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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ferghis" data-source="post: 6035703" data-attributes="member: 40483">It may well be, even though I often question how carefully these kinds of purposes are studied. On one hand, swordmages have a renewable marking power baked in to the class, so it's not, strictly speaking, necessary to allow it extra marks. On the other hand, they compete with battleminds for first place on the "worst defender" list. Honestly, a lot depends on the real mobility of the character. The main "trick" of swordmages is to mark one enemy (or more), and then move to the other side of the battlefield to engage other enemies, forcing the marked enemies to chase the swordmage down (or hit the swordmage's allies with a pillow), and having the swordmage engage the unmarked enemies. This is how swordmages defender it up: by marking, and then assisting the party with focus fire by attacking the unmarked things.The problem is that to implement this trick, the swordmage must move to within 2 squares of the first set of enemies, use a minor to mark them, and then either move again (finishing the round without attacking) or charge, usually with a less-than-stellar basic attack. This is already of disputable effectiveness in theory, and it becomes difficult to implement in practice. OAs, everyone's placement on the battlefield, a shortage of immediate actions, poor initiative, and terrain can hamper this tactic, reducing a defender that is relatively ineffective (in the small spectrum of effectiveness of 4e; 4e classes are all pretty balanced) to a somewhat more ineffective one.My guess is that, if the DM violates marks with any frequency, the most consistent bottleneck will be the character's immediate actions. In that case, the more frequent impact of being marked will be the -2 penalty to hit, which is not a dramatic deal. In that case, being able to mark more enemies more frequently, by allowing permissive instead of mandatory marking in the rare cases that Swordmage's Decree cannot be placed to mark only one enemy and is still available (the daily power may well be spent to make full use of it), will probably be a very minor benefit, and may well be worth granting.</blockquote>

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