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I've tested my warrior with both a 1 hander and tower shield and a 2 handed axe.

So far, it seems as if the best way to mitigate damage is not through having the high AC, but in putting your opponent(s) down as fast as possible. Most of the stuff I'm fighting in the 48+ level range is capable of hitting me every round, even in defensive mode, with expertise, and fully turtled up. I've got an AC ranging from 28-32.

Same fight 2 handed versus 1 handed, repeated multiple times ... with the 1 handed axe I will come out of the fight at around 85% hp. With the 2 handed axe I'm going to come out at an average of 94%.

Based on observation, this is simply due to the fact that the fight lasts for significantly fewer rounds when I use the 2 hander.

This is all related to solo play. With a group, or even just a cleric behind you, a tanky warrior is absolutely awesome. But for various reasons, can't always get a group going.

So ... is this the way it is for all warriors and my expectations are just too high? Am I doing something incorrectly? Are there issues with the way AC works against higher level mobs?

Oh, I'd like to add in some additional info ...

shieldwork, parry, dodge ... all of the damage mitigation functions are at about the "adept" range. Is this too low for them to kick in their help?

I have had similar experiences. Admittedly, I have never found certain feats that might boast the shield use (shield ward) and fully built in full plate on every location of my person. Even tinkering with disarm (better to not have shield) and bash (never seems to actually work) seems to show fighting without a shield is codedly better than fighting with. Still doesn't mean I break my characters RP to fight without it anyway.

AC in dnd in generall is pointless past a certain level. Take a few minutes to troll the SRD of like... Cr 12 and above creatures and you'll see they get ranges of +22 to +30 to hit you.

I'm no expert in 3.5 but if you don't want to get hit, the kind of AC your going to want to be looking at is more like 35 minimum, since usually successive attack bonuses are lower for creatures with multiple attacks.

But yeah, generally speaking, like was concluded here:
http://www.forgottenkingdoms.org/board/ ... ds#p125133

Magicked full plate, two hander fighters outdo all other types hands down majority of the time. Have fun with the roleplay by all means though, I know I do on mine 90% of the time. The gap is only painful to watch in duels and pvp which I don't really do.

It became noticable at the high-end levels of 47+ when I noticed my warrior is forced to retreat from areas that my druid or cleric find to be a cakewalk. All solo, of course. If you pair that warrior with an decently skilled buffer/healer then the team is incredibly good.

That's when I wrote some code to keep track of the number of times I hit versus when I get hit (and how much I get hit for). It counted the number of rounds in a fight, etc. Some testing revealed the very frightening math that I was way better off just using the 2 hander versus the tower and 1 hander when engaged with higher level mobs like ogres, hill giants, hook horrors, and such.

I bet half of you weren't even BORN the last time I played tabletop, so my understanding of the combat mechanics are probably off. I can't decide if this is just a case of warriors being weak or a case of druids/clerics being just so much stronger.

Well.., magic beats no magic everytime.
An overexageration but more or less true.

Yemin wrote:Well.., magic beats no magic everytime.
An overexageration but more or less true.

More or less, yeah.

Stone skin > high AC

With bulls strength I'm doing more damage on my 3 attacks than the warrior does on 5

Heal fixes all the little problems and allows me to keep going long after the warrior has retreated.

When you add in the mobility from wind walk, the ability to create food and water and to refresh your movement rate ... it's a wonder anyone plays a warrior at all.

I have one because I like the roleplay, but it they are pretty sub-par.

Now I've derailed my own topic, which was about 2 handed versus 1 handed, not the supremacy of clerics.

Seems that way yeah lol

Only saving grace is that a party of 5 clerics aren't as useful as a party with a fighter, wizard, rogue, bard and cleric.

Yemin wrote:Seems that way yeah lol

Only saving grace is that a party of 5 clerics aren't as useful as a party with a fighter, wizard, rogue, bard and cleric.

Haven't found rogues to be very useful in FK, and never seen a bard further than two steps from the market square.

Clerics have a ton of utility, aside from just healing. I don't remember them being this awesome in tabletop, but it's been years and years and years.

Clerics have held either the top spot or 2nd to wizards in various editions of dnd. in the latest edition, druids are at top i believe. Thats in terms of measuring everything, from utility to damage output though. In pure utility no one out does a wizard in table top simply because if there's a spell a wizard doesn't have he can either learn it, or summon a creature and pay them to cast it.

rogues are very useful in specific areas. I hate to play one here but I love having one in my party because they can scout and report, and provide alot of information, not to mention disarm traps and I love prepping spells specially to combo of their sneak attack. For me the ultimate combat role is having a spell list that enables the rest of my party to beat the crap out of gods, I really enjoy being the guy behind the scenes as funny as that sounds even though that guy is usually underappreciated and doesn't get any of the credit.

I have no clue what the reason is for bards being so... nonexistant in group ventures here, perhaps a bard player can elaborate.

In my experience, bards have all the tedious training/creation time of a powerful wizard and all the weaknesses of a thief.

That being said, you guys should really get into hard numbers. In a group setting, where a fighter or thief has all of the same beneficial magic because he's -with- a cleric/wizard, fighters and thieves actually shine very brightly. The chrome plating of magic is nice, but it's still better on a muscle car than a moped.

Heh. Well put.

Well, Even with a fighter's 5 attacks I think Cleric gives them serious competition when hitting.

I don't remember fighter or cleric BAB at level 40. Could someone throw them on here and I'll go about explaining why.

I dunno. I'm with Hrosskell on this one. The fighter shines when paired up.

I'll have to learn to get past what a fighter can't do and love them for what they can do.

And I love the idea of a warrior pitting bone, steel, and sinew against a world of magic.

Aragorn over Gandalf. Conan over Elric.

Up with warriors!

Reviving this topic a bit.

In 3.5e (the current codebase, though not quite perfectly renditioned- of course) the comparison between a war priest (A cleric, whether blank from the code books or with all the splats that make them ridiculous) outshines a Fighter for one very simple reason.

Divine Power. Divine Power is a spell that grants them a Fighter's BAB, an extra attack, and beyond that, they can wear the best armor and wield a fair assortment of weapons (Some of the best, depending on your deity.) It's true, that in higher levels you simply have no reason to care about AC whether on the tabletop (Where there are countless more ways to get AC and improve your defense) versus here where there are not as many options. Amongst the minmaxing / optimizing community for Pathfinder / 3.5e there is still the derision for healers and straight up tankers for this very reason.

It's much safer, and much more friendly to the party to kill things before they get into a slog fest with enemies and lose the AC / HP game- and they will lose it.

I admit, I'm still fairly new here and my current highest character -is- a cleric, so I can only make comparisons between what little I saw of the Fighter class and the Wizard class versus the Cleric.

TL;DR if you want to be a real tank. Kill things faster than they can kill you. And I know that kills you folks who want to use the neat and cool one-handed weapons and wield a shield- it kills me too.

True enough. Even here though if you discount heal spells, clerics still outdo fighters in terms of hit bonus and damage in melee as well as AC.

Fighter's have: +2 weapon focus feats on hit, +4 worth weap specialisation feats on damage, +3 AC boosting feats, of which you can only usually apply 2 of them at a time.

Clerics have: Divine power, good hope / heroism, shield of faith, prayer to name a few and yu've already push past the bonuses from fighter feats by level 16 though it'll take you 22 more levels to be throwing around as much damage as a fighter.

This Topic is about Tanking though and not just AC. So while the Math on all that is well and good people underestimate the brute approach of actually being able to take a hit. No one in the game can take hits like a Barbarian.

A cleric would need heals just to keep up with a Barbarian when clearing a zone and though technically, healing means the cleric can go for longer. One area has a finite amount of enemies within it, so past a certain point the heals are redundant.

Granted it's a fairly small number, but I have seen a few very well built fighters on this MUD who just blow me away with how well they tank. I have no idea how they do it, but I've seen, for instance, a mid-30s tank much more than keep up with mobs that most max level chars couldn't handle and come away with only a few scratches--and that's with a mid-damage one-hander and a shield.

Generally I agree with the 'just throw more and more damage at the problem' strategy, as it does tend to work well, but it is definitely possible to build a fighter with the right stats/feats/gear to create a char who can really take on the big baddy in true tank fashion while the rest of the group does its thing, or even outlast more powerful mobs in the solo fights where buffs aren't available.

Ungtar wrote:Oh, I'd like to add in some additional info ...

shieldwork, parry, dodge ... all of the damage mitigation functions are at about the "adept" range. Is this too low for them to kick in their help?

I forgot to comment on these at all though I think I have in another thread. Fighters are more dependant on gear than any other class. This is as true here as in tabletop so that certain small sized mid level fighter with magical full plate in all locations, mithral in some spots and a tower shield is going to be rocking 30+ AC pretty easily without magic. If your AC is any lower than 28 or so, with or without magic, your going to have problems making the defensive approach work at all well.

I started buying some potions to augment my warrior with and it REALLY made a huge difference.

The preference is to travel with a cleric or a mage, but I'm finding that's just difficult to do. Everyone is all over the place in level or just theologically incompatible.

Yemin wrote: This Topic is about Tanking though and not just AC. So while the Math on all that is well and good people underestimate the brute approach of actually being able to take a hit. No one in the game can take hits like a Barbarian.

A cleric would need heals just to keep up with a Barbarian when clearing a zone and though technically, healing means the cleric can go for longer. One area has a finite amount of enemies within it, so past a certain point the heals are redundant.

Save that many clerics have access to mitigation spells (Stoneskin, Stone Body) and even the basic non-trained Heal spell will often fully cap out a Cleric's HP versus a Fighter/Barb/Rang/Pal's exorbitant HP difference (which only exists if, and I don't know this myself, HP gen isn't random on it's own. If that's the case, a Fighter could very easily have less HP than a wizard.)

EDIT: This is, again, based off of my own experiences with my "battle cleric." I can generally solo anywhere as long as they don't shred my stoneskin the way groups of mobs do.