Paladin Defensive Mechanic

[Arthanos]

The two main critiques of paladin (ignoring balance) I have heard are:

1. No active interaction with incoming damage – Damage reduction is passive, and preventing paladin charges from maxing out is just constantly hitting a target. This means they aren’t well equipped to deal with tank mechanics like tank busters, which are generally what makes tanking unique and interesting.
2. Awkward downtime where there is nothing to do – Between putting the hammer up to generate charges, expending those charges quickly with attacks, and activating librams with the left hand, there is a significant amount of idle time while waiting for things to come off cooldown, where you can’t really do anything.

I suggest one new mechanic be added to paladin which would address both these issues well.
Block/Parry/NameTBD: When the hammer is held horizontally in front of the player and the trigger is held, “blocking” is activated as long as the hammer remains in this position, the player does not attack, and at least one charge is available. While blocking, damage to the paladin is reduced by an additional amount (~20% or whatever is balanced), but the incoming damage counts double towards generating charges.

With this paladins would need to balance when they have their hammer up to generate charges, swinging to attack, and horizontal to block. In 1v1 situations, the attacking of the enemy now influences how the paladin plays. These are also the most common situations where paladins are charge-starved, but by adding in blocking to their rotation, the paladin takes up down time AND receives more charges because of increased generation while blocking. On the other hand, when the incoming damage is much higher (groups of enemies or bosses), the paladin needs to be careful with blocking so they don’t quickly max their charges and lose their passive damage reduction. One charge is required to activate blocking for flavor (lightning from the head pulses down the hilt, as if empowering it to turn away attacks), but also to force the paladin to be mindful of hitting 0 charges. This way the paladin can’t spazz their hammer on an enemy to quickly use charges if they want to also be able to block.

[Dick_D]

Definitely interesting ideas and worth consideration however this seems to just be adjusting the symptom rather than solving the core issue.

First, this attempts to solve the downtime in between stacks by speeding it up through a (mostly) passive block. The core issue with no active interaction with incoming damage is not truly solved. Instead of standing passively you now stand with your arm turned. This combined with the additional reduced damage just means the rotation goes from:
max stacks -> blow up as fast as you swing -> afk/books
to
max stacks -> blow up as fast as you can swing -> block/books
while gaining a large amount of extra defense.

The ideas presented however seem like they are on the right path to something great. My view on how active mitigation would be through the ultimate ability. The block would be the paladin’s ultimate and maintain your same flavor. But functionality wise, block instantly maxes your stacks and you take heavily reduced (for example 60%) damage from the next X hits where X is the number of charges your ultimate gained. So if you were at 1 stack an use your ult the next 4 hits would be reduced damage. This would give powerful interaction with incoming damage and especially tank busters (tangential but tank buster combos would be very interesting) while keeping unique tank mechanics.

However my solution fails on awkward down time as well. The ultimate (even if the shortest charge time in the game) would have too much downtime to effectively spice up the normal moment to moment gameplay.

I do not offer a solution, but I think with more iterations a block of some sort could make the paladin an extremely fun tank.