This spot report no longer applies to the latest version of Diablo II. It remains here for archival use only.
Please note that this report was originally posted within the first month and a half after the game's release. As the mechanics of the game become better understood and the game itself is updated by patches, the strategies detailed in this report may change in their effectiveness. This writeup is intended as a "character class report" to introduce the class and give one possible way of completing Hell solo with the class. It is NOT to be confused with "class evaluations", "playing guides", or "hey I beat the game like this and now I'm on the ladder so you should do everything exactly the same way I did".
Confession: I don't really like melee combat. It's the Starcraft micromanagement vs macromanagement thing, except for D2--I prefer to keep track of the "larger" aspects of combat, such as where the enemies are, which exact enchantments a unique has, what the terrain is like and where I can run if I had to retreat, and so on--and melee combat just reeks of distracting micromanagement, with its constant targeting and retargeting. There's nothing worse than having the tides of battle turn while being caught unawares without an exit strategy. Also, melee characters are the most equipment-dependent (and level dependent) classes, and I really don't like having to waste too much time either trading or killing things just for the equipment (and levels) I needed to go on.
So for my paladin, I had four combat skills to choose from: sacrifice, zeal, vengeance, and charge (smite does negligible damage). Lately I've seen some debate mostly on sacrifice vs vengeance, with a few mostly-newbie paladins trumpeting high-level zeal (heh). However, my choice of specialization was a no-brainer, given my distaste for mixing it up with the crowd. I picked the one which kept me out of melee combat the most--charge.
As with other weapon-based classes, starting with some stats is helpful. To the left is a screenshot of my paladin's stats at the end.
The first thing to notice is the mediocre weapon (for Hell difficulty, anyways). The barbarian Barons out there are probably laughing at my puny sword, since I got it in Act 2 Nightmare and never managed to find a better one (even after 3 imbues!). The charge damage and AR seems respectable, but given all the 2-3k DR barbarians out there, how can a melee class survive Hell (and solo too!) with less than 600 DR and 400 hp? Granted, it's possible to do so with some variant-style dying (no offense to the "both hands and both legs tied and 'come back here, I'll bite your legs off!'" variants out there :) ), but the fact that my paladin gained 5 levels in Hell while rushing through it in my typical rush-through-while-skipping-waypoints style of play is a tribute to his versatility--and that of charge.
Going through the game with a melee character was a definite change of pace for me. Act I/Normal with my paladin pretty much went: "Monster, chop. Monster, chop. Oh look, 3 people in the game, chop chop." All of Normal was pretty smooth sailing for my paladin; being able to smack the fetishes around up close and personal was sweet revenge for all the darts in my earlier solo/Hell runs. :) He used sacrifice early on, then switched between zeal and sacrifice based on health/mana levels, then finally between zeal and charge with charge providing the mana-intensive big first-hit on uniques. Charge became mana effective on its own (i.e. steal enough to replenish mana cost) towards the end of Normal, and zeal pretty much went unused after that (except occasionally when my paladin had someone cornered and didn't feel like running back and forth with charge).
As my paladin's charge level kept increasing in Nightmare, his efficiency only got better. Being able to kill Act 2 monsters in a single charge reminded me of his Act 1/Normal days again (monster, chop, next). One highlight: in a big Act 1/Nightmare multiplayer game, my paladin's group found a stoneskin unique in one of the open areas. As another paladin and couple of barbarians worked on the pack, my paladin charged the boss, knocked it out of the pack, and charge-locked it halfway across the level before he finally died, while a sorceress was running after us to try to help me with her spells. Poor monster got it handed to him, and the other melee fighters wondered where I went. :) (Paladins can "charge-lock" a monster by knocking it back and stunning it for a very short time with a charge, then using the knockback distance to charge again during the stun.) Towards the end of Nightmare, things got a bit heavier in Act 3/4, but even the elemental attacks didn't phase him too much thanks to salvation. As a player, Nightmare once again proved to be a very useful practice for Hell for me since playing melee classes meant a paradigm shift in terms of crowd control, but I was actually beginning to enjoy having my paladin's speed and power at my control.
Hell changed all that. A big factor here was my paladin's poor eq: in Nightmare it was good enough for him to choose to go toe-to-toe with people whenever he wanted to, and thus he had many choices in how he went after monsters. Not so for Hell. Because of his heavy specialization of skills, there was only one or two ways for my paladin to approach many situations without suffering through an inglorious retreat, and it took a bit of trial and error to find them. Charge/thorns (damages single target with returned damage preventing being swarmed and/or stunlocked) was my paladin's bread and butter, but other commonly used skill/aura combinations were charge/salvation (spellcasters), vengeance/conviction (very useful vs physical resists), conversion/thorns (used against overwhelming mobs and cramped spaces), and conversion/salvation (LEB's). Conviction is especially useful when "flashed" before conversion attempts, due to the lack of AR bonus on conversion. My paladin originally tried to vengeance/might while flashing conviction, but eventually he just stuck to conviction to smooth the pace of battle. (Makes it much easier on the player. :) ) As you can see, with all this switching of auras and combat skills going on all the time, being able to switch rapidly, accurately, and decisively is really the key to playing a paladin in Hell. In the words of Mr. T, "I piddy da fool" who plays a lazy paladin and tries to one-trick pony their way through Hell, although conversion/thorns and GFP/thorns is viable (but requires very specific character stat point allocations--dex for conversion if one-tricking without flashing conviction, and vit for GFP). Rather boring though, IMO. :)
So for my paladin, Baron Parvanor: Hell was an exercise in theory and application. The theory lies in doing the groundwork and early trial-and-error to figure out which combination works in certain situations, and application in recognizing these various situations and switching to the correct solution, all completely on the fly and usually while the red globe is dropping perilously. And of course, an level head when the monster mix gets ugly and you wish you could put 3 auras up at once. :) This is why the paladin is the melee class which will separate the newbies from the experts, perhaps even more so than the sorceress for spellcasters (especially considering how easy it is to play a barbarian). The lack of passives really forces the paladin to be skilled in order to survive alone in Hell.
A few comments about paladins:
-Thorns and conversion are probably the most obvious paladin skills (and the most obvious combination as well), but keep in mind that melee combat is required for conversion. My paladin avoided having to convert unless absolutely necessary, since I tried to avoid getting close to the monsters with his low DR, but having a tank is sometimes necessary. Thorns is used defensively by my paladin to prevent mobs/stunlock, as he did not really have the hp to go out and try to take unnecessary hits. Conversion is buggy, as I've encountered both the "attack the converted corpse" and the "0 hp after conversion" bugs quite often. Other than that, these two skills are basically as strong as they look, and using these two together exclusively is a pretty cheap but efficient way of going through Hell, although I think they can be invaluable as supplements in the paladin arsenal. (I personally prefer to run up and smack them with a charge myself.)
-Charge will not be the primary combat skill for all, or even most, paladins. I used it primarily for its speed and large damage/AR bonuses. However, I think it's well worth "wasting" a point into smite for it (although smite definitely has its uses) for all paladins, because it gives a nice "first attack" as well as giving the paladin the speed to close in on fast/far away enemies. Not being able to charge face-to-face is a bit of an annoyance, although Cleclaw's Pinchers or a knockback weapon can fix that. This is a very "safe" skill to dump many points into however, since the returns are linear, the mana cost stays constant, and it becomes very easy to steal enough mana back to compensate for its high cost with the increasing weapon damage of later difficulty levels and the increasing slvls invested. This is not an absolute "must have" skill, but definitely worth looking into and learning how to use, as learning to manipulate melee combat with charge's knockback effect can be tricky. Also, clicking on the monster and then away from the monster to get some distance to charge again can be very destructive to your mouse. :) (You thought CD was bad? How about two clicks per attack? :) ) What's important is that in addition to the big damage/AR bonuses to charge, charge-lock definitely makes charge the ultimate one-on-one paladin skill, especially against uniques like the Council Members in Travincal. It can be effective against LEB's at just the right angle as well. However, the effectiveness of both the knockback and the stun varies widely from monster to monster, so relying on charge too much has its drawbacks. Still, the rewards of charge are well worth the look.
-Vengeance is very, very useful for countering damage resists, although there's a lot of room here for personal preference as to "optimal" point investment. The problem here is mana: even though additional points into mana increases its damage and its damage/mana ratio somewhat (and more significantly, the chill duration is lengthened as well), it is very difficult to achieve mana efficiency at higher levels since it will not steal any more mana at higher levels to compensate for its rising cost. (Mana steal is based only on physical damage.) Certain damage resist monsters (such as bug swarms) have reduced hp anyways, so maxing out this skill isn't necessary.
-Sacrifice and zeal each has their drawbacks. The chance and actual effects of "overkilling" a monster using sacrifice only increases with additional slvls, and these factors will also stack with other damage modifying factors, ranging from str/eq damage to aura enhancements. Thus, it can be somewhat riskier at higher clvls and difficulties, although the higher hp pool will help reduce the risk here. The increased AR from more points into zeal is nice, but zeal-lock is pretty much universally acknowledged as a serious drawback to having too many points into zeal anyways. I personally only have 1(+1) points into it as a prereq, and the quick 3 attacks works nicely whenever I need to attack a single target repeatedly. IMO, sacrifice works well with just one point (only a 10% improvement in damage for the second point) and zeal with 1-3, but YMMV on this. High level zeal is fun to watch though, and probably even more fun to use... but standing around swinging is NOT a good thing for Hell unless you have some serious DR and hp (which is definitely not my paladin! :) ), especially keeping in mind the paladin's lack of passives.
-As far as auras go, conviction is one which definitely works better in-game than it does on paper. It's hard to appreciate what the -DR does until you actually start swinging at the monsters. Conviction makes blessed aim completely obsolete in Hell, IMO, since the -DR is percentage based and can reach -80% (!) at slvl 10, and the -50% max magic resist at that slvl isn't bad either. Although the numerical returns on it decreases by slvl, the radius increases linearly and makes it nice for more effective "flashing".
-Conviction and holy freeze are the two auras I'd personally consider pumping for a multiplayer paladin. Thorns is nice and works very well with minions, but it faces the problem of diminishing effectiveness with increasing players. On the other hand, both of these work well for multiplayer, and the radius increase with multiple points can be invaluable for the more spread-out nature of party combat. The percentage-based decreases in DR and resist for conviction works nicely for both physical and magical allies, and holy freeze is a nice defensive measure regardless of what class your groupmates are. Even though they face diminishing returns and the value of pumping them to a full 20 is somewhat questionable, increasing the radius of the two auras makes them even more party-friendly than they already are and they are among the few paladin auras which really deserve multiple points. Note that these two auras work well whether solo or partied, but can be especially party friendly.
-The staticial modifying auras (might, blessed aim, concentration, and defiance), however, are less useful than they appear on paper. The reasons are simple: not everyone uses the affected stat for their primary method of offense/defense (especially spellcasters, who rely on cold/teleport/minions for defense), and the number of auras in a group is limited by the number of paladins. Pumping concentration might work well in pub games, especially with minions (but then thorns works better with minions anyways), but with smaller, potentially more diversified groups, using conviction and holy freeze to make monsters more manageable will work better, IMO.
There's my two cents on the paladin. :) (Okay, just a liiiiitle bit more than two.) Paladins are a very interesting class, and completely different from the other non-spellcasters (amazon and barbarians) in their lack of passives. Because of this, there's a steep learning curve for paladins: other than questionable thorns-based combinations, it's virtually impossible for a paladin to just dump a load of points into any one thing and have that skill or aura being able to carry them through. The good news is that many paladin auras (and even skills) work very well with just one point; the bad news is that they work well only when *used*--and since auras are not passive (i.e. they are not always on but only one can be activated at any time, outside of flashing conviction and holy freeze), the good paladin is an active paladin. The difference among newbie, mediocre, and expert paladins is huge, and even the mediocre paladin will likely not survive long enough in Hell solo to reach Diablo. This is a multiplayer-centered class with a nice, steep learning curve for solo; I heartily recommend trying him for solo/Hell (without simply pushing thorns/conversion!) if you're up for a challenge.
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Confession: I don't really like melee combat. It's the Starcraft micromanagement vs macromanagement thing, except for D2--I prefer to keep track of the "larger" aspects of combat, such as where the enemies are, which exact enchantments a unique has, what the terrain is like and where I can run if I had to retreat, and so on--and melee combat just reeks of distracting micromanagement, with its constant targeting and retargeting. There's nothing worse than having the tides of battle turn while being caught unawares without an exit strategy. Also, melee characters are the most equipment-dependent (and level dependent) classes, and I really don't like having to waste too much time either trading or killing things just for the equipment (and levels) I needed to go on.