The Seeker and other "forgotten" classes: How to help them?

D&D 4E appears to be, buy and large, the most balanced edition. There are no linear wizard-quadratic warrior issues. The difference between the top tier and the bottom is small, small enough to be negligible (especially in heroic). Nevertheless, there are some stinkers. For some, it's that they were badly built from the word go (Vampire, O-Assassin, Seeker) while for others the issue is more a horrible lack of support (Sentinel Druids, Runepriests).

In 3.5, there's a drive to "fix" what is broken. Seriously, just look at how many home-brew fixes there are for Monks, Fighters, and Paladins! In 4E, this seems to be less the case. For instance, I posted a homebrew Seeker fix with new powers and Paragon Paths to little attention here on the forums. I'll admit I'm partially posting here to get some extra eyes on my Homebrew, but this isn't my first project to get almost no attention and it struck me as curious. So, I was wondering, how do you deal with this in your games? Do you ignore and avoid these classes, using refluffing and/or hybrids to capture the flavor without the bad mechanics? Do you just roll these classes and deal with it, since the power difference isn't as vast as in 3.5? Do you try your own hand at simple home-brews and house rules to help these classes out? Why is home-brew so uncommon for 4E compared to 3.5E?

Well, Runepriest is lacking in variety but is considered a solid class. Seeker... My best guess is that for a lot of people (myself included) its concepts just don't do that much to start with, so there's little incentive to fix it.

You probably didn't get much attention on your homebrew because there's hardly any 4e homebrew and thus few 4e players frequent the homebrew forum. I know I don't.

The problem with homebrewing 4e is that you need so very many powers to make a class, or even a subclass, "complete" that it's just too much work for most people. In 3.x to make most a class you need 20 or so abilities at most, many or most of which can be cribbed from existing sources, whereas with 4e you need at least 2, preferably 4, powers per level in addition to class features, making a 4e class far more work to brew. As such, few people actually do it, which feeds back into the first problem.



As for the Seeker, the big problem with it is that it is supposed to be a controller, but effective control means actively eliminating potential options for enemies - "hard" control - rather than simply penalizing them if they take certain actions - "soft" control. The Seeker, by and large, has a lot of soft control but very little hard control, making it largely ineffective at its role. It's a reasonable fifth man, but a real controller would be better at that, too.

Just looking through the heroic-tier powers you brewed for the class there, I can't help but notice that you also don't give them an awful lot of hard control. Lots of minor extra damage, marks, defense penalties... Very little slow, prone, daze, or stun. It doesn't fix the fundamental problem with the class, though that could be done simply by giving the class new powers with appropriate effects.

Vampires were fixed: they made it a background instead of a class. It really made more sense that way. Vampires don't all use the same set of combat abilities, which is what a class is.

Seekers are most easily fixed by making them a ranger subclass (allowing rangers to take their powers and vice-versa), or forcing all seekers to hybrid with ranger. Now your striker can sacrifice a little nova power to get a couple small control effects as well, while still keeping the ranger striker feature: Twin Strike.

Assassins don't fit well with a group-oriented game like D&D, they never have. They were only included at all to quiet the fanbois. The people that wanted an assassin 'class' were drooling to play one, regardless of it's ability. Most other people wanted to play a group game, which assassins didn't fit into. For either group, there was no need to fix it.

I imagine that strong Seeker powers would be like this:

Tiger's Maw, Encounter 3

Insert Flavor Text Here

Target: One Enemy

WIS vs AC

1[W]+WIS damage, target is dazed, and every enemy within 2 tiles of target is slowed and knocked prone (includes target).

Or maybe like this:

Million Arrow Rain, Daily 9

Flavor Text goes here

Close Burst 5

Target: all enemies in burst

WIS vs AC

2[W]+WIS damage, enemy slides 2, is dazed and makes an attack against an enemy.

Both can be devastating but still have a rather Seeker feel to it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hawk7915

there are some stinkers. For some, it's that they were badly built from the word go (Vampire, O-Assassin, Seeker) while for others the issue is more a horrible lack of support (Sentinel Druids, Runepriests) ... So, I was wondering, how do you deal with this in your games? Do you ignore and avoid these classes, using refluffing and/or hybrids to capture the flavor without the bad mechanics?

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Yes, basically that.

The reason why these classes are neglected in the first place is because they don't respond to common fictional archetypes. There are lots of famous characters in fiction that are clearly The Paladin, or The Wizard, or the sneaky bastard rogue; and this is why they are popular (which both means that players want to play them, and designers want to design for them). On the other hand, there is basically nothing in fiction that is clearly an ardent or a seeker; people new to D&D have a clear concept of a fighter or a wizard, and would have no idea what on earth a battlemind is supposed to be. Therefore they don't attract players much, and don't attract designers much, and stay in the state where they are.

Fun fact: I've played LFR for years and kept track of the characters I've seen at all tables. That's quite a lot of data, and it confirms what I wrote above; i.e. the classes that players actually care about and play are basically all PHB1 classes, plus barbarian, bard, and swordmage. Everything else is exceedingly rare to see at the game table. I'm sure that WOTC has better statistics based on usage of their character builder (but obviously, the popular classes from 3.5 are those that appear in the 4E PHB, and the popular classes from 4E are those that appear in the 5E PHB).

I don't need to fix the battlemind because nobody wants to play a battlemind in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Hawk7915

D&D 4E appears to be, buy and large, the most balanced edition. There are no linear wizard-quadratic warrior issues. The difference between the top tier and the bottom is small, small enough to be negligible (especially in heroic). Nevertheless, there are some stinkers. For some, it's that they were badly built from the word go (Vampire, O-Assassin, Seeker) while for others the issue is more a horrible lack of support (Sentinel Druids, Runepriests).

In 3.5, there's a drive to "fix" what is broken. Seriously, just look at how many home-brew fixes there are for Monks, Fighters, and Paladins! In 4E, this seems to be less the case. For instance, I posted a homebrew Seeker fix with new powers and Paragon Paths to little attention here on the forums. I'll admit I'm partially posting here to get some extra eyes on my Homebrew, but this isn't my first project to get almost no attention and it struck me as curious. So, I was wondering, how do you deal with this in your games? Do you ignore and avoid these classes, using refluffing and/or hybrids to capture the flavor without the bad mechanics? Do you just roll these classes and deal with it, since the power difference isn't as vast as in 3.5? Do you try your own hand at simple home-brews and house rules to help these classes out? Why is home-brew so uncommon for 4E compared to 3.5E?

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It's worth noting that there are 2 ways to read O-Assassins to make them reasonably powerful as they advance in Paragon:

1) Read the two Flurry of Talons (E13) and Shadow Fire (E17) as up to 3 damage instances. They both roll 3 attack rolls, and you're supposed to "resolve them as one attack." The hit text reads like: "1[W] + Dexterity modifier fire damage if one of the attack rolls hits, 2[W] + Dexterity modifier fire damage if two hit, and 3[W] + Dexterity modifier fire damage if three hit", so it's possible to parse it as 3 separate instances (worth noting that there's an E1 that uses the same language but says "or" instead of "and" in the hit text).

2) Assassin's Shroud reads "This damage roll never benefits from bonuses to damage rolls, and is in addition to the attack’s damage, if any." If you read the latter half of the sentence as being a separate damage instance, it helps. Doubly so if you read the first half as only excluding things with the word "bonus," but not any other indicator such as a +. Both of these stretch the rules fairly heavily, but they're not totally out of all common sense, and they're helping a really weak class anyways.

Basically, reading it as a Brutal Barrage-thing is interesting.

I find weird that no one payed attention to my Homebrew, which I thought were solutions.

Still, I think I should write most of them down.

My assassin fix:

http://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=200548

Haven't really touched it substantively in more than a year and it probably needs some tweaking but the geist of it is a focus on stealth, mobility and deferred but high spike damage with a new base of powers and feats that plays to this theme.

I'm currently playing in a campaign with a seeker. She's considering changing characters because she cannot figure out how to make the character work.

I will forward your homebrew to the group's DM. As he puts it, the developers didn't eat their Wheaties when they make the Seeker.

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Originally Posted by archon_huskie

I'm currently playing in a campaign with a seeker. She's considering changing characters because she cannot figure out how to make the character work.

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It can be somewhat difficult for even extremely effective controllers to tell how effective they're being, because a controller's effectiveness is primarily in what the monsters aren't doing. It's fairly obvious if a striker is dealing lots of damage or if a leader is giving huge bonuses, but it's hard for players to see that the DM attacked a different target than they would have preferred to due to the controller's actions.

Of course, good DMs should at least occasionally say outright, "Aw man, I would've [X] if this thing wasn't [condition], now I have to [Y] instead." It helps both controllers and defenders feel more useful by making it clear what it is those roles are accomplishing.

That said, a Seeker kind of needs effects on their powers that they just don't have access to in order to be a decent controller, so even if your DM is doing something like that she might still have this problem.

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Originally Posted by GPuzzle

I find weird that no one payed attention to my Homebrew, which I thought were solutions.

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They were interesting, but the daily in particular was overpowered for a D9. Maybe as a 15?

Mostly, though, my response to the seeker bits of this boils down to, "did none of you read cazzeo's dragon mag #413 article that gave the seeker at least one viable and competitive controller power option for every slot?"

It can absolutely still benefit from more options, but if you pick the correct powers, it's totally possible to have fun playing a seeker with officially-sourced powers, in all but the very most optimized tables.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by archon_huskie

I'm currently playing in a campaign with a seeker. She's considering changing characters because she cannot figure out how to make the character work.

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Without commenting on any one class in particular, I must say that I've seen (and played at) several tables in low paragon tier where one of the characters wasn't meaningfully contributing in combat, to the point where he might as well not have been there at all except as a HP sponge. In some cases, this was due to the player (e.g. the one guy who was proud of having made a low-damage striker for some reason) but in several it was due to having a badly designed class or sub-class.

So I would say it's a definite problem in 4E that some classes are very weak. I'd say this is negligible in heroic tier, but clearly present in paragon, and likely worse in epic. A "guide to trap options" would be a worthwhile document to have, imho.

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Originally Posted by masteraleph

It's worth noting that there are 2 ways to read O-Assassins to make them reasonably powerful as they advance in Paragon:

1) Read the two Flurry of Talons (E13) and Shadow Fire (E17) as up to 3 damage instances. They both roll 3 attack rolls, and you're supposed to "resolve them as one attack." The hit text reads like: "1[W] + Dexterity modifier fire damage if one of the attack rolls hits, 2[W] + Dexterity modifier fire damage if two hit, and 3[W] + Dexterity modifier fire damage if three hit", so it's possible to parse it as 3 separate instances (worth noting that there's an E1 that uses the same language but says "or" instead of "and" in the hit text).

2) Assassin's Shroud reads "This damage roll never benefits from bonuses to damage rolls, and is in addition to the attack’s damage, if any." If you read the latter half of the sentence as being a separate damage instance, it helps. Doubly so if you read the first half as only excluding things with the word "bonus," but not any other indicator such as a +. Both of these stretch the rules fairly heavily, but they're not totally out of all common sense, and they're helping a really weak class anyways.

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Actually, some WotC op builds have exploited these interpretations to create a fairly ridiculous character as I recall, not just a viable one. That said, much like the Flame Spiral Sorcerer, relying on a singular build or subset of builds to give a class viability is pretty terrible design, nevermind the fact that this build set as you've noted essentially depends on a fairly dubious reading of the rules. Because this is true, and because I like the flavour of the O-ssassin, and the general idea of what was being attempted with this class, I created my homebrew addressing its (many) issues.


As for the Seeker it more or less needs the same as others have said (yes it got some decent powers later, but these result in the same problem of build centralization per the Sorcerer and O-ssassin); a comprehensive overhaul to the class which gives it additional viable options, and improves its ability to do its job of controlling the battlefield. Unfortunately I don't find the class compelling enough in any sense to bother with such a project personally.

A stab at an essentials style seeker.

Keep armor/HP/healing surge/defences/etc the same.

First, some baseline RBAs:

Seeker's Arrow
Ranged Weapon + At-Will Primal Attack
Requires: Projectile Weapon
Attack: Wisdom vs AC
Hit: [W]+Dex
Special: Seeker's Arrow counts as a Ranged Basic Attack

Seeker's Throw
Ranged Weapon + At-Will Primal Attack
Requires: Thrown Weapon
Attack: Wisdom vs AC
Hit: [W]+Str
Special: Seeker's Throw counts as a Ranged Basic Attack

All seekers get both powers. The use of a different stat-for-damage is intentional.

Next, maybe a stance like mechanic for at-will replacements. Ie:

Elemental Aura
Minor Action + At-Will Primal Utility
Aura 1
Special: Select Fire, Cold, Lightning or Thunder when you activate the aura. This power gains that damage type and keyword.
Effect: Enemies who attack or end their turn within the aura take Wisdom+1/2 level damage. If you hit a target with a ranged basic attack all enemies in a close burst 2 from the target take Wisdom+1/2 level damage. A creature can take this damage at most once per turn.

A psychic aura (howls of spirits?) A forced movement aura (wind?) A protective aura?

Next, riders. These act as modifiers to your ranged basic attacks, sort of like how slayer's encounter powers do.

Meh, not fun enough.

So, a second stab at it.

Primal classes are about the spirit world and channeling aspects of it.

Wardens morph, barbarians rage, shamans have their companion.

The seeker doesn't fit as it stands: like the monk, it was stolen partly from the Ki power source.

Make it fit. Have it manipulate aspects.

For some fun mechanics, the aspects are 3 part. They arrive with some effect, they impose some effect when they are around, and they depart with some effect.

The asoects can arrive on a hit (doing some effect), stay until dismissed, and be dismissable for some other effect maybe.