Steve, Paladin of Abadar's page

3 posts. Alias of Ian Brown 662.


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Greetings,
During the Playtest, I found the wording of the Righteous Ally class feature of the now Champion class to be a bit limiting. Perusing the new Core Rulebook, I notice that the wording is very similar and it still has the same issues as before.

Here is a link: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42d1y?Righteous-Ally-Question

Divine Ally Level 3
Your devotion attracts a spirit of your deity’s alignment. Once you choose an ally, your choice can’t be changed.

The following are divine allies:

Blade Ally: A spirit of battle dwells within your weapon. Select one weapon when you make your daily preparations. In your hands, the weapon gains the effect of a property rune. For a champion following the tenets of good, choose disrupting, ghost touch, returning, or shifting. You also gain the weapon’s critical specialization effect.

Shield Ally: A spirit of protection dwells within your shield. In your hands, the shield’s Hardness increases by 2 and its HP and BT increase by half.

Steed Ally: You gain a young animal companion as a mount (page 214). Ordinarily, your animal companion is one that has the mount special ability, such as a horse. You can select a different animal companion (GM’s discretion), but this ability doesn’t grant it the mount special ability.

To sum up the issue, as an archer, Shield Ally is beyond worthless, Steed Ally is not super desirable, and then we come to Blade Ally.

Blade Ally allows you to apply one of four property runes, which at first glance looks great. Then you look at the descriptions of the property runes and you find that three are strictly for melee weapons and one is for throwing weapons. So rules as written, you cannot use this feature for bows or crossbows.

Or do I presume that the class feature allows me to bypass the normal restrictions of the property runes?


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I'm a paladin of Abadar, it's a pretty sweet gig if I do say so myself, and my god's favored weapon is the crossbow. This being the case, I figured I should focus on using it in combat, if/when it negotiations break down to it. Things were difficult prior to the the most recent update, 1.6, as there was very little in my class abilities to support fighting from range. Nobody said that sticking to one's beliefs was easy, but I worship one of two god's that get the damage dice bump from Deific weapon, so I got that going for me, which is nice. An issue comes up when I reached level 3; I get this pretty nifty ability called Righteous Ally. It lets me do some pretty nifty stuff, but I'm finding a problem. Two of my choices are no go's. I can buff my ability to use a shield, which I don't use as I need both hands to work my crossbow. I could get this pretty cool horse, which I would never use in combat for the same reason as before, it hampers my crossbow use. The third option available to me is Blade Ally.
It's worded like so:

Blade Ally: A spirit of valor inhabits your weapon, granting
it additional power. Select one weapon each morning when
you make your daily preparations. In your hands, the
weapon gains your choice of the disrupting, ghost touch,
returning, or shifting property (see page 370), without
it counting against the weapon’s maximum number of
properties. In addition, you gain access to the weapon’s
critical specialization effect.

Pretty cool ability that, while named Blade Ally, repeatedly uses the word weapon and is therefore open to weapons like my crossbow... until you dig deeper.

Disrupting: Melee weapons
Ghost Touch: Melee weapons
Returning: Thrown weapons
Shifting: Melee weapons

Per the rules as I read them, none of these enhancements can be added to my crossbow or bolts. That makes all three options for my Righteous ally kinda worthless. Did I miss something in one of the updates? I appreciate what Paizo has done for my fellow Paladins of Abadar and Old Deadeye, but this is a somewhat major class feature.
Could we:
Allow Paladins to bypass the normal restrictions on these enhancements?
or
Add an additional enhancement that would apply to a ranged weapon?

As I said, I'm just a simple Paladin of Abadar and I just want to enjoy myself, while getting my fair wage for the effort. Is that too much to ask?