Night At The Roxbury:
Tricks For Multiple Defender Parties
What do you do if your small party has two defenders? What if you have even more than two? Here are some tips for forcing mark punishment and for powers and tricks that work well when you have more than one defender in a party. Each one varies by class since defenders can defend both through powers and class features, bur this should get you started:
Focus on powers that let you defend or punish even without marking. This lets your ally punish through his marking feature. Often forced movement and status effects like slow or immobilized will let you do this.
If you do plan to mark often, then make your mark punishment more severe than normal. With multiple defenders the DM may be forced to violate your mark if he wants to attack anyone that round if another defender has him tied up without marking. Only one defender probably wants to do this, but again it depends on what classes you are playing.
If your defender ally has long range punishment, through their mark mechanic or otherwise, consider forced movement. Most
defenders can push/follow, slide, or pull fairly often. If you
have an ally that can punish at range like an assault swordmage,
chaladin, lightning rushing battlemind, etc., then forcing the enemy
next to you and away from them can help to trigger the punishemnt.
Take powers that force enemies you haven't marked to attack you or someone else instead the ally that marked them. Lightning
Rush and Dimensional Vortex are two of the most notable
examples of this. With lightning rush for instance you can trigger
a warden's use of warden's fury, a paladin's divine challenge, or a
fighter's combat challenge.
Immediate attacks that punish enemies for going after your allies are your friend.
This is something that almost all defender builds can do and it doesn't
hurt if more than one defender loads up on these. Often it even
works better that way.
Many of these tricks are even more viable with hybrid builds.
Assault swordmages improve the best part of their mark punishment
when they hybird with a big hitting class like warlock, barbarian, or
ranger. Hybrid chaladins can load up on mark punishment and
get ranged powers from a class like warlock, cleric, or sorcerer so they
can maintain their challange at range. Hybrid wardens can focus
on the powers that isolate enemies from other PCs without marking to let
allies focus on marking and mark punishment.
You might want to look into a non standard weapon.
Either going for a big superior two hander to boost your damage if you
are going to be hitting hard with immediate/OA powers or going for a
reach weapon of some sort might be a good idea. A paladin can
hide behind the other defender maintaining divine
challenge with a reach weapon for instance.
This thread and its title were inspired by an earlier thread
and comment when a DM was asking about what to do with his new 5 person
party where 3 people were playing a paladin, battlemind, and warden.
Note on power recommendations.
These are not always the best powers to take for your build and this
isn't meant to be a comprehensive guide to each
defender. They are sometimes powers that don't normally
get blue or skyblue rating that you should take a look at for
multidefender parties because they have a niche use when another
defender is in the party.