Paladin stats & race

[Raev]

WK, have you considered rolling a Battle Cleric? I've been really curious to try this build. The Cleric quest armors all have very nice armor class: the Templar (Giant) set has 219 AC, 13 STA, and 200 HP which compares reasonably with the Scaled Knights (Paladin Skyshrine) set at 188 AC, 39 STA, and 260 HP. So from a mitigation standpoint you should be right there. Your avoidance would be terrible, of course, due to lower defense and minimal dodges. So I would guess that a Battle Cleric would take about 20% more damage than a Knight, which is really not bad. The worst part would be the lower HP pool and CH efficiency, so let's say in total the BC requires 50% more healing.

However, the Plane of Sky mace should give about 10 mana per tick (15 with full dexterity, but good luck trying to get a primal brawl stick over Team Monk). That's one complete heal every 4 minutes. If we assume that heal goes off for 2800 HP or so, that's 70 HP/tick of regeneration or 11-12 healing per second. That means the BC is winning if he is taking under 30 damage per second (vs a 'normal' tank's 20). I haven't parsed NPC damage in a long time, so Troxx would probably be the guy here, but I'd guess this is pretty typical.

Of course, the Paladin would be doing much more damage, but the BC would have the advantage if the group got in trouble. And the BC would have some options to increase damage output, especially via damage shield (since fewer attacks would miss) and perhaps judicious use of the pet (by breaking mez before the first NPC dies, its hatelist never empties).

TLDR: I think reasonableness of the Battle Cleric build shows how badly Paladins are underestimated. But I just don't see how they have enough mana regeneration in this era to function as efficient healers, and I'm having trouble imagining a situation where an extra 2-3 superior heals save the day.

WK, how about you post some fraps of that mana pool being put to good use in a group situation? If your theory is correct, you shouldn't need more than 1 group session to do so.

P.S. Troxx, you need to hit the Halls of Testing!