As a former paladin here are my 2 cents.

Paladins are totally out of meta, they are only usefull on new servers until lv 400-500, then they are replaced by barbarians, that can tank aswell but dealing more damage with a better skill pack.

Paladins must deal 8x damage just because the currently meta is about mobing creatures, not standing close to a wall, in special paladins that are supposed to tank for the team.

Paladins also need a taunt spell, sometimes when we are team hunting, in special in lower levels its hard to mages to come close to the "box" to pass the monsters to the paladin, so with a single target ranged spell and a AOE 4x4 taunt, this would give the game new mechanics to hunt

Another upgrade that paladins could use is buff on healing, Heaven's Aid heals around 20% more than recuperation, on high levels its not even that much, so my recuperation heals around 2700, if I were a paladin it would be 3100-3200. The problem is life steal is op right now, I can safely heal over 5000+ per round with just life steal (around 2200x8 damage on rage of fury 17200 x 34%). So I beleive paladin heal should've be better than life steal. An alternative to it is a holy water flask, a health potion only possible to use by paladins, that could heal base 1000 + 2-3 point/per level, costing 2-3k per potion (perhaps needing a quest to buy it and level 300+)


And last but not least, we need stronger creatures/bosses that requires a paladin to tank, creatures with templar priest and might magician werebear debuffs, heavily damage and perhaps switching targets, things that require a paladin to tank it.

~Tokan.

This is a topic worth discussing.

Life steal is like a bargaining chip, you need to have enough hp to "lose" and recover with life steal. This fools some novice players, who say this would solve any hunting problem.
Life steal is only effective when you have high damage and creatures to drain.

By doing some math, we can analyze life steal in other ways.
* if I have 10000 hp, and lose 4000 per turn, I would need to recover in order to stay in the hunt.
I could heal myself with traditional magic or use lifesteal.

-traditional healing depends only on me, no matter how many creatures attack me. this way we could heal a high value even with a single creature available.

-life steal depends on your damage and your life steal %, combined with the number of creatures you can damage (LS only works when you hit then, ok??); If you have 20% life steal and deal 3000 damage per turn to each creature, you will recover 600 HP per turn for each creature you damage. this way, you will only recover the 4000 lost HP by damaging at least 7 creatures.
using the life steal % provided above by Tokan Sado (34%) on the 3000 damage per turn, there would be 1020 healing per creature. which would decrease to 4 creatures until reaching 4000 healing. So, if there are fewer than these numbers of attackable creatures, you will not heal completely with life steal.
In case we face one (1) very strong creature, it would not be possible to heal with life steal alone.
(of course, these numbers relate to characters with high life steal % and high level. which is not the case for all zezenia players).

- otherwise, we can evaluate damage reduction spells, such as paladin and warlock buffs. they directly negate damage, so while a subclass that doesn't have this type of buff, such as rangers and barbarians, receive full damage from the creature (let's ignore items, since all classes have access to items), these subclasses receive less damage and They also have access to a life steal buff, so this buff only helps with the "healing problem".

Finally, I would like to say that Tokan Sado is correct in saying that we need more challenges, it is worth mentioning that the game stopped in time for a long period, but its players did not. so we became stronger than the game had to offer in terms of challenges.
The implementation of new creatures, with characteristics mentioned by Tokan Sado would be the necessary challenge to actually see which deeper changes should be adopted or not in the subclasses.