Has anyone made a successful Fighter-less party on Hard or higher? Personally I'm not really seeing how it would be successful with engagement being what it is, but maybe I lack the imagination.

 

Sure you can give people Hold the Line - but the trouble is that's a talent and not an ability; there's no class that I can see where I have 6 abilities lined up that I must have whereas many of the talents (though by no means also "must haves") are quite a bit more useful - meaning that having a Fighter is far better as he can do that job much more easily than anyone else with less relative investment (again, in terms of the comparative worth of abilities compared to talents). The only other way around this would be having people who can break from engagement easily (probably in addition to a Hold the Liner), so engagement becomes a lesser issue. When you consider you can also give a Fighter Hold the Line, they're more or less doing the job twice as well compared to anyone else.

 

I guess I'm not a fan of any class being more or less mandatory by offering a pretty huge advantage if it's part of the team; it makes party set up a bit too formulaic. Maybe if other melee guys could engage more (albeit less than the a Fighter) it would be better (or other weirder interplays with engagement that I can't think of), but as it stands I can't see how not having a Fighter on your team isn't majorly hamstringing yourself. It terms of personal bias, it's not great that the most vanilla class IMO is arbitrarily the one that must be on your team.

Edited April 1, 201510 yr by Jojobobo

Yes. A somewhat gamebreaking party which some already discovered intuitively

 

3 front line moongodlike chanters, each with a different chant and heaviest armor

moon godlike rogue, moongodlike druid or wizard, moongodlike priest for extra heals

 

 

Breaks hard mode as your endurance never drops really

No problem. I'm playing with a Monk as main tank in PotD and had no problem so far. Engagement limit is not really a problem since the AI basicly targets the first-in-sight character anyway.

Edited April 1, 201510 yr by Zwiebelchen

Engagement doesn't matter that much.

 

I went without a fighter the whole game except small periods of using Eder for his personal quest stuff on hard, found it fairly easy.

 

Used:

 

Custom Paladin tank

Custom Cipher

PC Druid

Pallegina

Durance

+1 of whatever NPC seemed wise to bring along for certain parts of the story or for their personal quest.

Engagement isn't a big issue if you play your bottlenecks and make sure that the tanky folks get in front of the enemies before your back line does. Yes, having all that engagement can sometimes help immensely, but it's not the crux of a good party.

Fighters aren't great tanks thanks to defender, they're great tanks thanks to Wary Defender and other sources of high deflect.  
120+ deflect at level 5 = you almost never take damage if properly positioned.  

You can faceroll Potd with 6 chanters. I'm not sure how, but they can also tank good somehow.