Heh. Fair enough. And, to be fair, I had forgotten they had said that in SCAG under purple dragon knights.
But, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] says, there's a fair distance between what a Warlord should look like and what a PDK gives. Compared to Shadow Monks, there's a pretty wide gulf. Shadow monks are doing pretty much most of what a ninja is expected to do, right out of the gate. Comparisons to what they could do in 1e aren't really pertinent since NONE of the classes in 5e actually can do what 1e classes could do.
Obviously any warlord that we see is not going to be a carbon copy of the 4e warlord. Everyone knows this. 4e and 5e have different design perspectives and there's things in the 4e warlord that won't translate very well. For one, granting saves vs ongoing effects. In 4e, that was a big deal since everything and its brother could plant an ongoing effect on you. I remember one 4e session where the group actually managed 11 ongoing effects on a single target.
4e could get awfully bloody fiddly sometimes.
Obviously, that's not going to be a thing in 5e. There aren't that many ongoing effects in 5e. Mitigating ongoing effects would be largely redundant.
Or, as another element, in combat healing. 4e combat was based on the idea that you would be triggering healing surges during combat. The entire game was paced on that idea. But, 5e isn't. In combat healing isn't that big of a deal. 5e tends to play a lot closer to 2e or 1e in that regard - monsters don't drop PC's in single rounds (most of the time) and you generally aren't breaking out healing in the middle of combat too often. Not like 4e where it was expected every single combat.
So, obviously, our 5e warlord doesn't really need healing word 2/combat plus a boatload of other powers that grant healing in the middle of combat. We can likely get away with damage mitigation (temporary HP work well here) and some sort of out of combat healing bonus similar to what a bard gets.
In any case, no one is asking for a direct port of the 4e warlord into 5e. Everyone knows that the 5e warlord is going to be different from a 4e warlord. I don't think anyone would find that unacceptable considering that pretty much every single class in 5e is different from earlier edition classes. I mean, if we can accept regenerating fighters, we've obviously moved a fair distance away from earlier edition sensibilities.
The whole argument boils down to this, AFAIC. What is stopping us from getting a 5e warlord? Pretty much all of the warlord mechanics exist in the game, under the umbrella of other classes and mechanics. We've now got a psionic leader ganked straight out of 4e and everyone seems to like it - at least I haven't seen too much fuss about it. So, the mechanics are fine.
So, what's the holdup here? There really doesn't seem to be any reason why we don't have this, other than the fact that they haven't written it for consumption yet. Otherwise, what hurdles do you see in the class?
