But... I was told in no uncertain terms that I was absolutely wrong that people were trying to shut down the conversation and telling me to shut up. Funny that…
I'm not telling you to shut up. I'm asking you to consider if this conversation is worth having. If finding or working on your own version of the warlord might be a more effective use of your time and energy...
As far as my "happiness", I've pointed out several times that I am actually pretty hopeful that we will see a warlord in the fairly near future. Next year or so. They keep baby stepping towards it.
I doubt that very, very, very much.
First we got the Battlemaster and the PDK and Mastermind to test bed the mechanics. Snuck those right into the game without so much as a whimper.
It could equally be argued those are filling the need for the class, not testing it's mechanics. I'm pretty sure that WotC released the PDK, said to themselves that was that, and didn't look back. They checked off the warlord and moved onto psionics.
They don't release so many new options that they can afford to use some as "tests".
Also… why the eff would they test them in a publish book rather than directly test them with an UA article dedicated to the class?
Plus, after so many years of D&D, I don't think they need to test mechanics anymore. At least not for something like the warlord, which likely uses pretty comfortably used mechanics. They need to test balance and the concept more, to see how people feel about the execution.
Then, recently, we have a full blown 4e style leader with the Mystic Avatar subclass. And, lo and behold, not so much as a twinge or whimper from the fandom. Well received apparently.
I don't think the hang-up about the warlord is that it was a 4e style leader. (I also don't see how the Order of the Avatar is "4e style" more than the other healer types we've seen.) It has more than a little in common with the 3e ardent.
We also don't know the overall reaction to the avatar, just that from the few dozen people here. From my glance, arguably, that order is another potential warlord replacement/dip…
I really don't think having a 4e style leader is remotely the hang-up you think it is. The edition wars are over. 5e is doing gangbusters and almost no one gives a crap about 4e anymore. There are just too many D&D fans around now that just weren't involved in the edition wars and have no side in that conflict.
That said, I don't think people want a leader "class" though. Subclasses are fine, but classes don't need one role or another. Characters have roles, not classes.
So, now, we have all the mechanics, and people have no problems with them being non-magical, and, we have a proof of concept that we can have leader inspired classes in 5e without anyone losing their collective poop.
Maybe one more step - another magical "leader" class, then the Big Book of Crunch in the fall, and then, by this time next year, the Myrmidon, or whatever name they finally settle on, will make an appearance.
Do they *really* need to warm people up to the warlord with incremental design? They're radically changing the psion into the mystic and they just dumped it on us with no real warning.... Why wouldn't they do the same for the warlord?
Also they're not going to put out
two big books of player crunch published in subsequent years. We received zero new classes in both 2016 and 2017 and zero class options in 2016. Why would we get a whole new classes in 2017
and 2018?
With all the possible books they could do (high level monsters, environmental/locations, planes, magic items, campaign variants, even more monsters, epic heroes, other settings) why on earth would they release another book of class crunch?
At the very best - which is still unlikely - they might release more classes in 2019 and you could get a taste of the "myrmidon" in a Nov or Dec 2018 Unearthed Arcana. But, in all likelihood, we're not going to see more classes after November for multiple years.
Hard truth: the warlord isn't coming. Not in 2017. Not in 2018. Probably not in 2019 either. And at that point we're looking at a version of D&D that will have been around five years: longer than 4e, 3.0, or 3.5. It's hard to imagine what the game might be doing then...