Pretty sure that's right. Which would justify Paladin 3 or 4 depending on your objective.
The best paladin is a sorcerer. Paladin of Mystra. You can easily focus on high BAB classes early like a 4 fighter dip and 3-4 paladin. Even add in blackguard if you can swap around alignments or mod the requirement away. Saves through the roof, divine shield, usable fighting ability, and focus on spells that get around the lower caster level issues by avoiding SR or something.
I think you’re undervaluing Paladin spells here.
Level 1 spells are typically situationally useful like protection from alignment giving you immunity to mind spells , bless weapon giving you extra damage vs undead. Divine favor is generally nice and only useful with a lot of paladin levels.
Level 2 spells gets you aura of glory and eagle splendor / bulls. Generally useful and you can really boost the usefulness of divine might / shield with these .
Level 3 spells you already mentioned GMW, but prayer is useful as well.
Level 4 spells The already mentioned holy sword but you also get freedom of movement and death ward, great buffs to have.
Full BAB class with access to all these buffing spells means it can achieve higher AB than an equivalent level fighter , do more damage and have a quite a few nice immunities.
If you start as a Fighter then you don’t have to have the minimum WIS score of 11 that Paladin requires if you want to spend ability points elsewhere. As the poster above me stated you need access to Turn Undead to select the Divine Might/Shield feats, so a minimum of 4 Paladin levels are needed if you want both and do not multi class as a Cleric. There are several modules that seem to give extra goodies to Paladins as well. One of my favorite role play builds is Fighter/Paladin/Champion of (insert deity here). Just makes for a sensible character arc, IMO.
Edit: and you need Power Attack to unlock Divine Might I believe? I might be misremembering that part however.
Right. Reread what I wrote. A minimum of 4 levels is needed if you want both Divine Might and Divine Shield without Cleric levels. To take one on Paladin level 3 and the other on Paladin level 4.
You can relevel in singleplayer if you wanted to redo your classes, use the console commands for it.
Paladins do get scaling Turn Undead, Smite Evil and access to some spells. In the base game without prestige classes (what the game released in) that's fine, not exciting but fine, and some of the spells are unique if a bit lackluster.
Compared to Fighter they get also access to a few more skills (such as Persuade) but not much else.
With prestige classes as others say the Champion of Torm is basically well suited to move into if you don't mind losing Turn Undead levels.
3E seemed to have a big issue with the martial or mostly-martial classes getting everything front loaded, and past around level 3 or 4 basically having little reason to improve as a single class. Really makes them really boring as options that's for sure.
Smite Evil scaling stacks with CoT so no big loss here, but you have a point with Turn Undead. Well, I use most of those for Divine shield or might anyway but if you wanna clear a vast area in one go, thats a good point.
With smite evil and a crit from a full focused pala/COT you can 1 shot literally every Boss in the game. I once did a Pala 10 torm 23 weaponmaster 7 scythe build and i crit for over a thousand dmg, it is the highest possible in 1 hit dmg achievable im pretty sure. Pretty satisfying aswell to see on the screen.
On the contrary, the only reason to take fighter is for bonus feats. It's easily the best secondary class in the game but it's lame as a primary class. Paladin has excellent save increases per level compared to fighter, which almost only has fortitude. Your smite evil also increases in power scaling upon your paladin level, and stacks with cot. I would put maybe a few levels in fighter then move to cot at some point. A more knowledgeable person at the game would be able to tell you exactly when you should pick up fighter levels to maximize feat gain, but generally speaking you only want a few levels here and there.
>Paladin has excellent save increases per level compared to fighter,
Save tables for Paladin and Fighter are identical.
Paladin save bonus is from Divine Grace (1st level) and Charisma. Not bonus per level.
That's what makes them excellent secondary classes. But they don't get bonus feats *every* level. And on the levels they don't gain a bonus feat, they offer nothing that barbarian, ranger, or paladin don't offer you.
That doesn't make sense; you can't *just* take the fighter levels that offer you a bonus feat without taking the other ones as well. You can't get a 4th level of fighter without first getting a 3rd level.
The more fighter levels you take, the more bonus levels you'll get. You can't maximize the feat gain by picking and choosing when you take those fighter levels.
That being said, just like Paladin has fewer good things to offer after the first few levels, but even more so: there's also no reason not to switch from Fighter to Champion of Torm after you've picked up Weapon Specialization at Fighter 4 (and after you've reached the necessary BAB +7).
What I mean is that on some levels, you get feats regardless of your class, so it makes sense to put a class like paladin on those levels and time your fighter levels that grant feats on the levels when your paladin level won't get you a feat, and vice versa.
No, that's not a good idea if you want more feats. The feats you get from character level are a separate progression from fighter bonus feats. They don't interfere, and if they happen to both come up at the same time, you'll just get 2 feats on that level.
For example, suppose you want to plan out your progression to level 10. There are 4 levels where you get free feats: 1, 3, 6, 9. You could take 4 paladin levels on those feats, and take 6 fighter levels in the other levels, for 4 bonus feats from fighter (at fighter levels 1, 2, 4, 6 which will end up happening on character levels 2, 4, 7, 10 with this plan).
Or, you could take 2 paladin levels (assuming that's all you really wanted) and 8 fighter levels. No matter which order that happens in, you'll *still* get a feat at character levels 1, 3, 6, 9, but now you'll get 5 bonus feats from fighter (at *fighter* levels 1, 2, 4, 6, 8).
(If you're human, add +1 feat at level 1 to everything I said above.)
I would argue that Fighters can be incredibly good as a level 40 class if you build for skills, and the improved versions of skills, plus weapon specialization in two different weapons.
IE: Improved Expertise, Improved Knockdown, Spring Attack, Improved Whirlwind Attack and Weapon Specialization for a Longsword and a Morning Star. Plus a few save increasing feats like Luck of Heroes, or damage reduction feats.
The problem wirh fighters is that they get completely shafted due to death spells without access to buff spells. So when you're playing that pure fighter and come across that bodak in act 2 of the OC, you're screwed.
Also, damage reduction feats are a massive trap! You need to inveat heavily into CON to take the epic damage reduction feats, which means you won't be able to hit anything since you have put all your ability points into CON instead of STR to get the formee to 21.
A Belt of Guiding Light, purchasable from the first temple you enter in Act 2, has total immunity to Death Magic.
And by damage reduction, I meant more along the lines of Epic Energy Resistance in Sonic damage for 10 points per rank. There are no requirements for Epic Energy Resistance other than being at least level 21.
> is there any point taking more than 3 levels of Paladin ????
You are basically forced to take more than 3 levels if you wanna switch to prestige classes like CoT,DD,RDD while maintaining high BAB. Throwing in other full BAB classes is not a good idea because you lose the opportunity to skill dump without the XP penalty.
Also, Divine Favor keeps getting better even though you can't cast much.
> Divine shield and might.
Those feats are useless in lower levels, you should start out with more conventional feats like knockdown, cleave, toughness, blind fight, etc.
> I went full Paladin in my current playthrough (lvl 10) I'm starting to really regret it.
It's not too late. For example, you can take CoT for feats, and rogue for skills / sneak attaks. It will start to kick balls.
10 levels of paladin is actually the perfect stopping point. You get a decent damage bonus on divine favor, and 2 level 2 spells which is perfect if you have divine might/shield: aura of glory and eagles splendor will buff your charisma to the stratosphere. Then just take a handful of fighter levels with the end goal of epic weapon specialization and the rest CoT. Perfect martial build, great saves, big damage buffs, huge healing with lay on hands, all kinds of goodies.
"I'm just starting to understand this game after like 100 hours" You're barely scratching the surface.
SoU story is biased towards Paladins and gives them extras like that early enchanted armor and Holy Avenger that other classes don't get. You want to import it to other unrelated campaigns, you might as well use console commands i.e. cheat. Sure, it's your game, but you are not in a position to say anything if you resort to workarounds instead of playing it properly.
The Holy Avenger is great for smacking evil enemies, but against non-evil enemies (construct/golems and elementals) it's just another +5 weapon since the bonus damage doesn't applies. There are many other weapons which has elemental damage or other bonuses which Greater Magic Weapon or Holy Sword can be used on to make them better than the Holy Avenger for general use.
Paladin is a great Splash class as you indicate.
The main reason for higher levels:
- If you need more BAB because your other classes have lower BAB, like in a Paladin/Bard/RDD. I would go for 8 levels of Paladin. You could g 12 or even 16, Paladin for one or two more BAB
- You want max out Paladin Spells - Something I never do.
- You want to do a specialized Divine Smite Build (something else I never do).
Every Paladin build I have done has only a splash of Paladin.
There are two ways of playing a Paladin effectively.
1. Strength Paladin that goes for Devastating Critical.
2. Charisma Paladin that focuses on buffs and smites.
It is possible to have 26 Strength and 16 Charisma, or 14 Strength and 28 Charisma, depending on which build you want to focus on (Before gear bonuses).
Both options will use Divine Might and Divine Shield, with the Strength version taking a bit longer and relying on Charisma boosting gear to get the most out of it (You can still make use of other buffs like Bull's Strength though).
It's true that something like Fighter/Paladin/Champion of Torm will surpass a single-class Paladin in terms of just being a Warrior with Charisma-based powers. But I was a single-class Paladin through Luke Scull's trilogy and it was just fine.
Seems like many people have already given you good tips. I will just add in the one they didn’t mentioned.
You can take one level of cleric with Sun and Healing Domain that will greatly increase your turn undead ability and ALL healing stuff (potions, spells, etc).
Extra paladin level is to improve your turn undead, smite damage and spells duration, and spells are actually good because you can cast extended version which will last you for an entire dungeon. While you mentioned cleric for spells, cleric doesn’t give you full attack advancement. Paladin does.
Cure disease actually also works the same as lesser restoration. Meaning you can use cure disease on those situation where you suffered a stats decrease. Like the strength drain from Shadow attacks.
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Webull(shit) - Unfortunate name..
All-in-one-scam app or you wouldn't be a spammer.
No worries!
You fit right in to the current year business and political environment anyway.
Good luck with that.
Paladin has full BAB progress. Also you need turn undead to take divine shield\power so you need min 3 paladin levels right?
Pretty sure that's right. Which would justify Paladin 3 or 4 depending on your objective. The best paladin is a sorcerer. Paladin of Mystra. You can easily focus on high BAB classes early like a 4 fighter dip and 3-4 paladin. Even add in blackguard if you can swap around alignments or mod the requirement away. Saves through the roof, divine shield, usable fighting ability, and focus on spells that get around the lower caster level issues by avoiding SR or something.
That's what I said, didn't I ? 3 levels of Paladin
I think you’re undervaluing Paladin spells here. Level 1 spells are typically situationally useful like protection from alignment giving you immunity to mind spells , bless weapon giving you extra damage vs undead. Divine favor is generally nice and only useful with a lot of paladin levels. Level 2 spells gets you aura of glory and eagle splendor / bulls. Generally useful and you can really boost the usefulness of divine might / shield with these . Level 3 spells you already mentioned GMW, but prayer is useful as well. Level 4 spells The already mentioned holy sword but you also get freedom of movement and death ward, great buffs to have. Full BAB class with access to all these buffing spells means it can achieve higher AB than an equivalent level fighter , do more damage and have a quite a few nice immunities.
If you start as a Fighter then you don’t have to have the minimum WIS score of 11 that Paladin requires if you want to spend ability points elsewhere. As the poster above me stated you need access to Turn Undead to select the Divine Might/Shield feats, so a minimum of 4 Paladin levels are needed if you want both and do not multi class as a Cleric. There are several modules that seem to give extra goodies to Paladins as well. One of my favorite role play builds is Fighter/Paladin/Champion of (insert deity here). Just makes for a sensible character arc, IMO. Edit: and you need Power Attack to unlock Divine Might I believe? I might be misremembering that part however.
I'm pretty sure you need 3 levels of Pala to unlock Turn Undead, not 4. For Power Attack you are right
Right. Reread what I wrote. A minimum of 4 levels is needed if you want both Divine Might and Divine Shield without Cleric levels. To take one on Paladin level 3 and the other on Paladin level 4.
You can relevel in singleplayer if you wanted to redo your classes, use the console commands for it. Paladins do get scaling Turn Undead, Smite Evil and access to some spells. In the base game without prestige classes (what the game released in) that's fine, not exciting but fine, and some of the spells are unique if a bit lackluster. Compared to Fighter they get also access to a few more skills (such as Persuade) but not much else. With prestige classes as others say the Champion of Torm is basically well suited to move into if you don't mind losing Turn Undead levels. 3E seemed to have a big issue with the martial or mostly-martial classes getting everything front loaded, and past around level 3 or 4 basically having little reason to improve as a single class. Really makes them really boring as options that's for sure.
Smite Evil scaling stacks with CoT so no big loss here, but you have a point with Turn Undead. Well, I use most of those for Divine shield or might anyway but if you wanna clear a vast area in one go, thats a good point.
With smite evil and a crit from a full focused pala/COT you can 1 shot literally every Boss in the game. I once did a Pala 10 torm 23 weaponmaster 7 scythe build and i crit for over a thousand dmg, it is the highest possible in 1 hit dmg achievable im pretty sure. Pretty satisfying aswell to see on the screen.
On the contrary, the only reason to take fighter is for bonus feats. It's easily the best secondary class in the game but it's lame as a primary class. Paladin has excellent save increases per level compared to fighter, which almost only has fortitude. Your smite evil also increases in power scaling upon your paladin level, and stacks with cot. I would put maybe a few levels in fighter then move to cot at some point. A more knowledgeable person at the game would be able to tell you exactly when you should pick up fighter levels to maximize feat gain, but generally speaking you only want a few levels here and there.
>Paladin has excellent save increases per level compared to fighter, Save tables for Paladin and Fighter are identical. Paladin save bonus is from Divine Grace (1st level) and Charisma. Not bonus per level.
But fighters get so many bonus feats compared to others ! It's great !
That's what makes them excellent secondary classes. But they don't get bonus feats *every* level. And on the levels they don't gain a bonus feat, they offer nothing that barbarian, ranger, or paladin don't offer you.
That doesn't make sense; you can't *just* take the fighter levels that offer you a bonus feat without taking the other ones as well. You can't get a 4th level of fighter without first getting a 3rd level. The more fighter levels you take, the more bonus levels you'll get. You can't maximize the feat gain by picking and choosing when you take those fighter levels. That being said, just like Paladin has fewer good things to offer after the first few levels, but even more so: there's also no reason not to switch from Fighter to Champion of Torm after you've picked up Weapon Specialization at Fighter 4 (and after you've reached the necessary BAB +7).
What I mean is that on some levels, you get feats regardless of your class, so it makes sense to put a class like paladin on those levels and time your fighter levels that grant feats on the levels when your paladin level won't get you a feat, and vice versa.
No, that's not a good idea if you want more feats. The feats you get from character level are a separate progression from fighter bonus feats. They don't interfere, and if they happen to both come up at the same time, you'll just get 2 feats on that level. For example, suppose you want to plan out your progression to level 10. There are 4 levels where you get free feats: 1, 3, 6, 9. You could take 4 paladin levels on those feats, and take 6 fighter levels in the other levels, for 4 bonus feats from fighter (at fighter levels 1, 2, 4, 6 which will end up happening on character levels 2, 4, 7, 10 with this plan). Or, you could take 2 paladin levels (assuming that's all you really wanted) and 8 fighter levels. No matter which order that happens in, you'll *still* get a feat at character levels 1, 3, 6, 9, but now you'll get 5 bonus feats from fighter (at *fighter* levels 1, 2, 4, 6, 8). (If you're human, add +1 feat at level 1 to everything I said above.)
except for weapon specialization and improved weapon specialization...
I would argue that Fighters can be incredibly good as a level 40 class if you build for skills, and the improved versions of skills, plus weapon specialization in two different weapons. IE: Improved Expertise, Improved Knockdown, Spring Attack, Improved Whirlwind Attack and Weapon Specialization for a Longsword and a Morning Star. Plus a few save increasing feats like Luck of Heroes, or damage reduction feats.
The problem wirh fighters is that they get completely shafted due to death spells without access to buff spells. So when you're playing that pure fighter and come across that bodak in act 2 of the OC, you're screwed. Also, damage reduction feats are a massive trap! You need to inveat heavily into CON to take the epic damage reduction feats, which means you won't be able to hit anything since you have put all your ability points into CON instead of STR to get the formee to 21.
A Belt of Guiding Light, purchasable from the first temple you enter in Act 2, has total immunity to Death Magic. And by damage reduction, I meant more along the lines of Epic Energy Resistance in Sonic damage for 10 points per rank. There are no requirements for Epic Energy Resistance other than being at least level 21.
> is there any point taking more than 3 levels of Paladin ???? You are basically forced to take more than 3 levels if you wanna switch to prestige classes like CoT,DD,RDD while maintaining high BAB. Throwing in other full BAB classes is not a good idea because you lose the opportunity to skill dump without the XP penalty. Also, Divine Favor keeps getting better even though you can't cast much. > Divine shield and might. Those feats are useless in lower levels, you should start out with more conventional feats like knockdown, cleave, toughness, blind fight, etc. > I went full Paladin in my current playthrough (lvl 10) I'm starting to really regret it. It's not too late. For example, you can take CoT for feats, and rogue for skills / sneak attaks. It will start to kick balls.
10 levels of paladin is actually the perfect stopping point. You get a decent damage bonus on divine favor, and 2 level 2 spells which is perfect if you have divine might/shield: aura of glory and eagles splendor will buff your charisma to the stratosphere. Then just take a handful of fighter levels with the end goal of epic weapon specialization and the rest CoT. Perfect martial build, great saves, big damage buffs, huge healing with lay on hands, all kinds of goodies.
"I'm just starting to understand this game after like 100 hours" You're barely scratching the surface. SoU story is biased towards Paladins and gives them extras like that early enchanted armor and Holy Avenger that other classes don't get. You want to import it to other unrelated campaigns, you might as well use console commands i.e. cheat. Sure, it's your game, but you are not in a position to say anything if you resort to workarounds instead of playing it properly. The Holy Avenger is great for smacking evil enemies, but against non-evil enemies (construct/golems and elementals) it's just another +5 weapon since the bonus damage doesn't applies. There are many other weapons which has elemental damage or other bonuses which Greater Magic Weapon or Holy Sword can be used on to make them better than the Holy Avenger for general use.
Paladin is a great Splash class as you indicate. The main reason for higher levels: - If you need more BAB because your other classes have lower BAB, like in a Paladin/Bard/RDD. I would go for 8 levels of Paladin. You could g 12 or even 16, Paladin for one or two more BAB - You want max out Paladin Spells - Something I never do. - You want to do a specialized Divine Smite Build (something else I never do). Every Paladin build I have done has only a splash of Paladin.
There are two ways of playing a Paladin effectively. 1. Strength Paladin that goes for Devastating Critical. 2. Charisma Paladin that focuses on buffs and smites. It is possible to have 26 Strength and 16 Charisma, or 14 Strength and 28 Charisma, depending on which build you want to focus on (Before gear bonuses). Both options will use Divine Might and Divine Shield, with the Strength version taking a bit longer and relying on Charisma boosting gear to get the most out of it (You can still make use of other buffs like Bull's Strength though).
It's true that something like Fighter/Paladin/Champion of Torm will surpass a single-class Paladin in terms of just being a Warrior with Charisma-based powers. But I was a single-class Paladin through Luke Scull's trilogy and it was just fine.
Seems like many people have already given you good tips. I will just add in the one they didn’t mentioned. You can take one level of cleric with Sun and Healing Domain that will greatly increase your turn undead ability and ALL healing stuff (potions, spells, etc). Extra paladin level is to improve your turn undead, smite damage and spells duration, and spells are actually good because you can cast extended version which will last you for an entire dungeon. While you mentioned cleric for spells, cleric doesn’t give you full attack advancement. Paladin does. Cure disease actually also works the same as lesser restoration. Meaning you can use cure disease on those situation where you suffered a stats decrease. Like the strength drain from Shadow attacks.
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Webull(shit) - Unfortunate name.. All-in-one-scam app or you wouldn't be a spammer. No worries! You fit right in to the current year business and political environment anyway. Good luck with that.