Paladins

Class hall dir: 16n, 2e, enter hall

Learning Curve	Medium-High
Damage Dealing	A-
Damage Absorption	A
Soloing ability	A-
Bashing ability	B
Tanking prowess	A-

Famous paladins: Druenarrii

With such power in all fields, it’s a wonder that paladins aren’t more popular. This is probably due more to their restrictions, rather than their kick ass abilities. Paladins can’t use marksmanship weapons – no boomerangs, throwing knives or bows, which most players like to have in their repertoire. They can’t attack anything nice or better, which is a pain when gathering equipment, soloing or tanking for clueless bashers. They have very restricted choices for guilds, not being able to join 2 of the more popular ones, bears and scythe. They can’t fall below nice, or they won’t be able to use any of their unique abilities. To level up, they have to do a set of chores, or missions, which are rather boring.

However they have some of the most powerful and unique abilities in the game, which become ‘unlocked’ as you gain levels, here’s a list:

Level	Ability	Sps cost	Description
1	Detect	3	Works out the alignment of an NPC
2	Turtle	2/round	Raises your blockiing ability substantially
5	Call	All sps	Gets you a pet horse, which does pretty good damage, but can’t go indoors, will not tank for you, and you do not get experience for whatever damage the horse does.
8	Cure	30	Heals another living being, can’t heal yourself
10	Charge	30	Opens combat when wielding a big spear or lance(maybe polearm?), when mounted for extra damage
11	Aura	75	Rather like the mage’s stoneskin spell, also provides free light, lasts about 12 minutes
14	Harm	max sps	Deals direct damage to undeads, and razar, very powerful
17	Smite	1/3 max sps	Direct damage to any nasty or worse thing, even more powerful, but more alignment based
18	Retribution	All sps	The second aura, which reflects damage dealt to you back to undeads
19	Sense	30	Sniffs out an evil being for the paladin – gives you approximate direction and distance to it

One other ability of paladins is that they have exceptionally high poison resistance for some reason.

Offensive Abilities

The paladin’s most obvious offensive abilities are smite and harm. The other offensive-related abilities are call warhorse, charge and retribution.

A called warhorse gets better with your alignment and level. As you can only get one of them every reboot, it’s best to use it purely for offensive purposes, instead of letting it take damage. A warhorse does very nice damage, probably more than an average ranger wolf – it’s useful to have it around with you for when you take the occasional outdoors kill (ogres come to mind). Don’t leave your warhorse alone for too long however, there are many horsekillers in the game who take pleasure in taking out a warhorse left alone for just a few moments.

Though charge also belongs in this area, not many paladins wield spears (because they do little damage and the good ones are two handed), and you have to be outdoors to use it, and it’s not that great anyway.

Retribution is in theory an offensive ability too, as it reflects damage back to undead. However in my testing, this damage reflection is miniscule. Considering that you can only have one aura at a time, that you won’t be fighting undeads a lot of the time, it lasts a very short amount of time and that retribution costs ALL of your spell points to cast, it seems vastly inferior to the normal protection aura. Why the ability was passed in its current pitiful form, and being a level 18 skill at that, is beyond me.

Harm is the first ability you get, at level 14. It allows you to do a fair chunk of direct damage to an undead foe of any alignment. The more saintly you are and the more evil the opponent is, the more effective it is – however it isn’t quite as strongly dependent on alignment as smite is. This makes it a good choice to use when you find yourself fighting undeads with only nice alignment..

Smite doesn’t become available until level 17, and is quite expensive, but worth every single spell point – for 1/3 of your spell point pool, you can do well over 100 damage. A saintly paladin can take down meateater (a 4000 experience kill) with just 4 smites. Of course, this ability only works on the wicked, and is strongly alignment dependent. A saintly paladin with a good flow of spell points can take down any evil monster twice as fast as any other class.

Defensive Abilities

The paladin only gets 3 defensive abilities, and only 2 can be used on himself, but boy are they good ones.

Turtle is the first one at level 2 – it costs 2 spell points every round to use turtle mode, which gives you a substantial boost to your blocking ability. This bonus depends largely on your level, dexterity and quality of shield – the most controllable factor being the shield. It is therefore important for paladins to always get the best shield possible, regardless of its weight. Fancy shields and polished silver goblin shields are therefore the best options.

At level 5, paladins get a decent cure ability, healing someone else about 30 hit points for 30 spell points.

At level 11, paladins get the aura ability. This is basically an overall boost to armour class, seemingly better than any of the mage protections (note: you can get a mage armour on top of the aura – add on some decent equipment and turtle, and you’ll be nigh on invulnerable). As an added bonus, it’s also a light source.

Skills

Paladins are very quick in almost all the skills, apart from marksmanship which they’re not allowed to touch. The best choices are longsword and polearm to start with – they’re high damage, fast and one handed to allow for a shield. Longsword is slightly superior as they’re more common, have more one handed uniques and the outstanding sword does very nice damage.

Once you have a primary skill down, you can branch out to almost any of the others. Ones which are reasonably quick and power are club, two handed sword and spear. Obviously some of the weapon classes aren’t great for a soloing paladin since you can’t use a shield.

Races

The best race for a paladin depends on your playing style – whether you plan on playing the paladin like a mage or a fighter, whether you’ll be partying a lot or soloing, working lots of skills or just massing experience using smite.

A paladin’s smites’ power depends largely on his wisdom, and to a lesser extent on intelligence. This makes the half elf’s smites the most powerful of all the paladins. The half elf also has 16 strength, enough to wield all the big weapons, and also allows it to skill very quickly. A half elf paladin is the best for someone wanting to take out the big evil kills with smite, drinking potions, using monks’ meditation a lot, and aren’t too fussed about weapon skills. A half elf isn’t quite as good as the stronger races in a party since it doesn’t do damage quite as consistently, but it is still nevertheless serviceable, and quite good with the Elvenheart unique.

The orc on the other hand, is the most fighter-like paladin. He gets 18 strength, 15 dexterity and very low intelligence and wisdom. This basically makes an orc a highly defensive fighter who can toss out an occasional blast of goodness. Downsides are that it skills rather slowly, and its smites and harms are quite weak compared to other racial choices. It is better in a party than solo as it has a more consistent damage flow instead of the spike damage of other races.

Dwarves are very popular choices for paladins. They have almost as much wisdom as a half elf, the highest strength of all the races, and lots of constitution to allow them to consume more heals, to get even more spell points to smite with. They’re quite versastile as paladins, and can play like a mage or a fighter, and are good at soloing, tanking or bashing.

Humans are worse than dwarves in every way except skilling speed at being paladins, while elves are quite bad for the same reason that elven fighters aren’t much good.

Levelling your first Paladin

A paladin starts off as nothing spectacular, but gains momentum towards the end and becomes a powerhouse by level 17.

Level 1-5: it’s a good idea to raise either polearm or longsword as your primary skill, as a paladin. If you choose polearm, try to get your hands on a hoe, Zhou it up, and just keep hitting things with it. If you want to raise longsword, it’s probably a good idea to get 4 dexterity first, either by CX or just hitting things with other skills – otherwise a dark longsword will miss too much. Once you get some dexterity, zhou it up.

You should hopefully have about 20 skill by level 6.

Level 5-10: through these levels, you’re just basically a fighter without berserk. Turtle is not great at this stage, and cure can only be used on others. Call yourself a warhorse, and patiently kill things outside with it – make dexterity and wisdom priorities, to raise your skills faster, as this is very important to get through the next few levels.

This might be a good time to start raising a secondary skill too, whether it be longsword or polearm, or the slower skills like club.

You should have by level 10 a skill of 30-40 in your primary.

Levels 10-14: through these levels, I have always found it tough going without either good equipment, or a friend to level up with. With good equipment, slap on your newly gained aura, put on turtle, and just whittle away things that are in your skill range– ogres, underground forest zombies, drakhyra guards, delair guards, etc.

With a levelling buddy, more opportunities open – you can use cure, and you can also fight non-evil things. With your aura and turtle, you’re still better off doing the tanking, but you’ll inevitably get into a situation where you have about 120 spell points and 40 hit points – this is time for your buddy to rescue you, and for you to cure them when they take the hits. When you run out of spell points and they’re badly hurt, the NPC should either be dead already or you will have sobered up enough/gotten hungry enough to heal yourself back up a bit again.

In this way, if your buddy does reasonable amounts of damage, you should be able to kill quite a few seemingly tough things for characters that low level like meateater, fairy queen, general, etc.

If you don’t have good equipment or a levelling buddy, then it’s just a process of getting yourself some armour, slapping the aura on, grabbing the horse and patiently getting experience. Don’t despair, freedom is near.

You should have about 50 skill by level 15.

Levels 14-17: you just got the harm ability. It’s time for the undead of the world to quake. What I like to do during these levels, is to work on two kills at the same time – one undead, and one non undead to gain skills on. I get equipped up, pick an undead, and harm it with all my spell points – this will probably drop it down to hurt. Then, I’ll run off to the other kill, and whack it with my weapon, eating food and drinking alcohol while my hit points go down. Once I fill up on spell points again, I go back and finish the undead off. This way I make both skills and experience, at the risk of someone coming along and killing the mob.

When you really need an undead to die fast, just go to monks’ meditation and fill up on spell points again. Also, if your harming got the undead to seriously wounded or something, it’s probably better to just quickly heal up and finish it off before leaving.

Good harm-whack pairs are: lord merrick/mound, sati + phantom/wyvern+general, meateater/temple guards+demonic priest, windmill guards+bonebreaker, anasazi spirit/guard. Of course, be careful with some of the nastier undeads, as they can very easily kill a level 14 paladin.

By the end of this, you should have anywhere between 55 and 70 skill in the primary, depending on how enthusiastic you were with your harming.

Level 17+: now you have the major ability, smite. It’s another step up from harm, and gives you much more choice in what to kill quickly. You could one of two ways. One is the expensive way – concentrating hard on getting as many smites out as possible – turning turtle off, using lots of potions, teas, meditating, etc This will get you a lot of experience, and not many skills.

The second way is the slow n steady – put on turtle, move from kill to kill, playing like a cleric, and as you get excess spell points, chuck a smite to speed up the kill. This is slower but gets you more skills and money.

With good equipment and good skills, a paladin can do whatever it likes and succeed in world populated by evil. It won’t be long before you hit level 19.

Playing a Paladin

Paladins can be played tanking, bashing or soloing all pretty well. The way to solo with a paladin has been already outlined above in the levelling section. An additional note is that a good fun way to raise middle-low weapon skills in the midlevels is to roam around with a scalping knife near the ranger camp, killing ogres with your horses – the scalps pay for your heals, and the scalping counts as missions for levelling up (wooo!)

A bashing paladin plays much like a cleric basher. You should ask your tank early on whether he wants you to smite the opponents or cure him. Generally speaking, if your tank is plenty good at healing anyway – clerics, or freedom fighters with very good equipment, or another paladin, then smite is good, otherwise cure will make the tank’s job a lot easier. If the cure option, then just monitor the tank’s hit points, and ‘top him up’ – when he’s about 50 or 60 hit points from max, just toss in a cure so he doesn’t have to drink a potion, and is never near dangerous levels of hit points.

A tanking paladin is quite an interesting character, as they can potentially be the very best tanks. With aura, turtle and a permed armour, the paladin probably takes the least damage of any tank. Of course, unlike a cleric, he can’t heal himself. To tank as a paladin, you firstly need at least one quick basher who can quickly attack nice or good aligned kills for you to initiate combat for the party. Otherwise, the party will be quite slow.

Other than that, get the best shield and armour you can, put on aura and turtle, and toss out smites when you have spare spell points, while keeping a watch on your alignment – don’t do heavily good aligned areas like Nepeth and Mount Kresh unless there’s something you really need. One special mention goes out to the Armour of Ichor – ironically the best piece of armour for a tanking paladin. Its ability to drain corpses to heal your hps and sps means you can toss twice as much smites, making tough evil kills a breeze.

Is a Paladin for you?

Paladins are a very powerful class. They’re not too good at exploration since they often can’t attack things that you might want to get past, and can be a pain to solo with after you get used to your other characters, as many of your favourite kills are actually alignment barred. However when it comes to things they can kill, (and there are a lot more evil monsters in the game than good ones) they are an unstoppable force of good. Paladins are for those who are a bit bored of their plain old clerics, fighters or mages, and want something similar but with a twist. Paladins are very powerful after reboot to gather equipment from evil aligned mobs, in a party and also soloing.

Credit

Drafted from Rhynsts newbie guide and updated slightly.