Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback The way Reaction actions are implemented right now means Paladins will suck.

It already makes Lore Bards nerfed to hell. In the TTRPG, you get to decide to use Cutting Words after you know what the enemy rolled on an attack roll or saving throw, meaning you want to save it for rolls where an enemy succeeds, but by just enough so that reducing it by a d6 might make them fail. So in this game you will NEVER use Cutting Words, because you don't want to use it on an enemy who rolled a 2 anyway, and it costs a use of Bardic Inspiration which you only get to use as many times per day as your CHA modifier (not a whole lot).

But PALADINS will really get the short end of the stick here. The reason you would play a Paladin vs a Cleric is probably for the Divine Smite feature, which you use by expending a spell slot. Like Cutting Words, in the TTRPG you get to decide if you want to use it after you see your roll, so you really want to save your meager spell slots for crits (Paladins are half-casters, unlike Clerics) so you can deal as much damage as possible. So by making players decide beforehand whether to use a smite, it basically turns the one major feature of Paladins into a worse version of Sneak Attack. You can't use it nearly as many times as Sneak Attack, and whenever you do use it, you sacrifice one of your few spell uses. It's a really, really raw deal.

tl;dr: the implementation of reactions in BG3 turns Paladins' arguably best class feature into the worst class feature of any other class in the game. Paladins will just be a fighter-y cleric that's worse than both.