Foreword:
My goal for this thread is to provide a collection of concise but detailed information about paladins in an easy to digest format. Feedback and suggestions for updating this FAQ are very welcome and please do show your interest in this class and share your experiences playing Paladin.
My intention is to keep this FAQ as up to date as possible and including the patch notes related to Paladin to shed some light on the recent changes to this class and the options for this class.
Rules:
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Do not post builds, videos or links below the main post. (I’m trying to keep everything all in one concise place for easy viewing).
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If you have a specific question or concern please direct it to my private messages and I will be able to help as best as I can.
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If you have any suggestions that could generate further discussion to improve this thread please join the discord below.
Introduction
There has been some debate as to whether Paladin is a DPS or Support hence where they work best is when circumstances are in their favor.
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They can utilize weaknesses to deal massive damage to certain enemy types.
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They can provide adequate support and healing alongside being able to quest solo with ease without having to worry about pot consumption or hp.
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They can provide their party with additional DPS support in dungeon and mission parties guaranteeing fast and efficient runs every time.
Paladin has very interesting themes, specializing in magic and elemental property buffs and debuffs as well as focuses on exterminating demon and mutant type enemies while protecting their group from harm.
As I mentioned earlier, I will be keeping this thread updated with the latest builds and patch notes. As such everything mentioned as of now will be subject to change as content and balancing is released. I hope we can work together to make this the best Paladin FAQ possible for the International version of Tree of Savior.
We will be covering builds, stats, early rank classes and synergy with Paladin, mechanics, skills and known issues that could or should change in the future.
While I have some personal tastes regarding which path to take as a paladin, I’ve tried my absolute best to be totally unbiased and to listen to the views of the community.
Below is a list of changes made in the above patch notes that indicate relevant details related to the Paladin class.
Patch Notes - 21/04/2016 [NEW]
[Monk]
Double Punch
- : Double Punch will have a 10% Chance of afflicting the enemy with a [Double Punch] Debuff
- : Double Punch Debuff: Recieves 30% Bonus damage with [Strike] Property attacks (Doesn’t Stack with God Finger Flick Debuff.)
God Finger Flick
- : God Finger Flick will afflict the enemy with a God Finger Flick Debuff for 5 seconds.
- : God Finger Flick ( Debuff ): 50% Additional damage from [Strike] Attacks. (Doesn’t work with Double Punch’s Debuff.)
[General]
- The maximum amount of consecutive buff effects that clerics can have has been increased to 7. ( From 5)
[Bokor]
Hexing
- : Changed to a Rank 2 Debuff.
- : Resistance rate for Hexing been reduced.
Effigy
- : SP Consumption Reduced.
- : Skill After-cast Delay reduced.
Zombify
- : Fixed problem where Zombies would attempt attacks on friendly targets.
Ogouveve
- : Damage Increase & Range Attributes added.
[Dievdirby]
Carve
- : Base Damage added.
- : Cooldown Reduction.
- : Number of consecutive hits increased.
Carve Owl
- : The firing rate of the Owl will increase.
- : Skill damage increased.
[Paladin]
Smite
- : Skill Damage Increased.
- : AOE Attack Ratio Increased.
Conviction
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Skill damage Increased.
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AOE attack ratio increased.
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When an enemy is suffering from [Conviction] Smite deals 3 consecutive hits.
Turn Undead
- : Fixed an issue where Turn Undead was dealing Strike property attacks.
- : Fixed issue where enemies were being killed in a wide area.
- : Cooldown Reduced.
- : Skill range increased
- : The skill now applies to [Skill LVL * 1]Targets, From [3 + SkillLVL * 1]Targets
Class Synergy / Options
Cleric
- Safety Zone attribute gives +20 blocks.
- Heal level 10 gives 10 heal tiles.
- Fade level 1 gives you some invulnerability.
- Divine Might gives you +1 skill level for x number of uses.
- Cure damage scales with Int twice.
Krivis
- Daino increases maximum buff slots.
- Selling Daino scrolls with Pardoner class.
- Zaibas damage scales with Int twice.
- Aukuras has soft taunt, placing will aggro surrounding mobs to it.
- Zalciai provides 0.8 crit resist debuff on enemies per SPR and additional critical attack to you and your party.
- Zalciai gives magic amp from attribute.
Dievdirby
- Carve does 5 hits to single target and 3 overheat.
- Statues have soft taunt, placing will aggro surrounding mobs to it.
- Laima Statue applies reduced movement speed to surrounding mobs.
Plague Doctor
- Debuffs can be spread through Pandemic including Conviction.
- Bloodletting prevents status debuffs to your party members.
- Healing Factor provides some invulnerability.
Bokor
- Bwa Kayiman damage scales with Str
Pardoner
- Magic defense skill scales with SPR for 50% uptime.
- Can make dispeller, barrier and daino scrolls.
Priest
- Mass heal scales with restoration.
- Stone skin has a high chance to block physical attacks.
Chaplain
- Additional row to your auto attacks with last rites and aspergillium.
- Aspergillum scales off Aspersion which scales off Magic Attack which scales off Int.
Monk
- Double Punch and God Finger Flick have a chance to inflict a debuff that increases strike damage.
Known Issues (General)
Conviction:
Deals 3 additional hits with smite followed by conviction however the extra hits do not apply the full type-damage modifiers When the enemy is demon type or weak to strike type attacks. Only the first initial hit receives the multiplier bonus but consecutive hits do not.
This makes this combo scale very poorly into endgame when you are competing with other dps classes. So hopefully it gets fixed to apply Strike [damage] and Demon or Mutant [type] multiplier on additional hits.
Barrier:
Monsters may pass through after getting hit by barrier, may not be pushed back if they have resistance to knock back or are knocked into the circle by some skill and thus are free to move around without receiving additional damage.
Turn Undead:
Bug - SPR does not make a noticeable difference with the attribute (tested with 190 SPR).
Known Issues (PVP)
Conviction:
While the debuff works in battle league, elemental damage from gear does not apply to your damage in Battle League.
This is a severe penalty to Paladin becuase of the nature of their skills relying on this elemental property damage to buff their attacks with this skill.
Normally in PvP duels you can get the effective damage bonus by wearing 4 pieces of elemental equipment (fire, ice, poison and lightning). This is quite literally the only utility this skill can offer, the damage itself is negligible and scales poorly with other equally ranks DPS classes. Yet it is entirely useless in Battle League.
Barrier:
Players can currently pass right through barrier uneffected by knockback by simply holding the directional key/button towards the barrier.
Turn Undead and Conversion:
These two skills serve no purpose in PvP at all, effectively 2 wasted skills for a PvP player that do absolutely nothing.
In PvP some effects apply from buffs given by equipment:
Your equipment does not have elemental damage property in Battle League:
- gloves (accuracy and magic amplification)
- stats from equipment (top, legs and boots)
- bracelets (magic defense and stat bonuses)
- Necklaces (magic defense and stat bonuses)
- off-hand (elemental property damage)
Do NOT work in Battle League and your equipment is ignored except your attribute (cloth, plate, leather).
The weapon-type you are using for example will change your attack stats based on weapon-type, but do not retain their true value and stat bonuses.
This is true for ktos Battle League only. Guild Battle and Battle League have not been made available yet on International server.
Equipment Attributes
Cloth Mastery
Only worth if you intend to raise INT as a main stat and equip a pair of cloth gloves, will get bonus from leveling the attribute to your sp (3 pieces of cloth armor) and magic defense (4 pieces of cloth armor).
Plate Mastery
Provides the best bonus per level, at level 50 will raise your max hp by 2.5k with only 3 pieces of plate armor equipped. 4 pieces will increase your physical defense further.
Useful Equipment
- Cafrisun Set (level 15) for additional property attack.
- Rokas Robe (level 40) for magic defense and Int.
- Legwyn Leather Gloves (level 120) or other that gives high accuracy.
- Ravinepede boots (level 40) for poison property attack.
- Electus necklace (level 120) for lightning property attack.
- Ledas Shield (level 120) for ice property attack.
- Arde Dagger (level 70) for fire property attack.
- Velniup (level 120) for critical attack and slash damage.
- Valia Mace (level 120) for + 50 holy property attack
- Catacomb Mace: (level 170) mace for +300 magic attack and +1500 hp
- ??? (Level 220) Set for ice property attack
- Animus (level 170)
- Mdef - 75
- Magic Attack stat up - 33
- SP stat up -182
- Increases magic amplification equal to 40% of HP recovery
- Reduces basic HP recovery to 0
- Aias Shield (level 170)
- Physical Defense - 88
- Critical Resistance stat up - 164
- Block Rate stat up - 2
- Block stat up - 84
- 8% chance to reduce damage by 50% when hit
Stat Allocation
CON - Con has the best scaling out of all the stat archetypes and is always relevant. It’s especialy important to find a good balance for your build and investing early on will save you when you approach level 100+ and are doing missions and dungeons regularly.
STR - Your main stat for a pure-melee build, will always be relevent due to the +10% per rank to Str.
INT - Int is a valuable stat for any cleric build because of heal and cure. Please read the section on Class Synergy. Int has better scaling with skills than Str.
SPR - Generally provides some immunity to cc, but not relevant for a STR-build because of it’s worse scaling than other stats unless you are committed to a full-support build.
DEX - You should mainly get Dex for accuracy, but for PvE it should mostly be ignored and replaced with a decent pair of gloves (plate or leather). In PvP you will want some Dex for accuracy if you have a PvP viable build. (see the chaplain build section below)
DEX (Explained)
Crit Rate: % = 42(critrate - critres)/level
As a Cleric I never think it’s a good idea to get DEX instead of INT or STR. I’ve applied my statistics and experiences from playing paladin to the guide. There’s very little more I can add to that.
That’s because the impact DEX has is unimpressive per point investment.
With 200 crit rate you’ll crit as often as 17% at level 280. That’s with 100 DEX and 100 crit rate from gear. 100 crit rate is equivalent to +14% chance to crit. On bosses your chance to crit is even lower.
Your character will get a bonus of +10% to STR and INT per rank.
Magic amplification is a random value between (1 ~ Magic Amplification).
Leveling Tips
As pardoners are very accessible to players in game, you can buy sacrament and blessing buffs when questing and doing missions.
If it’s a question of Int or Str, then get Int first, this is because Int will help more mid to late game. Not to help with early leveling. Int scales with your heal tiles, mass heal and the restoration applied to these skills.
Heal, Zaibas and Cure’s base damage has double scaling with Int. The Int bonus is added right into the tooltip and additionally adds your magic attack to your damage which also comes from Int.
It makes you more ready for any situation by having some int, and from playing both int and non-int variants of paladin things are much more fluid with Int during your mid-late game. It doesn’t take a lot of stat points to invest in some Int.
I made a Krivis c2 to test interactions with skills. The buffs since to Cleric c2 are very good. So my thoughts are that going Paladin without Cleric c2 would be extremely wasteful unless you are making a full support (Priest c3) build.
Stat / Skill Allocation - PvP Support Priest (SPR)
PvP and Earth Tower [NEW]
I honestly feel like Priest works well enough even without Paladin. Chaplain might have a lot better synergy and scale into higher level content because of conviction, so far I’ve noticed that any additional elemental damage will add on to each additional hit, such as with sacrament and cafrisun set. Because of this you will get an damage bonus with conviction that is significant whatever level you are.
(Additional Attack + Extra Elemental Attack) * (100% + T2 + T3) + T4
also:
((Elemental Attack - (Elemental Resistance +- Modification)) * Elemental Modifier) (+ ...)
Where (+ …) is a repeat of the first part for every element you have Elemental Attack for.
For a PvP focused build you may want natural resist to cc. I have a paladin on ktos with 190 SPR and that high resist works well in PvP. But unfortunately it’s not a PvPer build, it was meant for testing Zalciai (Krivis).
Heal tiles from Cleric only scales with INT, so that’s why there is some INT and INT has better scaling because of the +10% per rank bonus.
Mass heal scales with INT and SPR.
Stone Skin doesn’t need a huge amount of SPR to be good. In fact, 80 is enough but more helps of course.
You can invest in DEX for Accuracy and Crit Rate and use crit rate gems on your left and right hand, crit rate bracelets.
Beyond that you should have high enough CON and wear plate armor for the extra 2.5k hp bonus.
This build is for Chaplain (Rank 8) unless there are better alternatives at that rank. You should decide whether to go Chaplain at Rank 5 after Priest c3 or at Rank 8 after Paladin c3. The reason is there might be better options than Chaplain available so choose carefully.
In the end you will have something like this:
Stat / Skill Allocation - Dievdirby and Monk (STR)
Revised STR Paladin [NEW]
STR DPS / Support Hybrid
Simony + AFK Conversion
The whole build is based on:
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having high base damage (STR)
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Conviction adds damage based on your equipment because of the debuff. if you have elemental damage (fire, ice, lightning and poison).
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Carve is a 15 hit burst skill but the cool down is long (17 seconds).
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Carve scales really well with STR because it’s multi-hit and pierce damage.
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Level 5 carve and level 5 double punch (c1 monk) have low base damage and yet they are the most bursty skills you have and also do [pierce] and [strke] type damage.
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Smite is also very bursty, however 9 seconds cool down.
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Each of your skills also has attribute bonus damage +%:
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scales further into late/end game.
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further damage increase from conviction.
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So effectively you’ll use conviction, smite and carve.
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Then use double punch when all your skills are on cool down.
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Followed by conviction to debuff enemies.
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Double punch is going to be debuffing enemies every 5 attacks.
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This is because its a 10% chance and hits twice.
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You will do +30% damage with [strike] type attacks.
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Only the first hit of Smite will apply strike damage.
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Additional hits from attribute and conviction combo do not apply this [strike] bonus.
In comparison, how much dps does incineration bring to a phys pally?
Approximately 3:4 of a Pure INT build.
- Incineration base damage is high to begin with.
- Conviction debuff will lower elemental resistance of ALL elements (fire, ice, lightning and poison).
- Your weapon’s magic damage. (Catacomb Mace)
- Your 80 base INT.
- Every level you get +1 magic and physical attack (+280 matk at level 280)
80 INT - The reason why you can have a little is because:
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Cure, Heal and Zaibas have better scaling with INT than STR-based skills.
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Improves your heal tiles and mass-heal effectiveness.
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It does not take many points in INT for it to be at least somewhat useful.
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Cure does holy property damage making it strong against most bosses and enemy types.
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Cure has damage modifier attribute (+%).
Most Melee Cleric players tend to outright ignore INT because it’s useless! That aassumption is NOT true at all. 10 points in Cure gives you another additional multi-hit skill that has amazing scaling because it’s a multi-hit skill and stacks with INT twice.
Additional Buffs to Cure damage:
- Sacrament - pardoner buff
- Blessing - pardoner buff
- conviction - paladin debuff
- Elemental attack - off-hand elemental weapon, arde dagger, etc.
- Valia Blessing (+50 holy attack) - Weapon buff from Valia mace
- Cafrisun Power (+12 earth attack) - Buff from 4 piece Cafrisun set
- Swell left Arm, Swell Right Arm and Swell Brain - Thaumaturge buff
- catacomb mace (+300 magic attack)
I would suggest to raise Con and Int first until you reach 60 Con and 70 Int consecutively at a ratio of 1:1. Then invest entirely in Str.
In the end you will have something like:
Stat / Skill Allocation - Krivis and Plague Doctor (INT)
Magic DPS / Animus Necklace
I would suggest to raise Con and Int first until you reach 60 Con and 70 Int consecutively at a ratio of 1:1. Then invest entirely in Int.
In the end you will have something like:
Stat / Skill Allocation - Krivis and Pardoner (SPR)
Support Pardoner [NEW]
SPR - Essentially your main stat for Zalciai, Magic Defense and Barrier buff. I reccomend statting 1:1 con and spr until both are at 120~140. Then put the rest of your points in SPR.
In the end you will have something like:
Mechanics
Conviction:
Conviction reduces resistance for fire, poison, ice and lightning by -20 per skill level. If you have gear that gives you elemental property attack you can stack those bonuses for a total of +480 damage per hit for the duration of the debuff. With cure level 10 that’s an additional 28 hits x 480 = 13,440 damage.
Barrier:
Barrier is useful skill for making a protective zone where enemies are not allowed to pass besides a few exceptions.
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An attribute enables this skill to do damage equivelent to 100% of your magic attack every time the enemy is knocked back.
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Can be used to deal additional damage with conviction + smite by knocking up the enemy into barrier dealing additional hits when it’s pushed back by barrier.
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Can be used with frost pillar to deal consecutive hits.
Conversion:
Conversion is an all or nothing skill, more points allow you to convert more enemies. Keep in mind, the attribute applies +50% of your Str to the converted mobs damage.
Turn Undead:
The new Turn Undead is really nice. Try it out instead of getting Resist Elements. It will apply a success rate of about 40% ~ 60% chance to one-shot demon and mutant type enemies.
Turn Undead scales badly with SPR and is not worth investing in SPR for this skill, but the cool down is very manageable since the patch, it use to be over 100 seconds cool down which is why it was so bad. 70 seconds is GOOD. Trust me, I’ve tested it.
Restoration:
Restoration changed during kToS, and now applies this bonus to healing. I think it was a sneak buff, and wasn’t mentioned in any patch notes.
- Restoration will nearly double your heal tiles
- Heal tiles and mass heal scales with Int
- Restoration has double scaling with the Int bonus on heal
- Aukuras is only additive of the value equal to the level and attribute of restoration
Cure:
Cure has elemental property (holy) making it situational as well as good against a lot of bosses and ground-type enemies. It deals a lot of damage to bosses that are weak to it. If you have an arde dagger and catacomb mace as well as conviction debuff. You’ll see all of these damage modifiers add up. Having 70 int increases that damage by 140 per hit. 140 x 28 hits = 3920 damage for level 10 cure. 70 str is 15 x 70 = 1050 damage with carve (3 overheat).
Deprotected Zone:
3 points is required for the attribute and to have 100% uptime and might prove useful in boss fights. I happen to find it’s utility does drop off after level 100 as most enemies die fast enough without it in parties.
You could also keep it at level 1 if you have a high amount of SPR just for the utility at early game and end game.
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Enemies at level 280 have 200~300 defense.
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Enemies move around a lot and positioning can be exhausting.
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You also have to be in melee range and might have to take hits in the process or end up getting knocked back, frozen or sleep.
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It only works rarely because enemies will move, and it’s difficult to group enemies together in such a tight space.
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There is a delay when casting disrupting the flow of combat.
Animus Necklace:
Restoration + Aukuras increases your maximum damage by applying +40% of your HP Recovery to your Magic Amplification.
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HP recovery will be 850 with aukuras + restoration + 90 Con at level 280
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Animus (40% of 850) will give a bonus of 340 magic amplification.
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Zalciai also gives +45 magic amp with attribute.
Conclusion
If you want a unique build then go for it! And let me know how it goes. The guide is there to assist, and to give paladin some love and attention that it deserves. And to address the problems as well.
Often people gave up on Paladin because they think this or that. Since then it’s had some nice buffs to the class. With this FAQ people won’t be able to immediately criticize the option and gives players that much more freedom to explore their options.
I’ve heard too many times people saying Paladin is a waste of time. But everyone is learning here, and if one person says their experience was paladin was bad. Now everyone believes that there is some truth to it. But now there is more sides to the coin than first meets the eye. As you can see from information gathered in the FAQ.
It’s only there to guide players. A ladder that you climb to give you a comprehensive knowledge about the class and the play style that it offers.
one shot farming 