My general view on Paladins is that a lot of their power comes from the base class. That might not be quite as true as it was in the 2014 version, with the nerfing of Divine Smite and the buffs to things like Devotion's Sacred Weapon or Vengeance's Oath of Enmity.
I was shocked when Oath of Glory was announced as the fourth subclass to fill out the PHB '24 subclasses, as it's one that I always thought was among the worst of the Paladin subclasses, both conceptually and mechanically, but here we are.
Paladins just got arguably their most powerful subclass with the Oath of Noble Genies, a subclass that is... debatably appropriate for the class in concept but certainly very cool (the hook I came up with for a Noble Genies Paladin if I ever play one is that they were literally created by a wish, having previously been an in-universe fictional hero from a series of the setting-appropriate equivalent of pulp novels or comic books).
As a note, there's been a standardization of the level 20 subclass features for Paladins in the new PHB that I'd like to see applied to all these old subclasses. The only class that gets a subclass feature at 20, it's honestly something most players never see. But these "Ults" as I call them (like how in a lot of video games a character will have an "Ultimate" ability, often shortened to Ult) are cool.
The subclasses we'll look at here are the Oathbreaker Paladin, the Oath of the Crown, Conquest, Redemption, and Watchers.
Oathbreaker: Yes
D&D does not necessarily require PCs to be good people - while I think most people prefer to play heroic characters, having the opportunity to play a villain protagonist, or at least an anti-hero, is, I think, good for the game (as long as players respect their fellow players and play a version of this that works well with others). Again, I don't want to focus too much on the existing Unearthed Arcana versions of these subclasses, but I will say that the place that the recent version of this missed the mark on the most was just giving it tenets: an Oathbreaker forswears their oath, meaning they don't care about any of that. Mechanically, though, having a proto-Death Knight is a really cool idea (DKs are probably my favorite World of Warcraft class). I will say, though, that you could also imagine this not as a broken oath, but an oath in and of itself. Some (again, I'm thinking the Eldritch Lorecast) have questioned whether it makes sense for an Oathbreaker to automatically get necromantic powers, which I think is a fair criticism, though again, I feel like this is meant to be the "Death Knight" subclass. Perhaps it would be better to simply make this something like the Oath of Doom (we don't use "doom" enough in D&D features and abilities. It's such a wonderfully pulpy fantasy word). Naturally, mechanically, one of the DMG '14's Oathbreaker's biggest problems was that it technically buffed enemy undead and fiends, but I also think that a refinement of what we got in that recent UA could be a lot of fun to play, with lots of undead minions (perhaps tweaking them to have better hit bonuses, perhaps using bespoke statblocks... I'm getting into the weeds here.)
Crown: No
Oath of the Crown wasn't ever that great, and I think some of its mechanics were cannibalized by the Oath of Redemption, which probably has a better overall concept.
Conquest: Yes
I'll grant that if we get a revised Oathbreaker, we're already going to have the "dark paladin" subclass. Conquest in some ways felt like an attempt to give us a more player-facing antipaladin, and in fact, it probably fits the broader "paladin, but evil" vibe better than the Oathbreaker itself. Perhaps this is a "one but not the other" situation with the Oathbreaker. Truthfully, the only thing here that might need to be fixed is the Ult. I could be talked into a no here.
Redemption: No
Honestly, there are some things I might enjoy seeing revised here. But I also think that maybe there's an alternative "extra good" Paladin subclass that maybe empowers healing significantly. I could be talked into a yes here.
Watchers: No
This might actually be my favorite Paladin subclass conceptually, and it's also pretty strong mechanically. But I think this is A: probably fine as is and B: the kind of concept that I think we can move on from.
Yeah, not an enormous number of Paladin subclasses to look at in the first place. I'm perhaps revealing my own latent mall goth tendencies by endorsing only the two "dark" paladin subclasses. It's not the easiest class to come up with new concepts for, and perhaps we'll see some that are quite similar to existing ones. Though if Noble Genies is any indication, they're willing to go quite outside the box.
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