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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4210611" data-attributes="member: 2067">Not really. A defender keeps the enemy's attention on themselves. They aren't concerned about the enemy's actions beyond "if you're going to be hurting anyone, I want it to be me."Nothing about a defender worries about melee. Nothing about a defender requires you to block movement or inflict penalties. The only think about the defender that requires superior defenses is the fact that you're probably going to be smacked in the face a lot, and it'd be good to be able to take a few hits (or dodge a bunch of hits).I'd have loved that, really. Though less from a symmetry angle, and more from a "I'd like to have a party without a Wizard in it if I want and not suck" angle. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I think the reason we have the warlock -- and the reason we have 3 strikers -- is because strikers (and the warlock specifically) are very, very sexy. It is so much fun to make the enemy take buckets of damage. It is so much fun rolling dice, adding them up, and knowing that the bigger the number, the more YOU WIN. It's been the best part of the game since fireball. It's half the equasion of "kill things and take their stuff." Most of the time, it's totally worth sacrificing defensive ability, knowing that your friends will handle it, just to give you space to roll some more dice. The defender, the controller, the leader -- all exist simply to get your buckets of dice to fall at the enemy's feet with as big a total as possible. When you're mostly concerned about designing classes that are "cool," you're mostly going to design strikers, because strikers are the fun handed to you on a stick. It's a psychology thing, a power thing. This is even more true if the strikers are elfishly graceful and badass, or dark and powerful and mysterious. I anticipate warlocks and rogues and (to a lesser extent) rangers getting SO MUCH LOVE they will need to put on lotion to pull up their pants in the morning. Fighters, too, because they do dish out damage in 4e, apparently.I think that the 4e team was vastly more concerned with "cool classes" than they were with symmetry. And that's generally a good goal, but it leaves some gaps.We would come up with as many as we would desire, and we would, of course, have exactly the appropriate number for the occasion. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />You still get the problem of "uneven threat" in that case, though: where, in order to challenge the tactical, you need to hose the non-tactical. If your party uses group dynamics to yawn their way through every encounter, you need to ramp up the challenge, which, in official products, is going to wind up hosing parties that DON'T use group dymanics.I'm pretty sure the 4e team steered away from this as a prime source of "accidental suck" like it was in 3e (AC's so high that the fighter hit 50% of the time, but the non-optimised rogue could only hit 10% of the time). I like a lot of 4e. Sometimes I just think that those who really love 4e can be more than a little boneheaded in their eager embrace of it, and their even-more-eager dismissal of anything else. Remember my catchphrase for the month: "Some of 4e's worst enemies are really its biggest fans." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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