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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6346324" data-attributes="member: 996">Potentially.  But you could always find specific cases where they don't, thus avoiding strict superiority and justifying, on some level, the choice of fighter.  It's a stretch, and you have to optimize your fighter mightily to retain relevance out of the lowest levels, but it can be an interesting, even enjoyable challenge to do so.It's really that 3.x Clerics/Druids/etc making virtually as good melee combatants as fighter /while also casting spells that are very useful to the party/.  The fighter can marginally defend his own little conceptual niche in spite of the higher-tier classes, but they're still far above him in overall effectiveness. I think, first of all, you shouldn't use a class name in your character concept if you want a good answer to the question.  If your concept is 'kicks ass in melee,' and you don't much care how, then there are a lot of options that could do that, fighter being only one of them.  If your concept is an heroic warrior who pits courage, strength & steel against all manner of foes and wins through (a terribly common heroic fantasy archetype), you may have some issues.  In classic D&D, you prettymuch had to be a fighter with that concept, and, while you were tough at first and could technically become a 'lord' later, you depended heavily on magic items to retain much effectiveness out of the lower levels.  In 3.x you could be a fighter or fighter/rogue or even a rogue, really, or nip in a level or 3 of ranger, or other classes that didn't get supernatural powers /right away/.  You had a lot more options, but you were still relegated to a relatively low optimization tier.  In 4e, you could be a fighter or warlord or perhaps two-blade ranger (or archer-ranger or rogue), or even MC or hybrid two of those together.  They were all solid class choices and effective enough at all levels, but none quite fit the whole archetype by itself.  The fighter had the toughness, the ranger (and rogue) the hard-hitting dpr, the warlord the charisma/cunning and leadership.  In 5e, you're back to the fighter as the only real choice that fits the concept, yet, as in classic D&D, doesn't have that much to back it up - /but/ you can use a good choice of Background to make up part of the lack.  You may not be able to do justice to a knight concept, for instance, but you can take a Noble background that backfills some of it (that you could do so with any class notwithstanding).</blockquote>

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