Across the Table (OOC Discussion)

[VennDygrem]

The closest, I think, might be a Warlock character. There are powers and builds that can get a lot of Necrotic damage (read: Negative energy), and the Dark pact particularly offers chances for doing damage to yourself or your allies for the chance to do greater damage to your enemies.

Aside from that, Melblen may let you swap keywords on some powers for a particular class, say changing Radiant damage to Necrotic on a Cleric, as that sort of houseruling is fairly easy in 4E. More likely though, you'll want to check out classes with powers that incapacitate or charm/dominate. Plenty of Leader classes and Controller classes can do that. I once had a player running a Psion that would rely a lot on forcing enemies to hit each other, take big penalties to attacks, etc. Powers that Dominate targets tend to be higher level ones, but they're there.

[bhu]

Necromancy is in Heroes of Shadow which i dont see listed among the approved books...

I'm perusing my options now.  Hoping for something like an Alienist or Hexblade.

[bhu]

Okay I'm leaning towards Psion going on Alienist

Barbarian  Minotaur 

Warlock

Fighter of some sort

[Melblen_Cairn]

I don't think I have ever had a psion in any of my games ever. We had a battlemind in the last party which was interesting.

[VennDygrem]

Psions have some really fun powers, particularly their Daily Powers. Living Missile is such a fun concept (basically, pick up an enemy, and throw it 50 feet into another enemy. Until the target saves against the power, you can use a minor action each round to keep throwing it around. Amazing.), and the others are pretty cool too.

Human is the best bet since they get a bonus At-Will, so you've effectively got three options for basic powers and for "encounter" powers, which are your at-wills that you augment with your power points. Humans can also take the Human Ingenuity feat that allows them to regain a power point whenever they use an action point to take an extra attack, so they can effectively have two or more extra augmented powers every day (depending on how many milestones you hit [every two encounters]). That's incredibly useful.

Psions can be masters of moving enemies around, playing with enemies' minds, or creating psionic minions to do their dirty work for them. It's a pretty versatile controller class overall.

[Melblen_Cairn]

Oh and Happy Father's Day to those of us who have children. I have 4 little ones myself.

[VennDygrem]

Happy Father's Day!

I won't be the subject of the holiday for quite some time, it seems. 

[bhu]

Are pacts alignment dependent?

[VennDygrem]

No, though goodie-two-shoes characters usually don't enter into bargains with arch-demons or gibbering horrors from the Far Realm. They can suckered into making a pact with such powers, of course, but they are probably rarer than the alternative.

[Melblen_Cairn]

We have our sixth, Bartholomew expressed interest in joining. Also new to 4e. Welcome aboard Bartholomew!

[bhu]

Do we have any 4e handbooks here?  There are plenty at wizards but the crowd there can sometimes be ... iffy ...

[VennDygrem]

Because 4E has such a small fan base on this site, there's really been no one to make an adequate guide. I find that the majority of guides on the WotC forums have mostly sound advice for 4E. Just make sure to take it all with a grain of salt. If you want any advice on a particular class or option,  I'm happy to help. I've made test builds of almost every class even though I've only played a few characters.

[bhu]

What are your thoughts on the following:

Psion, eventually Alienist

Barbarian, eventually Frenzied Berserker, Dreadnought or Death's Thane

Warlock w/Star Pact, eventually Doomsayer, Dark Reckoner or Hexer

Fighter, eventually Dreadnought, Avernian Knight, Dread Reaper, Ravager

[Melblen_Cairn]

To me Alienist destined Psion sounds fun, but that may be cause I have not seen one in play yet 

For warlocks, I have always been partial to Fey Pact with a focus on teleporting around. We briefly had an infernal pact warlock but he retired early. I would be interested to see how a star pact looks.

How are the rest doing on narrowing the field of what they want to play, Nan and Venn, are you closing in further on what you'll be playing? Inspectre, how are you coming along with your "archer"?

[VennDygrem]

Hmm, well I've got a couple sheets made up;  but I want to see what everyone decides to go with before making a final decision. It seems like going with the Bard would be most benthic and would be a fun character to play. If bhu goes with the Warlock, though,  I'm kinda interested in the psion in his stead.

@bhu: I'm a big fan of Warlocks with either the fey or Star pact. Star is cool flavor-wise and Doomsayer tends to seem like a really good paragon path, though that's a long way off. Not as familiar with the other two, I can take a look.

As for Alienist, that could also be really fun and interesting. I'd say probably go with the Shaper focus and build around that, going toward Alienist,  but that's just me.

As for the fighter, Dreadnought and Ravaged always seemed really good, if memory serves, and the other two I'm less familiar with. I'm away from book/computer right now but I can give them all a look in a little bit.

[Inspectre]

I have Galadren already statted up as a ranger/rogue, as I mentioned previously.  I've been looking into what to take to make a Seeker version, but that will take a couple days to finalize.  I've also been pondering some sort of freakish hybrid between those various classes, but thus far I don't really see what the benefit to doing that would be.

[Melblen_Cairn]

The only benefit I would see in Hybridization at this point is if we covered all the roles and you wanted to split cover two roles. Going Ranger seeker would give you good crowd control and good damage all surrounding a bow.

[bhu]

Hybridization?

[Nanshork]

@bhu Just be aware that I don't see us getting past level 3 or so within the next few years. 

@Melblen

I'm sticking with the list I posted earlier:
Fighter - Defender
Barbarian - Striker
Warlord - Leader

Depending on what everyone else goes with I'll chose one of those three. 

[Melblen_Cairn]

True enough. Its been like 3 years and you guys are getting closer to level 2  . Hopefully our pace goes just a little bit quicker. I would really like to get to the second adventure soon which is probably my favorite of the heroic tier. At our previous rate of progress it would take like another 10 years to get to the paragon teir   

@bhu - Just a made up word to mean the process of creating a character that is a hybrid of two classes. Hybrids are found in PHB3. I think Venn explains it really well a few posts ago but I am not certain who it was directed at.