The bolded doesn't follow. Healing can't guarantee survival either. Either way, you make it harder to kill your allies.
Yes, it does. Because 5e is all about fat sacks of HP that can kill you in two rounds if you aren't incredibly careful. Unless, of course, you go for "Medium" combats, at which point damage never mattered to begin with because you effectively can't die.
What. I stab the unconcious guy, he dies. Either way. Damage mitigation is in many ways better than healing because it's better at preventing unconciousness.
...it's...I mean, it's "better" at that in the sense that
it might sometimes do that, sure. But the purpose of healing is not to prevent unconsciousness. It's to prevent
death. Which 5e is--as I have been assured both by others' reports and my own experience--absolutely full of. Especially at low level.
Great you inspiring worded me back up, too bad I lost my turn anyway because I go between what knocked me out and you. Would have been better if I'd not lost that turn.
"Great, you mitigated that hit. Now, two battles from now,
when I'm literally actually dead, all that mitigation doesn't make a damn bit of difference, does it?"
Missing one turn is unfortunate.
Death is a problem.
Can you please explain how you get "isn't a support class" from "doesn't have to just be a support class"?
You didn't say "doesn't have to be." You
specifically said, "I don't agree that the spirit of the class is even to be a support class." It explicitly was the spirit of the class, from the very beginning. That's literally what being a "leader" class
means.
Well, it helps that I never came to that conclusion. It also helps that I don't give the first tiny little damn about specific mechanics from past editions.
....so....you want to offer something
called a "Warlord," while completely pissing on anything people actually liked about the thing called "Warlord" in the past. That doesn't seem like a particularly friendly or effective position to start from, and makes it hard to understand why you would
I look at what the class did in the fiction and only after getting a grip on that do I even think about the mechanics, and even then they only serve as a pool of potential resources to use as inspiration to fullfill the mechanical needs to the current edition iteration.
Then you are going to produce something that, straight-up, isn't a Warlord in any way that would please fans of the 4e Warlord. That's a pretty bad-faith starting point when you're asking other people why it is they want the Warlord to do or be certain things.
It's like the attack granting. Sure, it was fun in 4e. I do not care if it's translated directly into 5e.
Nothing should ever be "translated directly." That doesn't mean the translation should not be as close as possible. A translation of Sun Tzu's
The Art of War that just reads, "Fight smart" would technically be correct, and yet completely useless because the whole point of the book is to give specific instructions on
how to "fight smart." Capturing, as much as possible, the meaning and structure of the original text is an incredibly important part of any form of translation--and mechanical translation fits in there just as much as linguistic translation.
IMO the game is better when we don't try to make a whole class fill one role.
And IMO the game is better when we
ensure that the class definitely
can fill one role, with other things as fun opt-in benefits where they can be made to work. Otherwise, we end up with stuff like the 3e Monk.
Because we are talking about two games, in comparison. The cleric doesn't have to pay to learn raise dead, and no feat will give it to you. So, the warlord in 5e cannot fullfill all support role tasks that the cleric can, without an in-class way to bring back the dead.
Hence why I have been so explicit about IN-COMBAT support. You don't
raise dead IN COMBAT. My wording was specific fore a reason.
IMO that is a good reason to drop the idea of "warlord has to be able to do all the support things".
Absolutely not. It is a reason to be
specific about what kinds of support it absolutely
needs to provide, and what kinds are optional.
That's all fine, I just still don't see why it is necessary. Why it's a no room for compromise point.
You cannot see it because you refuse to consider past mechanics as a reason for things. Mechanical expression matters. The past is not some irrelevant technicality that can be brushed aside. If you call something a "Wizard" in D&D, people are going to expect
magic missile and
fireball--and that
fireball better be potent. If you call something a "Paladin" in D&D, it better be able to smite things in some way and "lay on hands." Why are these mechanics important? Because they're part of the identity, the spirit, of the classes involved. These elements need to be respected, and translated as faithfully as possible within the limits of the new system.
For me, that pretty much ends the need for debate. That means that it's okay for those "warlords" (I have never and will never like the name) to not have any healing capability they don't gain from outside the class.
So...you want to give up what it has done in the past. And you want to give up the name as well. And you want it to be basically a Fighter except that it's got actual "leadership" features that somehow aren't making it support-focused. Why even ask about Warlord stuff then? Why even make a pretense of trying for conciliation and compromise when you not only don't want what other people want, you want to
avoid what other people want?
I've played without in-combat healing, with very little, and with plenty. All three modes of play work fine. In addition to that, the majority of classes have some access to healing, even if only optionally. The healing doesn't have to come from the warlord.
It does if it's going to be called a "Warlord" or bill itself as something that Warlord fans should appreciate and value.
So, while I'm fine with a Rallying Cry that gives a little healing to a group, or an inspiring word ripoff, I'm also perfectly happy to not have my vanguard captain ever heal anyone.
Okay. Can you then recognize that a lot of other people
wouldn't be fine with that, and that that wouldn't-be-fine-with-it is rooted in their past positive experiences with previous incarnations of this concept? Further, that many of the people who
do like this are really, really wary about so-called "compromises" given the way they were treated during the D&D Next playtest and how things actually cashed out in the edition that resulted from it?
Why do I
need more than "because that's how it was before," "because that's what I like," and "because without those things it doesn't actually act as a support-focused class as I would define the term"?
No, we don't. This isn't theorycrafting. I've had
multiple groups collapse because of unexpected (but completely predictable...) TPKs. It's a major issue.
Proficiencies are not remotely the same sort of thing.
Why not? They're both the capacity to do something, and yet that capacity is completely irrelevant to the context and fiction, even contradicting that context or fiction at times.
