Thank you for doing this. This is actually really good feedback.
I contrast this poll (great job btw! Come one everyone, give this poster some XP - not me, the OP!) With this one:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?521614-The-classes-that-nobody-wants-to-play
And it's fascinating. In your poll, Fighter and Monk have similar levels of satisfaction - not great, but not horrid either. However in the "nobody wants to play" the fighter did quite OK, while the Monk is the *worst* by far!
Um... There's something a little hinky about that poll...
... what on earth?!?
I very much agree. The warlock and sorcerer both illustrate the problems that better playtesting would have found. The warlock's way too tied to the short rest mechanic and has a lot of "feat tax" issues vis a vis invocations as well as a dominant strategy (spamming Eldritch Blast) that makes doing other things as a warlock not very cost-effective. Warlock is one of those classes a lot of people take a few levels in just to get EB and then leave. I can think of many ways to make it better, but they didn't support any of them and I think with more playtesting these issues and potential solutions would be more apparent. On the flip side, the sorcerer basically doesn't benefit from short rests and runs out of sorcery points quickly.I can't help but wonder how much better the sorcerer, and to a lesser extent the warlock, would be if WotC had included them in the public playtest. (I know they were in at the very beginning, but they only shared the versions that would make it into the PHB to the alpha testers.)
The ranger, too, could've benefited from more open playtesting. I can't remember how different the playtest version was to the PHB one, but I do know that the beastmaster wasn't openly tested.
I hate to say it but... if that other poll is borked, is this one too?
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Now that the most recent poll has been out for a few days and had time to acquire votes, here are the total results of the satisfaction survey. I suspect the data from this survey may be of some value in future conversations down the road, so you may want to remember it so you can search for it later. Of course there is the caveat that this poll is from EN World posters only. And there are always outliers (like someone voting very dissatisfied on every class because they hate 5e). So acknowledge those factors that may impact the results.
That all being said, I think there are some takeaways we can get from this. None of them are a big shocker, except possibly just how badly the sorcerer rated.
Personally, I think any time you can get a 70% or higher overall satisfaction rating for a class, you did a good job. So kudos to the design team and the approach of WotC to do playtests and get the feedback from the players. With no further ado:
I agree with most of your assessment, although you left out that Sorcerers particularly suffer due to a relative dearth of spells in 5E. In particular, if you're a Dragon Sorcerer who specializes in anything other than fire, you don't have enough spells of your chosen element to choose from.The Sorcerer fails in a narrative sense to really capture any niche, and mechanically has been compromised by spontaneous casting becoming a universal thing for all Classes. To be honest, the entire Class could actually be handled by feats (meta-magic; wild magic) and Background (sorcerous origins) and be incorporated generally into the Wizard Class for everything else. The Warlock has provided an archetypal alternative to Wizards now, making the Sorcerer Class increasingly redundant. They also don't really mesh with Dragonborn, if you were hoping to do a Dragon Sorcerer combo.
TBH, the Ranger is the class with by far the most confused history in D&D.The Ranger remains a classic archetype, but the execution was a bit off especially regarding the Beastmaster. I actually think that the companion beast should be a feature of all Rangers, while they could possibly be better differentiated by terrain and quarry if you want to make different sub-classes. In short though, it's all a bit of a mess.
I honestly don't have any complaints whatsoever about the Fighter builds--I like all of them. I think they suffer because of the same reason Fighters always have: their ultimate nature is to be the most basic class. Some people will always find them boring. I think the only satisfying solution is to offer more Fighter subclasses, and more options that fit the ones already available.Fighters are still just a bit boring for many, particularly the Champion. The Battle Master is possibly better, but I think that the various manoeuvres could have possibly been done better as Feats again. The Knight - done in the same way as the Purple Knights - would have been a better general archetype. In all though, how often do people actually prefer to play Fighters over Paladins, say, these days? That's the real issue.