Ok I found a solution atleast for now.
In my paddle blueprint, I added a box shape as a child of the paddle and scaled it down to match the size of the paddle, the box shape correctly generates overlap events, for the paddle I turned off all collision since it doesnt work anyway.
I cant figure out why my paddle wasnt generating overlap events. I made a BSP box, and used the editor to convert it to a static mesh, thats the only thing special about it that I can think of.