"Best" 4E classes (NOT strongest)

[Orion]

Suppose I was roped into running a 4e game, or was considering getting a friend with no GMing experience to run 4e cause it's easy. What classes or builds would make the best game experience? I am open to using as-printed material or post-errata material, preferring as-printed.

Most Important:

A: The class does not fail at life. My defining abilities should not fail or whiff most of the time. I should be able to stay on the to-hit RNG. I am not so weak that team monster wins.

B: The class does not trivialize team monster. No clerics that outheal entire encounters, no rangers that one-shot elites, no orbizards that perma-stun. For godsake no immortality loops, permastuns, or infinite actions.

C: The class is cool. I should have several abilities that are not number maniulation and make me feel different. I'm thinking the Beastmaster's pet, the Battlemind's "round 0" actions, the Warlord's action granting, and the Feylock's teleport.

Secondary Concerns:

D: Single-class characters are preferred. Builds viable in heroic are preferred.

E: Race/Class combos that feel reasonable are preferred

F: Having melee and ranged options is preferred.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Use any the Essentials classes except the Hexblade. Seriously. They do everything you want. They don't do anything particularly impressive or cheesetastic, but it's hard to make them fuck up--which is not the case for most of the core classes, even overpowered ones like the Wizard.

You want something like a Warpriest, Mage, Sentinel, Knight, and Cavalier. They get 'cool' abilities (YMMV), perform reasonably well compared to their core counterparts, don't get any game-breaking abilities, are viable in heroic, don't need much dumpster-diving, and have reasonable race/class combos because they're slightly less MAD than the core classes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Since you also want to DM in the heroic tier apparently, here's some advice from someone who has run a few games.

A) Have monsters surrender or flee. Seriously, I don't know why so many DMs have almost every monster fight to the death.

B) Make at least two characters in the party be leaders. At low levels, it's really hard for just one leader to keep the party healthy. A second leader makes things much easier.

C) Discourage people from being controllers.

D) Don't gang-bang the defender. Even before the huge monster errata to reduce the padded sumo, if a defender (there's usually only one to a party) actually successfully drew the attention of four monsters they'd be fucked pretty quick. This changes later on when PCs have enough tools and durability to survive this level of hate, but definitely not in heroic tier. Have some monsters slip past the defender to spread out the hate.

E) Encourage people to be mostly melee. This takes a lot of pressure off of the frontliners. See point D. I have had games where over half of the characters were ranged specialists and there were like two frontliners. The results are not pretty.

F) Be extra-generous in the magical item payout. 4E hands out magical items at too slow of a pace in the low levels. You should seriously be doubling the payout players get until about level 6 or 7.

G) Tell skill challenges to go fuck themselves. If you actually do want to do skill challenges, look on the boards for suggestions to make them less stupid, but do not run them the way the game tells you to.

H) Keep the workdays short. Seriously, until players get to level 9, having more than two encounters in a day is just cruel. Until they get to level 6, having more than one encounter in a day will quickly make players bored. Players will get bored of Five Moves of Doom pretty damn quick.

I) Slather on the minions. Especially if you're using Monster Manual I minions, you can seriously throw out six of them per one 'regular' monster you were originally planning on using. It makes the players feel awesome when they take out 20 monsters in one encounter, even if only four of them weren't pushovers.

[Username17]

Going full ranged works as well as putting 4 guys on the front lines. The key is that ranged and melee synergize incredibly poorly, so you should make the PCs pick a schtick and go with it.

Personally, I find ranged combat less incredibly boring than melee, since at least I have to move every round. But YMMV.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

For some reason though, a lot of people find ranged combat less sexy than HULK SMASH. Also because there's no such thing as a ranged defender and people are a lot more insistent on there being defenders in the parties than controllers, I've never seen an all-ranged team. I've seen plenty of all-melee teams though.

[Username17]

For some reason though, a lot of people find ranged combat less sexy than HULK SMASH. Also because there's no such thing as a ranged defender and people are a lot more insistent on there being defenders in the parties than controllers, I've never seen an all-ranged team. I've seen plenty of all-melee teams though.

Defenders are a lot more boring than controllers. "Knights of the Round" totally works, put five Paladins on the front lines and grind away, but it's even more boring than usual 4e D&D. The "all bow" party is a lot more entertaining, even if it does have a Seeker in it.

-Username17

[Dominicius]

For some reason though, a lot of people find ranged combat less sexy than HULK SMASH. Also because there's no such thing as a ranged defender and people are a lot more insistent on there being defenders in the parties than controllers, I've never seen an all-ranged team. I've seen plenty of all-melee teams though.

Think of it this way, how many cool maneuver (realistic and un-realistic) can you come up with for the sword? Now, how many can you come up with for the bow?

Honestly, for the bow to be cool it would need to step slightly into sword territory and be usable as a melee weapon. Swords in fantasy already fire colored shockwaves as ranged attacks but bows still almost never get used in melee.

[Koumei]

Fire one arrow at one guy
Fire many arrows at a group
Fire a rain of arrows at one guy
Fire one arrow through several guys as a skewer
Use the bowstring to garotte someone/saw their head off
Launch yourself from the bow to slam into foes (thanks Disgaea!)
Fire comets out, possibly dragging foes through space after them, possibly just exploding on impact
Somehow extend the bowstring as a snare or noose (thanks Disgaea!)

There are heaps of fantasy tricks for bows

[Username17]

This is 4th edition, you heave:

• Fire arrow and have it explode into a cloud of bees.
• Fire arrow into the ground and have an earthquake knock everyone over.
• Fire arrow into the sky, signalling an avenging angel to come down and smite your foes.
• Fire arrow into your enemies with such precision that your allies gain morale and their wounds heal.
• Fire arrow into an opponent knocking them into a hell dimension made from your own fever induced nightmares.
• Fire arrow that breaks up into a rope that ties your opponent's legs together.
• Fire an arrow into someone that melts their bones and turns them into an empty sack of wailing skin.

And so on. Sky is the fucking limit. Characters can just do Green Arrow shit or whatever for no reason. It's just going to do 2[W]+Stat and Immobilize until the end of your next turn anyway.

-Username17

[Doom]

I have to disagree with the 'two leaders' thing at low level. Healing is brutally excessive in 4e, and part of what makes combat so bloody trivial is the preponderance of healing. Part of what makes combat drag is too many leaders healing everyone up, instead of bashing the monsters.

The classes that tend to need healing (I'm looking at you, melee Rogue and melee Ranger) run out of surges too soon, making the healing abilities pointless.

I'd ban those two class designs, and just encourage someone with a high dex class to just take "thievery"....it's sad that this single skill is the only thing that makes a character a "thief" in the D&D sense.

Yes, the lack of a second healer means sometimes combats might be dangerous...but hey, that beats "combats never dangerous".

[Neurosis]

Since you also want to DM in the heroic tier apparently, here's some advice from someone who has run a few games.

A) Have monsters surrender or flee. Seriously, I don't know why so many DMs have almost every monster fight to the death.

B) Make at least two characters in the party be leaders. At low levels, it's really hard for just one leader to keep the party healthy. A second leader makes things much easier.

C) Discourage people from being controllers.

D) Don't gang-bang the defender. Even before the huge monster errata to reduce the padded sumo, if a defender (there's usually only one to a party) actually successfully drew the attention of four monsters they'd be fucked pretty quick. This changes later on when PCs have enough tools and durability to survive this level of hate, but definitely not in heroic tier. Have some monsters slip past the defender to spread out the hate.

E) Encourage people to be mostly melee. This takes a lot of pressure off of the frontliners. See point D. I have had games where over half of the characters were ranged specialists and there were like two frontliners. The results are not pretty.

F) Be extra-generous in the magical item payout. 4E hands out magical items at too slow of a pace in the low levels. You should seriously be doubling the payout players get until about level 6 or 7.

G) Tell skill challenges to go fuck themselves. If you actually do want to do skill challenges, look on the boards for suggestions to make them less stupid, but do not run them the way the game tells you to.

H) Keep the workdays short. Seriously, until players get to level 9, having more than two encounters in a day is just cruel. Until they get to level 6, having more than one encounter in a day will quickly make players bored. Players will get bored of Five Moves of Doom pretty damn quick.

I) Slather on the minions. Especially if you're using Monster Manual I minions, you can seriously throw out six of them per one 'regular' monster you were originally planning on using. It makes the players feel awesome when they take out 20 monsters in one encounter, even if only four of them weren't pushovers.

From my own experience DMing 4E a while back, this is universally good advice.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I have to disagree with the 'two leaders' thing at low level. Healing is brutally excessive in 4e, and part of what makes combat so bloody trivial is the preponderance of healing. Part of what makes combat drag is too many leaders healing everyone up, instead of bashing the monsters.

At low levels the damage gap is so low that it doesn't really affect the length of combat. Replacing two of, say, level 5 warlords with two rangers will usually just make the combat go by a round sooner. Seriously. The two rangers will contribute about 5-12 more DPR than their warlord or cleric buddies, depending on how well they're built.

And unless you want to hear 'I Reaping Strike!' it for four rounds in a row, you should keep the workdays short anyway--which takes care of the glass cannon problem, too. If you feel that combat is too easy you can ramp up the difficulty, but my experience is that new players do stupid things like save up their encounter attack powers for the end of combat and use standard actions to burn second wind and forget about action points.

[Doom]

But, "one round slower" is a GOOD thing.

My girlfriend could take a shower between her turn on one round, and the next. Taking one round off is a very worthy goal.

[ScottS]

G) Tell skill challenges to go fuck themselves. If you actually do want to do skill challenges, look on the boards for suggestions to make them less stupid, but do not run them the way the game tells you to.

My reading of the current rules is that they've pretty much said fuck off to their own design anyway (SCs are still in the RC and similar to the original version, but now you literally "can't fail" and get the full XP regardless of the result of the challenge; essentially the party is being paid to wank with d20s "engage in dice-assisted narrative").

[TheFlatline]

Going full ranged works as well as putting 4 guys on the front lines. The key is that ranged and melee synergize incredibly poorly, so you should make the PCs pick a schtick and go with it.

Personally, I find ranged combat less incredibly boring than melee, since at least I have to move every round. But YMMV.

-Username17

I can't speak for 4th ed (I avoid it these days like the plague) but in 3rd ed ranged and melee sucked working together because you had to blow two feats to make firing into melee anything other than a giant suck-fest, which limits your options significantly.

If they gave bow users at 1st or 3rd level the equivalent of precise shot as a character ability, they aren't too bad working together. Every melee rogue I saw was either situational (shit I can flank this round, and I have a rapier. Why not do some sneak attack damage?), built strictly towards his schtick, or sucked.

[Username17]

By "melee" and "ranged" I don't just mean "swords and bows", I mean swords and spells. Casting spells into melee is counter-synergistic, that is not a joke.

The way it works is that your work day is limited by your "healing surges", which is a maximum amount of healing you can use in a day. Like a Cleric's spell reserve in 2nd edition. But your healing surges are divided up per character, so when one of the characters runs out of healing, the party has to stop.

What this means is that any damage that team monster ever does to the character who is going to run out of healing surges second has essentially no meaning at all. This means that when the wizard hits an enemy at range with a damaging slow effect such that it can't get any attacks off this round, this is an equivalent state to the monster attacking the character in melee with the second least daily healing. So the party filled with slows and bows maintains its healing reserves by keeping enemies out of melee. The melee party maintains its healing reserves by getting melee monsters to split fire. These two strategies do not synergize. At all.

Yeah, they seriously made a game where having a wizard cast spells at enemies the fighter is tying up in melee is worse than either having two fighters split the monsters or having two wizards cast spells at enemies on a grassy field.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Wasn't this the system where they were banging on about "No longer is 4 Wizards the best combination, now you really want/need a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Wizard and they act all synergistic!" or am I off the mark? I know they dance themselves stupid* over the 4 roles, roles which are largely meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they specifically said the game would be way more awesome if you split the party into totally different things.

*not hard, it was their starting point after all

[Username17]

Wasn't this the system where they were banging on about "No longer is 4 Wizards the best combination, now you really want/need a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Wizard and they act all synergistic!" or am I off the mark? I know they dance themselves stupid* over the 4 roles, roles which are largely meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they specifically said the game would be way more awesome if you split the party into totally different things.

*not hard, it was their starting point after all

Yes. The claim was that you were better off with one defender, one leader, one controller, and two strikers. Ad so such as they tested the game at all (fairly minimal since they failed to notice that the entire noncombat minigame didn't work at all), they explicitly tested it with those ratios. Noone apparently thought it necessary to even do thought experiments as to whether you might be better off with two leaders and three strikers or five defenders, or whatever (interesting note: you are).

But the whole melee/ranged thing is a whole different issue. The game, such as it is about anything, is basically about preventing enemies from attacking or spreading enemy attacks out. Because of the way healing is individually rationed as your only meaningful daily limit, those two are pretty much equivalent. The only thing that matters is how much hate gets to whatever character has the worst hate to healing ratio. So putting a melee dude into a ranged party is a shitty thing to do, because you funnel a lot of hate to yourself and reduce the amount of adventuring the party ca do. Bringing an archer into a melee party is also a shitty thing to do, because by not taking your share of the hate, you are running through the healing on th weakest link on the front lines faster.

Now don't get me wrong: the roles also counter synergize. Putting a melee rogue into a party of Fighters is stupid, because you'll run out of healing before the rest of the team does and hold them back all the time. Putting a Fighter into a party of melee Rogues is also stupid, because you hand out damage slower than the rest of the team and thus run through more healing on the weakest link per fight than if you'd been another striker.

Even at the conceptual level, there's no real synergy there.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Wasn't this the system where they were banging on about "No longer is 4 Wizards the best combination, now you really want/need a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Wizard and they act all synergistic!" or am I off the mark? I know they dance themselves stupid* over the 4 roles, roles which are largely meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they specifically said the game would be way more awesome if you split the party into totally different things.

*not hard, it was their starting point after all

Yes. The claim was that you were better off with one defender, one leader, one controller, and two strikers. Ad so such as they tested the game at all (fairly minimal since they failed to notice that the entire noncombat minigame didn't work at all), they explicitly tested it with those ratios. Noone apparently thought it necessary to even do thought experiments as to whether you might be better off with two leaders and three strikers or five defenders, or whatever (interesting note: you are).

But the whole melee/ranged thing is a whole different issue. The game, such as it is about anything, is basically about preventing enemies from attacking or spreading enemy attacks out. Because of the way healing is individually rationed as your only meaningful daily limit, those two are pretty much equivalent. The only thing that matters is how much hate gets to whatever character has the worst hate to healing ratio. So putting a melee dude into a ranged party is a shitty thing to do, because you funnel a lot of hate to yourself and reduce the amount of adventuring the party ca do. Bringing an archer into a melee party is also a shitty thing to do, because by not taking your share of the hate, you are running through the healing on th weakest link on the front lines faster.

Now don't get me wrong: the roles also counter synergize. Putting a melee rogue into a party of Fighters is stupid, because you'll run out of healing before the rest of the team does and hold them back all the time. Putting a Fighter into a party of melee Rogues is also stupid, because you hand out damage slower than the rest of the team and thus run through more healing on the weakest link per fight than if you'd been another striker.

Even at the conceptual level, there's no real synergy there.

-Username17

Ahhhhh... I see.

And you're dead to rights. Instead of the workday being built around whoever runs out of spells first (the mage or the cleric), you're now only as effective as the weakest healing surge member of your party.

Would something as simple as some class/ability that lets you shuffle around healing surges go towards countering that? That would seem to be a perfect role for the leader (sort of a controller for the party I guess in 4th ed parlance). It seems like simply giving the boffer characters more healing surges or some way to bypass the healing circuit or prevent damage provides it's own issues with party balance. More healing surges would throw party balance out the window if you went melee heavy, bypassing the healing circuit defeats the purpose, and damage prevention/reduction needs to scale at the rate that monster damage scales or else it quickly becomes useless (in 3.x the 5 points of damage reduction a barbarian-20 had was fucking pointless when you were tossing 50+ points of damage in a *small* attack).

[Username17]

Interestingly, the Paladin is anemic in damage output, but does have the ability to share his very large (and almost never used) number of healing surges with the rest of the party. Also there are Cleric powers that allow you to bypass the need for healing surges entirely. As far as I know, no one ever errataed Astral Seal to not break the game.

The five man "Knights of the Round" party, where everyone plays a Paladin and you have to run the entire party out of healing surges before they even slow down, is a workable degenerate party.

But the bottom line is that the numbers aren't really that good at anything. Taking pretty much anything and cranking it up to 11 will either b broken or worthless.

-Username17

[DragonChild]

The artificer can also use healing surges from others to power his heals. End result? Healing surges no longer even matter, because a character with a lot of them can power up a character with a few, and you'll NEVER eat through the entire party's pool of healing surges.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This has been going on for awhile. The artificer is just the easiest example, but you could get the same effect with the ritual Comrade's Succor, which lets you spread healing surges around anyway and it's available in mid-heroic tier. And of course even if you don't buy into Astral Surge / Recovery Strike tjeese (which honestly isn't that bad nowadays with new monster damage and thing getting errata'd such that in paragon Astral Surge will only heal about 12 hit points a strike when ladelled up), there are a lot of game effects which will give disproportionate healing. The cleric has the lion's share of them, which means that even the STR-cleric -- which otherwise has no reason to exist after the Righteous Brand and healing set items nerf -- can effectively double a party's workday at paragon tier and beyond if they ration their healing effects properly.

Really, the idea of in-combat healing being able to be done as more than a once or twice thing AND assymmetrically eating at a party resource was a horrible idea. The only time it vaguely works as a limiting factor is in heroic tier and if you don't have an artificer.