Avenger Patch

[Nightgaun7]

I've got a few players, both in real life and online, who are interested in playing Avengers. To give them a little incentive, I told them I'd be willing to make a few changes to the class to help fix it up, as it's widely regarded as being sub-par, especially in later tiers. All the top Avenger builds that I know of rely on getting Oath of Enmity and then going off and doing something else, usually involving Dilettante.

What changes should I make to bring the Avenger up to scratch?

[Kurald Galain]

What would help a lot is having a minor action or immediate action attack, once or twice per encounter.

[squiggit]

OoE being less easy to disable might be nice. It's an amazing striker feature but the avenger chassis isn't the best offensively, so the whole "whenever someone else is touching you" really seems like an unnecessary activation penalty. Some people like it though.

Rebalancing the Censures would be nice too: Retribution should activate on attacks, not on hits, as is it's a really bad feature because soaking damage is always a bad option in 4e. It's even more bizarre because a lot of CoR has class specific abilities that improve your defenses, which makes you harder to hit, which makes the feature activate even less often? Very silly stuff.

Not sure what you could do about pursuit. It's not bad on paper and there's a few gimmicks for it, it's also the only censure that has a native PP that isn't completely awful... but it's still not as good as Unity (which bugs me because 'unity' really isn't something in the stock avenger fluff... ).

Other than that it gets a bit more difficult. The main downside to the avenger is your horrible daily power selection. They range from extremely situational to not-striker oriented to simply bad. You'd just have to go line by line fixing those, which is much more difficult. There's a few cool gimmicks here (like a pursuit avenger using the daily that lets them create darkness and hide), but by and large you really just don't have much going for you for dailies and the class suffers heavily for it.

Thunder and Echo might be good if you take a liberal reading of it to make it a multitap, ditto on living death strike, but those require some reading gymnastics and by and large you still don't have many options, especially in Epic.


Do keep in mind though that even without twin strike or dual attack shenanigans the straight avenger is not a bad class. You have incredible DPR and can do a decent off-defender game. You're extremely hard to kill, get two striker features by paragon and almost never miss. You just don't get that incredible spike damage because you lack any particularly juicy dailies to throw around or any powers to set up a later nova.


What would help a lot is having a minor action or immediate action attack, once or twice per encounter.

They already have two! Relentless Stride and Fury's Advance! They could use some higher level options though, sort of sucks that two of your encounter powers are gonna be e3 all game long.

[Nightgaun7]

Do keep in mind though that even without twin strike or dual attack shenanigans the straight avenger is not a bad class. You have incredible DPR and can do a decent off-defender game. You're extremely hard to kill, get two striker features by paragon and almost never miss. You just don't get that incredible spike damage because you lack any particularly juicy dailies to throw around or any powers to set up a later nova.


Most of the time I play defenders; my only striker, a charger barbarian, was doing about 100-120 DPR at level 14, sometimes up to 180. He was pretty damn tricked out, to be sure. How does a well-run Avenger stack up?

[Cloud]

They benefit pretty well from all the charging stuff the Barbarian does, so they're not bad.

In all honesty the class chassis is fine, it just...needs powers that actually deal damage, and the native paragon paths are....underwhelming. Also while there are ways around this, if you're going to patch the Avenger, just give them a MBA using Wisdom natively. ...Well really every class should just get a MBA using its attack stat but I digress.

[Yakk]

Make their implement powers not suck. I have sketched hooking them to censures and off turn actions somehow.

Implement the holy weapon patch: holy symbols working like Ki foci allowing them to enchant weapons.

Give them a basic attack, or at least an OA.

Upgrade censures:

Pursuit: +dex if you started your turn further away. +dex if foe moves away willimgly.

Retribution: +int if foe damaged an ally recently. +int if attacked.

Unity: +int if attacking marked foe (by ally). +1(per tier) max +int per ally adjacent to foe.

or similar.

Each applies to 'next hit'. (if too weak, boost numbers -- add 1/2 level or whatever -- rather than open up multi-tap).

Maybe throw some [w] at the avenger. Maybe change all weapon attack powers to boosts, adding to a basic attack (or pseudo-basic) once per turn?

Could solve daily problem with class feature. Like, daily use activates it on target, or steroid for avenger.

I personally like to avoid charge cheese and multi-tap: every striker can do that. Make features that block both from scaling somehow.

Ie, give a pseudo BA: wis based, can move speed prior to attack (does not provoke from target), can be used as an OA. Scalimg [w] damage (1[w] per tier?). Not BA, not charge.

Then use avenger [w] powers as boosts on it? Like preemptive power attack or backstab.

Aim for (level+3)*3 DPR against (level+12) NAD and (level+14) AC without charge or other cheese, and somewhat block the cheese. If you need some strange combo to reach it, make it core explicitly.

[Nightgaun7]

OoE being less easy to disable might be nice. It's an amazing striker feature but the avenger chassis isn't the best offensively, so the whole "whenever someone else is touching you" really seems like an unnecessary activation penalty. Some people like it though.

I think I'll leave that particular facet alone for now, but I may change it later.



Rebalancing the Censures would be nice too: Retribution should activate on attacks, not on hits, as is it's a really bad feature because soaking damage is always a bad option in 4e. It's even more bizarre because a lot of CoR has class specific abilities that improve your defenses, which makes you harder to hit, which makes the feature activate even less often? Very silly stuff.
Should I tone the damage down from INT mod to +2/4/6 or +3/6/9 in light of that?



They already have two! Relentless Stride and Fury's Advance! They could use some higher level options though, sort of sucks that two of your encounter powers are gonna be e3 all game long.
Yeah, definitely need to fix that.


Make their implement powers not suck. I have sketched hooking them to censures and off turn actions somehow.
Can you into more detail? I like the basic idea, I will go through and look at powers in more detail in a bit.



Implement the holy weapon patch: holy symbols working like Ki foci allowing them to enchant weapons.

Wait what? Can you unpack that a little? I may just be missing something cause my mind is stuck in economics-mode.



Pursuit: +dex if you started your turn further away. +dex if foe moves away willimgly.

Seems like that would very easily combine with charge-cheese for the first part, but there might be a way to rig it. The idea makes sense, since then you've actually got a reason to chase someone instead of trying to goad them into running away.



Unity: +int if attacking marked foe (by ally). +1(per tier) max +int per ally adjacent to foe.

I was toying with the idea of Unity having a secondary as Leader, and thus granting some kind of bonus to an ally, sort of like a Thaneborn.



Maybe throw some [w] at the avenger. Maybe change all weapon attack powers to boosts, adding to a basic attack (or pseudo-basic) once per turn?

Why bother with a Basic-ish attack that does 1 [w] and then tack another [w] onto it as an encounter power when you could just have the encounter power do 2[w]? Not sure I get the idea here.



Could solve daily problem with class feature. Like, daily use activates it on target, or steroid for avenger.

I was thinking about something like this, maybe "Seals" or "Covenants" that are sort of like barbarian rage, except they last until the target is dead rather than EoE.



I personally like to avoid charge cheese and multi-tap: every striker can do that. Make features that block both from scaling somehow.

Ie, give a pseudo BA: wis based, can move speed prior to attack (does not provoke from target), can be used as an OA. Scalimg [w] damage (1[w] per tier?). Not BA, not charge.

Then use avenger [w] powers as boosts on it? Like preemptive power attack or backstab.

It's fun on occasion but it can definitely be over-used. I expect I'll find more to work on here as I look through the power list.

[Dimers]

Yeah, definitely need to fix that.

Personally, I prefer to make more class structures that allow single big hits to work rather than continuing to reward lots of little hits -- there's already lots of that available in the game. Maybe some other way to get your static bonuses multiple times, like ... geez ... off the top of my head, you could just double static bonuses flat-out, or double them on crits (since the avenger makes a good critfisher).


Wait what? Can you unpack that a little? I may just be missing something cause my mind is stuck in economics-mode.

One of the problems avengers face is having to boost two separate attack tools: holy symbol and weapon. Yakk is suggesting combining them, either by letting them use their weapon properties and enchants for implement attacks or letting them use their holy symbol properties/enchants for weapon attacks.


I was toying with the idea of Unity having a secondary as Leader, and thus granting some kind of bonus to an ally, sort of like a Thaneborn.

I like that. Pursuit could be pure striker, Retribution could sub defender and Unity could sub leader, with some adjustments/additions to powers and class abilities.


Why bother with a Basic-ish attack that does 1 [w] and then tack another [w] onto it as an encounter power when you could just have the encounter power do 2[w]? Not sure I get the idea here.

If I'm reading Yakk right, he means you take existing standard-action avenger encounter powers and add their effects to a BA. For example, if you chose the Halo of Fire power for your 3rd-level E, you could boost a BA by adding 2 more [W] and an isolating-damage rider that's better for Retribution builds. Even for the super-accurate avenger, though, you'd need to choose whether to have the character spend the power before attempting the attack or after confirming a hit. And not all the powers will translate cleanly.

[Inevitability]

Pursuit is quite defender-ish also. It punishes people for moving away, which is another part of being a defender.

[Yakk]

Can you into more detail? I like the basic idea, I will go through and look at powers in more detail in a bit.
Basically Avenger implement powers all universally suck, as they are not striker-level and they don't get the avenger double-tap mechanism.

So one approach I sketched out was to tie them somehow to your censure. Each censure gets a way to use any avenger encounter implement power as an immediate action (or, the entire triggering ability is once per turn, but is an opportunity action -- I prefer that, because immediate action/reactions where a design flaw of 4e) based off some trigger.

Retribution: Someone other than your target attacks you. You get to attack them back with an implement power.

Pursuit: They move away. You get to attack them with an implement power. Or maybe you can make OAs with your implement powers period, including against shifting/teleporting foes.

Unity: If the target of your oath attacks someone other than you that does not have them marked and they are not under a defender aura, you get to use an implement power.

Or something like that.

Wait what? Can you unpack that a little? I may just be missing something cause my mind is stuck in economics-mode.
Holy Weapon + Divine Utility Implement
Minor Action + At-Will
Requires: Using a holy symbol.
Target: One weapon you are wielding
Effect: The weapon gains the magical properties of the holy symbol (including enhancement and critical damage), but not the mundane properties (including from superior implement proficiency), until you are no longer wielding it or you use this power on another weapon. If the weapon has other magical properties, your holy symbol's properties replace them.

Either that, or just steal the wording from Ki Focus for most classes.

Seems like that would very easily combine with charge-cheese for the first part, but there might be a way to rig it. The idea makes sense, since then you've actually got a reason to chase someone instead of trying to goad them into running away.
See that at-will below? Tie it to using that at-will, which cannot be used on a charge.

I was toying with the idea of Unity having a secondary as Leader, and thus granting some kind of bonus to an ally, sort of like a Thaneborn.
Sure. Each time you attack the next ally who attacks the target before the end of your next turn gains a +int bonus to their damage rolls on the attack?

Why bother with a Basic-ish attack that does 1 [w] and then tack another [w] onto it as an encounter power when you could just have the encounter power do 2[w]? Not sure I get the idea here.Two things. First, it provides a damage boost that doesn't require rewriting a bunch of powers (other than in a uniform way).

Second, it lets the avenger use *all* of their powers in a high-mobility way, without opening up charge cheese. (maybe restrict OAs to not being encounter/daily powers).

I was thinking about something like this, maybe "Seals" or "Covenants" that are sort of like barbarian rage, except they last until the target is dead rather than EoE.
And you can decouple them from the daily power text.

Seals: When you use a Daily Avenger Attack power on your Oath of Enmity target, you can choose to use a Seal. Seals last until the target dies or they are no longer under your Oath of Emnity. The Seals you have access to are determined by your ... what do they call the subtypes, like pursuit? Whatever, you get the drill.

You might start with 1 in heroic, gain another at paragon, and a third at epic. The heroic ones might be:
Seal of Pursuit: You gain a mobility bonus, and a damage rider from changing your position.
Seal of Retribution: You gain temporary HP, and a damage bonus when attacked.
Seal of Unity: You can expend a healing surge to heal an ally, and gain a damage bonus when your oath attacks an ally (or, grant a damage bonus to an ally when they attack your oath target, whichever you decide Unity doesn't get for free).

It's fun on occasion but it can definitely be over-used. I expect I'll find more to work on here as I look through the power list.
The goal is to fold that level of power "into the class" without requiring the cheese, do you don't get a party of all-chargers or whatever.

Same with multi-tap -- give the avenger a single heavy tap. Make them *different* than rangers.

[Nightgaun7]

Same with multi-tap -- give the avenger a single heavy tap. Make them *different* than rangers.


Personally, I prefer to make more class structures that allow single big hits to work rather than continuing to reward lots of little hits -- there's already lots of that available in the game. Maybe some other way to get your static bonuses multiple times, like ... geez ... off the top of my head, you could just double static bonuses flat-out, or double them on crits (since the avenger makes a good critfisher).
...
If I'm reading Yakk right, he means you take existing standard-action avenger encounter powers and add their effects to a BA. For example, if you chose the Halo of Fire power for your 3rd-level E, you could boost a BA by adding 2 more [W] and an isolating-damage rider that's better for Retribution builds. Even for the super-accurate avenger, though, you'd need to choose whether to have the character spend the power before attempting the attack or after confirming a hit. And not all the powers will translate cleanly.

While I chew on the rest of this stuff, can we get some more discussion on mega-hits? As Strikers are universally advised to do more multi-tapping and off-turn actions, I think it bears more thought.

The other thing is the concept of stacking things onto a pseudo BA. I'm still not getting why you should take (to use Dimers' example) Halo of Fire and have it add onto a 1[W] power rather than having one power that does 3[W] with the same effect. What's the actual, mechanical difference? Would it let static mods stack twice or something?

[vasharanpaladin]

While I chew on the rest of this stuff, can we get some more discussion on mega-hits? As Strikers are universally advised to do more multi-tapping and off-turn actions, I think it bears more thought.


"Mega hits" are ill-advised unless you drastically change how static bonuses are applied. Multiattacks are the end-all because each attack carries the full (or a vast majority of) amount of the static bonus. In a nutshell, this is why the [w] doesn't matter; what matters is how often you hit, how often you attack, and what you're adding to the damage roll. Avengers also have a greater chance of landing critical hits (about 9%), so they'll like high crit weapons as well.

One fix I recall seeing somewhere was proccing the static bonus or certain parts of it per [w]; basically, a barbarian landing a 7[w] hit would deal roughly the same damage as a ranger making seven 1[w] attacks. For the Avenger, this still doesn't change much due to a lack of high-[w] powers, but it would still fit the theme of "less damage more reliably."

At this point, I'm going to bring up how CharOp rates Strikers. They check for four criteria: Durability, mobility, at-will DPR and the encounter spike. Avengers have near-Defender level of HP and defenses, and a very good selection of approach powers. Further, if an avenger isn't getting his oath of enmity benefit somehow, he's screwed up somewhere (way too many ways to get out of a furball; it's about as easy to cancel as a rogue's reliance on CA), so they're pretty rock-solid for the first three.

Avengers, however, are lacking in the way of encounter frequency options that appreciably increase their spike output. For those who don't follow CharOp, the spike is the round in which a Striker unloads most if not all of his encounter attacks in the name of dealing as much damage as possible without using daily resources (to preempt any confusion, if you use daily resources or action points it's a "nova," not a spike... and avengers can't do that too well, either). For most Strikers this is the first round opener. Avengers, meanwhile, only get two decent powers that enable the spike (fury's advance at e3, soulforge hammering at e17) and have very little control over their in-class damage boost, requiring them to wait longer in the encounter to get off a proper spike round. This is where the avenger really suffers, and while it's only one out of four points this is a "speed of killing things" point so CharOp weights it more.

Really, the avenger just needs dailies worthy of the frequency and maybe a couple in-class PPs that directly increase their worth as Strikers (instead of the current desperate want to poach fighter or cleric paths).

So, tl;dr version:

Improve spike ability with more multitap or off-action encounter attack powers (optional)
Improve nova ability with daily attack powers that don't suck
Improve native paragon path selection with more +Striker PPs
Improve worth of single large-[w] attacks by changing how static bonuses are added (invasive fix)

[Nightgaun7]

I always think the most important thing to focus on first is the story aspect of the character, since that really guides the play style and mechanics of the character, so to help myself figure out what direction to take this, here are the two things I keep coming back to and how they might relate to play:

What sets Avengers apart from other classes?

Avengers are inescapable - any enemy will fall before his faith in time. Where the Paladin seeks to defend allies and champion the light, the Avenger uses dark methods to strike at the heart of evil, be they hiding in a fortress or defended by minions.

In game terms, this means Avengers are all about single-target murder. They lock on and home in. Barbarians can charge anyone, Sorcerers blast everything around, Rogues will stab any back that's convenient, Rangers can fire arrows at anyone. Avengers want to find a leader, a big damage dealer, or some other valuable target and slaughter it before moving on to the next one. Avengers often try to break through enemy lines to get at the enemies in the back or chase down targets trying to escape. Many of these are already supported by the Oath of Enmity and the Censures, so that's good. Other support needs to come from power changes. Tying in with this, and a couple of existing things, Avengers should have native support for cutting through resistances, doing necrotic and ongoing damage, and so forth. Even if you get away from the Avenger for a turn, you still suffer.

Avengers are implacable. Their devotion lets them shrug off wounds and conditions that would stop others from fulfilling their goals. Martyrs for their cause.

Complimenting their offensive reliability, Avengers should be harder than other Strikers to lock down, since they will be oriented around attacking one target and are a melee class anything that prevents them from reaching that target hurts a lot more than a barbarian who can just charge someone else, a warlock who puts his curse on another creature, etc. I was thinking about giving them a suite of abilities that function around trading HP to shed status effects, get offensive boosts, and so on. In conjunction, give them abilities that work better once bloodied or otherwise impaired. Give them some risk-reward, "I-take-my-own-damage-to-do-more" role for people that like to live on the edge. They're a cloth-wearing striker, seems appropriate.

Avengers are loners. Though they work with others, and may occasionally exhort them in the name of their faith, Avengers pursue their goals by hurting their nemesis more than helping their friends.

I feel like there might be a cool niche for the Censure of Unity Avenger, who has a secondary role as leader, but does all his helping by hurting the enemy. I suspect this might end up being hard to distinguish, but I like the idea enough to put it out there and see if it can be done well.

It's all still a nebulous swirl in my head, thinking about this in the gaps between working on other things, but I feel like there's potential to build a strong, fun class with a more distinguished theme and play style than the present Avenger. I'd love to hear what other people have to say.

[squiggit]

The avenger is a divinely inspired crusader and assassin. The paladin shields the weak from fiends and monsters, the cleric may bolster the spirits of the masses to resist the darkness and provide sanctuary against evil... But ultimately it's the avenger who enters the beast's lair and cuts them in half with their fullblade.

The avenger is unstoppable: Avengers are one of the tankiness strikers, optimizing AC on them is pretty easy and by nature they're gonna have a great will and reflex. This is also part of what Retribution tries to model. Retribution feats make you harder to hit down and retribution's kicker makes you stronger if they hurt you. This doesn't work well because soaking damage is not viable in 4e and their feats an features run counter to each other.

The avenger is inescapable: Avengers get lots of good movement oriented powers. Pursuit kicks in here too, running away just makes the avenger even more likely to drop you.

The avenger is unerring: Oath of Enmity is the best striker feature in the game. It makes you an amazing crit fisher and means you should never miss. Hell it's so good other classes take mulitclasses just so they can get a single round of it. This is honestly probably in part the avenger's downfall. I like to think that part of the reason almost every avenger power in their original book is bad is WotC being afraid of of Oath's power.

Lucky for is though the Avenger is one of the only classes in 4e that was bad on release and actually got fixes and new abilities that made it actually a good class later on.

If you want to visualize the avenger conceptually better, honestly I think the best is to take an Inquisitor from Warhammer or Pathfinder and give them a greatsword.

[Dimers]

Here's an idea for megahits.

"If you have not attacked any creature since the end of your last turn (or if this is your first turn during this encounter) and you roll multiple dice to attack as a result of your Oath of Enmity power, a hit deals additional damage equal to [W] + your Wisdom modifier, or d8 + your Wisdom modifier if you are using an implement power. At 11th level, add another [W] or d8 plus your Intelligence or Dexterity modifier. At 21st level, add another [W] or d8 plus your Strength or Constitution modifier."

Typical existing avenger in heroic: 2[W]+Wis+other mods, offturn/minor [W]+Wis+other mods
Megahits avenger in heroic: 3[W]+Wis+Wis+other mods
Existing avenger in paragon: 2[W]+Wis+bigger other mods, offturn/minor [W]+Wis+bigger other mods
Megahits in paragon: 4[W]+Wis+Wis+Int/Dex+bigger other mods
Existing avenger in epic: 3[W]+Wis+max other mods, offturn/minor 2[W]+Wis+max other mods
Megahits in epic: 6[W]+Wis+Wis+Int/Dex+Str/Con+max other mods

Seems comparable. Megahits will fall behind a bit over time, faster with a great leader ... but might actually come out ahead for a non-optimizer.

So megahits avengers can only get this big boost once per round, but it doesn't matter if they do it on their own turn -- they can still take advantage of lazy-leaders. This should be a class feature separate from Oath and not poachable via multiclass. Hybrids ... maybe hybrids could take this as a Hybrid Talent? The wording already limits it to avenger attacks because it relies on use of Oath. Making it a Hybrid Talent means it's a pretty unattractive choice for anyone who isn't going paragon hybridization (also generally an unattractive choice), but leaving it open to everyone makes it a major upgrade to hybrid avenger effectiveness.

You could also tie effects to this new class feature, letting powers improve it and feats expand its options. Stuff like "if you miss with a daily that has no miss effect and is not reliable, deal your megahits bonus damage anyway" or "No action, trigger: your megahits damage would drop an enemy. Don't deal the megahits damage, make an Intimidate check against the enemy, and give all your nearby allies temp hit points."