This is always my favourite debate. I always have trouble staying away from this.
New classes are fun and can bring in some great ideas. But they're also the surest way to bloat the game. A system can add three or four new class before things get unwieldy. Pathfinder is the good example. It was pushing the limits after its first two Ultimate books and the Advanced Class Guide that added seven new classes to the game, but each was pretty distinct. After that… suuuuuper bloat and redundancy that just weakened the identity of the core classes.
New classes are also hard to balance. The mechanics of a class affect every encounter in every level from first to twentieth. That requires a heck of a lot of playtesting to get right, which hasn't always happened previously in the game.
New classes are a trap, as devising a class with unique new flavour or unique new mechanics isn't hard. Imagination has no limits. And with a century of high fantasy, swords & sorcery, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, and science fantasy to draw from for inspiration, there's no shortage of iconic powers and concepts.
There's fifteen on the list, but off the top of my head I can also think of a dedicated
shapeshifter that turns into people, animals, or hybrids; the
binder/ spiritualist that summons spirits as pets, implants them in objects, or absorbs them into their body; the
swashbuckler that bounds across the battlefield with a rapier; the
dark knight that controls undead or uses darkness; the
demon hunter/ monster knight that uses supernatural powers to hunt horrible creatures, fighting darkness with darkness; the
truenamer that uses the secret true names of objects, forces, and creatures to cause magic; the
totemist/ fetishist that forms links between things or uses pieces of objects or creatures to affect the larger whole; the
tinkerer that crafts nonmagical constructs and devices; the
gunslinger that can make and employ either handguns or longarms in devastating ways; the
blue mage or spellthief that copies the powers of foes confronted in the past;
That's before you get to the weirder unique stuff D&D has done in the past. Like the Incarnate, Soulborn, and Totemist. Factotum. The Dragon Shaman and Dragonfire Adept. Runepriest and Runecaster. Swordsage and Warblade. Or the world specific stuff, like Dragonlance's Mystics and Sorcerers, Dark Sun's Templars and Defilers, and the like.
5e is built nicely to avoid much of the problems with class bloat. Subclasses and backgrounds can take the heavy lifting in that regard. When in doubt, things can be tweaked and slipped into an existing class. And reflavouring can also help, tweaking an existing class to be something else. Or making something that works through liberal multiclassing...
When thinking on what could be a class, it really needs a strong story. A hook and narrative. It needs to be recognisable without lengthy description or explanation of how it's different, while also avoiding stepping on the toes of other classes. And it needs to be diverse and flexible enough to spawn numerous subclasses, each with distinct flavour and mechanics. But it also needs to be generic enough to fit effortlessly into all campaign settings with almost no work, including Eberron, the Forgotten Realms, and the myriad homebrew worlds. A class where the DM is taken aback by how to fit it into their world is a poorly thought out class.
Going through the list:
Artificer It's popular and has been updated twice before. And it can encompass a lot of the magical creation archetypes or classes that use lots of magical items without imbalancing the game. It
could work as a wizard or bard archetype, but response to that was apparently lacking.
The playtest version we saw was nice and flexible. That's what you want in a class. You can use it as a chassis for alchemy and gunslinging. (Or more. I did a
DMs Guild product that easily added wandslinging, tinkerer, and paper talismans like you see in anime. It's a flexible class.)
Alchemist This is cool, and Pathfinder has shown there's lots of tropes and subclasses it can fill. But this can be folded into the artificer without issue.
Duskblade A less generic gish class. In an alternate reality, WotC released a spellsword or swordmage class in the 5e PHB. In that reality, the duskblade would be a fine subclass for said gish class. But here in this dark reality, the duskblade is probably best served as using an eldritch knight or hexblade warlock of a combination of both. It's not a class, it's a character's build.
Gladiator This is an occupation, not a class. Someone who fights for show could be a background. (I think it is.) A fighter or a barbarian or a war cleric can all equally fight in a ring and work as a gladiator.
Jester This is a bard subclass. Or rather, a specific flavouring of the College of Satire. So not even its own subclass. Much to my chagrin...
Knight This is a fighter subclass mixed with noble background or similar aristocratic backstory.
Mystic If this is the Dragonlance spontaneous cleric, that's just using spell points from the DMG with the cleric or the Divine Soul sorcerer.
As an alternate name for the psion? Yes, that is a class that needs to exist. Psions/ psionicists/ mystics are needed because they've been in every edition (save Basic and OD&D) and is essential for Dark Sun. And there's a lot of potential subclasses and flavours.Even former classes like the soul knife.
Ninja Historical ninjas are rogues. Fantasy/ wuxia ninjas are Way of Shadows monks. Done.
Pirate Like the gladiator, this is an occupation. You're a sailor that robs people. Fighters, rangers, rogues, and probably even bards can be great pirates. I ran a
Skull & Shackles campaign just fine without a "pirate" class.
Prophet Prophets and oracles are really just covered by diviner wizards. Or a theoretical sorcerer bloodline (seer?) Or clerics of a god of knowledge. As for the actual dude sitting in a cave with ineffable knowledge of the future… that's an NPC. They don't use classes or PC rules… IF they even need a statblock. It's not like we need a Fortune Teller class for every time a player gets their palm read in some smokey Vistani vardo…
Samurai The knightly subclass of the fighter reflavoured for Southeast Asia and wielding a reflavoured longsword. I think the subclass in
Xanthar's Guide also works just fine.
Shaman The shaman is a concept that hasn't been well supported, with its talking to spirits and serving as a bridge between mortal world and spirit realm. But it doesn't mesh well with standard D&D tropes and assumptions. And I’m uncertain if 3-4 distinct subclasses could spawn out of this. Maybe merged with the spiritualist/ medium archetypes, with different subclasses dealing with different types of spirit. But that would be super niche.
Otherwise, I think this works better as a druid subclass. Perhaps with a replacement power for wild shape or other feature that is fueled by uses of wild shape.
Summoner I have fond memories of my summoner wizard in 3e. This is a cool idea that could work and be distinct from the wizard. And being separate it's easier to balance, since you can add limits that don't/ should exist with the
conjure X spells. A dedicated pet class. Not sure about subclasses though…
Warlord The big divisive one. The idea of skilled tactician isn't so much a class as a character concept: you’re a fighter with a high Int or Charisma, or even a ranger or wizard that commands people. Ditto the natural leader. Anyone can be the strategist if that's how you want to play your character.
So much of the warlord debate seem like an excuse to hate on 5e and its designers. It's a talking point. There's little room for compromise as all elements of the class are seen as sacred cows, even the ones that were optional in 4e (like granting attacks). And stuff that is more optional in 5e (like healing, as only the paladin has baked-in healing) is still considered mandatory. It's also weird to call for a "non-magical cleric replacement" class when the cleric isn't really essential in 5e and doesn’t *need* replacing,
and it's hard to justify a non-magical replacement to reverse being petrified, blinded, diseased, ability drained, or killed…
The above means that rather than the designers being free to look at the general concept of the warlord/ tactician/ commander archetype and figuring out the best way to implement the concept in the game and innovating new mechanics, they’re stuck replicating decade-old design work.
Witch I'm uncertain how this is different from a warlock. A few choice invocations, a pointy hat, the Pact of the Chain for a kitty, and a
broom of flying and you're good. Okay, there’s a lot of witchy elements not covered in that, but the in world witch archetype in D&D is filled by hags and not mortal women who make a pact with the Devil.
What do we need? Mystic/ psion and the artificer are the big two. And I'd be happy just with the former. A good shaman class might be nice, and would expand the world in neat directions. And I suppose I wouldn't say “no” to a summoner (possibly working but I don't think it's completely needed.
Everything else is unnecessary. It can be filled by 3rd Party Products or content on the DMsGuild. Perhaps more classes designed to fit specific 3rd Party campaign settings.
I wonder if Kobold Press feels up to a Midgard class…
But, the hypothetical protest goes, what about Adventurer's League? So? What about it? The number of people in the Adventurer's League is relatively small. It's aimed at the players in the 2500-odd WPN stores in North America. Even if each store has a dozen regulars, that's only 30,000 players. And if recent talk of 6 million D&D players is accurate, that means as little as 0.5% of players might take part in organized play. That's not large enough of an audience to worry about releasing content solely for.
Plus, the Adventurer's League is aimed primarily at new players. It's a way to bring people into the game. who won't give a crap about some class from an edition they never played last seen half a decade ago. Home games are the vast, vast majority, and if your DM doesn't allow 3rd Party or homebrew stuff then you really need to talk with them rather than bug WotC to release a class. The percentage of the player base that only plays via AL
and played older editions regularly
and were a *huge* fan of a class in an old edition and simply must play one again is probably pretty small. (Really wanting to play that 3rd Party duskblade or warlord is good encouragement to find a home game.)
As a reality check, if my educated guess that 300,000 people play AL regularly, that means three times as many people watched the last episode of Critical Role live. So for every time we say "but what about the AL?!" we should also be asking "but what about streamers?" three or four times.
I don't expect new classes in 2018. They still have to release the updated artificer and mystic onto the DMsGuild for concept testing. They'll be the Autumn 2019 book at the earliest. (Okay… if they get one up in a month or two, it might squeak into the deadline for this autumn's book. But I doubt they'll do two years of class content in a row. And that still assumes the fall's book is a sourcebook.)
Anything new put up for concept testing now will be out in 2020, following two years of testing. Again, assuming they do two new classes back-to-back. 2021 would be more likely. And that's a long damn time away...
