Is this supposed to be able to potentially kill lowbies out of range?

If it is, fine but seems a bit off to me.

Lowbie attacks maran and maledicts etc, flees nearly dead. Domond or other paladin communes the divine retribution and you are, even at distance, damaged enough to kill if suitable hurt.

If it is a design then fine I will flee with more hps but most powers in the game seem not to be designed to kill lowbies when you are a hero.

Judging from the description, the OP is actually asking about the Retributive Curing ability granted by the Retribution Virtue. I think it is important to note this as the paladin cannot directly control this it is an automatic effect of lay on hands and a fairly weak power at that.

Divine Retribution is direct damage spell and if I recall correctly it is cast directly on the enemy target, it does increasing damage to a foe based on the number of good creatures it has killed. I'd assume Divine Retribution would not work out of level, but when I had it I never actually tried to use it on someone I couldn't PK.

I don't have a problem with this. There are a small handful of abilities that allow higher level characters to significantly interfere with and/or harm lower, out of range characters and I'm fine with that.

I got rotd'd for using an oblander devil to kill a lowbie that was mouthing off to me.

And he could have avoided that death. Then oblander devils got changed so it couldn't be done. And that was to a guy who had been rping as if my hero was insignificant to his lowbie.

Divine retribution doesn't necessarily allow any defense. The paladin doesn't even have to be logged on when the maladictions are placed.

gr

Or at least never being hurt badly after using them.

I'm not hip to that incident, but to me this reads like you found a bug and an Immortal asked you to knock it off and subsequently fixed it.

Anyway, I'm still fine with Divine Retribution, at least for now. If every Paladin had it, I might be more concerned, but that isn't the case.

He just didn't like that I was able to kill someone outside of my pk.

Bug, unintended behavior or change of mind, it doesn't really matter. If they asked you to stop then that's that, and if it changed as a result then it's likely that aspect of the ability was never intended, even if it was an oversight.

It's really not no bearing whatsoever on this topic anyway. We don't need a precedent (or absence of one) to decide an ability should or shouldn't work a certain way.

Clarify here as you may be reading the divine retribution helpfile and thinking the paladin can cast this spell like a shaman eye for an eye, divine vengeance etc. and do so out of level.

The OP was posting about retributive curing an ability tied to only one virture, which only works with lay on hands. The person who catches the "divine retribution" effect had to have done damage/maladecitions to a good creature, which it was possible for the paladin to heal, and the paladin made the dispel/cure check to do so.

Fairly restrictive scenario in which this ability works. On a 3 hour+ cool down, from only (an imm controlled) subset of players of a class.

I'm assuming it's not a PK for the paladin.

But all that stuff doesn't seem to be safe from change anymore. Ha.

I sort of like it how it is, especially now that outer guardians are useless.