My problem with their implementation of Oathbreaker's has nothing to do with Rules as Written - it relates to game content that gets broken when you accidentally or purposefully break your oath.
You basically, In my experience, lose ALL access to Withers functions. You can't resurrect any NPC's or yourself, you can't hire mercenaries, etc. He states he doesn't know you and you need to resume your original oath before accessing him. This happens whether you are an Oathbreaker before or after you encounter Withers in the temple.
Which ever way you want to play an Oathbreaker or get stuck with it as a consequence of your actions, the game shouldn't break for you for taking a legitimate game choice as offered by the devs.
Exactly this. I love playing oathbreaker, but I just want to adjust my ability scores, feats, etc. I absolutely do not want to reclaim my oath, but basic game functions are being blocked behind a huge gold sink. Even with that, I took the gold sink and reclaimed and respecced...but now there does not appear to be a way to break my oath again...without potentially breaking end game quest lines and companions potentially. I went back and killed all the remaining goblins from now neutral blighted village. I fnished off all the npcs at the creche. I'm looking hard at killing off any remaining druids at emerald, but afraid it will break something end game if I do. It shouldn't be this problematic to just want to respec ability scores/feats. No other class has this much of an over the top struggle for a basic game function. Just let withers respec everything except the oath already.
I found this thread because I would love to experiment with being an Oathbreaker. This is my first playthrough and I am doing it with three friends who are all very new to D&D and its lore, its rules, and roleplaying as a whole. We very much went into this blind, so we have used Withers quite a bit to experiment with our characters. I would love to dive into Oathbreaker, as I feel it would fit the roleplaying style of my group and how I want to play my character, but the concern of either being dead weight or a money sink to my group makes me hesitant to really pursue it.
Like everyone here has said, it makes sense to have a steep cost for reclaiming your oath if you choose to do so, and we should not be able to simply reclass/respec out of our broken oath. I don't think anyone is asking for that to change. I want to be able to keep my access to experiment with multiclasses and AS changes so I can have a build I am happy with as we finally progress past Act 1 (hopefully this weekend), while also actively playing as an Oathbreaker. I also don't want to have to preplan my character's entire build upfront because that breaks our fun of experimenting and filling in gaps for the party. Playing Paladin has been a blast so far, but I think it's unfortunate that we lose the ability to respec anything and can get it back only if we reclaim the oath.
If anyone has any news if Larian ever plans to change this, I would greatly appreciate them sharing it. The interview response makes sense, but it's not like I want to get out of breaking the oath. I just want to play the game and learn the system with my friends without having to fall back on saves from before I knew something didn't work.
