At a range of 5? That's never enough to prevent the opposition to reach you. He's being hit every turn.
Never say never. There are abilities that apply conditions such as slow, stun and daze, and a more than a few ways to impede the movement of the enemy.
Oh come on. You just basically admitted that your DM needlessly spread the attacks around. Focused fire is such a basic technique. PCs use it all the time and half the point of the defender is to allow the party to survive the same when turned against them.
Sorry no, you are completely wrong about this point. In your case it wasn't focus fire, it was incompetence on behalf of the enemy. You would have had the enemy ignore an extremely soft target, the wizard, at all times, in favor of mindlessly going after one target. Even if enemy is right next to the wizard already, even if the cleric is on the other side of a room filled with deathtraps. There is no justification for that, it is a bad tactic, and it only would have made the encounter exploitable.
The cleric wouldn't survive two round of focused fire alone on the front if the DM decided to go for it.
And the DM could just as easily say "Rocks fall, cleric dies." Even a defender can't survive two rounds of focus fire if the DM decided to kill them. Unless you are referring to the HP difference between a cleric and a fighter, which is exactly 32 hit points at level 30. Hardly an insurmountable difference when the cleric has access to more, and better, healing powers than the fighter does. But either way this point is irrelevant, as we are not trying to make a Cleric into a defender, there is already a paragon path to do that if we chose to do so.
I meant who is doing the bottling. I would think that the sentence ''If a laser cleric can hold a bottle neck...'' would have made it clear enough. A proper bottle neck has somebody tough preventing enemies from moving through the narrow point.
You don't need somebody tough, you just need an obstruction.
In a real time game, you can hold a bottle neck without melee troops in the narrow point; the fact that the enemies slow down to get through is enough for ranged attackers to have a devastating effect. But in a turn based game, there can be no bottle neck without the doorman; if nothing forces the enemies to stop in the narrow point, the enemies will just complete their moves on the other side of the bottle neck one after the other with none of the jamming that occurs in real time game.
It is actually allot easier to bottleneck in a turn based game than you would imply, as everyone occupies a space. Also the rules prevent move-attack-move rounds for most characters, effectively limiting the amount of enemies that can contact anyone in melee when faced with a bottleneck.
Every PC you have on your team is soft and needs to shift back constantly in order to avoid AoO so they can basically only hold one round. That's no way to run a proper bottle neck.
This is what conditions are for, they make encounters much more survivable than if everything was a simple slobbernocker. Which is a key point to this debate, control can make up for a lack of a defender.
Beside, bottleneck is the reverse if what you were arguing. It's not about staying out of reach; someone has to jam the enemies and take hits.
It is effectively staying out of reach of all the enemies that cannot hit you due to something being in their way. And you were the one who brought up how this party couldn't possibly work in an enclosed environment, a different but related argument. Just because this party favors a specific strategy, it doesn't mean they cannot adapt to others.
All and all, I think you are too dominated by the "must have a defender" rut, as most people are. 4E is remarkably more flexible than that, and I wish people would realize this, because it can add a refreshing spin to games. However this is slightly off-topic and I believe it may have derailed the thread.
