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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6816326" data-attributes="member: 996">It's never going to be quite as powerful as simply having a second caster, and all the additional spell slots that entails.  Exactly.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.Just like having a clone of the first character, or /any/ character, action-granting, casting, or otherwise. '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.Is there really so many of such options to specialize in in 5e?  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.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.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 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.  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 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. 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.  That's always part of the decision of casting a spell. 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.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. The same way you balance everything in 5e:  the Empowered DM.That's how 4e did it. At-will action-grants were fairly specific.  An MBA.  Shift 1.  A move action.  etc... 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. 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.  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.</blockquote>

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