Oath of the Cardinal (PEACH)

[Rerem115]

A friend of mine wanted me to port the paladin from Cardinal Quest to 5e, and this is my take on it. http://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/By-rxcAu

Any thoughts? The most unbalanced points are probably the oath spells and the capstone.

[Rerem115]

I'm rather surprised nobody's commented yet; my threads tend to spark criticism :smalltongue:. Anyway, I slightly modified the Channel Divinity options, removing the self damage from Wrath of God and making it so Consecrated Weapon users have to use their consecrated weapon or suffer disadvantage.

[BurchardOfEn]

The way that Consecrate Weapon is structured is not like that of a proper Channel Divinity and is simply broken in every way imaginable as is written. That option just needs scrapped and could be replaced with the Sacred Weapon option from the Oath of Devotion if you want to maintain a similar feature. Holy Armor should likely only receive the radiant damage equal to your Charisma modifier(and possibly a note that this damage cannot stack with Undying Light Warlock) or should require concentration. Wrath of God should not scale as no other Channel Divinity option scales.

Armor of Agathys is a very powerful spell to put on the Paladin's spell list and is probably too good of an addition to have while also using the Oath of Ancients's incredibly powerful Aura of Warding feature. One of them has to go and quite honestly they probably should. In general, you seemed to have tried to pick very powerful spells rather than flavorful ones.

Holy Light is again making a Channel Divinity scale. I'd say you could keep either the 22 AC or the Charisma modifier to damage, but that's really pushing it with the strength of the 7th level feature.

Righteous Fervor is just broken especially when combined with Armor of Agathys. You cannot have a guaranteed critical and Paladin level temp hp.

In general, I'd say that this just feels like you wrote this to be overpowered as you seemed to power-build its spell list rather than choosing flavorful options(with the only exception being that you didn't grab Hex or Hunter's Mark). You also mixed ways of trying to make this a combination of the good parts of the Oath of Vengeance as well as the Oath of the Ancients.

[JNAProductions]

Yeah, seconding this. It's OP as all hell.

[Rerem115]

I figured there'd be issues. The flavor in and of itself is weird, because it's an attempted port of a class from some flash game, which itself has less than a paragraph of descriptor text. As it is, I'll try to play up the "mage hunter" aspect of the class.

The oath spells are the closest I could find to the holy spells from the game. However, while 5e analogues to the Sleep, Dispel(stuns casters), Haste, Glide, Heal, and Bless Weapon spells from the game exist, they probably are too powerful for oath spells. I'll tone down the spells.

In the game, the class has a couple of features, with sort of a pick one, lose the other tree. At the core is Holy Armor, which gives an armor buff and damages attackers, which upgrades to Holy Light, which does the same, but a bit better and blinds on activation. For that, I suppose I could get rid of the AC buff and keep the on-hit passive, and then increase the damage and add a blind at 15th level. The other core features are a bit more problematic. The main tree had Consecrate Weapon and Wrath of God. Consecrate Weapon locked you into only using 1 weapon, but steadily upgraded the weapon as you leveled, something which really has no precedent in 5e; I'll probably rewrite that sometime in the next few days. Wrath of God is a fairly straightforward AoE damage ability, which unfortunately does not lend itself well to CD. Hmmm.....you're right about the 7th level feature being too strong; I'll move the choice between the two to there, and come up with a new CD.

The capstone should be less trouble after I change around a few things; removing Armor of Agathys and changing guaranteed criticals to another form of damage increase should fix any lingering issues.

On the topic of CD scaling, I got the idea from the Vengeance Paladin, who gets a fairly significant buff to their CD at 15th level.

[BurchardOfEn]

The Oath of Vengeance Paladin does get a buff to their Channel Divinity at 15th (although it's just an added benefit rather than numerical scaling which is what I meant was unprecedented), but I somewhat noted that when I referenced that you were taking the better parts of the Ancients and Vengeance Paladins since Vengeance pays for its 15th by having a relatively weak 7th and the only non-aura 7th.

Although if you do follow through with changing out the Aura for a less powerful option, remove Armor of Agathys, reduce the 15th, and change up the capstone to no longer grant guaranteed critical hits, then this could work. If you wanted to maintain an anti-mage flavor, then the 7th level feature could be an aura that gives casters other than yourself a penalty to their concentration checks which could be either disadvantage or a direct minus penalty equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum of 1).

[Rerem115]

Edited according to suggestions; oath spells are significantly weaker, and more focused on stopping magic, Consecrate Weapon and Wrath of God moved to 7th level, and capstone edited to prevent abuse.

[JNAProductions]

Haste should not be on the list as a fourth level spell.

Abjure Mage really shouldn't be that powerful on a SUCCESSFUL save.

Holy Light needs to allow a saving throw every turn. Every other ability does.

[Rerem115]

Nerfed Abjure Mage, replaced Haste with Freedom of Movement.

Holy Light does allow a save every turn, I don't know where you got that.

[JNAProductions]

Nerfed Abjure Mage, replaced Haste with Freedom of Movement.

Holy Light does allow a save every turn, I don't know where you got that.

Hm... Used to not allow it for enemies (allies only) but looks like you fixed it.

[BurchardOfEn]

Wrath of God should probably be a 10ft radius and then upgrade to a 30ft radius at 18th considering it is a pretty significant amount of damage nearly that of the Fiend Warlock's 14th level feature. Consecrated Weapon could be either decent or incredibly broken depending on what weapon the Paladin has when the ritual is performed. I think that it'd be easier to handle this by making it necessary that the weapon be of mundane nature to prevent a Cardinal Paladin from abusing a +2 Flametongue. If this breaks the flavor that you were going for, then I'm not sure if a balanced version of that idea could be made.

In general though, I would say that this looks a good bit better now overall, but I think the change with the capstone doesn't fully fix the gripe with it. You could allow it to be that while the capstone is active that you can re-roll and take the better of the two of any Divine Smite damage rolls with a note that it means purely from the Divine Smite feature, not Improved Divine Smite. I suppose it could also just mean Improved Divine Smite, but that would seem more confusing in my opinion.

@JNAA: Holy Light's Blind does allow a save at the end of each affected creature's turn. "Affected creatures may repeat their saving throw at the end of their turn."

I will agree that Abjure Mage is quite strong even when the creature succeeds. It's hard to think of what would be the most appropriate effect on a failure though.

[JNAProductions]

@JNAA: Holy Light's Blind does allow a save at the end of each affected creature's turn. "Affected creatures may repeat their saving throw at the end of their turn."

I think I was looking at an earlier version, where it didn't. It's fixed now, though, so all's good there.

[Rerem115]

To best keep the flavor of the capstone, I want it to be that the next strike after reducing a hostile creature to 0 hit points deals X2 weapon damage. Just the weapon, not smite, improved divine smite, or any other rider. How would you write that?

With Abjure Mage, I pretty much lifted it whole cloth from the Vengeance Paladin's CD, but added the stipulation that it had to be a reaction to someone casting a spell, so I personally feel it should be balanced.

[JNAProductions]

To best keep the flavor of the capstone, I want it to be that the next strike after reducing a hostile creature to 0 hit points deals X2 weapon damage. Just the weapon, not smite, improved divine smite, or any other rider. How would you write that?

"When you reduce a creature to 0 HP, your next attack doubles your weapon's damage dice."

[Rerem115]

"When you reduce a creature to 0 HP, your next attack doubles your weapon's damage dice."

Ah. Fixed it.

[Final Hyena]

Holy Armour
This has no duration (except for sleeping), which is a tad strong.

Consecrate Weapon
You can buff two greatswords and give one to a friend, was this intentional? I feel two weapons is to support TWF, if that is the cast you could try limiting all affects to weapons in your possession.

[BurchardOfEn]

Before one of his edits, Holy Armor had a duration of 1 minute (I'm pretty sure) as per the standard for a lot of Channel Divinities. I don't know why he deleted that part unless it was by accident.

[Rerem115]

There was a duration, which somehow got deleted, but I added it back again. Also, I edited Consecrate Weapon so that it only applies the damage bonus while it is in your possession.

[BurchardOfEn]

I still think that you should add that your Consecrated Weapon cannot already be a magical weapon as I noted earlier a +2 Flametongue (even a +1), for instance, would make this ability insane without even needing to delve into the potential combos with the Undying Light Warlock.

[Rerem115]

I want to keep Consecrate Weapon as it is so that it more closely matches the way it works in the game, but also because I feel that it adds a sort of dynamic tension to the class; you can consecrate any weapon, but if you delay until you get a really awesome weapon, you lose out on the damage until you do. If you somehow manage to get your hands on a +2 Flametongue by 7th level in preparation for using this ability, more power to you.

[BurchardOfEn]

What I meant was that getting a Flametongue that you can consecrate would be broken as it would transform it into a +1 Flametongue and then later a +2 Flametongue. There's other such weapons that could be abused in a similar fashion. It is basically cheesing if the DM is a fan of magic weapons that aren't +1, +2, etc., but it's still good in other situations too. This gives it a pretty strong situation without any real opportunity cost. I mostly recommend it to avoid abuse as well as to keep its utility somewhat consistent.

This Paladin is also getting a Magic weapon without having to lose a spell slot like an Artificer would(which would be the next thing that I'd suggest as a guide on how to handle it, just scaled more towards the Paladin's spellcasting), and the Artificer sacrificing a spell slot can't even grant a magic weapon a flat + like the Consecrate Weapon. I mean it might have been fitting for that flash game, but I don't see any way that it could really be maintained without becoming a source of cheesing in 5E.

[Rerem115]

It's not quite a +1/+2; it only adds the bonus to damage, not attack. To prevent abuse with magical weapons, but still encourage players to seek them out, I made it so that the combined damage bonuses to a weapon cannot exceed +3.

[BurchardOfEn]

I must've missed that it only adds to the damage. I suppose that's probably fine albeit odd for a Paladin's features.