Overview

Role: Striker

The Avenger is a Divine Striker. As a Striker, your job is to kill monsters. As an Avenger, you do this by inflicting consistent high damage to the monster, never missing, until it dies. Strikers generally need the following things to be successful:

DPR: Avengers get this by never missing. The Oath of Enmity is a great feature. Really, as striker class features go, it's the best one. An avenger should be able to put out DPR as good as anyone's, except a good Ranger's. Then for the low cost of one feat at Paragon and two at Epic, you keep solid DPR all the way through. Head for either Radiant feats or Critical Abuse to move DPR from solid to great.

Accuracy: Avengers use mobility to select the right target, and then use powers or their censure bonus to isolate that target. Lots of powers give additional movement before/after the attack. That mobility can be effective out of combat too: if you can't find a fun use for the ability to walk through walls, you're not trying hard enough.

Spike Damage: The real weakness of Avengers is their general lack of Spike damage (Damage focused in one round)... However, you have enough off-action attack powers to do decently with this. You won't get 3-hit encounter powers unless you power swap for them, but you can use powers and equipment to attack 2-3 times per round for the first 3 rounds of a fight. And that's usually enough.

Survivability: You start with more HP than most strikers. You can take some obvious feats for more AC than most strikers. You can take "energizer bunny" utility powers and forget to fall down. You're not a real defender, but you can take enough of a licking to get your job done, and are objectively ahead of most other strikers.

Debiliating Effects: You do get control powers, but the majority of them are ranged, and thus miss. (Because your Oath is so powerful, most of you won't be built to hit to the same degree as a controller or other striker, because you don't need to be. Also ranged attacks require you to keep a second attack item at par, and that's very expensive). But then there's the occasional power that does this extremely well, and I point them out in the ratings. Also, Lordduskblade points out that you have a fairly good assortment of forced movement powers.

Hit Points: 14 + Con score at 1st level, 6 each additional level. You have more than the normal number of HP and surges than most strikers. This supports your "solo a monster" play style. That said, it's still probably best to focus fire, in which case you're just tougher than you might need to be.

Surges: 7 + Con Modifier. See above.

Proficiencies: You start out with fine proficiencies as far as melee weapons are concerned. Your armor proficiencies? Well, they don't exist. And you're discouraged from using feats to get them. The good news is that either Int or Dex should be high, and there are some easy feats to make cloth better than plate. 

  Oath of Enmity: Rolling twice can't be underestimated. If you have a 50/50 shot of hitting normally, this is worth +5. If you only hit on a 20, it's still equivalent to a +1. You also get twice the chances to crit, so with your oath you crit as often as people with Weapon mastery. If you can increase your threat range, you crit a lot more often: 19-20 crits 19% of the time and 18-20 crits 28% of the time. Rolling twice changes ... almost everything. The relative values of bonuses to hit vs. damage changes. The attractiveness of power attacking changes. The importance of a bonus to your attack stat changes. The desirability of the Mastery feats changes. The frequency of critical hits changes. This is absurdly powerful, if you can take advantage of it. So you need to make sure that every attack takes advantage of it. You only get your double rolls if your target is the only enemy adjacent to you. You get them when fighting next to your party, just not when fighting in the middle of the enemy's line. So remember: do NOT run out into the middle of the monsters in order to get combat advantage: that will hurt your DPR, not help it. 

  Censure: As of Divine Power, there are three different censures. They should all play significantly differently, even if they don't come up that often... because the threat of them should affect monster behavior and your behavior. 

 Censure of Pursuit: This is perhaps the weakest Censure by strict effect, but it has side benefits. When your oath target voluntarily runs from you, you get bonus damage. 2*Tier + your Dexterity Modifier bonus damage, which can be quite significant. The problem is that very little you can do will cause your target to move away from you, and especially very little once the DM is aware of the feature. This means that, if you can take your target off to the side, they'll tend to stay there, which gives you a defenderish flavor. This censure is tailor made to take out Skirmishers or Artillery. It also works very well taking out Brutes, although the fight will take a while if you actually do pull them off to the side. Now for the side benefits. Dex boosts initiative (which is important for your control/nova). Dex boosts Stealth, so you can be an awesome point man (radar and stealth). Dex is a frequent pre-req for PHB1 weapon feats. Pursuit opens up Ardent Champion, which is the best in-class PP. So while the actual effect of your censure may not be great, it's the choice most frequently taken. 

 Censure of Retribution: This censure will play very weirdly. You get to do extra damage anytime someone other than your oath target hits you. In theory this will convince them to move away from you to leave you and your target isolated. In practice, it means your character plays like someone in desperate need of psychiatric help, begging monsters to hit them. The trick here is that the bonus damage can scale very high very quickly. It's equal to your Intelligence Modifier times the number of times you get hit. This means you can end up with some ridiculously high modifiers. Combine this with powers that allow you to move your target before the attack roll, and you can set up rounds where you do insane damage per hit... It's just going to be very hard to get multiple attacks during those rounds. The key problem is that, especially post MM3, you can't actually take that many hits without some source of damage resistance. A second issue you face is that Intelligence isn't as good a stat as Dexterity. It doesn't help Stealth, it doesn't help Initiative. But it does open up some Arcane Multiclassing options. 

 Censure of Unity: Your censure gives you bonus damage for fighting next to your party. This is bonus damage you control, so you should always get some of it. Your Oath of Enmity doesn't care about party members next to you, so this really suggests you fight in formation. And that's a good thing, because damage bonuses you can control function far more reliably for spike-damage purposes. This also means that as the optimization level (and PC level) increases, it's going to be the only source of bonus damage you ever see. If the party focus fires at all, the target-de-jour will die before it had a chance to run... but generally not before the warlord has decided that team PC should surround it and beat on it. The other nice aspect of this censure is that while the powers care about your Intelligence Modifier, the censure doesn't. This means it's the best censure for Avengers that Multiclass out. And that's a decent strategy, as we'll cover elsewhere. That also makes this the best censure for anyone who wants to start with a 18 Wisdom pre-racial modifiers.

Channel Divinity: You get two Channel Divinity powers. One of which (Abjure Undead) does decent damage vs. undead, but it's an implement attack and nothing special. The other (Divine Guidance) gives an ally a reroll when it attacks your Oath of Enmity Target. That's just silly good. The other value of Channel Divinity is that it allows you to take Deity Specific Channel Divinity feats, and there are a couple good options. Skills Avengers get Religion, and then pick three more from the list below. Ok, let's get real now. Avengers get Religion and Perception, and then pick two more from the list below. Skill powers will change the rating of these skills, so you might want to look there if you're undecided about what to take.

Secondary Roles

Defender: You've got the defenses and the HP and surges. If you're pursuit, your censure sort of acts like a Mark, you convince the bad guy to not run once you get it alone. Look for powers that let you take your target off to the side, away from the rest of the scrum.

Controller: There are a number of nice controller powers, but many of them are ranged and so can't use your trademark class feature. Skip those. Look for the Melee Touch ones, and load up on save-ends penalties (Hybrid Swordmage?)

Leader: The Censure of Unity has a bit of "help your team beat on someone", but not a whole lot, and not at the leader level. = Class Features = One quick note first: While the censure gives out bonus damage, do NOT think of it as your striker class feature. It's not (usually). It's a control feature to offset the limitations of your real striker class feature... which is your Oath of Enmity. HP, Surges, Proficiencies

Skills

Acrobatics - It's not too clear what this does beside let you fall on your feet, so even when it's on a key stat you might want to skip it. If your DM will work with you to do cool things, then those with good Dexterity will want it.

Athletics - Useful, but on a dump stat for most of you. Those with strength will take it without thinking much.

Endurance - Useful, but based off a non-prime stat. Check out Die Hard (u16d) though, as if you are taking this, fighting while at negative HP rocks.

Heal - The heal check DCs you really care about can be reached without training. Take this at low levels, then retrain at Paragon... or keep it if your DM like diseases.

Intimidate - Fun and in character, but based off a dump stat. If you take this, look at skill powers. There's one skill power (Everybody Move, u6e) that guarantees your oath for a given round.

Perception - Important and based off a key stat. You take this. You also may take Spot Weakness as your u10.

Religion - You get this for free, so it doesn't matter much if you're dumb as a brick. You still have it.

Stealth - Take this if you have Dexterity as a secondary stat. If not, attribute scaling will rapidly mean you can't make any checks, so there's little reason to bother.

Streetwise - Based off a dump stat. There are some other skills that are not class skills you might be interested in. You can pick these up by being an Eladrin or having the right background... or chose one of these when you take a multi-class feat.

Arcana - There's an Epic Destiny (Sage of Ages) that's good for you (and others) that asks you to make silly high Arcana checks ... and there are some skill powers that do nice things with silly high Arcana checks. So if you've got the book smarts, this is a decent choice.

Bluff - Useless for most. But if you're also a Rogue then this enables Raise the Stakes.

Dungeoneering - If you've got some book smarts, it might be good to know more about the creepy crawly unrighteous.

Insight - A useful skill in most social skill challenges, based off a key stat, and comes with some decent skill power options. Great if you stumble into it.

Thievery - If you're nimble, this wouldn't be a bad skill to pick up.... but there are usually less subtle ways to solve your problems.