idea that the fighter could emphasize certain fighting styles (ranged weapons, dual wield, martial artist) without having to take on the extra elements that classes identified with those styles have (ranger, monk).

In my opinion, the designers of the "Essentials" line already have a structure in place to do this: Stances. That is, a fighter makes only ranged and melee basic attacks, but he can gain bonuses depending on what stance he uses.

Take, for example, the fighter who fires a couple of shots off with his bow as the orcs charge in. Well, he could be using his "archer stance", which gives a +1 bonus to ranged attacks, and provokes no opportunity attacks. If the fighter wants to dual wield, then he switches his stance to one which gives him an advantage when he has a sword in each hand (maybe roll the damage die twice, and take the higher result).

Of course, the rules should probably increase the number of stances a fighter gets, but there's hardly anything wrong in giving players more options.

In my opinion....

 

[mkill]

4E solved the Fighter issues other editions had. I have no idea why they are now regressing the class to a previous state, with all its well-known issues. Makes no sense to me.

The only criticisms I've heard is first, that people don't like that there is no in-game explanation for encounter / daily powers. Just come up with a fatigue system or similar.


The other typical criticism is the lack of basic maneuvers like disarm. But thats an issue of the combat system, not the fighter class itself, and needs to be fixed there.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

The author described his fondness for the 3rd edition fighter, which could "fire off a few shots" with his bow before drawing a melee weapon and charging. He contrasted that with the 4e fighter which was very much melee focused. There is also the idea that the fighter could emphasize certain fighting styles (ranged weapons, dual wield, martial artist) without having to take on the extra elements that classes identified with those styles have (ranger, monk).

The writer of that article is looking back through rose-tinted lenses. Unless that 3e fighter has a high Str and high Dex and a sufficiently masterwork bow, he's wasting his time just as much as the 4e fighter with a bow is.

And emphasizing different fighting styles? Please. A 3e fighter is free to blow all his feats on dual-wielding, archery or kung-fuing, but he's only gimping himself. Swinging a big honkin' sword is objectively better than all of those things, excepting certain circumstances. (Being a rogue, grappling an enemy caster, being stuck out of melee range.)

The 4e fighter has a dual-wielding build, a grappling build, and like six others. There's no archery build, but being any one of the fighter's 'Dex secondary' builds gives you decent RBAs. Which is more than the 3e fighter can say. Some builds may not be as awesome as others, but at least you don't have to blow your feats on n00b traps in a vain effort to make up for picking an inherenty gimped fighting style.

Anyway, I hope 5e makes the mistake of going backwards on this. Because it'll make my decision that much easier.

 

[S'mon]

4e Fighter can throw javelins and be better at ranged attacks than 90% of 3e Fighters.

I'd say the 4e PHB Fighter basically got it right, though the Essentials Aura beats PHB Marking. The Opportunity Action vs Immediate Interrupt thing is painful, but the Powers are not hard to choose, and IME are better/more fun than the E-stances.

 

[mneme]

I wouldn't sell the 3e fighter -that- short -- I mean, there were archer builds, grapple monsters, reach and trip monkies (and sometimes both), charging builds, exotic weapon builds, and a few other things besides.

Also, the "every stat is crucial" approach combined with slower scaling monsters meant fighters would have a more usable Dex, and iterative attacks meant they kept a lot of their potency with bows.

That said, 4e had the Slayer, who could do everything the 3e fighter could, easier plus fighters could control an area without being a big cheese monster (Spiked Chain Trip Fighter, I'm looking at you).

 

[Jhaelen]

I wouldn't sell the 3e fighter -that- short -- I mean, there were archer builds, grapple monsters, reach and trip monkies (and sometimes both), charging builds, exotic weapon builds, and a few other things besides.

Sure, but those were dedicated builds - most of them one trick ponies.

I've never seen a 3e fighter do what the article's author describes, i.e. using a bow in the beginning of a fight and later switch to a melee weapon.

I prefer the 4e fighter a lot over its 3e incarnation, but I liked something else even better:
I had one player in my 3e group who never played anything but a fighter. And when we started playing 4e his first character was ... a wizard!
And he played that wizard competently and had tremendous fun in doing so.

Imho, that like nothing else showcased that the 4e designers must have done something right. And now they're going to reverse all of 4e's achievements in 5e? I hope they know what they're doing and won't be surprised if not everyone shares their enthusiasm for the 'good old days'.

 

[mneme]

I did, actually. Pretty much all the fighter types would pull out bows to shoot with when combat were at long distances. Remember, 3e combats sometimes took place over far larger distances than 4e combats (mages would get a chance to use those 160 square, er, 800 foot, fireballs, ; I remember once taking out a White Dragon before it even got into bowshot). So whether they could hit the broad site of a barn or not, fighter types would usually have bows as backup weapons so they could do -something- until things got down to brass tacks (and remember, that +11 attack bonus at 11th level meant they were throwing three arrows into the air every round, for at least two chances to crit. GMW from the wizard could make sure their bow had at least a +3 attack bonus, too).

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Sure, melee types occasionally pull out the bows when there's no other choice. This happens in any edition.

But I've never seen a melee type plink away at a foe when he could be running or charging at it. Why deal 1d6 damage at an effective -3 attack penalty, when you could be dealing a lot more damage at no penalty?

 

[Jhaelen]

I did, actually. Pretty much all the fighter types would pull out bows to shoot with when combat were at long distances. Remember, 3e combats sometimes took place over far larger distances than 4e combats (mages would get a chance to use those 160 square, er, 800 foot, fireballs, ;

Oh, I do remember! Actually, my campaign featured a large number of wilderness encounters and some of them were decided before any enemy got into melee range.

However, I don't think any of the fighters ever bothered to waste a bunch of arrows because the spellcaster artillery (meta-magically enhanced fireballs certainly being among them) was more than sufficient to deal with the (actually non-existent) threat.

Even dedicated archers (i.e. the party's ranger) couldn't compete with long-range spells, anyway.

So in a way, that's another thing where 4e fighters can shine compared to their 3e incarnation: They're not completely overshadowed by the spellcasters!

 

[cavalier973]

OK, I was scanning through my "Heroes of the Fallen Lands" book, and have decided that the Slayer is pretty much what the author of the original article was describing.

The stances "Battle Wrath" and "Poised Assault" apply regardless whether the slayer is making a melee basic attack or a ranged basic attack. So the slayer can start out with a bow (his build gives a bonus to damage equal to his DEX regardless whether the attack is melee or ranged, as long as it is a "weapon attack"), and fire a few shots; drop the bow as a free action when the enemy is in range and pull out his big honkin' sword with a minor action. When he reaches level 4, the slayer can stow the bow as a free action rather than dropping it, and pull out the BHS.

In fact, the slayer can be built as a pretty effective ranged fighter:

Slayer1 Human, Female, Level 1 (Using the "Red Box Array")
STR 12
CON 14
DEX 18
INT 10
WIS 11
CHA 13

FEATS
Bow Expertise
Weapon Focus: Bow

Using a Longbow

So, the fighter will have a +8 to hit, for 1d10+9 damage (+4 for DEX, another +4 for DEX as slayer, +1 for Bow Focus) If the target is alone, then it is 1d10+10 dmg.

When the slayer uses her "Poised Assault", the attack modifier goes up to +9 at level 1. With "Battle Wrath", the damage goes to 1d10+11 (+12 for enemies who are alone).

Or, for a more mobile archer, the slayer could take the "Mobile Blade" stance, in which case she can move up to 4 squares as a free action anytime she hits an enemy.

One disadvantage of an "archer build" is that the "Weapon Specialization" and "Greater Weapon Specialization" only apply to the greatsword or the greataxe, so the "Slayer-Archer" would not benefit from those features of her class.