Hi all, first time in the forums so let me know if this belongs elsewhere. I wanted to create a paladin oath based around communing and working with spirits, kind of in the same vein as the ancestral guardian barbarian path. At it's core is the concept of protecting life but accepting death, and powers centered around a sort of 'alliance' with the spirit world. I'd love to get feedback, particularly on balance with respect to the other oaths.
It looks very cool, but a little on the strong side. I compared it to Oath of Devotion from the basic rules and Oath of Glory from Tasha's; generally I think most homebrew should fall somewhere on that power creep continuum.
I like the spells you've chosen; they all fit well with the theme, and you're not overloaded with combat power. Find Familiar and Hallow are both highly class-restricted, so using those as subclass spells is pretty strong, but I think the extremely situational use cases of many of the other spells keeps it reasonable. You only have one Paladin spell on your list, which is uncommon: Devotion has 4/10, and Glory has 2/10. Again, this is strong but I think you can get away with it.
The Channel Divinity options are unorthodox. Spirit Walk's action economy restrictions make it very hard to use in combat in my opinion. On the other hand, the forever DM in me at shudders at the thought of a PC that can turn invisible and intangible for 10 minutes at level 3; I can see Spirit Walk becoming the first way a group tries to solve every problem in a campaign with any value placed on stealth. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to adjust this without gutting the cool factor of the ability, which is very high.
Ancient Knowledge is great, though it's going to feel weaker than it is in the early game. I might let the Paladin change which skill they gain proficiency in while the feature is active by spending a minute in meditation; that's a significant enough time spend that I don't think it would be changed frivolously, but it also prevents the situation where you feel like you burned Channel Divinity for one skill check.
That aura though... Hoo boy. That's strong as hell. A lot of Paladins won't cap Charisma, but even at +3 you're reducing the average damage of common enemies (I'm using the Orog as my baseline here) by 30%. Of course it gets proportionately weaker the more damage a monster deals, but as a DM my concern would be that this aura really restricts the range of monsters I can use effectively. At the very least, I would adjust the reduction to only work on certain types of damage; physical damage would be the obvious choice, though that's still really strong (especially if they stack it with Heavy Armor Master). You could do some less ubiquitous damage types like Necrotic, Cold, and Poison if you want something more flavorful and less overwhelming at the same time. I'd also consider scrapping the damage reduction altogether; if you had a second-string idea in mind, maybe try that one out and see how you feel about it.
Spiritual Stasis is powerful, but not so powerful in my opinion that it needs 3 limitation clauses (the spellcasting and movement restriction, the psychic damage, and the 1/Day). I would streamline it by removing most of the complications, and balance that by reducing its range. This version would read: "When an ally you can see within 30 ft of you is hit by an attack or fails a saving throw, you can use your reaction to transport them into the ethereal plane interrupting the attack or effect that forced the save. While on the ethereal plane, your ally cannot affect or be affected by creatures or effects on the plane it left. It returns to that plane at the start of its next turn, reappearing in the closest unoccupied space to the one it left. Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest."
Paladin 20s are really hard to balance, because they all do very different things. That said, no Paladin 20 gives the character a passive bonus except Emissary of Redemption (which is extremely limited in its own way). I'm not saying you can't have a passive on your capstone, but you should consider how unique that already is when you design the rest of the feature. I think the disadvantage on all attacks against you is fine, but the ability to blip in and out of the ethereal plane as a bonus action and still have your auras cross over is too much, especially with the damage reduction from Aura of Etherealness. As written, this Paladin can very easily become a powerful, invulnerable buff bot when threatened, and I don't think that's a play pattern that should be enabled. I'd either limit the ability to plane shift in some way, or remove the aura cross over entirely. I might have a rewrite on this ability to offer when I get more time.
I hear you on the spells. I was struggling to find something fitting for the theme within the paladin spell list for sure. I had considered Aura of vitality but speak with dead is almost required thematically and I really like the aura-ish nature of spirit guardians (plus great theming!). I could probably slide in find steed/find greater steed if you think it's needed since those are also spirits.
I spent a lot of time working with my DM to try to balance spirit walk, and a major part of that was limiting action economy so I can't just surprise attack a boss or treat it like a free misty step. It's still useful as an "oh shit" button though. I can imagine making a stand to let the party escape and then disappearing into the ether at the last second. It is abuseable for stealth but unless they dip in cleric they can only do it once per long rest, and I kept the time on it intentionally short, but could shorten it further if needed. Most things seem to last, 1 minute, 10 minutes, or 1 hour though, and 1 min strikes me as annoyingly short. One way to possibly counter it would be to make you barely visible/audible so the DM can call for stealth checks or make perception checks to catch you. It's starting to get into overly complicated territory at that point though.
The skill change thing with Ancient knowledge is a nice idea, I'll consider it. I definitely wanted to avoid making a free skill monkey out of it.
The aura is a challenge to balance, for sure. I want it to be a defensive aura of some kind, and was comparing it with the oath of ancients magic resistance aura. Since I'm offering blanket damage reduction, it needs to be considerably lower %. Since there's no precedent that I've seen for anything other than resistance or a flat damage reduction, I had to choose reduction, which has the issue of scaling better against weaker opponents. I scaled the reduction based on this post discussing the average damage of creatures attacks by CR:
which puts the average attack of a CR4 around 12-15 and levels off at 20-25 around CR7. With normal stat rolls I figure most paladins are getting +2, maybe +3 without dumping physical stats and in the late game mostly +3/+4, which for most opponents falls around 15-20% reduction. Which could still be too strong honestly, just giving you my thought process on how I ended where I am. Some other thoughts I had were a small ac and save bonus (ring of protection aura, basically) but my DM was concerned about giving extra AC bonuses with the whole bounded accuracy thing and you already get save bonuses from aura of protection, so doing that again is boring - and also probably too good. I'm not a fan of a highly specific damage resistances because unless you're dealing with that damage type regularly in your campaign it just feels bad. DM talked about choosing specific resistance(s) on a daily basis, or maybe you meditate for an hour to change them could be an option, but I also don't want to bog down the player with a bunch of complexity either. I may have to scrap the aura and come up with something entirely different. Curious to hear your thoughts!
Looking forward to your feedback on the rest of it! One thing I just caught was I forgot to list on the level 20 that it's only once per long rest, like all the other oath transformations.
Well, you've definitely done your due diligence in regards to the aura balance, so there's not a lot I can tell you on that front that you haven't already considered. My 2 cents is that Bludgeoning, Piercing, Slashing, and Poison are the four most common damage types in the game, so limiting the aura to just those would still be very versatile while also being easier for the DM to work around.
You could also keep the generalized damage reduction and pull back combat power in other ways. One easy thing would be to add a clause to the aura that specifies it can't reduce damage to less than 1; it's still very strong, but it doesn't totally neutralize weak hits. Spiritual Stasis is also pretty strong, and is (in my opinion) a little too complicated; you could weaken and simplify that feature to allow the aura to be stronger. Instead of protecting the target for the entire round, Spiritual Stasis could instead just force one attack to miss or automatically pass one DEX save (you might be able to let them use it more often in this case, maybe CHA/Day). I would also weaken the capstone by either limiting the duration you can stay in the Ethereal Plane or cutting the aura crossover between planes. With a little bit of the power budget pulled out of the later features I think you could get away with keeping the aura very strong.
Hi all, first time in the forums so let me know if this belongs elsewhere. I wanted to create a paladin oath based around communing and working with spirits, kind of in the same vein as the ancestral guardian barbarian path. At it's core is the concept of protecting life but accepting death, and powers centered around a sort of 'alliance' with the spirit world. I'd love to get feedback, particularly on balance with respect to the other oaths.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subclasses/2050186-oath-of-the-spirit-guide
Thanks!
It looks very cool, but a little on the strong side. I compared it to Oath of Devotion from the basic rules and Oath of Glory from Tasha's; generally I think most homebrew should fall somewhere on that power creep continuum.
I like the spells you've chosen; they all fit well with the theme, and you're not overloaded with combat power. Find Familiar and Hallow are both highly class-restricted, so using those as subclass spells is pretty strong, but I think the extremely situational use cases of many of the other spells keeps it reasonable. You only have one Paladin spell on your list, which is uncommon: Devotion has 4/10, and Glory has 2/10. Again, this is strong but I think you can get away with it.
The Channel Divinity options are unorthodox. Spirit Walk's action economy restrictions make it very hard to use in combat in my opinion. On the other hand, the forever DM in me at shudders at the thought of a PC that can turn invisible and intangible for 10 minutes at level 3; I can see Spirit Walk becoming the first way a group tries to solve every problem in a campaign with any value placed on stealth. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to adjust this without gutting the cool factor of the ability, which is very high.
Ancient Knowledge is great, though it's going to feel weaker than it is in the early game. I might let the Paladin change which skill they gain proficiency in while the feature is active by spending a minute in meditation; that's a significant enough time spend that I don't think it would be changed frivolously, but it also prevents the situation where you feel like you burned Channel Divinity for one skill check.
That aura though... Hoo boy. That's strong as hell. A lot of Paladins won't cap Charisma, but even at +3 you're reducing the average damage of common enemies (I'm using the Orog as my baseline here) by 30%. Of course it gets proportionately weaker the more damage a monster deals, but as a DM my concern would be that this aura really restricts the range of monsters I can use effectively. At the very least, I would adjust the reduction to only work on certain types of damage; physical damage would be the obvious choice, though that's still really strong (especially if they stack it with Heavy Armor Master). You could do some less ubiquitous damage types like Necrotic, Cold, and Poison if you want something more flavorful and less overwhelming at the same time. I'd also consider scrapping the damage reduction altogether; if you had a second-string idea in mind, maybe try that one out and see how you feel about it.
Spiritual Stasis is powerful, but not so powerful in my opinion that it needs 3 limitation clauses (the spellcasting and movement restriction, the psychic damage, and the 1/Day). I would streamline it by removing most of the complications, and balance that by reducing its range. This version would read: "When an ally you can see within 30 ft of you is hit by an attack or fails a saving throw, you can use your reaction to transport them into the ethereal plane interrupting the attack or effect that forced the save. While on the ethereal plane, your ally cannot affect or be affected by creatures or effects on the plane it left. It returns to that plane at the start of its next turn, reappearing in the closest unoccupied space to the one it left. Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest."
Paladin 20s are really hard to balance, because they all do very different things. That said, no Paladin 20 gives the character a passive bonus except Emissary of Redemption (which is extremely limited in its own way). I'm not saying you can't have a passive on your capstone, but you should consider how unique that already is when you design the rest of the feature. I think the disadvantage on all attacks against you is fine, but the ability to blip in and out of the ethereal plane as a bonus action and still have your auras cross over is too much, especially with the damage reduction from Aura of Etherealness. As written, this Paladin can very easily become a powerful, invulnerable buff bot when threatened, and I don't think that's a play pattern that should be enabled. I'd either limit the ability to plane shift in some way, or remove the aura cross over entirely. I might have a rewrite on this ability to offer when I get more time.
Thanks for the feedback!
I hear you on the spells. I was struggling to find something fitting for the theme within the paladin spell list for sure. I had considered Aura of vitality but speak with dead is almost required thematically and I really like the aura-ish nature of spirit guardians (plus great theming!). I could probably slide in find steed/find greater steed if you think it's needed since those are also spirits.
I spent a lot of time working with my DM to try to balance spirit walk, and a major part of that was limiting action economy so I can't just surprise attack a boss or treat it like a free misty step. It's still useful as an "oh shit" button though. I can imagine making a stand to let the party escape and then disappearing into the ether at the last second. It is abuseable for stealth but unless they dip in cleric they can only do it once per long rest, and I kept the time on it intentionally short, but could shorten it further if needed. Most things seem to last, 1 minute, 10 minutes, or 1 hour though, and 1 min strikes me as annoyingly short. One way to possibly counter it would be to make you barely visible/audible so the DM can call for stealth checks or make perception checks to catch you. It's starting to get into overly complicated territory at that point though.
The skill change thing with Ancient knowledge is a nice idea, I'll consider it. I definitely wanted to avoid making a free skill monkey out of it.
The aura is a challenge to balance, for sure. I want it to be a defensive aura of some kind, and was comparing it with the oath of ancients magic resistance aura. Since I'm offering blanket damage reduction, it needs to be considerably lower %. Since there's no precedent that I've seen for anything other than resistance or a flat damage reduction, I had to choose reduction, which has the issue of scaling better against weaker opponents. I scaled the reduction based on this post discussing the average damage of creatures attacks by CR:
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/202476/what-is-the-average-damage-per-attack-for-monsters-by-cr
which puts the average attack of a CR4 around 12-15 and levels off at 20-25 around CR7. With normal stat rolls I figure most paladins are getting +2, maybe +3 without dumping physical stats and in the late game mostly +3/+4, which for most opponents falls around 15-20% reduction. Which could still be too strong honestly, just giving you my thought process on how I ended where I am. Some other thoughts I had were a small ac and save bonus (ring of protection aura, basically) but my DM was concerned about giving extra AC bonuses with the whole bounded accuracy thing and you already get save bonuses from aura of protection, so doing that again is boring - and also probably too good. I'm not a fan of a highly specific damage resistances because unless you're dealing with that damage type regularly in your campaign it just feels bad. DM talked about choosing specific resistance(s) on a daily basis, or maybe you meditate for an hour to change them could be an option, but I also don't want to bog down the player with a bunch of complexity either. I may have to scrap the aura and come up with something entirely different. Curious to hear your thoughts!
Looking forward to your feedback on the rest of it! One thing I just caught was I forgot to list on the level 20 that it's only once per long rest, like all the other oath transformations.
Thanks for your help!
Well, you've definitely done your due diligence in regards to the aura balance, so there's not a lot I can tell you on that front that you haven't already considered. My 2 cents is that Bludgeoning, Piercing, Slashing, and Poison are the four most common damage types in the game, so limiting the aura to just those would still be very versatile while also being easier for the DM to work around.
You could also keep the generalized damage reduction and pull back combat power in other ways. One easy thing would be to add a clause to the aura that specifies it can't reduce damage to less than 1; it's still very strong, but it doesn't totally neutralize weak hits. Spiritual Stasis is also pretty strong, and is (in my opinion) a little too complicated; you could weaken and simplify that feature to allow the aura to be stronger. Instead of protecting the target for the entire round, Spiritual Stasis could instead just force one attack to miss or automatically pass one DEX save (you might be able to let them use it more often in this case, maybe CHA/Day). I would also weaken the capstone by either limiting the duration you can stay in the Ethereal Plane or cutting the aura crossover between planes. With a little bit of the power budget pulled out of the later features I think you could get away with keeping the aura very strong.