D&D 4e: The Avenger
I went to the PH2 release World Wide Game Day yesterday before VegFest, and .
The Avenger is billed as a Divine Striker, added in the just-released Player's Handbook 2. There is some expectation that there will be some Avenger-related material in next month's Divine Power, but the Wizard's pipelines are long enough that there's no way for feedback from this month's release to have any effect on what's in next month's book, so I don't expect any huge shifts in the class for a few months at least (except that a broken bit of Epic Destiny might get errata). In other words, what we see now is mostly what we get for the next several months.
As a Striker, the primary purpose of the character is to `lay down the hurt'. Most striker classes have some source of extra damage on top of a base amount that pretty much any character can choose to take if they want -- in fact, a common complaint about early 4e releases was that all the strikers seemed very similar, whether you called it `Sneak Attack' or ``Hunter's Quarry'' or ``Warlock's Curse'' the mechanics were all very similar. The Strikers in PH2 don't follow this pattern, which is probably a good thing. As a Divine character, the Avenger has some religious flavor , including the perpetually troublesome Channel Divinity and Holy Symbol rules (in brief: Channel Divinity options are tremendously uneven, and Holy Symbols are painfully neutered compared to nearly everything else). The Divine options in the Player's Handbook were (IMO) most in need of additional help (EDIT: after the Wizard), and PH2 does help by adding a Divine Striker and Controller option (note: Invoker seems awesome so far).
The deal with the Avenger is this: the extra damage sources are tremendously situational, and are what I call Consolation Prizes -- you get extra damage potential if your opponents do or don't do specific things, but these things are pretty easy for them to do/not do. Your power selections are mostly baseline for damage; in other words, your extra damage isn't included in the powers ala Barbarian. Compared to basically any other striker (and modulo some problems with specific Epic Destinies) you'll typically be doing considerably less damage.
What you *do* get, though, is a completely different take on the Striker, and one that I imagine will be attractive to many people. Your signature ability allows you to pick a particular enemy to fight in a manner similar to a defender's Mark, and if you fight just that guy, your attack resolution mechanic turn into `rolls twice and choose'. This means that you will miss much less often, and crit roughly twice as often. If your enemy tries to get away from you, or if his allies try to gang up on you, your damage output goes up (this is your bonus damage source) -- but you're built with the idea of going toe-to-toe with one enemy, so don't expect this often. To go with this, you have very high hit points and defenses, so you can stand to keep your chosen opponent focused on you. Your powers are mostly about hitting an opponent and keeping it from escaping -- massive mobility, shifting, teleporting, extra movement before and after attacks, etc.
So, the Avenger is built to do ~baseline damage to a single target while keeping that target focused on the Avenger, and has defenses and hit points to allow it to stand up to this focused attention.
For those of you who don't spend too much time analyzing D&D, that previous sentence is a description of the role called the Defender, not the Striker. If someone were to simply apply s/Wisdom/Strength/g to the class description, it would instantly become the class that Strength-based Paladins thought they were signing up for (although it really should have a few more Healing Surges also.
There are a few factors to consider still, of course. The pregen characters for these events are usually built following a strategy of `this looks neat' rather than `this looks effective'. I only saw one of the two types of Avengers. The entire party for the WWGD adventure was more or less flat, seemingly designed to keep all the characters close together on damage (which makes sense as a promotional technique). My particular run of the adventure was basically missing a solid Defender. And, let me be clear, the class was fun to play, and has a lot of promise. I just don't see how it came to be classified as a Striker.
The Avenger is billed as a Divine Striker, added in the just-released Player's Handbook 2. There is some expectation that there will be some Avenger-related material in next month's Divine Power, but the Wizard's pipelines are long enough that there's no way for feedback from this month's release to have any effect on what's in next month's book, so I don't expect any huge shifts in the class for a few months at least (except that a broken bit of Epic Destiny might get errata). In other words, what we see now is mostly what we get for the next several months.
As a Striker, the primary purpose of the character is to `lay down the hurt'. Most striker classes have some source of extra damage on top of a base amount that pretty much any character can choose to take if they want -- in fact, a common complaint about early 4e releases was that all the strikers seemed very similar, whether you called it `Sneak Attack' or ``Hunter's Quarry'' or ``Warlock's Curse'' the mechanics were all very similar. The Strikers in PH2 don't follow this pattern, which is probably a good thing. As a Divine character, the Avenger has some religious flavor , including the perpetually troublesome Channel Divinity and Holy Symbol rules (in brief: Channel Divinity options are tremendously uneven, and Holy Symbols are painfully neutered compared to nearly everything else). The Divine options in the Player's Handbook were (IMO) most in need of additional help (EDIT: after the Wizard), and PH2 does help by adding a Divine Striker and Controller option (note: Invoker seems awesome so far).
The deal with the Avenger is this: the extra damage sources are tremendously situational, and are what I call Consolation Prizes -- you get extra damage potential if your opponents do or don't do specific things, but these things are pretty easy for them to do/not do. Your power selections are mostly baseline for damage; in other words, your extra damage isn't included in the powers ala Barbarian. Compared to basically any other striker (and modulo some problems with specific Epic Destinies) you'll typically be doing considerably less damage.
What you *do* get, though, is a completely different take on the Striker, and one that I imagine will be attractive to many people. Your signature ability allows you to pick a particular enemy to fight in a manner similar to a defender's Mark, and if you fight just that guy, your attack resolution mechanic turn into `rolls twice and choose'. This means that you will miss much less often, and crit roughly twice as often. If your enemy tries to get away from you, or if his allies try to gang up on you, your damage output goes up (this is your bonus damage source) -- but you're built with the idea of going toe-to-toe with one enemy, so don't expect this often. To go with this, you have very high hit points and defenses, so you can stand to keep your chosen opponent focused on you. Your powers are mostly about hitting an opponent and keeping it from escaping -- massive mobility, shifting, teleporting, extra movement before and after attacks, etc.
So, the Avenger is built to do ~baseline damage to a single target while keeping that target focused on the Avenger, and has defenses and hit points to allow it to stand up to this focused attention.
For those of you who don't spend too much time analyzing D&D, that previous sentence is a description of the role called the Defender, not the Striker. If someone were to simply apply s/Wisdom/Strength/g to the class description, it would instantly become the class that Strength-based Paladins thought they were signing up for (although it really should have a few more Healing Surges also.
There are a few factors to consider still, of course. The pregen characters for these events are usually built following a strategy of `this looks neat' rather than `this looks effective'. I only saw one of the two types of Avengers. The entire party for the WWGD adventure was more or less flat, seemingly designed to keep all the characters close together on damage (which makes sense as a promotional technique). My particular run of the adventure was basically missing a solid Defender. And, let me be clear, the class was fun to play, and has a lot of promise. I just don't see how it came to be classified as a Striker.