At X level capabilities should be roughly balanced with other classes abilities.
This is important to remember. The capabilities of most 5e sub-classes include spellcasting which is both quite powerful and extremely versatile.
Granting movement does relatively little in 5e most the time
But, 5e has movement, range, area &c precise to the foot. It's up to the DM how carefully to track such things. A matter of style (and modules in use).
That said, abilities that grant movement or special kinds of movement can be abstracted to the intended benefit of that movement: like being able to disengage from or gain advantage against an enemy, for instance.
An ability to buff any ally is strictly superior to an identical ability that just buffs yourself.
Well, an ability that buffs you or an ally is strictly superior. Ally-only buffs run into serious issues when you lack allies atm.
Attack granting is very difficult to balance.
Almost as difficult as at-will multi-attacking. Which 5e has tons of.
Advantage granting abilities are very difficult to balance as well.
The help action grants advantage. It's almost trivial.
Action granting abilities are even more difficult to balance.
Not as difficult as attack-granting.
Attack roll boosts are very difficult to balance
Bounded Accuracy doesn't leave a lot of wiggle-room for large bonuses or multiple stacking bonuses. It's just a matter of keeping them small, or non-stacking, or random.
Damage boosts on more than a single attack can be difficult to balance (since different characters get different numbers of attacks)
It's the parenthetical that's the problem. This is one of the big reasons that multi-attacking has always been problematic to balance. 5e's solution is not to worry about it, and Empowering the DM to enforce the level or degree of balance he's comfortable with.
Finding fluff reasons for such a Warlord's abilities can be very difficult as well.
Not really. Warlord fluff all but writes itself, it's so fantasy- and action- genre-appropriate.
Because most of the "Warlordy" type abilities are so hard to balance
The warlord balanced neatly in 4e, so it can't have been that hard.
I don't know if we will ever see a balanced 5e Warlord that meets 4e Warlord fans expectations from just a mechanics perspective.
It is a challenge. The bar has been raised so high by the 5e versions of other classes that filled the 'leader' role in 4e, and in 5e are supremely versatile support-capable casters. A Warlord that's a viable alternative to the Cleric, Bard, Druid, & Paladin will have to be much more versatile & powerful than the 4e version.
Would a concentration mechanic really be that difficult to implement for a warlord? It doesn't make the warlord's abilities magic, but it does requite concentrating.
It doesn't make oodles of sense for the Warlord to concentrate, per se, but RL certainly teaches us that keeping a fighting force on-mission is very challenging. Sufficiently abstract/'simple' (by 5e standards) mechanics to model that could play a similar balancing role as concentration. Not that concentration is exactly a massive balancing factor, nor that balance is a major goal/consideration of 5e design (it's more a consideration left to those DMs who care about it).
. Right now, their are four major economies in 5e: Dice (superiority Dice, Bardic Inspiration Dice), Spell Slots (Spells), Per Rests (x amount per short/long rest) and Points (spell points and psionics).
Slots are an x/rest resource, just a very plentiful, powerful, and versatile one compared to things like Rage or CS dice. Points, likewise, are plentiful x/rest like spells, just more granular and thus even more flexible.
So, really, you've got x/short rest, x/long rest, and 1/2x/long rest (HD, the slowest-to-recover resource in the standard game).
Personally, if it were me, I'd be looking at a suped up Battlemaster as a base class (with more powers and many more dice) with some per-rest auxiliary powers and a few always on abilities (such the aforementioned bonus to init)
For a design that eschews doing anything unprecedented it's an obvious place to start. There's an obvious analogy between the Battlemaster's slight dabbling in a x/rest resource (CS dice, a handful of maneuvers), and the EK's dabbling in slots & spells known. Just look at how much more full casters get relative to the EK, and you'll have a rough order of magnitude idea about how much more the Warlord might need in the maneuver and resource department relative to the BM. Of course, that's assuming that the BM's CS dice at all measure up to the EK's spells, in the first place....
