Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Heavy imbalance in Paladin Lvl1 Class Feature

As far as I can tell, Oath of Rebuke and Healing Radiance are abilities unique to Larian's interpretation of Dnd5e. The problem is, as initial implementations of new abilities, it's hard to imagine them being any more imbalanced relative to one another. There are a number of issues:

First, Healing Radiance is immediately useful while Oath of Rebuke's usefulness is immediately questionable. In the early game, having extra healing, especially healing that can be leveraged for the entire party, is at arguably its highest need as there are limited spell slots and resources for healing outside of spells. Oath of Rebuke, on the other hand, requires that a unit be hit, which is most dangerous at these levels with such a limited health pool. Even so, the return damage is very low for the two turns its granted. In a best case scenario, you'd want to be hit by a high number of enemies to maximize its usefulness, but the low hit points makes this a very bad idea.

Second, Healing Radiance's healing scales with level, while Oath of Rebuke's damage does not. This imbalance is self explanatory, but is just compounded by the first point. An ability of very questionable utility at level 1 becomes increasingly inviable at later levels, with the only bonus being able to soak more hits and therefore trigger the damage more.

In order to balance Healing Radiance, I would recommend one of two solutions:

(1) Make the damage dealt to the attacker equal to the caster's Paladin level and consider making it trigger even on a miss. (edit to add trigger recommendation)
-or-
(2) Make any attacker receive a debuff that grants attacks against them advantage for one round.

The first has hard scaling, while the second provides a buff that scales according to the increased offense potential of the party with levels.

Thanks for reading this feedback and considering it.

Warm regards.

All abilities that require you to be hit to trigger are counter-productive with the D&D Armor Class system.

The idea of survival is that you don't get damaged > you maximize your AC > higher AC makes enemies "miss" you (even though in most cases it means the armor actually absorbs a hit) > revenge damage triggers less and less. Reworking these type of abilities would be a good idea for the next edition.

I agree that the Rebuke ability is completely useless. I've never used it and never will just after reading it. Revenge damage type protections should just have a 5ft. range and some enemies should actually avoid them.

Agreed. You reminded me that I indented to recommend that it trigger even on a miss, as you point out that a miss can mean deflection (and therefore contact).

Trigger on a miss i.e. deflection is what I suggested before as well. BG3 could easily even calculate what is a clean miss and what is a deflection, and animate the events as such. You could then have triggers on the actual deflection.

Still, perhaps unnecessarily complicated to explain in a spell description. You would need a new AC value for deflection, like Touch AC used to be in earlier editions. 5e has simplified those things so perhaps it would be better to just have a more straightforward implementation of a 5ft damage aura.

Yeah, I think just triggering all the time is sufficient, although I agree the calculation would be easy, I don't think the extra crunchiness adds much.

Quick bump for the work week.

I am currently playing as an Oath of the Ancients Paladin and their Channel Oath ability is insanely powerful. Pair it with whispering promise ring, boots of comfort and hellrider's pride and you get AOE heal 12, give 2t blade ward, bless and 3 temporary hp at level 4 for a BONUS ACTION. Then repeat the same next turn FOR FREE with a possibility to reposition yourself... Even without paying the other Oath I can tell that Holy Rebuke sucks in comparison.

Indeed. There might just also be too many opportunities to buff very minor healing abilities.

Does the asinine potion throwing also count as "healing" someone?

Yes it does.

Don't you know you just have to be splashed by the potion? ><

Definitely agree there’s an imbalance here. I found I just stopped using Holy Rebuke after my initial experiments with it. It’s unlikely that there’s ever going to be no better action a paladin can take.

There are various ways it could be tweaked to make it usuable. Possibly turning it into a bonus action like Healing Radiance, or even a reaction sort of like Hellish Rebuke (though triggering if an ally were attacked, rather than the individual with the power). Though it would probably still become obsolete pretty quickly if it continues not to scale with level or, say, charisma modifier.