PHB Fighter or Essentials Fighter?

Weaponmaster? Slayer, or Knight? Which fighter is your favorite? Or if neither of them are your favorite tell me what you favorite fighter class would be.

I personally would have liked to have seen a good mix between the Weaponmaster and Slayer. I really liked the idea of stances but instead on every fighter getting the generic Power Strike, I would have rather seen it have other encounter powers to use as well. Dailies and fighters still don't make much sense to me. They make more sense that Wizards with Encounters but still not much. I would have also like to have seen more Fighter talents and not have them restricted to the different fighter sub-classes. Perhaps even a make your own Fighter Talent option where you got choose which armors, weapons, and fighting styles your fighter will be good with.

Based on use, the groups I'm in overwhelmingly prefer the fighter (we don't even call it a weaponmaster, because none of the fighters in our games are even focused on particular weapons... they're battle-ragers and brawlers... for us its Fighter, Knight and Slayer... indeed, we use all the original names for all the classes because its NOT actually confusing to know which is which when you call a wizard a wizard, a mage a mage, a cleric a cleric and a warpriest a warpriest).

Indeed, the only Knight and Slayer we've ever used were at small tables (two to three players) when we wanted simple characters to round out a party.

That said, we HAVE house-ruled that fighters can take "Defender Aura/Battle Guardian" in place of the standard fighter marking mechanic and every last fighter has chosen to do so.

We also allow fighters to take any of the at-will stances in place of the usual at-will attacks if they wish, but only one of the fighters has bothered to do so, and that was a human who took Battle Wrath more to boost the damage on his ranged basic attack while closing (or against flyers) than for using it in melee (largely because they have much better encounter/daily stances to use once the melee slugfest starts).

The overall effect is pretty much a best of both worlds where they get the at-will stances (if they want) and the defender aura (if they want), but still get regular encounter and daily powers. In exchange they only lose out on plate armor proficiency and a free shield finesse.

I definitely prefer the options of the PHB Weaponmaster fighter.

Personally, the weaponmaster is the only fighter I'd ever play in 4e. But the fighter player in the group I DM for started out with a weaponmaster, decided it wasn't for him, changed to a knight as soon as Essentials came out, and was much happier with it. The simpler and more intuitive way the knight's aura works, as well as the use of stance-modified MBAs rather than the resource management of daily and encounter powers, just felt more like a fighter to him, and that 'feeling right' and relative mechanical simplicity translated into better tactics and therefore a far more effective character in actual play.

Chris24601 wrote:

That said, we HAVE house-ruled that fighters can take "Defender Aura/Battle Guardian" in place of the standard fighter marking mechanic and every last fighter has chosen to do so.

I like this idea!

My one complaint with the classic 4e fighter is the whole Combat Superiority vs. Combat Challenge thing. Somehow it's usually the players who don't care about rule details like 'what's the difference between opportunity and immediate actions?' who end up playing fighters, and I honestly have a hard time keeping the fighter's two defender abilities straight. So they both end up becoming opportunity actions. Which is alright I guess, but it niggles at my conscience all the same.

But at the end of the day, I much prefer classic fighters to retro fighters. Bring on the options!

Felorn Gloryaxe wrote:

Dailies and fighters still don't make much sense to me.

I still scratch my head when I hear this comment. I mean if daily moves are an issue, aren't encounter moves an issue for the same reason? They both violate our hum-drum everyday reality of what people can do.  

I chalk them both up to "Martial doesn't mean muggle. There's some kind of magic involved!"

It really all a matter of taste. I can get the idea of a fighter only be able to pull off a move once against a group of enemies but not being able to only pull one off and not again for the rest of the day. But I still use dailies. They aren't that big of a deal. I was think of using 13th Age's Recharge mechanic for them.

Oh! And welcome to the forum.

Fair enough, and thanks!

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

Chris24601 wrote:

That said, we HAVE house-ruled that fighters can take "Defender Aura/Battle Guardian" in place of the standard fighter marking mechanic and every last fighter has chosen to do so.

I like this idea!

Thanks. Our group's really started into home-brewing of late (now that the edition is done and basically abandoned officially it just feels like we have more permission to mess around in the guts to really make what we want out of it) and that's one of the first things we came up with (the second was restoring magic missile to its pre-errata PHB1 state).

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My one complaint with the classic 4e fighter is the whole Combat Superiority vs. Combat Challenge thing.

Same problem here. Actually, we've had a bear of a time with off-turn triggered actions in general (free actions during our turns haven't been a problem though) and unless its an at-will trigger that comes up practically every turn half the time we won't even remember we've got a triggered power that will help us out until our turn rolls around again. It's so bad we've even home-brewed swapping out built-in off-turn encounter/daily trigger-powers (ex. the 8th level Shield Block power on a Knight) for another power of that type of its level or less (ex. Shield Block for a level 6 fighter utility power) in a couple of our games.

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But at the end of the day, I much prefer classic fighters to retro fighters. Bring on the options!

I generally agree, though we've gotten pretty good use of knights, slayers, thieves, scouts, elementalists and to a lesser extent, hunters and skalds (built with only basic attack modifying at-wills and the aura buffing dailies from HotFW) as companion characters in smaller games.

For example, in my Monday game we only have three players with an Artificer, an Invoker and a Fighter as primary characters and a Scout, a Thief and a Slayer as companion characters. Since all we have to do for the companions is basically roll a basic attack and then apply a power strike/back stab if needed it doesn't take too much longer than if it were just three PC's, but it lets us fight larger and more interesting battles because we've got the three simple strikers to back the main PC's up.

That's where I've found that the simple build E-classes really shine.

The weaponmaster simply because we prefer the extra options even though it means fiddly bits.

I like having all archetypes with climactic ... cinematic abilities. Not seeing how the essentials fighter can really have that. I do indeed like the modelling of stances and strokes but not thinking the sacrifice is worth that.

Interestingly enough Next has the Warrior which is a crit fisher simpler fighter with big booms relegated to random chance not my cuppa tea but I was kind of hoping before essentials came out that critical hit enhancements would be the replacement they got for dailies.