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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5733415" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK. But I don't quite get why a Ranger built with Dungeoneering as a trained skill (rather than Nature) doesn't adequately realise your desire to play an archetypal archer warrior. You wear light armour (leather or hide), you're really good with a bow, you can fight with your sword or knife in a pinch (using the DEX melee powers for Rangers from Martial Power 2), and you have both attack and utility powers that let you move around the place to avoid/escape melee assailants.I mean, what else would an archer warrior whose light on his feet look like?Your Warlord sounds like either a Warlord with the right suite of class features (init bonus for allies, to hit bonus for allies based on INT, etc), powers (those that let allies move around the battlefield cleverly and effectively) and who treats Inspiring Word as helping allies who have got themselves into tactical dire straits out of those dire straits (I think this is one permissible reading of martial healing).Alternatively, you could build a straight fighter or paladin with the appropriate warlord multiclass feat, but that build won't give as many tactical bonuses (although there are also fighter utilities and also skill powers that can help with this).Generalising - as with Thunderfoot upthread, I don't see many of these PC types as that hard to build in 4e. The key (as I'm sure others have mentioned upthread) is to start with concept, and then have someone who knows the long lists of mechanical options for character building help you find the right bundle of options to realise your concept. Sometimes this will be easy (the archer is just a ranger). Sometimes it will require a bit of thought (your warlord option is pretty easy, but takes a bit more thought than the ranger). Sometimes it requires a higher degree of system mastery (eg any concept that requires hybriding to realise it).OK. I think it's obvious that, in some cases at least, 4e classes are subsets of archetypes. In other cases, they're supersets.For example, I see the paladin as encompassing both Lancelot (STR) and Galahad (CHA). The fighter is both the duelist (Tempest, DEX) and the wild axeman (Great Weapon, CON). But warrior includes the paladin, the fighter, the ranger, the warlord and (at least some iterations of) the rogue.And then some classes - wizard, druid, invoker, shaman, warlock, sorcerer - don't really correspond to standard tropes at all, I think. The differences between them really only make sense in the context of the particular story elements that the game incorporates into their descriptions of classes.I don't have any strong preference as to how PCs should be built. But in a game like 4e, where PC building depends upon looking through long lists of options and putting them together in more-or-less subtle ways, I'm not going to fuss too much about the precise labels given to elements of the lists, provided that in the end my PC does what I want it to. (Practical example - when I rebuilt my 2nd ed Skills and Powers cleric for 4e, I eventually settled on a paladin as the best way to realise him. What's in the change of class name? For me, nothing. It's all about the powers and class features.)What I do care about are keywords of powers and abilities, because these are one of the key anchors, in 4e, between mechanics and fiction. So I do have some sympathy for scepticism about the suggestion to build a paladin as a hybrid barbarian - I can't just ignore the "primal" keyword on those powers. Unlike the label "barbarian", which is just the label for a suite of mechanical options (although intended to tell you something about the likely sort of build you'll get out of those options), "primal" is a part of the power description that means something. It gives the power a "home" in the gameworld.</blockquote>

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