I haven't really made any surface changes to the Paladin class, they were pretty beefy before hand, but at the same time they were also fairly 1 dimensional. Double target, double target, double target. The shield spells made them great, but I can't remember if they had anything above level three. In any case, they won't now. I plan to keep it so that all shield/protect/blur spells 4 and above are only self cast, so that means that Paladin spells are only as good as anyone else could cast on them. The advantage being that they don't have to find someone to cast the shields for them. As before, their damage/defense (prior to shields) are not as good as skeletons and lizardmen. One of the biggest downsides to Paladins was that they could only reasonably train one weapon type, maybe two, whereas those in evil and chaos could use all. As it stands, I've made it so that every realm has a "weapons" skill instead of "crush" "slashing" etc. A simlar change has been made to armors, but I'll get into those two changes in deeper detail in another post. To give Paladins a little diversity I also retooled parry and pummel so that they actually make viable choices as an attack compared to double.
As best I can recall, parry was mildly useful, if the user had enough percentage in it they could use it to run through tough areas without getting hit, or laugh at people while they try and get through his defenses for minutes. I have tooled the parry percentage to work in the same manner as backstab but instead of removing % from defense and placing it in offense, the % is moved from offense to defense. It will still be possible to hit while parrying, and to be hit during parry. However, it won't be indefinite, there will be a timer to disengage berserk/parry style attacks.
Anyone who has ever played a zombie for any length of time can tell you how useless pummel was. I think I only ever played one to mid-teens or so, probably not any higher. However, Masterpuppet provided me with a great deal of input on zombies, which includes the Pummel attack. As it was, for zombies and maybe priests, the situation was more of a "Well I might as well Pummel instead of regular attack" instead of it being a definite primary attack. While I did do more with zombies (more in a future post on that), there isn't much I can do for pummel mechanically. If I made it do more damage, it would need some sort of drawback, but from a RP perspective, I can't really think of one. Keeping it HP/Fatigue damage calculated the same way as regular attacks is good, but since everyone has the same max hp and fatigue, and many heals are both HP and fatigue, its kind of pointless since by the time you pummel away someones fatigue, they'd likely be dead or at least 0'ed too. Now, this is by no means definite, but the only thing I could think of was to also have pummel do power damage. It gives someone a slight more reason to use pummel, power can't be healed and takes forever to regenerate, from an RP perspective it is much less effective on a fighter than a caster, which would make sense as the casters are traditionally physically weaker. While HP and Fatigue damage were originally the same, and will remain that way, the power damage is still up in the air, but will probably be less. The starting testing point will be power points equal to the number of HP/Fatigue, divided in half. I'll see how it goes from there.
From a spell perspective, Paladins will have roughly the same they used to. Shield/Protect/Blur/Holy Warrior and a basic bless, storm pets, and some energy intensive low yield healing spells.
Edit: I want to emphasize that Pummel is one of the more subject to change skills on my list
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