In Defense of the Champion

[Fwiffo86]

... it's a game of completely built characters in a completely built team, and if the Fighter picks the right skills, backgrounds, and feats, with a focus on harmonizing with the rest of the party, the Fighter will be a great addition to the team.

This is how I feel. So many people here want to look at a class as a single entity alone in the dark, and base their judgments on that class alone. I also find it frustrating that many people can't seem to grasp the concept (or perhaps they just don't want to) that any single class is only 25% of the base equation.

You see alot of This class vs. That class, but I have yet to see a thread where abilities are compared to what they would work best with from another class. Since the idea of the game being that its all based on a 4 man party, you would think we could spend some time doing that instead.

Example) While the champion fighter seems to lack interesting activated abilities, our party has found that he makes the perfect buff target. Slap the champion fighter with Enlarge and Bless, and suddenly he's dropping the hammer on everything out there. And because he isn't the one doing the concentrating, there is no chance of loss of buff. So while the Fighter is buffed, the casters are lighting up the other targets with cantrips and non-conc spells to assist. Because that's how the game is designed.