Funny how even in this thread, labelled as "productive" nothing has been actually created and the warlord is no closer to being built. No warlord is emerging from this thread and this discussion isn't going to be read by Mike Mearls and thus is in no way going to contribute to the subclass' design.
An
actually productive thread in terms of the warlord would be something like
this, which has seen less action in a week than this thread has seen in a day.
Ironic that warlord fans, like the warlord class, really seem to be all about shouting in a battle while not actually taking part.
That is a... rather skewed and incorrect perception.
Not only have at least 4 pretty decent stabs at the class been made since 5E began that you can find on DM's guild, but if you had bothered to look at the board in general, since this discussion started at least 3 people have tried making a Warlord class.
Of course there is going to be division on exactly how to go about it. Had the Druid or Ranger not been in the base handbook, there would be a dozen different ideas on how to go about it, and very few would match what was even in the PHB.
In fact, I would be surprised if very many Druid or Ranger players are at all happy with what was presented in the PHB. Certainly people are not happy with the Ranger and a dozen people have attempted to remake it in a dozen ways.
Similarly-- there is little consensus on how exactly a Psion class should be built-- and whether some of the psionic classes presented in previous editions should be subclasses of that class or should be subclasses of other classes that get abilities from the main Psion class.
Just because there are dozens of options to choose from and none wins the award for the overall consensus of the perfect version doesn't mean there is nothing productive. After all, one can notice that overwhelmingly there are certain trends one can see among all the various options there are certain trends, certain aims even if the exact ways of going about them are a bit different.
Aims, by the way, that Mearls stubbornly refuses to acknowledge. And there is no wonder. The trend is obvious that the guy is not incompetent, but rather outright malicious. He was a terrible choice as a head designer, especially in an edition being this tightly regulated and controlled. Because he has a specific vision about how D&D should be and is openly hostile towards anyone else playing or enjoying the game in any way but his way.
He thinks all heroes should be small and agile, so he only made the races that are well-balanced and have good universal access to all classes. He even went as far as to take the traditional strength class, the Fighter, and warp it so that the Strength version is massively inferior to making it a Dexterity class, similarly he absolutely removed even the possibility of playing a Monk as a Strength character and has added a total of 0 functional subclasses that take advantage of strength.
Of course, in his version Orcs absolutely cannot ever be heroes. Certainly they are not allowed any variety. So the Half-Orc is the only race in the whole PHB that is entirely non-functional unless you play it as a very narrow specific stereotype and don't stray one iota from the singular functional build. And when he felt pressured to make a full Orc race, he made it entirely useless. It is even worse for the Hobgoblin-- if you play that as anything but a Warlock or a Wizard, he intentionally made it so you are functionally an entire level behind the rest of the party. And even worse when it came to those who might want to play Gnoll, which was made a decent playable race in the last two editions, and outright refused to even entertain the idea of making a PC version of them at all.
This is why the Warlord was the singular class left out of the 5E PHB. Simply because HE didn't like it, because HE had control wrapping his head around it, because HE didn't want anyone to get to play the concept. And this is why he is absolutely opposed to doing it correctly at all-- insisting on shoving it into that tiny 1/3rd sliver a subclass of Fighter would even allow when its damn obvious to anyone who isn't a complete idiot that you can never properly compete with the Cleric or Bard in terms of support class while making 2/3rds of the class vanilla thug. In fact, there have already been two attempts to do this-- the Battlemaster and the Purple Dragon Knight-- neither of which worked. If it could have been done, it already would have been done.
It all comes down to him being a damn autocratic control-freak who wants to make damn certain that anyone who doesn't play in his exact way using only his favorite races and classes, you are massively penalized to the point of ensuring your character won't survive long or will contribute so little to the party that you would be pressured into playing one of his chosen options that he wants people to play and thus made the mechanically superior options.
This wouldn't be such a problem if D&D wasn't being so iron-fistedly controlled by one guy with a singular vision and outright hostility towards all other visions. D&D was at its best when there were dozens of worlds and nothing was guaranteed to be universal between them.
But at least he is honest by saying that he isn't even remotely trying to balance things. It is just unfortunate that he chooses to imbalance things towards his own personal preferences rather than imbalance sneaking in by mistake or accident.
