Paladin Guide

Hello! Seeing as the forum is lacking a series, in-depth starter guide to the Paladin class, I figured I’d give it a shot since it’s my most played class (I’ve only slightly dabbled in Ranger for multiclass purposes!)

Paladin is an incredibly fun, powerful, and roleplay/lore heavy class, and is one of the most beginner friendly classes to pick up! One of its only downsides is its (relatively) early specialization into paladin oaths which cannot be changed or respected. Aside from that minor, and class defining feature, the class itself is robust and ideal for newer players, or experienced players looking to min/max potent tank builds.

At it’s core, Paladin is a Tank class, boasting high health and the ability to wear heavy armor and swing heavy swords. They excel at soaking up damage no matter what style of paladin you play, and only lack in the Tank role in the distinct lack of taunt-like abilities, making up for it with high damage which can re-aggro enemies and bosses to them rather than having abilities that force aggro onto themselves. As such,Paladins usually play very aggressively regardless of build, as even ability and spell heavy builds need to be in front and in the way of enemies in order to make use of their bulk to begin with. This unique approach leads them to be a potent solo-play class due to having the advantage of both high survivability and the ability to compete with other high damage classes without needing to compromise.

The other feature that makes paladin unique is the “Oath” system I mentioned earlier. As the game was developed, there were a ton of Oaths added to the game, but I’ll just cover some of the more unique and powerful Oaths for this guide. Once a Oath is chosen, you cannot undo this change, except by completely resetting the character, or making a new one, so choosing your Oath is extremely important to how you want to experience the game as a Paladin. These Oaths fundamentally alter the base gameplay for Paladins, allowing for this Tank/Damage hybrid class to specialize even further.


With the Basic structure of what Paladins are, and what makes them unique amongst the Forsaken Prophecy classes, I’ll go over the first couple of abilities paladin get, From level 1-5, before talking about just a couple of the Oath Progression trees, since the Oaths change paladin progression all the way up to the level cap, and I don’t have the time to go through every single change and unique ability each Oath modifies on the Paladin talent tree.

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The base Paladin class begins with four basic abilities:

Level 1:

Smite: At the baseline, this is a low cooldown buff to your auto attack, causing the next attack you make to deal an extra 10% of it’s damage as divine damage (Which ignores armor, and deals bonus damage to certain enemy types). It’s the bread and butter of most of the paladin’s damage due to it dealing “True damage” regardless of enemy defenses or buffs. It’s high mana usage means that it cannot be spammed if you want to be able to keep up with other abilities as you progress along your paladin trees however. That being said, just spamming this button alone will allow you to function as your role more or less, making this an easy button to slam in an emergency situation should something go awry, or you're new to the class.

Lay on Hands: This ability, and future healing abilities from further down your progression trees, is the ability that stands slightly astray from the main role Paladin plays, as its a short two second channel that heals for a small amount of damage to either an ally or yourself. It definitely helps players handle situations by themselves, and allows Paladin to act as a pseudo healer in comps, but other healing classes far outclass even dedicated healing Oaths and builds (That's not to say there's no reason you shouldn’t play a healing focused paladin: more on this later). The ability is a little underwhelming, and was probably meant to allow Paladins to better function as a Tank - taking the punishment, then stepping away to give themselves a quick health boost. It’s medium-ish cooldown prevents the ability from being spammed however, so mileage may vary when using this. Skilled player’s can make this ability give them plenty of longevity, but I’ve seen newer Paladins struggle to understand when and where to actually use the ability.

Stand Against: This is a long cooldown, short term buff that prevents debuffs from being applied in a short window of time. For five seconds after this is activated debuffs cannot be applied to the player and all damage taken during this time is halved. This is the ability that allows paladins to truly live up to their role as tank. While it could be timed to ignore debilitating debuffs, the best usage for this is to survive high burst attacks from enemies, or in situations where you get caught in the wrong spot during a raid. The long cooldown prevents it from being spammable, making this one of the few abilities that Paladin player’s need to be constantly thinking about when to use.

Hallow: This is a self-buff ability that purges debuffs from the paladin. High cost, but high cooldown as well. Combined with careful usage of stand against, Hallow can help pick up the slack of cleansing debuffs from yourself if you weren't quite quick enough to dodge or prevent them.

Level 2:
Fervor: THis is the first passive the paladin picks up. This is a minor boost to the paladin’s survivability, giving them a baseline passive health regen that increases linearly as the paladin loses max health. The regen gets a 25% boost at 75% max health, 50% at half health, 75% boost at 25% health, etc. etc. Its a great baseline ability for early players fighting weak groups of mobs, that mostly becomes useless for high level play. One point of health still isn’t dead however, and every little bit helps.

Level 3:
Strike Down: Medium cooldown, medium mana cost. When used the paladin does an auto attack for triple it’s normal damage that is all converted into all divine damage. Also benefits from Smite, making this a huge power spike damage wise, and finally providing enough abilities to give a reason to watch your mana. Spamming your abilities at this point will drain your mana rapidly, and cna leave you in a sticky situation if you're not careful.

Level 4:
Crusade: Another passive for Paladin, this works in a similar way to fervor, but instead of health regen, it provides a damage buff in a small aoe around the paladin. As health lowers, damage is increased linearly from 0% up to 49% (Where you get a 49% damage bonus at 99% health lost)

At level 5 Paladins finally take their Oath, permanently altering their progression and gameplay. I’ll just do a brief overview of a few, but know there are plenty of Oaths to choose from!

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Oath of the Deep Sea

This Oath alters your paladin to be water based. What do I mean by that? I Mean fishing buffs! This Oath allows you to use the Harpoonblade and Harpoon in addition to traditional paladin weapons, on top of giving you a flat boost in fishing (admittedly only a small 3% boost to select fishing loot pools, but it adds up over time!).

The Deep Sea Oath also admittedly gives you the Seastride passive, giving you a +10% movement buff in water and along beaches, making repositioning during fishing and aquatic battles a breeze.

Your enemy type damage bonus on your divine damage also swaps to crustaceans, fish, mollusks, sea serpents, and aquatic. Very useful for the various mobs you’ll need to kill when fishing at select locations!

This Oath gives a variety of enemy debuff abilities as you progress down it’s class, providing in-built ways to pull small mobs and slow larger ones, allowing you to maneuver around the battlefield and force enemy creatures to fight you head on, whether you’ve lost their aggro or not. Abilities such as Brine Armour, and Cold Shelter provide temporary health and type specific damage resistance, allowing this Oath to become very tanky indeed. While damage to a wide variety of enemies may be limited, as this Oath does not get too many high damage potential abilities, the damage types it can hurt with it’s altered divine damage get shredded by the various attacks this class can do. It’s almost tailor made in order to fight (and possibly solo!) The leviathan end raid boss that one can fish up at the highest tiers of the fishing aspect of the game.

Oath of the Divine

This Oath is one of the best healing paladin Oaths you can take. Although I mentioned that healing in the paladin class is not particularly powerful in comparison to other dedicated healing classes, the benefit to the Paladin healing Oaths is the insane amount of powerful buffing abilities that are inherently tied to their healing.

To start, the Divine class automatically applies a free cast of smite to the recipient of tier Lay on Hands ability, making high damage classes strike for truly incredible numbers. It is not uncommon to see a Divine Oath Paladin pocket heal for another damage based role in order to reach some very silly damage numbers between the two of them.

With abilities like Angelic Reprise and Sunlight Oath, they can provide powerful damage reduction and healing aoe buffs. Unfortunately, as is the case with most healing abilities on all Oaths of paladin, the majority of them are long heals over time, meaning that high damage spikes from bosses can nuke your allies before you can adequately heal them (Which other healing classes do not suffer from!) In addition, Divine Oath Paladins also have a Capstone ability of Invoke Justice, which is the single most powerful flat damage ability in the entire game. Lots of reasons to pick up this Oath!

Oath of the Death Ward

This Oath is THE damage paladin Oath. Upon taking this Oath , it immediately replaces your Lay on hands ability with the Death Touch ability, turning it into an instant cast, ranged damage spell. In addition, the divine damage from your smite turns into Unholy damage, which inflicts 50% of the Unholy damage dealt as unblockable Rot damage, which is a very long dot.

Death Ward Paladins juggle both long term dots on top of high spiking damage abilities from all ranges, making enemies in their path melt as they progress along this Oaths tree. At the highest ends of this Oath, Death Ward Paladins get a passive ability that creates a Ghoul companion to help in fights, and which automatically resurrects after a time if slain. Perhaps the biggest flaw in this Oath is the fact that it gains very few protective abilities, and because of their high damage output, will constantly be drawing aggro from raid bosses and larger enemies. If there was a “glass cannon” build for paladin, this would be it. This class's survivability solely hinges on the naturally high health of paladin and its passive regen, which I don’t need to tell you, will run out eventually and with no way to replace it requires a teammate to be able to draw the attention away from your vindictive abilities.

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*As a side note, although I have used Oath here, as the majority of the Oath’s are called Oath of ____, the actual name of each “Oath” does vary, since Forsaken Prophecy took a decent amount of time to solidify this as the paladin’s defining feature. Several Popular and more unique subclasses were/are called Vows, with one or two Subclasses lacking any sort of similar title, such as The Holy Hotbod “Oath” and the Cavalier “Oath”. Some of these older “oaths” can more drastically change core gameplay (Im looking at you Holy Hotbod) than usual, so be very careful when taking them as they drastically subvert class expectations and play styles from the ones I’ve mentioned here!
In addition, Paladins also have a Title system unique to them, that is almost entirely Cosmetic, if even. They are achievements that can be “Equipped” to the end of your player name, and some provide some light to moderate cosmetic changes. There are a few super difficult or strange Titles that provide an extra ability or passive, but they are so hard/strange to find and complete that it would be pointless posting them here. If anyone wants to share some of their favorite titles in the comments however, feel free!
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As you can see, the Paladin class comes with a LARGE variety of different options to choose from, and these are just a couple of Oaths from the plentitude Forsaken Prophecy has added over the years. There is a play style for almost every player, but make sure your investigate your options carefully. Once you make an Oath as paladin, you cannot break it!

I hope this has been an enlightening glimpse into paladin as a class! Feel Free to let me know if there's anything you want explained further in depth!

Woah Fsh, this is an incredible effort!

I will say this: Paladin is still not a class I personally enjoy (sorry Admin!!). I still think making characters lock themselves into an oath "for life" while giving barely any information to base that decision on is bad to begin with.

The first time at level 5 I just took Divine because the NPC is right where you get quests around that level, and I didn't even realize there were other options ... and then all the really interesting ones got added later down the line. So old paladin players that wanted to try them had to make new characters and level from scratch (Sorry i'm still bitter about this haha, it took me so much time)

But you've done great work making this choice easier for people!! I wish we'd had a pally resource this exhaustive back when things were in full swing. . Great job!