Base Class: Paladin
The Oath of the Dragon Slayer is taken by Paladins who have witnessed the destruction and terror created by the power of evil dragons. These Paladins have trained to hunt their prey with ruthless tenacity, using a more versatile arsenal and specialized tactics. Their oath is a commitment to hunt down and slay their sworn enemies while safeguarding the world from future threats by taking proactive measures.
These paladins share the following tenets:
- Evil dragons must be slain.
- Prevent destruction and collateral damage in your hunt.
- Work to prevent future harm by evil dragons and those that use their powers.
Level 3: Dragon Slayer Spells
The magic of your oath ensures you always have certain spells ready; when you reach a Paladin level specified in the Oath of the Dragon Slayer Spells table, you thereafter always have the listed spells prepared.
Paladin Level | Spells |
---|---|
3 | Absorb Elements, Hunter’s Mark |
5 | Pass without Trace, Misty Step |
9 | Fly, Blink |
13 | Fire Shield, Locate Creature |
17 | Hold Monster, Summon Dragon |
Level 3: Weapons of the Dragon Slayer
Dragons can be evasive and difficult to fight in close quarters. You have adapted your Paladin training to use a wider variety of weapons effectively. You can use your Strength or Charisma for the attack and damage rolls with weapons that have the Range and Heavy properties. You also ignore Disadvantage on your attacks with Ranged weapons due to the Heavy property.
In addition, you can cast a Paladin Spell that requires hitting with a Melee weapon when you hit with a Ranged weapon. For example, you can use Divine Smite when you hit with an attack from a Longbow.
Level 7: Slayer's Enchantment
Call on the strength of your oath to protect yourself from the power of your enemies or increase the effectiveness of your attacks. As a Bonus Action you can expend one use of your Channel Divinity to enchant your weapons or armor for 1 hour. When you use this feature, choose one of the following options.
Dragon Resistance. You gain Resistance to one damage type of your choice: Acid, Cold, Fire, or Lightning.
Dragon Fury. Once on your turn, when you hit a creature with a weapon you can deal an additional 2d6 damage. This additional damage can be either Acid, Cold, Fire, or Lighting (your choice).
Level 15: Slayer Tactics
While your Slayer’s Enchantment feature is active, all allies affected by your Aura of Protection gain the benefits as well.
In addition, if an ally within your Aura of Protection is damaged by a creature you can see, you can take a Reaction to make an attack against that creature using a weapon. You can use this Reaction a number of times equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum of once) and you regain all uses whenever you finish a Long Rest.
Level 20: Master Dragon Slayer
You have mastered the art of hunting your sworn enemies and calling on the power of dragons to aid you in your hunt. You have Advantage on all attacks made against Dragons, and if a Dragon forces you to make a saving throw, you have Advantage on the roll.
In addition, you can cast Summon Dragon without a spell slot and you can modify it so that it doesn’t require Concentration. Once you cast the spell in this way you cannot do so again until you finish a Long Rest.
Made a new version already. Go look at that and revise the feedback, otherwise it's pointless for me to act on it. But I wasn't looking for outright replacements to the features nor was I wanting to completely change the design and focus of the subclass.
The focus is and always will be a Paladin that is just as good at using Ranged weapons as they are at using Melee weapons because they're hunting EVIL dragons (who fly) and they've learned magic specifically good for hunting EVIL dragons. That includes summoning a GOOD dragon to help them. I think I took the most direct and simple route to achieving that focus. The point wasn't to force the player to use Ranged weapons, but to allow them to without severe punishment.
Also, the space is intentional, I like it. Every subclass I make has it, because I hate when text looks all squished together.
I appreciate the time and effort you put into the feedback though. Seriously, I do. Even if I don't agree with most of it.
I don't want to look at the thread because of that one super toxic pos who kept commenting on it.
You can refer to the thread for my main commentary, for here, your Subclass features look like there's an unintentional additional space at the end of feature (this happens when you create features all the time, which is why I always backtrack to a recently made feature to remove that space in any homebrew).
Generally, I don't like the 3rd level feature, mainly because it doesn't really interact with the Channel Divinity clas feature, and doesn’t really *need* to do what it does (using Charisma/Spellcasting for attack and damage rolls). This Paladin's choosing to be a *ranged* centric Paladin; if the player wants those additional boons from having a decent Charisma modifier, they can sacrifice Constitution for it (since this *is* ranged focused).
You could look at Pact of the Blade, Shelliagh, or <insert whatever weapon attack/damage modifying feature in the game> but its not that important. If you Paladin's going to be Dex focused, let it be, having a better Dex save is already wild on a Paladin, if that means said Paladin can't wear plate, oh well). You're already in a position just being a Paladin to have good AC/saves; hell, now you can craft Gauntlets of Ogre Strength to ignore the burden of plate's Strength recquirement (starting with an 8/-1 Strength).
So, that's why I suggested just leaning into the 7th level feature to build a pseudo Oath of Vengeance meets the Elemental Monk 3rd to 7th level feature.
(3rd level) Slayer's Enchantment/Whatever:
When you take the Attack action, you can expend one use of your Channel Divinity to imbue your Ranged weapon attacks with draconic slaying power. This power lasts for 10 minutes or until you have the Incapacitated condition. You gain the following benefits while this feature is active.
Smiting Bolts. Whenever you make an Ranged weapon attack, the attack is considered an attack made with a melee weapon.
Draconic Fury (or whatever). Whenever you hit with your Ranged weapon attack, you can cause it to deal your choice of Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder damage rather than its normal damage type.
That marries Sacred Weapon/Elemental Attunement for the versatility of turning say Searing Smite into (initially) Lightning Damage or whatever, while also allowing your smite spells to proc on ranged weapon attacks in a way that makes more sense (just *casting* the spell doesn’t seem like it should work by Raw; the spells want a melee weapon attack to occur, this facilitates that).
(7th level) "Greater <insert channel divinity name>"
While your <insert Channel Divinity name> is active, you have Resistance to one of the following damage types of your choice: Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder. At the start of each of your turns, you can change this choice.
In addition, you add your Charisma modifier to Ranged weapon damage rolls.
Since the feature *wants* to be a self buff, lean into that with a touch of the Oathbreaker's Charisma modifier to Ranged weapon damage/Elemental Monk(and Djinn Paladin if that ever becomes official) modular elemental Resistance.
(15th level) I like the idea of an Aura of Protection benefit here, hate the idea of it being applying your class benefits to everyone else, lol. Everyone being *you* is contrary to the goal here, and somewhat, super-useless for the other players (unless you're party is a Sorcerer/Bard melee centric characters, your feature is 90% bloat). Just have your Paladin able to make their Reaction attack on a creature damaging their allies in the Aura (10 ft limit is... really bad at 15, it kinda works at 18 with 30). No Cha. based uses, Oath of Glory is a *BAD* Subclass to emulate.
(20th level feature) Almost no one will play with this in a campaign, so you go ham. If you want an *always on* feature, go for it. Its *hyper specific to Dragon types,* it will more than likely never actually do anything 99.99% of every campaign. There's probably better text here for a feature like this on the 2024 classes, you'd have to look at it/divy it up into those benefits. Maybe even a reaction to do something in addition when you hit with the 15 level feature (maybe give Dragons Disadvantage on attack rolls/spell attacks on you). Hell, you could, if the idea is *you're stealing* Draconic power, could just *transform* into your prey via the Shapechange spell or something.
The summon dragon bit is weird, just cuz, you're here to kill dragons, not be bros with them.
Some Version 2 Changes that I'm considering:
Level 7: Slayer's Enchantment
I'm considering reducing the duration to 10 minutes, down from 1 hour. On a normal day with 2-3 combat encounters spread out by more than an hour the feature is perfectly fine compared to other Paladin Channel Divinity features. But the issue is when you have multiple back-to-back encounters, which makes the power of the feature skyrocket beyond what was intended.
Level 15: Slayer Tactics
I think I'll remove the Reaction attack from this feature. The issue is, it's not very useful and only adds an extra resource for you to track. In my tests I've barely ended up using it as I only had about 4 uses every day and sometimes your allies just aren't in range or not being damaged when they are. Sure, it's powerful, but it's not necessary.
Let me know what you think about these ideas.
To select the subclass on D&D Beyond you'll need to allow Expanded content because the subclass gives the Absorb Elements spell.
Also, a clarification:
The "Weapons of the Dragon Slayer" feature at Level 3 only affects weapons that have both the Range AND Heavy properties. This means the Longbow and Heavy Crossbow. I thought it would be obvious, but just in case someone thought the feature lets you use Charisma for any Heavy weapon I figured I'd clarify. The feature is meant to let the Paladin use those weapons just as well as their melee weapons without sacrificing the ability to focus on STR or use their Smite spells. The idea is that a hunter of dragons would need to be more versatile.
This Subclass was inspired by the Dragon Hunter from Guild Wars 2 and my own personal desire for a Ranged Paladin. It has never made any sense to me why we can't use Smite with ranged weapons, so I wanted to fix that.
The features are fully implemented to work with D&D Beyond character sheets, please give it a try and let me know what you think. I hope you like it.