Agree.
I really hope that the Eldritch Knight bucks the trend of previous editions attempts and enables the creation of a decent fighter-mage.
Also I wonder if there is any way the hunter ranger will have a quarry ability. I am sure there will be some form of favoured enemy but I really liked the quarry ability in 4e as way of modelling focusing upon a single enemy.
Going by the Alpha PHB, which seems to be extremely close to this, no and no, sadly.
The Eldritch Knight is not a "decent Fighter-mage". He IS a decent Fighter. Not as good as the other two, but decent. His spellcasting, however, is limited to only cantrips and abjuration and evocation spells (which are thematically appropriate but prevent him getting most really serious battle-altering spells, and goes off INT, and most importantly he only gets 8 + 4 spells EVER (the 4 being fixed), casting 4th level spells at the highest (only at level 19 and 20, though I'd be unsurprised to see that go down to 17 in the final).
It's not a horrible class or anything, but it's just a Fighter with a bit of magic bolted on, not a true "hybrid" or "fusion of sword and spell". I expect we will see such a class eventually, but they'll probably need to be their own base class.
5E Ranger as per the Alpha PHB is a very solid class, but does not have any kind of Quarry feature and even Favoured Enemies offers zero direct combat benefit.
I actually made a pretty high level eldritch knight level 10 or so, we played a bit and I didn't really notice being any worse than any other character.../shrug. The worst thing was picking the spells because they aren't listed by type only level, that was really really annoying.
They aren't terrible, it's just that they aren't very good Fighter-Mages, if that's what you want. They're good Fighters who also dabble in low-end magic (which appeals to some people, but kind of different ones to those serious about Fighter/Mages).
Is there a way to play a noble politico, in the manner that we see quite frequently in Game of Thrones for example (Littlefinger, Cersei, Daenerys, etc)?
I was kinda thinking of a Rogue with a noble background - but there not really an archetype to fit.
That's sorta doable, but he is still going to be SUPER-good at murdering people and stealing stuff. He could have the appearance, the skills, the background, the outlook of a noble, but he'd have the abilities of a killer/housebreaker. That could work, though, for nobles who were trained that way for some reason (I can think of a number of fantasy novel characters who fit that mould, including GOT ones who I will avoid naming because spoilers).
There's no "more skills, less kills" Rogue, yet.
On a related note, is there any intention to add to the Class list in the DMG (or beyond)? Including things like NPC Classes (Aristocrat, Expert, etc). Personally, I hope they don’t go down this route too much, but rather expand on the in-Class archetypes. Like others, I feel there should be a lot more archetypes for Rogues and Fighters in particular.
Looks like they plan to avoid NPC classes. I'm totally "reading between the lines" here, but there's been zero mention of them or response to questions about them (that I'm aware of), and Mearls has specifically said that trained soldiers with experience are Fighters, which fits with 2E, but not 3.XE, where they'd have been Warriors.
Totally agree that Rogues and Fighters could do with more archetypes. It feels kind of cheesy that they put out so many Wizard specializations (each of which is probably more complex than the Champion Fighter sub-class, and not far off or equal to the Rogue sub-classes), but only three each, one of which is basically "With a side of magic" in both cases, for Fighter and Rogue. Hopefully they will add to these options before too long.