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2010-07-13, 07:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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A honest question about the Fighter?
I see a lot of people saying fighter is the weakest class.
And even when it got upgraded in pathfinder, people still say its pretty weak.
I just want to know, why specificly is the fighter weak?
If someone could give me a reason for both normal 3.5 dnd, and one for pathfinder, I'd be most apreciative.
Thanks in advance ;D
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2010-07-13, 07:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
in 3.5 its the fact that the fighter's main job is to kill things. Which many other classes do a lot better then him in upper levels. And then you add the fact that a fighter can't do much outside of combat while other classes have many uses outside of combat. So I guess it's the lack of versatility and being worse then others at his prime job.
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2010-07-13, 07:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Fighter is not the weakest class. In core, that honor belongs to the monk. Out of core, probably the truenamer. It's actually a pretty high tier 5, which can become tier 4 with ACFs.
However, the problem of fighter is that it's A) fairly boring (its class feature consists entirely of feats, and all it does is full attack every round), and B) not very versatile (again, all it does is attack). Ultimately, a fighter can charge to deal lots and lots of damage, or control the battlefield with Standstill/trip, or bull rush everything into pieces, but it can only focus on one trick at a time and can rarely do more than one or two things all that well.
Pathfinder doesn't really change much about this. It gives a few boosts, but all of those are simple and minor numerical boosts; the lack of options doesn't really change at all.Rogue Handbook | Warmage Rebuild | Diablo's Assassin | Revised Classes
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2010-07-13, 07:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
You options. If you face someone who teleports, what do you do? If you face someone who's flying, what do you do? If you get a solid fog dropped on you, what do you do? How about negotiation between rival nations? Someone with untouchable AC? Hits so hard you can't face it directly? Finding someone invisible?
The problem with a fighter is that he does one thing and one thing only - hits someone with a big stick. If the situation can be solved by beating someone with a stick, but it's just someone standing there in the open willing to trade hits back, fighters are effectively useless. If it's can't be solved by hitting it with a big stick, fighters are useless.
Take someone like a bard, though. They've got the skills to fight decently in hand-to-hand, but they've also got got spells and skill points to spend on social stuff. They've got the skill points to spend on things like Spot and Listen - even cross-class - to pinpoint people who are hiding. If they find themselves in a situation where they can't use all that other stuff, they can buff their allies (and they can buff their allies with everything else, as well).
Weakness in D&D isn't about number. A fighter can drop enough damage to one-shot the tarrasque. It's all about versatility, being able to do a lot of things, and fighters just don't do that. The closest you get is a fighter with Dungeoncrasher (Dungeonscape) and Zhentarim (Champions of Valor), which can target regular AC, can do damage with an opposed Strength check, and can lock someone out of a fight with Intimidation.
EDIT: The fact that everything comes down to "I charge and hit something" and "I full attack and hit something" gets very boring too. Guys like ToB classes basically still just hit stuff, but they've got more options when hitting stuff.Last edited by lsfreak; 2010-07-13 at 07:14 PM.
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2010-07-13, 07:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
the Fighter is actually one of the strongest classes when played correctly
and by playing it correctly, i mean rolling up a warblade and call it a fighter.Spoiler
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2010-07-13, 07:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
To echo Pid6, fighters are very limited. There are only a small handful of decent builds that will take more than two levels of the class.
In their areas of expertise they shine. Tripping or Bull Rushing, for example, is something Fighters can specialize in and excel at. But a Fighter can easily be replaced by a summoned dinosaur or Celestial Elephant in most cases. Or a Druid who chooses smart wildshapes. Or a Cleric who prepares the correct spells.
You begin to get the idea.Last edited by Yorrin; 2010-07-13 at 07:18 PM.
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2010-07-13, 07:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
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2010-07-13, 07:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
the fighter can fight, but that's about it.
the fighter's lack of skill points and skills that aren't "jump/climb/swim", plus the fact that he doesn't get much benefit from Int or Cha means the fighter is usually the big dumb brute. the exception is the fighter who has 13 (no more, no less) int so he can take advantage of Combat Reflexes for extra AoO.
now the fighter gets feats, this allows him to spread his skill in separate weapon styles (2-handed power attacker, bowman, ect...) or in separate combat styles (trip, grapple, disarm)
the other problem is that there are other classes who fight just as well as he does, and better, with less effort.
now, a druid comes with a built in-pet (and upgrade funtion) and can shapeshift and share buffs. a druid doesn't need to spend feats to get multiple combat styles... wild shape into a dire bear and you're an instant grapple-monster. have a dire wolf as a pet and you can trip AND grapple. get natural spell... you get the picture.
wizards are in the same boat. the polymorph line of spells can allow the wizard to turn into forms that emulate the fighter's capabilities and, like the druid, self buff himself. for things he can't properly polymorph into, the higher level summon monster spells are pretty nasty. summon 1d4 or 1d4+1 decent combat monsters and you can emulate the fighter easily. ditto for sorcerors if they go that way
clerics are the king of the self-buffs. divine metamagic+persist spell means going by base stats alone you can be better then the fighter, but like the wizard and druid, you have full access to your spell list. and like the wizard, the cleric can summon.
barbarians share a fighter's full BAB but have the bonus of the Rage class feature. Barbs usually don't have the full gamut of styles the fighter has, but these guys really only need to know how to charge+power attack and one alternate feature gives them the ability to pounce, or full attack on a charge.
the list goes on but again, the fighter can fight, but that's about it. and he's not even the best at doing that.
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2010-07-13, 07:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
The fighter is bringing a knife to an airplane fight. It's generally regarded as a pretty manly thing to do, but it gets harder and harder as the planes get faster and deadlier. His sword arm getting stronger doesn't aid him significantly in his war against aeronautics.
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2010-07-13, 07:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
These are the problems with the fighter in 3.5
1) full attack is supposed to increase your damage output as you continue to level up. This doesn't happen.
The main advantage of the fighters full BAB is more iterative attacks. Unfortunately, in order to get them you need to hold still, getting next to your opponent and STAYING next to your opponent. In most fights, the fighter winds up spending the first round moving up to a mook to attack it, the second round moving up to the big bad to attack him, and then finally attacks for a full attack in round three... assuming the big bad hasn't negated this somehow.
2) Wizards are quadratic, warrior damage is linear.
Even WITH the extra attacks, they're at -5 per extra attack. With extra damage from specialization and magic items as the party levels up they do SOME more damage.. but not much.
Spellcasters on the other hand not only gain access to more powerful spells, but their other spells increase in power. As the wizard levels, not only does her earn more powerful spells like dominate, dominate monster, but his lower level spells increase in power, such as his fireball upgrading from 5d6 to 10d6.
3) Wizard damage is Spikey, warrior damage is constant:
Baring a warrior with a scythe, the chances of the warrior killing you in 1 round of combat is negligible. A wizard on the other hand, has a number of save or die spells that can whipe you out in a single hit.
4) Warrior feats are regressive
forget linear. Warrior feats past 8th level are complete and total garbage. Most of the time you don't have any choice BUT to branch out, diversify, and pick feats that were balanced for 1st level characters. For example, once your fighter hits 6th level, whats the point of being a fighter anymore? If you have power attack, cleave, and great cleave you're stuck taking something balanced for 1st level characters.
5) The armor, like the goggles, does nothing at higher levels.
At low level plate mail is a pretty good deal. It makes you almost immune to the orcs, skeletons, and hobgoblins that you run accross.
At higher levels, its just a nice crunchy outer shell when you get served up like an ordeurve to a high level beasty. As mentioned above fighters take a -5 on each iterative attack, -0,-5,-10. Monsters on the other hand take a flat -5 for extra claws/tentacles unless they take multi attack.. and guesse what.. EVERYTHING takes multi attack. So when that dragon pounds you with the bite claw claw wing wing tail ? Even if you max out armor, things are only going to miss you on a roll of a 1 or a 2 anyway because its strength bonus is so high.
This is assuming that the thing is even using normal attacks. If its doing ranged touch attacks forget about it.
6) 5 foot step and cast.
Its almost impossible to interupt spellcasting in 3.5. The wizard can always take a 5 foot step away from you and cast a spell, and there's not much you can do about it.
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2010-07-13, 07:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Think about simple damage. How does a fighter do damage?
Let's say his weapon does 1d10 or 1d12 or 2d6. You add strength on top of that, and amplify it with Power Attack, and so on.
How much damage does the wizard/sorcerer's weapon do? Let's take fireball. It does 1d6. Except it goes up 1d6 for every level up for the wizard/sorcerer.
The fighter doesn't get to do double the damage of his weapon when he goes from level 1 to level 2. The fighter doesn't do ECL*weapon hit dice. The wizard, however, does. And in an area-of-effect attack. Fireball: Caster Level * d6.
This means your level 10 fighter is left behind with his 2d6 greatsword + STR and various bonuses, while the level 10 wizard is flinging around 10d6 fireballs.
And this is just from a very simplistic, non-optimization viewpoint. I haven't even touched Save-or-Die/Lose spells - i.e. the ones where doing damage is rendered irrelevant.
...You hear that? Doing damage to an enemy is the biggest waste of time you could have, in comparison.
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2010-07-13, 08:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Also, one must note that some of the "buffs" in Pathfinder aren't. Main source of damage for non Dungeoncrashers? Power Attack, which was nerfed in PF. The checks for tripping and the like were also hindered slightly.
Other than that, what PId6 said.
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2010-07-13, 08:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Pretty much what everyone above me (except the warblade guy) said. To which I would add one well-considered insight that I read somewhere.
When WotC made 3rd edition, they basically updated almost every class to have more variety of options than ever before. The main exception to this is the fighter. The fighter does the same thing it did in previous editions, about as well as it did then, but every other class can do more than ever before.
3.5 made the rules better but didn't address this problem.
Pathfinder made the rules even better but still didn't address this problem.
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2010-07-13, 08:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
One nitpick: fighters do damage. They can do damage better than most wizards, barring a few specific builds. It's fairly arbitrary to get a fighter (or fighter-ish - paladin and barbarian are best) class to drop between 500 and 1000 damage a round by level 10. The problem is that's all they do, and if they can't charge, they're screwed. If someone has unhittable AC, they're screwed. If someone's flying, they're screwed. Damage, at least if you're willing to stick with specific builds, is easy.
Which does lead to another problem. There are an extremely limited number of ways to build a fighter effectively: charging with a 2-hander, attacking back when someone attacks you (Jack B. Quick build), chaintripper, Dungeoncrasher (bullrushing), and to some extent, archery. One weapon? Nope. Sword-and-board? Nope. Two weapons? Even bigger nope. Not charging? Nope. Spring attack? Nope. This applies to most melee classes; a very, very limited number of fighting style actually work, and even then they only work if you focus on them. Tome of Battle does all of those, and does them well (though archery is iffy until high levels, barring homebrewed disciplines, but ToB does do a mix of archery and melee much better than fighters).Last edited by lsfreak; 2010-07-13 at 08:49 PM.
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2010-07-13, 08:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Since I play in a group that rarely gets above 8th level before we stop one campaign and start another, the fighter is a pretty good class for us. Once you start getting beyond that level though, the fighter gets left behind.
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2010-07-13, 08:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
There's a reason E6 stops at 6, and that reason is because 7
ate 9means 4th level spells. You can probably get to 8-ish before you notice how bad things have gotten, but even by 7, a Fighter is well behind his casting buddies.Last edited by DragoonWraith; 2010-07-13 at 08:58 PM.
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2010-07-13, 08:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Gonna have to call you on this one. Here is the problem with fireball.
they do 1d6 per level max 10d6. So on average that is 30 points of damage. Now the bad guy gets to make a save for half. My experience is that most people make this save. Not always but better than half the time. So classes with evasion (their are several) don't get damaged. Those that saved take half damage. Now were down to 15 points of damage. You just blew a 3rd level spell and did what a fighter does on an average attack.
Fighters do have it tuff these days though. It is not really their fault. People don't play them correctly, and a lot of DM's are spell caster crazy and over populate their worlds with spell casters. That makes the problems worse.
Pathfinder is a lot better to the fighter than 3.5 was. In addition to the better skills sets and rules, their game world allows fighters to have 4 skill points instead of 2. With the right amount of brains, you can get a fighter that has decent, but not legendary skills.
Magic items make up for the rest.
In my campaign worlds we have several fighters that do well. Not that we play at the top of the optimization game mind you, so that helps.Remember no matter where you go. There you are.
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2010-07-13, 09:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Even then, you've got wizards regularly flying or teleporting around the battlefield, no way of getting your iterative attacks, and skill checks high enough that the fighter sucks at them all.
Pathfinder is a lot better to the fighter than 3.5 was.Proudly without a signature for 5 years. Wait... crap.
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2010-07-13, 09:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-07-13, 09:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Except you're doing it to a 20' radius area. Have you drawn a 20' radius area on a 5' square grid? It's freaking huge. You might as well just say "If it's on the battlefield, it is now on fire." The fighter gets to do his swing to one dude pretty hard, sure. A blaster wizard gets to hit just as hard over a gigantic area.
Nonblaster casters are even further above fighter-types: one spell can render large swaths of enemies useless and usually in a position to just be coup de graced.Last edited by Fax Celestis; 2010-07-13 at 09:24 PM.
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2010-07-13, 09:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
My point was simply from an equally non-optimization point of view.
Sure, bring out 500-1000 damage fighters, and I'll bring out Incantatrix death-machine wizards.
From the most basic and simplistic point of view, the difference is already apparent.
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2010-07-13, 10:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
For some reason, in 3.0 and even into early 3.5, I think Wizards of the Coast feared the power of the all-mighty Full Base Attack Bonus. You can almost hear them quivering in their collective huddled fear in the Player's Handbook and Complete Warrior. "He has a full BAB! And a d10 HD! He's got lots of HP, and a high chance of hitting! We can't give him skill points! That's what the rogue does! What's that? Spells and full BAB? Are you insane? He has a full BAB! It's bad enough we're giving the paladin those few spells, and I was personally against giving him free Remove Diseases X times per week!"
At the same time, they underestimated the power of spells. I think the druid got all of those fun toys like an animal companion and wild shape because they weren't allowed to have metal armor! And they had limited weapon selection! If they can't wear full plate, then we've got to give them something to compensate... I KNOW! A FREE GIANT BEAR! AND THE POWER TO TURN INTO A GIANT BEAR!
Nobody wants to play the bandaid box, so you could see WotC tossing the Cleric some shiny goodies, like a d8 HD, 3/4 BAB, and access to heavy armor. Never mind that the cleric spell list alone makes them easily one of the most powerful classes, but they expected people to prepare cure spells, despite the fact that there is a built-in mechanic to avoid doing this.
By a similar token, the wizard was 'balanced' with 1d4 HD, poor BAB, and no armor proficiency. Nevermind that by level 7+ or so, HP means increasingly less, AC loses significance, and wizards don't even need to make attack rolls to win battles.
It seems that WotC was placing too much value on their core mechanic, that is, modified d20 roll vs. static DC, most typically Attack vs. AC. The Fighter and similar classes were built to excel at what was supposedly one of the most important rolls in the game: attack vs. AC.
Over time, WotC slowly realized that they had given the spell writers enough freedom to effectively make their core mechanic obsolete. Forget splat books, just read the chapter on spell descriptions. Summon some monsters. Turn lead into gold. Freeze time. Steal someone's soul. Steal someone's mind. Turn their corpse into your slave forever.
Perhaps the best example of this shift in ideology is the Duskblade and the Hexblade. The Hexblade, earlier in 3.5's life, was a full BAB class with arcane spellcasting. Oh, heinous union! Oh, abuse potential. Thus, they give it laughable casting, crappy abilities, and light armor, believing it balanced when the core cleric is already making a mockery of the Fighter with core spells alone.
Then, later in 3.5's life, the Duskblade. Full BAB. Better casting. Heavier armor. A cool spell-channeling mechanic. Even a decent class skill selection. They learned.
The same occurred with Tome of Battle, and even to a certain extent with Tome of Magic (foreshadowed by Expanded Psionic Handbook). Eliminate the core casters, replace them with ToM 'casters,' and suddenly the gap between melee and 'magic' has closed significantly. (unfortunately, the way they designed monsters is such that without core casters or their close relatives, you're basically doomed)
Thus, the appeal of E6 to some. I personally enjoy the reward of rules mastery that vancian magic provides; a knowledgeable group with a good DM can create an interesting, strategic game of edge-of-your-seat magical rocket tag. However, for the poor fighter, he'll never really be able to partake in that game, except as a mannequin upon which to place buffs. Even ToB will never reach that next level, and that's just the way it is.
Blame WotC, blame the spell writers, blame Jack Vance, blame Vecna, blame Canada, blame whoever you want. Realistically, you can probably blame a mixture of ignorance and poor communication between the writers, but they had to salvage what they had created in what ways they could. It would seem 3.5's philosophy wasn't to fix what was broken, but rather just add more potential for insanity. This has made a titanic, bloated, ponderous, preposterous, ridiculous game.
And yet, when you kill five half-white dragon wyverns in one round with your wizard/warmage/ultimate magus... well, you just can't do that with many RPG systems. In most games, you can improve your numbers, stats, modifiers, or dice pools, but with 3.5... there's always that possibility that you'll get high enough level to become a friggin' god. And I think it's that possibility that makes me addicted to the system. It's that promise of stupid, ridiculous power... in an imaginary, pen and paper game.Last edited by CockroachTeaParty; 2010-07-13 at 10:08 PM.
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2010-07-13, 10:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
I just published my first novella, Lúnasa Days, a modern fantasy with a subtle, uncertain magic.
You can grab it on Kindle or paperback.
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2010-07-13, 10:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
*hoards the cookies*
These cookies are MINE! MINE YOU F****** *** ****!!
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I always ask a big question on the League thread right before bedtime so I have something to read while trying to wake up.
Responses of any sort are wonderful.
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2010-07-13, 11:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Almost every class has problems with somebody that teleports. If you face somebody thats flying you throw a weapon aptitudes boomerants at them.
If get solid fog dropped on you you Use your blink shirt to get out. Against untouchable AC you throw oil or acid on it, with negotiations with rival nations use lasting intimidate on various higher ups. And when you face something that hits so hard you can't face it directly you throw boomerangs at it.
Finding an invisible person you make pact with a partially real being giving you see invisibility. For traps you take the trainee feat from DMG2 and bind theft gloves.
The main problem is that its very hard to get all of these, I think it involves selling your soul, flaws, and worshiping an elder evil, and meticulaously choosing feats, skills, ACFs, and arranging stats. Spending hours to make sure you have every thing covered that you can covered.
With the Tier 1-3 classes use a bit of common sense and you will be fine.
Jack B quick is very much a two weapon build.
Not sure what you mean by one weapon, but a two-hander is one weapon usually.
Sword and Board works, better as just Board. Various shield daze feats make it useful. Spring Attack works with Lockdown.
Using Prestige classes don't count. The right answer is Gate, always going first, armies of undead, double actions a round, and eleventy fifty Explosive runes with dispel magic, omnisciences, and
Fred over there. He's kind of like only the party's fighter only he's free and I don't care about him. He's also a giant at higher levels, or when I want him to be, also I have the easy button to any problem we could come against.
I also have to reiterate what other people have said that wizards don't know the game that they made. I'd bet that I could run a party of 4-5 fighters through just about any adventure published by Wizards, even with them being as weak as they are.Last edited by Lans; 2010-07-13 at 11:50 PM.
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2010-07-14, 12:12 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
As much as I think we can all (or at least most of us) agree that fighters are crap in most campaigns, has anyone ever played in a campaign where there wasn't one in the party, if only as a meat shield? I'm sure there are better classes that can still serve as a mobile HP buffer, but is it reasonable to expect a party to survive long enough for the casters to become omnipotent without said flank of beefsteak to get them there?
Also, as I noted in another thread, I think fighters (and other pure melee types in general) become more useful when you play the game in the style it was originally intended to be played: as a dungeon crawl. The limitation on most casters is that they have a limited amount of spells. Sooner or later, they will run out. Fighters, on the other hand, never run out of hits. In a sufficiently long dungeon crawl, a mage will have to conserve his spells or risk having nothing left by the time the party reaches the dragon's chamber. This circumstantial limitation changes things such that fighters and other melee types with unlimited ability to deal HP damage take the front lines, with the wizards and sorcerers holding their powerful spells in reserve for situations which truly call for their use.
For both good and bad reasons, most campaigns don't tend to feature too many labyrinthine dungeons anymore. You tend to have at best about 3-5 encounters a day, not all of which call for fighting. But even if they all do, a 10th-level sorcerer or wizard has more than enough spells to get them through the day, with plenty of room to spare.
Fighters were made for a different game setting, in my opinion. And that setting has (perhaps sadly) gone the way of the dragon for the most part.Last edited by Tedesche; 2010-07-14 at 12:12 AM.
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2010-07-14, 12:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
Wizards doesn't publish adventures, so you are technically correct.
You would also be correct in that you could run 4-5 fighters, but I think you would quickly find them dead in some modules. Care to take the challenge?
I don't think I've ever played in a game with a Fighter. Maybe two levels on the way to something else. But no, I've played many a game without a fighter, and many a game without any big HP buffers either. It's very reasonable to expect a party to survive. If for example they are Druid, Wizard, Rogue/Beguiler, Wizard/Druid/Other Caster type, then they can be expected to survive just fine.Last edited by Malakar; 2010-07-14 at 12:30 AM.
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2010-07-14, 01:02 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
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Re: A honest question about the Fighter?
One of the reasons I love 4e is how they fixed this problem (well mostly). You have your different roles and each does their own thing pretty fricken well with some minor exceptions (avengers and shamans *glares at them*).
A defender such as a fighter will have just as much value as a controller such as a wizard.I have to give Paizo credit...
They took an established work and said they fixed it but didn't actually fix it and yet still made money off from it.
How can you beat that?