D&D 4E So, which class will end up being the -Zilla of 4e?

[hong]

I think it will take about 18 months to find out what class is the most dominant. However, you must also keep in mind that the style of play will matter a great deal.

- Encounter frequency: Lots of fights favor classes with better healing / Hp, and the most per encounter powers. Low fight frequency skews towards peak damage output, which may skew towards the per day powers of spell casters.

It's the pressure v spike debate again!

- Opponent Types: If the DM skews towards running fights with lots of opponents, battlefield control will be king. If it skews to fights against Elites / Solo types, that will play well towards Strikers.

I suspect strikers will tend to be favoured more than controllers. There's only so many monsters a DM can control at once, and because it's a human controlling them, they'll often be smart enough to avoid area effects. You can also see this in PvP v PvE gameplay in something like Guild Wars. AoE stuff is great for PvE, where you can have large mobs who are relatively stupid, but not so much in PvP, because the fights are smaller and the opponents smarter. (Apropos of nothing, there's a lot of angst in GW about assassins being too good in PvP, but that's hard to avoid because their schtick is all about single-target spiking.)

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

I also agree that more than one specific -zilla class, we will have MonsterParties(c), meaning adventuring parties with synergizing abilities.

I, for my part, can´t wait to see the Defender hurling a Striker towards the enemy, fastball special style... or maybe Leaders pushing enemies towards the Defender´s AoO zone.

I wouldn´t mind seeing things like that every once in a while... It will be a lot more fun for me as DM to plan against the full party than planning against the wizard or the cleric only.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

I, for my part, can´t wait to see the Defender hurling a Striker towards the enemy, fastball special style...

I had a couple of players want to do this... until they realized that throwing the 10-Con halfling rogue into melee was not a bright idea. Never got the chance to have a hill giant try to hit the fastball, though that would have been funny.

 

[HP Dreadnought]

The new summoner class. . . "Flumph-master" FTW!

 

[WyzardWhately]

Now here's the real kick in the pants: If CharOp goes into team-building, then guess what? GMs get to do the same thing. We're going to be throwing multiple monsters at the party at once, along with trap/terrain effects. I think there's going to be an "encounter optimization" arms race against the "character build" fiends over at the WotC forums, where GMs get together and try to come up with the most inescapable character meatgrinder possible while staying under the XP limit for a normal encounter.

I mean, it's always going to be cheating to throw a half-dozen illithids at a first level party...but it's a bit harder to complain if Team Rocket* honestly uses better tactics than you do.


I often use Team Rocket as a placeholder term for whoever the bad guys are in a given scenario. I don't know why I do this, but I suspect it's because I like making people grind their teeth.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

There probably won't be a Zilla like the 3e CoDZILLA. Maybe wrong, since none of us have seen the edition yet. But at least the impression I get is that the unification of "powers" will create classes that are only different from each other as a matter of window dressing. While names and flavor will be changed the mechanics will be so similar in the name of balance it will render them less distinctive.

 

[boolean]

I mean, it's always going to be cheating to throw a half-dozen illithids at a first level party...but it's a bit harder to complain if Team Rocket* honestly uses better tactics than you do.

If they're using decent tactics, they definately aren't Team Rocket.

 

[Darth Cyric]

I've heard some mention that certain party synergies might be the new "zilla," but I'd probably be able to live with that a lot easier than I can live with 3.5's CoDzillas and their Wizard lieutenants running the show themselves.

At least in the case of party synergies, it takes more than one character and rewards teamwork.

 

[Simm]

If they're using decent tactics, they definately aren't Team Rocket.

He never said decent, he said better, and from what I've seen it isn't hard to have better tactics than some parties.

If I had to put money on a zilla out of the box I would say warlord or two warrlords using some combination of haste and a WRT clone.

 

[Ahglock]

I mean, it's always going to be cheating to throw a half-dozen illithids at a first level party...but it's a bit harder to complain if Team Rocket* honestly uses better tactics than you do.


I often use Team Rocket as a placeholder term for whoever the bad guys are in a given scenario. I don't know why I do this, but I suspect it's because I like making people grind their teeth.

Dude I like Team Rocket, so much cooler than team galactic.