What class does the most damage overall?

Question

I'm new to D&D 4e and I am an illusionist Wizard. We have 3 PCs playing, but one of our players should do a lot of damage.

Which class does the most damage?

Answer 1

Good question, and the answer changes significantly by level. The "damagers" tend to be strikers. The easiest "lots of damage" strikers are an Essentials Thief and a Twin-Strike Ranger. My recommendation is for essentials thief, as they provide interesting play and tactics, without being the boring "twang-twang" of ranger. The other significant advantage of ranger and thief is that they don't require significant optimization to get damage out of.

For ranger: static-mod is king. Get bonuses to damage rolls as fast as you can, and your damage output will be astronomical. For thief, charging is king. Take a look at the lovely combination provided by cunning stalker and surprising charge for "I'm going to do a tremendous amount of damage to you."

Check out this link for the theoretical optima of strikers and damage output. Be advised that most DPR specced builds are insane glass cannons.

If you have more specific requirements: party composition, races, level, and expected monsters, we can help you with a specific build.

--Edit--

Or, how to optimize a slash-slash ranger.

First, a note of warning. Rangers are boring. For the next 30 levels, your two-weapon ranger will be spamming twin-strike. It's just that good. However, you can get interesting RP out of them, so all hope is not lost. (Just make sure the player isn't interested in making interesting tactical choices).

For a look at how to build a ranger, check out the ranger link here, which goes into far more detail. If you just want a level by level build, here's one by LDB. (LDB is lordduskblade, one of the more notable pepole on the wizards forums.) It's hard to go wrong building on those lines. And, on a happy note, he'll be throwing lots of dice around every given round. On a less happy note, melee rangers tend to be a bit ... fragile. Make sure he's very good buddies with your paladin.

Another important factor is what books and errata you're using.

Rough metrics of effectiveness: 1. Does each character have one and only one primary stat? Primary stat is determined by "my powers use this stat to attack." While it is... theoretically possible to make a "balanced" paladin (between STR and CHA) it's a lot easier to really really mess up a balanced paladin. (I've done that. It kinda sucked.). Is the stat 16 or better? 16 means they'll be missing often, 18 is usually the norm (means a 16 pre-racial) and 20 is best for strikers (usually)

1. Does each character know who they'll buddy with? Generally you want the defender to buddy with the melee leader if you have one, or with the melee striker if you don't.

2. Without getting into character design theory in the middle of a post, D&D has roughly 3 axes of design-space: Damage-done, Damage-received, and Damage-mitigated. With a ranger and a barb in your party you'll be very very good at damage-done* (probably) soso at damage-recieved (paladin is decent) and absolutely pants at damage-mitigated, as you're relaying on your paladin for healing.

3a. Looking at your party composition, and noting that leader tends to be the hardest (and to myself most rewarding if done well, and most frustrating if done poorly) class to play, insure either a) that everyone in your party can do a bit of healing (MC leader), or, if they're not interested, have the person who likes tactical thinking the best play the leader. It is possible to get through a quest without a leader, but just make sure you've got a lot of healing potions.

Also, ranged monsters are going to be real problem. Not a whole lot you can do about it, though it sounds like with brutes and minions (minions are your job, BTW, make sure you have Area bursts) the party is well equipped to deal with them.

Summary: check out the forums for help in finding the traps in character builds, the handbooks are excellent and well maintained.

Answer 2

Monks do the most damage to groups. They can get feats that let them flurry multiple times per round and twice after each hit, and they can do at-wills and encounters that hit multiple opponents. We've got a monk in our group that hits 3 enemies and flurries 6 times, and when the cleric drops abilities that make groups of enemies vulnerable 10, or vulnerable 20, that's 90-180 extra damage. A bit ago he dropped an action point to get 2 standards and extra flurries in a round, and he went at a group of 10 enemies. He missed 3 of his attacks, but was still able to do 800 damage in that one round.

It took him nearly half an hour to roll each attack and figure out how much damage he did. 2 people had time to take a dump and 2 went out for smoke breaks. I'm not making this up. Everyone always times their breaks for rounds where the monk spend an action point.

Answer 3

Without going into very specialized builds and situations I'd say that the most damage delivery is done by the Essentials Theif.

I already mentioned it elsewhere, but in our game even from first level he tends to hit on a roll of 4-20 and does 18-30 damage. (This is just from gameplay, not statistical) partially due to a continual combat advantage).

With the Backstabber feat he does 3d8+ every single round by getting CA from at-will tricks.--I was just looking at a build where he can do 5d8+Dex every round. If you don't need the trick for CA, another will grant you extra damage.

That said, this is the most boring class I've played. The only reason I play it is as a second character when not everyone shows up--it deals great damage and takes absolutely no thought to play--I just set her in the corner, pick an enemy and it's one roll every turn.