Video Game / Paladins

Welcome to the Realm, champion.

Paladins is a Free-to-Play hero-based First-Person Shooter developed by Evil Mojo Games and published by Hi-Rez Studios of SMITE fame. It was in Open Beta on Steam, Xbox One, and Playstation 4 before being fully released on May 8, 2018, where a now-defunct Nintendo Switch port released shortly afterwards on June 12, 2018. The game was also put on the Epic Games Store on March 24th, 2020. The story is based around a war between the Magistrate and Resistance in a world simply known as "The Realm".

Long ago prior to this war, the Realm was in chaos from other threats. Dragons ravaged everything with their nigh unstoppable strength, forcing other species to fight for the remaining scraps, and later, goblins would also devastate the Realm in two massive scourges.

Two groups, one composed of those who learned the secrets of the dragons, the Warders, used their powers to subdue that threat, while another group, composed of powerful warriors and magicians, formed as the Paladins and dealt with the goblins, with the group being led by the warrior Valera. The Realm was saved, bringing a golden age of peace - and with the absence of war, the Paladins disbanded.

In their place, the Magistrate formed, led by former Paladins Karne and composed of other powerful magicians and former Paladins, it was under their wise rule and studious research, Crosswind Hold furthered its golden age for nearly an entire century.

It was not to last.

A new type of magic via crafted crystals was discovered and transformed by scientists and inventors into a powerful kind of magic that rivaled even the Magistrate's might. A technological revolution overtook the Realm - and as with all progress, came its costs: destructive accidents, misuse of power, and a threat to everything that had been built.

Karne, fearing a repeat of the past chaos as well as the crystals' terrible potential, declared crystals to only be handled by the Magistrate, stripping towns, cities, and commoners of crystals - for some, a lifestyle they could not live without - by peace, or by force, causing an uproar among the Realm, violence to deepen, and a schism within the Magistrate and its people:

• Valera, believing crystals had the potential to improve the lives of everyone, gathered those who shared her beliefs, those who saw crystals as a right to all living beings, or those who simply despised the Magistrate, into the Resistance, aka the Paladins.
• Karne, disgusted at the abuse of crystals by evil men widening the gap between the haves and have-nots, costing the lives of innocents for every accident, and wars over the crystals threatening to destroy the peace the Paladins had worked so hard to establish, gathers loyal scientists, soldiers, spies, and wizards to the banner of the Magistrate.
• And, finally, the oddities caught in between - rogue witches and wizards who wish to continue their research (and find it hard to do so when there's a war going on), opportunistic bandits and thieves, free spirits (sometimes literally), old villains come to plunge the realm further into chaos, and even Gods, Goddesses, and destructive forces from beyond the Realm - the Wild Cards.

War has come back to the realm.

There are 55 unique champions thus far, falling into four different classes:

• Front Line: Ash, Atlas, Azaan, Barik, Fernando, Inara, Khan, Makoa, Nyx, Raum, Ruckus & Bolt, Terminus, Torvald, Yagorath
• Damage: Betty La Bomba, Bomb King, Cassie, Dredge, Drogoz, Imani, Kasumi Kinessa, Lian, Octavia, Saati, Sha Lin, Strix, Tiberius, Tyra, Viktor, Vivian, Willo
• Flank: Androxus, Buck, Caspian, Evie, Koga, Lex, Maeve, Moji, Skye, Talus, Vatu, VII, Vora, Zhin
• Support: Corvus, Furia, Grohk, Grover, Io, Jenos, Lillith, Mal'Damba, Pip, Rei, Seris, Ying

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Paladins' main selling point that distinguishes it from competitors is its three separate forms of Champion customization. Despite how it sounds, this system manages to completely avoid Bribing Your Way to Victory (although this wasn't always the case, see this page for details) and keep all players on an even playing field. The forms of customization are:

• Talents, which massively influences how a Champion will be played. Each Champion has three, and can only equip one at a time, and is chosen at the start of each match. They have a significant effect on the Champion's Abilities, and oftentimes add abilities or swap base abilities for new ones. They are unlocked by increasing a Champion's mastery level (all can be unlocked by the time you reach level 8, where the final Talent is unlocked, and can be done quickly enough).
• Cards, which have a smaller effect than Talents, but they can be levelled up from 1 to 5 to multiply their effect. Champions must have 5 Cards equipped at once, whose total levels add up to 15. Each Champion has a selection of 16 Cards that are all available from the start, with no need to unlock anything (again, this never used to be the case, see here for more information on those dark times).
• Items, a set of 16 upgrades that are available to all Champions (although certain Champions cannot purchase certain Items that are incompatible with their playstyle) and are purchased during matches using Credits. At the start of each game, all players are given a set amount of Credits, and can earn more by capturing objectives, damaging enemies, and healing or protecting allies. Each Item has 3 levels, and players can have up to 4 Items at a time. Items and Credits are not kept between matches.

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List of Game Modes and Maps:

• Siege: A hybrid of King Of The Hill and Payload. Two teams of 5 players compete to capture the center control point before the other team is able to, upon which a cart spawns. The team that captured the point then has a time limit to escort the cart to the other team's spawn. Capturing the center control point, successfully escorting the cart, or successfully defending your spawn from the engine awards one point, and the first team to four points wins (however, a winning point cannot be achieved via a successful defense). This mode is used for both casual and competitive. Includes the following maps:
  • Ascension Peak
  • Bazaar
  • Brightmarsh
  • Fish Market
  • Frog Isle^*Originally released Closed Beta 20 with a more native-american-jungle look, it was revamped in the Sands of Myth update to include a lot more frog-themed architecture.
  • Frozen Guard^*Originally released back in Closed Beta 31, it was revamped in the Vora's Pact update to resemble a snowy mountain town rather than an ice quarry, as well as adding more statues, distant scenery, and a fjord.
  • Ice Mines
  • Jaguar Falls^*Originally released in Closed Beta 30, it was revamped in the Shadows update with updated textures, models, and lighting
  • Serpent Beach
  • Shattered Desert^*Partially reworked in the Calamity update, removing some of the sand dunes, and changing the blue lighting on the capture point to red, tying into Yagoraths' release.
  • Splitstone Quarry
  • Stone Keep^*Originally released in OB41 it was revamped in the update to resemble a gothic cityscape, and comes in day and night variants
  • Timber Mill^*Originally released in Closed Beta 33, it was revamped visually in the Calamity update, and did offer some balance changes to make the map less sniper-dependant
  • Warder's Gate^*Originally released in Patch 1.9, it was redesigned in the update to visually update the level and remove the floating crystals
  • Dawnforge

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• Team Deathmatch: Two teams compete to see which side gets to forty kills first. The following maps are:
  • Abyss
  • Dragon Arena
  • Snowfall Junction
  • Throne^*Can only be played in custom servers and during some Limited Time Modes.
  • Trade District^*Originally released in OB65, it was revamped in the RWBY update to upgrade its textures and models, as well as make it look consistent with Stone Keep.

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• Onslaught: A 10-minute 5 V 5 hybrid of Team Deathmatch and King of The Hill where points are gained by capturing the control point or killing enemies. The winner is the first team that gains 400 points or the most points after 10 minutes. There is also a variant called King of the Hill, where the capture point moves every 90 seconds and respawning work more like Team Deathmatch in that players respawn in random spots on the map instead of a designated spawn room. This game mode features the following maps:
  • Foreman's Rise
  • Magistrate's Archives^*Originally released in the ill-fated OB64 update, it was revamped in the Darkness and Dragons update to turn it into Corvus' study, with more abyssal artifacts, notably a giant ball reminiscent of Seris' weapon, among other visual changes to make the map look nicer.
  • Marauder's Port
  • Primal Court

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• Limited Time Modes: A list of which can be found here.
• Payload: While technically a Limited Time Mode, it is active whenever another LTM is not, and is semi-permanent to the game:
  • Outpost
  • Jungle
  • Ice Push

There are also temporary game modes based on events in the Realm:

Events

• Siege of Ascension Peak: It's Magistrate vs. Resistance as they battle on Ascension Peak. Players will be assigned a random character and that character's allegiance determines which team they are on (ex. Skye will be on the Magistrate, Cassie will be on the Resistance). The map is under constant artillery fire and players must dodge explosives crashing down everywhere. Not only that, the ascendance of Jenos has affected the battlefield, granting all Champions 50% cooldown reduction for more power. This event lasted from OB 68 to OB 70.
• Rise of Furia: Relive the fatefal day the town of Seris was destroyed by the Abyss. Race to the top of the demonic spire, avoiding rockets fired by an abyssal lord. Then prepare for a winner-take-all Team Deathmatch to escape eternal torment. Use your Champion’s abilities to scale the spire. But watch out — the abyssal lord is on your tail! Brave the Abyss to snag boosts, granting Ultimate Charge for the entire team! Once atop the spire, fight to escape the Abyss in Team Deathmatch!
• Dragon's Call: The beacon is lit and both Magistrate and Resistance have come to heed the dragon's call, arriving on the shores of the Warders' long since abandoned homeland. Race to unlock seals guarding the island’s inner vaults and capture what lies within. In a 4 v 4 match, players carry the Warder’s Key into the opposing team’s Vault four times to win. Careful though, the Key Sphere is a power not meant to be handled alone and will rob the carrier of their abilities and render them unhealable. Keep the Key Sphere moving by passing it to your teammates if you want to win.
• Dark Tides: Abyssal Horrors are invading the Realm! Every Siege, Team Deathmatch, and Onslaught game will have a 25% chance to spawn one of four Abyssal Echo during the match. Abyssal Echoes are powerful miniboss forms of champions in Dark Tides skins. Once an Abyssal Echo appears, players will have a short time to defeat the Echo before it tears open a portal and escapes to the Abyss. Destroying an Abyssal Echo will award every contributing player 1 Dark Doubloon to spend at the Dark Tides event store, the Dark Exchange. Careful! There have been sightings of a rare Abyssal Echo howling in the night. Defeat this rare wolf Echo and you’ll find yourself with a special Gold Doubloon, which can be exchanged for Limited Special Variations of the Dark Tides skins.
• The End Times: Strange and deadly events have begun occuring within the Shattered Desert. Rifts are opening, powerful relics have been found, while the Magistrate and Resistance's forces are on the move. The game is like King of the Hill, with capture points spawning and moving across the map. Each point represents a tear in reality, with tears affecting reality in ways which can buff characters in some way, such as increasing ultimate charge, reducing gravity, and other effects. Killing players gains points but not as many as controlling a point does. The event lasted from update 2.02 to 2.04.

The current standalone cinematics are:

Lore Cinematics

• "A Realm Divided"
• "Siege of Ascension Peak"
• "Rise of Furia"
• "Koga's Revenge"
• "Dragon's Call"
• "Dark Tides"
• "A Conflict Reignited"

Champion Cinematics

• "Meet Kinessa"
• "Meet Androxus"
• "Ying, The Blossom"
• "Drogoz, The Greedy"
• "Bomb King, His Majesty"
• "Viktor, The Lone Wolf"
• "Makoa, The Ancient"
• "Mal'Damba, Wekono's Chosen"
• "Sha Lin, The Desert Wind"
• "Torvald, The Runic Sage"
• "Maeve, of Blades"
• "Inara, The Stone Warden"
• "Lex, The Hand of Justice"
• "Seris, Oracle of the Abyss"
• "Willo, Of the Summer Court"
• "Ash, The War Machine"
• "Zhin, The Tyrant"
• "Lian, Scion of House Aico"
• "Jenos, The Ascended"
• "Strix, Ghost Feather"
• "Talus, of the Ska'drin"
• "Terminus, the Fallen"
• "Vivian, The Cunning"
• "Moji and Friends"
• "Imani, The Last Warder"
• "Atlas, Man out of Time"
• "Io, The Shattered Goddess"
• "Raum, Rage of the Abyss"
• "Tiberius, the Weapon’s Master"
• "Corvus, The Magistrate's Blade"
• "Vora, The Harbinger"
• "Octavia, The Indomitable"
• "Yagorath, The Devourer"
• "Vatu, The Shadow"
• "Rei, Scholar of House Aico"
• "Saati, The Trickshot"
• "Azaan, The Eternal"
• "VII, Right Hand of the Tribunal"
• "Betty La Bomba, The Bomb Queen"
• "Lillith, the Heartless"
• "Caspian, Thief of Hearts (And Treasure)"
• "Kasumi, Death's Howl"
• "Nyx, Queen of the Abyss"
• "Omen, Disciple of the Abyss"

Cinematic Trailers

• "Champions of the Realm"
• "No One Escapes the Law"
• "Go to War"
• "Official Launch Trailer"

The Paladins Youtube channel also created a mini-series, called "Drunk Lore" between 2018 and 2019. As the name suggests, this has content creator "Punk Duck" trying to recount the lore of various champions while... well... drunk.

Drunk Lore

• "Bomb King, His Majesty"
• "Makoa, the Ancient"
• "Fernando, the Self-Appointed Knight"
• "Jenos, the Ascended"
• "Imani, The Last Warder"
• "Dredge, Admiral of the Abyss"
• "Zhin, The Tyrant"
• "Koga, The Lost Hand"
• "Androxus, The Godslayer"
• "Atlas, Man Out of Time"
• "Ash, The War Machine"
• "Ying, the Blossom"
• "Lian, Scion of House Aico"
• "Furia, Angel of Vengeance"
• "Raum, Rage of the Abyss"
• "Khan, Primus of the House Aico"

Paladins has also spawned two spinoff games: Paladins Strike (made largely by Tencent, not EvilMojo) and Realm Royale. Paladins Strike was an actual MOBA available on Android and iOS, whereas Realm Royale was a Battle Royale Third-Person Shooter, which was initially a gamemode inside of Paladins itself, known as Paladins: Battlegrounds, but got separated into its own game two weeks later. It's available on PS4, Xbox One and PC in Open Beta, before essentially being put on life support in 2020.

The developers also occasionally host a Podcast, aptly named the "Evil Mojo Podcast", and can be heard on their official Youtube Channel, though these podcasts have since become extremely rare occurences.

Not related to C. J. Cherryh's stand-alone book The Paladin, nor to the black-clad hero of the Western Have Gun – Will Travel. This trope does has some minor thematic relations to the The Paladin trope (see below for why).

Forging the New Tropes

A-F

• Abandoned Mine: Splitstone Quarry and Foreman's Rise. A mining operation that had goblins workers, which is where Ruckus discovered the mind-stone containing Bolt, and used him to upgrade his mining mech before the two agreed to work together and escape, though where the rest of the workers are is unclear.
• Abnormal Ammo: Pretty much every champion that isn't using generic bullets count as this. For example, Pip uses potions for his Potion Launcher, while Khan uses highly experimental carved-crystal bullets in his repeater.
• Aborted Arc: The Crystal War that kicked off the game's modern lore, with A Realm Divided, making it clear the conflict was a huge deal, with most character bio's at the time referencing it in some way, often tying the other characters that were absent in the cinematic into the war. However, while this story arc was still present in the background, occasionally being brought up, most characters began to stop being tied to it while the focus was shifted to fighting Yagorath and the Abyss, and A Conflict Reignited showed the aftermath of Yagorath's rampage, instead of resuming the Crystal War. With the introduction of Paladins Chronicles, much of the Lore's nuance has started to return, however.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The maximum level for any character or account is Level 999. Player accounts are purely aesthetic and, save for a small amount of gold gained every now and again, does not offer cosmetic rewards. Character mastery levels do give you rewards; Levels 2 and 8 unlock other talents for that character, level 30 unlocks a character title, and Level 50 nets you the characters' Golden Skin and Golden Weapon. Some older characters, such as Bomb King, also have Mastery Poses, Emotes, and Cosmic and Obsidian Skins at varying levels below Level 30. Past level 50 however, champion levels also become purely aesthetic and are simply there for bragging rights.
• Achievement System:
  • The game has 57^*actually 58, two can't be unlocked anymore, see below for why achievements to unlock. Some of them are for reaching a specific mastery level for a particular amount of champions, for playing in a group for a certain amount of hours, or for making a card loadout. Other achievements are for doings tasks directly in a match; such as "Boom Headshot" which requires you land 5 headshots in a row without missing, or "Questions Later", which has you deal damage to each enemy before they damage you.
  • One achievement; "Beta Player", can no longer be achieved by new players due to the game exiting Beta.
• Action Bomb:
  • Bomb King's entire gameplay kit revolves around this, mostly throwing other types of bombs with some form of life to them, and even turning into one himself when he uses his ultimate ability, though unlike his other bombs, Bomb King survives it himself.
  • Ying can also turn her illusions into these using her Shatter ability.
• Adjustable Censorship: You can turn off the profanity filter in the options.
• Advanced Movement Technique:
  • You are able to travel further with certain abilities, like Moji's scamper if you bunnyhop at the right time before the initial dash ends.
  • Wall Jump Boosting (or "Wall Jumping", "Z-Jumping" or "Wall boosts") came about from an oversight as to how the game determined if you were near a wall or not, and adjusted height of the jumps accordingly. However, if you look at the wall in any direction, and use a movement ability that propels you forward, you are granted a much higher jump. Pip, for example, can take advantage of this with his Weightless ability to propel himself through the air by hugging the wall beforehand.
• Aerith and Bob:
  • Paladins runs the gamut when it comes to naming the Champions. Some names are plain, such as Cassie, Lex, Vivian, Evie, and Buck. Others are from different countries, with the characters only sometimes corresponding to them, such as Maeve (Irish^note which is funny since she's portrayed as French), Viktor (Russian), Fernando (Spanish), Tyra (Scandinavian), Makoa (Hawaiian), Torvald (Nordic; variant of "Thorvald"), Willo (Irish; variation of "Willow"), Grover (English) and Inara (African/Middle Eastern). Then you have Asian names like Ying, Sha Lin, Lian, Zhin, and Khan. And of course, there are names that were completely made up for the setting, like Androxus, Kinessa^note Sounds like it could be a real name, but it isn't, Mal'Damba, Drogoz, Grohk, Jenos, Talus, and Barik^note It's actually a less common Persian name, but it's unlikely that had anything to do with naming a Scottish dwarf, which was most likely a Punny Name for "barricade". Let's not forget that there are names like Ash, Pip, Strix, Terminus, Moji, Ruckus, and Bomb King either. Let's just say that nothing is off-limits when it comes what how Hi-Rez names each Champion.
  • Seris and Furia sound like examples of "Aerith", but their original names were much more "Bob" with the comparatively mundane Abby and Sarah.
  • Androxus and Lex were once partners as lawmen, which perfectly highlights this.
• All There in the Manual: Much of the game's lore and story is delivered through lore cinematics, developer streams and statements, character bio's and the Paladins Chronicles blog posts, which are usually character-driven pieces.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: Paladins has frequently been accused of this by Overwatch players, and while the sentiment isn't entirely unfounded, the fact is, is that the games' closed beta pre-dates the latter's' full release of the game by a full year, and even some of the changes to make the game less MOBA-like for open beta were more to to put it more in-line with the Hero Shooter mold, and the game has its own twists on gameplay (card loadouts, talents etc) to differentiate themselves from the competition. Even the characters people frequently compare as clones (Androxus/ Cassidy) play very differently in practice (Androxus is based on fast movement and accuracy while flanking the enemy, Cassidy is about disorientation and supporting other team mates).
• Always Night: The map Serpent Beach takes place at night with the big, broken moon looming overhead. Though the map was originally set during the day prior to its redesign.
• An Adventurer Is You: There are four classes of champions to choose from, each one with their own playstyle to go along with them. Each class also has a special way of gaining credits (See Fight Like a Card Player below). They are...
  • Front Line: These champions are the ones who lead the way. They can't usually heal, but by using shields, their naturally high health, and/or anything else at their disposal, they'll make sure you and your allies survive. They gain bonus credits from capturing the objective. Current Front Line champions include Ash, Atlas, Azaan, Barik, Fernando, Inara, Khan, Makoa, Raum, Ruckus, Terminus, Torvald and Yagorath.
  • Damage: Right behind them are the Damage champions. These characters are pretty simple to understand, just run up to anyone you see and shoot the crap out of them, with abilities based on causing as much damage as possible. They gain bonus credits from damaging enemies. Current Damage champions include Betty La Bomba, Bomb King, Cassie, Dredge, Drogoz, Imani, Kinessa, Lian, Octavia, Saati, Sha Lin, Strix, Tiberius, Tyra, Viktor, Vivian, and Willo.
  • Flank: Sneaking into the back lines are the Flank champions. Like the Damage characters, they have high DPS, but unlike those champions, Flanks aren't very good at longer range, though they tend to have abilities more focused toward stealth or mobility than damage, allowing them to more easily get in close to deal damage before hopefully escaping. They gain bonus credits by landing killing blows. Current Flank champions include, Androxus, Buck, Evie, Koga, Lex, Maeve, Moji, Skye, Talus, VII, Vatu, Vora, and Zhin.
  • Support: And patching up wounds are the Support champions. These characters are designed to protect you and your allies, but unlike the Front Line champions, instead do so by healing damaged allies, and in most cases, their weapons are designed to interfere with enemies in ways other then just lowering their health, like inflicting Slows or Stuns, although their damage isn't to be underestimated. They gain bonus credits from healing allies. Current Support champions include Corvus, Furia, Grohk, Grover, Io, Jenos, Lillith, Mal'Damba, Pip, Rei, Seris, and Ying.
• Angry Cheek Puff: One of the player icons is a chibi version of Zhin cutely puffing out his cheeks in annoyance. This is an Evil Overlord Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy who has put entire villages to the torch and killed countless people and is in no way cute in-game.
• Anti-Climax:
  • Siege of Ascension Peak had a dedicated lore cinematic, an entirely brand new gamemode bringing the entirety of the Magistrate and Resistance against each other as Ascension Peak is put under siege. It was hyped up by the developers, making the event to have huge implications for the game, with those changes showing up throughout future lore. However, the event was slowly revealed to not actually be as impactful as the hype suggested. The conflict involving the entirety of the Magistrate and Resistance was revealed to actually just have been House Aico against Jenos, with the latter having dealt with the siege without much difficult by himself, as Dragon's Call was occurring at the same time. To wit, the siege didn't affect the Realm or any characters much, with the only references to the event following it being an offhand comment by Jenos in the written story to promote End Times, as well as one of Rei's spawn chatter lines referencing it, with the line just her being upset with Jenos and telling him he needs to apologize.
  • Raum was hyped up as being one of the most feared and unstoppable of the Abyssal Lords, with his various cards showing him causing chaos and destruction all over the Realm, with it being said that he forced the Magistrate and Resistance to drop everything and fight him to stop the carnage. However, barely over a month later, Tiberius' teaser was released, toying with Raum, and after their fight (which ended in a tie), Raum himself just faded into the background for about two years, where he seemingly hadn't been doing much while Yagorath rampaged.
  • Speaking of, Yagorath was also hyped up as being a genuine threat to the realm, which was only reinforced by her card art, which contains almost a third of the cast getting their teeth kicked in by her. With how powerful Yagorath was shown, being able to defeat other powerful characters such as Karne, Valera, and Io (among others), Yagorath being defeated would be a huge undertaking, and many players expected that it'd involved an in-game event, or at the very least a cinematic showing the champions taking her on. Nothing of the sort happened; instead, Azaan, a literal Deus ex Machina just re-sealed her back up, defeating Yagorath in a single hit. Even the implications for the chaos wasn't dwelled upon much, nor what happened to Atlas and Vora, two people heavily involved in the story arc.
• Automaton Horses: Mounts can be summoned out of thin air at the start of a match or upon respawning and can be ridden around endlessly until the player dismounts or gets shot, with no worries about the mount getting tired or hungry. Additionally, some mounts literally are robots or actual vehicles.
• Announcer Chatter: In addition to the default announcer, more colorful announcers can be purchased:
  • Champions:
    • Atlas (earning 300 Commendations during Season 3)
    • Bomb King (200 crystals / Flair and Style Chest)
    • Evie (200 Crystals / Flair and Style Chest)
    • Fernando (Community Battle Pass reward, and later the Flair and Style Chest)
    • Lian (Lost Future Event Pass Trials of the Realm reward)
    • Saati (Starforged Event Pass Trials of the Realm reward)
    • Vora (Beach Bash Event Pass Trials of the Realm reward)
  • Notable Hi-Rez community Members:
    • Bruce Buffer (UFC Announcer)
    • Evan “Raynday” Raynr (Former Hi-Rez spokesperson/ caster)
    • FeyRazzle (Twitch Streamer, earned through leveling up in Battle Pass 2)
    • Le Tigress (Former e-sports caster)
    • Nick “Pretty Hair” Koegh (Hi-Rez spokesperson)
    • Rohn Jobert (Former Hi-Rez caster)
    • Vox (Paladins Plays of the Week Commentator, earned through playing 25 Ranked games in Season 1)
    • Punk Duck (The "Drunk Lore" host). Released as a tiered reward from a charity event, and made free in the Sands of Myth Battle Pass since they raised enough money).
  • Miscellaneous:
    • First Mate (From the Pirates Treasure Battle Pass)
    • High Command (from the Battle Suit Battle Pass, 300 crystals)
    • Jester (from the Steel Forged Battle Pass)
    • Lore Lady (The voice in the Lore cinematics)
    • Town Crier (Play 25 games in Ranked season 1 summer split)
    • Watson Amelia (Virtual YouTuber from hololive, earned by playing 5 matches during the Absolution patch)
  • There are also announcers for languages other than English that can be acquired through gold; ESLA, French, German, PTBR, Russian, all costing 25,000 gold each.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The idea of the Event Pass and other similar systems. Unlock new content and skins by playing the game. You can only get all the skins directly themed to the Pass by paying the premium portion. However, completing the free portion of an Event Pass does still give you a skin from the pass for free, as well as certain chests that contain recolors, along with direct unlocks for MVP Poses and simple emotes. However, completing all levels of an Event Pass nets you a huge chunk of Crystals, and you can also unlock emotes, sprays and MVP poses in both the free portion and paid portion too (depending on the event pass and its own rewards, of course).
• Angels Demons And Squid: The Pyre resembles heaven and angels (though it doesn't seem to actually be heaven), the Abyss resembles hell and demons (which also doesn't seem to actually be hell), and the Darkness consists of monsters from space, notably alien space worms like Yagorath.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • A partial version of this trope occurs if a player disconnects from a match, resulting in them being replaced by a bot. However, while this evens the odds in terms of active players, this still leads to frustration, as bots are generally incredibly stupid and often serve as little more than distractions most of the time outside training modes.
  • With many characters, if you are killed just as you activate your ultimate but before it properly deploys, it will still be available when you respawn, meaning you won't spend five minutes charging your Ultimate only to instantly lose the chance to use it. Once it's deployed though, you're fair game.
  • Characters with weapons have infinite reserve ammunition (the magazines still have a finite capacity, so reloads are still necessary). The exceptions are Grover, who has an Infinite Axe supply, Moji's Familiar uses Familiar Spray that lasts indefinitely, Maeve has an infinite supply of knives, Terminus is a melee-oriented character and wields an Axe, while Sha Lin's quiver never runs out of arrows.
  • Matches in practice mode still count towards player XP, Event Pass XP and Character Mastery XP, as well as quests, allowing players who don't want to fight human opponents an easy way to progress. It's also handy to do certain Event Pass challenges that are painstakingly difficult to do naturally, such as healing 150,000 in a single match.
  • Characters who place down deployables, or otherwise place traps (namely Talus, Barik, Vivian, Dredge, Saati, and Bomb King) have indicators on their screen that show roughly where they're placed and their status, namely when they're being triggered and when they're destroyed.
  • Characters announce when they are supporting allies, such as Pip shouting "Here's the catalyst!" when throwing a healing potion. This is also true for the person on the receiving end too, as they will say variations of "thank you for healing me" in response. On a related note, Fernando and Barik announce when they have their shield and turrets up respectively.
  • Some characters have built-in mechanics to avoid fully wasting their ultimates:
    • In Khan and Zhins' case, it resets to 30% if they do not hit anyone with the Ultimate.
    • Lian has a talent that let her keep 50% of ultimate charge so long as she hits someone with it.
    • Talus keeps 70% of his ultimate charge if he does not succeed in hitting anyone with his Ultimate.
    • Atlas, Tiberius and Viktor keep 60% of their Ultimate charge if they never use their Ultimate.
  • You will get warned by either your own character, via a teammate, or through a player using the VGS chat system in various critical situations, including if anyone spots a sniper, if someone starts capturing the objective, if you get attacked from behind, or if you need to spend credits for items.
  • Because the game is essentially non-stop team fighting, things can get extremely hectic really quickly. To properly alert players about Ultimates, the game plays a echoed voice line for each champion globally so that everyone on both teams knows who's ulting. The game also accounts for Mirror Match situations for most characters, and when an enemy team also ults, a different voice clip will play (Kinessa, Lian, Tyra, and Vivian are the exceptions to this rule). The voice line is normally different-sounding to your team vs what your enemy hears. The enemy team hears a more distinct and aggressive-sounding voice line such as Atlas shouting "You're Out of time!" on the enemy team, and "Time is on our side!" on his own team.
  • Crowd Control Ultimates do not apply to players when they have left spawn within a few seconds. This gives players a fighting chance to get back into the fight without being blinded or unfairly hit by something they may not be prepared for (such as Maeves' Midnight).
• Anti-Rage Quitting: Players are unable to leave a match in progress without closing the game entirely. If they reboot the game before the match ends, the player will be dropped right back into the same match they just left. The game will also still count as a win or loss for them, even if they leave. In addition, XP and Gold are calculated based on how well a player did in the match. Even if they finish the round after rejoining, they'll get a penalty due to their lack of effort, which means being unable to join matches for a varying length of time, depending on if the player returned or not.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Crystals are a source of power in the Realm and are used to power pretty much everything. From street lights to weapons to machines. However, misuse of crystals can lead to catastrophic results.
• April Fools' Day:
  • In 2017, a game mode called Fowl Play was teased on April Fool's where you could play as chicken versions of champions and become a true pala-hen.
  • On April Fool's 2018, the official Paladins website announced that the champions were being reworked to resemble bad fan art.
  "I don’t know what to say. This isn’t what I signed up for. Why does a rock need a butt?"
  – Anonymous 3D Modeler on the Paladins Dev Team
  • The Sands of Myth Battle Pass drew some controversy for featuring a new skin for Maeve, who already had plenty of skins. When the Update Show for the next update, Darkness and Dragons, was scheduled for April 1st 2020, the Paladins Twitter account teased yet another Maeve skin for the Battle Pass along with a demon theme (note that Maeve already had a Demonette skin). The actual Battle Pass turned out to have a dragon theme and didn't feature Maeve.
  • April Fools Day 2024 had the dev team create an LTM where you play as a horse; the one you ride in on when you start a match, which also includes some Self-Deprecation about the developers (including one of the cards having a dev note stating it doesn't work). The LTM itself has you battling against other horses (and the other unlockable mounts) where you could dash like Fernando, leap forward like Tiberius, shoot particles, and punch people like Androxus.
• Art Evolution: As a game that went through an open beta, this is to be expected:
  • Some champions were redesigned during the beta, such as Sha Lin's face. Emotes and skins introduced later were also more complex and detailed than earlier ones. Rise of Furia introduced "roaming emotes", that allowed players to move while using them.
  • The champion teasers underwent a notable jump in quality and action after the open beta grew popular. The earlier teasers, such as Kinessa and Androxus' would either only show the champion or had other characters appear with their faces obscured. Starting with Sha Lin's teaser, other characters were usually shown in full with animated facial expressions and custom props not in the game were used, including destroyable props.
    • The "Go to War" trailer was praised for having animation comparable to Smite's "Hell and Back" trailer.
    • After Moji's teaser, the champion teasers did away with the in-game models in favor of using an illustrated motion comic style. Several 2D teasers later, the teaser for Imani used in-game models again, but since the game was updated with new textures and shaders, the teaser was much better-looking than the previous ones.
  • Ruckus and Bolt both underwent a redesign — Ruckus looking less gremlin-y, and Bolt going from a cartoony 80s-style mech to a wood-and-steel power loader more in line with the Dungeon Punk stylings of Paladins.
  • In OB 66, 2K textures were added, making the graphics look more polished. For example, compare Fernando before and after◊.
  • In update 1.6, new shaders were added to metal textures to give them an actual metallic sheen◊ instead of looking matte and plastic. This doesn't apply to all characters, however (certain weapon skins, such as Khan's Golden Weapon Skin comes to mind).
    • In the same update, the Fish Market map was given a lighting and material overhaul and is now stocked with fish for once!
  • 4K textures were also added to characters during "Siege of Ascension Peak", though not all characters use them. This makes a few of the champions (Barik, for example) look much sharper visually than before.
  • Originally, getting a champion to level 50 would unlock a golden weapon skin. From update 1.8 onward, there will be golden skins for the entire character as well.
  • Patch 3.02 redesigned the Frog Isle map to have better, higher resolution textures, higher poly models, a brighter skybox, and most important of all, significantly more frog-themed architecture. The latter is something the old version of the map notoriously lacked, as it only ever had one frog statue◊ which faced away from the playable space, making the map have a Non-Indicative Name of sorts.
  • Update 3.03 redesigned Magistrate's Archive to not only improve the lighting, textures, architecture, but to tie it more closely to the lore of Corvus and the Magistrate.
  • Patch 3.05 revitalized the entirety of Frozen Guard to make it look more like a town on the side of a mountain Fjord, rather than an abandoned in-progress ice mining quarry operation. The statues have been shuffled around so the player can see them better, the frozen mountain walls have turned into housing, the already existing housing has changed to look less generic, cover was updated to better fit the setting, as well as replacing the mining operation with a cold seafront containing boats, houses off in the distant mountains, a Statue of Liberty Expy, superior lighting in the rooms, and more golden trimmings. Unlike the above-mentioned reworks, which change the art assets to be of better quality, this straight-up visually reworks Frozen Guard into something indistinguishable to its former self.
  • Timber Mill was reworked in Patch 4.0 to not only get rid of the old textures and models, but to rebalance the map to not be so biased towards snipers by removing the fences on the high ground. There are loads more shrubs and plants on the ground, the grass is more luscious-looking, and the scenery has changed to have an actual timber mill operation, as well as a waterfront. As with the above, the old and new versions of the map are very different.
  • Patch 4.6 completely overhauled Stone Keep with significantly better textures, better models, and changing the theme from "derelict ruins of an old courtyard" to "gothic-esque city courtyard with clocktowers" and boy does it look nice. The map also comes in two variants; daytime (sunset) and night (midnight). The background was swapped from being a top-down view of Trade District to a bustling city with a river, a church, and several hundred houses to make up the streets. It's a completely different visual experience.
• Artificial Stupidity: The bots in practice mode completely ignore Kinessa's mines, no matter what. Two of them defending the point? No reaction. Six of them right outside their spawn? Nothing whatsoever.
  • They also never turn around unless you hit them, even if one of their friends are being shot at.
  • They do not prioritize damage dealers, which leads them to randomly attack the fleeing Support when there's a Front Line pouring lead into them (and, as expected, die).
  • All of them follow pre-set lanes, which makes it incredibly easy for Viktor's grenade (and other AOE attacks) to do enormous chunks of damage to the entire bot team.
  • In addition to the above, there's a chance that the bots will clump together and attack as one instead of trying to attack from the sides, which leads to getting shot into itty-bitty pieces.
  • In Team Deathmatch, bots refuse to buy equipment. Also, specifically on the Abyss map, they often end up missing the launch pad on the starting platforms, commonly resulting in multiple suicides in the first three seconds.
  • Bots with deployables, such as shields, will often place them down, only to walk right through them and completely disregard the point of the shields.
• Art-Style Clash:
  • Notably present when comparing older characters and maps with more recent examples, such as comparing Cassie or Ying, the game's original Ms. Fanservice characters, to champions like Io, who looks as though she came straight out of an anime.
  • However, this is also present among the more recent characters as well, such as going from characters like Azaan, a fairly stereotypical angelic looking paladin warrior, to Saati and VII, characters who look as though they were pulled from a modern setting, to Betty La Bomba, who looks like she was pulled out of a cartoon.
• Ascended Meme: Hi-Rez is aware of the Paladins community and will sometimes put community memes in the game:
  • Tyra is often seen as a female version Viktor by fans because of their similar weapons and play style. When Viktor's V1-KTOR skin was added in the game, one of the lines V1-KTOR can say if he kills an enemy Tyra is "Ever feel like you've seen a female version of yourself?".
  • Androxus' original "Defiance" ability was infamous for being very inaccurate to land all the shots. His Steam Demon skin references this by hoping at least one shot hits and being surprised if he manages to kill someone using Defiance.
  • Lex's "In Pursuit" ability is often criticized for automatically targeting enemies and requiring no skill to use. In his L-Exo Suit skin, he'll sometimes claim that it's all skill while using In Pursuit. Other times, he'll mention using a targeting system.
  • Deft Hands is considered a very useful item for Mal'Damba because it will speed up his reload stun. Mal'Damba's Wickerman skin really likes Deft Hands, and makes multiple references to it, one of which asks the player if they bought it when they got an item from the shop.
  Wickerman Mal'Damba: "Was it...Deft Hands? It was! Admit it!"
  • Similarly, the now removed item Cauterize was considered an essential item to purchase in almost every single scenario, due to its near universal usefulness in lowering the effectiveness of enemy healing. Tyra's Marauder and Royal Mark skins make reference to this by suggesting the player just buy Cauterize, as it's all they'll need.
  • As part of the protest against the Cards Unbound system, protesters submitted intentionally crappy fan art to show their disapproval. Hi-Rez was so amused by the unusual protesting method, that when they removed Cards Unbound, they also immortalized several of the bad fan art as in-game sprays.
  • A very popular meme is having the Support champ, Pip, be portrayed as a Flank because of his high mobility. In the Developer Diary detailing Flank champions, Pip's Weightless ability is grouped with the other Flank abilities.
  • Fans made fun of Androxus' Nether Step pose◊ because it looks like he's dabbing. In the Siege of Ascension Peak event, one of the unlockable roaming emotes is Androxus dabbing for real◊.
  • Khan's Overlord skin is decked with cowcatchers and exhaust pipes, making him look like a reference to the memetic fanmade champion, Trainmageddon. Word of God even admitted that Overlord Khan is the closest we'll get to having Trainmageddon in the game.
  • Quite a lot of items in Battle Pass 10 are references to community memes;
    • The "Interstellar Crisis" and "Peak Performance" sprays come from the Io reveal trailer. The former is Jenos looking at his hands, and the latter is a Smug bearded civilian carrying a barrel while looking directly at the camera.
    • The "Pool Shark" death stamp comes from the splash art of Shore Patrol Fernando of a shark looking quite goofy◊.
    • The "still needs healing!" Title is a jab at players abusing the VGS command for "I Need Healing!" (as is common in many other games.)
    • The "Evil Ojo" spray is a deliberate corruption of Paladins' development studio; "Evil Mojo", which was often typed in as a mis-spelling, but became widely used online to satirize Evil Mojo's competence at a given task.
    • The "Classy Cutout" spray is the "Classy Barik" spray from the OB64 pack, but with the face missing.
    • The Fernando Announcer Pack was an often-requested announcer pack that was finally made.
• Background Music Override:
  • The tune Tiebreaker will play instead of the usual music when a Siege match is tied at 3 to 3.
  • When a team gets 300+ points in Onslaught mode, The music will become more intense.
• Badass Boast: Taunt voice lines, as well as Ultimate callouts make up a good deal of these.
• Badass Normal: Viktor and Tyra. They use pretty standard guns, with even their ultimates being pretty mundane. The only thing magical about these two is Tyra's "Hunters Mark", which basically enhances her tracking skills, Viktor's Grenade, which uses crystals, and also his "Barrage", which is literally just ordering a plane of some kind to fire missiles from the sky.
• Ban on Magic: The main conflict of the lore's original plot, the Crystal War, comes from Karne believing crystals are too dangerous to be left in the public's hands, causing him to ban them, with it also being implied magic as a whole was being banned on top of that.
• Barrier Warrior: Almost every Frontline has a shield of some kind, though in varying amounts of HP so you use it in the right situation. Khan has a personal shield no bigger than himself, Fernando has a massive shield thrice his size, Atlas has an attack-absorbing barrier that nullifies all damage passing though it for 5 seconds, Ruckus & Bolt have an Emitter that's specifically for themselves, Ash has a relatively small moving shield, Barik has a curved barrier, Makoa has a dome shield coming out of his shell, and Torvald has a gauntlet that creates shields for him and his allies. Inara uses deployable walls, while Terminus has a damage absorption field that can charge up a projectile meter, and so don't really count.
• Beach Episode:
  • The Summer Chest has revealing beach skins for Cassie and Lex along with star-spangled weapon skins for several champs.
  • The Shore Patrol Battle Pass includes swimsuit skins for Kinessa, Koga, Fernando, and Lian, with recolors for each to turn white parts into yellow.
  • The Beach Bash Event Pass is another beach related pass, though only two skins from the update are related to the beach theme (oddly including a shark and Statue of Liberty themed skin), while only one of them is even included in the pass.
• Becoming the Costume: Most Epic, Legendary, Limited, and Unlimited skins also include voice packs that change along with a champions' appearance, sometimes significantly changing their personality.
• Berserk Button:
  • Bomb King is described as such, despite his in-game character displaying no such trait.
• Bloodless Carnage: Downplayed. While there is some barely noticeable red splatter◊ when champions get hit, as well as some minor blood at other points such as Vora's default taunt and in some card artwork, not a drop of blood is ever spilled during in-game combat, no matter how violent things get. Though it is sometimes mentioned that blood is in-fact being spilled in-universe, such as Ying noticing blood after leaving combat with low health.
• Blown Across the Room: Pretty much anytime you get killed by someone, this tends to happen to your dead body.
• Blatant Item Placement: Notably averted. Unlike its competitors, Health and Ammo packs are not on the battlefield, no matter the game mode. To compensate, you have Out of Combat Self-Healing, which kicks in around 8 seconds after leaving combat, and heals you relatively rapidly (depending on item cards purchased)
• Body Armor as Hit Points: More specifically, shielding. Shielding is considered a type of hit point that essentially gives you extra health. Champions like Torvald and Fernando spawn with shielding as part of their health bar, with the former being able to grant a personal shield to nearby teammates.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Class-wise, Healers are often this, due to sacrificing their damage-dealing capabilities in order to keep the team in tip-top shape without slowing the game down as allies need to leave combat for self-healing to kick in.
  • Champion-wise...:
    • For the damage champs: Viktor, Tyra, and Vivian. Their kit is pretty easy to use and understand, powerful in most circumstances, and the former two are free to all players of the game from launch.
    • For the support champs: Seris. They have some of the best healing in the game, but requires the player to spam the "Restore Soul" ability every few seconds to get the most use out of it. Even her ult is not that flashy (pulling people to a single point), and more utilitarian more than anything, as it's more used as a set up to other ults (like Skye's Time Bomb).
    • For the flankers: Talus. His primary fire is nothing too special, has normally mediocre damage, and his movement ability is tied to a punching ability. His Overcharge ability has some of the highest DPS in the game, however, and if you can time his teleporting ability well, you can truly be an agent of chaos for the enemy team. However, said teleporting ability is on a timer that makes it tricky to use effectively.
    • For the Frontlines: Barik and Torvald. The former is exceptional at locking down objectives, but less efficient when the payload starts moving, with most of his kit being made for close quarts fights. The latter requires you to spam shields constantly to get the best use out of Torvald, which comes off as repetitive, while his Nullify ability silences enemies, which is also fairly situational.
  • Many abilities, usually deployables like Barik's turrets or Kinessa's Oppressor Mines, do extremely small amounts of damage with ticks over time. However, even one point of damage knocks champions off of their horses and, more importantly, resets the healing timer, so even though the damage is small it can *really* knock someone off their game if placed strategically.
• Both Sides Have a Point: The Magistrate wants to ban crystals from public use due to the destructive power that could easily lead to the wrong people destroying all order and sending the Realm back into chaos, though at the same time, the crystals are capable of creating incredible things, inventions the Resistance believes outweigh the risks.
• Boss Battle: During the "Dark Tides" event, Abyssal Echoes can show up occasionally in unranked matches. These echoes are bigger and stronger versions of the characters who take a ton of damage. Once killed, every contributing player gets a doubloon that can be spent in the event store.
• Bottomless Magazines: None of the champions ever run out of ammo and some of them (Grover, Sha Lin, Terminus, Maeve, and Moji) don't have to reload at all. Because of this, Deft Hands (an item that speeds up reloading) is unable to be purchased when using these champs. What they run out of however, is their clip, so Ruckus will still need to reload Bolt's miniguns to continue using them.
• Bottomless Pits: Some maps have them on the edge of their boundaries. They're generally not a major concern, but skilled players can use knockback to throw enemies into pits for an easy kill. Some champions can use their mobility skill to counter this, though.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Golden skins and Mastery rewards, such as Cosmic/ Obsidian skins/ MVP poses (the latter two aren't for all characters). Golden character skins and golden weapon skins are proof that a person has played the character to level 50. Prior to Update 3.02 you could purchase player levels with obscene amounts of Gold, but was frowned upon in the community for doing so. The 3.02 update removed this feature.
  • Limited skins work like this; Chieftain Grohk for example, is a skin that could only be obtained through playing Ranked Season 3.
• Breakout Character:
  • A few characters fall into this, but the most notable example would be Corvus. Originally, he was only introduced as a generic background character meant to represent the Magistrate for the Rise of Furia lore cinematic. However, due to the way he was framed unintentionally making him seem like an important character, people began to focus on him, wondering who this mysterious figure and what his story were. This led the developers to develop him into his own playable character, while also giving him a large amount of cameos elsewhere while he was being created. He eventually launched as a hugely important character, being son of Grand Magister Karne and arguably being the most active individual in the entire lore, with him still getting focus and attention in trailers for a few years following his release (potentially more in the future as well). Meanwhile, many in the community similarly continue to love him, with some happy to see a relatively more fleshed out and active character in the lore, to others who like Corvus for... other... reasons...
  • Additionally, many female characters also fall into this for... obvious reasons. The most notable of these being Maeve and Ying. While these two and the various other characters like them don't get any additional focus in the lore like Corvus did (most having been absent from it for years despite their popularity), they instead receive a huge amount of skins and in-game content, with Ying and Maeve in particular being guaranteed to receive Epic or better skins every year, which may not sound that impressive, but compared to many other characters who can go literal years without seeing anything, and of the lesser popular characters having their skins largely locked behind Ranked a lot of the time if they do eventually get a skin, the difference in treatment is extremely noticeable.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Mercifully averted as of the start of 2018, as no pay to win elements exist in the game anymore after the OB64 "Cards Unbound" incident (which made card levelling a pay to win mechanic, as well as unbalancing a lot of balanced champions). The system was removed in January 2018, made all cards free, and also added in some intentionally bad fan art into the game to "commemorate" the occasion.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • If a chicken shows up in a trailer, something bad will happen to them, like getting blown up or being sent flying.
  • Viktor appears often in teasers and trailers, but usually dies or is seriously injured whenever he shows up. Subverted in Strix's teaser, where Strix has Viktor in his crosshairs, but it turns out they're working together.
    • When Viktor's model was updated, Hi-Rez honored him by releasing a video compiling all of these moments. Of course, Viktor would eventually go back to being abused in later trailers, though not as frequently.
• Cain and Abel: Seris (Cain) and Furia (Abel). One was a sacrificed to the Abyss and ultimately was transformed with its power. The other was embued with angelic wings and powers by the Pyre.
• Calling Your Attacks: Each character calls out their ultimate ability, which in some cases can help you avoid them or even negate them with the right ability. Some characters also give a voice line after using standard abilities; For example, Moji does this, though admittedly with magical names in place of the actual ability, such as Moji shouting "Barrium Protectis" after using Magic Barrier to protect herself.
• Can't Argue with Elves:
  • Skye and Saati. Both constantly gloat about how great they are, with Skye even insulting herself in mirror matches, while Saati constantly insults both her enemies and even her allies if the match isn't going in her favor.
  • In regards to skins, High Elf Lian is an arrogant, haughty noble who constantly gloats about how hated and envied the elves are.
• Card-Carrying Villain:
  • The Abyssal characters often tend to boast about how evil they are.
  • Zhin seems to make no attempt to hide the fact he runs the largest criminal organization in the Realm.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Talus in his reveal trailer has him constantly pestering Barik, calling him Mr. B, asking him various questions, and generally getting on his nerves.
• Character Blog: Jenos, Lian, and Khan all have official Twitter accounts. Jenos naturally is following space-related accounts such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Space "X", Khan is following Lian, while Lian herself doesn't have any tweets and doesn't follow anyone.
• Character Roster Global Warming: Damage champions are far more plentiful than every other role.
• Civil War: The Realm is awash with war between two major factions and several independents.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Downplayed, but present. Most characters can be seen wearing something that explains their in-game abilities, ranging from a hand-mounted rocket launcher (Drogoz) to a full-out set of power armor (Khan and Fernando).
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Generally, good things and team specific things are blue, green, and yellow, while bad things and enemy team specific things are red, orange, and purple.
  • Player names, outlines and health bars are red for enemies, blue for allies, yellowy-green for injured allies and green for players in the same group. Bullets and most abilities are also colored red or blue / white, so you can easily tell if it's either a teammate firing behind you or if it's an enemy flanker.
  • All base character healing abilities (i:e: Not skins) have green effects, while anti-healing has red / orange effects. The two exceptions are Grohk taking the "Spirit Domain" talent, which keeps the lightening beam blue, instead of green, while Octavia's healing AOE is green for allies, but yellow for enemies (likely so enemies don't confuse it for Willo's Deadzone, an Anti-Heal AOE which is red and orange).
  • Shielding is denoted as a part of your health bar when added, and is coloured yellow instead of your Health Bars' blue to distinguish the two. Shields themselves are Blue for both teams.
• Combat Medic: All heroes with healing capabilities are still capable of fighting to varying degrees of viability. Some are able to both support and fight independently (such as Pip, Furia, Grover, and Jenos), but some require directly taking part in combat in order to support the team (such as Seris and Mal'Damba). You can, of course, make pretty much any healer into a proper Combat Medic if need be, thanks to the talent system the game offers that changes a champions playstyle and sometimes their abilities. Grover is the closest to a "pure support" there is in this game, having a passive AOE healing radius, as well as in-hand healing to heal specific players. Seris comes a close second due to her in-hand healing being really potent, and not having a large amount of damage capability in her default loadout and Talent.
• Comeback Mechanic: Three instances:
  • Overtime. When the normal match time runs out or a team reaches 99% on Siege maps, as long as there's at least one attacker on the control point or payload, the match continues to play on, giving them a little extra time to turn things around. However, when someone leave the payload, the time to get back on it decreases rapidly.
  • The Comeback Mechanic. The team that lost the previous round will capture the point 5% faster than the enemy team.
  • Killing a player on a kill streak (whose team is logically probably winning if they succeeded on holding onto that kill streak) grants the killer and assisting teammates more credits the longer the kill streak was, though it's certainly still less than the player on the kill streak would have gotten off of every kill, given each kill earns a minimum of 30 each while the kill streak bonus is 10 per kill streak integer for the killer and 5 per for the assisting players. Killing a player on a 7+ kill streak also gives the killer (20%) extra ultimate charge, with another 20% ultimate charge per two kills up to 100% ultimate charge from being at a 15+ kill streak.
• Continuity Snarl: Kinessa used to wield a more sci-fi themed weapon, back in the early days of the games' life, with the weapon being changed to better fit the Dungeon Punk setting later on. However, her old weapon randomly reappeared in one of Saati's cards with no explanation years later.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • New characters generally coming out of nowhere and having never been referenced at all prior to their introduction, which is more apparent with certain characters that are mentioned as being big deals in-universe, such as Vatu and Azaan, who are both part of Realm-wide legends.
  • One of the short stories from "End Times" involves Imani finding Dredge after he steals her gauntlets, with it never being explained how she knew about or found him. Imani also assumes the Resistance had lit the Warder's Beacon, due to finding some traces of them at that location, to which she arrives at their base soon after, with no explanation given as to how she tracked them down.
• Cliffhanger: Happens incredibly often due to lore updates being sparse. For example, Siege of Ascension Peak's victor was left unresolved for nearly a year, with it only being explicitly confirmed a year after that for no apparent reason.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The AI in bot matches are either as dumb as rocks, or are as omnipotent as to be beyond your understanding, depending on the servers' mood it seems. An Enforced Trope to some degree, as perfect-aim bots would become preferential to human teammates, and so they have to be handicapped.
• Cooldown Manipulation: A common pattern inside the champions' cards is granting a large amount of cooldown reduction to another ability after using a particular one. Another pattern is dramatically reducing/resetting a mobility ability's cooldown after its user's health gets low enough.
• Cool Horse: There are a few varieties in addition to the standard mount. The Onyx Stallion is just a black version of the regular horse, but there's also the Infernal Warhorse and Obsidian Warhorse, the Frostmare, the armored Scarlet/ Sapphire Charger and Legionnare horses, the spooky Nightmare and the Candy Unicorn for those who aren't overly protective of their masculinity, which also has a blue equivalent, named Snowflake.
• Coup de Grâce: A few champions, notably Torvald, Jenos, Evie, and Khan, they all have an ability that could disable the enemy for a period of time for only a second, to a critical five seconds. Torvald is good example, as he silences enemies with his suppression beam, locking them out of abilities, while also not dealing much hurt to the enemy.
• Cosmetic Award: Levelling champions will reward players with mastery cosmetics such as skins, emotes, and MVP poses. Which then have to be purchased with gold or crystals. Leveling to 50 will reward players with golden weapon skins, which along with looking cool, have special vfx for killing enemies.
• Crack Defeat: This can happen a lot in Siege stages. So for three times, you managed to take the objective first, but your enemies managed to defend their base afterwards. Then in the last round, your enemies managed to capture the objective first. That's it, you lose from the team you always prevented to take the winning point.
• Creator Cameo: A bunch of the prominent Paladins figures in the community, as well as the developers, cameo in various cosmetics:
  • EvilMojoRomanova (former community manager), Thunderbrush (lead artist), as well as Blu the Corgi (the VA for Luna the Fox, Io's "Pet" in-game) appear in three◊ separate◊ avatars◊, while EvilMojoAdanas appears in these two◊ avatars◊.
  • Feyrazzle and Raynday (former Paladins casters) voice two unique announcer packs.
• Critical Existence Failure: Played straight with the playable roster as to be expected, but also notably played straight with shields such as Khan's Bulwark, or Makoa's Dome shield. If it's still standing, it will completely block damage sources, including a 3000-damage-dealing Skye Time Bomb that is close to the middle; as long as it has at at least 1 hit point remaining, it will completely shield from it as much as if it had 2500.
• Critical Status Buff: A variety of cards have the effect of granting its user the likes of cooldown reduction to an ability, damage reduction or receiving additional healing while their health is under a threshold.
• Crossover:
  • Grover is a somewhat unique case, being taken from SMITE and changed from an originally mostly silent mount for Sylvanus, into a full talking playable character. Though the Grover in Paladins is considered a separate entity from SMITE Grover, despite the two looking and sounding identical.
  • The game also received a crossover with one of its inspirations, with Barik dressing up as the Engineer from Team Fortess 2, even receiving a unique voice pack to make him sound like the Engineer as well.
  • Beginning in 2021, the game started to get more crossover content that advertised outside franchises:
    • The gen:LOCK Event Pass (and its associated chest) features five skins based on characters from the series, including Chase (Viktor), Yasamin (Kinessa), Cammie (Maeve), Valentina (Kinessa), and Kazu (Zhin), as well as an unlockable death card depicting Dr. Rufus Weller and associated iconography.
    • The start of 2022 had Viktor receive a Rambo skin, available if you had Amazon Prime.
    • The Monstercat Crossover Pass featured GG Magree (Skye), Justice OH (Khan), and "VIP" recolors of both. Amazon Prime offered additional exclusive skins in the form of WHIPPED CREAM (Cassie) and Bossfight (Koga), with all the skins being voiced by the musicians portrayed, with the exception of Bossfight Koga.
    • This was soon followed by the RWBY Crossover Pass, which featured Ruby Rose (Vora), Weiss Schnee (Furia), Blake Belladonna (Saati), Yang Xiao Long (Imani), Qrow Branwen (Corvus), and Salem (Seris).
• Cruel and Unusual Death: With so many champs running about, there are equally just as many ways to die in a match. You can be filled with lead by Tyra, burned to death by Fernando, frozen to death by Evie, get crushed by Raum, thrown off the map by Torvald, stunned to death by Terminus's hammer, get your soul stolen from Seris, cut by knives by Maeve, obliterated by a Kill Sat by Octavia or Viktor, and the list just goes on and on.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: The Cinematics have shown many of the champions using abilities that they aren't capable of using in-game, such as Jenos' ability to fly in his cinematic, but not in-game (though, he does float 24/7 in-game), Ruckus being really durable, Bomb King's' ultimate lasting longer than it should, Yagorath being a nigh-unstoppable monster, among other things.
• Cutting the Knot: When it comes to ultimates that involve boosting health or making teammates more dangerous, many resort to the method of shooting the target until they drop dead, hiding, or at least interrupting the ultimate. Others resort to simply pushing or dragging the target off of the map while they have a Torvald Shield on them, or of Khan has someone in their grasp.
• Damager, Healer, Tank: The game has these three classes, but four roles; Damage and Flank (the Damagers), Support (the Healers), and Front Lines (the Tanks).
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Take warning if you come here after playing Overwatch or Battleborn: Mobility skills are activated by pressing F, not left shift, while your Ultimate is done by pressing E, not Q. And your other skill is the other way around. Mercifully, you can rebind the keys to your needs.
  • Can happen in-game with two Champions who have similar abilities tied to different buttons. For example, both Grohk and Zhin have abilities that turn them immaterial and invincible, but Grohk's is bound to F while Zhin's is Q.
  • Merrymaker Lian has two rifles, and the scoped rifle variant can cause some brief confusion if you've recently been playing a sniper and expect to scope in with right click, only to shoot out a burst of energy instead.
  • Io and Furia go backwards with their respective "Lunar Leap" and "Wings of Wrath" abilities, not forwards (as with almost any other champion with a similar movement ability).
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Paladins Strike has a slightly darker art style compared to the main game. For example, in Strike, Fernando never opens his helmet's visor to show his face, obscuring the charming persona underneath.
  • As the main game progresses, darker lore keeps getting added. Some examples include:
    • The introduction of Zhin: an assassin, crime lord and the game's first real villain.
    • Talus' kind being a victim of extreme racism and survived nearly being exterminated twice.
    • Terminus being a Tragic Monster who was not willingly brought back to life and forced to kill for the Magistrate's own ends.
    • Characters in general being less jolly and whimsical and more dark and edgy, such as Vora being dark, sadistic, and hatred filled in nearly every single one of her voice lines, as opposed to older characters like Androxus, who take themselves less seriously despite their dark nature.
    • The main plotline moved from an originally gray conflict regarding crystal usage, to apocalyptic scenarios involving demon-like beings, and alien worms threatening to bring about the end of the world.
• Death from Above: Viktor's ultimate calls down an artillery strike from the sky. Octavia's ultimate is similar, but calls down giant laser beams instead.
• Deflector Shield: Ruckus & Bolt's "Emitter" ability is essentially this, as is Torvalds' Shield ability.
• Delinquent Hair: Downplayed with Imani, as her recolor "Warder" has tribal-esque tattoo's on her head, instead of a full head of hair. Played straight with Kinessa's "Cutthroat" skin, which has her with orange hair, shaved sides of her head, and a bandana.
• Depending on the Writer: Many things in the game's lore constantly shift and once established facts can suddenly turn out to be completely false... only to be reverted later. One of the most notable examples of this with Paladins is the representation of the Magistrate. Many developers have mentioned they're not bad and that their conflict with the Resistance is intended to be Grey-and-Gray Morality, with the group and its characters occasionally receiving content that backs this up, but there's also equally, if not more so, content that paints the Magistrate in a negative light, with this back and forth still happening to this very day.
• Detonation Moon: The moon has notably been shattered to pieces for much of Paladins' life, with it eventually being revealed years later that Yagorath was responsible for this, having collided with the moon centuries ago, raining down dozens of shards, with those containing Yagorath destroying all nearby life and turning the once lush forest into the Shattered Desert.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Some champions, such as Ruckus & Bolt, Moji and Viktor don't do all that much damage when burst firing. However, they do the most damage over a long period of time.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • Azaan. With Yagorath being nigh-unstoppable and defeating incredibly powerful characters, how is she defeated? By a brand new character Azaan appearing out of absolutely nowhere and one shotting her before vanishing himself and never appearing again. Though to be fair, there was setup for Azaan prior with the introduction of Raum, but this was hardly presented to the point Azaan still felt like he came out of thin air.
  • Tiberius would technically apply to this as well, but that would've required for Raum to actually present himself as a threat before Tiberius appeared out of nowhere to easily defeat him.
  • This happened twice in an old cinematic. Lex had knocked Androxus to the ground and caused him to drop his weapon, allowing Lex to easily shoot and kill him... only for Zhin to appear out of absolutely nowhere and protect Androxus for... some reason. Soon after, when Zhin had similarly knocked Lex to the ground and moved in for the killing blow, Maeve appeared out of thin air and helped Lex for no apparent reason, which makes even less sense when Maeve is a thief, while Lex is essentially a policeman.
• Did Not Think This Through:
  • Corvus is constantly painted as this, most notably when he was desperate to defeat the Resistance after believing they had the power of gods on their side, leading to Seris tricking him into making a Deal with the Devil and summon Raum, getting him exiled from the Magistrate.
  • A meta-example: The developers added a commendations system into the game in Patch 3.02, which allowed players to give commendations to other team mates. However, a glaring design flaw in the UI was that the button to activate the commendations menu looked like a crystal, which was non-distinct and looked like some decoration, rather than a menu prompt. This was later fixed in Patch 3.05 to be an icon of a more distinct, and significantly more obvious, awards medal. When the players' mouse rolls over it, "commendations" would show up, making this menu easier to find, and better understood by players.
• Disneyesque: The original art style was very cartoony, somewhat reminiscent of an early 2000's Pixar CGI film.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Some champions have a sort of quirk to their playstyle that can make them hard to work with when starting out, but can be devastating in the right hands. Examples are Skye ^Reason Close-Range Combatant that's devastating at her range, but with an escape option that is countered by short range, Barik ^Reason Front Line bruiser with relatively little health and durability, but great area lockdown and a shield that impedes enemy progress and Mal'Damba ^Reason A support that can only fight at close range, but capable of locking down areas as well, and has a stun as a reload.
  • Flanking in general is this. A Flank has the strengths of a Damage combined with mobility, but the weakness of Front Line (short range), and the fragility of Support (Flanks are actually WORSE than Supports in terms of HP, with the average HP of a flank clocking it at about 2000 ^listEvie and Maeve have 1800, Skye, Androxus, and Zhin have 2000, Lex has 2200 and Buck has 2300, compared to Ying, who has 2200). Against coordinated teams, Flanks will have a hard time finding openings, but given the chance, they can take out Damages and Supports, contest the objective with impunity, and generally make life hell for the enemy.
• Distaff Counterpart: Pepper, a Battle Pass 3 skin for Pip, replaces him with a blue female fox. Lore-wise, she's supposedly Pip from Another Dimension. Gameplay-wise, she is literally Pip outside of her appearance and some interface icons.
• Disproportionate Reward: There is a regular daily quest that doles out 100,000 Event Pass XP for...getting 25,000 Event Pass XP. This seems to be an oversight, as that amount of XP is hilariously easy to get, as Siege, Onslaught, and even TDM will almost always give out much more than this. The developers very likely meant 250,000XP, but it hasn't been fixed.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Originally, Cassie used a bow as her weapon. When another archer was added in the form of Sha Lin, Cassie was later redesigned with a crossbow to differentiate the two. It helps that Cassie's bow acted more like a crossbow in the first place, lacking the Charged Attack expected from bows.
• Dreamworks Face: Fernando displays one on his champion icon. Tiberius has this expression when meeting Raum in his teaser.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Averted for Casual and Ranked, as the game enforces you to stick with the same match, no matter how terrible your WiFi connection is. Played straight with custom servers, as you can leave those anytime.
• Dumb Muscle:
  • Buck is as loud as he is gullible - a hulking man blissfully too stupid to realize he scares/annoys his teammates.
  • Raum does not appear to be very bright, not that he necessarily needs to be when he's supposed to be one of the most powerful characters in the lore.
  • Conqueror Zhin, a Conanesque, Dungeons-and-Dragons barbarian archetype, admits he's not too high in intelligence skill points, and truly believes Default Zhin (a genocidal, thieving warlord) and Ebon Star Zhin (a Sith Lord in all but name) are honorable foes.
• Dump Stat: Logically, this tends to be true of least one or two cards out of the 16 cards you have per character; take Pip for example, who has a card called Smithereens, which generates 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 ammo for free for every person hit with Explosive Flask, which is completely counter-productive to his role as a healer.
• Dungeon Punk: The setting can be described as "fantasy with magic and guns". The guns themselves are empowered by magic crystals instead of gunpowder. The "A Realm Divided" lore cinematic shows that the Realm used to be Heroic Fantasy prior to the discovery of crystals.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • The dance emotes that were introduced in patch OB 59 first appeared a few weeks earlier in the showcase video for the Raeve Maeve skin.
  • Khan made a background cameo in the "A Realm Divided" cinematic before debuting in "Siege of Ascension Peak" and his addition to the game in OB 69. His cameo in the former used a scrapped character concept that had him with massive wings, however.
  • Io had a statue of her on the Bazaar map, and her familiar Luna appeared as a particle effect in the Shattered Desert spawn room before the pair were formally revealed.
  • Corvus appears in a lot of Paladins-related media, even being alluded to on the lore page, and has appeared in trailers as far back as May 2018. He first appeared in the background of the Rise of Furia cinematic (as the one who takes Abby away), before later reappearing in Atlas' reveal trailer, Io's reveal trailer (as well being in her "Protectors" card art), and Raums' teaser trailer.
  • Yagorath appeared as an additional voice in Vora's head prior to Yagorath's champion release.
  • Octavia appeared in one of Yagorath's cards prior to her reveal.
  • Saati appeared in a bikini in Beach Bunny Rei's loading art prior to her reveal as well.
• Early Game Hell: When you first start the game, only 7 of the 50+ characters are freely available at the start, with others requiring between 30,000 - 60,000 gold to purchase. Gold, while being a free currency, takes quite awhile to build up, and evcentually has the opposite problem later on. Each characters' talents are unlocked via character mastery (level 0, level 2, level 8), so the player can learn the champions' kit. There is a weekly rotation of four premium characters being temporarily free for all, while the first three wins of the day also give you increased gold, not to mention daily quests and login rewards, so it's not as cruel as other games can be.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The game has undergone significant changes over the course of its development, as have many of the champions, both in terms of abilities and appearance.
  • Androxus was introduced as early as the Alpha, but looked considerably different◊ (most noticeably, his mask only covers his mouth, leaving most of his face exposed). He was removed before the Closed beta, and when he returned, he had changed to his current look.
  • Buck's kit originally involved throwing down rock walls to block movement and fire. His Ultimate would raise a large circle of stone around himself, entrapping enemies, while giving himself CC immunity and heavy damage resistance. Eventually, this was scrapped, with the "walled defense" concept eventually being re-used for Inara.
  • Cassie has seen a number of visual updates. In Closed Beta 0.27, her outfit was changed from green to yellow, but in Open Beta 0.40, her skimpy look was swapped for a more modest green outfit^note It's still available as an unlockable item, though. (trading her bow for a crossbow into the bargain). Even earlier, her companion Zigs used to be a robot bird, but this was changed before the closed beta began.
  • Pip had a very different design◊ during the early days of the Alpha. Additionally, his kit worked a little differently-instead of firing an Explosive Flask, he could spray a field of adhesive to slow enemies, and his movement skill was a generic speed boost, rather than a series of high-powered hops.
  • Grover originally used his axe as a melee weapon (he could still throw it with his alt fire) and he switched between healing nearby allies and damaging nearby enemies. His ultimate was also a Spin Attack instead of an area heal. The concept of a character who uses an axe as a melee weapon was reused with Terminus.
  • The control point in Siege maps changed places at the start of each round, explaining the tip that says this, even though it doesn't apply in the current version.
  • The alpha and closed beta stages of the game had pieces of outdated lore. The wiki has archived this lore and refers to it as alpha lore.
  • There were originally three very large maps called Temple Isle, Glacier Keep, and Enchanted Forest. Prior to open beta, they were reworked and divided into smaller maps.
    • Temple Isle became Frog Isle, Jaguar Falls, and Serpent Beach.
    • Glacier Keep became Frozen Guard and Ice Mines.
    • Enchanted Forest became Fish Market and Timber Mill.
  • The Battle Pass format has seen quite few changes:
    • The first two Battle Passes only had Epic skins for three characters instead of four like all later passes.
    • Battle Pass 1 had four Rare skins on top of the Epic skins, which were just champions in their default skin wearing a hat. Later Passes would lack non-Epic/Limited skins completely.
    • The first two Battle Passes had 50 and 75 tiers, and no Battle Pass Plus. Battle Pass 1 was also cheaper (500 Crystals instead of 600) due to its shorter length. Battle Pass 3 would introduce the Battle Pass Plus system, consisting of 50 normal tiers with free and premium tracks, and an additional 50 tiers that can only be earned if you buy the pass. Battle Pass Plus would also be ditched with Battle Pass 10 (Community), which has 80 tiers that can all be unlocked without buying the pass.
    • Skin recolors wouldn't be part of the Battle Pass until Battle Pass 3, and even then, it only had one for one skin (Remix/Redux Strix). Battle Passes 4 and 5 would again lack recolors completely. Battle Pass 6 (Steel Forged) would be the one that would standardize four skins and four recolors.
    • Battle Pass 13 has Thirty Two skins in it. The four default skins are for Io (Blue), Inara (Pink), Imani (Yellow) and Seris (Green), with six recolors per champion (Pink, Blue, Yellow, Green, Red, Black, and Purple), making for 24 recolors. And then finally, we have four "Inverted" recolors (the default colors for the skins are inverted in their placement, so for Io, what was blue is now white.)
    • Battle Passes 12 and 13 both lasted for significantly longer than prior battle passes; 120 days, instead of the usual 70 days. The developers later admitted that this was due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and was done to make the studio's lives easier with the workload at home. Making lots of recolors of the skins in Battle Pass 13 for Io, Inara, Imani and Seris not only fitted with the theme of Anime and Magical Girl shows, but also meant that work could be spent on future additions to the game. Battle Pass 14 reverted back to 70 days and showcasing two skins each for Bomb King, Tyra, Vivian, and Zhin, but retained the same amount of levels needed to finish it; 120.
    • The Event Pass replaced the Battle Pass, making all of the free rewards be tied to fairly standard challenges (get a few triple kills, Heal for 1 million HP etc.) that unlock in locations each week. The level grind is considerably easier (25 levels instead of 120, and the grind between each level is 1.25 million instead of 500,000 to balance this out, but it is about 50% less than previously). The focus seems to have been shifted so that players focus on grinding challenges for rewards they want, rather than a singular grind that unlocks everything (which you either find to be a slog to do, or too easy and not worth it, depending on who you ask). The number of skins is also reduced to 2 (plus recolors), with the remaining skins being put in a chest (and recolors being a separate direct purchase). It also marks the first time a player can get a skin related to the event for free (level 18).
  • Older Champions have generic-looking card art that only loosely fits their theming and abilities, and usually depict generic, nameless humans (even for nonhuman Champions) instead of the Champion themselves or related characters. Newer Champions' cards specifically depict scenes from their backstory.
• Easily Elected:
  • Karne becoming Grand Magister of the Magistrate, though he seems to have wanted the position and spent the time since doing as much good as possible for the Realm.
  • The same sort of thing also happened when Karne stepped down from this position, giving the role to Lian, despite her and House Aico doing little to prove themselves worthy of the position, even outright going against what Karne stands for.
• Easter Egg:
  • On Stone Keep, the church bells high above on the towers can be rung when shot at.
  • Stone Keep's rework also featured an additional room with a forge and stained glass window, an early tease for one of the upcoming champions of the time, Azaan.
  • It's possible to see parts of other maps in the distance while playing on certain maps. For example, the serpent statue from Serpent Beach can be seen from Jaguar Falls◊ and Frog Isle can be seen from Serpent Beach.
  • In Brightmarsh, potted plants will expel glowing pollen when set on fire.
  • If you type "/setreticlerainbow" into the chat, the aiming reticle will flash rainbow colors.
• End of an Era: In the "A Realm Divided" cinematic, as soon as crystals started being used for nefarious purposes, with an exploding house being shown on-screen, the war between the Magistrate and Resistance began not long after. Furthermore, people like Zhin and others made themselves more known to the public eye to profit off the war.
• Enemy Mine: Because you can choose any character in a casual match regardless of their faction, it makes it possible, heck, very likely that your team of five players will contain characters that are diametrically opposed lore-wise; such as Zhin working with Koga, with the former having chased Koga out of the Thousand Hands after Koga was framed, to Vora working with... well, pretty much anyone, considering she wants nothing but for everyone to die, particularly her former goddess, Io.
• Equipment Upgrade: A purchased item can be bought twice more to enhance its effects. As an example, buying Life Rip once will grant 10% Lifesteal on any player you hit. Purchase it a second time, and that will increase to 20%, and finally to 30% with the final, third level.
• Escort Mission: The second half of a round in the Siege game mode, where one team tries to move a payload to the enemy base while the other team tries to stop it. But before you can do that, you need to earn the payload itself by standing on a point in the center of the map for long enough.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: Hitscan weapons will leave always have a muzzle flash of some kind, and sometimes have visible trails in the air so that players can locate shooters and distinguish between friendly and enemy fire. Kinessa's sniper shots leave trails that last for around 2 seconds to help enemies locate her. The fact that the game's guns are powered by magical crystals rather than bullet-propelling cartridges might explain this, but the background has never gone into that.
• Evil Versus Evil: Yagorath destroying the Realm was such a big deal Atlas managed to convince Zhin, sadistic leader of the Thousand Hands, to assist against her, while at another point, Seris was fighting Yagorath alongside Corvus and Terminus.
• Experience Booster: Four variants:
  • You are awarded 1500 gold for the first three wins of the day.
  • You get 10% extra XP for playing in a group.
  • Using a Battle Pass Team booster will boost that match's XP for everyone in your team by 20%.
  • Purchasing into a Battle Pass has you gain a permanent 50% booster for the duration of the Battle Pass. You also gain 5% perma-boosters in certain tiers of the battle pass.
• Exact Words: In Battle Pass VI (Steel Forged), a Tier 4 challenge was to "Heal 5 players at once with Blossom (Grover)", which, considering its placement, sounds hair-pullingly hard to achieve, because everyone has different roles in a match, meaning getting five people to be near you at all is a near impossibility in the midst of a match. However, the challenge never specified that it had to be mid-battle, meaning you could complete this in your spawn room.
• Eye Scream: Barik's right eye has a visible bruise, but the eye itself remains intact.
• Face Death with Dignity: Both Viktor, being Old Soldiers for the Magistrate, will both quip "I'm not...afraid." as one of their death quotes.
• The Faceless: Khan, Mal'Damba, Androxus, and somewhat Moji. The first three have never taken off their helmets and masks in any form in any media, while Moji used to play this straight but somewhat averts it as of "Dragons Call", with her Dragonborn skin showing her face with the skin being a questionably canon future version of her.
• Failed a Spot Check: Back-capping, the practice of capturing a payload or control point without your enemies realising until it's too late is a rare occurrence, but it can be a tricky way to divert an enemies attention while a team member tries to capture the point or payload.
• Fanservice: Quite a lot of it, the point that it'd be easier to list skins and characters that aren't fanservice. Of the current 23 female characters, only around 4 or so of them aren't explicilty fanservice, and of course, that's not even mentioning the various skins, from Maeve's Demonette skin exposing a lot of skin on the originally modestly dressed character, to Ying's Carnival skin and Skye's Temptress and Devilish skins putting them into what are essentially bikinis, if there's a female character, it's only a matter of time until they become fanservice's next victim.
• Fantastic Firearms: Being a fantasy setting, many of the weapons used by the various characters are crystal-powered guns of some kind. Though for some inexplicable reason, some characters seem to have more realistic guns that don't use crystals at all.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Inverted. Nearly every character is sporting a Magitek crystal-powered firearm of some description. Furia's Pyre Blade can't even be used like an actual blade in any way and just fires like a shotgun.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The setting itself is distinctly fantasy, but that's less of a specific term and more of an umbrella to include as many fantasy archetypes as possible on the roster. Just looking at the cast, you'll see normal humans, a mortal god, a sentient tree, mages, a demonic godslayer, an ice witch, an intelligent rabbit sorceress, an Asian archer, a demonic (but not evil) teenage boy, a bomb-throwing monarch robot, and zombies. That still isn't all of them.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Ska'Drin. Only Khan does so in-game as one of his jokes, but it's said that the species have been killed off almost twice before. Ironically, this is due to them not assisting in fighting off the goblin scourges from a century prior, yet the goblins themselves don't seem to be hated much at all.
• Fiery Lion: The Molten Prowler mount skin is this.
• Fight Like a Card Player: There are three types of cards utilized in the gameplay: a "loadout" deck which provides extra power to a Champion and their abilities (16 cards for each hero, 4 each for the 3 non-ultimate abilities, and the last 4 for their main weapon and passive armor effects) that are unique for each hero, Talents that provide special effects to each Champion, of which there are 3 per champion, and 16 "burn cards"/"items" that are bought in-battle (think like the equipment in a MOBA) with four types: Defense, Utility, Healing, and Offense. Some of the earlier Champions will refer to their ultimates as "cards" as well.
  "Ultimate is ready!" voice clip: Cards are ready!
  "Ultimate is down!" voice clip: Cards are down.
• Flanderization: Two notable examples so far.
  • Ash suffers from this. When first released, Ash was an individual with a slightly rough exterior passionate about fighting, but still cared for her allies and improving herself. However, as time progressed and new characters and skins with lines directed towards Ash were introduced, most referred to her as though she was a violent sadist who cares for nothing but fighting and constantly being violent.
  • Corvus was originally introduced as a well intentioned, but extremely stubborn and arrogant individual who served as the Magistrate's leading expert on the Abyss, with his bio mentioning other traits of his as well (which were unfortunately never actually shown). However, due to Corvus being involved with at least three events that ultimately led to massive losses of life, the community began to view Corvus as nothing more than a bumbling idiot that puts the Realm in danger every five minutes, which the developers accepted as well and began incorporating into the game by having nearly every new character and skin with a line directed towards him commenting about his idiocy constantly putting the Realm in danger, rarely commenting on any other aspect of his character.
• Flying Firepower: Drogoz is a Draconic Humanoid who flies around in a jet pack while raining down rockets with his rocket launcher. His ultimate, Dragon Punch, unleashes a jet-powered punch that one-shots anyone who gets in his way.
• Forced Transformation: Pip and Moji's ultimates turn enemies into chickens and doggie treats respectively. Pip's ult can affect multiple enemies while Moji's only affects one, but Moji can insta-kill a transformed enemy by touching them.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Most of the non-human champions have these, but Moji takes the cake by having three-fingered hands.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: Androxus's Ultimate has a bell chime in at the start.
• Friendly Fireproof: Played straight for the most part, though Bomb King, Drogoz, and Dredge are capable of blowing themselves up with their own explosives. However, Androxus's Reversal can invert this, sending his enemies' fire back at them a few seconds later, as it does nothing to his allies.
• Fungus Humongous:
  • Brightmarsh has mushrooms the size of trees..
  • A skin for Grover; Doom Shroom, has this down as its skin motif.

G-O

• Game-Breaking Bug: Trust this wiki when we say that this game is buggier than a grasshopper in an anthill:
  • Ash's Ultimate; "Assert Dominance" has a visible radius that should tell you where her no-damage zone is, however, the actual radius of the no-damage zone is bigger than what is shown.
  • Strix's Unauthorised use talent does not prevent the flare from revealing if combined with the card "Flare XL". This was fixed in Patch 2.01, but the bug remains after a single death.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: It'd almost be easier to list what the gameplay and story have in common with how little the gameplay has to do with the story, with character abilities being one of the few things the two have in common, though often this doesn't show all of the character's abilities or to their full extent. From in-game matches putting characters who would never work together fighting against duplicates of themselves in random locations for no reason, to characters' in-game personalities sometimes not matching their supposed background at all (such as Buck being a former criminal, soldier, and monk, yet acting like a typical dumb brute), and of course, to the obvious difference in power among characters, such as simple humans like Cassie being capable of killing the nigh-unstoppable Yagorath in-game, while in the story, Yagorath easily defeated numerous more powerful characters, including a literal goddess, to many, many more.
• Gangplank Galleon: The map Marauder's Port, which is the Hideout of Dredge and other pirates. He goes here after collecting the warders gauntlets.
• Giant Flyer:
  • Flying whales can be seen in the sky of Ascension Peak.
  • Yagorath is implied to be capable of becoming one through card art, with her also mentioning one of her kin apparently being one of these as well.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: Talus and Barik fit this in the former's teaser trailer, which is odd considering Barik is usually rather gleeful himself, meaning he either finds Talus to be just that annoying, or Barik is like many others in the Realm and isn't the biggest fan of the ska'drin.
• Goggles Do Nothing:
  • Played straight by Ruckus and Clockwork Torvald. The former having them on his forehead, and the latter on his top hat.
  • Averted by Barik, Biker Vivian, Pip and Pepper. When all of them are at champion select, both Barik and Pip have forehead goggles, while Pepper and has glasses placed in her hair. However, they all wear their goggles and glasses respectively over their eyes in the match. Barik's TF2 Engineer skin, like the Mr. Conagher he's based off of, constantly wears his welding goggles, no matter what. Biker Vivian never takes off her glasses either. On a similar note, Fernando also puts his helmet's visor down when attacking.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • In the Siege of Ascension peak trailer, Jenos tells Buck about a bigger threat at play that would one day threaten the Realm, with this later being revealed as Yagorath.
  • The Abyss could also count, often working behind the scenes to tip the scale in their favor, such as tricking Corvus into summoning Raum.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Although the conflict is presented poorly to the point the Magistrate is seen as evil by many in the community, the conflict between the Magistrate and Resistance is intended to be a gray conflict, with the Magistrate concerned the power crystals contain could lead unsavory individuals to destroy all order and return the world to chaos, while the Resistance believes the crystals' potential for good outweighs the risks. Additionally, both sides have people with good intentions, as well as those who are more questionable.
  • Furthermore, in the "A Conflict Reignited" cinematic, it turns out the Magistrate did most of the heavy-lifting against Yagorath until Azaan banished her for good. Crowds of people cheered for the Magistrate following Yagorath's defeat, but others, such as the regular victims of Fantastic Racism, the Ska'drin, saw it as more discrimination. Then, the Resistance got a little desperate and decided to draft Zhin and the Thousand Hands Guild as their partner, restarting the old Magistrate vs Resistance conflict with no one being in the actual right.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • A variety of ultimates can be activated and then quickly canceled to make use of its mobility/crowd-control immunity benefits. You'll usually have to try this out for yourself to realize it.
  • All champions have their own movement speed. This is not stated anywhere in-game and players will be unlikely to realize this due to mobility abilities and how they can just die in a few seconds, even if they happened to be a champion that actually moves a bit faster than their killer.
  • These mechanics used to completely fit this, but loading screen tips were eventually added with the information, though these tips do have to be manually enabled by the individual player.
    • Teams capture the point faster in Siege if their side is losing on score.
    • The killer of an enemy with a high kill streak will gain bonus ultimate charge depending on the enemy's killstreak, so using an ultimate to guarantee a kill on an enemy with a 15+ kill streak will make the killer able to immediately use their ultimate again.
    • Diminishing Returns that reduces the effects of each boost to one stat. The largest boost is always applied in full, but everything else has its effect reduced more and more. The difficulty of calculating the exact effect of each card in the middle of a heated match means that you can waste a lot of points on cards that quickly become almost ineffective.
    • While objectives display how many players on one team are on it while they have it uncontested, having more players on it does not affect the rate at which it is captured.
• Halloween Cosplay: Androxus, Ruckus & Bolt, Bomb King, Evie, and Mal'Damba all have skins that are Halloween-themed, while characters like Pip have a weapon skin that have a Halloween makeover.
• Hammerspace:
  • Averted for the most part, as anything the champions use is directly seen on their model in either Third or First Person. However, this is Averted for most champions with projectiles; Ash (Her shield spawns from thin air), Barik (He just magically places a Turret down, but he does have a turret permanently on his back), Bomb King (Grumpy Bomb comes out of nowhere, but his sticky bombs are made on-the-fly), Grover (Pulls new axes out of absolutely nowhere), Koga (His guns despawn when his Wolverine Claws activate), Maeve (Has an infinite amount of knives in her coat), Strix (who can quick-switch between his Pistol and Sniper Rifle), Kinessa (her trip mines are not shown on her person), Vivian (Her Booby Traps are not shown on her person), Willo (Her Seedlings come out of nowhere).
  • Evie's Bewitching skin calls attention to this, notably as the skin is incredibly skimpy with very few options for putting other objects.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: Pretty much any of the frontlines fighting against each other will cause this, for example, Raum against Terminus, or Barik against Khan.
• Have a Nice Death: After being killed, the camera tracks the movement of the person who killed you. A challenge in Battle Pass 11 is to emote 11 times in front of said camera as Tiberius.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • Atlas had his arm cut off and attached a gun to it. The reason this occurred was due to an attack by a future version of Vora from the Bad Future. The gun itself lets him manipulate time for his own ends, sending enemies back in time, and even himself.
  • Octavia lost her leg in a battle, but obtained a new prosthetic one and reenlisted in the Magistrate, making absolutely no difference from a normal leg and technically making her not handicapped at all.
• Hand Wave:
  • For the longest time, it was largely implied that Furia was Sarah being powered up by the Pyre, only for it to eventually be claimed that she's actually mostly just a Pyre Entity controlling Sarah's body. This was naturally disliked for various reasons, but in regards to this trope, it was claimed that Furia wasn't completely the Pyre Entity, but that Sarah had merged with one, resulting in a fusion that was largely the Pyre Entity, but with some traits such as bits of Sarah's personality and memories, which many found a bit too convenient.
  • Seris also had a similar occurrence. Originally, it was mentioned that Seris is an Abyssal Entity controlling the body of what was once Abby, with further statements showing that the entity in question was expectedly the Abyssal Dragon from the Rise of Furia lore cinematic, which itself was represented in-game as the Abyssal Lord skin for Drogoz. However, the skin's voicepack portrayed the dragon as a stereotypical demonic monster, despite the fact Seris herself doesn't behave like this. Later developer comments would eventually claim that Seris is actually a fusion of the Abyssal Entity and Abby, with Seris being considered a completely new entity rather than one or the other.
• Healing Factor: As mentioned above, every champion has out-of-combat self-healing, which kicks in once you have left a fight for more than 5 seconds, and will heal you gradually back up to full health.
• Healing Shiv: After update 1.4, Grohk and Pip can heal allies by hitting them with their main weapon if they have the right Talent (Combat Medic for Pip, Spirit's Domain for Grohk). Grohk's talent is the closest Paladins has to a constant healing beam, with Seris coming a close second.
• Heal Thyself:
  • The lack of Blatant Item Placement of health and ammo kits means that every champion has out-of-combat self-healing. The healing kicks in once you have left a fight for more than 5 seconds, and will heal you gradually back up to full health.
  • Some characters, such as Buck have abilities that let them heal themselves for a certain amount. Some character cards let other champions heal themselves when activating certain abilities.
• Hell Is That Noise: A lot of ultimate noises could qualify for this; Skye's ultimate is a time bomb that has a very distinctive ticking noise.
• Hero Shooter: One of the more recent examples of one. All the champions are characterized with unique personalities, lore, and weapon abilities. All champions have an ultimate that needs charging up that can massively impact the game.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: A lot of skins could qualify for this; Neon Demon Grohk is very neon, the Remix skins have EDM-themed moving textures, and loads more. Golden Recolors also qualify, with Bomb King being blindingly bright gold!◊
• The Hilarity of Hats: A lot of the older "Parts and Pieces" cosmetic items look plain stupid. Squid Jenos and Dashers Antlers for Androxus are a good example of this. Also applies to some of the other skins too which were made with the limitation of swappable parts in mind.
• Horse of a Different Color: Some of the mounts qualify, such as the Shadow Stalker (a Vampire Bat), Crimson Serpent, Molten Prowler, and Primal Prowler to name a few.
• Hitbox Dissonance: The champions all have one Capsule-style Hitbox (to cover the body), and a headshot hitbox (that covers the head), that are more befitting of an arena shooter, rather than a competitive first person shooter. This comes with the obvious problem of having large blank spaces around the head, torso and legs that score damage onto the enemy you shoot at, despite not visibly hitting them. This makes spraying bullets a fairly viable tactic, and makes some projectiles, such as Dredge's Broadside or Sha Lins' arrows appear to be more powerful than they actually are. The Server Lag compensation doesn't help matters, with the game updating at 27 ticks (for comparison, TF2 and CSGO update at 64 ticks), meaning the server is slower to respond to actions.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: While players are immune to allied explosives, they are not immune to their own. Leading to the possibility of accidentally blowing onself up or, in the case of Tyra, burning themselves with their own fire bomb. However, a few explosives-using champions have cards that can reduce or even completely negate self-damage from explosives, averting this if they have the right card in their loadout.
• Holiday Episode: There are usually skins relating to a holiday that often releases near said holiday; American Independance day is one such example; (Ameri-Khan in 2018, Freegle Drogoz in 2020, Freedom Fighter Octavia and Lady Liberty Inara in 2021).
• Holiday Mode: The 2018 "Merry Maker" event changed the menu to have Christmassy music, as well as the background to be more snowy.
• Holler Button: This is how the Voice Guided System works (or VGS as it's better known by players). By default, pressing the V key, followed by a set of letters and/ or a number makes you call out a specific piece of information, anything from "I need healing" (VE) to "I'll attack left flank" (VVE1) and even the SMITE favorite of "You Rock", Cancel That" can be done here too (VCER, VCRF). There are three VGS systems in place:
  • "Default" - Keybinds optimised for both moving and typing.
  • "Radial" - An Overwatch-style system that replaces the keybinds with quick mouse gestures
  • "Legacy VGS" - retains the old command style used by Video Game/SMITE before the VGS revamp of Patch 2.09. Patch 4.5 also readded commands removed during said rework too.
• Homemade Inventions: Barik is credited with creating the initial design of what would become the standard goblin mining suits used in Splitstone Quarry, as well as his own turrets and shield.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Conqueror Zhin, a Conanesque/tabletop-style barbarian, honestly believes the default Zhin (a mass-murdering warlord who leads an Army of Thieves and Whores) is an honorable, worthy opponent. Though this may be more accurate than it appears, as default Zhin does mention honor a few times.
• Horseback Heroism: You start each match, and return after each respawn, riding into battle on horseback. It becomes a gameplay point — once you attack, or are attacked, you're off your horse, which effectively halves your speed. Flankers can stop enemies from getting to the objective quickly by ambushing them as they ride past. As of writing, there are about 22 mounts to choose from, all of which can be seen here.
• Horse Jump: The game has horse mounts that are able to jump over small obstacles.
• Hostile Show Takeover: On August 24, 2018, the Official Paladins Twitter was taken over by Bomb King to promote the crystal discount event that weekend.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Khan is the towering advisor and bodyguard to the much smaller Lian.
• Huge Rider, Tiny Mount:
  • Since most Front Line champions are large, they make the horses they ride on look tiny in comparison. Terminus looks like he would crush his mount by sitting on it, Ruckus complains that the horse is "uncomfortable", and Tiberius sits on it in the direct-center, as if he were about to pounce.
  • Naturally inverted for the smaller champions, like Pip, Moji, and Willo. In order to see where they're going, Pip has to stand on his mount, while Willo flies over hers.
• Hurricane of Excuses: One of Pip's lines for a joke details how he came across his equipment.
  "My equipment was a generous gift... Okay, it was loaned to me... FINE! I stole it!"
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Unlike most other First-Person Shooters, this is for the most part averted, as the weapons that are not equipped appear on the player model. Though there are exceptions, such as Strix with his weapons (his Rifle and Luger flare gun magically appear and disappear depending on which one you have selected), and Barik and his turrets and shield (the game implies the turrets are small and one can be seen on his back, while his shield is carried on his person, just not visually).
• Hypocrite:
  • Vora is prime example of this, believing loyalty and serving others is weakness, yet after coming to this conclusion, instantly begins serving Yagorath.
  • Yagorath herself is a bit of a hypocrite, admonishing other characters such as Atlas for going against the natural order, only to get upset herself when she naturally gets killed.
• Hypocritical Humor: One of Barik's taunt lines for when he kills Ruckus is to insult him using machines...only to realise that's exactly what he does too.
• I Know You Know I Know: Playing against an enemy Skye can lead to this kind of thinking, with many attempts to bait her out of hiding.
• Immortality Field: Fernando's Ultimate, named "Immortal," prevents his allies from dying in an Area of Effect. Allies, as well as himself, cannot be brought below 1500 HP when it's active.
• Implied Death Threat: One of Zhin's taunts has him taunt you in this manner:
  Zhin: "You dishonor yourself by fleeing. Stand and face your death!"
• Informed Species: Chickens in the Realm look like oversized, cartoony chicks with short legs and egg-shaped bodies.
• Informing the Fourth Wall: Trying to use an ability while on a cooldown or if it's otherwise unavailable will make the champion either say they can't use it, it isn't ready yet, telling the player to wait a bit, or exclaiming to themselves to hurry up.
• Infinite Supplies: Nobody runs out of anything in the midst of a battle; however the likes of Tyra or Ruckus and Bolt do need to reload their supply of bullets in order to keep shooting.
• Interface Screw:
  • Maeve's "Midnight" works like this, darkening players' view form anything outside their immediate vision.
  • Strix's "Flashbang" works in much the same way, only with players being fully Blinded by the Light instead.
• In the Style of: The artstyle occasionally takes cues from films such as those of Pixar, which are much more noticeable in the cinematics.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Surprisingly averted. Most of the maps have Bottomless Pits on either side full of water/ an abyss, with Bazaar having walls all around the map. Shattered Desert averts this, as the map is "open" in the sense that an invisible hurt-box keeps you within map boundaries.
• Invisible Wall: While most in-game maps allow the player to leap or fly off at nearly any location, there are some notable invisible walls, most obvious on maps like Warder's Gate, which has several fences or rock piles that could realistically easily be jumped over. Perhaps even more notable though, are the invisible ceilings over maps, which can lead to frustration when playing as Drogoz.
• Invisibility with Drawbacks: Characters with invisibility can't stay invisible forever, while getting too close to enemies reveals them anyway, and attacking instantly breaks their invisibility.
• I Shall Taunt You: Part of the Emote Wheel. Pressing G brings the wheel up, and it's the bottom-right option.
• Item Amplifier: This is how loadout cards, talents and item cards work, all of which amplify specific parts of your kit to fit a particular playstyle; Loadout cards are for tweaking percentages, Talents often change or add abilities of characters, and Item cards amplify certain aspects of the game (Bulldozer dealing more damage to deployables, Nimble makes you move faster).
• Instant Gravestone: Death Stamps and Death Cards. Death Stamps are models that fall to the ground when you die (anything from a gravestone, a Not-Pacman icon, even a turkey barbecue), while Death Cards is a purchasable image/ Event Pass reward that you taunt enemies with once you killed them.
• Interface Screw: When you're badly hurt, the screen sides will be blood-filled. Healing removes this.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Get defeated on a Siege map, and you get to see the payload you failed to stop blow up.
• Jump Jet Pack: Drogoz's jetpack functions like this. You cannot stay in the air forever, but manage your fuel well, and you can stay up there for a fairly good chunk of time.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: If a champion starts to announce their ultimate, but then suddenly dies, it will be interrupted by their death quote.
  Androxus: DEATH AWAITS YOU A- Pity, I was enjoying myself...
• Kudzu Plot: The Paladins world is full of countless plot threads and ideas that have been introduced, but never expanded on, from simple worldbuilding details like the formation of the Outer Tribunal when the original Paladins were a thing, to what happened to notable characters, such as Raum following Tiberius' release, or notably Vora and Atlas following Yagorath's defeat, to entire story arcs like Koga's revenge or the entire Crystal War.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Champions with shield abilities, like Torvald's shielding, and Khan's Bulwark have a HP value after which they break, but they always absorb the entirety of the attack that breaks them. This makes them good for defending against ultimate abilities that deal their damage in a single massive explosion, like Skye's ticking time bomb, Moji's Snacktime polymorph, among others. The former does 3000 points of damage to an unprotected target in an AOE with damage falloff, but if there's even 1 hp worth of shielding in the way, the ability is negated.
• Lazy Bum: Jenos has a relaxation taunt, where he floats on his back.
• Leeroy Jenkins: An unfortunately common practice with new players is dying repeatedly if they try to go alone into battle, with their first impulse being upon getting killed and respawning is to immediately dive back into the exciting battle alone...again. This is called "Feeding" (as in feeding the enemy free kills to get ults quicker). Instead, they should be waiting to group up with their teammates for full-on team fights, instead of going it alone, and trying to One-Man Army the situation (which very rarely works).
• Level Grinding:
  • The Event Pass works like this. Play the game to get rewards, and do challenges to get even more rewards.
  • Character-level grinding nets you talents to use, mastery skins, mastery emotes, and a Golden skin at Mastery 50.
  • Every player also has their own individual account level, though this means little to most players. However, each level up does award some gold, which can lead to newer players grinding account levels in order to build up gold so they can purchase characters.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • The Pyre, despite seeming like stereotypical angels, don't actually care about much of anything whatsoever, instead only caring to stop the Abyss... sometimes.
  • The Legionnaire skins for Viktor and Atlas. They're dressed in brilliant white-and-gold armor...but their voicelines portray a Shell-Shocked Veteran who's lived through too much while Atlas' is of an uncompromising and pitiless individual devoted to cleansing the Realm through brutal conquest.
• Limit Break: Each character has a powerful ultimate ability that builds over time, whether by dealing damage or by healing allies. They're all useful in their own right, and can change the tide of gameplay when used correctly.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The description for Serpent Beach on the "Trials of the Realm" map briefly describes the stones and their "sorrowful story of its long-removed inhabitants", with the doom and gloom of said story makes the place "seem to always be under perpetual night"; alluding to the map in-game always being set at night.
• Loophole Abuse: Purchasing specific skins can be used as a way to get more favorable results from chests. So for example, the Final Frontiers chest has nine skins, five of which are directly purchasable^note Star Slayer, Invader, Battlesuit Godslayer, Battlesuit Eagle Eye, and Battlesuit Angel, leaving four skins left as the only options left to roll. This does require one to be persistent and prepared enough to fully achieve this, as you need to have enough crystals to purchase the skins as leverage (about 3,200 crystals), but there's nothing in the game stopping you from doing this, so you can tip the odds of what you get in chests in your favor.
• LOL, 69: Update OB69, which is in reference to this trope and joke. It featured skins which were intentional sexy Fanservice, like Carnival Ying (one of the most Stripperiffic skin in the game) and Love Machine Bomb King (A topless sultry womanizer with innuendo-laiden voicelines and...interesting sounding bombs.
• Massive Race Selection: There's quite a number of races present in-universe, including regular humans, elves, dark elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs, faeries, dragons, wyrins, stagallas, ska'drins, leiporis, vulpins, tigrons, elementals, abyssal creatures, pyre creatures, alien darkness monsters, and various types of animals.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Several characters don't make a big deal about being set on fire. For example, Torvald's reaction to burning up is to calmly say "Oh dear... I am in flames", while Skye's reaction is "I got hotter!"
• Meaningful Background Event: A lot of the newer maps have lots of world-building details:
  • Splitstone Quarry has various insights into the mining operations goblins work in, their awful living conditions, an accident involving mechs, as well as drawings sprawled about the place by the local denizens. They all connect to the lore of Ruckus and Bolt, and the map basically justifies quite clearly why Ruckus wanted to flee away from the mines so badly.
  • The Calamity update changed Shattered Desert's control point from emitting blue light to spouting red energy. This is because the same patch introduced Yagorath, who had just been released from said control point by Vora.
• Medieval Stasis: Despite centuries passing between Yagorath shattering the moon, dragons rampaging the Realm, peace being established, and even the discovery of crystals, not much about the Realm seems to have changed that much... for the most part.
• Mini-Mecha: Ruckus's mech — oddly enough, it's not mini for him, being a goblin.
• Min-Maxing: The Card loadout system encourages this, though it can lead to Master of None situations if you're not careful. The game has three default card slots that are optimized for a specific talent for that champion, with three others being free to use for experimentation.
• Mirror Match: Downplayed in casual modes, where both teams can choose the same champion, but not have multiples of the champ on the same team. Averted in ranked mode due to the draft system. Once a team chooses a champion, the opposing team cannot choose the same champion.
• Mood Whiplash: In Splitstone Quarry, you can find two collapsed mines◊, with crushed mining mechs sticking out of them, a memorial of flowers and candles at the base, with a warning sign depicting a goblin being crushed. It's a surprisingly dark and tragic scene for what was at the time, a mostly lighthearted game.
• Money Sink: Buying Event Pass levels acts as this for Gold, which acts as the only real consistent money sink; costing 75,000 Gold to level up. The games' initial solution to this problem was to let players purchase character levels (which players were never really fond of, and when this functionality was removed in Patch 3.02, it was replaced with the ability to purchase five super-expensive titles for One Million Gold each; those being "Has it all", "Live, Laugh, Frag", "Is a bot" and "The Edgelord". The last title is an eye-searingly expensive Five Million Gold, and is aptly called The 1%.
• Motion Blur: Paladins uses cartoon-like smearing for some of the characters animations, in place of more traditional motion blur techniques, most noticeable with Mal'Damba's snake and Tiberius's sword.
• Moveset Clone:
  • With several skins intended to be completely different characters, this isn't an uncommon occurrence; from Pepper, Salt, and Magnus, to the gen:LOCK skins and more.
  • Also occurs to varying extents with new champions as well, with some new characters sharing abilities similar to those of other past characters (such as Corvus' Mark of Fate being similar to Jenos' Astral Mark, Lillith's Swarm being similar to Mal'Damba's Gourd), to other characters sharing an overall similar playstyle to others (such as the previously mentioned Corvus and Lillith playing similarly to Jenos and Mal'Damba, or characters like Betty La Bomba and Saati playing similarly to Dredge and Lex respectively).
• Musical Assassin:
  • The Raeve Maeve skin made Maeve into an EDM-powered techno thief, killing the enemy with blades and beats. She also has her own theme music that plays during the character select screen.
  • In the same vein of Raeve Maeve, the Remix skins from the third battlepass gave Strix, Seris, Jenos, and Pip EDM-inspired designs and weapons. In Pips case, his Remix skin is unique to the game as it's also a separate Distaff Counterpart character named Pepper, who acts as a Moveset Clone to him. Pepper is also one of the few skins to be tied canonically to the games' lore, solidifying her place when she appears in card art for Yagorath.
  • The Monstercat skins also fall into this.
• Ms. Fanservice: It's be easier to mention the characters that don't fall into this. Some champions are less extreme, such as Ash wearing a skin tight suit under her armor, to Kinessa and Inara baring their midriffs, while others are more extreme, such as Betty, Imani, Io, Skye, and Evie rocking outfits with prominent cleavage, with Skye having a Navel-Deep Neckline and always assuming a Boobs-and-Butt Pose and talking in innuendo's, Lian, Saati, Seris, Vora, and Ying's outfits are all decidedly stripperiffic, among so many more fanservice tropes. Though this is somewhat subverted with Cassie and Furia, as Cassie used to show her midriff with a skintight top, but was later redesigned with a more modest costume, while Furia used to lack pants and had a Leotard of Power. Both are still available as unlockable costumes, however.
• Music Box Intervals: The "Lost Future" Event Pass's music uses lots of music-box notes as an instrument to compliment the otherworldy-lovecraftian themed Event Pass it features in.
• Near Victory Fanfare: A tense orchestral track plays when the timer is down to 30 seconds to push the payload, which is also the attacking team's cue to hurry up.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: When the Resistance manages to win Dragon's Call and leave with the Warders' gauntlets, they're instantly attacked by Dredge and have the gauntlets stolen, making the entire event nearly pointless; though this would soon happen to Dredge himself, as Imani would show up and instantly defeat him and reclaim her gauntlets, making Dredge's interruption pretty much pointless.
• Nice Guy: There are some nice people in Paladins, such as Ash, Atlas, Makoa, Torvald, Cassie, Viktor, Grover, even the alien worm Yagorath is surprisingly nice to her allies. Though there are some equally arrogant and unfriendly individuals as well.
• Nobody Can Die: While characters die constantly in-game and NPC's are occasionally implied or shown to have died in the game's lore, despite the developers claiming they have no issue killing off champions in the present time of the game's story, none of them actually seem able to die. Some notable examples include:
  • Terminus, who actually comes the closest to actually dying, with him being shattered to pieces by Ash. However, he wasn't killed, but instead restored with Abyssal magic and unstable crystals and turning him into a near mindless weapon of war controlled by Corvus, with Terminus using his spare moments of free will to beg for death or depress over his situation.
  • Raum, who supposedly is a huge deal and causing a huge amount of chaos, vanishes alongside Tiberius after the latter's trailer, and with Raum not appearing and his chaos seemingly stopped, many assumed he may have died. Instead, he reappears fighting Azaan in some of the latter's cards with no explanation of what exactly happened to him beyond "Tiberius temporarily stopped his rampage".
  • Lex, in a battle against Yagorath, is hit by several exploding quills and falls limp to the ground. Atlas is distraught, and many assume Lex is dead. However, he was quickly confirmed by a developer to still be alive. Though months later, a different developer gave a vague answer, despite Lex already having been confirmed to be alive. This second developer however, did imply Lex had very nearly died and gone to the Abyss, but avoided such a fate.
  • Yagorath, is hit with a massive blast by Azaan that seems to completely annihilate her, leaving her a burned corpse on the ground. This too however, didn't result in death, and Yagorath was simply resealed.
  • Corvus, after being exiled from the Magistrate, is eventually attacked by VII, an executioner who spends all his time assassinating people, with him even very clearly murdering several of Corvus' men in his trailer. Corvus himself is also attacked, and VII severely injured him, oddly with no visible injuries, allowing Lian to bring him in and have Lillith revive him.
• No Body Left Behind:
  • Lex's ultimate completely vaporizes enemies out of existence if they've been weakened enough. Otherwise, they'll just take some damage and be momentarily slowed.
  • Yagorath's ultimate completely consumes her enemies, leaving nothing behind.
  • Golden weapons vaporizes enemies they kill in a multi-coloured blaze of glory.
• No Experience Points for Medic: Averted. Healing points nets you more Champion Mastery XP, Event Pass XP as well as an getting credits at a faster rate, moreso than by killing foes or capturing points does. And this is important, as it lets players buy match upgrades to get better bonuses, rewards a player who sticks to their class's strong points, and encourages the healing playstyle where relevant. OB67 made all healers gain eliminations if the person they're healing kills an enemy.
• No Ontological Inertia: Very few abilities in-game actually continue to work once you are dead. The exceptions are general healing abilities and Ultimates.
• No OSHA Compliance: Splitstone Quarry has large spinning blades in the middle of one side of it, with two ramps leading right in front of it and would probably cause a mess if someone was unfortunate enough to trip on these ramps. On the opposite side of the map, lava flows in next to a floor without additional barriers over it aside from the grate over the lava flow and has a wooden ramp leading to it that's not quite as close as the blades, but still hardly safe.
• No-Sell: A variety of abilities temporarily grant crowd-control immunity, so quick use of them can avoid getting stopped by major stuns. A number of ultimates can even be used for this and then quickly canceled if you only need the crowd-control immunity from it.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • This game has a very weird aversion to using melee weapons in the correct way. Zhin, Furia, and Tiberius have swords, while Vora wields a scythe. Zhin, Tiberius, and Vora only use theirs to hit people in their Ultimate (and in one of Vora's normal abilities). Zhin's regular abilities use the sword as a way to create flaming projectiles. Furia's sword seems to be purely decorative, and is more a chassis for the gun hidden in the handle of said sword. Tiberius uses his sword as a Precision-Guided Boomerang, throwing it and then recalling it to his hand to damage enemies between him and it. Pyre-based Lian and Koga skins (the same group Furia is part of) also feature a purely decorative sword as part of their guns.
  • In Ranked, the meta is to have the Support on the point capping, despite Tanks explicitly being for this role - the rationale is that Tanks can stonewall enemies before they reach the cap.
  • Pip is explicitly a Support healer, but his mobility, damage, ult, and small hitbox make him a viable Flank.
  • Similarly, Skye is explicitly a flanker, but one of her talents; "Smoke and Dagger" lets her heal allies within her smoke screen, making her a fairly viable support character that gives Grohk (an actual support character) a run for his money.
• Obvious Rule Patch: You cannot gain Ultimate charge while in the Spawn room. Normally, this would be pointless, since you gain Ultimate charge by shooting enemies, and there are no enemies in the Spawn room. However, Tiberius has a Card that grants Ultimate charge while Combat Trance is active. When it was discovered that this could be used to fill the Ultimate meter during downtime, the rule was put in place. Also applies to Rei, whose Spirit Link grants Ultimate charge to herself and an ally.
• Official Couple:
  • One of Atlas's cards is Distant Memory◊, which reveals that Lex and an unnamed woman in one future future are together.
  • One of Barik's voicelines also reveal he has an unseen wife.
  • Atlas too, has been mentioned to have a wife and daughter he was forced to leave behind.
• Old Soldier: Viktor sounds like one, but does not look it. Makoa and Grover count given they've been protecting the Ska'Drin and the forests respectively for a couple of hundred years.
• One-Hit Kill: While the ultimates of all the champions in the game can be pretty powerful when used in the right circumstances, the only true One Hit Kill in the game is Drogoz's Dragon Punch, a powerful charge attack that hits one person for 100% of their current health. During the charge, you pass through and ignore any and all shielding and damage resistance effects. Only Ash, Evie, Fernando, Grohk, Khan, Koga, Lian, Maeve, Moji, Ying (debatably), and Zhin truly have the abilities to avoid it:
  • Ash's ultimate grants her complete damage immunity, provided she can land before Drogoz can get to her.
  • Evie can go into her ice block to wait out the Dragon Punch.
  • Fernando can use his own ultimate, which makes him and nearby allies unable to be brought below 1,500 HP.
  • Grohk can use Ghost Walk to make Drogoz pass through him, though the timing is very strict.
  • Khan can use the skill "Battle Shout" to give him a brief second of damage immunity, which causes Drogoz to sort-of ping off of him.
  • Koga can use his ultimate, which makes him slice anything (including Drogoz should he be low on health) in a circle radius, and also becomes immune to all damage and stuns attacks for its 3 second duration.
  • Lian's ultimate gives her brief damage and CC immunity while channeling.
  • If Maeve has taken the "Street Justice" talent, she can kill Drogoz while barrelling towards her. The only condition is that in order for Drogoz to be executed ^{which means...}Execution is a mechanic that instantly kills the target below a certain threshold of health, ignoring all other status effects, such as damage resistance, he has to be below 35% health, otherwise you'll just damage him at worst, or at best, if he's low on health, he'll die with you.
  • Moji can use her Magic Barrier to block the ability, which like Khan, will make Drogoz ping off of her.
  • Ying can be argued as having a similar ability in a round about way too. She can use illusory rift to teleport herself to an illusion to avoid the incoming Dragon punch. You can also set up an illusion to trick the Drogoz into hitting what he thinks is you, while you're safe and sound nearby, though both of these aren't really so much a No-Sell, more of a clever trap to bait him.
  • Zhin can block it with his sword's "Block" ability.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Enforced for the characters, as no character shares their name with anyone else on the roster.
  • Played with in the lore, as both Khan and Karne are almost phonetically identical (and did briefly cause confusion when Corvus was revealed, and a developer had to clear up the confusion).
  • Averted with Makoa and his "Dredge Anchor", who has been lugging it around long before the champion, Dredge, showed up. Before Dredge's backstory was known, some fans speculated that Makoa salvaged his anchor from Dredge's ship, which was later confirmed, despite Makoa having his anchor long before Dredge would logically be alive, with ancient statues showing Makoa wielding an anchor.
  • Downplayed with Saati's unique resource; Pips, which shares its name with Pip, a fellow Champion (the name is not random however, for the curious Saati's "Pips" refers to Predicted Impact Point.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Giant lizards with massive wings, the ability to breathe fire, and are some of the most powerful creatures in the setting? Paladins dragons fit that description to a T.
• Our Dwarves Are Different: Dwarves in Paladins are some of the most stereotypical elves one will ever find.
• Our Elves Are Different: They're more or less just pointy-eared humanoids with no discernible physical or cultural differences from the Realm's plain humans, though supposedly there's more to them that has yet to be seen◊. They've since been stated to be long lived, similarly to many stereotypical elves. Lian's High Elf skin instead plays into the common fantasy trope of them being highly snooty.
• Our Fairies Are Different: Aside from not being literal tiny humans with wings, and having plant-based designs (which themselves aren't very unique already), Paladins faeries are pretty stereotypical.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Ours are tiny, green, very big-eared, and once threatened much of the realm as one of two "Goblin Scourge"s. Judging by the little drawings around the Foreman's Rise and Splitstone Quarry maps indicating goblins make up its downtrodden workers, they are presumed to be very oppressed in current times or even slaves.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Despite the ever so slightly more unique origin of Lillith via the Abyss, she's pretty much a stereotypical vampire in nearly every aspect, only really lacking the weakness to sunlight, as that'd make it hard to play as her on daytime maps.
• Out of Focus: Pretty much every old character is completely ignored in the game's lore, with only one or two sometimes making a minor cameo in new champion teasers... which often doesn't end up expanding their stories much.

P-Z

• Painted-On Pants: Almost every female character in Paladins has this, including Ash, Betty, Furia, Evie, Imani, Maeve, Rei, Saati, Vivian, Vora, and Ying, while the rest generally only lack this because they don't wear pants.
• Palette Swap: Uncommon skins act like this, as they are recolors of their main kit. Characters released after Furia sometimes have a minor model change too (Furia has no pants, Dredge removes his hat, Imani shaves her hair off etc). The "Stellar Sisters" skins take this trope to the extreme, as they have a default look, and six recolors for them abd their weapons (Yellow, Red, Black, Green, Blue, Magenta), and, uniquely, an inverted recolor, which inverts where the default colors are placed on the weapon and character model.
• Panthera Awesome:
  • The Primal Prowler mount. It is the first non-horse mount and is free with a Twitch Prime subscription.
  • The Mecha Prowler is a robot lion that was rewarded when you bought the first Battle Pass.
• Patchwork Map: The Map of the Realm is a downplayed version of this trope as while some parts of the realm map look odd next to other parts, they otherwise conform pretty well. Frozen Guard and Ice Mines are freezing cold, but are near Splitsone Quarry and Trade District that are snow-free. They're all not far from the Vulpin Swamp that make up Brightmarsh (admittedly there are mountains in the way for the latter), while Shattered Desert and Bazaar slowly turn into forest the closer to the center of the map you get.
  • The map introduced in the Game On event pass is a more akin to this trope, while still taking visual cues of the actual map of the realm.
• Patriotic Fervor: Something of a Running Gag with the skins released, in that often around June - July, a skin will release for someone that will be this towards the USA. Currently, the game has Ameri-Khan, Freegle Drogoz, and Lady Liberty Inara.
• Permanently Missable Content: The "Limited" Tier of skins, which are only around for a short time, and once it's over, that's it, you can't ever get the item. You might have another shot at some during charity events, but you'll have to donate a massive amount of money to get one skin, with these charity events becoming extremely rare nowadays, as well as only very few Limited items being offered as rewards.
• Planet of Hats: Most races in Paladins often fall into this, with only one or two playable characters of the race sometimes, but not always being an exception.
  • Goblins are pretty stereotypical for the most part. Originally, they were unpredictable and violent, being behind the two Goblin Scourges that ravaged the Realm, but have since mostly become peaceful in the modern day, though they're still mostly unpredictable and dangerous despite that, as evidenced by Ruckus, and a group of them that attacked Grohk's tribe for no apparent reason.
  • Dragons / Wyrins are also pretty stereotypical, being wrathful beasts of destruction with minimal intelligence that only care for building hordes of gold.
  • Faeries all hate modern civilization and wage an endless war against it. Though they're also smart enough to temporarily stop their attacks to bolster their dwindling numbers... with Willo being the sole exception to the latter.
  • Leiporis, despite their powerful magic, are all largely cowards that flee into the forests and caves to avoid getting caught in conflict, all except for Moji and Rei. One wonders why the leipori are so scared instead of using their abilities to take over the Realm.
  • Ska'drins are generally peaceful lovers of nature, though they also have connections to the Thousands Hand, as well as generally being incredibly fearful due to the Fantastic Racism they receive, leading them to cutting off their horns and hiding their tails. All this, except for Talus, Mal'Damba, and Vatu in different ways. Talus and Vatu don't hide their features, and all three, despite Talus wishing for peace, aren't very peaceful or scared, in fact, they're often rather deadly.
  • Vulpins are pacifistic alchemists that will drop everything to ensure the safety and health of others... aside from Pip, who's very clearly not a pacifist, though he is still a skilled alchemist capable of creating rather effective healing potions.
  • Tigrons are a deeply religious group of willingly nomadic warriors, with Tiberius being the epitome of their values.
  • Stagalla are generally dignified and stoic rock people created by the original Paladins to fight the Goblin Scourges and are oath bound to assist Valera should she desire their help.
  • Abyssal Creatures are largely incredibly violent demonic monsters that reside in another world who all appear to have a shared goal of entering the Realm and causing as much destruction as possible. They also despise the Pyre.
  • Pyre Creatures meanwhile, similarly hate the Abyss. Entities of the Pyre largely spend their time keeping to themselves in their own realm, forging weapons to use against the Abyss, yet despite that, rarely ever appearing in the Realm to fight them when the Abyss does show up. On top of this, most of the Pyre don't care for the Realm itself or the people within it, with only Furia appearing to care at all.
• Play Every Day: You are given three daily quests that reward gold and varying amounts of Event Pass XP when completed; anything from accruing 750 Gold from matches to playing 5 games of Siege. Starting from Battle Pass 10, crystals that were once found by logging in every day are made available in the free tier of the Battle Pass; capping at 450. The paid tier also includes an extra 150 crystals that brings the total up to 600 crystals, enough to buy the following battle pass.
• Plot Hole: Paladins is notable for lacking information and explanations in many areas of its lore and worldbuilding, which includes some plot holes as well, such as:
  • New characters generally coming out of nowhere and having never been referenced at all prior to their introduction, which is more apparent with certain characters that are mentioned as being big deals in-universe, such as Vatu and Azaan, who are both part of Realm-wide legends.
  • Speaking of Azaan, as a Pyre entity tasked with keeping the Realm free from the Abyss' influence, it's never explained why he never did anything for certain Abyssal events such as Dredge's awakening, as well as why it took him over a year to show up and finally stop Raum.
  • Crystals were a major discovery in the Realm, ultimately sparking the Crystal War shortly following said discovery, however, despite the fact they're stated to be a new discovery in the A Realm Divided cinematic, Karne can be seen wielding magic crystals earlier in the same video a century prior to their discovery.
  • The reason the Outer Tribunal was created, being to combat the constant threats to the Realm, leads to questions regarding it and the original Paladins, the latter group having been created specifically for that reason as well, ultimately causing a case of Voodoo Shark.
  • Additionally, the Outer Tribunal had been established as being a group of merciless judges that battle supernatural monsters and horrifying threats to the Realm, yet for some reason, when VII released, these traits were treated as though VII was unique in these regards.
  • The Ruby Throne of House Aico was originally shown to inhabit a snow free area of the Realm, but was later placed in a frigid tundra when the Realm map and later Trials of the Realm released. Yet despite this, House Aico was later placed back in a non-snowy area again in one of Saati's cards. Additionally, House Aico being located in a tundra seems notably odd due to Lian's... light clothing.
  • Cassie's crossbow has always been said to have originally been an enchanted one that originally belonged to her father, yet oddly in the A Realm Divided lore cinematic, the crossbow can be seen on a table in the Resistance's base before Cassie had joined the group.
  • Sarah attached the lock of Abby's hair she received from Corvus to her own following Abby being taken away, however, it was said she did this with the usage of Pyre magic, yet Sarah can be seen with the hair already attached prior to her even entering the Pyre church and becoming Furia.
  • Kinessa used to wield a more sci-fi themed weapon when the game's setting was intended as more advanced, with this weapon being changed to a more setting fitting one later on. However, her old weapon randomly reappeared in one of Saati's cards with no explanation years later.
  • When the Magistrate's Archives map was updated, it was changed into Corvus' personal study, despite him being kicked out of the group in the exact same update. While some may assume the old version of the map is simply no longer canon, or at least was retconned into having been remodeled in-universe at an earlier point in time, the old version of the map inexplicably appears in Yagorath's card, Raze and Burn, despite the fact Corvus being tricked into summoning Raum and being exiled from the Magistrate all occurred before Yagorath was even released from her seal, let alone managed to make her way to the other side of the Realm.
  • Several members of the Resistance don't make much sense being part of the group. This notably includes Grover and Makoa, who intend to protect nature and the Temple Isles from the chaos of the Crystal War, making little sense for them to join either side. Moji has additionally been seen with the Resistance, despite this similarly making little sense, though she's since been mentioned as not being part of the group, yet her appearance with the group in Dark Tides was never explicitly deconfirmed. On top of these individuals, Evie, Koga, and Buck had joined the group, yet none of them seem to have much reason to, as they've never been shown with a notable opinion on crystals or a negative opinion of the Magistrate. Buck is additionally confusing due to Jenos fighting alongside the group against the Darkness, yet specifically isn't a member, meaning the possibility Buck joined to fight the Darkness unlikely.
  • Additionally, Siege of Ascension Peak was originally presented as a big battle between the Magistrate and Resistance, but has since been changed to largely just being House Aico against Jenos, leading to confusion on how and why Jenos began fighting alongside the Resistance.
  • In the short lore stories released around the End Times update, there are several, two of which involve Imani. Firstly, after Dredge steals her gauntlets, Imani somehow manages to both figure out where Dredge is and also arrive there herself to take them back. Secondly, after recovering her gauntlets, Imani assumes the Resistance had lit the Warder's Beacon, due to finding some trace of them at said location, to which Imani arrives at their base soon after, though how Imani knew where their base was located is unclear. With the possibility that the Resistance's base is public knowledge though, instead raises the question on why the Magistrate didn't use that information to end the Crystal War.
  • On the topic of the Magistrate, it's been established Karne's main focus is ensuring peace. While Lex has been shown and mentioned to be going after Androxus, as well as Koga and Caspian being briefly mentioned as being wanted, many other problematic characters appear to be allowed to roam freely and engage in harmful activities, such as Bomb King, Betty La Bomba, Drogoz, Maeve, Kinessa, Saati, and notably the Thousand Hands Guild (an organsation that is basically an open secret).
  • The A Conflict Reignited cinematic introduces several. The first of which relates to Karne. He's been said to be very stubborn (similarly to Valera), and has spent the past century ruling the Magistrate and working hard to keep the Realm peaceful, yet the cinematic shows Karne believing he had failed for reasons never explained, leading to him stepping down as Grand Magister, which comes off as rather out of character. Additionally, he decides to give the Magistrate to House Aico, who's been stated to not be very loyal to the Magistrate and often acts out of their own self interest, a fact Karne is well aware of due to events such as Siege of Ascension Peak, further making the decision extremely odd that Karne would trust the Magistrate to someone that he knows he shouldn't trust, on top of people that go against his goals of peace by resorting to violence when they don't get what they want as demonstrated by Siege of Ascension Peak.
  • Koga's betrayal is a more confusing one. Koga's own lore makes it clear he only wants revenge against the one that spread lies about him and led to his exile from the Thousand Hands, which he doesn't believe to be Zhin. Despite this, when Koga eventually returned to the guild, he attempted to murder Zhin for some reason. However after many years of the plotline going completely ignored, the A Conflict Reignited cinematic showed the two working together without issue, despite having never addressed the two making up.
  • The A Conflict Reignited cinematic also shows the continued discrimination of the ska'drin, yet the cinematic doesn't say anything about their discrimination has changed beyond House Aico now being in charge, leading one to wonder why exactly a resistance opposed to this discrimination randomly formed now after at least a century of this discrimination.
  • While the in-game interactions themselves aren't exactly canon, more so just containing canon information in what-if scenarios (such as what would happen if Willo ever killed Grover), these interactions are generally based on canon, leading to confusion at how some characters are familiar with others they realistically are unlikely to have ever actually met (such as Vora knowing Drogoz or Maeve), to characters similarly knowing things they also are unlikely to be able to know, such as Vora knowing Lex warned Atlas of her in the future.
• Plot Tumor: Originally, the Crystal War was the main focus and conflict of the lore, with nearly every character being tied into it some form, even if only loosely. However, both a mysterious threat mentioned in Siege of Ascension Peak and the racism against the Ska'drin, the first an offhand comment, the latter a standard part of the world, would both grow in focus to the point they overtook the Crystal War and created their own story arcs that similarly forced many characters to get involved, with the original conflict ultimately never being resolved.
• Portal Door: Some maps, like Timber Mill have transporter doors that allow you to reach the top of a building without climbing it.
• Powered Armor: Several champions are an example of this trope, bearing large high-tech suits to wear in combat.
  • Ash: Wears experimental armor that gave her the title of War Machine.
  • Drogoz: The dragon sports a suit of armor and a jetpack to boot. This suit also has a rocket launcher attached.
  • Fernando: This champion wears a high-tech suit made to resemble medieval armor.
  • Khan: His advanced armor completely covers his body and is decked with boosters, a shield emitter, a tether, and a hologram projector to receive orders.
  • Ruckus: To compensate for his otherwise short size, Ruckus pilots a mecha suit of power armor named Bolt, a mining mech that he repurposed into a war machine.
• Point Build System: You have a 15 point budget when creating a card loadout, with 5 card slots to fill up before it can be saved. Back in Open Beta, the budget was 12 points, but was increased to add some more flexibility in cards.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Terminus can't die, which sounds like a good deal, but is being controlled against his will, leading to him constantly begging for death.
  • Dredge, Furia, and Seris would all fit this... if they were still alive and not just nearly empty vessels being used by otherworldly entities.
• Practical Taunt: Using emotes shifts the view to a third person perspective and can be used to peek around corners. However, using emotes locks you out of your controls for up to two seconds, making you a sitting duck if an enemy encounters you.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Each character's ultimate ability has one that is heard by everyone on the map. Most characters have two lines, one heard by their allies, and one by their enemies, so in the case of a Mirror Match you'll know if you should run away or press the advantage the ability gives you.
• Pungeon Master: About half of Grover's lines are tree or plant puns. Even his name is a pun on "grove"!
• Quick Melee: Androxus and Talus are the only characters that can punch people. The latter is tied to a movement ability.
• Quad Damage: Headshots deal more damage than bodyshots do, 50% more in fact. For example, a fully charged Kinessa bodyshot deals 1200 damage, but under the same conditions, it deals 1800 damage when it's a headshot. This only applies to Hitscan champions^note Androxus, Atlas, Barik, Buck, Furia, Jenos, Khan, Kinessa, Koga, Lex, Lian, Raum Ruckus and Bolt, Skye, Strix, Talus, Tyra, Viktor, and Vivian.
• Queer Colors: This game, as well as SMITE, received seven Avatars for Pride Month in 2020, and seven more in 2021 that always cost 1 gold; Asexual, Agender, Bisexual, Demisexual, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, Lesbian, Non-Binary, Pansexual, Polysexual, and Transgender. Each Avatar represents a specific gender and the colors of the flags of representation of that gender. A crystal with rainbow light refracting off the crystal is also available (which represents LGBTQ+ Pride in general) as well as Straight Ally (which is to represent allies), and those too too is 1 gold.
• Ragdoll Physics: Get killed by someone, and your body will often go flying in very unusual ways. Certain types of kills avert this, and use a pre-rendered animation sequence instead (Kills with a Golden Gun for example have the enemy obliterated into dust).
• Rage Against the Heavens: In Season 1's "Siege of Ascension Peak" event, Jenos' return has been buzzing throughout the Realm. Interested in Jenos' godlike powers, Lian sends her forces led by her primus, Khan, to confront Jenos in hopes of "persuading" the Physical God to ally with House Aico.
• Random Number God: Chests and Gifts, the former earned from the Event Pass through grinding, or by buying them. They contain skins, emotes, voice packs, sprays, MVP poses, avatars and titles. The saving grace of getting something you don't want is that there are no duplicates, so once you have Invader Pip, you can't get it again, and you'll get something else instead.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: Strix and Imani (in a sense) can do this. Strix can switch between his Rifle and Luger flare gun with minimal delay, while Imani can switch between Fire and Ice at the press of a button (with a longer cooldown of about 8 seconds).
• Refused by the Call: After the Resistance retrieved the warder's relic from the "Dragon's Call" event, they were ambushed by the pirate, Admiral Dredge, who sought to use the relic's power himself. However the dragon that he summoned deemed him unworthy and struck him down. The Abyss, on the other hand, found Dredge useful and reanimated his body to continue terrorizing the oceans.
• Regenerating Health: Every champion has one that activates when they're not taking damage or using their abilities. However, it takes a few seconds for it to kick in and the regeneration isn't very fast, so it's more practical to be healed by a Support champion unless you find a good place to hide. There is an Ability card that makes this effect stronger.
• Respawn on the Spot: King of the Hill and and Team Deathmatch all spawn you at pre-determined points on a map, often near allies, or otherwise out of the way from enemy fighting (or it tries to). It's possible, albeit incredibly unlikely, to respawn closer to where you died.
• Respawn Point: On Siege and Onslaught, you respawn at your Teams' respawn area on polar opposite sides of the map.
• La Résistance: The Resistance, of course. Also known as the Paladins, they are led by Valera to fight against the Magistrate for the free usage of crystals. Their members are Barik, Buck, Cassie, Evie, Furia, Grover, Inara, Koga, Makoa, Pip, Sha Lin, Talus, Tyra, and Ying.
  • Another Resistance, dubbed the "New Resistance" by fans, also emerged following Lian taking control of the Magistrate, though it's unclear what its connection with the original Resistance is. Their members are Zhin, Koga, Talus, Vatu, and Ying.
• Recognizable by Sound: Every champion has unique voice lines divided between two groups; "VGS", a system that has player-initiated commands (such as "Retreat" or "Capture the Objective"), and "Auto-callouts", which as the name implies, has characters automatically shout out relevant information mid-match (usually when a sniper is nearby or when capping the point). Between the two, there are around 150 voice lines (that we know of), and skins get their own VGS and Auto-callouts too, greatly inflating this number. While some skin voice packs do share voice actors, the great majority are distinct and at least try to sound different to each champion and skin.
• Rise to the Challenge: The "Rise of Furia" event takes place in the Abyss, where players will have to climb the Abyssal Spire and destroy the crystal on the top. Hazards include the slowly rising Abyss and the Abyssal Lord flying around and blasting the spire. Dying during the climb will respawn the player at the lowest possible checkpoint. Destroying the crystal at the top of the spire will bring all the players to the top for a 5v5 Team Deathmatch, with the team who broke the crystal gaining additional Ultimate charge.
• Retcon:
  • The game's original lore from the alpha was completely abandoned, with new lore being made later alongside the switch away from Science Fantasy, which also lead to some character redesigns (Ruckus and Cassie most notably). According to the "A Life Unlived" lore excerpt this was turned into an alternate universe, and a place where time has stopped, and characters depicted in the old lore are namechecked and Atlas, who travels to this universe, notes how odd it all is.
  • A big retcon came when the Golden Age of peace was lowered from several centuries down to only a single century, making a bunch of cinematics, bios, and voice lines inaccurate, with Jenos no longer having spent several centuries in the stars, the Warders, Stagalla, and Paladins no longer being ancient, among other problems this change causes.
  • Originally, Mal'Damba was never specified to be a ska'drin, and when Talus was later introduced, the race was described as new to the game, though there were hints that people theorised about on his race. While it's difficult to be certain whether or not this was a retcon or intended from the start, it was a well implemented change regardless.
  • Talus was originally claimed to be a young kid, but after many years of vague comments, he was stated to be an adult, despite literally everything about Talus (voice, appearance, personality) working against that statement.
  • Drogoz was initially created as a dragon, only for him to be changed into a wyrin.
  • Fernando launched as a flamboyant Casanova Wannabe, but was later revealed as gay. Though this was explained after the fact, even the developers admitted they didn't do the best job at hinting at this change.
  • Jenos' bio originally said he returned for "some arcane purpose that only he understands", yet it was eventually revealed he returned to stop the Darkness from destroying the Realm, a goal that doesn't appear to be very complicated to comprehend.
  • Dredge was initially presented as Judd Roberts being revived by the Abyss, only for it to later be said that Dredge was almost entirely the Abyssal entity controlling him, making his pirate-like demeanor very strange.
  • It was originally said that Atlas chopped his own arm off due to the Bad Future being so dire and necessitating it. Later, a future version of Vora is blamed for tearing off Atlas' arm.
  • Androxus, both with his title and original lore, mentions him as having killed an actual goddess. However this goddess was eventually changed into being an Abyssal entity that was only pretending to be a goddess, while whether or not he actually killed it has been made vague.
• RPG Elements: Let's see, we have cosmetic weapon tiers, Item Purchasing, many Status Effects, Ultimate charge meters, a pretty comprehensive Voice Guided System; the works.
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: The various Temple Isle maps (Frog Isle, Serpent Beach, and Jaguar Falls) fit this. The various ruins apparently used to be inhabited by the ska'drin, yet the layout and function of the maps from an in-universe perspective makes little sense, with them mostly consisting of various ruined walls, stairs, statues, and the occasional small room, with nothing else around to suggest the maps were once where anyone lived.
• The Runt at the End: Gameplay-wise; Flankers and damage champions are often the most to die, and so will likely be the ones behind you to get back into the fight.
• Sailor Senshi Sendup: Battle Pass 13 is themed around this trope, with characters referencing various things related to it. They all have similar Sailor Fuku outfits in 7 different colors and one inverted, their Transformation Sequence is what they call their ultimates, all have a separate Stellar Name for each member (Star Sister IO, Stellar Sorceress Imani, Stellar Sentinel Inara, Stellar Mender Seris), Star Sister Io has Luna be a Cat; all have powers as part of the games' fantasy setting (Io's are explicitly star-related), Io is not only the name of a moon, but also related to space as part of her backstory in the game. They all have hairstyles that usually stem from this trope too.
• "Save the World" Climax: Originally, free usage of dangerous crystals was the biggest conflict in the lore, only for the conflict to be put into the background, as monsters such as Raum, Yagorath, and Nyx grab attention or have the Realm destroyed. As is to be expected from this trope, despite the severity of these entities, most of the playable cast seems perfectly content to sit on the sidelines without helping.
• Save Your Deity: Jenos and Furia, though technically neither are true deities, do fall into this, Jenos after nearly losing to Corvus' troops during the fight of the Shattered Desert, leading to him encouraging Io to join the battle and ultimately save him, while Furia ended up being saved from Yagorath with the sudden appearance of Azaan in his teaser trailer.
• Scavenged Punk: Splitstone Quarry has shades of this, with improvised, rickety machines and architecture all over the place.
• Science Fantasy:
  • The game itself used to be this, but was reworked into a Dungeon Punk setting with Magitek weapons, with some characters getting reworked designs to better fit the setting (like Skye and Ruckus).
  • Though this didn't stop characters like Saati and VII from being added, who look straight out of a modern or futuristic setting, with Saati riding a motorcycle in one of her cards; not very fitting for a world that largely still uses horse and carriage.
  • The alternate skins make use of sci-fi tropes, like the futuristic and Star Wars-inspired Star Slayer Ruckus, the I, Robot-esque Android Ying, and the Super Robot-inspired Helios Fernando, which exist alongside the fantasy-inspired default skins.
• Scenery Porn: Quite a lot of the maps, although Brightmarsh, Jaguar Falls, Warders Gate, Frozen Guard, Timber Mill, and Bazaar are simply stunning to look at. Magistrates Archive is also pretty detailed too, being filled with relics the magistrate has collected.
  • The reworked maps look much nicer than their original looks. Just take a look at the old Frozen Guard map, and compare it to the new Frozen Guard map, and it looks vastly different in terms of aesthetics.
• The Scream: Nearly every character lets out a huge scream if they fall off a map.
• Scunthorpe Problem: The game has a bit of a problem with its profanity filter that is used in the chat and card titles, censoring words that makes no sense for the game to actually censor, with the game often over-blocking completely reasonable sounding words like "Massive", "Cumulative", "Hooker" (which doesn't sound reasonable, until you consider Makoa's Hook being an ability), "Crass", "Cassie" (an actual name of one of the champions in the game) and yes, even "Scunthorpe" gets blocked by the game.
• Schizo Tech: The likes of Fernando, Khan and Ash wear large and bulky suits of armor. They are also armed with a flamethrower, a large automatic pistol, and a handheld cannon that releases shrapnel shot respectively (and Ash's card explicitly displays other people who are armed and armored just like her). Meanwhile, there may be Willo, Evie, or Cassie around, who fight with magic wands or a crossbow respectively. Other characters also use far more typical guns like assault rifles or semiautomatic pistols - though all of these guns appear to be powered by crystals rather than cartridges. A variety of cards' artwork further corroborate this trope and imply Fernando, Khan, and Ash are hardly exceptions by doing this in the universe, such as Ash's War Machine card◊ which depicts a man wearing similar equipment as her leading other troops using swords and shield into a wall breach, or Khan's Into the Breach card◊ showing an armored man on a horse holding a banner with one hand and an automatic pistol like Khan's in the other as he leads more troops armed with spears in the background into a wall breach which sees the wall's defenders wearing half-plate about to flee.
• Score Screen: At the end of each match, you will get a pretty comprehensive table of your achievements. MVP's of a given match are also shown; Best Healer, Most Damage and Most Capture Time.
• Serial Escalation: The first event, "Siege of Ascension Peak", was a souped-up Onslaught mode with lowered cooldowns and artillery fire raining down on the map. On top of that, the unlockable skins for the event didn't relate to the event at all. The second event, "Rise of Furia" ups the ante with a unique Rise to the Challenge mode never seen in the game before and elaborate skins that perfectly tie into the theme of the event.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • The type of settlement that Seris was has never been consistent, sometimes being referred to as a town, other times a city, and sometimes a village, yet nearly every time it's mentioned, it's referred to as something else.
• Self-Plagiarism: A lot of the character archetypes and abilities from this game come from SMITE. The Legacy VGS system also comes from said game, and even post-VGS-rework, the system is still called as such.
• Sexy Santa Dress: The Merrymaker skins for Evie and Lian have them in revealing holiday outfits. Downplayed with Merrymaker Maeve, who's festive dress is more cute than outright sexy.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The "Dragon's Call" event has the Magistrate and the Resistance fighting over the powerful Warder's relics, with both sides sending out their finest warriors for the dangerous mission. The subsequent event, "Dark Tides" reveal that the Resistance won and retrieved the relics. However, they were ambushed by the notorious pirate, Admiral Dredge, who stole the relics before the Resistance even had a chance to use their power, rendering their whole mission moot.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Several champions have one.
  • Barik's blunderbuss is pretty weak at long range, but he reloads all of his shots at once and does decent damage at mid-range. Averted with the "Tinkerin'" Talent, which makes his blunderbuss fire slugs for longer range precision shots.
  • Buck, being a flanker, has a strong shotgun that needs to be reloaded one shell at a time (and can be fired before being fully reloaded). It can also fire a net that slows enemies to prevent them from escaping.
  • Makoa, being all about reeling in enemies, naturally has a cannon that does more damage the closer you are to someone.
• Shoddy Knock Off Product: Was widely accused to be this for Overwatch upon release of the Open Beta, as the two are Dueling Works. What Paladins developers claimed to have happened was simply both games playing Follow the Leader with Team Fortress 2, and it was only coincidence some character archetypes and abilities were present in both games.
• Shoot the Builder: As with Shoot the Medic First, this applies to Barik and his turrets and barrier (and Inara too, as she technically "builds" walls). His turrets can heal him if the Barik has taken a card to allow for it, as well as have a shield when the rocket boots are activated, so it's best to try and prioritize him after Healers.
• Shoot the Bullet: You can destroy Bomb Kings's sticky bombs this way. On a similar note, you can also kill deployables by shooting at them (faster with Bulldozer), the sole exception being Atlas's Barrier, which instead absorbs all damage and projectiles that pass through it.
• Shoot the Medic First: Since Support champions are the backbone of any team, they are top priority to be taken out.
• Shout-Out: Enough to warrant its own page!
• Short-Range Shotgun: Bucks' Shotgun does heavy damage up close, but is practically useless against targets at a distance. This isn't because of bullet spread, which is actually pretty reasonable, but because of damage falloff that makes lots of weapons in-game (sans Sniper Rifles) near-useless at long range.
• Similar Squad: Every champion on either team can look identical to each other, but more often than not wont, due to a variety of cosmetics being adorned by each player.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Seris and Furia were sisters who are opposed to each other. Seris is associated with the dark and evil Abyss, while Furia is associated with the bright and "invested in better PR" Pyre.
• Single-Use Shield: This is how deployables and Shields work. You can use their powers temporarily, but often have a hefty cooldown for doing so (Bariks' turrets being the exception to this).
• Sigil Spam: Crystals of different colors and shapes are everywhere in this game. They're found throughout maps, on champions' attire, as a type of currency, and in the game's logo.
• Skill Gate Characters: Each class has one permanently unlocked champion that is easy for beginners to use and learn how to play that class. There's Fernando for Front Line, Pip for Support, Viktor and Cassie for Damage, and Skye for Flank.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: The skins are quite silly, but the story is played dead seriously.
• Slow Doors: Gates can be found on Bazaar on both sides, which only opens for specific teams on their specific side of the map.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • There are tons of sound cues in the game. There are the distinct sounds of each champions' weapon and abilities, the Ultimate cries that can be heard from anywhere on the map, the jingling tune when your Regenerating Health activates, and the chime that plays when your Ultimate is ready.
  • Patch OB 59 introduced context sensitive voicelines that champions will utter depending on the situation. Some examples include responding to being attacked from behind, by a sniper, when an enemy is above them, alerting the team that the Front Line needs help, and notifying the player when they have a lot of credits to spend.
• Spinoff:
  • In August 2017, Hi-Rez announced a MOBA spinoff game called Paladins Strike for Android and iOS. The spinoff title is developed by a team of Hi-Rez developers separate from the main game.
  • Due to balance and performance issues, the Battlegrounds game mode was quickly removed and is being developed into a separate game called Realm Royale. Instead of playing as specific champions, the game uses a class-based system where players can mix and match weapons and abilities from Paladins.
• Spinventory: The various menus lets you rotate the character models and weapons a full 360 degrees to look at details of the skin/ weapon you otherwise might not see in a match.
• Sprint Shoes: The "Nimble" item card. It increased base movement speed by 10% on each tier. Similarly, Master Riding does the same thing for your mounts. Barik has a card that lets him turn his barrier into a speed gate, so allies get a speed boost when running through it. Oh, and he also has Rocket-powered boots.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Maeve, Viktor, Seris and Ying. They get the most skins out of any of the other characters, in large part because they are some of the most popular characters in the game, and the developers are more than happy to use this knowledge make money. To date, Viktor has 21 skins, Ying has 20 skins, Maeve has 19, and Seris has 17 (not including Stellar Menders' set of recolors).
• Stat-O-Vision: The User Interface lets you see how much health allies have, how much ultimate charge allies have, as well as their ultimate charge being printed in the text chat.
• Stats Dissonance: Lots of the attacks are heavily based on context, with so many playable characters and so many permutations of damage numbers and healing numbers makes it very tricky for any one player to work out what loadout, item picks, and talent to go into battle with for any situation they find themselves in. For example, almost any hitscan weapons' damage drops sharply with distance, meaning an attack that would normally be fatal at close range is more survivable at long range. Some characters have abilities that allow them to soak up more damage than expected; Raum can gather souls to act as a secondary health pool, meaning working out exactly how much damage it will take to put him down is hard to do. Part of why the "Burst Meta" has been so resiliant is because players tend to pick characters that have the highest chance of killing a character before they can be healed or protected.
• Stone Wall:
  • Fernando, of course. With a massive 4,600 HP (By comparison, most heroes only have around 2-3 thousand HP.) and packing a shield that can withstand another 8,000 for a total of 12,600 HP, and you also start with cards that allow you to boost the health and shield even further (125-500 HP for Fernando and 500-2,000 HP for the shield). This is enough to withstand any ultimate bar the Dragon Punch, and even then, as above, Fernando's own ultimate will stop the Dragon Punch cold.
  • To a lesser extent, Ruckus' own shield can, with the right buffs and timing, absorb a good chunk of damage. Pulling this off, however, requires health management (often activated when his health is halfway), and as soon as the shield goes down, so might Ruckus.
  • Inara not only creates literal stone walls, but can bolster her high HP with her damage reduction skill, Earthen Guard. Combined the innate increased healing that comes with the skill, Inara can potentially be immovable provided she has a decent healer.
• Stock Control Settings: As mentioned under Damn You, Muscle Memory!, The controls are different to other HeroShooters, especially if you come from Overwatch; E activates your Ultimate (not Q), Q activates Ability 1 (not E), F activates Ability 2 (Not Left Shift), and R is to reload (the only key that's the same between both). You can rebind these, however, as to not get confused if you happen to play both games often.
• Story Arc: There are currently three story arcs that have played out in Paladins story.
  • The first arc is the "Crystal Arc", which was focused on the initial conflict between the Magistrate and Resistance, though this arc was slowly shifted to the sidelines and ultimately left ignored and unresolved.
  • The "Darkness Arc" is the story arc that slowly took over, starting from Siege of Ascension Peak and Jenos' return, to Yagorath being unleashed and ravaging the Realm until stopped by the sudden appearance of Azaan.
  • The "Ska'drin Arc" is the current arc, and focuses on the new war between the Magistrate, now led by Lian, and the New Resistance, seemingly led by Zhin.
• Strategic Asset Capture Mechanic: Every mode aside from Team Deathmatch and some LTM's feature capturable points. Aside from the Shattered Desert's point being one of the seals that formerly contained the Darkness, it's never explained what exactly is so important about the specific areas the characters want to capture.
• Symbol Motif Clothing: With crystals being a powerful energy source, almost every champion has at least one crystal on their clothes and/or weapon◊, though whether or not these are the same kind of crystals or merely some kind of decorative variant has never been elaborated on.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Frontlines bully out Flanks with the two classes' similar domain of close-range damage but Frontlines have superior durability, Flanks have the mobility and close-range damage to get up to Damage champions and eliminate them, and Damage champions have the best range for pushing the close-ranged Frontlines off. Supports are largely outside of this triangle given that they are just usually disadvantaged against every other sort of champion when under threat, though exceptions can happen based off of cards and talents.
• Take Cover!: Usually bullets being stopped by terrain aside, explosives rely on line-of-sight to damage. If you can find something to hide from the explosion, you will not be damaged. It doesn't matter if it's a wall, a crate, or a tree.
• Take That!:
  • The More Than A Hero trailer. The title itself is already a jab on Overwatch calling their characters 'Heroes'.
  • Later, in the Heartbreaker Skye reveal, one of the players Skye eliminates is "Blizzard".
    • "Blizzard" often turns up as a name for AI players in training matches.
• Taunt Button: Pressing G, then selecting a right-hand slot lets you pick an emote to taunt with. There are also taunt voice responses found in the emote wheel for each character.
• Tattoo as Character Type: Quite a few champions have tattoos, like Zhin and Koga. Zhin is an Ungrateful Bastard who is Obviously Evil, while Koga has the same tattoos from his time at the Thousand Hand guild, before Zhin tried to kill him.
• Team Shot:
  • When you select characters, your team is shown in the background, doing whatever MVP pose they have equipped.
  • At the end of a match, The Most Valued Players (most damage, most healing, best flanker, most killing blows) are shown off. Players can acquire different MVP poses to change the pose of their character during this shot.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • In the loosest sense of 'teamwork' possible, the duo of Ruckus (a wily, overly excitable, overcompensating, violent little goblin) and Bolt (the mind-stone of a fallen war golem who is not pleased with having a giant mining mecha as its new body). Ruckus relishes in the violence he forces Bolt to go through, and Bolt relishes in the explosions and despair Ruckus goes through. Bolt makes it quite clear he dislikes his position, and Ruckus makes it quite clear he's a Genius Ditz.
  • Unused spawn room chatter makes it clear a good deal of the champion team ups cannot stand each other, such as Zhin and everyone else.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: A few:
  • Kinessa has a transporter, which lets her move about out of harms way. A talent lets her use it instantly, where otherwise, there's a second-long sequence to activate it.
  • Talus's Modus operandi. He has an ability called "Rune of Travel" that lets him put down a teleporter that only he can use. He puts one down, deals damage to the enemy team, then he can manually activate it to teleport back, or if the timer runs out, he'll be yanked back to the teleporter.
• Temple of Doom: The maps Jaguar Falls, Serpent Beach, and Primal Court are set in a Mayincatec temple in the jungle.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • Beta-exclusive skins, such as Fernando's "Ares" skin and Makoa's "Volcanic" skin, are no longer able to be acquired since the game fully launched, as the former was exclusive to the Founders Pack (which are not sold by Hi-rez anymore), and the latter was for reaching Level 30 while in the Open Beta.
  • There are epic-level skin rewards for reaching the Gold V rank of Ranked each season. When the season ends, so will the opportunity to get that season's skin. This was changed in season 4 so that simply playing 200 ranked games was enough to get the skin.
  • The Twitch Prime Bomb King skin and the Primal Prowler mounts are Twitch Prime's loot for January 2018 and stopped being available after May 31st, 2018.
  • The Mixer Khan skin was unlocked by watching Paladins gameplay on the streaming website Mixer for long enough. When Mixer shut down, the opportunity to earn the skin went with it.
  • Limited Skins work like this. Once the opportunity to get one passes, that's it, bar charity events that make you pay for the skin for donating, but this happens extremely rarely.
• Tempting Fate: Logically, this tends to happen. If the character makes a Badass Boast and then gets Killed Mid-Sentence, then you'll be treated to their boast and their kill quote:
  Kinessa: Try and Ru- UGH! LUCKY SHOT!
  Androxus: DEATH AWAITS YOU AL- Pity...I was enjoying myself...
• Theme Naming: At first only being a running joke in the community before being officially acknowledged and intentionally incorporated by the developers, every character whose name begins with an S (including VII) has an ability that grants them some form of invisibility.
• Too Awesome to Use: Skin Boosters, which let your team use any non-limited skin for a single match. They're rare to get as they only drop in the Event Pass, players only tend to use them if they're confident the match won't be a steamroll against them. It's not uncommon for players without one to ask for other players in the lobby to activate one, sometimes in the more extreme cases, even refusing to play altogether if one isn't activated.
• Timed Mission: The second part of the game's Siege game mode plays like this, as well as the Onslaught and Team Deathmatch gamemodes.
• Tsundere: Ash's Ronin skin turns her into one, complete with a "I-It's not like wanted to shield you or anything" stammer and "baka" sound clips.
• Underequipped Charge: Octavia and Khan both fall into this, with the two attacking Yagorath with fairly standard rifles that do little more than annoy Yagorath. Though Octavia does have a massive laser barrage she also uses, this also expectedly does nothing to Yagorath, who's had no issue fighting off numerous powerful characters all at once.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: In a Hero Shooter with very little platforming, the first half of the "Rise of Furia" event turns the game into a Rise to the Challenge platforming race that focuses on collecting power-ups and making it to the top. The second half is a more familiar game of Team Deathmatch.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: In the Splitstone Quarry map, standing in front of the molten metal fountain, or the rock grinder will get you instantly killed. Much like a payload, putting anything deployable, like an Inara's wall or one of Barik's turrets in front of a car will do nothing to stop it, the latter will come along for the ride!
• Units Not to Scale: This varies for each map, for instance, in Brightmarsh, the houses that have non-openable doors on buildings are much smaller than the larger champions, even regular sized champs, like Kinessa and Viktor, only barely squeeze into the door. They are however, the exact height of Pip, a fellow Vulpin of Brightmarsh, and so everything is scaled down to his size. Conversely, the same map has fully accessible rooms and buildings that all champions can get into, which have massive archways easily twice the size of Pip.
• Universal Poison: Any weapon with a chemical component to it (Like Pips Potion Launcher) will work on its victim regardless of whether the victim is flesh-and-blood or a mech. Oddly enough, when Ruckus is controlling Bolt, and get's Crippled or Stunned, he'll let out an exasperated "It's jammed!", and be really annoyed about it.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Capturing the Control Point in Siege mode grants the entire team 300 Credits, massively helping them to buy more Items and ensuring that, even if they fail the push, they'll have an easier time capturing the objective again in the next round.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: Fernando's Ultimate grants him and team mates near him damage immunity for a few seconds, which is useful for denying Drogoz's Dragon Punch, a One-Hit Kill. The Unstoppable Force (Drogoz) yields to the Immovable Object (Fernando).
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Despite most of the playable roster being unique or strange in some form compared to what's standard in the Realm, most other characters don't usually seem particularly surprised by it, that is, if they even interact with them at all, even though most should still logically be at least a bit surprised.
• Unwanted Assistance: A variety of crowd-control effects can make it pretty easy to inadvertently help the enemy. Knockbacks (may knock enemies back toward the help of their team or cause allies to miss them due to the knockback), Pip's ultimate Evil Mojo (Turns enemies into chickens that always start with 1500 health, meaning the enemy may be accidentally "healed" when very low on health and then allow them to survive) and Atlas' Setback ability and ultimate
• Vagueness Is Coming: In "Siege of Ascension Peak", Jenos shares with Buck the knowledge he's gained of the cosmos, including a darkness that will one day threaten the Realm. Later revealed to be Yagorath.
• Victory Pose: The purpose of MVP Poses. Generally, all champions have at least two, one to use from the start, another to unlock. They are and used for the rankings screen, as well as when you choose you character, other players
• Video Game Sliding: Combat Slide is one of Lex's abilities. It's his main mobility move, pushing him forwards at high speeds even when used from standstill or going uphill. He can also shoot while sliding.
• Visual Pun: The Rekt weapon skins make weapons look like harmless plastic toy guns that shoot foam darts. Get it?
• Vocal Dissonance: Many of the redesigned characters didn't have their voices updated with their appearance or new lore, so they don't quite match their characterization anymore:
  • Barik's redesign was relatively subtle, but he's much angrier-looking now, and his backstory was changed from him being a loud and obnoxious "Ruins Raider" to being a serious engineer who designed most of the weapons and tech in the game; his cheerful voice lines about loving mead and gold still reflect his old appearance and backstory.
  • Grohk's redesign made him larger, more muscular, and far more serious-looking, and his lore changed from "lightning gave him superpowers and made him a crazy outcast" to "lightning gave him superpowers and brought him the respect and leadership of his tribe", but he still has silly voice lines more suited to his old look and characterization (like singing "It's not easy being blue").
  • Viktor was redesigned to look much younger, but he still has his old gravely voice and an out-of-place Russian accent (which made more sense when the setting was less well-defined).
  • Pip's appearance wasn't updated, but his lore was, and many of his voice lines still reflect his original lore where he was a thief who stole all his gear (like "You'll remember this as the day you almost caught Pip the fire thief" and "My equipment was a generous gift... okay, it was loaned to me... fine, I stole it").
• Voodoo Shark:
  • The Outer Tribunal, the law enforcement branch of the Magistrate, was mentioned to have been created to combat the constant threats to the Realm, yet this makes matters regarding the original Paladins confusing, as if the Tribunal was created first, why was another different group made to combat the threats, while if it was made afterwards, both begs the question on why the original Paladins weren't just kept around themselves, as well as the point of making a new group at all due to the Realm having entered such a peaceful state it was decided there wasn't any need for a group like the Paladins.
• Walk It Off: Players that have been damaged can just Walk It Off if they don't reach Critical Existence Failure, so long as they avoid taking damage, causing damage,or using their weapon along with abilities that count as weapon shots (even if these shots miss entirely). However, these conditions do mean that it is possible for Frontlines to throw up shields and for Supports to heal their allies while waiting for out-of-combat regeneration to heal them.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Downplayed with Lex's Sarrada skin and Cassie's Copacabana skin, who use the colors of the Brazilian flag in their costumes, but played completely straight with Ameri-Khan, who has stars and stripes on him, as well as radiating off of him. The "Freedom", "Comrade", and "Samba" weapon skins also use the same colours associated with USA, Russia, and Brazil respectively.
• Wild Card: A huge majority of the characters don't side with anyone and often do whatever they want, sometimes working with either the Magistrate or Resistance, or sometimes getting in their way.
• With Cat Like Tread: Using either Skye or Strix's innate invisibility, or Seris's dimension travelling abilities and making a fool of yourself by de-cloaking earlier than you should. On a related note, everyone has footsteps, and especially varying types of footsteps, so Khan's footsteps are much meatier-sounding, while Skye's sounds like high heels. Koga has the "Sneak Mode" emote, which makes him tiptoe with exaggerated motions while pizzicato notes play on each step.
• World of Pun: As is Hi-Rez Tradition, a lot of the games' humor comes from a large amount of puns the games has, heck Barik's name is a pun on Barricade! And then there are some skins and emotes that were made specifically because of the potential pun profit. One standout is The skins released in OB69, which were all love-themed.
• Wutai:
  • The area where Lian is in control distinctly has this style for its appearance (as can be seen in the of Ascension Peak lore cinematic and map), including Lian's own fashion sense. That being said, Lian looks entirely white herself, and Khan along with his soldiers have heavy armor that looks more like something from a Medieval European Fantasy.
• Yandere:
  • Stellar Sentinel Inara is alarmingly defensive of her friends, and similarly alarmingly obsessed with spending time together with them.
  • The Heartbreaker Skye voicepack turns her into a weird, high-pitched girl completely obsessed with love (love is in the air) and hearts... and who goes more than a little nuts at targets she repeatedly dominants.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: There are many, many dumb ways to die in this game, mostly involving throwing yourself into a pit by complete accident. Or backing into the rock destroyer in Splitstone Quarry. Or throwing yourself off the map with another person.
• Yin-Yang Clash: The Abyss and Pyre fit this to a certain extent. The former has demon-like design motifs, hate the Pyre, and love torturing people and causing destruction. The Pyre meanwhile, has angel-like design motifs, hates the Abyss, and doesn't care much at all for the people of the Realm. Despite the design motifs, the two forces don't actually seem to be Paladins' version of heaven and hell.
• You Have Researched Breathing: There are abilities codified by First Person Shooters and other similar genres that found in those games, but which Paladins does not make standard for each champion as part of their kit:
  • There's only one way to sprint in the game: by playing Viktor. Raum can similarly run conventionally, but his has a much more conventional duration limit and long cooldown unlike Viktor.
  • There are only two ways to crouch: Play as either Kinessa or Strix. Neither can manually activate this ability either, it just happens automatically when scoped in with their sniper rifles.
  • There are only two ways to punch people in this game: by playing either as Androxus or Talus, the latter being tied to a movement ability.