Opinions on the oath of the watchers paladin?

[Rfkannen]

I LOVE the concept behind the oath of the watchers paladin, but the mechanics just seem kind of... boring and weak. What are your opinions on the subclass? It is more fun/better than it looks at first glance?

[KorvinStarmast]

I LOVE the concept behind the oath of the watchers paladin, but the mechanics just seem kind of... boring and weak. What are your opinions on the subclass? It is more fun/better than it looks at first glance? Like you, I find the thematics very appealing. Until I play one, I can't say yay or nay. I think it will depend on the campaign: a lot of elementals or demons might make this better ...

[Jon talks a lot]

As a chronically enthusiastic paladin player, I too love the thematics of the oath of watchers, but I've always found the mechanics to be underwhelming at best and borderline useless at worst.

Watchers Will is pretty good, but it would be better served as an aura rather than using your channel divinity.

Abjure the extraplanar is kind of awful. Turning is decent, but you spend your channel divinity to do so only for a party member to cast fireball the next turn and everything you turned takes damage, and now you used your channel divinity for literally nothing.

Aura of the Sentinel is useful, but not as game-breaking as other auras.

Vigilant Rebuke is basically trash.

Mortal Bulwark is probably the worst paladin capstone feature. Avenging Angel turns you into an angel of death for an hour, Elder Champion makes all your spells bonus actions and gives your enemies disadvantage on saving throws against your spells, and Invincible Conqueror gives you resistance to all damage, an additional attack, and a 10% chance to crit. Compare those to Mortal Bulwark. You get true sight, advantage against a very specific group of creatures, and a banishment spell. Yay.

[Waazraath]

The mechanics are fine tbh. The paladin already is one of the most powerful chasis in the game, it hardly needs subclass features. If you look at other subclasses, you see a mixture of fairly powerful and weak stuff. Ancients has a crazy strong lvl 7 ability, but a hideous channel divinity and pretty meh spells. Vengeance has a worthless lvl 7 feature, but a great channel divinity option (vow of enmity) and pretty cool spells.

Watchers have great oath spells; counterspell, see invisibility (situational, but always prepared so it's there when you need it and if you need it you really need it), banishment... those are great.
Watcher's will is situational, but if you face an enemy with applicable abilities, this is a 'never fail a saving throw' for the entire party, combined with your regular saves aura. Abjure the extraplaner is also strong if used well; use it to turn half of the enemies, take care of the rest, than finish the turned half. Strong battle field control.
Aura of the Sentinel (lvl 7 ability) is extremely strong, it's hard to overstate how important it is to go first. Combine it with a dex build (and a high dex party, with maybe a war wizard, swashbuckler rogue, or gloomstalker ranger, or somebody with the alert feat) for over the top party optimization.
The lvl 15 ability sucks (you probably have something better to do with your reaction, and if not, a situational 2d8+5 is hardly to write home about at this point in the game)
The capstone is ok. Its a bonus action, and when fighting these foes (and there are quite a lot of creatures with these types) a free banaishment attempt and advantage on attacks isn't half bad, nor is having truesight available.

[BoxANT]

counterspell and an aura that gives your party +prof to initiative

everything else is gravy

[LudicSavant]

I LOVE the concept behind the oath of the watchers paladin, but the mechanics just seem kind of... boring and weak. What are your opinions on the subclass? It is more fun/better than it looks at first glance?

I've got a build for one here:

https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24941211&postcount=938

Essentially, Watchers can be used to make your entire party into a consistently deadly alpha strike team.

As for the class's mechanics:

- Winning initiative is a big deal -- the difference between winning and losing initiative is effectively an entire extra round of actions relative to Team Monster. Plus all the reasons D&D 5e has a massive first turn advantage factor.

As such, Aura of the Sentinel is really good. You can further stack it with Fey-Touched (+1 Cha / Gift of Alacrity) to just make the whole party win initiative all day every day. Like BoxAnt says, anything else is gravy.

- Watcher's Will is best used as a pre-fight cast against certain kinds of enemies -- easy when you're a very stealthy Dexadin. That said, their Channel Divinities are still quite situational overall, as is their level 15 ability.

- The spell list has Counterspell, and is therefore a good Paladin spell list.

[MrStabby]

I LOVE the concept behind the oath of the watchers paladin, but the mechanics just seem kind of... boring and weak. What are your opinions on the subclass? It is more fun/better than it looks at first glance?

Pretty much my view.

I absolutely love the theme but the mechanics don't really work for me.

And some of the elements just don't work well - Abjure the extraplanar would be nice, if so many enemies you should be able to use this against didn't have magic resistance. Others... just don't seem a particularly good fit - like bonus to initiative just for standing near you. Watcher's will is OK if you know what is coming and what it will do to be worth the action (especially if you have your level 6 aura as well).

I think the last nail in the coffin is simply that the devotion paladin does so much of this better - Aura of devotion is really powerful against the enemies that waters should be good against: sacred weapon makes a weapon magical which is vital against extraplanar creatures.


Personally I would have preferred something a little more like the monster hunter ranger (although sufficiently different to keep from stepping on the toes of the ranger).

[stoutstien]

Like most paladin oaths, it's okay in a white room break down when viewed alone or can be an exponential power boost to certain parties. As pointed out above a party focused on going first and hitting hard will have a stupid high minimum roll value before you even add in ways to reduce the enemies initiative.