Okay, I couldn't help but notice this being said here and there while I surfed around the internet, but I can't keep it out of my head now that I have seen it: The paladins in 3.5 suck, they say.
And now I ask: How much do they exactly suck?
There are several issues here and I'll try to address as many as I can think of.
The first problem is that 3.5 and to a lesser extent 3.0 tended to make almost everything suck compared to playing some sort of optimized build and/or full spellcaster especially if you played at high levels. So yes, the paladin in 3.5 does suck but so does most things in 3.5 that comes out of core without lots of supplemental material except for some well run and optimized versions of full spellcasters (which are comparitively simple to build). I mean, if you look at how the char op people tier the basic classes, most things end up 'sucking' and the things that don't suck are assuming you 'build them right'. This is actually 3.X's problem and not a problem with the paladin specifically.
The second problem is that the Paladin pretty much sucked from the beginning. The Paladin was basically a fighter without feats that relied on self-buffing to make up the difference. But the Fighter was just a better fighter than the Paladin, and the Cleric just did self-buffing yourself into a fighter better. The Paladin was a heavily front loaded class that was quite strong at 1st or 2nd level, but past about level 3 it was slipping versus just about everything.
The third problem is that even if we overlook its marginal power level, the Paladin is still a major failure as a base class. This can be witnessed by the massive number of alternate and variant paladins that have been created over the years - and not just for 3e. The problem with the Paladin is that it lacked the ability to customize it the way you could easily customize a Cleric or a Wizard. What if you wanted to play a Paladin of a CG diety? Or a CE one? What if you wanted a play a Paladin whose patron diety had different primary interests than a sterotypical LG god - like a god of magic, or death, or creation, or music or something? There were a lot of attempts to kludge a fix with prestige classes or alternate base classes, but most of these could never avoid looking like ugly kludges (witness Blackguard, etc.)
Also, how do you guys think of fixing it?
Well, I do this:
The Champion.
However, that's probably only satisfying to you if you play in a game which has the same basic assumptions as mine; otherwise, you are still dealing with a class that doesn't quite cut it against full spellcasters, ToB classes, and various PrC's and optimized builds available in 3.5.
Otherwise, you'll need to go with something like the Crusader. Of course the problem here is that regardless of whether you go with a solution like mine or a solution like the Crusader, you are still going to have the problem that the power levels of the classes are spread across 5 or more tiers and just fiddling with one won't really solve the problem.
