The 1.10 paladin (LONG)

[Stephen van Ham]

The 1.10 paladin (based on 1.10 beta)

What follows is a breakdown for changes listed for paladin skills in
the 1.10 beta with my own comments and questions interspersed.

(Note that figures listed could if course it may all be rendered
fiction by the final version of 1.10).

Sacrifice - +7% damage per point in Redemption, +4% per point in
Fanaticism. This one seems a little funky. I'd have preferred a
synergy between Sacrifice and Zeal.

Zeal - +12% per point in Sacrifice. Nice bonus. I think we could
see more paladins breaking the '4 points only' rule to get their
Attack Rating up.

Vengeance - +5% damage per point in Resist Fire, Resist Lightning, or
Resist Cold, +2% damage per point in Salvation. Sounds good in
theory, but with the more varied attack forms in 1.10, I suspect we're
going to see many paladins still focusing on Salvation instead of the
individual auras, and settling for the lesser bonus. We'll see.
Still, the individual resistance auras do provide synergies elsewhere,
as noted further on.

Conversion - no synergies.

Holy Bolt - +17% magic damage per point in Blessed Hammer or Fist of
the Heavens, +7% more healing per point in Prayer. This one looks
good for the caster types, and also for medics (coop play focused
healer paladins) It'll be interesting to see whether the healing
power of Holy Bolt and Prayer is going to be able to keep up the
massive damage Hell monsters can now dish out. I remain hopeful,
but realistically, I think medics might remain an off the wall build.

Blessed Hammer - +15% magic damage per point in Blessed Aim or Vigor.
I can see thousands of pally players rushing out to max Blessed Aim.
No, seriously, with the need for greater Attack Rating in 1.10, we
might actually see a few Blessed Aim paladins around. Maybe.

Fist of the Heavens - +15% damage per point in Holy Bolt, +7% per
point in Holy Shock. I'm still trying to get my head around the
various build possibilities for some of these skills. There's a lot
of crossover stuff to consider now. I'm sure about ten paladin
builds from now I'll have the hang of it though.

Smite - no synergies.

Charge - +8% damage per point in Vigor and Might. I guess the
synergy with vigor is logical, but synergies between skills and
physical damage auras make NO SENSE. I mean... damage auras have an
innate damage boosting synergy by their very nature. A boost from
points in Smite might have made more sense.

Holy Shield - +15% damage per point in Defiance. I was reading
something over in another forum which suggested the damage bonus for
Holy Shield now amplifies your total defense, not just the defense on
your shield, making it sort of castable version of the barbarian's
Iron Skin. Now this is one change I like. Without the life
boosting skills of classes like the barbarian and shape shifting
druid, I'd say no twink or single player paladins are going to get
seriously beat up when playing alone. This new form of Holy Shield
could really help there. The bonus from Defiance is logical and
welcome. I'm sure a rebuild of my old maxed Holy shield/defiance
paladin is a strong possibility.

***

Might, Blessed Aim, Concentration, Fanaticism - no synergy.

Holy Fire - now adds a fire damage bonus to the paladin's melee or
ranged attacks, and gets +16% damage per point in Resist Fire, +5% per
point in Salvation. Okay, hands up all those that will now have a
paladin with maxed Holy Fire and maxed Resist Fire. Hmmm, am I the
only one with my hand still raised. Tresa and foobear, where art
thou?

Holy Freeze - now adds a cold damage bonus to the paladin's melee or
ranged attacks, now does pulses or cold damage to everything in range,
and gets +14% damage per point Resist Cold, +7% per point in
Salvation. Hmmm, I dunno. I'm still doubtful you'll see many
people maxing Resist Cold instead of Salvation.

Holy Shock - +12% damage per point in Resist Lightning, +4% per point
in Salvation. I've always liked Holy Shock, and I can see myself
investing in Resist Lightning to boost its damage. I probably
wouldn't max RL to get the bonus, but might do a 10/10 split between
RL and Salvation.

Thorns - no synergy.

Sanctuary - +7% magic damage per point in Cleansing. Sanctuary has
always been a funky skill in 1.09 for the effects NOT documented on
the skill screen. Does anyone have a test paladin who has tried this
skill maxed to see how it behaves compared to 1.09?

Conviction - no synergy.

***

Prayer - no synergy. It looks to have better healing power than
before though. Anyone run it through in 1.10 at level 20?

Cleaning and Meditation - gain 2 healing every 2 seconds per point in
Prayer. A nice coupling, but I suspect the healing power is still
going to be a drop in the ocean compared to the damage the monsters
dish out now. Still, I'll try it anyway.

None of the other defensive auras have synergies documented.

***

Overall, some things I like (changes to the 'Holy' auras, changes to
Holy Shield), some I'm not so sure about (the role of prayer in future
builds), and some just plain whacky (synergies for points in damage
auras).

I'm a little bit unsure what my paladin build will be the 1.10 team
some of us AGDers have in the planning stages. Early on I had opted
for a conventional Zeal/fanaticism build, then I changed my mind and
opted for a Sacrifice/Fanaticism, and now - I don't know. Possibly 1
point Sacrifice (to get some offense) + 20 Prayer + 1-5 Meditation +
5-15 Salvation + 20 Holy Freeze, 10-20 Holy Shield for a healing/mana
regen/freezing party paladin.

[Michael Vondung]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 10:12:22 +1200, Stephen van Ham
<svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
Blessed Hammer - +15% magic damage per point in Blessed Aim or Vigor.I can see thousands of pally players rushing out to max Blessed Aim.No, seriously, with the need for greater Attack Rating in 1.10, wemight actually see a few Blessed Aim paladins around. Maybe.

Am I missing something or does this mean that Blessed Aim and Vigor
give more damage to Blessed Hammer than Concentration, per level?
Concentration goes up by 15% per level, but the bonus to BH is halved,
so it's 7.5% -- while Blessed Aim and Vigor give 15%. This is curious.
:) I sort of like this, though. For ages, I've wanted to re-make my
pre-LOD Hammerdin, and with synergies this looks like an actually
viable build.

Something like this: 20 Blessed Hammer, 20 Vigor, 20 Blessed Aim, 20
Concentration, some points in Holy Shield and perhaps some points in
Zeal, some points in Redemption or one in Meditation. Zeal won't be
awesome with Concentration, but it might be a working way to deal with
magic immunes. Hmm. Just a spontaneous idea, and probably flawed (one
of the flaws being that I am assuming you'll be able to get high
enough to have a sufficient number of skillpoints).

-M.

[Dalai Lama]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 10:12:22 +1200, Stephen van Ham
<svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
The 1.10 paladin (based on 1.10 beta)

The biggest change they need to do is allow an offensive and defensive
aura at the same time (and move thorns over to the defensive side and
tone it down a bit).
What follows is a breakdown for changes listed for paladin skills inthe 1.10 beta with my own comments and questions interspersed.
Zeal - +12% per point in Sacrifice. Nice bonus. I think we couldsee more paladins breaking the '4 points only' rule to get theirAttack Rating up.

Maybe a fifth point. Zeal needs something other than more AR to be
worth maxing- perhaps a slight boost in hit recovery and block time,
or else a lowers target defense % per skill pt. Hmm, or allow zeal
to work with ranged weapons as well, so you could do a mini strafe
with Deathbits for instance :-)
Vengeance - +5% damage per point in Resist Fire, Resist Lightning, orResist Cold, +2% damage per point in Salvation. Sounds good intheory, but with the more varied attack forms in 1.10, I suspect we'regoing to see many paladins still focusing on Salvation instead of theindividual auras, and settling for the lesser bonus.

The individual auras could have been given some absorb %. It would
take careful balancing, but make having a couple paladins very
valuable.
We'll see.Still, the individual resistance auras do provide synergies elsewhere,as noted further on.
Conversion - no synergies.

Should last longer with Sanctuary synergies or give converted more
damage.

Holy Bolt - +17% magic damage per point in Blessed Hammer or Fist ofthe Heavens, +7% more healing per point in Prayer. This one looksgood for the caster types, and also for medics (coop play focusedhealer paladins) It'll be interesting to see whether the healingpower of Holy Bolt and Prayer is going to be able to keep up themassive damage Hell monsters can now dish out. I remain hopeful,but realistically, I think medics might remain an off the wall build.

Yeah, need a near instant heal with max amount healed upped per level
of char and skill to make this work.
Fist of the Heavens - +15% damage per point in Holy Bolt, +7% perpoint in Holy Shock.

Thunderstorm and Fist of Heavens should be swapped between characters,
with the sorceress getting a castable (one hit) but much bigger damage
version- say for iilustration purposes a couple strikes (1 per 3
levels of the sorceress skill), overlayed with a nova (centered on
target) (spell level =3/4 Tstorm =3/4) and a burst of charged bolts...
Thorns - no synergy.

Boo! This is where synergies could have paid off big in diversity of
character build. Say a Paladin has holy fire and thorns, then when
thorns is active should reflect back a % of the attack as elemental
fire damage. If the Paladin had resist fire and thorns, then it
could reflect a % of fire attacks back as physical damage to the
monsters casting them.

Thanks for the info.




--

Urk!

[Stephen van Ham]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 17:34:47 -0700, Dalai Lama <daiailamaSPAM@aol.com>
oozed up out of the petri dish and said:
Zeal - +12% per point in Sacrifice. Nice bonus. I think we couldsee more paladins breaking the '4 points only' rule to get theirAttack Rating up.
Maybe a fifth point. Zeal needs something other than more AR to beworth maxing- perhaps a slight boost in hit recovery and block time,or else a lowers target defense % per skill pt. Hmm, or allow zealto work with ranged weapons as well, so you could do a mini strafewith Deathbits for instance :-)

I can't recall specifically maxing zeal on any build, but I frequently
break the '4 point rule' in 1.09 anyway. The comment about the '4
point rule' was a bit of a tongue in cheek dig at some the 'experts'
and their sometimes rigid build advice. The problem with hard and
fast rules is that they don't reflect well the diverse builds that
some people create or the diverseness of 'non standard' equipment
setups (e.g. non twink).

I noticed before that Zeal appeared to be adding 6% damage per level
after a point, but the numbers seemed a little off, almost as if the
zeal damage bonus was overwriting the sacrifice synergy bonus... but
it's a little hard to go back on that character and reallocate the
points, so I'm going to download nobbie's level 99 template characters
so I can check again.

<snip>

As far as requests go (of which I have dozens myself), sadly, I'm of
the belief that what we see is pretty much what we're going to get,
apart from bug fixes. My assumption is that Blizzard won't embark on
such a long patch development and then start reengineering the skill
set and creature balance much right at the 'last minute'.

[Dalai Lama]

On Sat, 5 Jul 2003 12:16:57 +0900, orchid@csonline.net (Orchid) wrote:
Stephen van Ham <svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:I've never followed this rule anyway. However, if early observations arecorrect, people may need to pay more attention to AR now anyway.

AR and DR compared to monster/character levels have always been
skewed. A low level character with 20,000+ defense rating (shrine,
shrine, shrine, shrine) should almost never get hit by a normal mode
non act boss monster. Think nerf bat vs Abrams tank. This isn't
a small thing, it's substantially why a melee character should exist
vs just ranged characters. It is in fact, why modern armies no
longer melee.

If the armor classes were done properly, ranged attackers (of
comparable level to the monsters and typical AC for their level) would
fear for their lives against melee monsters, as they didn't have the
defenses to keep from getting hit often and hit hard. On the other
hand, Melee characters (again of comparable level and typical AC)
could withstand small crowds of melee monsters, taking periodic hits,
but not so often that stunning was a big factor. Better melee
armors would incorporate % phys dmg reduction (after all that's part
of what armor does, spread the impact over a much bigger area).


AR on the other hand should be a factor, and not just because the
appropriate level of character can never hit the same level monster.
At 100% AR, the character should have the equivalent chance (all
other things being equal) of sucessfully striking a monster as a
character who was one level higher. A level 45 char with 500% AR
would thus be like a level 50 char for the attack tables.

Vengeance - +5% damage per point in Resist Fire, Resist Lightning, or Resist Cold, +2% damage per point in Salvation. Sounds good in theory, but with the more varied attack forms in 1.10, I suspect we're going to see many paladins still focusing on Salvation instead of the individual auras, and settling for the lesser bonus. We'll see. Still, the individual resistance auras do provide synergies elsewhere, as noted further on.
Tito's early results with a new paladin show that the increasedelemental damage, even in early normal, may make these auras seem morevaluable in gameplay. One might not want to wait to get these aurasconsidering how badly elemental attacks can smart prior to level 30.

Sounds like Blizzard has gone exactly the wrong way in balancing.
It should be mandatory for everyone involved in such decisions to be
familiar with the better mods have balanced the game.



--

Urk!

[Stephen van Ham]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 17:56:53 -0700, Dalai Lama <daiailamaSPAM@aol.com>
oozed up out of the petri dish and said:
Stephen van Ham <svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:I've never followed this rule anyway. However, if early observations arecorrect, people may need to pay more attention to AR now anyway.
AR and DR compared to monster/character levels have always beenskewed. A low level character with 20,000+ defense rating (shrine,shrine, shrine, shrine) should almost never get hit by a normal modenon act boss monster. Think nerf bat vs Abrams tank. This isn'ta small thing, it's substantially why a melee character should existvs just ranged characters. It is in fact, why modern armies nolonger melee.

Agreed. I've long held the opinion that character and monster level
should not be a factor in 'chance to hit' calculations in any form.
I've also long held the opinion that 'ignores target defense' items
and 'auto hit' skills should be addressed as well. Simply put I want
AR and DR to be significant regardless of the opposition. If I'm a
skilled sword fighter facing clumsy, mindless drones, it shouldn't
matter whether they're level 20 or level 80.

[Stephen van Ham]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 22:07:07 -0300, foobear
<bearmacNOSPAM@hotmail.com> oozed up out of the petri dish and said:
Now this is interesting. I just decided to try the Beta, making a holyfire pally of course. In my version of the beta, it's Might that addsa 16% increase to Holy FIre, not resist fire.

It's a documented skill display bug. Go put a point in Resist Fire
and you'll find that Holy Fire damage increases.

[Stephen van Ham]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:20:57 +0200, Michael Vondung <mvondung@gmx.net>
oozed up out of the petri dish and said:
Am I missing something or does this mean that Blessed Aim and Vigorgive more damage to Blessed Hammer than Concentration, per level?Concentration goes up by 15% per level, but the bonus to BH is halved,so it's 7.5% -- while Blessed Aim and Vigor give 15%. This is curious.:) I sort of like this, though. For ages, I've wanted to re-make mypre-LOD Hammerdin, and with synergies this looks like an actuallyviable build.

Whereas the Blessed Aim aura is a passive bonus, Concentration must be
the active aura for its bonus to apply.
Something like this: 20 Blessed Hammer, 20 Vigor, 20 Blessed Aim, 20Concentration, some points in Holy Shield and perhaps some points inZeal, some points in Redemption or one in Meditation. Zeal won't beawesome with Concentration, but it might be a working way to deal withmagic immunes. Hmm. Just a spontaneous idea, and probably flawed (oneof the flaws being that I am assuming you'll be able to get highenough to have a sufficient number of skillpoints).

Zeal itself now gets a 6% damage bonus per level from 5 onwards.
Factoring in 1 point in Sacrifice (for another 12%), and you have a
108% damage bonus if you can somehow find the points to invest
(presumably these things still work off weapon damage, so it's 108% of
weapon damage added, not a literal doubling of total damage). I
think it's going to take a while for people to really get a handle on
what works best - on one hand, passive bonuses are nice and maxing a
bunch of synergies is nice, on the other hand you have to factor in
versatility and the party compatibility - your party might prefer you
max concentration instead of blessed aim since it might benefit them
more. Of course single player is a whole different kettle of fish.

[foobear]

On Sun, 06 Jul 2003 13:15:03 +1200, Stephen van Ham
<svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 22:07:07 -0300, foobear<bearmacNOSPAM@hotmail.com> oozed up out of the petri dish and said:Now this is interesting. I just decided to try the Beta, making a holyfire pally of course. In my version of the beta, it's Might that addsa 16% increase to Holy FIre, not resist fire.It's a documented skill display bug. Go put a point in Resist Fireand you'll find that Holy Fire damage increases.

whoot, go go Holy FIre. Burn baby burn!!!!!!!

foobear

[Michael Vondung]

On Sun, 06 Jul 2003 10:48:30 +1200, Stephen van Ham
<svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
In short, with the Concentration Aura active, the character screeninforms me that I was doing between5-6+ k per hammer! Ouch

I can't reproduce this. On an edited character, with the same set up
(20 points in BH, Vigor, Blessed Aim, Concentration) and Concentration
being the active aura, the displayed hammer damage was under 2000. I'm
beginning to think that skill points from equipment are taken into
account for the synergy calculations (which would contradict what GF
said before, but well, it is GF!).

-M.

[Stephen van Ham]

On Sun, 06 Jul 2003 04:42:28 +0200, Michael Vondung <mvondung@gmx.net>
oozed up out of the petri dish and said:
On Sun, 06 Jul 2003 10:48:30 +1200, Stephen van Ham<svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
In short, with the Concentration Aura active, the character screeninforms me that I was doing between5-6+ k per hammer! OuchI can't reproduce this. On an edited character, with the same set up(20 points in BH, Vigor, Blessed Aim, Concentration) and Concentrationbeing the active aura, the displayed hammer damage was under 2000. I'mbeginning to think that skill points from equipment are taken intoaccount for the synergy calculations (which would contradict what GFsaid before, but well, it is GF!).

I did the same test and got 3731-3808 max damage listed for BH when I
had Concentration as the active aura.

It was my understanding from past 'hype' updates and threads that
while the boosting the synergy skills using +skill items has no
effect, boosting the primary skill (in this case, BH) will increase
the damage further. So a level 30 Blessed Hammer will do more damage
than a level 20 Blessed Hammer, but a level 20 Blessed Hammer with a
level 30 Blessed Aim is no better in damage terms than a level 20
Blessed Hammer with a level *20* Blessed Aim.

[Angus Davidson]

On 7/6/03 4:16 AM, in article pg1fgvgv2k9p8tjhrvbjrrj2v5atgd7fb1@4ax.com,
"Stephen van Ham" <svanham@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 23:11:25 -0300, foobear <bearmacNOSPAM@hotmail.com> oozed up out of the petri dish and said: It's a documented skill display bug. Go put a point in Resist Fire and you'll find that Holy Fire damage increases. whoot, go go Holy FIre. Burn baby burn!!!!!!! I guess we all have our favourites. :-)
I am glad artic blast does something now at least. However ever it does
assume to assign all 100 skill points to the wind / cold line of the
elemental druid skills. With a few skills point to get a spirit and a lvl 1
bear

Angus :)

Frosty the snowman cometh