Armor Up - Developer Diary #3

[Qhualor]

combining evil and undead in the core is good, but why in the level 18 cant it also be evil?

Your vorpal hits against undead do an additional 500 damage.

[toapat]

Tier One (0 AP Required)
• Divine Light: Your Turn Undead ability now also deals 6d6/12d6/18d6 light damage to nearby undead. Scales with 200% Melee Power.
• Action Boost: Attack: Activate to gain a +(4/6/8) Action Boost bonus to hit for 20 seconds.

Tier Two (5 AP Required)
• Improved Turning: You count as (1/2/3) levels higher when turning undead, and add (2/4/6) to the number of hit dice turned.
• Divine Might: Channel Divinity: Channel Divinity: You gain an Insight bonus to Strength equal to your Charisma modifier for 30/60/120 seconds. (Cooldown 20 seconds)
• Rally: Channel Divinity: Remove fear from nearby allies. You and the affected allies gain a +2/+4/+6 Moral Bonus to Will Saves vs. Fear effects and a +1/+2/+3 Morale Bonus to Attack and Damage for 60 seconds. (Coodown: 3 minutes)
• Action Boost: Damage: Activate to gain a (+10/+20/+30)% Action Boost bonus to Melee Power for 20 seconds. (Cooldown: 30 Seconds)

Tier Three (10 AP Required)
• Vigor of Life: Your Positive Healing Amplification is increased by (5/10)%, and you take (5/10)% less damage from Negative Energy.

Tier Four (20 AP Required)
• Censure Demons: You gain On Vorpal: Stuns Chaotic Evil outsiders for 3 seconds.
• Passion: Your Divine Sacrifice ability gains: On Damage: Gain (5/10/15) temporary spell points if you strike an undead or evil outsider an evil creature with this attack.
• Vigor of Life: Your Positive Healing Amplification is increased by (5/10)%, and you take (5/10)% less damage from Negative Energy.

Tier Five (40 AP Required)
• Censure Outsiders: Your Censure Demons ability now applies to all Chaotic or Evil outsiders.
• Vigor of Life: Your Positive Healing Amplification is increased by (5/10)%, and you take (5/10)% less damage from Negative Energy.
• Holy Retribution: Melee Channel Divinity: Executes a powerful holy strike against the target that deals +1/+3/+5[W] damage. On Damage: Evil creatures with less than 1,000 HP have a 50%/75%/100% chance to be forced to make a Will save (DC 10 + Paladin Level + Charisma Mod) or be destroyed. On a successful save, the affected creature takes 100 holy damage from this attack as well as -6 to all ability scores for ten seconds. (Cooldown: 6 seconds) This ability also recharges one Smite Evil.
• Sealed Life: You are immune to Energy Drain.

We are still in the process of examining the Sacred Defender tree and will describe those changes in a future post.

Sev~

Major Issues, listed in decending order of the list:

0: I dont understand whats going on with this layout of the core enhancements, i cant comment on them because im not comprehending what they are saying. also, you wrote Exaulted smite not Extra Smiting for the first tier enhancement
1: Improved Turning and Divine Light: If the team really wants to allow paladins to be able to use the turn undead ability, Please combine these together.
2: Action Boosts: Can you merge these together as a multiselector?
3: Can paladins receive Endless turning in place of the Improved Turning selector?
4: Divine Might: Can we get this for mana? Boosting Turn Undead uses is much more difficult than mana.
5: Rally: Underwhelming still, doesnt compete with a Cleric/Fvs' Inflame
6: Vigor Of Life and Sealed Life: Can these be moved to Sacred Defender, and merged into a single 6 point, 3 tier enhancement for them? This is just eating alot of potential room for expansion of the abilities.
7: Passion: Does this need to be separate from Divine Sacrifice?
8: Censure Outsiders: Should probably be merged into Censure Demons as an improved tier, for a 4AP/2 tier ability
9: Holy Retribution: can this be allowed to recharge 2 smite evil uses at third rank? as it is the ability is quite expensive for actual use

[Dalnarac]

When are these paladin changes going live? These changes may convince me to dust off my pally and maybe even enjoy playing him. He is sword and board and as it is, I TR'd him over a year ago and got bored with him in the lower levels. He is just far to boring to play solo in the lower levels. Your changes may just make him fun again. I really like the Holy Sword and Zeal changes. Duration of buff is a huge deal to me. Having to cast a buff every 2 minutes is annoying. And of course Holy Sword, this actually will make it useful for the pally's entire career! I want to log in my pally now just to play these changes! Is it live yet? How bout now? Now?

[BDog77]

Looks goodish, I suppose. Not trying to be lukewarm about things, I actually see a lot of good things about this, BUT, and it's a big BUT, a couple of things kinda worry me.

First, the description of holy sword is unclear, does it add holy to the weapon (thus making it bypass Good DR, and making part of the capstone fairly unnecessary?), or just add a holy enhancement to the weapon (thus making sure it stacks with all other enhancements)? Also, one of the best things about this spell was the fact that it created a metalline weapon, which meant if you had no boss beater, the holy sword plus the capstone (when it worked) gave you a metalline + pure good weapon, useable even at level 20. It's OK if that is gone (you could just use the spell on a metalline weapon, but it is unclear whether the metalline transmutation is gone or not.

I still don't see any reason to take Holy Retribution, unless there is some way for Pallys to regen turns. You could make this a +100/+300/+500[W] ability, and maybe (well probably, I love dem big numbers!!!) I would take it, but considering that I power DM and possibly now Divine Light (will at least check it out, and is at least an AOE in a way that a swing is not), even with those huge pluses I mentioned above, I might be able to use it 2-3 times per rest. At +1/+3/+5, it isn't really feasible to take until getting regenning turn from an ED (and that should not be necessary for an enhancement), and that's OK as far as that goes, but why even waste a slot (and a tier 5 one at that!) for an ability no one will take? Even to use it in Epics, that 1000 hp limit needs to scale to 5000 or more, unless the added 100 damage and -6 applies automatically to creatures above 1000 hp (not really clear here), and even then it's OKish (hey added damage is added damage, but again a tier 5 slot?).

I'm also not sure what exactly the terms "scales with 100% melee power" and "scales with 200% melee power" actually mean. Does this mean that the damage is doubled and tripled respectively? If so, why not just double and triple the numbers? If it means that it will effectively double and triple my existing melee power and then apply that somehow to scale the damage, then I'm not really sure of a couple of things. First, how much melee power am I expected to have at each level, and second, how exactly is that power supposed to scale this damage? In your other threads you talk about adding 90% melee power in epics, ok, but 90% of what (my base melee damage, I assumed)? If this is true, then how is my base melee damage actually affecting this light damage? What is my actual melee base damage? Is it 1.0 for levels 1-9, 1.5 for levels 10-19, and 2.0 for levels 20+, or is it based on the weapon I hold?

I'm also a little underwhelmed by the "changes" to spells. Don't get me wrong, I love the changes to Holy Sword (I think) and to Zeal (definitely), but are we just ignoring the fact that by the time we get second level spells, most of them are already obsolete (all of the stat buffs)? By the time you reach level 20, you are just slotting some spells (especially level 2 spells) that you will never use just to avoid getting the irritating "you have unprepared spell slots" message. I guess I was hoping we could get some more Pally focused spells, especially at this level (where it feels like the original Devs just tossed a bunch of stat boosting spells to fill out this level). I mean, at least Rangers get a STACKING strength spell (Ram's Might).

Other than the questions I have about how a light ability might scale with melee power and those small things I mentioned above, I think at first glance it looks great. Will definitely head to lamma to try these out!

EDIT: Lotta people posted while I was writing this, lol, but y'all are right, I didn't even notice the problem with the cleaves. Sev, could we either get a separate cooldown for these, or allow Avenging Cleave to stand in for Great Cleave for OC (if the intent was to let Pallys free up some feat slots)? Otherwise we take 2 feats that we cannot use, and I think that that part of this game (taking things you can't use just to qualify for something else) really frustrates people.

[HastyPudding]

We are still in the process of examining the Sacred Defender tree and will describe those changes in a future post.

Sev~

That was the most interesting sentence in the post, for me. The rest of it was more or less a blur on the page as I read through it. I like my paladins to be uber meatshields saying 'my god has a bigger *** than your god, and you can't harm me'. I am eagerly waiting to read the next diary. :3

[Lonnbeimnech]

This looks fantastic.

[Impaqt]

Shouldn't Tier 5 be 30 AP's required?

I love the +4 Chr at capstone. ALL capstones should be bumped to +4 as far as I;m concerned.

[gemineye]

In the next developer diary we will be talking about some of the Paladin improvements, including Knight of the Chalice changes, the redesign of Vorpal Weapon, and the increase in the duration of Zeal.

Sev~

What happened to the Vorpal Weapon redesign?

[Karadon_II]

THANK YOU for finally combining the Cores so that we get both Undead and EO, I always thought it was asinine we had to choose one or the other.

This was my main gripe. It was assumed that from what the devs said before the enhancement pass a that 'merge of KOTC and HOTD' meant just that, but to our horror we discovered thay managed to seperate them in the same tree!!! Now they are together, as they should be.

[FranOhmsford]

6: Vigor Of Life and Sealed Life: Can these be moved to Sacred Defender, and merged into a single 6 point, 3 tier enhancement for them? This is just eating alot of potential room for expansion of the abilities.

Because a tree that already requires more AP than you can actually get really deserves to be made even costlier!


I'm going to /sign the suggestion that the KotC tree serve as pre-req for Overwhelming Crit otherwise the obvious intention to free up Feats isn't going to work {People will still be stuck taking Cleave/Great Cleave!}.

[Krelar]

Zeal
Zeal is already quite good, but as a quality of life change we are increasing its duration to match the new Holy Sword spell. It will now last one minute per caster level.

Would you consider boosting the duration of Divine Favor as well?

Currently it's durations is close enough to zeal that I usually cast them at the same time.

You might also consider increasing the cap on it. (Currently +3 at level 9)

[Dagolar]

• Holy Retribution: Melee Channel Divinity: Executes a powerful holy strike against the target that deals +1/+3/+5[W] damage. On Damage: Evil creatures with less than 1,000 HP have a 50%/75%/100% chance to be forced to make a Will save (DC 10 + Paladin Level + Charisma Mod) or be destroyed. On a successful save, the affected creature takes 100 holy damage from this attack as well as -6 to all ability scores for ten seconds. (Cooldown: 6 seconds) This ability also recharges one Smite Evil.

This cooldown seems pretty absurdly low. It'll end up being a default attack in the player's attack pattern, and always the first one they toggle.

This isn't inherently bad, persay-
But, well.
"This ability also recharges one Smite Evil."

Suffice it to say that the ED faster regenning smites enhancement will be utterly useless for KotC Tier5 builds.
You know. The one that allows you an extra smite every few minutes?

You could just scrap the 'recharges one smite evil' and write in a 'this ability grants infinite smite evils'.
You could even leave the functionality the same.
It'd only be in rare instances that a player'd actually be able to notice the actual mechanics [at least going off of the premise that players will use the attack as a default in their pattern].

In other words-
Is this WAI? ;P

[toapat]

*snip*

You missed one thing:

It costs a turn undead to activate

Because a tree that already requires more AP than you can actually get really deserves to be made even costlier!

more like Defender of Syberies should have those and is still being reworked.

And no tree should be able to be completely invested in. its bad design if you dont have difficult but rewarding choices.

[Dagolar]

I'm going to /sign the suggestion that the KotC tree serve as pre-req for Overwhelming Crit otherwise the obvious intention to free up Feats isn't going to work {People will still be stuck taking Cleave/Great Cleave!}.

Ah, it didn't click until just now why all the cleave feats were in there. It was honestly rather a weird concept until you made that clarification.

Of course, as you say- it's back to just being weird [and needlessly, crudely redundant] if they don't apply the enhancements as equivalent feat substitutes for the purposes of OC prereqs.

[Dagolar]

You missed one thing:

It costs a turn undead to activate

Oh, doi. The channel divinity didn't click, not used to seeing 'melee' prefixing it :P

Hm. Making turn undeads useable for combat usage, outside of ED +threat abilities?

No, that's pretty great.

My last post on the topic may be disregarded

[Scrabbler]

And no tree should be able to be completely invested in. its bad design if you dont have difficult but rewarding choices.

Given that each character has at least 4 trees open for APs, you still have choices even if you can train all of a single class tree. In general, it should be possible to get all of 1 tree, but you should hardly ever want to because you're missing too much from others.

[Scrabbler]

I'm going to /sign the suggestion that the KotC tree serve as pre-req for Overwhelming Crit otherwise the obvious intention to free up Feats isn't going to work {People will still be stuck taking Cleave/Great Cleave!}.

It is impossible for Enhancements to unlock Feats. (For example, try using Halfling Dexterity enhancements to access GTWF and see if it works)

[Memnir]

Looks like it might be time to make a Paladin.
We'll see how it turns out at launch, though. Not saying it looks bad - far from it. Just been way too many Charlie Brown v. Football missives from on high in the past.

[toapat]

Oh, doi. The channel divinity didn't click, not used to seeing 'melee' prefixing it :P

Hm. Making turn undeads useable for combat usage, outside of ED +threat abilities?

No, that's pretty great.

My last post on the topic may be disregarded

The ability sucks. Its only gaining a few small benefits. and it needs to recharge at least 2/use to currently compete with either Divine Might or Glorious Stand.

if you think Confront any Foe is good, its not. it never has been

Given that each character has at least 4 trees open for APs, you still have choices even if you can train all of a single class tree. In general, it should be possible to get all of 1 tree, but you should hardly ever want to because you're missing too much from others.

that isnt good design either. Good design would be every class has 3 distinct trees, each able to invest 90 points in, and which all 80 points of theirs are difficult but rewarding to invest.

[Monkey_Archer]

Holy Sword
Evocation (Good spells)
Paladin 4
Components: Verbal, Somatic
Metamagic: Quicken
Range: Touch
Target: Self
Duration: 1 minute per caster level
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No
Cooldown: 3 seconds

Channels holy power to increase the effectiveness of your equipped weapons. Weapons you currently are wielding gain an additional +2 holy bonus to enhancement value. The spell also increases the threat range and critical weapon multiplier of these weapons by 1.

Clarification on bonus type is needed for proper feedback. Specifically, is the threat range doubled by the improved critical feat, and does it stack with Celestial champion in Divine crusader.
Assuming yes on both of these, then I think its great.
If the answer is no to either, then this change is too biased towards high threat range weapons like rapiers/falchions and I don't like it.

Knight of the Chalice
As part of our ongoing Paladin examination, we have made a number of changes to Knight of the Chalice to increase the effectiveness of the Paladin.

Looking over this I'd say a few things:

1) This is a buff to the 2 or 4 paladin splash, giving additional light damage and a free cleave. Assuming a divine grace nerf goes through, i think thats pretty fair compensation. Assuming the divine grace nerf got canceled, its going to be interesting coming up with builds that don't use paladin levels.
2) Mid range paladin builds (14-17 paladin levels, split focus on other trees, up to tier 4 KOTC) seem like they're in a good spot. Holy sword, and 3d6 or 4d6 light damage is nice for a reasonable investment
3) Dedicated KOTC paladins (18+ levels, tier 5 KOTC). The cores are great. Up to 8d6 scaling light damage is fairly significant. Justifying tier 5 however is a bit more difficult. Holy retribution is completely useless.Remove the hp limit and it might be worth taking.
4) Cleaves... Good intentions, poor implementation. Sharing a cooldown with the feats, but not being a prereq for overwhelming critical makes them fairly useless.


Suggestion:
Combine Censure outsider and Censure Demons into one tier 4 ability. Use the extra spot in tier 5 to include Overwhelming critical with avenging cleave as a prereq.