We went through that before.
We did. All you could come up with was want of a Martial Controller and XOMG, Inherent Bonuses were in the DMG
2. All-martial parties worked in 4e, I played in some, even one that was entirely inadvertent, we just sat down at an Encounters table and had all happened to pick martial classes. The very idea of Sources neatly supported not just groups that wanted to play a given Source, but settings that focused on or excluded one. Low-/no-magic
item campaigns worked fine with Inherent bonuses, your anecdotal frustration with enhancement bonuses not stacking with inherent ones (which would've been broken, and which theoretically obviated exactly 3 of the myriad items in the game, some of the time), notwithstanding.
I mean, you can claim D&D has never supported low-magic games, but it's been trying for a long time, 'low-magic' is party of the lingo and has been for a long time, and trying to show that 4e failed to do so would be fantastically difficult - it's something even other h4ters tended to agree on, along with 4e's obvious balance.
And I could make that exact same claim about a dozen of other play styles.
You could claim 5e doesn't support Space Opera, and should, because it once had the Spelljammer setting. You wouldn't even be completely wrong, though there's nothing much I can think of about that setting that you'd actually need to add
classes to the game to resolve. Races, perhaps.
We DO NOT need a new class or two for every play style.
Also true. Spelljammer, above, wouldn't require a new class. Dark Sun is going to need the Mystic, at least.
Judging by the sales and response to 5e, then that's mission accomplished. People have wholeheartedly embraced 5e.
Happily so, but that does not prove, by fallacious appeal to popularity, that it's done all it can or can't be improved.
Balanced in 4e. But 4e balanced does not equal 5e balance.
5e balance is much looser and easier to design within.
A lot of what worked then doesn't work now, just as what works in 5e would break 4e.
Sure, almost anything from 5e would shatter 4e's neat balance. The reverse isn't true, things from 4e would tend to be pretty innocuous in 5e. Of course, that's assuming minimal translation, obvious +1/2 level bonuses to anything would break 5e like glass, but 5e already has a bonus progression use instead.
Sure there is. Any new addition leads to a little more bloat.
At the current pace of publication, that might become an issue in the 2030s.
I don't see how proving that the fighter is the king of single target damage means it cannot do anything else.
What else does it do
at all well?
I'm not arguing that the fighter cannot DPR. I'm arguing that it's not just good for, that you can build a useful and effective fighter that does more than DPR
You can, but his usefulness and effectiveness come primarily from contributing DPR to his party's success. That he also has a background as a basketweaver, or gets a +1 to roll to bend iron bard, just doesn't measure up.
and might even be poor at DPR.
Not so much. You can design a tanky fighter with merely good DPR instead of fantastic DPR, throwing away the good DPR doesn't net you anything.
And that variants for the class can easily be designed that encourage you to build alternate fighters that do other things than DPR. That the fighter framework is more flexible than you give it credit for.
It's easy to see what fighter archetype can do, and other, fairly limited and minor things, in addition to DPR are on the table.
Instead of DPR relies on hypothetically just undermining features for no gain. That's the problem, that the class itself, before sub-class goodies, is invested in Extra Attack & Action Surge (among other things), that naturally make it a solid-DPR class, unless the archetype adds directly to that, or at least dovetails with it, it's not going to be viable.
And adding a new class that does DPR via other characters doesn't add anything new either.
That's like saying the Cleric doesn't add anything because it has Flame Strike, and the Wizard already has Fireball. Every class can contribute DPR, in some way, some of the time, using some option or resource. It'd be odd if the Warlord didn't. He just can't be tied down to it the degree the fighter is.
I could say that about ANY of the martial classes in 1e-4e. The warblade, the knight, the cavalier, the thief-acrobat.
The Knight (3e or Essentials) was a low-grade attempt at a defender, a fighter with Protection Style and maybe some feats wouldn't do it a grave injustice. There wasn't much to the original Cavalier, it was restricted to certain weapons, that it was crazy-good with, wore heavy armor, and fought from horseback. The Thief-Acrobat was a proto-prc-like oddity, an artifact of the lack of skill rules in 1e, I doubt a Rogue (Thief) with Expertise in Acrobatics would fall far short of it, though I can't say I remember it well.
OTOH, Something akin to the Warblade would be a great addition to 5e, especially if it could be finagled to also bring some of the 3.5 Fighter's customizeability with it, and/or could be implemented as a master of maneuvers exploring more of the potential of that sub-system than the surface scratched by the BM. Wedging the (3e, not Essentials) Scout in somewhere wouldn't be a bad idea at all, either.
The only really thing that differentiates the warlord from any other past edition class is that it was in a PHB.
And it was an adequate primary-support character, which no martial character before or since has been. It was the reason you could easily have all-martial parties in 4e.
