And there are entire states, every presidential election, that are stunned at the results. They simply cannot believe how it turned out. See the connection...?
Clearly. No matter how much WotC may poll the fanbase, they can't be certain of their interpretations of the resulting data - something that tests well may do poorly. Such are the vagaries of business.
I don't see how it helps your wild speculation about WotC market research that you haven't seen, that may or may not even have been undertaken.
Sure, anything could happen. People'll surprise you sometimes.
Nobody knows that better than a DM...
Did you intend to misrepresent what I said?
No, I intended to contrast what you implied with some equally-valid hearsay.
the EK uses the wizard's spell list (and for the majority of their career, only a tiny fraction of it at that). That's it.
That's exactly what makes the parallel so strong. The EK is prettymuch all fighter, like all fighter archetypes. But at third, he gets a couple of spells from the wizard list, as he levels, he eventually gets a number of them spread out over 4 levels. That's all the wizard there is to the EK. /Very little/, but more than taking Magic Initiate, say.
Similarly, the BM is all fighter, but he has a handful of maneuvers that are comparable to the kinds of things the Warlord did, and he can start with 3 of them (just about all of them, unless we're being terribly generous). Over time, he can get every other maneuver on his list of 16 that's remotely warlord-like. Though, not as many as the EK learns spells, and not from an expanding list, and not scaling with spell slots.
So, yeah, the BM is a teeny bit Warlord, just like the EK is a teeny bit Wizard.
Just an even teenier bit.
Same with the PDK, it's just completely inflexible, as well.
If you say so. No one was EVER trying to say that the Wizard and the EK were the same. We were attempting to illustrate that, in a similar way, the game has room for both a Warlord and a PDK.
Nod. The point is that the former aren't the same, and the latter wouldn't be the same, either.
I mean, we have no example of a sub-class of one class that is entirely obviated by a different class. It's hard to think how one could even be designed, since the hypothetical uberclass would have to subsume the base class, as well, to co-opt any synergies between it and the sub-class targeted for inferiority.
Can a wizard make one weapon attack as a bonus action after casting a spell?
Take Remathilis' Warlord, above. Can it take a second action in the same round? No. Can it regain hps as it heals others? No.
See how that works? The PDK is a fighter sub-class, it's got the fighter's focus on DPR, and it's warlordish stuff are
riders on those fighter features, features that a hypothetical Warlord full class shouldn't have.
Therefore, no imagination is necessary. The wizard cannot do everything an EK does.
And, for the same sorts of reasons, no hypothetical warlord should do everything the PDK does. Heck, a big part of the need for a full class Warlord is that the Fighter chassis does too much un-warlord-ly tanky-DPR stuff, there's not enough design space in a fighter archetype to fill out the warlord's past abilities.
The nonsense uberclass you're envisioning would be a hard fail for warlord fans, too.
