If you are looking for a step by step walkthrough on how to build the uber paladin, this is also not your guide. One of the best things about Diablo2 is that it seems like sooner or later someone finds a new great use for a skill previously thought worthless, and mainstream strategy changes. In this spirit I have tried to focus upon the positive aspects of skills rather than direct you in actual skill point distributions. This is not a PvP guide. I have little experience presently in PvP, and at best relate second hand tips I have run across on the boards. The main goals of this guide are to discuss the features and flaws of various skills and address issues such as hit rates and crowd control. Armed with this knowledge, you are prepared to develop the next generation of variants.
Unless you play exclusively in groups, you must consider some method of crowd control. You know you have a crowd control problem when they are arriving faster than you can dispatch them. Crowds can also pin you down while ranged attackers hammer you from a distance. Let's take a look. At the time of writing (diablo2 version 1.05), there are 6 main approaches for the paladin to control crowds:
A. Thorns/conversion - the idea here is you convert minions who get your thorns aura, which when hit return so much damage that they kill the attacker. This puts you off the front line and in a supporting role. You can use this to convert a boss' minions to take out the boss. Also, since the thorns aura has such a large radius, you can stand off and let your flunkies take that lighting enchanted boss. This method works fine regardless of player count in the game - your kill rate drops with number of players, but your monsters last longer. This method also is very nice for laggy battle.net, since you have minions to fight on your behalf and your aura will damage attackers while you are frozen by lag. Another upside to T/C is because conversion does not depend upon your attack rating, you can skimp on dex and put points into other attributes.
The downsides are many. First, there is a period of time when your conversion wears off but your minions still have your thorns aura. If you group with barbs and other melee characters, they will not like this one bit. However, necromancers, sorceresses, and strafe amazons will love you since your aura helps a necromancer's minions, provides meat shields for the sorceress, and ups the number of strafe arrows for the bowazon. According to Jinx, each minion puts a server load of 250 bytes, and the lag of an 8 player game is about equal to 4kb, so many minions can equate to lagging the hell out of people in the game. You will notice this if you play open battlenet. Next, since conversion was nerfed in 1.03, you need to put 11 points in it to get a 33% conversion chance, and you get about a 1% improvement per point invested beyond that. So you must swing more to convert. Increasing your swing speed can help, and some recommend a bit of fanaticism or holy freeze to be applied during the conversion process. This means getting your first convert may be difficult. This high level of conversion means you will be well into nightmare before the combo starts to pay off. Failed conversion attempts may hit and damage your potential minion. So if you succeed on the 3rd try, you may get a minion who has very little life left. You can compensate by using either a low damage weapon or no weapon at all while converting. Finally, the AI for your minions really varies. Anything that flees when hurt stinks, and many ranged attackers are not very useful since they do not close to make use of thorns. Some creatures are dumb as posts, while others fare better. Experiment to determine which ones work best. The worst AI flaw is your minions will stand there and not follow you. All they will do is attack enemies if there are enemies onscreen. You can compensate by exploring into a new area, and fleeing back to your old area to drag monsters into your minion's awareness radius. Unlike a necromancer and revives, you do not have a trusty golem to follow you into a new area. So many people say "if I am going to to T/C, I might as well be a necromancer." The thorns aura does beat out iron maiden from the standpoint of returned damage.
Attributes - again, take advantage of the fact you don't need dex to put those points elsewhere. A good place is vitality, since when you have no minions it will be you who takes the pounding. Energy is nice since you will not steal mana on successful conversions, but you do not need much. Some strength permits better armor usage, but your armor usage as a paladin is not as critical as maximizing shield block.
Skills that work well with T/C - blessed hammer, holy bolt, and fist of heavens work if you go the low dex route, since their chance to hit is independent of your dexterity. However all of these spells are of limited general use - holy bolt on higher difficulties will not really take out creatures, nor significantly heal minions, but at lower game difficulties it can come in handy for healing hirelings. Blessed hammer really shines in combination with concentration (see next section), but without concentration its damage wanes. In combination with a thorn army it could make a difference and may prove useful, but you may want to invest more in mana or triumphant type items to offset its mana use. FOH as of 1.05 has very little return for mana invested, and to top it off the holy bolts do not heal your minions as they are supposed to (bug). Were its cost lower and the bolts did heal, it would help out your thorns army by either healing them or helping in undead thick zones. Charge is a nice skill to consider, since it gets huge attack and damage bonuses, and can work well with lower dexterities or even lower damage piercing weapons. A bit of mana steal and your mana worries are over. Holy shield is always a consideration, as it will let you get max shield block with a perfect diamond shield. You can use twitchthroe, but if you do that your shield block will be your only defense and you will not get any resistance/abilities benefit from your armor slot. Salvation can also be of help in situations where you face only ranged attackers using spell based attacks. Your minions will also be ranged attackers who will stand off and fire. Redemption is a nice aura to consider if you opt not to use iceblink, since you can heal up after battle with redemption and cancel the thorns aura on the minions you leave behind.
B. Blessed Hammer/Concentration - the most popular combination for speed leveling now on bnet for the paladin. Concentration does increase damage on BH. The idea here is you get triumphant type items (+x mana per kill) and send off a volley of hammers, changing position between casts. Redemption even at low skill point allocations can greatly speed mana recovery. Fast cast items can dramatically speed up your hammer rate. This will fill the screen with hammers, which can do lethal damage even on hell difficulty to anything they touch, and they do this while you are a nice safe distance away. Hammers only stop when hitting solid objects, so one hammer can kill multiple enemies. With a modest mana cost, a few triumphant items can keep you mana neutral. Also by choosing concentration, you have an aura that works very well with zeal, charge, and even vengeance. Strafe amazons and other melee characters will love you (as long as you leave something for them to kill). The downsides include finding many other BH/Conc paladins out there with you, learning how to take advantage of the spiraling hammer cast pattern and set up a cast, dealing with mana drainers, and the possibility of a future nerf of this combo if enough people complain about how powerful it is. Ranged attackers at a distance can pose a problem to this character. Malphigian's tests show that unless you have concentration active when you cast BH, it will not receive the damage bonus - keep this in mind for flashing. Finally, many people advocate a small level of holy freeze, to be used while gathering a large pack prior to hammering.
Attributes - strength only matters for armor usage, dex is not very useful, mana is important, and life is always nice.
Equipment - wall of the eyeless - very nice mana return (+5 per kill) and fast cast is the perfect item, or a set of triumphant items. Skill adders are fantastic as each point beefs your damage a whole bunch. You will want resistance to cope with stand off casters, and a nice shield block helps against physical ranged attackers. Get as many fast cast items as you can, and a scepter with fastest cast rate is very useful.
Skills that work well with BH/Conc - well, you have many choices here. Smite is an excellent skill (see Lord Satorious' guide at the Lurker Lounge). Zeal and concentration works great, but odds are if you have a bunch of skill adders, your zeal swings can be too high, locking you up in zeal lock. Zeal works best against crowds, the very thing your hammers are there to take out. If you are going to use zeal, get a piercing scepter so you can hit. Charge works nicely against single foes for mop up and mana steal recharge. Charge/concentration can achieve stupendous single target damage levels. Consider vengeance if you have a piercing weapon, since vengeance will let you cope with physically resistant creatures better than charge. However if you get BH/conc up there high enough, even physically resistant foes drop. A bit of holy freeze can help with crowd control if you flash them with holy freeze, then switch back to concentration, but you will need a bunch of points to get your radius up there.
C. Holy Freeze - holy freeze can not be resisted, nor does its duration reduce with game difficulty. You have a chance to shatter enemies chilled by holy freeze. Duriel's aura is holy freeze. Many people 'flash' this aura. The way flashing works is that the game checks every 3 seconds or so (a pulse) and applies the aura you presently have, but only checks every 8 seconds or so to remove an aura from monsters. In principal you can use this to stack up to 3 auras for a brief 2 second interval. In practice it is very difficult knowing when you can switch. The easiest combination of auras to flash is one aura which affects enemies, followed by one aura which affects allies. Since the animation appears on different creatures, it is easy to tell by direct animation when the aura is working.
With holy freeze, the game checks once a pulse to apply freeze to approaching creatures. Since this is once every 3 seconds or so, late arriving monsters can cross a large area and reach you prior to getting stuck with HF. So a large radius on HF increases the likelihood that it will be frozen before it arrives. Some creatures are so fast that they can cross the maximum range of the aura in under a pulse, and for those a full out running retreat with the aura on helps you stick them with HF. On the other hand, since HF is an offensive aura, it will attack and activate creatures even if they are not presently hostile. This can have a negative effect if you wish to be more selective in what you fight.
This aura helps the most in open areas with multiple fast moving opponents. Also this aura can help you achieve stun lock easier when zealing, since you can easily hit a creature a second time before it completes its attack sequence. You can use hit and run tactics with this aura, where you either charge or use vengeance to make a quick attack, then back out and repeat before they get a chance to counter.
The downside to this aura is it does not enhance either your attack rating or your damage, so you will need to compensate by considering piercing weapons (for zeal, not needed for charge) and possibly concentration to up base damage on vengeance or charge. Many people will build characters around other combat skill/aura combos and rely upon flashing HF for crowd control. Learning how to time flash is a bit tricky, and it is sound policy not to flash unless you have retreat space established (so if the HF unsticks, you have running room to use until you can stick them again).
Attributes - your build here varies depending upon whether you are using HF as your main aura or if you are just flashing HF to help out another combo.
Equipment - items which slow (Cleglaw's, etc) add to the slowing from HF. Also chilling will also slow. So vengeance on a slowing weapon with Cleglaw's while HF is running can really slow an opponent down. If you find one of these, try it out.
Skills which work well with HF - concentration will beef up damage, and many use charge with HF (frost chargers). Zealots can benefit from HF. If you want a huge relative speed difference, flash HF and switch to fanaticism with your attack speed tweaked. Vengeance is nice as the cold slowing stacks with the HF, but getting your hit rate and damage up there and at the same time to make mana steal work is difficult. An interesting use is to use HF while converting minions for T/C, then switch to thorns once you have minions. Some like to flash conviction and HF, but since the animations overwrite, it is difficult to time aura switches.
D. Alternating smite - Lord Satorious claims that you can take advantage of the knock back and stun effect of smite to thin a crowd with a smite paladin (smiteadin or smackadin). The approach involves the usual smite paladin build (see smite in this guide), and an emphasis upon obtaining a very fast weapon speed. As smite's attack speed is linked to your weapons speed, you can speed up smite to very fast levels. When faced with crowds and fast smite, you alternate between stunning each foe one at a time. With maximum stun length (4 seconds for level 20 smite), you can stun and re-stun your targets repeatedly until they die, facing only one at a time.
E. Defiance - the strategy here is to maximize your base defense rating, then boost it with holy shield and defiance. As long as you do not run and stay relatively close to monsters of the same level and are careful about getting the best defense you can find, defiance will permit you to stand in a large crowd and be hit so infrequently that you are never in real danger. However, this is not foolproof - a mixed crowd of, say, breeders and abyss knights can be a real problem, since you will be surrounded by a vast sea of dogs and be taking ranged attacks from the abyss knights the entire time. See Shocklance's guide at the Lurker Lounge for further use of this aura.
F. Item methods of crowd control - at this point there are 2 good ones that I have used, (1) iceblink + zeal, and (2) knock back + blind + zeal.
Iceblink and zeal works great. Iceblink's freeze duration increases with character level (duration in seconds = (100+ 2*clvl)/25, halved in nm, quartered in hell), which offsets to some extent the freeze duration reduction imposed by higher difficulty games. The way this strat works is you zeal, freezing foes you hit within your weapon's reach. Later arriving foes can not reach you due to the frozen intermediates unless they have long weapon reach. You continue to zeal until everything is dead, and nothing you hit counter attacks (excepting bosses, who will not freeze, they only chill). This is fantastic against leapers, who freeze and do not leap away, and this works great against reanimators such as souless ones in act 2. Your main goal here is to make sure you will always hit or have a high hit rate, which means either conviction or a piercing scepter.
The problems with iceblink and zeal are (1) monsters with long attack reach can attack over their companions (e.g. doom knights), (2) you have no corpses for necromancers, barbarians, or redemption, (3) you can get blocked by frozen enemies, making yourself a sitting duck for ranged attackers and reducing your ability to flee or respond to a changing field, (4) you tie up your armor slot with armor which provides little in the way of resistance or defensive value. If you realize your limitations with this armor and avoid zeal when facing ranged attackers or creatures with long weapon reach, you will find iceblink a fun way to play the game.
Knock back, blind, and zeal - the way this works is you get a knock back item (Cleglaw's Pinchers or a weapon of the bear), an item which blinds target (coif of glory), and zeal. Each time you zeal and hit, you will knock back and blind one creature. Since it is blinded and out of melee range, it will just sit there until blindness wears off. You can pin one creature against a wall and zeal on it and you will lash out at all subsequent arriving creatures, blinding and knocking them back. Even a modest 3 swing zeal is sufficient to send off foes faster than they arrive. The advantages of this are that you do not shatter corpses, and blinded foes out of melee range will neither melee attack, flee, or use a ranged attack. A fast zeal using this can disrupt a lightning enchanted boss from emitting charged bolts if you can hit him again before he recovers from knock back. Also your armor slot is free for whatever you want (A good choice is Rattlecage, which will give you a chance at crushing blow, and your coif of glory prevents the undesirable flee effect of Rattlecage). The downside to this approach is you can not click and hold zeal unless you have pinned your main target against a barrier, so you must single click zeal in open field situations. Also it can be annoying chasing down a knocked back foe, but again you can compensate by lining up your attack to knock them into a barrier.
where p is the attackers chance to hit, a is the attackers attack rating, d is the defenders defense rating, L is the attackers level, and l is the defenders level. This percent can be no greater than 95%.
For a piercing weapon, d=0, and the equation becomes
p = 100*{2L/(l+L). You can hit creatures at the 95% level with a piercing weapon who are roughly 10% higher in level than you. If you are 2/3rds the monsters level, you will hit it 80% less than you would a creature of your own level.
For facing creatures of your level it becomes,
p =100*{a/(a+d)}
If you solve for a in the case of the hit limit (%=95%) we find
a = (p/100)*d/(1-p/100) = 19*d
So to get a 95% chance to hit a creature of your level, you need nineteen times its defense rating. Hell urdars (see their info at Darkness) have a 481 defense and level 82. To hit them at level 82 95% of the time, you would need an attack rating of 9139. Since most people are not level 82, their required attack rating is even worse.
Since attack rating = dex*4, this means you would need over a 2000 dexterity to hit such a beast with a normal attack with no enhancements. This is where piercing weapons and conviction come in.
For conviction, the attack rating needed to hit a creature of your level 95% of the time is
a = 19*d*c, where c =(1-C/100) and C is the percent reduction in defense from conviction. For a level 10 conviction, C = 80%, c = 1/5, and
a = (19/5)*d = 3.8*d = 1830 attack against that same hell urdar.
Now this is a much more reasonable number (still not as reasonable as piercing), and is livable. Consider a paladin with 90 dex, a +200 attack rating item. His base attack is 560. For the different attack skills
sacrifice, level 20 - 115% attack is 1184. He will hit that urdar at level 82 71% of the time. This is ok, since misses do not hurt martyrs so much.
vengeance, level anything, 20% attack rating boost, attack is 672, he hits that Urdar 58% of the time. Better bring some mana potions or have a huge mana steal.
zeal, 4 swings, 25%, attack rating is 700, hit at 59%. You will not get stun lock here. Add fanaticism, level 20 (i.e. he flashes conviction), attack-rating goes up to 1456, hit rate is 75%. That isn't much, better get a piercing weapon if you want stun lock. If you do pay attention to weapon speed (greatly enhanced scepter or better + a few other attack speed increasers) you can live with a hit rate as low as 50% in hell, particularly if you flash HF.
charge, level 20, 335% attack, rating is 2436, or hits 84%. This is nice, and probably will suit him well.
So conviction at a decent level can make non piercing weapons hit with high percentage rates on the toughest difficulties, but you will need to invest more points in both the skill and some in dexterity and get a nice imbue on a weapon to hit well. Conviction levels maxed out will really help offset hell monsters defense. Charge has a much higher attack rate than other paladin skills, and those who like zeal stun lock better consider piercing.
So what can you do if you go with piercing? You can do the 20 dex paladin, and pump those points elsewhere. A word of caution though - piercing and enhanced damage is a rare shop sell, and if you do not get it on an imbued weapon, you will always be lacking somewhat in base damage. Putting those points saved on dex into strength can help somewhat if you get a fairly nice piercing weapon.
The 95% hit rate covered in this example is high. In reality descynchronization between the client and server can make you miss far more than your stated miss rate. You can over come this with shift-zeal, which lets the server decide where the target is.
Lets consider 75% hit rate as a reasonable target for most skills for which stun lock is not critical.
If you assume l=L (attacker and defender's levels are equal) you get
p=[a/(a+d)]
With the 75% hit rate criteria, you find
a = 3d = 1443 for our ultimate target, the hell urdar
also we know a = 4*dex -28, where dex is your dexterity
The level difference factor, [2L/(l+L], matters. Here specifically are some numbers
Here I have listed the required dex, or the 'dexterity equivalent' needed to hit the creature. Fortunately skills and items provide bonuses. For items which convey a fixed attack rating bonus, think of the dexterity equivalent of the item as the attack value divided, by 4,
Dex Equiv = Attack/4
So something like a 150 attack meteoric ring or a 150 attack kings weapon has a dexterity equivalent of 37.5. Add up all your dexterity equivalents from your items and add it to your dex. You still see that even with a lot of stuff, you fall short. Fortunately, most skills provide a percentage increase to attack rating. See the following table for instances of typical attacks, and the required dexterity (assumes hell urdar, you are level 82).
(table assumes skill level 20 in the said skill, which for many is an impractical level of skill).
So a max mace mastery/WW barb needs 106 worth of dexterity. A kings martel and a meteoric ring would drop this by 75, or 31 dexterity. Since barbs start with 20 dex, this explains why many mace/ww barbs can get away with not pumping dex at all.
Some skill forms are not listed. I will try to show how the equations change.
For conviction, you rewrite the first factor as
[a/(a+(1-conviction/100)*d)]
where conviction is the percent you reduce the defense by. For a lvl 10 conviction with 80% defense reduction, our hell urdar drops to a defense of 96.2, and you only need a 289-attack rating or a dex equivalent of 79 dex to hit it.
For bashing where you drop a defense by an amount each hit, the factor becomes
[a/(a + (d-N*b))]
where N is the number of hits, and b is the bashing reduction (max is 40 per hit). This can be very significant against tough bosses. For our hell urdar, this is
Hits Dex 0 368 1 338 2 308 3 278 4 248 5 218
or you can see a -40 def per hit weapon drops the dex requirement by 30 per hit for our hell urdar.
For inner sight, you write the equation as
[a/(a + (d-IS))]
At lvl 20, IS grants -72 def, dropping our urdar to 409 def and taking your dex requirement from 368 to 314.
Because paladins do not have much in the way of defensive armor enhancements, armor by itself will always prove inadequate as a sole means of defense. Only a barbarian with the combination of shout and iron skin or a paladin who specializes in high defense armor and the defiance aura can achieve high enough defense values to make armor meaningful for the highest difficulties. Much of this is due to the fact that bliz fudged monster attack ratings by a factor of 4.
Let P = p/100 from the previous section, then
d = a*(1-p)/p
To equal maximum shield block, armor must have p=0.25 (a 25% chance to be hit, which equals a 75% shield block). In this limit
d = 3*a
Since bliz fudged the attackers rating by 4, the true equation is
d = 12*a, where a is the attack rating listed
Now lets amble back to our hell urdar, who has a listed attack of 380-514. On average this urdar has a 447-attack rating, so to get hit less than 25% of the time you would need an armor rating of 5364. Now you will be doing well to achieve without aura a 1000 rating, and even if you had maximum defiance with +260% defense, you would only reach 3600 defense, which falls short of a 75% block shield. So armor by itself will never cut it for the paladin even with defiance.
How useful is armor in combination with shield? Assume you can get an armor rating equal to the listed attack rating of creatures you face. This is a modest armor level. The first term of the %chance to be hit equation goes to 0.8, since the creature's actual attack rating is 4 times higher than listed. Against creatures of your level and assuming you have maximum shield block, you would go from 1 blow in 4 landing to 1 blow in 5 landing. This is noticeable, so some moderate level of defense does help.
Paladins get the best blocking percentages of all classes and they also get holy shield. Holy shield is designed such that the maximum blocking addition it yields takes a tower shield or a pavise to the 75% maximum blocking percent limit (54% +21%). There is also twitchthroe with its +25% block percent, which can take a tower shield or pavise to the max. A third option is to imbue a pavise or a tower shield and hope you get the 'of deflecting' ability, which will add 20% to the block rate, reaching 74% block. Such a shield can in principal be better in many ways than 20 points in holy shield + a perfect diamond tower/pavise. Holy shield also ups smite damage, and if you go the route of a smite paladin, you will want it. The defense bonus of holy shield only applies to the shields defense, so exceptional shields work better with holy shield.
Prayer - useful early game, particularly if you use hirelings. Its healing rate trails off in utility for the later difficulties.
Resist lightning, resist fire, resist cold - useful for hardcore, you can probably compensate with scepters or base resistance until you get salvation at level 30 otherwise.
Defiance - the foundation of the Defiant paladin, see Shocklance's guide for details.
Cleansing - although in most instances modest poison resistance or duration reducers will make poison not a threat, most people forget that cleansing reduces curse duration. In hell difficulty, oblivion knights with iron maiden can stick you for a long, long time, and cleansing will speed this up. Town portal also will achieve the same result, if you visit the healer.
Vigor - my main use for this is to cross vast areas previously cleared. Some enjoy using this in combination with charge to speed up your charge attack speed. Vigor is popular with the PvP crowd. Late game chargers probably will want to use concentration instead to overcome high monster life. A good party aura to help the party move as a unit faster. Another worthwhile use is against obsidian knights with charge - by reducing the time it takes you to complete a charge, it minimizes your chance of getting hit with iron maiden, and also it lets you offset slowdown if you get decrepified.
Meditation - another nice party aura, you will be loved by sorceresses and necromancers who will use this to gobble up all the experience, leaving you with a warm fuzzy feeling that you helped them level faster than you. Seriously, you can use meditation as a means of mana recovery, and this is really nice if you use either iceblink or adventure with glacial spike sorceresses or others who need corpses and do not want you using redemption. Maximum meditation will refill your mana orb in less than 30 seconds, and can really help with FOH or BH.
Redemption - in solo play, this is a cheap way to refill after a big battle. Just walk back and forth over the corpse pile. For multiplay, it will not benefit your party members and may actually annoy barbs that like to find potions or necromancers who reanimate. Do not use this if you intend to go with iceblink.
Salvation - a nice stopgap skill until you find equipment, which gives you high resistance naturally. Most paladins do not plan upon using salvation as their primary aura, as they need auras to assist in either crowd control or enable their primary attack to function well in the higher difficulties. Many find that fire and lightning resistance are sufficient for almost all adventuring and equip to trade off low poison/cold resistance for maximum lightning/fire resistance. They rely upon salvation for those times they need strong cold resistance or face dangerous poison (Andariel). For T/C paladins, salvation may be used to supplement minion resistance when your minions are ranged attackers and they face ranged spell casting attackers. A very nice party aura.
B. Offensive Auras
Might - a great prerequisite aura, which is very useful in the early game. An alternative to consider for multiplay with other paladins, as it can stack with concentrate. For hardcore, a great skill as it gives you immediate offensive power to help in survival from lvls 1-18.
Holy Fire - another good prerequisite aura, useful early game. Run around in act 1 and get a huge pack of fallen chasing you, then run this aura. They will all drop quickly with little risk. Also useful against bosses when you can trap them on the other side of a barrier such as a cage verses the Smith. This aura can be used to finish off zero hp unkillable monsters created by the charge bug.
Thorns - see thorns/conversion section. Can help for corpse retrieval and in lag situations for non converter. Great aura for normal act 3, as you can run around without a shield and drop scores of flayers.
Blessed aim - another great prerequisite aura, useful for those 20 dex paladins trying to survive until their first piercing weapon. Since it is much harder to supplement damage than it is to improve hit percentages and mana/life steal scales with damage, most will opt to run a damage enhancing aura instead.
Concentration - perhaps the most versatile aura for paladins, see section on BH/conc.
Holy Freeze - see holy freeze section.
Holy shock - like holy fire, but much higher in the tree. By the time you can use this, odds are you will be using something else. Holy shock is a likely candidate for beefing in the D2 expansion.
Sanctuary - a great aura for the 'undead paladin', damages and knocks back undead. For the knock back to be effective, you will need invest more than a few points to up the aura radius and improve your odds at getting an aura check in their time crossing your radius. Most people forget that all of the wraiths and ghouls in the arcane sanctuary are undead, and the oblivion knights and doom knights in the chaos sanctuary are undead. Also good in act 2 of the tombs. Boddozerg says that sanctuary can let you press through the skeletal hordes and get up to the souless one reanimating them. An interesting aura to consider for a bowadin, as it will hold undead off at range and let you use your bow with impunity. Hammerdins should consider running with this to keep creatures off, and switching to concentration to launch a volley of hammers. This aura will damage undead bosses (e.g. Griswold), and can keep stygian dolls at bay. Many of the most feared creatures in the game are undead, and this is a great solution for them. Seriously consider this aura for hardcore play.
Fanaticism - used by fanatics with zeal, ups attack speed to the point where stun lock is common. The attack rating bonus on this aura is nice, but not sufficient in and of itself to achieve the 95% hit rate. Reasonable attention to dexterity, attack modifiers, and weapon speed modifiers can achieve super fast attack speeds with high enough hit rates such that a few misses will not break stun lock. A useful party aura for non WW barbs, all amazons, and other paladins, but its limited radius means it is probably only useful for small 2 man parties.
Conviction - reduces monster resistance by
R = r*conviction
Where r is the uncapped resistance of a monster, conviction is the percentage reduction, and R is the monster's resistance while under conviction. So say you face an monster with r=95% resistance capped to 75%. If you have -50% resistance from conviction, R = .5*.95 = 47.5% resistance.
The natural skill most use with conviction is vengeance, as you need both the improved hit chance but also the reduced resistance makes the elemental damage more effective. This aura is still of use for non-vengeance users as a means to make high level monsters hittable. As an aside, the bright green glow vengeance gives makes it easier to spot monsters in dark dungeons, and tell the difference between minions and enemies. A level 10 conviction is a nice break point as far as elemental resistance goes and range (12yds), but for use as a defense reducer, taking it further helps out.
C. Combat skills
Sacrifice - the buzz name for characters using this is martyr. Because sacrifice scales up in attack rating and damage, it can work well in conjunction with auras, which do not increase attack or damage such as holy freeze or defiance. The Chaos Sanctuary has a nice full description of the skill. This is the only combat action, which does not use mana. You can use this very well against mana drainers, as you continue to sacrifice without interruption. Also you only lose life if you actually hit - misses or blocked blows do not cost you life. The main worry with sacrifice is overkill damage. The way this works is from the full damage you would do your fixed 8% is docked. So if you do 400 hp of damage, you lose 38 life. Now the game applies it to the monster. So if the creature only has 2 life left when you hit it for 400 hp of damage, you only hurt its remaining life - 2. Your life steal is based upon the actual life you hurt. So a 10% life steal of that 2 hp would give you back 0.2 life. So even though your life steal percent is greater than your sacrifice percent, the life lost is greater than the life gained, and you can kill yourself. Because of this, players will pay attention to life bars on targets and switch to something else for the finishing blow. If you are going to be a martyr, you will want life steal percents to be very high to compensate for overkill, in the 15-20% range. High life is also an absolute must for this skill. Develop a secondary attack like zeal for finishing or taking on low life monsters like beetles. Sacrifice is the best toe to toe solution against magic resistant bosses (charge works, but you need space).
Holy Bolt - this skill is more of use as a means of healing hirelings early on, or even low level group members. As you get into higher difficulties, you will find it difficult to use against swarms of high undead. You can still use this against undead bosses with nasty abilities like lightning enchant (Kaa the souless one), but you reach diminishing returns quickly with difficulty as the monster heal rate exceeds the rate of holy bolt damage. If you use a unique piercing bow/crossbow, your holy bolts will pierce multiple targets.
Smite - smite always hits at the 95% chance limit. Smite does not steal mana. Holy shield and concentration increase smite damage. Generally the base damage for smite on shields is low (spiked 5-9, barbed 10-20), so if you are going to develop this as your main skill (and become a 'smackadin', or a 'vindicator' if you want to use the more senseless name currently in vogue) you need to amplify it with concentrate, holy shield, and smite levels. Also you probably want to get triumphant items or items, which convert a percent of damage, received to mana or look into meditation or redeem. Crowd control with smite relies upon alternating between targets and using the stun duration (which does not decrease with difficulty) to slow down the rate at which you are attacked. You can stun lock a boss with smite and kill it fairly easily, but the mana drain is enormous. For this reason most who use smite use it in combination with something else, IE smite, then hotkey to zeal or sacrifice, repeat. Sacrifice is probably best for this as its cycle time is lower than zeal and it costs no mana and helps replenish the mana ball. Fast fingers, and one point in smite and sacrifice can fell mighty opponents. Some do not like the knock back effect of smite, and the slow development path for a smackadin deters many. Iceblink disables knock back from smite.
Zeal - this attack is remarkably effective even at low skill levels. In fact you want to avoid putting many points in this at all. The reason is that zeal swings in series - from one target to the next until all swings are done, then it repeats. Until you complete the entire swing sequence, you can do nothing else. Fortunately if you are hit, your zeal sequence is interrupted and you can exit. So forget about using a slow pole arm with zeal unless you go to great lengths to enhance weapon speed (maybe fanaticism + other adders). Your inability to change action during zeal is called 'zeal lock'. The skill works much like the Amazon skill strafe or fend with limited swings. Paladins who mainly use zeal (zealots) often seek piercing scepters with the greatly enhanced weapon speed modifiers, and they try to wear other attack speed enhancers like Goldskin and fast gauntlets. Those who use fanaticism ('fanatics') as well can obtain 3 frame attack speeds (about 8 attacks per second). Because speed is enhanced by removing frames from the attack sequence, your weapon speed increases in discrete steps. Three frame zeal is achieved for a cutlass of quickness, SAIS gloves, Goldwrap, Twitchthroe, and lvl 16 fanaticism. Another great enhancer for zealots is a crushing blow item such as goblin toe boots. Typically damage is less for zeal than other attacks, and crushing blow items with a high swing rate can compensate for lower base weapon damage. Zeal is a fantastic skill for clearing beetles, but is dangerous to use against lightning enchanted bosses when your frame rate is too slow to achieve stun lock ( I think 5 frames + knock back does it, or 4 frames on its own). Presently there is a bug that prevents zeal from hitting monsters as they close. There is much discussion over how many points to put in zeal. Personally I recommend 2 points in zeal for a 3 swing base zeal. What this does is give you room for +all skill adder items later on. As you start to exceed 5 swings with zeal, you must pay greater attention to speed issues and its utility is reduced. If your plan calls for more skill adders, only use one point with zeal.
Charge - perhaps the most bang for the buck, this skill gives both huge attack and huge damage bonuses. At maximum development, a small attack rating bonus translates into a huge adjusted attack rating. Characters without heavy attack rating investments should consider charge as a secondary attack. With reasonable mana steal and charge, you can recover its cost easily. The main disadvantage of charge is you can not execute charge if you are within melee range. Many back off, and charge another time. Scorch points out that long weapons like pikes mean you need to back off further before you can charge. Charge does knock back opponents, and you can immediately charge a second time (click and hold). Sometimes you will observe no knock back when the creature blocks your charge, or it is knocked into another creature or some kind of barricade. Your foot speed effects charge speed, so get fast boots - some use vigor. Beware of oblivion knights and decrepify, as they can slow you down locking you up in a charge, which never completes, and bone spirit you (which also is something to beware of in PvP vs. necromancers). In 1.03 I vividly remember charging DeSeis, only to be hit with decrepify and then have his thieving function deleplete all my potions from my belt before I could even complete the charge. You can not break out of a charge until it completes. You can charge with 2 handed weapons and do even more damage, and mauls and martels with their great damage and short reach seem ideal for this purpose. Charge in combination with holy freeze makes disengagement and a second charge much easier. Charge in combination with concentration does huge damage, one-shot killing stuff even in hell difficulty. Charge lets you close distance with a target, even if you have run toggled on, and receive full defense from your armor, so you can use charge to close and some other skill to melee and not worry about defense reductions from running.
Vengeance - characters who use vengeance as a primary attack are called 'avengers'. As of 1.03, this skill is bugged and does double damage as long as you do not have elemental damage adders. Like sacrifice, it lets you do big single shot damage. Where sacrifice shines against magic resistant foes, vengeance shines against physically resistant foes (wraiths, swarms, vampires, will-o-wisps). Zeal, charge, sacrifice, and blessed hammer all work against physical resistance, and only FOH and vengeance work against elemental resistance. Vengeance is probably your best hope of dropping a teleporting stone skin boss. The pitfalls of vengeance are (1) its high mana cost, (2) it can be resisted, and elemental resistance is more common than physical resistance. The mana cost problem is compounded by misses and blocked blows (you spend the mana regardless of if you hit), and the fact that it does not enhance the base physical damage so your mana steal is less. Some go with concentration to help out on base damage, and some go with conviction to improve the attack rate. Flashing conviction and using concentration would result in the most powerful vengeance possible. Conviction also improves elemental damage (see offensive auras) which offsets to some extent the second problem. There is no way to reduce physical resistance in the game. As martyrs need to go heavy on life steal, avengers need to go heavy on mana steal. The items which convert a damage fraction to mana can also help make vengeance break even. Cold length is solid and when combined with HF can really slow monsters. You can take out hell difficulty creatures with a well developed vengeance. If you are going to go with vengeance as your main attack, you should plan on maxing conviction and getting a huge base damage weapon, which will improve your mana steal and compensate for a lower hit rating. See my avenger guide at the Lurker Lounge for more details.
Blessed Hammer - see the section on crowd control for a discussion of this skill.
Conversion - see the section on crowd control for a discussion of this skill.
Holy Shield - see the section on defense and blocking for more discussion. You get 3 minutes duration and maximum shield block percent at level 16.
Fist of Heavens (FOH) - rumors abound concerning this level 30 skill. First of all some claim FOH is a great PK skill. For this to be true, it would have to do far more than its listed elemental damage of 153-192 at level 20, which btw costs 63 mana. Even assuming 100% enhancement from conviction, this damage level for mana cost is meager, paling in comparison to the 730 damage a single 20th BH/20th conc does at a fraction of the mana cost. The main PvP use for this is against a low life opponent such as a necromancer or sorceress as a surprise move to get them at a distance. Early on I saw reports stating that FOH could be used in combination with redeem and thorns/conversion to heal minions while doing damage, however more recent reports indicated that FOH does not heal players at all, limiting the usefulness of its secondary holy bolts. Who knows if it heals minions. Perhaps a BH/conc paladin best uses this skill, as he would have the mana to even attempt to use it for multiple casts.
To summarize, start your process in finding the ideal paladin by thinking about which method of crowd control appeals most to you. Also decide early how you wish to address the problem of hitting hell difficulty monsters, either via conviction or charge or piercing, or by vast dex and or meteoric rings. After you have these aspects nailed down, then consider all other paladin skills for how they can help your character. If you have plenty of play time, make a jack of all trades paladin and try out the various combinations through mid nightmare, keeping in mind that some combinations only become really effective for heavy point investments. Once you know what you like, build your paladin.
Navigation:Home 
Strategy 
