Since you would think that during battle with pointy sharp things being used, it would be the one thing holy blessed knights could cure 100% of the time? It is just something that has bothered me for a long time.
Well Trauma wounds are physical and would require dressing and/or strong divine magic to mend as you aren't healing a burn/hex/disease. Paladins are divine warriors but not straight channels for divine magic like clerics are. That's my guess.
The whole "Lay of Hands" idea goes against it though, As warriors Paladins would see more of those types of wounds than any other and it would make sense they would be able to treat them. In most fantasy realms the lay of hands ability is the Paladin laying his hand(s) on the wound (trauma) and closing it. OT: We fought the big ape tonight, you were right hes a lot of fun..
Hm, I certainly wouldn't mind Lay on Hands having a "cure Trauma" component. Hehe yeah the monkey is fun, its like poking an angry bear with that item
except in most fantasy a paladin can only use Lay Hands like 1 time every week or so, and he has to be able to concentrate all his effort into doing it for it to be 100% successful. it's not something a paladin can usually use mid battle like they do in EQ. and most trauma is stuns/stifles...so a paladin who doesn't have but maybe 1/10 the divine connection a cleric does can't channel the divine essence well enough to 'cure' it.
i refer you to aura of the crusader, that in itself proves they can cure physical aliments, personally i dont think it's much a lore barrier as much as it is mechanics choice by the devs. stuns/stifles are there to counter tanks and healers in solo and group settings. It wouldnt be a good idea to let crusaders cure these on other people as that cuts down options for the devs. if your only healer is stunned and pally could remove it that takes away some challenge from encounters with stuns doesnt it?
Game mechanics do not have Lore reasons to exist. At the time that the paladin cure AA line was created the mechanics dev thought that giving a fighter a self-cure for trauma would be overpowered in group content. You'll notice that the other two abilities that paladins have that cure do remove trauma. They were both introduced at different times and also note that the devs haven't gone back and modified the paladin cure mainly because they don't fix things unless they preceive something is wrong with the ability. It is very hard to convince them that something introduced years ago isn't working correctly just because it is inferior to other similar abilities.
No, there shouldn't be. Mechanics are purely done to make the playability of a class. When dev decided to add Reckless Stance and Prestige abilities they don't need to stop and think "But what Lore explination am I going to use to introduce these new game changing abilities?" What affects gameplay doesn't really change the story behind EQ2. It just changes how we play the game. There are occasions where story and gameplay go hand in hand. The Epic Weapons are a good example of that. Just because there are examples where one feeds the other doesn't mean everything should be that way.
Sometimes lore cannot justify everything. A group of 10 friends (myself included) have been working on a DnD world and we had to nix the "lore justifies everything" rule during development because it had 3 members almost at each others throats because of conflicting lores. I am in charge of creating the Dragonlands of the lost continent but some characters of mine apparently were conflicting with another members feelings of how "lore should be done" so instituted a "game over lore" type style basically that we will try to not tread on each others sovereign continents of creation but that we have control of our own lore. Lore is great but it can be very nasty to keep track of you almost need a full team devoted to tracking and writing it. If you read the Lore of Everquest 2 from launch till now there are many holes in it. Each expansion is more its own lore-pocket fitting within itself. The story of Rohen Theer's Return in Sentinels Fate had little to do with Ykesha and the struggles of the Moores but it had small ties to the invasion of the void that TSO centered around. The Ages End prophecy is nice but I am starting to note hole in it too. Such as the Fallen Swords was a work effort of many Norrathians yet that was only protecting and discovering things about Enoxus and Aeotok. Now the fate of Ethernere rests on the shoulders of one Norrathian? (The Signautre Quest). That seems outrageous to me lore wise such a monumental task as saving Drinal would be far beyond any mortal. My experience with lore is that it is a tangled mess and very hard to write well.
But when a class is created, there is no Lore. Paladin was created as a hybrid warrior/priest. Origionally Paladins could only worship (and must choose a diety) Brell, Erollisi, Mithanial or Tunare. If every decision about paladins followed from this origional "Lore" (it isn't lore, there is no story here. Just some vauge concept ideas.) they would be very different than they are today. There would only be three races that could become paladins, and they would need to follow one of these first four dieties. Nevermind that halfling paladins that worshiped Karana were added later, that doesn't follow the Lore of Paladins. Or that EQ2 had clerics and paladins before the Gods were re-introduced to Norrath (and thus, they didn't worship gods but still had powers). Story (what we refer to as Lore) is equally important as mechanics to a game world to make the experience fufilling. I think trying to elevate one above the other is a mistake, you can't ignore either element but you also can't make them dependent on each other.
Tbh honest if EQ2 wasn't so old having to follow tenants and worship specific gods may be more engaging for paladins making is almost to use the Pathfinder term a "Prestige Class". EQ2 is too old to follow such stringent class 'lore' though.
In game design, balance and playability have to trump everything else. Design the game, then figure out the lore. Otherwise you end up with an unbalanced mess. If you have time you should iterate: design a first pass at the game, figure out reasonable lore, make tweaks give better lore, tweak the lore for the revised game, more tweaks to game, etc. But lore has to come after things like balance and playability. Besides, who'd want to write down lore for every spell and every ability for every class?
I feel that in first conception Lore is more important than game mechanics. You need a world to put things in. You need an idea of what should be in the world, and what should not. Having a world, a story, a theme gives you something to focus your design on. Now you could go with a game play concept, but that leads to very limited games. Games like Marrio Brothers started with the idea of what we call platforming and the Lore developed as the game developed. That leads to very limited gameplay. Larger concept games like the GTA series started with Lore (basic premise: Lets have our hero work for gangsters and steal cars) and grew into the open world sandbox style game that is very popular today. While Mario has kinda gone a bit in that direction, I think it has more to do with people taking the Lore from previous Mario games and trying to expand the franchise rather than growing from the gameplay that made Mario what it was to start with. In a more basic sense, if you start with an idea of what the gameplay is going to be and try to fill in the Lore portions the developer is constrained by the initial concept and Lore for such games are usually an afterthought and usually very shallow. Games that start with a story or a world-concept have to come up with game mechanics that support the idea and the story usually continues to develop which can be either Lore or even gameplay driven as the game is allowed to develop more oganically without a meaningful restraint on what mechanics can be used or avoided.
