Random Thought of the Day

Paragons are just always going to be problematic because they were such a shitty design decision. A character class with a ton of armor, ranged attack, and tons of party-wide passive defenses. Right. That's not a recipe for disaster at all. You try to limit them with poor regeneration but then you go ahead and give them the hands down best energy management attribute in the game in Leadership so they can power out the expensive stuff from other professions. They compete with the Warrior, sort of a midline Warrior, while contributing to those passive webs of defense that are so choking the life out of the game. Instead, I really think they need to compete with the Ranger. They have to compete for that slot in the team with the character who's spreading conditions and interrupts and, to do so, they need their own separate niche which I don't think they have yet. And the big reason is they're so unsplittable. Paragons work best with the main team, they need at least a few other people around to benefit from Leadership and their shouts and chants get better the more people hear them. I'm not really sure how you fix this except that I think the answer lies in giving people a clearcut reason to go with a Paragon instead of a Ranger. And, to me, that means emphasizing the force multiplying effects of a Paragon on offense. Instead of being a class revolving around a bunch of non-spell Heal Parties and Aegises, they should be based around the idea of an Orders Necro. Someone who makes the other attacks on the team better through skills like Anthem of Flame and Crip Anthem. But the problem there is those offensive buffs are too broad and unfocused to really matter - you don't target or time those buffs for maximum effect because, for most teams you really can't and for those that can you don't really care, so you just sit there, throw out your shouts, and hope for the best. Which, really, sums up the entire problem with the Paragon.