Tree of Savior Forum

[Guide] Solo Paladin

Class and Rank
#1

Hello.

I made a Solo Paladin past level 80 and I would like to share my feedaback. When I first started the game as a cleric, it was hard to find any information really tested in game. All this information is based on my experience from playing the game.

Of course, keep in mind that until the game is released, much will be changed and balanced, and this information may not be the optimal.

CLASSES AND RANKS

This is my build with the key skills:

http://www.tosbase.com/tools/skill-simulator/build/keour6yycl/

So, what about priest?
Priest has Blessing, Monstrance and Sacrament which are really nice buffs for auto attacks. I can say that those buffs could be easily better than Zalciai, however Zaibas from the Krivis class is a skill that will add too much more DPS and mobility than the Priest buffs could provide.

So, Cleric>Krivis>Priest>Paladin would not be perfect then?
No because the buffs durations are too low. You would end up consuming most of your time buffing and preparing the field instead of damaging the enemies. If the durations are increased in the future, then it might be a viable option, however with no Sacrament from Priest C2, I would not pick up this option even with greater duration buffs.

Using the skills
Heal: heal you or allies whenever needed. Only use to damage when enemy is weak to Holy element.

Cure: there are too few moments when you need to cure yourself from debuffs on open world leveling. Good damage complement, even better against enemies weak to Holy element.

Deprotected Zone: good defense down for auto attacks. Always use on bosses.

Zalciai: really nice buff with the build provided bellow. Nicely improves critical damage, and reduces the enemies critical resistance affected by the blue area. However there’s no point worrying too much to apply this debuff, since this skill at higher levels will consume more SP, so use only when you need the buff.

Zaibas: Incredible damage with two casts.

Smite: this skill has two charges, high damage, and can hit multiple enemies. The hitbox is small, so make sure to get a good position to cast. Using against enemies weak to Strike damage will result in massive damage.

Restoration: what matters about this aura is the attribute bonus from the Paladin Master which increases the SP regen by 10 per attribute, with a total of 50 SP regen at level 5 (max level). The only downside of this aura is that it’s a buff, which will expire some seconds before the 60 seconds cooldown, so it’s not active 100% of the time. The SP regen bonus will only be provided when the buff is active, and not passively.

About other skills: Safety Zone from cleric is not needed since you have Heal, and it’s not even possible without the skill points.

Divine Stigma gives a good bonus, but the way the skill works to be activated is very bad. Sometimes the skill will miss the monster, sometimes the monster will run away with the debuff countdown, and other times you will kill the monster and the skill will not even activate (bug or monster resistance), so it’s just a waste of time in battle.

For Aukuras the HP regen is really worthless, but I not tested the accuracy down debuff, which could be something usefull with a high evasion build.

Remember that this build is for a Solo Paladin. If you want to go more supportive for parties, Priest instead of Krivis could be a better option.

Of course Krivis stills have some good buffs for the party like Zalciai and possibly Daino. However Zalciai depends more on the other players critical rate, and Daino will be hardly usefull, unless there’s another Priest or support class in the group for additional buffs.

STATS

It’s really hard to define the pefect stats for Paladin, since some skills will benefit from STR, others from INT, others from SPR and others from DEX. What I made was to get good stats for a sustained DPS. Zaibas has a nice damage, and could be even greater with a full INT build, however the skill has a 30 seconds cooldown. There’s no point giving a burst damage with Zaibas and after that have to wait half a minute for another burst. Also, this skill has a relative small hitbox. If the monster moves or don’t enters the area, there will be no damage.

I leveled my way up to Paladin with a Full DEX build, and then I realized it was time to make some tests.

NOTICE: the tests below were made around level 80-85 on enemies weak against Strike damage, for better results using Smite. The damage numbers are an average.

STR/DEX Build (Around 60-70% in DEX, the remaining points in STR)
Auto Attack Normal: 170-190
Auto Attack Critical: 320-350
AA Critical w/ Zalciai: 405-430

Smite Normal: 1640-1680
Smite Critical: 2730-2750
Smite Critical w/ Zalciai: 2950-2980

The critical rate was something between 20-40% of the time.

Full STR
Auto Attack Normal: 240-290

Smite Normal: 1970-1990

The attacks are almost never critical. Not enough critical data to take into account.

Full DEX
Auto Attack Normal: 110-135
Auto Attack Critical: 190-210
AA Critical w/ Zalciai: 260-280

Smite Normal: 1480-1490
Smite Critical: 2265
Smite Critical w/ Zalciai: 2480

The critical rate was something between 50-70% of the time.

Conclusion
The best option for me was the STR/DEX build, which I prefer with more DEX than STR. There’s a noticeable difference in critical rate by going full dex, but it’s not 100% of the time to worth the loss of damage with no STR points. Full STR build for me was the worst one, because you have no evasion (will take much more damage) and less accuracy, for the same overall DPS of the Full DEX build, or even worse, since Zaibas and Cure also can critical strike.

I’ve not taken into consideration higher levels where you can have much more critical rate and gems, and of course the game will probably have some drastic balance changes, so the stats effectiveness can change in the future. I don’t think stacking SPR for Deprotected Zone debuff is a good option, since the monsters need to be inside the area, and you are changing flat DPS for a situational debuff.

That’s everything for now. Hope this guide helps some new players trying to test a Paladin.

Edit: I’m currently at level 3 Paladin with Smite 2 and Restoration 1. Once my Smite is at level 5, I’ll start putting points in Resist Elements.

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#2

For stats I’d say you want to go INT on this. Zaibas scales twice with INT, once by adding it to the skill, and once through magic attack. Your Cure (which you got on 5 for some reason) also scales with INT, and so does your Heal. If you were to go STR/DEX I’d really opt for Priest since their skills only offer scalings with SPR and all benefit aa.

About your issues with Zaibas being high CD. I have had no problem so far with it. Usually when killing normal monsters 1 stack of Zaibas will either finish a whole mob or leave it low enough that I can finish it with Cure/Smite/aa. That means I can clear a mob every 15-30 seconds (2 charges).

Smite seems to have very different numbers depending on the enemy you are hitting. With 0 investment in STR and lvl 1 Smite I will hit for around 1.3k (only 300 less than you) on monsters weak to it, while other monsters will take somewhere closer to 300-400 damage. Imo this makes it very unreliable to use Smite as a DPS skill.

Only other points I have on skills here (running Cleric>Krivis2>Paladin as well), is you should take 1 level into Aukuras, you should take Safety Zone, and you should take Resist Elements. Daino is optional.

Aukuras as a 1 skill point skill provides you with a nice AoE taunt which is great to set up for Zaibas when soloing. The cooldown is long and all, but it’s still something, and it costs almost nothing.

Safety Zone is a no brainer. You might have Heal, but ToS isn’t about taking damage and healing it, but rather avoiding it altogether, hence the cooldowns. Safety Zone usually is not very useful against normal mobs, but it is incredibly useful against bosses, and there are tons of them. The points that you are taking away from Safety Zone give you the following:

  • A smaller downtime on Deprotected Zone, and a small boost to the defense reduction on each stack. The bulk of defense reduction however comes from the 1st stack which applies your SPR, that’s all that’s really important other than uptime.

  • More potential DPS on Cure. Level 1 Cure will heal status effects just as well as level 5, so the extra skill points will only add to the DPS of the skill. Seeing you aren’t even running an INT build I don’t see why spend points here. Another issue I have with this skill is it won’t work on flying monsters, which annoys me a little.

Resist Elements is in my opinion the most important skill in the whole Paladin tree, going up to +162 resistances and a wooping 15.4% chance of completely nullifying those types of damage. For some weird reason you didn’t even grab it.

The reason I say Daino is optional is because it is a group focused skill. I realize you named this “Solo Paladin” for a reason, but you’ve got 10 points left in Krivis. That is more than enough to get Daino, which is all you need to make this more group oriented, as well as Divine Stigma.

EDIT: fixed some spelling errors

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#3

I think maybe the reason he went dex builds was to get crit chance to fully take advantage of the Zalciai buff. A zero int level 10 Zaibas with attributes still does quite a bit of damage right?

#4

One thing to consider here is that spr/dex does similiar damage to debuffed enemies as str/dex builds while having a much higher crit chance. Basically the only advantage your getting out of str/dex is you don’t have to bother with deprotection zone, but your also massively less useful in parties.

#5

Nice details.

Sorry but I forgot to mention, I’m only level 3 Paladin, so my Smite is at level 2 and Restoration at level 1. I could not test yet the other skills due to the lack of skill points.

As you said, Smite gives different damage according to monsters weakness. There are some monsters in Mausoleum that I can critical strike up to 3,4k damage with Smite level 2, but the overall damage will vary according to the monster. This games is about elements and resistances, so the Paladin should always look for Strike weak monsters in order to boost damage.

I have to reset the Skills to remove Divine Stigma and put the points in Aukuras to test it. I could not test more due to the broken ipi file error. I’ll try logging in now using the spam enter button trick, which worked for me through the last week.

Thanks.

#6

Smite’s triple damage bonus is based on if the monster is a demon or mutant. Really wish it would be added to the ingame description.

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#7

Thanks, nice to know :smile:

#8

Awesome! I love Paladins, in general, and I’ve been searching a guide for solo Pala for a long time, but I dropped it. Until now :smile:

You have a amazing way to explain your calculations, detailing all the procedures that you used. Excellent work! I’ll stay tuned for further updates :grin:

#9

Thanks everyone for all the replies.

My next step is testing an INT build (perhaps INT/DEX?), and SPR/DEX, and put this information into the chart to be compared.
Also, I’ll try to get Smite level 5 at least to see how the damage will scale with the skill level.

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#10

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#11

@itzNiko why not
Cleric > Priest (c2) > Krivis > Paladin C2 just to be able to keep all those buffs at once?

#12

How about going Cleric(c1) - Priest(c2) - Paladin(c3) just to get that awesome looking barrier :>. Personally i havent the paladin yet but i think going str on stats can make your auto attack and smite stronger to have some damage while having alot of defensive and hp/mp regen.
This is my planned build btw:

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#13

I don’t know why you’d bother going paladin if you’re not getting barrier. Circle 2 paladin isn’t even that much better than circle 1.

#14

My build is incomplete because until now I got only to Paladin C1, but other Paladin skills are indeed necessary, like Resist Elements and Barrier, and perhaps Conviction, but I could not test these skills yet.

#15

Yes, when the game is officialy released, I’ll probably go with Priest. On closed beta going Solo is a better option, since most of the features are not working and people want just to level to test things.

Priest can solo as well, but Zaibas from Krivis gives more damage overrall.

As for STR build, as I said at the chart above, going full STR was a bad option, but of course you can mix it, and I don’t know what’s your plan with STR.

STR on Paladin is more for auto attacks and physical damage (Smite skill for instance), but gives you also critical damage when skills can cri (you need critical rate to make it work). SPR is a good stats when focusing on Zalciai and Deprotected Zone, and INT is a good stats to Heal, Cure and Zaibas.

I want to make more tests and level up my Pala rank when my game stops giving the broken ipf file error.

#16

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#17

Can you link to these new updates? I’d like to read them.

#18

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