The best contribution the wizard can make is to deal AoE damage. Any time they could deal AoE damage but are not it's a waste of their spell slot.
First of all, it's not true that the best contribution a wizard could make is AoE damage. It's classic, but wizards have many very effective spells that do other things and do them very well indeed. The Fighter does not have any such alternative actions to blow his Action Surge on. He has a relatively powerful attack action, and the alternatives are just 'everyman' actions.
I didn't want to get into this as someone would appear and call out "edition warring!" but I really didn't like how inherent bonuses worked in 4e. It was all or nothing. You either used them and had no magic items or you didn't. Because the two didn't stack.
That's odd. Why would you expect them to stack? 4e's treadmill progression was pretty tight, doubling enhancement bonuses would have been game-breaking. That the two didn't stack was precisely why they
could be used together: in a low-magic game that had some magic items, but wanted to keep them rare & special, you'd flip on inherent bonuses so attack & damage with weapon & implement powers and defenses would stay on the treadmill as designed, but you wouldn't have to cycle new weapons, armor, and neck-slot items every 5 levels or so. One character could have acquired a flamey magic sword at 8th level, named it and kept it his whole career, for instance, whether others gained items or not.
I wanted a lower magic campaign and hated having to give out two or three magic items each session and a +2 item at second level. And to have everyone swap magic items every 5 levels. And tracking who had how many magical items and such. So, bonuses. But that meant that I had no reason to give out magic items since they didn't actually make you better at hitting. And since the players relied on the Character Builder, there was no easy way to adjust.
It's clear (above) how inherent bonuses were ideal for a low-magic game where not all characters get items with enhancement bonuses. You could give out an item that was better than the current inherent bonus, giving a character a boost until the inherent bonuses caught up, and, unless it was one of the exactly 3 boring generic-enhancement-bonus-only items, it's other properties & powers would remain even after that happened. Ideal. The character builder had a check box to use inherent bonuses, and used the higher of that bonus or the equipped item, so it was easy and seamless to use that way.
And trusting official classes would be much more appealing, if WotC hadn't released such stinkers in UA and a couple pretty broken/nerfed options in the PHB.
UA is prettymuch betatesting (if not outright spitballing), anyway, so doesn't have that 'official quality' expectation. And the bar for balance in the 5e paradigm is much more flexible, there's so much left to the DM's judgement that class balance is largely determined by him, anyway, so that ball is left in his court, part of the Empowerment that makes the game such a blast to run. (No, that's not irony or sarcasm: I run 5e, and the degrees of freedom it gives me to optimize the experience for my players is awesome in it's own right.)
What do you do the first 6 levels of the game? What do you do with enemies that are 4 or more squares away? While my 4e play experience is hazy, the times when the party needed a minion sweeper wouldn't have been much helped by that fighter.
CaGI could attack as many enemies as Fireball, you just had to get in the middle of them. At range, an Archer-Ranger could blow through minions pretty quickly, too, with the odd AE encounter power. Minion-sweeping was not the insurmountable problem for a 4e all-martial party that every non-DPR combat contribution a party might need currently is for a 5e all-martial party.
They would be able to if they are a Warlord.
How much a low-level Warlord might be able to help a high-level ally would depend on how much the ally figures into the mechanics. Earlier in these discussions, ideas have been floated, like basing hps recovered by Inspiration on the ally's HD, or the lower of the Warlord's or ally's level. Not that it would be an unusual trope for a less experienced or much less capable sidekick to inspire a hero in some way.
Similar to how a level 3 BM could boss around a level 20 champion? But I suppose that level 3 fighter knows how to fight better than the level 20 one.
Or the way a 3rd level caster could Charm a 20th level champion (who never boosted his WIS and gets no proficiency in WIS saves, so has the same save bonus he had at 1st level): Not quite as well, because of Indomitable, but still pretty practical to try.
Bounded Accuracy intentionally makes it more practical to have wildly-different-level PCs working together. Not nearly seamlessly or anything, but less impractical. So how very different-level PCs would interact is something to consider when designing the mechanics of a new class.
I'm not arguing about the virtue to the players of imposing the "dead" condition on their enemies, and saying that anything else is not worthwhile.
Though that is something that gets argued all too often in the community, typically in some questionable 'white room' scenario.
I'm arguing about what the fighter, in particular, can do with his/her actions (including via action surge) that is a powerful contribution to combat.
Which is demonstrable. The fighter has combat styles that make his attack action more effective, the two styles that don't do not make any alternate action more effective (one gives a static defense bonus, the other a useful reaction), his basic proficiencies make his attack action more effective, his most significant class feature and claim-to-best-at-combat-fame Extra Attack makes his attack action much more effective. Conversely, the fighter has vanishingly few features that make any other actions he might take more effective. The Champion's "Remarkable" Athlete gives an almost trivial, non-stacking half-proficiency bonus to some checks. The Battlemaster's CS dice directly add to the effectiveness of his attacks.
The comparison to using a spell slot to fly or conceal an ally strikes me as unhelpful - those things tend to be done before combat starts, outside of the formal action economy. And then, during combat, the wizard can use a cantrip. What action do you have in mind that a fighter might perform, using action surge, that produces a buff comparable to casting invisibility or fly in advance plus using a cantrip during the actual combat round?
And, of course, not just anyone can cast fly or invisibilty, while literally just anyone can use the help action or stabilize an ally.
So what I realized is that is what we already have.
Yeah, the original point of this thread was that if you have bits and pieces of something lying around, you don't need the whole. A few shards of glass are as good as a window. A soapbox racer is as fast as a formula 500. You don't need a wizard because you have the Sage background, Ritual Caster feat, and EK & AT.
Well, that and the OP seems to have such a low opinion of 5e that he misrepresents it as being /unable/ to do anything more than it has. I can see how the slow pace of releases might seem to encourage that attitude, but the system itself is for too open and flexible in design philosophy, and it's stated goals to expansive and ambitious to take such negativity seriously.
It comes down to how useful making 1-3 attacks is to a fighter.
Let's consider a good tank build for a fighter.
A sword-and-board fighter with the protection style who has used their feats for Sentinel, Heavy Armour Master, and Shield Master. Ability Score increases boost their Con first, before moving to Str. Battle Master is their best option subclass option, with Goading Attack, Maneuvering Attack, Parry, and Trip Attack.
The question isn't so much how useful are his attacks - with those Maneuvers, they're clearly useful whether they do huge damage or not. The question is how useful are alternate actions? What does that build have going for him that make his use of help or something better than the next guy's.
They'll be level 16 before they might be able to boost Str (14 if they're human). And given Con is their high stat, they might only have a 14 Str.Spending their Action Surge at those levels means two extra attacks with the odds being one hits and deals 6 damage.
Unlikely, but possible. One can always willfully build a sub-optimal character. You can build a wizard to be the best melee tank he can be, for instance. (Actually, you can do that surprisingly well, maybe not the best example - but, still, clearly sub-optimal.)
That's not an effective use of a short rest recharge ability. Not compared to increasing the accuracy of an ally, dodging to stay alive, shoving an enemy, positioning themself to block an enemy, or readying to move and defend an ally.
Positioning is rarely an issue in 5e, certainly very rarely one that calls for a move and two dash actions to pull off. As well-defended and non-threatening as this character is, dodging is just going to push enemies to further ignore him, making it a wasted action. Granting advantage to one attack of an ally who's optimized for DPR may not do all that much, either, he likely hits /really/ well, anyway, so you're looking at the equivalent of a +1 or 2 rather than the +4 or 5 giving a mediocre combatant (ironically, like this guy) advantage would give - that is, if his optimization doesn't already give him advantage much of the time anyway. You can't Ready two actions, either, so maybe ready is good for this guy, but he can ready anyway, so it's the /other/ action he takes that round that is enabled by the Action Surge.
