Wait, he's only level 13 and his Charisma mod is already at least +12? How?
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If the player is turtleing, he isn't a threat. Ignore the unhittable paladin and attack someone else.
By the way, to have +12 AC from confident defense, they need a CHA of 34.
The archertype is in Inner Sea Combat, and it's well balanced. Monks (and this archetype) have an easy time boosting AC, but you're calculating it wrong.
1)He has a 34 charisma? and a 20 dex? How did you do stats and how did he get so high?
2)Also the confidnet defense is ADDED to his dex bonus to AC, meaning it plus his dex is limited by the mithral chain. (so following the rule he'd likely ditch the armor and use a mage armor wand or bracers of armor)
3)The shield wand lasts only 1 minute (unless you're giving him better wands) so that shouldn't be up often, or he's using a round to buff his AC, which means he's not fighting defensively that round.
4)What is his damage output like? odds are he can't hit much or do much damage so he's a turtle. He's just there not getting hit but not doing much. So the enemies should just ignore him pretty quickly.
5)If you scroll down on the page you listed you'll see that it's located in Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Combat.
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You're calculating confident defense wrong.
It's "Enlightened paladin adds 1 point of his Charisma bonus (if any) per class level to his Dexterity bonus to his Armor Class. If he is caught flat-footed or otherwise denied his Dexterity bonus, he also loses this bonus."
It looks like you've taken that to mean AC bonus = level. When the bonus maxes out at his actual CHA bonus.... Unless the paladin has a huge CHA bonus.
Edit: Damn ninja'd so many times!
and don't forget that it's treated as if his dex bonus is just that much higher, so it's limited together by the max dex of his armor.
and don't forget that it's treated as if his dex bonus is just that much higher, so it's limited together by the max dex of his armor.
That is one of the main caveats here- you but your head against max dex, which means you have to deal with those really flimsy light armors that are merely an excuse for getting an enhancement bonus (and you might as well just grab bracers of armor).
Overall, this ability is similar to the monk ability, but it is slightly delayed yet allows you to use armor.
I find it is actually not as good for turtled up dex/cha builds (the class just doesn't have much dex support).
No, I think it works perfectly for a character that wants to have heavy armor like protection, but still have good touch AC. This lets you to get only 'meh' dex/cha (lets say starting 14/14 at level 1) and still but up against the max dex of light armor (which is generally mean to make all armors roughly the same, give or take a point or two). This way, you have good AC, but you are not focusing on turtle stats. Instead, you can just grab a 16+ str, and 2 hand like the rest of them.
It is rather nice for reach builds, since you have unarmed strikes for close threatening, and you can enhance those unarmed strikes seperately as needed. There are some other trade offs with the archetype, but they can mostly be written off as 'you can now use your class feature against neutral things like golems'. It still keeps the regular tanky stuff like lay on hands, and you keep spells.
So overall, it is a valid enough archetype. And hardly overpowered. You will find many more complaints from GMs who ahd their BBEGs one shotted by a regular paladin's smit that critted.
wouldn't bracers of armor be better then trying to get heavy armor + if you had bracers of armor then you could add in monk ac from dodge and wisdom.
Well, I was just comparing it to the standard idea of a paladin tank decked out in heavy armor.
you might be able to get something from monk...but you are MAD enough already. I'd rather just fake proficiency to grab a mithral breastplate, and then jsut forget about dex/cha for the most part and focus entirely on str.
I just like viewing it as an alternative for a paladin melee tank that doesn't take a hit to speed and has good touch AC. Also, good against neutral things.
The Enlightened Paladin (also known as the Iroran Paladin) is from Inner Sea Combat, which was released in 2014. Provided you apply the archetype correctly, I would not consider it OP in the slightest.
Let's take a look at the AC math:
Unfortunately, I don't know his charisma modifier is. Luckily, in this case it doesn't actually matter. Mithral Chain Mail* has a maximum dexterity bonus of +4, which he's already maxing out using his dexterity bonus. He'll be adding a grand total of zero charisma to his AC as long as he's wearing the chain mail.
10 Base
+12 (confident defense) <-- should be limited to his total CHA bonus or +12, whichever is lower. Note that he gets zero bonus since he's already maximized his armor's dexterity bonus.
+6 (mithral chain mail +2) <-- max dex cap of +4
+1 (dodge) <-- fine
+5 (dex) <-- should be +4, because of the chain mail.
tot= 34
The revised AC bonus is:
10 baseline
+0 from Confident Defense (armor dex cap)
+6 from Mithral chain mail +2
+1 from Dodge
+4 from Dex (armor dex cap)
= 23
During his turn he can use the crane style combat and so fighting defensively (or total defense action) he gets another +4 dodge on the AC, plus +4 AC on the first melee attack from crane wing, arriving to 42, plus +4 CA from shield wand (he has get use magic device). SO the total AC is 46!!!
Let's see... Fighting Defensively adds a +2 Dodge bonus, which increases to +3 if the character has three ranks in Acrobatics. This seems likely. Crane Style increases the AC bonus by an additional +1.
23 AC
+2 (Fighting Defensively)
+1 (ranks in Acrobatics)
+1 (Crane Style)
+4 (Shield spell)
= 31 AC
Crane Wing gives him an additional +4 AC against melee attacks, but only until a melee attack misses him by 4 or less. Provided he's had time to activate his wand and is using his round to Fight Defensively, his AC is 35 until an attack misses by 4 or less, then it drops down to 31.
Things worth noting here are:
A. He needs to make an attack in order to benefit from the AC bonus from Fighting Defensively. Unless he has Crane Riposte, he takes a -2 penalty on all attack rolls while fighting defensively.
B. Ranged attacks bypass Crane Wing entirely.
C. A level 1 shield wand only lasts for one minute, so he's likely spending his first round in combat activating it. That's time he could probably spend more productively.
D. Unless he has a good damage output (which seems unlikely), defensive characters like this one are usually somewhat underwhelming in combat. When the intelligent enemy realizes he hits like a pool noodle they're likely to go for the other, more dangerous targets.
He should attempt to better armor like Celestial Armor (Max +8 Dex).
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/magic-armor/specific-magic-armor/celest ial-armor
a standard monk would have probably higher armor anyways. But I think the OP is already happy with the answers, as they were using the archetype wrongly. His paladin doesn't have CHA 34, so everything else matter very little