best defender?

[Nightgaun7]

I'm wondering what the best defender is. on the one hand which is the most powerful? On the other hand which one is the most fun to play?

[obryn]

I'd say Fighter for all three, easily.

Although Paragon+ Battleminds can be pretty amazing, too. Just less interesting.

-O

[Dan Arcueid]

I'm wondering what the best defender is. on the one hand which is the most powerful? On the other hand which one is the most fun to play?

Just about everything is a decent and viable defender it comes down to what you what you want out of it flavor-wise. It's hard to say what is most fun as that's all up to you. Fighter can be fun while swordmage can also be powerful and a humorous lockdown.

It also comes down to if you want to be defender of 1 or many things such as some mark 1 thing while stuff like berserker and cavilier have defender auras.

[NecroRebel]

Fighters are probably the strongest and most versatile up until epic levels, when monsters with teleport speeds become more common and thus the Combat Superiority feature ceases to be quite as amazing. Said feature, which causes the fighter's opportunity attacks to stop enemy movement, makes fighters the stickiest of all the defenders, allowing them to hinder enemies in ways no other defender can. They're also still very strong at epic levels, but they don't have anything that puts them above and beyond in the same sense.

Prior to level 7, Battleminds are lackluster defenders, but at that level they can take the Lightning Rush power, which is an amazing interrupt. They're quite boring after that point, however, as it's practically never useful to use their power points on anything aside from Lightning Rush, so they tend to do the same thing over and over.

Shielding Swordmages are the most effective ranged defenders. They can still effectively guard allies even if they themselves are halfway across the battlefield (something no other defender really manages - Paladins need to attack the mark to maintain it), and unlike most defenders they can actually negate damage rather than simply punishing it. Monsters with only single-target attacks with average damage less than the Swordmage's aegis reduction are practically harmless, whereas another defender would just result in killing it faster if it violated the mark. Such monsters are uncommon, however.



Personally, I'd probably go for Fighter up until mid-Epic tier for most powerful, at which point I'd become unsure. I like playing Swordmages, so I'd vote for them as most fun.

[Dan Arcueid]

Shielding Swordmages are the most effective ranged defenders. They can still effectively guard allies even if they themselves are halfway across the battlefield (something no other defender really manages - Paladins need to attack the mark to maintain it), and unlike most defenders they can actually negate damage rather than simply punishing it. Monsters with only single-target attacks with average damage less than the Swordmage's aegis reduction are practically harmless, whereas another defender would just result in killing it faster if it violated the mark. Such monsters are uncommon, however.


I'm not very knowledgeable about epic tier performance but if i remember correctly the set of feats are called Rose King or something similar. With these I've made some humorous swordmages with the mark+booming blade+these feats the following occurs.

Booming blade makes them take damage for moving, the aegis of assault will cause you to hit them if they attack anyone else but you. And with the right feats you can shift 1 away immediately and cause them to take damage if they attack you. Basically this can leave a target in a situation that will will result in it taking damage if it does anything but sit there. Find a way to get a melee basic power in there and you can actually be decent.

[obryn]

Shielding Swordmages are the most effective ranged defenders. They can still effectively guard allies even if they themselves are halfway across the battlefield (something no other defender really manages - Paladins need to attack the mark to maintain it), and unlike most defenders they can actually negate damage rather than simply punishing it. Monsters with only single-target attacks with average damage less than the Swordmage's aegis reduction are practically harmless, whereas another defender would just result in killing it faster if it violated the mark. Such monsters are uncommon, however.
Shielding Swordmages are among the finest tools for DM Trolling ever written. Defending at a distance. Marking a dude, then running away from them to go fight someone else.

When released, their Aegis protection usually eliminated all or at least most damage. Nowadays, it probably needs a buff of about 5 points per tier.

-O

[windgate]

"Best" Defender is a difficult question to answer, because of the numerous role requirements.

At its core it comes down to the "catch 22" of being a defender. You are trying to give a "marked enemy" no good choices. Those choices are:

1 - Attack the defender
2 - Attack defenders Allies
3 - Attack Nobody


For points 1 and 2, I would place the fighter and swordmage on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Swordmage: Extremely high defenses (charop eventually leads to an unhittable AC) and only defender that can work from range but have poor mark punishment for attacking allies. These punishments can occur only once per round, and either hurt the enemies after the ally has been damaged or reduce the damage allies take (without prevent status effects). In heroic they have a difficult time getting more than one target marked as well.

Fighter: Defenses are lower than most other defenders and they need to be adjacent to enemies to be effective. On the flip side their "punishment" hits hard and amongst all the defenders probably have the easiest time "marking" multiple targets.

Paladin:
Better Defenses than the fighter and deals automatic damage to any mark violators (somewhat weak, but isn't limited to 1/round) Self Healing abilities but has some mobility problems.

Warden:
Marking Capabilities comparable to the fighter. Lower defenses than even the fighter but compensates by having more life than any other class and makes additional saving throws at start of turn. Second Winding gives them additional benefits and might actually be worth sacrificing a standard action for.

Essentials (cavalier, berserker):
Really effective at locking down anything within "Burst 1", cant do much outside of the box and gets screwed over by forced movement. Really easy to use though.....

[windgate]

Find a way to get a melee basic power in there and you can actually be decent.

Or just take the intelligent blade master feat.

[masteraleph]

Paladins also take off in paragon once they get the ability to punish with attacks as well as with auto-damage. And MCing fighter via Battle Awareness can boost this even further.

[Surrealistik]

Fighter or Battlemind and I'm leaning towards the latter. Lodestone Lure, Lightning Rush and Brutal Barrage are _damned_ strong powers, and the first two excel at defending.

[Mando Knight]

Swordmage: Extremely high defenses (charop eventually leads to an unhittable AC) and only defender that can work from range but have poor mark punishment for attacking allies. These punishments can occur only once per round, and either hurt the enemies after the ally has been damaged or reduce the damage allies take (without prevent status effects). In heroic they have a difficult time getting more than one target marked as well.

Fighter: Defenses are lower than most other defenders and they need to be adjacent to enemies to be effective. On the flip side their "punishment" hits hard and amongst all the defenders probably have the easiest time "marking" multiple targets.
Shielding Swordmage's ability is considered one of the better mark punishment abilities because it absorbs damage, unlike other punishment abilities, and at a magnitude that can mean the difference between your ally being bloodied or only being a bit worse than one surge down, every turn. Against the relatively weak MM1 monsters, it almost grants invulnerability at higher levels.

The difference between the Assault Swordmage and the Fighter in terms of Mark punishment is more nuanced than CharOp advice sometimes purports: the Assault Swordmage has far more flexibility on positioning when activating it and doesn't need to do anything to maintain the mark, but needs to invest more to get its MBA up, needs to explicitly use the Aegis mark, hits as a Reaction, and can only trigger the attack when the enemy hits an ally. The Fighter can only punish enemies within its reach and needs to attack the enemy every turn to keep the mark up, but has more generous punishment triggers (though natively can do nothing against teleportation), works off of any mark, and has an innately powerful and accurate MBA.

The most bandied-about feature of the Fighter's punishment mechanic is not its mark. Combat Superiority only enhances Opportunity attacks (not the Immediate attack from the mark), but further punishes enemy movement (though, again, does nothing against teleportation as-is) by further increasing the Fighter's good accuracy and then stopping the target dead in its tracks.

IMO, the main reason the Fighter gets to punish enemies that shift is because it can't punish enemies that are farther away. The Swordmage and Paladin, while they don't deal as much damage right away as Fighters, can.

[Zaq]

Swordmages have so many good interrupt powers that they'll hardly ever use their actual built-in mark punishment until at least round 3 on the average, unless you're using it as part of another power (Transposing Lunge with Aegis of Shielding, for instance). This isn't a bad thing (in fact, it's a really cool thing a lot of the time), but it's worth mentioning. Dimensional Vortex, for example, is one of my favorite powers in the entire game. Sure, powers in 4e don't explicitly have verbal or somatic components, but if they did, the verbal component would be "u mad bro?"

Paladins undergo a weird curve. They're decent in early Heroic, though they get pretty lackluster in late Heroic. At Paragon, if they take one of three specific PPs, they're just fine (Champion of Order works brilliantly at 11, and Hospitaler works pretty OK at 11, though Morninglord doesn't kick in until 16), though if they take any other PP, they're generally pretty forgettable throughout Paragon. At Epic, though, they take Weakening Challenge and become amazing at defending, which is actually pretty much the reverse of what happens to most defenders at Epic (since the tricks that worked before Epic rarely work as well once everything is giant, has huge reach, attacks solely with bursts and blasts, teleports everywhere, makes a zillion attacks a round, automatically dazes, and all the other fun tricks that Epic monsters pull).

Wardens are sturdy as hell in Heroic, but unless you take a pretty liberal reading of a certain Paragon feat, they never really get any better. They can take a beating like crazy, but it's generally pretty tricky to get enemies to focus on them, unless your GM obeys marks for the sake of obeying marks. Early on, they can use slows, prones, difficult terrain, and so on to be pretty hard to get away from, but those tricks really only work for so long. It's sad, because I like them, but it's a fact.

Battleminds are weird. Mind Spike is pretty tame punishment, all things considered, so their real ability to defend depends on their powers. Lightning Rush is, of course, phenomenal, though in low Heroic, Conductive Defense and Lodestone Lure are still top-notch at the job. The thing is, once Lightning Rush comes online, that's as good as the Battlemind gets at defending. They've got some absolutely killer striker powers if you abuse them (Brutal Barrage and Brilliant Recovery, specifically), but Lightning Rush is pretty much where the buck stops. (You can have some fun with Intellect Snap, but it feels gimmicky.)

Fighters, of course, get all the best toys. I've had so many builds that multiclass Fighter (including a damned Invoker!) it's not even funny. Their class features are pretty much the gold standard for defending, and they're rock solid throughout Heroic and Paragon. At Epic, they lose a bit of their shine, since the same tricks that I've mentioned earlier hit them pretty hard, but they remain functional, even if they tend to be closer to durable strikers than raw defenders. That said, they've got enough goodies to do pretty much whatever they want, since they're obscenely oversupported.

Swordmages are probably my personal favorite, followed by Paladins, though both of them make me a little sad in that most optimized ones tend to end up looking pretty damn similar. There's a little bit of leeway, but especially for Swordmages, the standout powers are blindingly obvious at each level, and it's really hard to justify taking anything else. The powers are fantastic, but my Swordmage and your Swordmage are going to look pretty much the same if we both know what we're doing, you know? That's kind of annoying, but that's the way 4e rolls. Fighters definitely have the greatest number of viable strategies, so if you take joy in building different characters and thinking hard about what different parts to use, the Fighter's probably your choice.

That said, all of them are pretty decent in Heroic (except, to a certain degree, the Paladin, and they're hardly unplayable), so depending on what level you're starting at, you might not need to worry that much. It's only really in Paragon where "just mark it and stand next to it" stops being an inherently good strategy (that is to say, you'll need more than that to really do your thing), so that's a consideration.

[tcrudisi]

Most powerful? It really depends on party composition. I'd daresay that the defenders are pretty well balanced and there are definitely times when I'd take one class over another. But, on a more generic scale, nobody annoys ranged characters like a Battlemind. Fighters lock down melee enemies exceptionally well. And Paladins can annoy everyone on the battlefield at one time.

If you force me to choose, I suppose I give an ever-so-slight edge to the Fighter, but the Battlemind is seriously right there and the rest of the defenders are close enough.

However, for fun? I definitely rank the Battlemind and Swordmage as the top 2. The Battlemind just literally bounces around everywhere like a ping-pong ball and it's so fun to go, "Wait, you're doing what? I interrupt!" But the swordmage? They teleport. A lot. And it's a lot of fun.

[Epinephrine]

If you include hybrids in the mix, the Warlock|Paladin can be pretty amazing. My party's flail-wielding Warlock-a-din messes with enemies thanks to the slide/prone function of his MBA, and by sacrificing curse damage he can teleport the foe when he hits with warlock encounter/daily powers. He's often invisible to his foes (by having teleported away from them), which is quite a dilemma for enemies - take the penalties to hit to go for the invisible paladin, or incur his wrath my ignoring his mark. Every time I hear him say, "Well, there's a price to cowardice..." I know he's just screwed one of my critters. His Delban's Deadly Attention (since it is an encounter power) often negates an attack, since he opts for the teleport, and puts the target out of range. Very solid defenses, a penalty for his cursed targets to hit, auto-mark punishment with additional interrupts, an OA that slides and prones foes, and the fact that he's often invisible (and has bothered getting a solid stealth for a guy in plate) add up to a lot of defending.

[Kurald Galain]

My favorite is a reach weapon Fighter with lots of multiattacks, mobility, and Polearm Gamble to throw enemies prone. Effective, too.

Almost everybody in my area who plays a defender has either a Swordmage or a Paladin; of the two, swordmages are generally flashy and effective; I've been less impressed by the paladins. However, the paladin does get some brokenly good paragon paths, which makes all the difference.

I've seen a warden and battlemind in play only one or two times; neither was particularly impressive, although this may have been due to the player. You need to have seen a class in play a lot to get a better feel of how much the class contributes to effectivity and how much of it is the player. If anything, fighters are very straightforward to build and play, and that doesn't hold true for all defenders.

[obryn]

I should also note that, for the time when I had a Berserker in my party, he was a much more effective Defender than I had expected.

-O

[Nightgaun7]

So what can fighters do to remain viable in the later part of the game? Multiclass?

[Kurald Galain]

So what can fighters do to remain viable in the later part of the game? Multiclass?

What makes you think they wouldn't be viable? Sure, multiclass feats are a decent pick, but they don't usually change a character much.

[Nightgaun7]

What makes you think they wouldn't be viable? Sure, multiclass feats are a decent pick, but they don't usually change a character much.

People saying in this thread that they suffer when enemies can teleport all over the place and do damage using AoEs and such

[Kurald Galain]

People saying in this thread that they suffer when enemies can teleport all over the place and do damage using AoEs and such

Undeniable Challenge says hello :)

In my experience, enemies with a teleport speed are virtually nonexistent in paragon tier, and still pretty uncommon in epic. Enemies with a one-per-encounter teleport ability appear in heroic and aren't that big of a deal to the fighter. Teleport speed is annoying, in the same way that enemies that weaken you are annoying to most strikers. But annoying isn't the same as crippling.

[Mando Knight]

People saying in this thread that they suffer when enemies can teleport all over the place and do damage using AoEs and such

I said that they can do nothing against teleportation innately, just as Swordmages innately have a fairly weak MBA and can't keep multiple targets marked. That's what feats are for.

[NecroRebel]

People saying in this thread that they suffer when enemies can teleport all over the place and do damage using AoEs and such

They become less effective, not ineffective. Monsters with a teleport speed are rare, and their teleport speed is almost always half their normal movement speed, so even if every monster in a battle has a teleport speed, a Fighter will still be complicating their plans. Fighters also tend to be one of the highest-damage defenders, meaning that even in the worst case they can still contribute as an off-striker. And Polearm Gamble Fighters get their OAs regardless of how an enemy moves - if an enemy enters a square adjacent to the Fighter, they take an OA, so such Fighters are still major obstacles.

[Surrealistik]

I'll be honest, I think polearm fighters are one of the most overrated defender archetypes ever; their main schtick is ridiculously easy to circumvent.

Also Battleminds optimizing Brutal Barrage are definitely the most damaging defenders.

[Kurald Galain]

Also Battleminds optimizing Brutal Barrage are definitely the most damaging defenders.
Sure, but aside from BMs cheesing out a particular badly written power, Fighters are generally the most damaging defender.

[obryn]

Also Battleminds optimizing Brutal Barrage are definitely the most damaging defenders.
I have fortunately not seen too much in the way of Brutal Barrage vulnerability abuse. Hammer Rhythym has been popular to pair with it at my table, though, for obvious reasons.

It's also an at-will highly reliable Prone, like more reliable than a regular attack by a pretty nice margin. Which is a great thing for a Defender to be able to do.

-O