EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Ah, so now abstraction is good, when it gets you what you want, and takes away what others like? Can't say I'm super pleased about that sort of argumentation.
It...does neither of those things.
Trying to cram three classes into the same box necessarily, guaranteed, makes those three distinct things watered down. The single superclass is forced to avoid doing anything that would contradict any of the things being shoved into it--forcing it into safe, blandly inoffensive non-commitment. But because 5e subclasses are incredibly narrow things, unable to actually carry much of a theme themselves even in classes that already are carrying the general class theme (see: Paladin subclasses, where even as a Paladin fan I challenge folks to tell me the real, meaningful difference between Devotion and Redemption, or between Glory, Vengeance, and Conquest--without splitting hairs), you're left with having to pare down to only the barest minimum of representation, and leaving the rest purely projected onto the class by the player.
If you, for example, shove Ranger, Paladin, and Barbarian into Fighter, the Fighter now can't commit to anything that would ever be contradictory to any of those three classes--and has to squeeze all of the flavor thereof into no more than four, small, subclass features. Mechanically, you are absolutely strained because you can't alter upward, only downward--you're stuck with the Fighter chassis. The super-class has to become as generic and bland as possible, and the subclass has to squeeze everything it can out of a tiny handful of often very minimally influential pieces, because if any subclass is too powerful, it will overwhelm the other options, and players will (rightfully) complain about it. Because, despite all assertions to the contrary, even the 5e fanbase does in fact care about balance.
Now, if subclasses worked the way 4e builds did, where you could actually swap out core class features for different options, then perhaps the mechanical strain induced by shoving three classes into a single superclass trenchcoat wouldn't be so bad. It would still be present, but at least you could mitigate the problem upward as well as downward. But that's not how 5e works, and unless something truly radical changes at WotC, it's not how any revision of 5e ever will work.
The one, and only, reason that the Sorcerer and Warlock have lackluster mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they're separate classes, and absolutely everything to do with the fact that they got, only and precisely, ONE playtest packet before they were permanently removed from public playtesting. They never resurfaced until the leaked document which contained, more or less, the final published form of 5e.
The Sorcerer and Warlock are lackluster because they were thrown together last-minute due to the D&D Next playtesting process wasting nearly three years repeatedly rewriting the Fighter--because the public playtesting process had several fundamentally wrongheaded ideas about how effective playtesting works.
