As the title.
One thing I have observed is that a Paladin's ability to use Lay On Hands requires a hand to use. This means a Paladin using sword and shield is out (including Light Shield, since in PF1, it only let you hold stuff in there, not do anything else with that hand, per RAW), which meant unorthodox ways of combat (such as a two-hander or just using a single weapon) was required to make use of this ability during combat for yourself or someone else.
With the current rules, even two-handing is now impossible. To put it simply, while wielding a two-handed weapon, you must spend 1 action to remove grip on it, spend another action for your Lay On Hands (to yourself or an adjacent ally), then spend your last action re-gripping your two-handed weapon. Did I also mention you provoke Attacks of Opportunity the moment you let go of your weapon? Which means against enemies that have them, using Lay On Hands is just giving your enemies free reign to attack you without (much) penalty. It's extremely clunky and extremely punishing for no apparent reason. After all, you can't just heal yourself automatically, or just give your ally a poke with your weapon, or the GM might have to rule you deal damage to yourself or the ally, at the very least, if not outright say "You can't do that." The feat that removes the manipulate trait really only makes Lay On Hands no longer provoke, but that's circumvented when a player removes his grip on his weapon (which provokes), making it a very moot point. You still need a free hand (which takes actions and/or losing equipment to rectify at the least), and you still provoke at the part where it is most critical for it to not occur.
This means a Paladin, if he wants to make effective use of his Lay On Hands, has to use a single weapon (with no shield!), meaning a "swashbuckler" style of combat is required for this feature to have its use. Last I checked, every Paladin should not have to use a Zorro/duelist fighting art to be good at their class features; it's unfairly limiting and just doesn't make sense except for the most stringent and unique of characters. I should be able to play a Paladin, two-handed or sword-and-shield, and be able to make fair use of my class features. Telling me I have to throw away either my shield or my sword to heal others (or even myself!) can actually be grounds for anathema depending on Paladin codes, because it can also mean you're discarding your ability to fight Evil or protect innocents who may need it. Which is either silly, setting myself up for failure, or outright unplayable. (P.S., can we expect to get those deity-specific codes fleshed out? I seriously wonder if a Paladin of X deity can do Y action and have it not go against its code, but I can't know that for sure until it's released, and this isn't really something that requires much developer thought, since it's more of world-building rule than a mechanical one.)
Something like this needs to be fixed if I even want to consider playing a Paladin as a PC. As it stands, unless I want to play Zorro (which meshes poorly with the rest of the Paladin's schtick I might add), I'm not seeing how a Paladin's mechanics really sit together with the current rules set, making it both extremely limiting and unnecessarily clunky.
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Re: Warded Touch
It has errata.
Page 108—In Warded Touch feat, just before the final
period, add, “, and you can cast it and deliver your touch
with a hand holding a weapon or shield.
Removing your grip is a free action. You could also drop your shield with a free action.
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Removing your grip is a free action. You could also drop your shield with a free action.
I believe they changed this in the errata to now requiring an action if done with a two-handed weapon (it requires one for re-gripping), so for a two-handed weapon, it's still not possible. (Even without that, it still provokes.)
@ Joey Cote: My fear now isn't that the feat is useless, more that the feat is practically required. While a Paladin can select it as their first level feat, having to take it just for using a Shield (their based design), or a two-handed weapon (which was originally possible in PF1), instead of being Zorro, seems silly.
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Removing your grip is a free action. You could also drop your shield with a free action.I believe they changed this in the errata to now requiring an action if done with a two-handed weapon (it requires one for re-gripping)
He said "removing your grip" is a free action, which it is.
You said "regripping costs an action," which it does.
These two statements are not in conflict.
Removing your grip is a free action. You could also drop your shield with a free action.I believe they changed this in the errata to now requiring an action if done with a two-handed weapon (it requires one for re-gripping)He said "removing your grip" is a free action, which it is.
You said "regripping costs an action," which it does.
These two statements are not in conflict.
You're strawmanning me.
To put it simply, while wielding a two-handed weapon, you must spend 1 action to remove grip on it...
He said that in reference to the bolded point, and I said that I think it is currently the bolded part thanks to errata.
Either way, it still provokes an attack of opportunity, which can easily make a Paladin waste actions for no reason (because 3 actions for a heal spell for yourself or an ally while giving an enemy a free attack is not really worth it when you could have spent 2 actions going in and striking the bad guy).
Even if it is still a feat tax, that's a feat that could have instead went to something else to make the Paladin better at his duty, and I thought this edition was meant to eliminate the idea of feat taxing, which this basically is.
To put it simply, while wielding a two-handed weapon, you must spend 1 action to remove grip on it...He said that in reference to the bolded point, and I said that I think it is currently the bolded part thanks to errata.
I've got the errata right here.
In Basic Actions, in Drop, at the end of the first
sentence before the period, add “or release your grip from
one hand while continuing to hold it in the other”.
'Drop' is a reaction that triggers "at the start of your turn, end of your turn, or as you start another action."
Also, because it's relevant:
In Warded Touch feat, just before the final
period, add, “, and you can cast it and deliver your touch
with a hand holding a weapon or shield”.
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The fact that this thread has to exist is more indicative of the problem than any comment that could be made here.
This is my #1 concern for PF2, in that the actual class features don't function unless you take these feats and thus must take them or be vanilla characters.
I'd rather see the paladin as a whole gutted and replaced, the whole class is a mess.
Could also multiclass into cleric and get the feat that lets you make a weapon or shield a holy symbol. The paladin lay on hands feat is hardly useless in combat. It is however, stupidly less effective then the channel energy they get at 4th.
I don't know if this is RAW, since the casting a spell section states:
If you're a cleric [emphasis mine] Casting a Spell from the divine tradition while holding a divine focus, you don't have to have a free hand to take this action, and you can touch the target with the focus instead
Does multiclassing cause you to count as a cleric for this purpose? Because it feels ambiguous to me. I say this, because it's actually something interesting that came up with the most recent part of DD, where I nicked an idea from a poster for a Dwarven Wis-Paladin, and I wound up just going with Warded Touch for being less Ambiguous.
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Clerics getting access to a class feature that covers nearly all their spells is neat, but all the other classes struggle somewhat which two-handed weapon use which really isn't too great.
The recent change about losing your grip as a free action already helped significantly.
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This is my #1 concern for PF2, in that the actual class features don't function unless you take these feats and thus must take them or be vanilla characters.
I think the intent is that a basic Paladin only uses Lay on Hands in-between combats, which shouldn't be a problem if the Paladin isn't the party's main healer. Warded Touch is a bonus to the basic Paladin, in that it allows it to do something that would be difficult for it to do otherwise. I suppose the problem is that most people feel that LoH in combat should be the baseline, not something you need a feat (or play a Goblin Paladin of Irori) to get.
To put it simply, while wielding a two-handed weapon, you must spend 1 action to remove grip on it...He said that in reference to the bolded point, and I said that I think it is currently the bolded part thanks to errata.I've got the errata right here.
In Basic Actions, in Drop, at the end of the first
sentence before the period, add “or release your grip from
one hand while continuing to hold it in the other”.'Drop' is a reaction that triggers "at the start of your turn, end of your turn, or as you start another action."
Also, because it's relevant:
In Warded Touch feat, just before the final
period, add, “, and you can cast it and deliver your touch
with a hand holding a weapon or shield”.
Oh, it's a reaction now? That's almost as bad as it costing an action, since that means you can't ready or utilize Retributive Strike (or even Attack of Opportunity if you decide to take the feat). That's still absolutely clunky and screws you out of numerous other actions, and also means you can't spend an action to regrip your weapon back to make attacks. And in order to circumvent that, you need to spend a feat tax, which just seems silly to me in relation to things that once didn't require a feat or something to do, and last I checked, one of the design goals of this game was to cut out feat taxing. Did I also mention you'll likely get attacked for trying to do this?
So, in other words, Zorro as the quintessential Paladin playstyle it is.
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Oh, it's a reaction now? That's almost as bad as it costing an action, since that means you can't ready or utilize Retributive Strike (or even Attack of Opportunity if you decide to take the feat).
Sorry, it's a Free Action. The symbol next to it is almost the same as Reaction.
It still has a "trigger" line which doubly confuses things.
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...As the title.
One thing I have observed is that a Paladin's ability to use Lay On Hands requires a hand to use. This means a Paladin using sword and shield is out (including Light Shield, since in PF1, it only let you hold stuff in there, not do anything else with that hand, per RAW), which meant unorthodox ways of combat (such as a two-hander or just using a single weapon) was required to make use of this ability during combat for yourself or someone else.
With the current rules, even two-handing is now impossible. To put it simply, while wielding a two-handed weapon, you must spend 1 action to remove grip on it, spend another action for your Lay On Hands (to yourself or an adjacent ally), then spend your last action re-gripping your two-handed weapon. Did I also mention you provoke Attacks of Opportunity the moment you let go of your weapon? Which means against enemies that have them, using Lay On Hands is just giving your enemies free reign to attack you without (much) penalty. It's extremely clunky and extremely punishing for no apparent reason. After all, you can't just heal yourself automatically, or just give your ally a poke with your weapon, or the GM might have to rule you deal damage to yourself or the ally, at the very least, if not outright say "You can't do that." The feat that removes the manipulate trait really only makes Lay On Hands no longer provoke, but that's circumvented when a player removes his grip on his weapon (which provokes), making it a very moot point. You still need a free hand (which takes actions and/or losing equipment to rectify at the least), and you still provoke at the part where it is most critical for it to not occur.
This means a Paladin, if he wants to make effective use of his Lay On Hands, has to use a single weapon (with no shield!), meaning a "swashbuckler" style of combat is required for this feature to have its use. Last I checked, every Paladin should not have to use a Zorro/duelist fighting art to
I believe many players feel it is a "tax" because they are expending a class feat to get Lay on Hands back up to its basic functionality in 1E: A heal that, when used on yourself, is fast and viable to use mid-combat without having to worry about juggling items or taking AoOs.
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The fact that this thread has to exist is more indicative of the problem than any comment that could be made here.
This is my #1 concern for PF2, in that the actual class features don't function unless you take these feats and thus must take them or be vanilla characters.
I'd rather see the paladin as a whole gutted and replaced, the whole class is a mess.
Urgathoa approves of gutting the paladin.
If a party desperately needs a lot of in combat healing, they need a cleric more than they need a paladin, and if a paladin is doing a lot of in combat healing, they need to come to terms with the fact that they're really a cleric.
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if a paladin is doing a lot of in combat healing, they need to come to terms with the fact that they're really a cleric.
Paladins in PF1 were probably the class that did more in-combat healing than any other, because they could do it as a Swift action.
I don't recall anyone saying that made them Clerics.