I agree with Tony's overall point (loose balance in 5E) if not with the specific example (granting spell casting action is "obviously balanced").
It's never going to be quite as powerful as simply having a second caster, and all the additional spell slots that entails.
Not that balance is an overriding concern for 5E writers anyway.
Exactly.
It's not particularly balanced.
Neither has D&D been particularly balanced, for the most part, nor does 5e buck that general trend. Balance is a possible concern for the DM, who can rule in favor of balance vs fun vs consistent applications of RAW vs whatever other priorities he has, as he sees fit.
While it'd be nice if any new class weren't any worse-balanced than any extant classes, that's a non-issue for even the most out-there of hypothetical Warlords. No concept of the class that has ever been advanced could bring with it more balance issues than any of the existing 5e spell-casting sub-classes.
It's the equivalent of giving one character twice as many actions. Which seems fine when you consider they're replacing another character in combat. However, the replaced character would still have all their potential non-combat options.
Just like having a clone of the first character, or /any/ character, action-granting, casting, or otherwise.
So it's everything the one character can do and everything else.
'Everything else' just being what any/every character can do, anyway.
A 6 person party with one heavy-hitter and one hypothetical unlimited/at-will action-granter (something the Warlord never came close to being, but for the sake of discussing the concept of action-granting...) will have something close to the consistent DPR of a 6-person party with two heavy hitters. Both will also have the non-combat abilities of a 6-person party.
If the action-granter is even more hypothetically passing out extra spell-casting actions, then a party of 5 casters and one action-granter has the same spells/round capacity a party of 6 casters, but, it has a little more flexibility about which spells it doubles up on in a given round - and, more tellingly, significantly fewer spell slots. And, of course, both remain 6-person parties for all other purposes.
Think about it this way, you could do that right now. Build a character where every feat and class option was based around non-combat options or bonus actions, and then just let another character act during combat.
Is there really so many of such options to specialize in in 5e?
Additionally, it's replacing an ineffective turn with an effective turn. Not all characters are effective each round.
That's part of the appeal, yes. It's a level of added flexibility, and the price of requiring two characters able to act & coordinate to pull it off. Compared to the flexibility inherent in full neo-Vancian spell-casting, though, it's paltry, hardly a balance concern.
Even in 4e this was an issue.
Not really, no. 4e was much tighter-balanced than other versions of D&D, yet the Warlord, even the more out-there builds, did not disrupt that balance appreciably. In 5e, which features much looser, DM-mediated balance, it really is a complete non-issue.
The lazylord was not a standard build, and was a fan build and one not really viewed seriously at first (as seen by its original name as "the princess warlord").
You've got it backwards, there. The Lazylord was the optimizer name for it, shortened from the Lazy Warlord. The 'Princess build' was a more specific variation on it that Garthanos came up with later.
The vast majority of warlord powers involved attacking.
The vast majority of 4e class powers were attacks, yes, the rest being utilities. Only the Pacifist Cleric build and Essential Mage featured a lot of non-attacking attack powers.
The lazylord was problematic as it could dump stat the warlord's attack stats and focus on the presumed kicker stats for superiour bonuses.
Meh. In 4e it was easy enough to max two stats, so you could max out a bonus on a rider and the primary stat. Sometimes you didn't even need to do that, the Cleric, for instance, had an at-will power in the PH that applied an attack-bonus rider based on it's primary stat. The kind of damage bonuses the most heavily-powergamed Warlord builds handed out were comparable to striker damage, having a second striker in the party instead of such builds would still have generated more sustained DPR.
And, it's not like you can't build characters who can more or less 'dump' their traditional primary stats if you want to in 5e. Spellcasters really only need their primary caster stat for attack rolls & save DCs, but there are plenty of spells that require neither, even fairly effective attack spells.
It was a great munchkin build, being very effective.
It was cute, and effective enough to be viable. Which was saying something, as it wasn't a concept you could have done very well before, and one that you can't currently do in 5e.
It's also very much not what I'd base a 5e warlord on, since it's a message board build. It's very, very unlikely to be how the majority of warlord players designed their characters.
There were ultimately 7 or 8 sorts of warlord builds, not even considering all the customization available through feats, themes, & hybriding, so, just statistically, it's very, very unlikely that any one of the /was/ how the majority of warlord players designed their character.
It's exchanging a spell you could need later for a spell you do need now.
That's always part of the decision of casting a spell.
Wizard spells are potent and balanced between the fact you have so many per day. But when you can get two out before the enemies can even act, that's game changing.
And all you need to be able to do that is a pair of wizards. Or a Wizard and a Sorcerer who happens to know the right spell. Or, given how much spells are re-used from one list to another, just at least two casters of some sort in your party.
Now, given that 30+ of the 40+ sub-classes we no have in 5e /are/ casters, casting two (or more) spells before the enemy can do anything is hardly game-changing. It's just the game.
You can hit people with that second fireball or sleep spell. At that point even low level spell slots can become deadly.
Yep. Two wizards can do that. And, they can do it for twice as long as one wizard and one action-granter. There's no balance issue, there - well, except that the action-granter is going to have to have a lot more to do besides grant actions in order to be 'balanced' with the second wizard.
How do you balance against something so phenomenally situation?
The same way you balance everything in 5e: the Empowered DM.
You could limit the actions granted: an attacks not Attack action, cast a cantrip not cast a spell. But the big way would be to to limit the uses of that power per day.
That's how 4e did it. At-will action-grants were fairly specific. An MBA. Shift 1. A move action. etc...
The iconic on is Commander's Strike, where an ally does a melee basic attack + your Intelligence modifier. But because you're dumping Str you can boost Int so instead of a +2 bonus to damage it's a +4, which only goes up as you level.
Which could get pretty high in 4e, but in 5e, it'd be limited to 20 and a +5, like every other stat, so even less of an issue.
Ditto Guide the Charge. And so does... well, actually that's it. Because of the 50 non-Utility Warlord powers in the PHB, only 2 were attack granting.
Guide the Charge was a utility, and didn't grant an attack. Attack-granting Warlord powers (most granting free action attacks, a few OAs or immediate actions) in the PH were: Commander's Strike, Hammer & Anvil, Viper's Strike, Surprise Attack, Iron Dragon Charge, Knock them Down, Beat Them into the Ground, Warlord's Gambit, Hail of Steel, Victory Surge, Windmill of Doom, Pillar to Post, Sudden Assault, Relentless Assault, & Stir the Hornets' Nest. You may notice that there were more than two of them.
It really wasn't a major part of the class compared to beating people on the head and having a friend move 5 feet.
Also an example of an action-grant, though, just granting a move rather than an attack. Including not just shifts but moves, slides, & charging, the Warlord attacks from the PH that granted movement were: Leaf on the Wind, White Rave Onslaught, Wolf Pack Tactics, Steel Monsoon, Surround Foe, Iron Dragon Charge, Knock Them Down, Warlord's Rush, and Rabbits & Wolves. Not as many as granted attacks, but still nothing to sneeze at.
