[The Paladin Project] Do more than Remove Disease

[FireLance]

The impression I got from reading a number of posts on these boards is that many people think that the increased number of uses of Remove Disease per week for a higher-level Paladin is rather lame. As such, I've come up with the following feats to allow a Paladin to swap out uses of Remove Disease for other spell effects:

Healing Touch [General]

Prerequisite: Remove Disease as a spell-like ability.

Benefit: You have learned to use your spell-like ability to Remove Disease in different ways. You can expend one use of your ability to Remove Disease to cast Cure Serious Wounds, Delay Poison, or Remove Blindness/Deafness as a spell-like ability. Where applicable, your caster level is equal to your character level.

Lightbearer [General]

Prerequisite: Remove Disease as a spell-like ability.

Benefit: You have learned to use your spell-like ability to Remove Disease in different ways. You can expend one use of your ability to Remove Disease to cast Continual Flame, Daylight, or Searing Light as a spell-like ability. Where applicable, your caster level is equal to your character level.

Undeath’s Foe [General]

Prerequisite: Remove Disease as a spell-like ability.

Benefit: You have learned to use your spell-like ability to Remove Disease in different ways. You can expend one use of your ability to Remove Disease to cast Lesser Restoration, Negative Energy Protection, or Remove Paralysis as a spell-like ability. Where applicable, your caster level is equal to your character level.

What do you think? Are they too powerful? Bear in mind that a Paladin can only Remove Disease (Level/3) times per week.

 

[Darklone]

Actually, I like the feats. Though they are IMHO a little bit on the weak side, the paladin class itself is more on the strong side... so this COULD unbalance it even more.

 

[Derrick Reeves]

Interesting idea, but I think the feats need to be tightened up a bit. First of all, these should probably be divine feats. This isn't really that important, though.

Remove Disease isn't a combat-related power, so it shouldn't be "natural" to gain spin-off usage to combat immediately. If I might be so bold as to suggest a regroup, how about the following:

Healer's Touch to contain Delay Poison, Lesser Restoration and Remove Blindness/Deafness. (Cure Serious Wounds, while not overpowered, would easily edge out all other contenders, and that's not really what a feat should do.)

Undeath's Foe to gain the prerequisite of the Extra Turning feat. Now to contain Negative Energy Protection and Remove Paralysis, and to grant a +2 bonus on Turning damage.

Shadowed Path as a new feat of the same general pattern, with the additional prerequisite of the Alertness feat. Contains Change Self, Comprehend Languages and Undetectable Alignment. Remember, Paladins aren't always "the establishment".

Just Hand as another new feat of the same general pattern, with the additional prerequisite of 3 ranks in Sense Motive. Contains Discern Lie and gives a +2 bonus on Sense Motive checks. But on the other hand, they often are.

Providence as another new feat of the same general pattern, with the prerequisite of Leadership. Contains Create Food and Water, and gives a +1 bonus to the character's leadership score.

To be honest, I couldn't think of a good way to revise Lightbearer - it's not a bad idea, but there really aren't good spells to implement it with. Searing Light is too useful, and Continual Flame is either worthless or too useful. Daylight does pose some potential, though, and perhaps something could be built around that.

Anyway, it's a very good idea, and I hope that this comes across as assistance, rather than arrogance

 

[Spatzimaus]

I agree that the whole Remove Disease thing is just dumb, but I don't think the solution is to patch more Feats on top. Not that they're not nice Feats, and I'm sure they'll work fine.

What we did IMC was replace the Immunity to Poison/Disease and Remove Disease X/Week with a domain. The Paladin can pick any one domain of his deity, gets the granted power (which replaces the immunity nicely), and can swap any of his memorized spells for the domain spell of that level.
Then, just design a new domain (say, Purification) that has the immunity as the granted power and has appropriate domain spells (I went Bless, Lesser Restoration, Remove Disease, Neutralize Poison for the first four levels), and add that domain to a bunch of Paladin-appropriate gods.

 

[FireLance]

Thanks all, for the comments so far.

Spatzimaus: I agree that one solution might be to replace Remove Disease with something else. However, I was thinking more along the lines of adding options to the core Paladin instead of re-doing the class. I am also eagerly waiting to see how the 3.5e Paladin turns out, and whether the proposed feats need to be changed as a result.

Derrick Reeves: No worries, you sound more helpful than haughty.

Anyway, the main principle behind the feats was that each feat would give the Paladin three alternative uses (grouped around a theme) for his Remove Disease ability. As such, I didn't want to confuse the issue by adding bonuses to turning or skill checks.

I do take the point that Cure Serious Wounds and Searing Light may be useful too often. As such, I've re-done the feats to include spells that are sometimes useful, but not always.

I will take up your suggestion that Healer's Touch should contain Delay Poison, Lesser Restoration and Remove Blindness/Deafness.

Instead of a +2 to turning damage, Undeath's Foe would contain Consecrate, Negative Energy Protection and Remove Paralysis.

Light of Truth would contain Daylight, Discern Lies and Invisibility Purge.

I need to think a bit more about your other suggestions. I would like to see if there are better spells that fit the theme of Shadowed Path (perhaps Find Traps?) and other spells that fit the theme of Providence.

 

[mattcolville]

Remove Disease isn't a combat-related power, so it shouldn't be "natural" to gain spin-off usage to combat immediately. If I might be so bold as to suggest a regroup, how about the following:

This is a good point, about the combat thing.

Personally, I'm wary of things that make it so one class steals another's shtick. The 14th level Cleric in our group, with Aspect of the Diety, is much, much harder to stop than our Paladin. You can Wall of Force our Paladin, and there's literally nothing he can do about it. But the Cleric gets high SR with Aspect of the Diety. And he becomes a serious ass-kicker.

I'd rather see the Paladin become more unstoppable, rather than see other classes get his unstoppableness. But, since WotC's decided, who are we to argue?

Remove Disease is just so pathetic, so truly useless and meaningless, that while I think it's cool to turn it into something you can cash in, i.e. a cleric's turn ability, I don't think it'd be that useful, since it's ONCE PER WEEK!

I'd just give the Paladin a few prestige classes. I'm not sure how these would work, I like the Knights in DotF, but I don't like that the Paladin has to give up his spells, his Lay on Hands, and Smite going up each level.

Paladin's are really tough, but much of that toughness is directed toward evil[/] which is as it should be. That's a limitation, Only Usable Against Evil. it's not much of a limitation, since so much is evil, but much is not (constructs).

So here's what I'd do, I'd create three new prestige classes. One that's Anti-Demons, one that's Anti-Undead, and one that's Anti-Evil Priests. I don't have my DotF right here, but while I know two of the Prestige Classes there were oriented towards demons and undead, it bugged me that they didn't get to keep the Paladin stuff.

 

[Derrick Reeves]

Personally, I'm wary of things that make it so one class steals another's shtick. The 14th level Cleric in our group, with Aspect of the Diety, is much, much harder to stop than our Paladin. You can Wall of Force our Paladin, and there's literally nothing he can do about it. But the Cleric gets high SR with Aspect of the Diety. And he becomes a serious ass-kicker.

My version of the PHB suggests that Spell Resistance is ineffective against a Wall of Force. I may be out of date, however.

I'd rather see the Paladin become more unstoppable, rather than see other classes get his unstoppableness. But, since WotC's decided, who are we to argue?

Touche.

Remove Disease is just so pathetic, so truly useless and meaningless, that while I think it's cool to turn it into something you can cash in, i.e. a cleric's turn ability, I don't think it'd be that useful, since it's ONCE PER WEEK!

At 3rd level (when it's a very useful ability). It's 1/week/3 Pal levels. So, being able to cash it in is modestly useful, though (IMO), it's better to keep the purchases to spells of uncommon usefulness.

I'd just give the Paladin a few prestige classes. I'm not sure how these would work, I like the Knights in DotF, but I don't like that the Paladin has to give up his spells, his Lay on Hands, and Smite going up each level.

It's really against policy to give a class a PrC to make it better. If that's the fix you want, then add more to the Paladin itself. Hospitaler may help, though.

Paladin's are really tough, but much of that toughness is directed toward evil[/] which is as it should be. That's a limitation, Only Usable Against Evil. it's not much of a limitation, since so much is evil, but much is not (constructs).

IIRC, Lay on Hands, Divine Grace, Aura of Courage, Mounts, +1/level BAB and d10 hp work fine against anything... it's only Detect/Smite Evil and some of their spells that are limited.

So here's what I'd do, I'd create three new prestige classes. One that's Anti-Demons, one that's Anti-Undead, and one that's Anti-Evil Priests. I don't have my DotF right here, but while I know two of the Prestige Classes there were oriented towards demons and undead, it bugged me that they didn't get to keep the Paladin stuff. [/B]

Why should they be? Are you suggesting that Paladins have a monopoly on fighting undead?

Better might be to (as others have suggested) look to trade away some of the needless Paladin abilities, or make them more useful. Turning the nag into a companion (like the Holy Liberator gets) would certainly help.

 

[Kannik]

One possibility that I've seen work quite well was to simply expand, at the cost of no extra feats, the ability of the remove disease to similar healing effects, such as slow poison (with neutralize poison at later levles), lesser restoration, and the like (someone once suggested remove curse, but that wasn't used).

It worked very well -- they aren't earth-shatteringly powerful, yet are used far more often that remove disease.

And let me tell you, in one campaign right now, with the DM's liking of poisons and their ability-drains, I sure with my paladin had the lesser restoration. }:>

Kannik

PS - As an additional thought, if you wanted to still have some feats that worked off the remove disease ability, one could allow remove disease to be rd/slow poison/less restore, etc, and then provide feats for remove curse, neutralize poison, and the like.

 

[Castlin]

The paladin class was the target of heavy revision in my group's campaign. In the end, we removed it and replaced it with a new core class, the zealot. Zealots are basically the same as paladins, but can be LN, NG, NE, or CN. Instead of turning undead, they turn outsiders of the alignment opposed to them, and rebuke outsiders that share their alignment. They can smite against their opposed alignment, and gain extra smites attacks as they level, rather than remove disease. Their remove disease and lay on hands abilities were removed. There is a general zealot spell list along with an alignment-specific one for each.

The class has worked out very well for us. It also replaced several prestige classes we had been using, such as the blackguard. The extra smites may sound overly powerful, but they tend to result in one or two very good rounds for a zealot, as opposed to the fighters and barbarians who have routinely solid rounds.

Removing the capacity for LG paladins didn't really do any harm either. In our group, most paladins were drawn more toward one component of the alignment anyway.

So that's a rather long-winded answer to how we dealt with the remove disease ability.