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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 5021159" data-attributes="member: 8158">OK, that outlook is so strikingly wrong that it's sufficient to take me off the warlock tangent, at least for a minute, so I can pontificate about one of my other pet paradigms. The notion that healing is the most important asset a leader has is a very newbish kind of misconception. Healing is something every leader should have in moderation, but no leader should have in excess. The creed that "if a little is good, a lot is even beter" does not apply here, because all healing does is put you back on the starting line. It doesn't move you an inch farther forward to the finish line, therefore you only need healing in proportion to the amount of damage received. And if your party is consistently taking extreme amounts of damage in battle, you have a problem that is not going to be fixed simply by tossing extreme amounts of healing at it. When my group started playing 4e, nobody touched the warlord. Everyone played clerics. And I constantly heard griping about how long combats took. 4e was blamed for the extreme grindyness. But the real problem was that our leaders thought that whenever a good healing power was available, that was the hands-down choice for them to take. Oh how wonderful it was that we could just keep taking punishment forever, bloodied and beaten one second and then back to full the next. All praise the cleric, master of healing. But the problem was, we couldn't crush our enemies through superior offense, so we whittled them away through the long slog of gradual attrition. It was rope-a-dope.Finally, I got a chance to play a leader and I embraced it. I rolled up a bard, not a warlord, but the principal was the same: first and foremost, give out offensive buffs--bonus attacks, attack roll bonuses/rerolls, and damage roll bonuses/rerolls--to make sure attacks hit and do lots of damage. The secondary priority is to give out defensive buffs like AC bonuses and temp HP that are, essentially, pre-emptive healing. For healing of the purely reactive variety, majestic word is all they get during the battle. They can burn surges with the benefit of my restful song after the fight's over. I don't think the gang could be more happy. Even the DM prefers this approach to leaders. Nobody likes a slog.When we get those threads abuot the grind of 4e combat, most folks start analyzing the party makeup and fingering the striker as the make-it-or-break it role. Personally, I think a good leader turns everyone into a bit of a striker.</blockquote>

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