The group I currently play with seems to have problems. Occasionally, people change characters, but last night was the worst I've seen. The party was:
Level 10 War axe and shield weapon talent dwarf fighter. High AC (30), and feats to make sure his mark is very punishing (devoted challenge, shield push, forceful opportunity) (me)
Level 10 half elf fey lock.
Level 9 elven pacifist cleric
Level 7 genasi fighter. Has several form related feats, uses the genasi earth racial (earth stomp) stomp to multi-mark (with a power jewel), and an at will that can prone enemies. He's deliberately tried to avoid some of the powers I've taken on my fighter (such as "come and get it").
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So we've got a party with a lot of controller minors, but very little damage. We were playing a 7-10 LFR module, with the high level option, and breezed the first couple of combats, whilst only spending one daily each.
Then we came to the end combat. The first round I charged the nearest enemy, and in the second round I used "Come and get it" followed by an action point and "Thicket of blades". I pulled in four of the five enemies, and hit all four enemies with my first attack, but only one with the daily, for a total of 110 damage. The mob that was hit by both attacks died shortly thereafter.
After that, things started to go wrong. The warlock was spreading his damage and frequently missed. The cleric was spending most of his actions maintaining a daily, and trying to move away from the enemy. Me and the other fighter were able to hold the elites on us, but after a few founds, and several mobs showing a willingness to accept combat challenges on a regular basis, we had the lesser mobs running off pursuing our squishies.
The combat dragged on. We were soon reduced to at-wills. Damage was spread. After 2 hours of combat, the DM called the fight as a party victory - but at that stage, 3 out of 5 bad guys were still standing (I believe the enemy leader was on single figure hit points - hence the DM decision).
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To me this is painful. I don't think any of the characters are particularly bad - they could all find a place in a well balanced group. But having 3 out 4 party members with low damage builds just doesn't work. I tried to point this out to the group, but didn't seem to get much positive response. The warlock admitted that the most damaging striker in the party was probably my character, and that I'd probably done almost as much damage in my second round, as he'd done all combat.
I doubt much will be done. But I'm worried that if the same party is levelled up to paragon, then we could find ourselves in a lot of trouble. It also isn't much fun when combats become long drawn out grinds, which can't possibly be lost, due to our clerics endless healing, but which take forever to win.
Any suggestions?
Next, discuss your concerns with the DM. It's possible he can tailor the encounters to be less of a grind by altering monster HP or using different enemies.
Encourage your group to focus fire one enemy at a time. Spreading damage all over only keeps enemies on their feet longer and prolongs the combat by adding more rolls that need to be made every round.
Start working together as a group to when leveling up to choose powers that will allow for better coordination. The cleric might look at powers that give bonuses to hit to help with the miss factor. The other fighter should consider if his avoiding certain powers is a help or hinderance or perhaps the other fighter can focus more on damage dealing powers while you stay defender focused. The warlock might take a look at what NADs his powers are targeting and see if that's an issue with his missing. You yourself might consider some retraining to pick up some feats/powers that allow you to deal out more damage. This might go against the heavy defender concept you have, but locking everything down doesn't do much good if you can't kill anything and, ultamately, you really only have control over your own selections so you might have to be the one to aim for the high damage role.
One thing I notice right away is the level disparity. This is not helping and should, in my opinion, be fixed. Put everyone at the same level and keep them that way. Doing so will help the DM balance encounters and will ensure that everyone participating in the battle will be able to help equally.
People choose which characters to play. The guy who played the 7th level fighter also has a 10th level ranger, but for some reason that I don't quite understand he chose to play the fighter.
Next, discuss your concerns with the DM. It's possible he can tailor the encounters to be less of a grind by altering monster HP or using different enemies.
The DM's been playing living games for years, and enjoys running LFR modules. However, since he's running pre-written modules, he only has so much room to adjust. Unless anyone else summons up the motivation to accept the commitment of running a campaign, then this situation is like to continue.
LFR modules do come with a high/low difficulty switch, that can be picked by the players. However, choosing low difficulty with a relatively high level party would be an admission of failure rather than a fix. It would also result in lower quality rewards from the adventure, which might hurt us in other ways later on.
Encourage your group to focus fire one enemy at a time. Spreading damage all over only keeps enemies on their feet longer and prolongs the combat by adding more rolls that need to be made every round.
I try to. I've said it so often it's almost become a cliche. However, for one reason or another it rarely happens. Out warlock often picks the target that's most threatening to him, in order to enjoy the benefits of spells such as eyebite, whilst as a defender, I often want to try to lock up big, mean enemies, such as elite brutes or soldiers, whereas these are seldom the best targets for DPS. The other fighter will also normally pick a different target to myself, in order to keep enemies locked up.
Start working together as a group to when leveling up to choose powers that will allow for better coordination. The cleric might look at powers that give bonuses to hit to help with the miss factor. The other fighter should consider if his avoiding certain powers is a help or hinderance or perhaps the other fighter can focus more on damage dealing powers while you stay defender focused. The warlock might take a look at what NADs his powers are targeting and see if that's an issue with his missing.
When I try to urge people to do these things, I seldom get anywhere and risk annoying people further. Each player seems to have some sort of idea of where his character should go, and doesn't seem very open to compromise. I'd agree that the NADs the warlock is hitting may be part of the problem - several of his powers target fortitude - but I don't know enough about locks to be able to know if there are better alternatives. I could look at some of the guides on this site, and basically figure out how to rebuild his character to do more damage - but then I doubt he'd listen to me.
You yourself might consider some retraining to pick up some feats/powers that allow you to deal out more damage. This might go against the heavy defender concept you have, but locking everything down doesn't do much good if you can't kill anything and, ultamately, you really only have control over your own selections so you might have to be the one to aim for the high damage role.
I already do a significant amount of damage - more than anyone else in the group. I've already partially rebuilt the character for more damage. The only way I could realistically increase it any further would be to switch the build from a one hander to two hander.
Maybe the problem is communication between the players. The warlock knows his damage his low - but he doesn't seem to acknowledge it as his problem and his responsibility to fix it. The player isn't remotely interested in optimization, even when playing in environments where at least a small amount of optimization is expected from players (i.e. LFR). I'm not even sure if the cleric understands the problem - he definitely doesn't seem to want to accept any compromises that would lower his healing potential, and probably views his character as quite powerful - doing damage is someone else's problem, and it's only his excellent healing that's keeping us going through such long combats. The other fighter is built both to fulfill a character concept, and to avoid many of the powers I've chosen - and combining these restrictions leaves little room for manoeuver.
Maybe if the other player chooses to play his fighter again, I should switch to playing my seventh level melee ranger. Perhaps that will work better - but we'd still have 3 out 4 low damage characters.
Now I understand the level differences and why they exist. It also explains some of the other issues. My advise was more tuned to a home game setting.It sounds like your frustrations are similar to the ones that drove me out of the local LFR groups; no one listens/is interested in making a team. The LFR has advantages (you can play anywhere) but also runs with disadvantages (group of individuals vs. a cohesive team). From what you've said, it looks like you've made an effort to speak with the group and it's just not working out. Sometimes no DnD is better than bad/boring DnD and you might have to decide between not playing or long, tedious combats. I chose not playing and I don't miss it at all.
One other thing you might try with the group is not run LFR like LFR. The DM could simply use the adventures from LFR and run them as an unofficial home game which would allow him more leeway in changing the modules. This would also allow people who wanted to change characters to do so with less disadvantage in levels.
Also, you are missing a controller. This is one reason for your accuracy issues; controllers excel at making monsters easier to hit.
Anyway, you can't control what the other players do or what characters they choose to build and play. It sounds like they just aren't very good at D&D and aren't interested in improving, in which case maybe it's time to find another group.
If that's not an option, see if you can convince the DM to use more minions, and to generally ease up on the challenge level. Maybe not possible in an LFR environment, but I'm not convinced LFR is a feasible option for this particular group.
And your party's only striker is a feylock. I like feylocks a lot, but they should be a secondary striker/controller, not your primary striker. (Unless you are playing with a very skilled optimizer and it sounds like this player did not optimize the feylock for damage). And a party of 4 generally only needs 1 defender.
I played in a similar party for our first campaign and we had long combats: 1-h warforged fighter, charisma paladin, eladrin wizard, and dwarf balanced cleric.
In the first place, 2-hour combats happen pretty much to all groups. Or sometimes longer than that. It's not necessarily planned out that way, it just works out that way, even if the party is balanced and cohesive.
LFR adventures can have wildly varying degrees of difficulty. Much like published adventure modules which are easier for some groups and harder for others, LFR is kind of more extreme, in my experience.
Possibly because the author is constrained by both making a short story and having a certain amount of XP that has to get used, and parties rarely have plausible ways to back out after a really hard fight to rest and recover. I think most are also written for low level as the default, and high level is made mostly by scaling monsters, which can have odd effects. The random party makeup does not help either.
Not all players are the same. You like optimizing your character for combat. Some players like intentionally making their characters weaker. Some like choosing whatever options sound cool at the time, or which will "some day" turn out to be cool. Some players are crazy powergamers who have horribly lopsided characters, but those characters can do hundreds of damage easily or whatever it is they wanted to do.
Playing High normally would require one or more of the following:
1) At least half the group is at or near the upper level limit,
2) At least half the players have done the adventure before, and know their characters can handle things,
3) Recognition of a very compatible party, or at least a highly damaging one,
4) An actual adventuring party made up of PCs who've played a long time together, not random groups,
5) Crazy strong PCs, and/or many of those cards that let you do weird things in LFR games.
I think in general, Playing Low is not admitting "defeat." In a group like you have, it may just be admitting "reality."
But in any event, your party was victorious despite the odds, and only had some trouble with the last encounter, which tends to be the hardest anyway. So you did pretty well I'd say.
You say they don't listen to you, but that's not surprising. I don't know what your relationship is with those players, but nearly any time you say or imply that a character is not as effective as he could be, it's like calling the player a bit of an idiot who doesn't know the rules.
Most players really do have their own ideas for their character, or are perfectly satisfied with the status quo, and your advice was not asked for.
I'm sure some people take "constructive" criticism well, and maybe discuss the various aspects of why their character is as it is -- but it's not something to count on with strangers.
There may be decent ways to open the topic, maybe "Hey I like your character, he's really cool. What do you plan to do with him down the line?" and then you can somehow work in effective combinations and powers into the talk, complimenting things interspersed with what you believe to be a good course of future development, but that's not something I've engaged in really.
You probably would be able to influence the character's future development in some ways, if you know the character already, with lines like, "Hey Bob! Did you see that cool new Warlock power in Dragon XXX? When I saw that, I thought of your character. You might want to look that one up."
That's not really my style to do that to "fix" a character, but I will bring up certain options that are relevant to my adventuring party, that my friends actually would be interested in hearing about even if they don't want it for their character.
You can do some other things to improve your party's cohesiveness, even if their characters are not terribly meant for each other. Primarily I'm talking about in-game character interactions.
Roleplaying often gets relegated to the "social encounter" in the adventure, maybe with some little introductions in the very beginning. Otherwise personality just kind of leaks out at odd moments because everyone is on a schedule, or comes out only when it's time to make combat decisions for the character.
I suspect many LFR players are a bit "starved" for roleplaying. That's not really what happens in LFR adventures.
But your character can communicate effectively with in-game comments, instructions, declarations and such.
You probably are well aware of the line, "I need healing!" but there are many other things you can communicate verbally in-character.
For example, speaking in-character, and having your character call out to another PC by name (or epithet) for assistance with an enemy. It's very hard for a player to rationalize tactically unwise decisions as "This is what my character would do," when the character is directly asked to do something else and thus being presented with tactically more wise decisions.
This only goes so far, and certainly players will ignore you if you're just a bossy character in general. Save it only for those times when it's really important, not just on normal fights you're going to win anyway.
Various ways you can introduce it are, "Hey You, I need some help with this guy," "Wizard, do you have anything that can tangle this guy up?" "We have to shut that door or they'll keep coming!" "That shifty fellow in the back is the real threat, don't let these weaklings distract you!" Etc. Etc., modified for your character.
Anything that strokes another player character's ego is liable to work too. "Fighter, I don't think I can beat this guy without your help!" "My attacks can't get through his thick hide; Sorcerer, use your mystical fire energies to burn a hole in his head!" Many PCs won't be able to self deprecate though, without being creative about it.
If your PC is an "idiot" character, you will likely have to be extremely creative to issue competent advice in a way that makes sense. But if you have at least average intelligence and wisdom, it should be fine.
You can also communicate what is (to you) obvious game information, that the other PCs should notice but don't seem to. Many ways to go about this, but I think the "Insult" or "Complaint" approaches are likely the simplest.
If you're fighting an Ogre, and you know (and it has also been described to you by the DM) that he's a big tough guy that seems a bit dumb and slow to react, use that character information to convey things that have game repercussions. "Come on ya empty-headed tub 'o lard, just try to hit me with that big slow club of yours!" for say, when you Mark the Ogre.
This reminds everyone in an "unobtrusive" way, that the Ogre is big, slow, dumb etc., which usually translates directly into their Defenses and Hit Points. Their character would be acting unusual if they disregarded that information (unless they really don't trust your judgment or something).
And sometimes players are tired and they miss certain points, which may otherwise make a fight simpler.
Terrain features for instance, and current monster positions, can be "complained" about. "If they would just stop blocking the bridge, I could go smash their little green heads in!" "What genius put this pile 'o sticky gunk in the middle of the floor? It could take yer shoes off!"
The more "entertaining" your tactical advice is, and the less it seems like you're telling people exactly what to do, the better it will probably be received. It's not foolproof, but it's effective.
I think you or someone else has to step up and DM an old fashioned non-LFR game, so that the DM is free to mod the game for the group as DMs are supposed to, or else your group is going to continue slogging through LFR adventures.
This is why I'm generally not in favor of the pacifist build. It makes fights too safe and too boring.
Also, you are missing a controller. This is one reason for your accuracy issues; controllers excel at making monsters easier to hit.
A well-built, well-played pacifist healer is really good for that. Not only debuffs the monsters, but leaves hit points attached to their hide for your PCs to grab.
One that is pretty much just a healbot... not so good.