Paladin Divine Challenge

[PallidPatience]

All right, so most people agree that the Divine Challenge RAW allows a paladin to mark a single target for an encounter (or its life), as long as he continues to attack that target. They also agree that the Divine Challenge damage is applied only the first time that a creature moves away from or attacks a different target than the paladin.

Unfortunately, this severely cripples the paladin as a defender when compared to a fighter, who is capable of marking as many creatures as he can attack (including on OAs), and attacking a single marked creature each and every turn.

So I have a proposed change to the Divine Challenge feature that I would like to have critiqued by those with enough foresight to notice all of the loopholes that would make this change a too-drastic improvement. My end goal is to give the paladin a defender ability which puts him on par with the fighter, but has a distinct flavor. I want to base the power on CHA, and balance it against the Combat Challenge class feature. The result of my musings follows:

Divine Challenge Paladin Feature
At Will Divine, Radiant
Minor Action Close burst 5
Target: One creature in burst

Effect: You mark the target. The target creature remains marked until the end of the encounter or the creature's death. You may have a number of creatures marked equal to your CHA modifier. If you have a full number of creatures marked, and choose to mark a new one, the farthest marked creature loses the effect. If they are equally close, choose one to lose the effect. A creature can only be marked once. A new mark supersedes an old one.
A marked creature takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls for attacks not including you. Each round, the first creature to make an attack that does not include you, or to move away from you suffers damage equal to 3*your tier + your CHA modifier.

 

[inati]

Marks that last until the end of the encounter are just overpowered, open to abuse, and potentially game breaking. You need to make the mark have a limit as a function of time/turn.

if you really want a house rule like this, make the ability constraint qualifier be Wisdom, as that is the tertiary score for paladins. A Cha qualifier just means Cha based paladins will kick butt compared to Str based paladins, which would be unbalanced.

With that said, the Fighter Combat Challenge feature SHOULD be better than the Paladin's Divine Challenge, just based on the fact that the Paladin possesses the Channel Divinity power suite and Lay on Hands. Fighters have just Combat Challenge and Combat Superiority. Paladins give up some of their aggro retention in order to receive some quasi-leader abilities. This is what makes the disparity in the two aggro mechanisms balanced.

Now, mechanically, Divine Challenge is a burst 5 power, whereas Combat Challenge must be an attack. With this house rule, you have just given the paladin the ability to mark things at will, at range, as a minor action (which means up to 2 marks per round), and which will debuff the mobs for the rest of the encounter. I feel that the the two abilities from the PHB are balanced as is. If you were to implement a Paladin house rule like this, it would make Paladins way overpowered.

 

[PallidPatience]

I understand that it would make them a lot more powerful. How else would you suggest to change them so that they wouldn't be more powerful than the Fighter in the defender role? As it stands, it doesn't seem that they have a real way to keep enemies on them at all, except for a -2 penalty to attacks, which frankly isn't enough when compared to the ability to crush heads in response to attacks on other PCs.