Over-all I think this dedication has great potential, especially in RP. Paladins especially giant paladins towering over everyone, shoving their long weapon into the air rallying the masses together against the dark forces...

Bat: It hits TOO few times to the head and far between (trip lag) to stop or lag anyone. It is the ONLY lag Marshal has and it is not consistent enough to do ANYTHING with.

Tweak I would like to see- make polearms STR and Wisdom check for being able to get more head shots... Make staff DEX and Wise. Polearms are all around heavy and require strength to wield while staffs can be light and wielded easily.

Fend: It is an awesome ability defensively... feint against anyone fighting you + possible strike.

Tweak I would like to see, make a change that the person(s) you are fending off have a small change of being impaled on your weapon and cause some stat effect or bleed... That could even be an edge.

Marshals should last longer period.

Tweak I would like to see, either make it last about double the rounds or just make it last 1 hour (two ticks)

1 more word --- EDGES ---! Where is the LOVE?!

Bat Lag : There's another dedication with more consistent lag but that dedication has - by design - less survivability and group utility.

The rest, I mean they are like that for a reason.

The biggest issue with non-shield, non-2h paladins is lack of defiance...not anything in their abilities in my opinion. Ability wise they make sense in terms of utility vs tanking vs offense.

As an aside, I'd *really* like that weapon to get toned down and integrated into a more balanced overall class. A unique item like that which is so critical to making a 'steamroll paladin' yet at the same time no other paladin can kill them for it without breaking role...it's not necessarily unbalanced but it certainly presents a "quality of life" issue.

In fact for goodies *specifically* I'd like to see high end gear nuked and replaced with quest granted gear that stays on death like a leader-weapon. This would encourage solid and consistent roleplay and mitigate "herald gear lockers" and "Acolyte gear lockers" and general good aligned gear whoriness.

Shield dedication has much more defense and edges to boot to go along with shield bash.

Avengers have two lag moves, and a blind. But not as defensive.

Poor Monks with no lag (that I know of) and Champions with random chance lag. :-P

Yeah but monks get spectacular melee offense and champions have very solid defenses (on par with shield), slice for bleeding damage and some very good group utility skills.

I think it mostly balances out other than the issue of 'Defiance' being such a character defining weapon that it actually changes game balance by itself between the dedications.

Make defiance able to be pole arm, staff, or 2h sword only. So champs could use it but shield deds can't. Avengers can use it as a sword only.

Then you'll see more champs and also more balanced pallies in general since shield deds did best out of pally edge love.

Even as a dwarf...
Even with no edges...

Sure you can't kill as many people as you'd like, but played conservatively, it's pretty hard to die, even if you do everything wrong.

>1 more word --- EDGES ---! Where is the LOVE?!

Currently neither monks or champions have edges because everything I considered giving them as an edge in my first pass at them, I just made an automatic part of the class that everyone gets.

They still probably will see some eventually.

Was marshall rally designed to fail as often as it does when in groups of more than just myself? (or even myself) Or am I just not hitting the stats it needs to function well?

I mean, with the right virtues, you can go toe to to with anyone - marshalling to give haste/offense, slice for bleeding, fend for damage/feint, wrath (yay), and then bat on the off chance that it will lag to land a kill.

Granted, I don't know how people do it without an offensive type virtue...

Before I got one under my belt as toktok (granted first Marshal there too)