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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Leatherhead" data-source="post: 4641280" data-attributes="member: 53176">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. 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. 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. You don't need somebody tough, you just need an obstruction. 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. 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. 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.</blockquote>

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