End of the day all I care about is that people have a class that they have fun playing and that the people playing feel like they significantly contribute to the game. For me, people I've played with? I don't see a major issue with fighters. Based on actual play number? Ditto.
Actual play number only tells the lesser half of the story. The recently revealed player satisfaction survey data clearly shows that people aren't happy. They still play the classes and subclasses, but they're dissatisfied.
That's a pretty clear rebuke to the idea that everything is fine, nothing to see here, no reason to change anything, move along.
5e helpfully reversed all that. Well, 5e didn't reverse removing restrictions from casters.
It seems to me that only one of these two statements can be true.
Apropos of the thread topic, I find the point raised that class imbalance is not, for most players, the big deal it can be to the "terminally online" crowd because it doesn't interfere with their realisation of their character concept (up until the point where it does, of course) to be very insightful. The neo-trad play of modern D&D just requires that characters can (a) feel awesome for their players to play and (b) fulfill the concept they desire (subject to the way that certain classes are more suitable for some concepts than others).
Again, this implies that there should never be player dissatisfaction from the "weaker" classes/subclasses, so long as the concept still appears. WotC's actual player satisfaction data proves that (a) people do keep playing these options but (b) their player satisfaction rating is low, often
very low, sometimes less than 50%. (IIRC, Champion was specifically 54%, which if you account for margins of error, that's effectively the same as "people dislike it about as much as they like it.") Unless you think WotC is conducting bad surveys with faulty data, I don't see how it is possible to hold the "players really don't care at all about effectiveness, only concept." They DO care about concept! If they didn't, we wouldn't see so many of these underpowered classes and subclasses. But they also do care
to at least some degree about effectiveness, which is why they keep playing things they're unhappy with.
Because it is
complicated. Because playing something is not identical to loving it. Because you can love specific
parts of something while hating or just not really liking other parts. Because it is possible to
feel, intuitively, that something isn't quite right without knowing what exactly is wrong.
I vote for reinstating TSR-style play, or something like it.
I had not realized you were so keen on killing the game. Full TSR style play would do that. It is not in keeping with the expectations and interests of modern-era gamers. This style absolutely should continue to get support and
some modern players love it just as some longtime vets do. But to make it the only properly supported style would kill D&D within five years. Murderhobo fantasy heistery where all that matters is the gold and every character that dies is instantly replaced with another cardboard cutout and PCs die every other session? Nope. Not gonna fly as fhe default experience. Doubly so if you try to bring back all the intentionally frustrating rules.
Then you are assuming that one of the most serious balance problems of both 3e and 5e isn't going to happen. You are starting from a very, very flawed assumption.
As long as people can do the 5MWD and get significant power from doing so, they will. This is a fact. People
will do this. The only solutions are to get increasingly and story-warpingly draconian about how every problem somehow cannot let a single night pass without overwhelming cost but
can allow multiple hour-long naps to pass with no issues whatsoever. (Seriously, why 5e couldn't have kept short rests at 5 minutes, or even 10-15, I will
never understand; it would have been better for literally almost everyone,
especially if Champions had actually gotten some kind of simple, straightforward benefits from taking a short rest.)
Unless and until you fix the 5MWD problem, all of this stuff remains. That's literally why 5.5e is moving to PB-per-LR dependency for most things, and why they tried to eliminate the uniqueness of the Warlock (something I'm very glad they reversed course on.) Because the 5MWD is alive and well in 5e.
Personally, I think they should have done the reverse and made
casters more dependent (or, rather, dependent at all) on short rests. E.g. remove one spell slot from every spell level up to 5th level. Then make Arcane Recovery a thing every class can do twice a day, recovering slot-levels equal to half class level (summed across all regular spellcasting classes.) That way, spellcasters are now
dependent on getting at least two short rests every day in order to exercise their full magical mojo; if they go two battles and then call it a day, they're only getting about 2/3 of their full potential.
