Questions about making a Fighter

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As has been mentioned, fighters in this game are the ultimate tanks.
if you're a fan of min-maxing, you can pretty much drop your might to the minimum score of 2 and dex to 3 so you can focus on perception and resolve . As far as melee toons go, the barbarian is much better suited as a damage dealer.

A good int is nice to have too, so you get a long duration and big benefit from your class innate ability and your self-buff skills.
Constitution is also a good thing to have on a tank, for obvious reasons, though you can skimp a bit here - there's not going to be much diffrence between having 16 con and 18 con.

Now, if you want a high might score, there's nothing stopping you.
You can't really afford to skimp much on perception and resolve, but you can keep your int at the middle ground at 10, drop con to about the same and put the rest of your points in might instead.
Thing is, you won't be hitting enough to make good use of the high might by default so you'll want to work around this in one of two (or both) ways :
-Make your character a fire godlike, he does fire damage to attackers each time you get hit - the damage output gets boosted by might
- Get an item with the Riposte modifier on it ASAP - this will automatically make you counter attack, also on getting hit, again taking into account your might score, same as any melee attacks your character would make.

 

You really don't need to though. I took Eder (who has mediocre stats) and gave him with the heaviest armor and shield and tank'y talents, and by act 4 almost nothing could hit him (or at least not very often).

 

True, you can make fighters that still tank really well, and do a bit of damage alongside aswell. couple balanced stats with Riposte on gear and/or fire godlike race and you can be pretty damn good at both defense and offence.

I guess it's more a personal preference of mine to make characters (at least my PC) that focus on on the aspect of a class that they can really excel in.

 

I'm toying with the idea in a future run through (not that I'm anywhere close to completing my first) of having an uber tank fighter and a more damage focused fighter, just to see how they stack up. This would likely be played on PotD, where I'm hopeful having an optimized party will be very important. While the overall difficulty on my normal playthrough has been higher than I recall from the IE games, I'm beginning to think that some of this is due to my lack of 15 years to master this game like I've had with IE. As I master the combat mechanics, I suspect I'm going to need to up the difficulty to keep it fun.

At any rate, two fighters I'm guessing will serve as an all but impassable wall for a party.

 

Yeah, having 2 tanks for the rest of your party to hide behind is a good idea in general.
I could really advice you to make 1 fighter and 1 paladin instead though, they will synergize much better then 2 fighters.
Whereas the paladin the game supplies you with (pallegina) is built for offence reght as you get her, and her stats are kind of terrible, if you make your own, you can make them into pretty great tanks, same as fighters.
The added bonus here is that you will be getting acces to their buffs, like zealous endurance for more DR to the entire party, and Liberating Exhortation for whenever you get hit by CC.
The biggest advantage to this is that the paladin gets access to Hastening exhortation at level 11, with wich they can increase the attack speed of 1 ally. perfect if you are running them as tank and your fighter as damage dealer.

Of course, Paladin tank and barbarian tank/dd hybrid would work even better, espescially for PoTD, i think you'd be better off going for it as a combo instead of any combination with a fighter in it.

Fighters are great tanks, but that's all they really excel at. Other then that, he has zero presence on the battlefield.
At best you're using Riposte to get something out of getting hit all the time and at least get some damage in. You're better off picking something more team-oriented - Tanky barbarians are idea for this, they can still tank with the best of them, while also acting as a debuffer with things like Barbaric Yell , Threatening presence & barbaric shout.

 

The thing about Fighters is that you only need as much deflect on them as necessary. Once that is done, you can play them pretty much however you want. It also helps that they can learn so many talents/abilities, so you'll always have enough extra points to get all the tanking essentials even as you devote everything else to improving your damage-dealing capabilities. They are also perfect candidates for getting the bane talents (Beast Slayer, Primal Bane, Sanctifier, Wilder Hunter, Ghost Hunter). They already have Knockdown for humanoid opponents, and just about every other class already excels at bringing down humanoid opponents anyway.

 

But that would mean you could not pick other talents that might be useful?

 

Fighters already get bonus abilities/talents. You can afford to pick ease-of-use/convenience/niche talents, which is why the game offers you a whole bunch of them (mostly under utility). There's also the fact that you can't activate several modal talents at once. As a general rule, you won't find many stacking effects in PoE. This is one of the more appealing aspects of the game imo.