Are paragons useful?

Paragon have DPS comparable to a warriors, but at range. You're really making a big mistake if you neglect to use your spear to it's fullest potential. Right now, command is pretty awesome. You can make some really snazzy command/spear/leadership builds, but I wouldn't bother too much with motivation. I take it you're more of an offensive Paragon then?

See with my paragon build i have:
15 Motivation, 10 Leadership, 9 Spear Mastery and 7 Tactics

This build is primarily defensive designed to help my party, focusing mainly on health management....occasionaly energy management too. At most i have 2 offensive skills (Spear of Lightning and then either Lightbringers Gaze or another Spear skill). I have found this to be a great build.

It might not be so much that the paragon is bad, per-se. As it does not excel at anything. With higher base dps than axes and swords.... I'd say the paragon excels at damage. That's why you see so many spear/command builds, The paragon excels at pressure damage and overall team damage output... as well as have some decent supportive skills (condition removal, hard rez, team speed/armour buff etc...) exactly what a midliner should do.


You wouldnt expect a warrior to have no weapon skills... why expect this from the paragon... (in most cases anyway...the bip build for instance would be one exception) with the current state of the motivation line, you shouldnt expect too much from that anyway, apart from all paragon teams.

*sigh* Well, thanks for the advice, though it seems to be pointing in the direction I had hoped it didn't. I have a level 20 warriors, and have had him for almost 2 full years now (his 2nd birthday is in the next week, I believe). And I have a ranger, who I've had and played with through the better parts of Factions and Prophecies. So I have no wish for another basic DPS class; when I made my paragon, I wanted command/tactics to make sure my team does its thing better.

Also, an update from before, I'm starting to notice that my allies do much better with me than without me. It's very obvious when you have 10 minions running around, where "Go for the eyes!" really spikes damage. I suppose you can go Leadership, Motivation and Command and have 0 into spears. I don't know if Never Surrender will give minions health regen or not.

Spam shouts can still be the way of the Paragon. True, they changed the effectiveness of the shouts, and buffed the spear mastery. But then again, who said you had to go with spear mastery to be a good party paragon? If your party can do loads of damage without you, then go with pure shouts. You can help the monks out by giving them energy, giving the party healing, removing conditions, maybe removing hexes (Hexbreaker Aria), etc.

Personally, i hate paragons. Yes, they can be usefull backup and decent offense, but to me it seems like whatever a paragon can do, another class can do just as good or better. After playing the paragon for a while, I have to agree that anything he can do another class can do better. However, that being said, he can do more than one of them at once, while the other classes do a single one, albeit better.

So he has a place in parties, I think he is just misunderstood.

And that also means I've sorta answered my own original question :P