From the 4e Warlord I played, I was under the impression that healing was only one of it's toys and that it's other specialties for granting actions and buffing were a bigger part of it's makeup.
That was a matter of player build choices. You could choose more maneuvers and utilities that triggered surges or restored hps, or fewer. From an optimization PoV, the warlord had more arguably superior offensive buffs, but it wasn't by such a profound margin that failing to optimize made you non-viable or anything.
[qoute] Having a 5e warlord with damage mitigation and then the array of other powers that make a warlord a different Leader than a cleric can easily make a class cool without it also having to try to be all the healer the cleric can be.[/quote]the warlord is inescapably differentiated from the cleric by the simple fact of not being a spellcaster. There's no need to take away basic functionality and player choice to do so. The only thing that can be accomplished by taking central abilities like Inspiring Word and other hp-restoration abilities away from the Warlord is to make it non-viable as a primary support contributor.
If it's as good a healer as a cleric AND it has warlord specific toys it's overpowered.
First of all, "no hp restoration at all" and "as good a healer as a cleric" are not the only choices. There's a vast excluded middle, there, including the desired one: a warlord that is a viable support-oriented class, with a high degree of flexibility and player choice. Secondly, no, even if you made the Warlord exactly as capable a healer as a Life Cleric, /and/ gave it everything it had in 4e, you wouldn't have an overpowered character, it would still be less flexible than the Cleric, because Warlords don't go around casting Flame Strike or Plane Shift or Meld into Stone or anything.
I'd rather give it warlord abilities and some mitigation rather that focus on healing to make a drop in-replacement for a cleric that doesn't change how the party plays out.
You couldn't begin to make the Warlord into a drop-in replacement for the Cleric that doesn't change how the party plays, /because it doesn't cast spells/. You drop a Warlord into a survival challenge, and he doesn't trivialize it by casting 'Create Food & Water,' for one of many possible instances. Warlords don't Turn Undead. The party will play /very/ differently.
If the warlord can't restore hps, however, that difference will be much shorter days and more likely TPKs - a difference dramatic enough to keep anyone from playing the class when Cleric, Druid, Bard, Paladin, or even Ranger is available.
Why? I'm not trying to be a smart-alec, but why is reducing damage taken not a valid replacement for healing?
As Neonchameleon, puts it, it 'requires prescience.' Support classes pull the party through when things go wrong. When things aren't going wrong, damage mitigation will extend your adventuring day, just like healing. You'll drop temps on people who then get hit, there will only ever be one big-damage attack an ally needs negated with your Reaction between each of your turns, your save and AC bonuses will make the difference between success and failure - all the dice-dependent variables in the chaos of combat will come out neatly average, and you won't have to heal anyone who drops, because no one will ever drop.
That'll happen prettymuch 0% of the time.
Similarly, being 100% dependent on restoring hps has it's problems. Your allies will lose actions when they're dropped as they wait for you to get them back up, especially when more than one goes down at a time. Those lost actions will extend the combat and the ability of the enemy to further reduce your allies' hps that you must then expend more resources restoring. You can't leverage actions before a combat to restore hps to someone in advance of those hps being lost, you have to use actions in-combat actions or wait until the fight is over.
Restoring hps and mitigating their loss are two very different things. Every extant 5e class that can fill the support role does both, and has a great deal of flexibility in deciding which to use, from day to day, and even round to round.
The Warlord had similar flexibility, it's concept calls for it, and it needs such flexibility if the game is to realize the advantage of expanding support of play styles to all-martial parties and low-/no-magic campaigns.
But why MUST the warlord have to have a healing component vs. a damage reduction component? The poll has no healing at all as the most answered response, double the next highest which is still 80% mitigation. This seems to be a viable option for other players, what makes it wrong?
I've explained what makes it non-viable. What makes it wrong is that it's telling everyone else how to play the game.
I thought tactical play, such as making field decisions about who is in a high risk position, or is going to be placing themselves in harm's way, and could use a buffer and who isn't was a feature of playing a warlord.
It is, and it's fun, but it also means making decisions about /how/ to support the party. Taking away an option entirely reduces options, and gives you fewer, and less meaningful tactical decisions, a fixed ratio also reduces flexibility and tactical depth (every option in this pole is, in essence, an anti-warlord vote, because every option results in a warlord strictly inferior as a contributor of support to the party, the extremes - all hp-restoration & all hp-preservation would make it non-viable as the party's primary support character, closing off the play styles that he Warlord enabled in the past).
Reactions don't require Precog.
Using one doesn't. Trying to use even reactive damage mitigations as a substitute for restoring hps not mitigated, however, does. Deciding whether to use a reaction to mitigate damage on one character, when there's still enemy actions coming before your next turn, for instance. Even if the 'reaction' lets you know the damage, so you can save your reactions only for attacks that would drop an ally (which is absolutely critical if you're relying exclusively on mitigation, because you can /never let an ally drop/ since you have no way of getting him back up again, you have to help him stabilize and wait d4 hours!).
To sum it up:
The most basic difference between restoring and preserving hps is that you can't mitigate damage that has already happened, and you can't restore hps that haven't been lost yet. One absolutely cannot be used in advance, the other absolutely cannot be used after the fact.
Having both, and the flexibility to apply resources to either, lets a support character get the party through the wide variety of challenges and dice luck they face. Every existing support class in 5e can do that. A character with only one or the other, or even with both but no ability to re-assign resources between them, is less able to do so. That's strict inferiority, and making a class strictly inferior in it's primary contribution is the tantamount to denying the class as an option, entirely - it absolutely eliminates the benefit of expanding supported styles of play, which is a major, indeed, existential, goal of 5e).
