Holy Sword Tweak

[The Rambling Midget]

When a Paladin *prays* while holding a weapon with Holy Sword active on it applies an empowered version of the spell.

Duration is increased, damage vs. Evil is increased, and dispelling power is upgraded.

Costs a good chunk of piety, (maybe 20%?) and causes the deity to ignore requests for a period of time.

[Valo65]

Perhaps changing it from Dispel Magic to a weakened Lesser Spell Breach (stripping only one effect) would keep it useful at all levels?

[Ecstatic]

I would love to see something like this. Perhaps edit holy sword so that it does the following:

+5 enhancement bonus vs evil,
+2d6 divine damage vs evil
+1d6 additional divine damage vs evil outsiders & undead.

Change the dispel to a breach effect, so it will pierce acid sheath within a couple of hits, without making it an unstoppable spell-muncher of doom (on hit dispel is a very powerful property if the cap is made too high). If possible, only trigger it against evil targets.

Allow spell to stack with other weapon properties (so it no longer requires a bronze weapon to function).

Duration: Significant

Make this available to characters with a majority of levels in the paladin class, create an evil variant that applies a similar weapon to the BG weapons when their BG bull's strength is used. BG levels 10+ (requirement not as stringent as level majority, because this is a PrC and it's harder to get loads of levels in it). People using holy sword wands get the vanilla effect.

What this would accomplish is make a holy sword wielding paladin a strong source of sustained damage against evil opponents, but only against evil ones. Holy sword would be functional only against evil opponents, so the paladin would need to turn to GMW'd bronze for a +5 weapon against non-evil adversaries.

I'm currently feeling a little like, in light of recent changes to the fighter class, that a fighter-heavy build will outperform a paladin in terms of wading through hordes of evil adversaries. Fighter 22/Paladin 4/Rogue 4 in particular gains most of a paladin's best class features, while racking up the feats, extra damage, and a good set of fighter buffs. The paladin has a very strong feature in the form of smite evil, and a couple castings of divine favor help too, but this tends to mean that a paladin's window of excellence is between 1-4 fights, depending on how well they ration their abilities. A tweak to make holy sword a lasting source of bonus damage against the opponents they are supposed to be strong against, available only to people who have taken way more than "dip for saves" levels in both paladin and BG.

[The Rambling Midget]

Make this available to characters with a majority of levels in the paladin class, create an evil variant that applies a similar weapon to the BG weapons when their BG bull's strength is used. BG levels 10+ (requirement not as stringent as level majority, because this is a PrC and it's harder to get loads of levels in it). People using holy sword wands get the vanilla effect.

I'd make it scaling, with a minimum level. Five would be enough to weed out the multiclassed four level Paladins.

But I still prefer the idea that it's something you have to pray for in order to get the enhanced effect. Asking your patron to trust you with such great power should be a big deal.

[Ecstatic]

True enough, and if done that way, could set the greater restoration and god save on cooldown. That way, busting out the enhanced holy sword of greater awesomeness is a conscious choice for specific circumstances.

Definitely agree with the notion of buffing paladins who take more than a dip in the class, though, and HS feels like a good place to start looking, given Bioware nerfed it into oblivion.