Saying the Battlemaster is a Warlord is like saying the Arcane Trickster is a Wizard - if it had only 3 wizard spells on it's list and they were all 1st level.
It does everything you'd want a basic warlord to do, it just doesn't do them often. But, other than commander warlords - which were not an official build in any published book - warlords relied on making attacks for themselves. Which in 5e translates into straight attacks. At-will powers aren't a thing for martial classes, only dailies and (effectively) encounters.
I know, it wasn't /technically/ a class or even a sub-class. You'd think it'd've rated at least a 'Wild Talent' feat or something in that case. It'd also be reasonable to think it'd get in the line for the Advanced Game behind the Warlord, which was.
Anyway, it's in the pipeline now, so that's a good thing for psionics fans.
I think they were choosing to hold back psionics until they could go in rather than just giving an unsatisfying tease (apart from content that they needed feedback and playtested). Which I can understand. Better to go all in than have a single small feat. (Plus, if you chose the right spell Magical Adept can work just fine with a flavour tweak.)
Neither was Camber of Culdi a religious fanatic calling for the murder of writers or other acts of terror against other civilians. But we can still play Clerics.
How the media chooses to translate the title of some lunatic has no bearing on what names we can use for classes in D&D.
Cleric is largely neutral in tone. There can be good or bad. Warlord is used exclusively negatively.
And it's not the media co-opting the term. That's just the modern usage of the term. There are no good warlords and haven't been in a hundred years. You'll notice the complete absence of the term "warlord" in the advertising for the John Carter movie.
But, unlike alternatives, like Marshal, doesn't imply a rank in a military hierarchy, nor legitimate authority. Nor does D&D stick remotely to actual definitions of class names. The Sorcerer doesn't conjure up spirits for instance.
Warlord does imply rank. It's right there in the
definition: military leader/commander. Warlord means nothing else. Not leader of soldiers or a militia, not leader of warriors or troops, but leader of the military. Rank is being implied with as much subtly as a brick to the head.
Marshal at least has some variant uses along with the verb usage (to arrange in proper order; set out in an orderly manner; to array, as for battle.) Ditto "commander".
Warlord was a contentious name when the class was announced, well before the books were released/leaked and the edition war really got started.
If they're going to present 5e as being for everyone who's ever loved D&D, they need to avoid the appearance of taking sides.
Putting in a class explicitly to placate a single small fraction of the group is very much taking a side.
Including it might seem like 'catering to 4vengers' excluding it does seem like 'catering to h4ters.' Thing is, is 5e supposed to be exclusionary or inclusive?
Inclusive means being welcoming and not pushing people away, not catering to their every whim. They included warlord-esque maneuvers in the battlemaster. That was pretty darn inclusive right there.
You can't make everyone happy all the time, and trying to do so only leads to frustration and making other people unhappy. You can set a place for everyone at the table, but you can't make them sit. If you made an honest effort to accommodate everyone, and someone still wants to sit elsewhere, then that choice is on them.
Including it as an optional class outside the Standard Game would seem a reasonable compromise.
How would a class option "outside the Standard Game" be released exactly? As an UA article? Would a unplaytested, unformatting class really satisfy you? Maybe a separate exclusive PDF like the
Elemental Evil Player Companion?
And how is that really different from the myriad homebrew warlords available, which have received significant more attention and manhours put into their creation?
Also... how is it a compromise? The warlord fans are getting exactly what they want (a warlord class) while everyone else who doesn't want a warlord class still has to know that WotC put time and money and hours and playtesting into content they'll never, every use. It means once side gets something rather than content being produced that at least has the
potential to appeal to everyone.
The appearance WotC should try to avoid is of WotC, itself taking sides, not of edition warring among folks posting on the forum today (also a bad thing, of course), which they can't control - and have, coincidentally, distanced themselves from by giving up their own forms.
The edition war already happened, the Warlord was a favorite target of h4ters. No matter how much or little we may raise the level of discourse, now, that's already happened. And WotC shouldn't go giving a big high-five to the h4ters of 2008-12 by pointedly excluding the Warlord they h4ted so much from 5e forever.
But neither are they obligated to create a class they don't like or feel doesn't works just to avoid accommodating h4ters. If they feel something they designed and worked on was unsatisfactory, they have every right to choose not to update it.
Assuming they even
know the warlord debates are part of the edition wars. It's not like they spend their free time cruising message boards like us. D&D is their day job, they likely go home and look at other things rather than effectively do work in their own time.
2 or 3, yes, compared to over 300 for the Warlord.
So less than <1% of the Warlord was nicked by the Battlemaster. They could plausibly label it 'warlord free.'
By that argument they didn't update the fighter, as there's only 17 battlemaster maneuvers compared to the 417 fighter powers. That's 4%. Not much.
Even if they had made the warlord it's own class and given it as many pages as the fighter, it's still only have 34-odd maneuvers. Still a fraction of the 4e numbers.
That's assuming they bothered to add many and not just keep the number low and allow more uses of the limited maneuvers. Really, a theoretical warlord would likely only know a dozen manuevers (to avoid the "hand size" problem) so lots of maneuvers are unneeded; if a warlord knows 12 then 24 maneuvers means two L20 warlords could be completely different.
Plus, there's only so many ideas for maneuvers. After a couple dozen they become super situation or finicky. I doubt I could think of more than a half-dozen new warlord powers that weren't variations.
At least, here we can agree: a 5e Warlord would potentially have a lot /more/ to it than the original Warlord. It's the case with a lot of 5e classes (and even sub-classes), like the a fore-mentioned Illusionist & Assassin, for instance.
But a 5e "maneuver master" class would still potentially only have a warlord subclass. With other subclasses doing very different things.
And it's still unlikely to do EVERYTHING the 4e warlord did, which is apparently a prerequisite for it being a warlord. So it'd *still* be unacceptable to many of the "warlord fans".
And it's still unlikely to include options like healing or reviving fallen players from a distance.
So, if WotC were to do such a class, they'd spend days working on the class, week (if not months) playtesting, and there's *still* be a vocal minority going "We want a real warlord!" So it's really a "why bother??" situation. A design Kobayashi Maru.
