I would call it a feature (of D&D), not a problem. In D&D, the story of the class comes first, and the abilities are chosen to fit the story. Subclasses (kits/prestige classes in other editions) further focus the story. Bad subclasses are ones that don't have a clear story. This Hellknight...
This is pretty much Darth Sion from KotOR2. And what is different about it is the flavour of the abilities. You don’t want smite - aside from theme it’s mechanically bad for monks, who have better things to do with bonus actions, you don’t want a steed, you don’t want Bane - since the...
The Death Knight used to be a subclass, it was called Oathbreaker. The issue was, in order to tell a story of a character falling from grace you needed to use an obscure DM-facing optional rule for changing subclasses. Using feats is pretty much the same as a subclass, but can be tacked on to a...
This goes into both philosophy and etymology. As most people know, the word "lich" is just an old word for corpse, applying it to an evil undead spellcaster is a D&D-ism. However, the concept of the evil undead spellcaster without the name was a well established fantasy trope well before D&D...
Different code, different tropes. You could have a dark path suitable for a monk, but it needs to be different from the death knight, with its focus on knightly tropes like wrathfully smiting enemies with a big sword and galloping around on a fiendish horse.
Death Knight is an example of a dark...
Yeah, made a bunch of suggestions for the titan, suggested a fix for warlock liches being broken after level nine and red lighted hell knight and demon sorcerer for being dull.
Way to completely miss the point.
As already pointed out, death knight is a role playing choice . It has nothing to do with mechanics, it’s the story that is important. It’s the story of a character who falls (and is possibly redeemed) from a code of chivalry. Ergo, it’s the fluff of the class...
Clerics become liches. It’s mentioned in the 1st edition monster manual.
Who should it, they are not knights? Different classes are different. Making all classes the same, devoid of any lore or fluff, is what blandification is. If you don’t want class choice to have any significance you can...
That’s going to be difficult to time, as we saw with BG3 tie-ins. Not allowing for delays in video game development leads to poor quality products being released.