Demon Hunters and Death Knights aside, every other class is named for an occupation in our real world.
[Edit - Oh, you did include Hunter. I donât know how I missed that. Leaving my commentary intact.] But the biggie that you overlook is Hunter. âBut not with animals!â you may protest. Au contraire - people still breed, train and employ hunting dogs all the time. A RL Hunter, with a RL rifle, and RL dogs is a formidable opponent.
Of metaphysical classes, the oldest (dating from the stone age) is probably Shaman - a professional caste of Finno-Siberian tribal peoples, which combines religious functions with folk medicine and something an awful lot like what we call psychotherapy.
We have written records of established, organized, regulated priesthoods going back as far as we have writing - roughly 6,000 years (ancient Egypt, as a culture, is astoundingly old). Contemporary religion demonstrably derives from these practices.
Monks are real, and an actual Kung Fu adept really can mess you up, bare handed. To what extent Chi / Qi / Ki is real, and to what extent it is woo is open to debate. The effectiveness of a flip kick to the head is less so.
Iffier are Mage and Warlock, although the distinction has been made since at least the time of Homer (Iron Age Europe, approximately 500 BC) between theurgia, or socially sanctioned, educated, ceremonial magic, and goetia, superstitious, disreputable traffic in the Black Arts. The distinction remained current into the Early Modern period, and just for one notorious example, Aliester Crowley (1875 - 1947) is known to have employed both up through the Second World War.
Now, occultism is full of flim-flam, but regardless of its effectiveness, serious people have and do seriously practice it. Jack Parsons, a late protege of Crowley, was also a founding scientist and aerospace engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. (Parsonsâ magical work is a matter of public record, and led to his expulsion from the program in 1944.)
So wizards and warlocks? Yep - actually a thing.
Paladins havenât been around since the collapse of the Carolingian Dynasty. In troubadoursâ tales, they were twelve knightly companions of Charlemagne, who did noble deeds along the same general lines as the wholly fictional King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. In actual history, paladins were court officials and magistrates of the Merovingian and Carolingian Frankish kingdoms of the early Middle Ages (about 600-900 AD). They were as effective as any trained, mounted, armored man swinging a sharp, tempered length of steel. That said, they lost the Battle of Ronceveaux, and the Moors were not fully expelled from the Iberian Peninsula until the Fifteenth Century. But yes - there really were paladins.
We know next to nothing about ancient Druids, because all our written records of them are from hostile sources - Roman historians, and Christian monks. But beginning with the Romantic Movement from roughly the latter half of the Eighteenth Century, we have seen various attempts, more or less imaginative but sincere in intent, at revivalist practice.
The best established, and most respectable, is the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, which can trace itâs origins to the Gorsedd Cymru, formerly the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain, a Welsh revivalist order dating to 1792. Queen Elizabeth II, while still princess and heir presumptive to King George VI, was initiated as an honorary Ovate in 1946. Her honorary membership was rescinded 60 years later, when bylaws of the Gorsedd required its members to be at least marginally fluent in Welsh, which Her Maj sadly is not. Nothing in the bylaws about being able to turn into a bear.
If we interpret Warrior as âsoldierâ, in a modern, military sense, they probably win this shin-kicking contest from sheer material and governmental support, especially if we are talking units. Even individually, Iâd bet on an equipped special forces commando against a hunter or martial artist. That said, individual expertise varies.
There is a long history of fiction around all these, most particularly distortive in regards to magic, or what actual practitioners expect to achieve versus Hollywood fantasy. But they are all real things, DKs and DHs aside.