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Why is There No Warlord Equivalent in 5E?
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<blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9338415" data-attributes="member: 6877472"><p>It's a start, the main issue with Second Wind affecting your team is you need a situation where multiple characters need that healing and are in range. d10+level is better than a Healing Word, but worse than a Cure Wounds, and Healing Word is generally an "oh hell!" emergency heal sort of thing.</p><p></p><p>You can make arguments about Mass Healing Word being outperformed by a Banneret, but it's not really enough- this character couldn't replace a Cleric, and would be less useful I think than someone with the Healer Feat for helping ease the healing burden of a solo Cleric.</p><p></p><p>Which is really the problem, everything in 5e has to be compared to what a spellcaster can do. If we're making a Warlord who is not a spellcaster, it's apparent that design in 5e is generally martial < magic. The Warlord would probably need to be closer to a caster in power to do what we want them to do, but that's not how the game is built and a lot of people like it that way. I don't, but I understand I'm not exactly the majority opinion.</p><p></p><p>The attack granting is interesting, because you have to try and take into account what your damage + the damage being granted is. Having played a Battlemaster, there are vanishingly few times where my attacking with a superiority die and some debuff was worse than granting someone else a bonus attack with a maneuver. It basically comes down to someone who can make a big single hit, like a Rogue or a Paladin who will actually dump their spell slots on a random attack and not try to wait for a crit (trust me, there are Paladin players who do that and they drive me nuts, lol).</p><p></p><p>The same problem would occur with a dedicated class feature for it. You'd have somehow make the Warlord worse at damage than a Fighter (which is hard because the base class doesn't get much more raw damage than anyone else baseline, they rely on making more attacks) so that when they grant attacks, it's better than the Warlord attacking themselves.</p><p></p><p>The movement granting bonuses have issues since not everyone wants to play on a grid (I do, many don't) and movement powers are not as useful in 5e <em>at this moment</em>. We don't have combat advantage, every spell caster can have great AC if they want it, and there's not a lot of forced movement powers running around- we're basically in 3e territory where people move into base with one another and keep swinging until one or the other falls down, the necessity of combat movement like it was in 4e just doesn't seem to be there. So things like Reorient the Axis would be very situational.</p><p></p><p>What really made Warlords stand out were with Dailies, IMO. Sure they could heal. Sure they could grant you an attack with bonuses, or offer you bonus initiative, but the main reason to have them, was how they made other people's daily powers more reliable or harder hitting (with the Action Point benefit) or how crazy their own Dailies are. If you were ever in a rough fight and saw a Warlord use Stand the Fallen, it was a huge momentum shift.</p><p></p><p>In 5e, there's no real budget for things like that. Daily powers are almost exclusively spells. Martials don't get a lot of spells. And would we even want a class that actively buffs spellcasters, when many people think they are already too strong?</p><p></p><p>So yeah, as others have said, it's not that you couldn't make a 5e Warlord. The issue is, the class would stick out as being not like other classes, and worse, depending on party composition, it might be way worse than just playing a Peace or Twilight Cleric (not even getting into how a given person feels about those subclasses). I don't accept that the Banneret or the Battlemaster are Warlords. But I can see the issues of trying to create a Warlord and having it be this "5th wheel class" that either outperforms existing options or underperforms, based on what the other players are doing. Which isn't a problem for the Bard or Cleric- they can adjust to any party using their basic abilities. </p><p></p><p>A Warlord in 5e might be like "well, uh, I'm not sure what I'm doing here" especially in the light of so many classes and subclasses being invested in the spell system.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James Gasik, post: 9338415, member: 6877472"] It's a start, the main issue with Second Wind affecting your team is you need a situation where multiple characters need that healing and are in range. d10+level is better than a Healing Word, but worse than a Cure Wounds, and Healing Word is generally an "oh hell!" emergency heal sort of thing. You can make arguments about Mass Healing Word being outperformed by a Banneret, but it's not really enough- this character couldn't replace a Cleric, and would be less useful I think than someone with the Healer Feat for helping ease the healing burden of a solo Cleric. Which is really the problem, everything in 5e has to be compared to what a spellcaster can do. If we're making a Warlord who is not a spellcaster, it's apparent that design in 5e is generally martial < magic. The Warlord would probably need to be closer to a caster in power to do what we want them to do, but that's not how the game is built and a lot of people like it that way. I don't, but I understand I'm not exactly the majority opinion. The attack granting is interesting, because you have to try and take into account what your damage + the damage being granted is. Having played a Battlemaster, there are vanishingly few times where my attacking with a superiority die and some debuff was worse than granting someone else a bonus attack with a maneuver. It basically comes down to someone who can make a big single hit, like a Rogue or a Paladin who will actually dump their spell slots on a random attack and not try to wait for a crit (trust me, there are Paladin players who do that and they drive me nuts, lol). The same problem would occur with a dedicated class feature for it. You'd have somehow make the Warlord worse at damage than a Fighter (which is hard because the base class doesn't get much more raw damage than anyone else baseline, they rely on making more attacks) so that when they grant attacks, it's better than the Warlord attacking themselves. The movement granting bonuses have issues since not everyone wants to play on a grid (I do, many don't) and movement powers are not as useful in 5e [I]at this moment[/I]. We don't have combat advantage, every spell caster can have great AC if they want it, and there's not a lot of forced movement powers running around- we're basically in 3e territory where people move into base with one another and keep swinging until one or the other falls down, the necessity of combat movement like it was in 4e just doesn't seem to be there. So things like Reorient the Axis would be very situational. What really made Warlords stand out were with Dailies, IMO. Sure they could heal. Sure they could grant you an attack with bonuses, or offer you bonus initiative, but the main reason to have them, was how they made other people's daily powers more reliable or harder hitting (with the Action Point benefit) or how crazy their own Dailies are. If you were ever in a rough fight and saw a Warlord use Stand the Fallen, it was a huge momentum shift. In 5e, there's no real budget for things like that. Daily powers are almost exclusively spells. Martials don't get a lot of spells. And would we even want a class that actively buffs spellcasters, when many people think they are already too strong? So yeah, as others have said, it's not that you couldn't make a 5e Warlord. The issue is, the class would stick out as being not like other classes, and worse, depending on party composition, it might be way worse than just playing a Peace or Twilight Cleric (not even getting into how a given person feels about those subclasses). I don't accept that the Banneret or the Battlemaster are Warlords. But I can see the issues of trying to create a Warlord and having it be this "5th wheel class" that either outperforms existing options or underperforms, based on what the other players are doing. Which isn't a problem for the Bard or Cleric- they can adjust to any party using their basic abilities. A Warlord in 5e might be like "well, uh, I'm not sure what I'm doing here" especially in the light of so many classes and subclasses being invested in the spell system. [/QUOTE]
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