When I think of knights, I think of Dragonlance. This knight doesn’t begin to resemble any of the knighthoods, in my opinion. I think of honor and a code. None of that is here. That may be fluff, but it could have been woven into the mechanics.

Likewise, I’m not a huge fan of the samurai. I expect something like ancestral daisho, or maybe a quick draw/single slice ability. Also, I expect honor and some tie to one’s daimyo. And maybe a write-up about ronin.

To me, the knight and samurai just seemed lackluster at best. Sharpshooters…eh. I don’t need a subclass for that. The arcane archer is the best one of the bunch.

To be fair, I edited that in after Michael posted the request. =)

It is there, just click on “present four new fighter archetypes” in the first sentence of the text.

Well now that’s just rubbish. I know plenty of people in the local Greektown who can fly into a rage when you fail to order your food in a timely fashion.

Point taken, though.

Once again, I submit the lack of a real arcane hybrid causes problems 🙂

To expand on the point about fighters a bit more – one of my long-term characters was a Warmain in an Arcana Evolved campaign. Now AE has a lot of great examples of “splitting” the fighter class – you’ve got Unfettered and Warmains and Champions (that are sort of the setting’s paladins) and Ritual Warriors, all of which are narrower visions of a weapon-using class. All of these classes are extremely good at what they do, but outside that competency they are flat useless.

For the warmain, this meant that as soon as a social scene came up, I had nothing to contribute, and the best thing I could do for the party’s success was to tune out. Since then, I’ve been strongly opposed to one-trick ponies. I’m fine with a character having weaknesses, but those need to not be quite so rigid by class. There was nothing I could have done, other than change classes, to be okay at Diplomacy and Sense Motive, because they were out of class and warmains are a 2+Int skill points class… just like all fighters in 3.x.

The good news in 5e is that classes have a broader range of skill options, and more importantly, you can gain any skill from a Background. Backgrounds are seriously one of my favorite new pieces of D&D – I was getting out of 4e by the time Themes were coming along.

As for the Arcane Archer: yes, why not. It is actually down to the setting and the DM I suppose.

As for the Samurai: unfortunately, yes, my example of players is that most of them that play a Fighter are there mainly to kill stuff. But I can understand this being a bug of the game (it gives little to no social interaction skills to the class) and it makes players think the same way in return.

No argument on the social features, which aren’t really ribbons so much as helping the fighter stay involved. Your point about the party already having a Face by 7th level is spot on. (But then that might apply to 3rd level also, and that’s the earliest the fighter is getting ANYTHING subclass-ish.)

On the class name: totally agree. Paladins are now restricted to cultures with a Frankish palace guard. Bards are now restricted to the Welsh; the new Scop and Skald classes are identical but similarly restricted. The monk is shot to death for creating confusion. Barbarians cannot come from Greek-speaking cultures. And your precious warlord? No longer appropriate for small-group play, because it isn’t a warlord without an army.

All of which is to say, D&D is a primordial soup of ideas, and we draw our lines of what’s okay and what’s not in ways that are pretty arbitrary. =) In reality I agree with your point, as I hope I made clear in the main text of the article.

Arcane Archer: I don’t have too hard of a time imagining a tiefling using something like this – they are, if anything, MORE intrinsically magical than elves, and that magic is arcane, if more warlock-y than anything else. As the edition matures, we’ll also see a huge variety of more outré races, many of which will have intrinsic magic comparable to the elves, so leaving it open for all is the better approach than having to call out qualification for every one of those races individually.

Knight: Reacting to that many enemies (with Defender’s Blade) just feels like too much to me. Sure, you usually won’t have more than two or three enemies on you at once, but if you did, gameplay grinds to a halt as you react to every. single. turn. But if Defender’s Blade came earlier and some of their other reaction-driven stuff got cut, then okay, whatevah.

Samurai: Here I take a completely different tack. I don’t tend to find that fighters don’t want to talk at all – in my campaign, two of the group’s very chatty heroic leader types are fighters (one Battle Master, one Champion). But it has always bothered me that fighters were only good at fighting, while other classes didn’t have to sacrifice combat potential for out-of-combat effectiveness. I’m saying that all of those asocial fighters got that way because they didn’t have anything on their character sheets that would help, not because of an intrinsic desire to disengage from play during social scenes. Obviously, there are SOME players who do exactly that, but let’s not design so that disengagement from one pillar of gameplay is the default.

Hey, the Sharpshooter can totally Rapid Strike with melee weapons if he wants. But yes, the fundamental problem with Close-Quarters Shooting is that you no longer have any reason to EVER not use a bow, short of the DM forcing the issue (i.e., a sort of bullshit DM call that the PC will ruin the bowstring by using it in the rain, or whatever).