D&D General When Was it Decided Fighters Should Suck at Everything but Combat?

[Lanefan]

For the record, I've always wanted a healing class that gave up the Cleric's melee abilities (armor and weapons) to more purely focus on support. Divine Soul Sorcerer is actually a pretty a good option for it, but I'd rather it be a class.

My Nature Clerics (reworked Druids) aren't far from this. Their fighting is fairly bad, their weapon and armour selections are quite restricted, but their healing is the best and their other spells are pretty good. And they get shapeshift at higher levels, too.

I'll note right now, however, that our Nature Clerics have in the long run shown themselves to be somewhat overpowered, to the point where next campaign I'll be dialling them back some.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The bolded is fine until there's too many classes competing for the same somewhat-limited number of clearly-defined niches.

Solution: fewer classes. Preferably just one per niche, with maybe an alternate sharing the same niche in a different fashion (example: Thief and Assassin, or MU and Illusionist, in 1e).

i don't think there needs to be less classes, and i don't think there's (much) conflict over niche identity for the classes that exist, but my point is that the designers of the classes tend to be overly hesitant to share certain mechanical abilities which are deemed to 'belong' or 'define' a certain class, and it's not even especially special abilities sometimes, like the rogue is the only class allowed to sneak attack, when it's entirely thematically appropriate for that to be something a ranger, a fighter or maybe even a monk to also be capable of, speaking of the monk they get to have claim to being the only class with a notable basic movespeed increase, something more special for example, druid's wildshape, could be apropriate as a subclass feature on rangers, clerics, sorcerers, barbarians and perhaps warlocks.

put more simply, classes ought to be defined by the sum of their parts taken together in conjunction with each other rather than having exclusive claim to a certain type of part.