This post is a continuation of the Assessment found here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/425698

The current Champion setup is a great on in concept. We have five strong archetypes that we get to use to craft our heroes as we see fit; the strong Warrior, the skilled Assassin, the noble Defender, the wise Governor, and the powerful Mage. The issue I see is not with the framing of the system, but the implementation of the skills. Too many of them are in strange places or across specializations, which cause the identities of the archetypes to be watered down, and actually serves to make most of them less appealing in general. I feel it is a problem of cleaning up identities more than anything, and my overall assessment is being done with that in mind.

I begin with my assessment of:

The Defender.

Defenders are a bit harder to clearly define with Warriors running about, but given the types of abilities they are given, they really feel like Generals rather than stand-alone heroes. I think there is quite a bit of room for this type of hero in the game, provided they get the trait support. In terms of conceptual archetypes of the Defender, we have the Stalwart Defender (currently well supported), and the Cunning General.

The Good Stuff:

• Guardian: Fantastic. Dodge is hard to come by in FE and this hands it out to the entire stack. At low levels it isn’t much, but the Guardian 3 ability hands out a whopping 12 Dodge. Stack that atop some shield wearing folks and you are looking at impossible to hit tanks.
• Shieldwall: Solid non-scaling trait that essentially gives chainmail to everyone in the army.
• Immune to Counter Attack: I’ve never seen this one come up, but I would take it every time. Not that the Defender is out dealing a pile of Damage, but this helps them take even less when at the front lines.

Ill Fit Abilities:

• Endurance: Technically, this fits well here. However, the Defender has no other real abilities allowing it to back up the giant stack of Hps that they get. They just get to take lots of hits. This should be shared with the Path of the Warrior.
• Defender: This line of traits is boring. I was recently made aware that it only impacts the Defender character (worse than I assumed), but works whenever the Defender does not attack (sorta better than I assumed). Still, it represents a missed opportunity to attack, or benefit other units. Still Boring.
• Stun: Lose your own action for a chance to force an enemy to lose theirs. Meh.

Recommendations:

Defenders need more flavor. They aren’t bad, they just have some of their abilities on other classes, and aren’t really exciting otherwise.

• Tactician: This ability, which is currently Warrior only, belongs to Defenders.
• Leadership: As above. Leadership belongs with the more offense-oriented Defenders.
• Defenders need a couple good one-off abilities. Warriors have them. Assassins have them. Give Defenders a retinue of 2 City Defenders that spawn with them in combat.
• Defenders should also have something that improves the size of their stack (+1 Army size with them, up to +3). This will help make the Magic tree a bit more viable, as players will become less reliant upon Civ and Warfare tech to field armies of useful size.
• There should be a few “Battle Cry” type abilities which give good short term buffs to their entire army. Things such as ignore armor, immune to Counter Attack, Tactical Regen. Many possibilities. These Champions are already intended to be mighty Generals based upon what skills they carry. Treat them like it.

Also Noteworthy is a post here about how the army-wide benefit abilities need to not stack. I agree whole-heartedly with that. WAY too much opportunity for Abuse any other way.

Finally, I think starting at level 15 each and every Path needs to start getting access to some pretty over-the-top abilities. The sky is the limit here, and I’m not going to take the time to really illustrate all of them, but if you can get a champion to Level 15, you deserve some crazy stuff for your effort.