D&D 5E Pick only one: What should the next class be?

[dave2008]

So, what is the difference between a Fighter and a "Warlord"?

I've never played or even seen the class, so I am honestly curious...

The warlord was a class in 4e. It was a fighter type, but provide buffs, bonuses, protection, and movement to allies while still being able to fight. Some people didn't like it because it did quasi-magical things without magic.

 

[Parmandur]

Though the general archetype of "Shaman" can be covered using the PHB options very easily, it strikes me that a Magic: the Gathering style Shaman would be the perfect fodder for a 3/4 caster Class, and get some new concept space going design wise. Subclasses could be a more nature-y Shaman, a more necromantic Shaman, a punchier Shaman, a more healy Shaman, etc...

 

[Charlaquin]

They made that claim? Where? I don't recall it. Not saying it didn't happen, but it seems like such an odd claim to make, I'd be curious to know who said it.

I don’t remember specifically, but I do remember how throughout the playtest process they gradually walked that claim back further and further. Some would probably argue that I was reading too much into something they stated as a goal rather than as a promise, and I’d say that’s fair. But I was definitely not the only one under the impression that they had set out intending to represent all past editions’ PHB options in the core. Just another one of the lofty goals they set early in the playtest process and failed to
achieve in the final product, along with modularity and the ability to customize the game to reflect the style of any edition.

That's not what they said. They said only classes that were in at least one PH1 were 'on the table' for inclusion in the 5e PH.

That's arguably why psionics were left out, they existed in a PH1 only in 1e, and not as a class, only as a random add-on special ability based on stats in an appendix.

That’s not how I remember it. I specifically remember them saying they wanted to include all the PHB races and classes, and then progressively walking that claim back, first by saying that while they wanted to represent all past PHB classes in some capacity, that they might not all be in the form of classes (citing the Assassin and Illusionist as better suited to subclasses than classes). And then they walked that back further, saying that they just wanted to make sure the type of character the class represented could be expressed with the PHB options, excusing the lack of a Warlord by saying you could play a warlord-like character with a Valor bard or a Battlemaster fighter. And when their pitch for a Psion as a subclass of wizard bombed in the surveys, they said, “well, Psionics were a thing in the 1e PHB, but they weren’t a class”
and promised to work on a more robust Psionics system after the core book had been released so they could do the class justice.

And now here we are, five years later, still no Warlord, and they’re back to experimenting with Psionicist as a Wizard subclass.

Still, even if the Warlord had to be cut to as a compromise to appease the h4ters and avoid an Edition War II, it should have been first in line to see print as an optional class.

Agreed. I wouldn’t have minded the Warlord not being in the PHB, but it would have been nice to get it in a supplement. At this point though, it’s clear they have absolutely no intention of making a 5e Warlord.

 

[billd91]

I don't really see much point in most of the options. You can do warlordy or marshally things by expanding the types of maneuvers used by the battlemaster. Some others are mixes of druid or ranger or even just spellcasting with a slightly different focus like the summoner or runecaster.

I'd be more inclined to look at things like alchemists or gunslingers - classes that can add a bit to the overall feel of a campaign - weird sciences for the alchemist and westerns for gunslingers.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The beguiler, spellthief and the jester (Dragon Magazine compendium) are examples of hybrid sthealth + arcane magic. The assassin may be other stealthy class with some magic tricks, or martial maneuvers, and today it is more known thanks to Ubisoft videogames.

There is space for a fighter with arcane spells, like hexblade, duskblade, swordmage or magus, I don't mind the name, but I liked most hexblade.

A 3rd Party has published the warlord as class for 5th Ed, and it is in the SRD.

A class can't be only a list of superpowers. Its needs its own identity. If a character appears in a fiction work and you can't notice she is a different class, then it is wrong.

I don't miss the truenamer.

The elementalist is a famous concept. I wonder about to create an elementalist class using the game mechanics of the mysteries by the shadowmancer class. But I would rather others before.

 

[Charlaquin]

So, what is the difference between a Fighter and a "Warlord"?

I've never played or even seen the class, so I am honestly curious...

It has been said that the Warlord was poorly named because people often had exactly this reaction to it. They probably should have called it a Tactician or a General or a Marshall or something.

So, In 4e, each class had a power source (Arcane, Divine, and Martial in the core, with Primal, Psionic, and Shadow being added in later supplements), and a combat role: Controller (basically debuff and CC), Defender (basically tank), Leader (basically buffs and healer) and Striker (basically DPS). This was a major contributing factor to the overblown comparisons to WoW. The idea behind the warlord was that it was a Martial Leader - it buffed and healed the party in a nonmagical way.

Thematically, it was a military commander type class, commanding, rallying, and inspiring its allies. Mechanically, it combined healing powers and powers that enhanced its allies’ attacks, and/or allowed them to attack off-turn, at the cost of the Warlord’s own action. It wasn’t as strong of a healer as the Cleric or as strong of a buffer as the Bard, its true strength was in its ability to grant its allies additional chances to attack (lazylord became an endearing term for warlords built around never actually attacking, and “making,” or rather, allowing, their allies to do the attacking for them.)

They were extremely unpopular among the HP-as-meat crowd, who hated that their could heal without magic, deriding it as “shouting wounds closed.”

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

I voted for other because I want the Swordmage. Not because I think the game needs it, there are about a million different ways to build a gish in this edition now. But because I selfishly want it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

A very important part of 5e class design (and how they arguably missed as bad as they did with the original Fighter) is that classes shouldn't be designed around a specific gameplay niche but rather a concept within the world. Despite being the weakest classes, conceptually, a Rogue and a Fighter are still conceptually different from each other in a way a "spell-less Ranger" or a "Warlord" are not.

Can't agree.
I mean, the Fighter, Ranger, & Warlord are /not/ that conceptually different from eachother - they're all heroic warriors of one stripe or another, Backgrounds, if a single martial class were given enough depth & breadth, would be enough to differentiate them. It's just that the same is absolutely true of the Rogue. The only difference is a vestigial one of, well, specific gameplay niche protection.

The Rogue is the 5e incarnation of the 0D&D/1e Thief and the Theif's raison d'etre was it's set of dungeon-exploration/eponymous-'thieving' 'Special Abilities.' The 1e Fighter was a STR-prime-requisite high-hp, heavy-armor, big-weapon doorstop that blocked the doorway or corridor and, well, fought. The Thief was a DEX-prime-requisite, low-hp, light-armor, light-weapon scout & very occasional backstabber.
That changed over the editions, they converged, but remained stubbornly separate. In 3e Finesse Weapons and maxDEX by armor type made the STR/DEX choice less about class and more about concept. A fighter could use a rapier or spiked chain and be all about DEX, it wasn't efficient, but it was possible. The Rogue still had trapfinding as a special ability, but the rest of her toys had become skills, she (Lidda, by 3e convention) just got more of them, and, in compensation, got iterative attacks at high level and Sneak Attack that was more broadly useful than the old Backstab, making it a regular DPR-contributor. 4e kept the Fighter & Rogue separate, by combat role as well as by concept. But, in 5e, the Fighter and Rogue (upgraded to d8 HD) both contribute DPR, the fighter just with multiple attacks and the rogue with very-lightly-limited SA, and the Fighter can be just as DEX-primary as you like, good at stealth & scouting if an Outlander or good at thieving if an Urchin or the like. The only clear line between them is a mechanical one: Extra Attack on one side, SA & Expertise on the other. The conceptual line is gone. A Rogue could take the Soldier or Noble or other background that suggests the traditional Fighter archetypes, a Fighter Urchin or Charlatan or the like and emphasize DEX and be conceptually much like the Rogue.

They're separate classes thanks, mostly, to Tradition, and the separation does neither of them any favors, as the Fighter is sorely lacking out of combat, for no valid reason, and the Rogue artificially 'slow' in combat for want of extra attack, likewise, to no particularly conceptual purpose, just, maybe, to 'balance' SA. The two classes could be merged, keeping all of their best stuff, and be just fine - even still a bit behind the versatility/power/contribution of most casters.
Class Tier 3.

4e's Ranger was the most conceptually confused version of the class in its history, which is a high damn bar to clear. 4e Ranger was basically "Nature Rogue, but different, we guess?"

Really, the 5e ranger is a whole lot more confused. Fighter/Druid? Scout? Aragorn? Dritzz? Grizly Adams? It doesn't know, and it can't even effectively hand the choice off to the fighter. The 0e/1e Ranger knew it was Aragorn, after that, no one's been too sure.

But, the 4e Ranger was only split by two choices: DEX or STR primary - in the PH, Archer or TWFer - and Dungeon or Wilderness. No racist damage bonus. No nature magic confusing the issue. The Grizzly Adams thing was one sub-class.

Their design was to fill mechanical gaps (or in the case of the Ranger, "I guess we'd rather have two Martial Strikers than two Nature Strikers?") This goes for the "Shaman" too.

MM was on record affirming that they "were not just grid-filling" and the Martial Grid, conspicuously, was never filled. So you can't pretend the Warlord was there to fill in a mechanical gap. In the PH, there was already a leader - the traditional one, the Cleric - so it can't have been to provide that role at launch, and there was never a martial controller, so the Martial Source, at least, was being driven by concept, not Role/Source grid-filling. (Though, I suppose, you could make the Grid-filling claim for every other source - Swordmages and Shamans and Avengers and Invokers and Wardens and Ardents and Battleminds and so forth - since their grids were filled.)

You don't need a class to tell you can play a warlord or a shaman; you can build those characters still in 5e. They might not match up, mechanically, with what classes using those names have done in the past, but again, a 5e class needs more than separate mechanics to justify their existence. One can argue with whether not that should be true, and there are certainly good arguments to be made there. But as far as 5e is concerned, that ship has sailed.

Supposedly, in 5e you also need a concept that's broad enough for about 10 sub-classes, ultimately.

Now, the Fighter & Rogue (and Ranger) fail the separate concept pretty dramatically, and there are PH classes that still aren't up to 10 sub-classes. So any "you must be so high to be a full class" rules of thumb are clearly pretty flexible.

Were the Fighter class-Tier 1 (or even 2), it could probably handle the Fighter, Rogue, Ranger, Barbarian, and Warlord - and Scout, Knight, Cavalier, Swashbuckler, Duelist and others. If. But it's just a mindless beatstick, albeit, a mindless beatstick that can beat on you with DEX instead of STR if designed to do so from 1st level on.

Psionics are conceptually different from other classes in spite of being easy to enough to mechanically represent as subclasses through different races

True. And psionics were in a PH1, just, unlike the Warlord, not as an actual class. A technicality.

If we were being fair, the Warlord should have been added as an optional full class first, followed by the Psion(icist?/Mystic?), then arguably the Shaman, and, late-ed, when all the othere elements were in place, the Artificer in an Eberron sourcebook.

I don't really see much point in most of the options. You can do warlordy or marshally things by expanding the types of maneuvers used by the battlemaster.

That'd be a mechanical starting point, but you'd have to expand on them radically.

It has been said that the Warlord was poorly named because people often had exactly this reaction to it. They probably should have called it a Tactician or a General or a Marshall or something.

General & Marshall are worse, as they're RL military Ranks, and Tactician is one Warlord build out of 6 or 8 depending on how you count 'em.

Mechanically, it combined healing powers and powers that enhanced its allies’ attacks, and/or allowed them to attack off-turn, at the cost of the Warlord’s own action. It wasn’t as strong of a healer as the Cleric or as strong of a buffer as the Bard, its true strength was in its ability to grant its allies additional chances to attack (lazylord became an endearing term for warlords built around never actually attacking, and {granting their allies attacks, instead}.)

They were extremely unpopular among the HP-as-meat crowd, who hated that their could heal without magic, deriding it as “shouting wounds closed.”

The h4te was pretty strong, but the hp-as-meat thing prettymuch sprung up to justify it, rather than being the source of it, was my impression.

It wasn't just the Warlord, though it became the poster boy, it was that martial classes got encounter and Daily powers, that they were, all-round, closer than ever to balanced with the traditional casters.
The core of the edition war was always class balance: every complaint, however dressed up in newly-minted terminology and blazing nerdrage boiled down to begrudging anyone playing a martial concept anything close to parity with a supernatural concept.

And, it's the real stumbling block for a 5e Warlord. The BM & PDK 'shouty heal' and grant actions and have limited-use abilities, and they're not a problem in spite of those having been the complaints voiced about the warlord - because they're the power/versatility equivalent of second-rate 1/3rd-casters. To step into it's support role - the only role it's had, as 4e was it's one appearance - the Warlord would have to be equivalent in power/versatility to a class-Tier 1 or 2 caster, like the Cleric or Bard.
That's a bridge too far.

 

[Charlaquin]

Lots of great stuff, but also a comment about there never being a martial controller.

Actually there was eventually, though one could be forgiven for forgetting about it since it was an Essentials class and didn’t actually control very well (it was a primary Striker, secondary Controller). The Hunter subclass of Ranger.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Actually there was eventually, though one could be forgiven for forgetting about it since it was an Essentials class and didn’t actually control very well (it was a primary Striker, secondary Controller). The Hunter subclass of Ranger.

It was a Martial/Primal dual-Source sub-class. It's best control - OP daily 'utilities' like Stalker's Mist - were Primal invocations.