D&D 5E [GUIDE] My Word Is My Sword: The Paladin Guide

[FrogReaver]

Inspiring Leader is OK but HP is an inefficient line of defense unless you've got resistance. If you've got say a Barbarian and the DM is giving you plentiful short rests it's not a bad pick to increase your dungeoncrawling mode sustain, but you'd rather see it on a Sorcerer or Bard than on the MAD as hell Paladin.

I consider a "loss" to occur when a character in the party dies. You can't die in combat if you don't hit 0 hp and inspiring leader really helps keep that from happening especially for the squishiest backline characters.

Also, if you're using a one handed weapon all it takes is a single level of hexblade to solve the mad issue.

Honestly, I think inspiring leader is most thematic on a paladin and nearly just as strong on one as on a bard or sorcerer. So why the hate on taking it on a Paladin?

Heavy Armor Master only factors in when you actually take damage, and even then the true impact comes down to how many times you took damage during a fight, as it's generally trivial to patch yourself up between encounters. It kicks ass when 3 bps is like 25 to 10% of your HP applied per instance, but once you're past level 4 you should be really be thinking about how many times per fight it's actually applying. Absolutely worthwhile if you have an odd STR score you need evening out, but that's only going to happen with rolling, and from an optimization perspective PAM does far more for you at early levels.

I was going to get into specifics on HAM because I think you are underrating it's effectiveness even at higher levels but instead I'll use this opportunity to point out another one of my guiding principles. All the party contributes to damage. So even if you are doing double damage you aren't ending encounters twice as fast because you are still only increasing your party's damage output by a fraction of that.

However, when it comes to defense generally front line melee combatants are skewed toward actually taking a lot more attacks than their backline counterparts. As such that makes defensive abilities somewhat better than their percentages often appear. Likewise offensive abilities are often worse than their percentages appear.

You can replace one of your Attack action attacks with a Shove attempt, so if what you're looking is crit-fishing then PAM is identical in function since you get a shove plus two attacks on top. Shield Master is nice for different reasons (namely, reaction evasion to avoid chip damage), not as an offensive tool.

I totally agree here and it has the added benefit of not being DM dependent as Shield Master now after the last sage advice as often gets ruled favorably for offense as disfavorably.

5e has a narrow window for optimization - there aren't really that many picks that make a difference - but the ceiling is high. For example, take two level 5 Paladins: one is a VHuman who started with 16 STR, took Polearm Master and Resilient(CON). The other is a Tiefling who took HAM at 4 to round up his CON to 16, and wants to be the tank so grabbed Protection Fighting Style.

Do you want to know how much more damage the optimized human does? +108% on a typical fight. Literally two tieflings worth of DPR contribution, and if you put them together in a party and they played at equivalent skill levels, it'd be easy to tell who is the greatest asset to the team - because being a little individually tougher does not help the group overcome challenges as much as being twice as good at inflicting The Best CC.

Not even 108% more as smites make up a sizable amount of your total daily damage and that number is basically flat between the 2 builds. Also even if that 108% was accurate it would drastically drop at level 5. It still isn't causing your party to do but maybe 30% more damage per round. It's good but it's not nearly as good as it appears.

But all this talk about offense has also got us ignoring the defensive benefits of the HAM protection style paladin. In the early levels HAM is probably reducing the damage you take by nearly half. The protection style itself is vastly increasing the survivability of any ally near the paladin. Honestly against many enemies at those levels it's nearly halving the number of times the ally is hit, effectively reducing their damage by nearly half as well.

At the end of the day I think offense is often overrated and defense(at least on front line characters) is often underrated.

I agree with the sentiment of playing what you want, and there are many ways to contribute to the cooperative challenge-solving game that is D&D besides damage numbers, but to say individual character-building choices within a class don't make much of a difference is being disingenuous.

Back before the updated shield master ruling, I had developed a crit fishing paladin build that without buffs could nearly keep up in damage per day with a PAM + GWM Precision attack battle master fighter. On a fighter shield master isn't better than PAM + GWM but on a Paladin shield master offers very impressive offense when built correctly.

 

[FrogReaver]

To add to that, it's also worth to note that Shield Master shove can comes only AFTER you use all your attacks. As per description: "If you take the Attack action on your turn, you can use a bonus action to try to shove a creature within 5 feet of you with your shield." - you have to take first attack action and then use Shove. It was also confrimed by Sage Advice. You can check here: https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/994993596989300736

That ruling came so late into 5th edition after a previous sage advice ruling by the same guy had stated the exact opposite that it's more of the wild west on how any particular DM is going to implement shield master in their particular game.

HAM is good early level talent but it's becomes insignificant in tier 3 and I don't like to take feats that lose their power over time. Feats like PAM, ASI, Sentinel, War Caster, RES etc. stay relevant all the time from 1st to 20th level.

As you level, HAM increases in absolute effectiveness (as enemies get more attacks as you level) while decreasing in relative effectiveness. PAM actually doesn't increase much in effectiveness while lowering in relative effectiveness as you level and gain extra sources of attacks and enemies increase further in HP (extra attack, haste etc).

Most every feat decreases in effectiveness in some way as you level. If your not able to spot how then you likely aren't looking through the right lens.

There is of course a lot of stuff to care about when you want to be "optimized". Not only your private damage or protection, but also how usefull you will be for a party.

I totally agree. There really isn't a best build but there are very optimized builds and very un-optimized builds. I try to take a holistic approach, what aspects of combat would me being good at and exceling at help my team the most and what aspects for out of combat tasks do I think will be the most useful. I try to optimize along both of those axis. Then if I'm melee I personally try to optimize some for offense and some for defense.

How will HAM Paladin contribute to team vs a PAM paladin or Sentinel Paladin?

If my build advice is followed you can have both PAM and HAM by level 4 with 16 str and 16 cha. 1 defensive feat and 1 offensive feat. Order isn't particularly important as either is an amazing feat to begin the game with and both still are pretty strong for most of the level 5+ game.

While we focused a lot here on damage- there is a reason for that. A good optimized Paladin can have great damage, defense and support for party. And will be ten times more usefull than HAM & SM Paladin.

Many still use shield master such that the bonus action shove attack can be used before the attack action. Honestly a shield master paladin doing that ends up being one of the most impressive offensive builds imaginable if built right (it does take till higher levels to get everything you want).

I also agree with @Nephlim X that you can always play what you want, but sadly in 5e- one feat can really make a huge difference.

As long as it's one of the good feats then they all make a big difference. HAM is one of those feats. So is PAM. So is Inspiring Leader.

I am not rushing but I am curious about those! Did you have a chance to do some samples?

And thanks for catching that and testing!

I'll run those calculations once I finish with my comments

 

[FrogReaver]

This is wrong. I knew many DMs who like to throw higher CRs than they should at party and HAM while strong early is not as strong as PAM or RES (CON)/Warcaster. There is a reason if you look on every optimized thread ever on Paladins- that no one ever recommend HAM.

I recommend HAM. I know a thing or two about optimization. I'm the guy that actually sit out and quantified for everyone the real impact of precision attack. The thing nearly every optimization analysis does wrong is that it forgets you have a party. It forgets that combat optimization has a goal and that goal is to not lose a party member (whether yourself or someone else). If you do that the game may go on but that's a failure.

Again- it's not bad feat. It's not bad decision to take it. People should play what they feel is most fun.

However when it comes to optimization- it's just simply not a best choice.

There's so many qualifications on that. In a campaign where your melee paladin is taking nearly every enemy attack then you better hope that you brought along a shield and HAM. Heck you probably want to forgo divine smite at that point for shield of faith as well.

Even in a campaign where your melee paladin is only taking 50% of all the attacks it's probably more wise to focus more on defense than offense no matter how much faster you think having a lot more damage should be killing enemies.

Let's take your level 4 example. Let's take Variant Human.

You take on level 1 HAM and level 4 PAM. The other Paladin takes level 1 PAM and level 4 RES (CON).

So first Paladin have easier time staying alive for first 3 levels but he has only one attack. The second Paladin will take more damage while being hit but he will kill more enemies faster than first Paladin. Dead enemies don't do damage too.

Sounds good so far. In an individual combat an ability that halves goblin damage like HAM does will have the same impact as an ability that doubles damage (except smites actually favor the less offensive character in this situation as they increase damage by a flat amount regardless of what you are already doing) the absolute damage difference changes but the relative damage difference adjust due to that.

Let's take example of 3 Goblins attacking our first level Paladins. Both have 18 AC (16 +2 shield). One has longsword 1k8 + 3 and second one have Spear 1k6 + 3.

3 2 1 goblin attacks vs 3 3 2 2 1 1 goblin attacks. That's 6 goblin attacks vs 12 goblin attacks. If HAM halves that damage as expected then it doesn't matter. But more importantly fights aren't 1v1. You have allies that are also doing damage and so even if the paladin is doing twice as much damage as the other. So it's not like the party with the PAM paladin is actually killing twice as many goblins per turn as the other HAM paladin's party. Neither is the HAM paladin lowering the damage of all the goblins by effectively half, instead some goblins are attacking other party members. That said HAM is likely reducing a good number of the goblins damages because enemies tend to focus more on melee pc's that run at them than on the backline party members.

Now level 4. So first Paladin has dmg reduction + PAM and second one have PAM + RES (CON). Now ok- first Paladin is still more tanky when he takes damage and he has same killing power now. However- what about Concentration? HAM does not help with maintaing your Shield of Faith, Bless or Divine Favour. So you will take less damage but second Paladin will be able to safely maintain their concentration buffs.

I'm sorry but a +2 or +3 bonus to concentration saving throughs doesn't make concentration that much easier or harder to maintain. resilient con is a terrible feat to take early. IMO.

Now on higher levels, tier 3. Enemy is hitting Paladin for 36 dmg. That is Concentration check DC 18. First Paladin takes 33 dmg instead, ok. But what is important more at this level? 3 dmg deduction or passing that CONC checks to maintain your Healing Ward, Haste, Holy Weapon etc. ?

But more importantly, paladins can usually get nearly just as much of a benefit from using a smite as from buffing. So why would a paladin want to use a buff spell that might end when he can just use that spell to smite? In this perspective resilient con is mostly a waste.

If you think you can prebuff a bunch then go for resilient con but if your games are like mine then good luck getting up prebuffs before most encounters.

What I say is: at some point HAM loses it's usefulness but RES (CON) stays relevant all the time, and it's getting even more important as you level up.

Resilient con is next to useless at level 4. A +2 or +3 con save at a level when there's not even really a buff spell worth using except in the most extreme situations isn't my idea of a good use of resources.

 

[Nephilm X]

@FR

1. Death comes from failing Death Saving Throws. Dropping to 0 HP every so often happens and is normal, you just make sure to have a Healing Word handy or pick players up before they expire. A little bit more wiggle room on your starting HP bars is nice but it's more important to decide the course of the battle before people start dropping.

As for why not Paladin? That's because the class wants Strength, Charisma, Constitution, and Feats. Everything it's expected to do scales off three stats and severely benefits from feats. Sorcerer and Bard on the other hand, played straight as casters, only care about maxing their CHA and keeping concentration with War Caster and/or Resilient(CON). That's it.

Inspiring Leader is a general feat - anyone with 13+ CHA can grab it and hand out the party-wide benefits, so why take it on the class that already has half a dozen other excellent things it wants to take to be better at its job?

2. Yeah, as an individual member of the party, it's unlikely you'll be the party's sole source of damage (though in the chaos of combat it's happened to me more than once). However, not everyone deals damage the same, and this comes down to party class composition and how they're are building or playing.

Let's say you have a "balanced" 5 man party: Paladin, Cleric, Archer, Wizard, Bard. Of those, save for specific Magical Secrets Bards are bad at individual target damage, Wizards likewise unless they're nuking. Clerics are middling. So over half the focus damage, that which takes down baddies so that they stop hitting back, and which deals with big scary enemies, is going to be coming from the Archer and the Paladin. That's a big proportion of damage falling onto the Paladin's shoulders, for when damage is called upon as the best tool for the job (ie Legendary Resistance enemies). How good you're at it matters.

OTOH if you're a Paladin in a party with 3 semi-competent fighters and barbarians, then sure build for Charisma and make everyone better. That's perfectly valid.

However, in regards to personal defensive abilities, the truth is that, even if they sometimes last longer, fights are usually decided in the first 4 rounds if not earlier. Ergo, you only need build to be reasonably sure you can fight through and contribute as much as you can for those 4 turns - there is such a thing as building too defensive.

Attrition is a losing proposition from a gameplay perspective, as not only does it prolong combat in real time and thus eats the from the session budget, but also the system in general disproportionately increases offense ability vs defense for similar expenditure of resources and 'character options'. Player Characters are glass cannons and the rocket tag is real - the system math just ends up working out that way, and punishes you for going against the grain.

3. No, no: I did the analysis while factoring in smites. It really *is* that big of a difference.

And the party having 30% higher DPR is huge. I think damage is actually really under-appreciated as a tool in a party's arsenal, given how much it can widen the range of threats having it allows you to take on while standing a decent chance of succeeding. Damage ends fights. Every round longer a fight lasts, every other turn an enemy gets, is a chance a nasty ability will be used against you, or a party member will drop Concentration, or a party member will decide "actually, we're losing" and turn tail, or another spell you'll have to (or they'll feel they need to) spend to maintain the battle under control. It matters.

And yeah HAM is nice early... after 5, though?

Protection, though, is garbage through and through. You only get one reaction. It imposes disadvantage on single enemy attack per round. I'm firmly convinced it's a development artifact back when the game didn't have Extra Attack/Multi-Attack and everything scaled off higher damage die.

 

[Gladius Legis]

As you level, HAM increases in absolute effectiveness (as enemies get more attacks as you level) while decreasing in relative effectiveness. PAM actually doesn't increase much in effectiveness while lowering in relative effectiveness as you level and gain extra sources of attacks and enemies increase further in HP (extra attack, haste etc).

Most every feat decreases in effectiveness in some way as you level. If your not able to spot how then you likely aren't looking through the right lens.

Difference is, defense has a saturation point, a point where enough is enough and any more doesn't really help you in your objective in staying alive. As you level, your party gets more ways of boosting your survivability, you get other ways of increasing said survivability, your party is inflicting disadvantage on enemy attacks more often, you or your party is dealing status effects to enemies that straight ruin their offense, and HAM just ceases after a while to contribute meaningfully to that objective.

Healing, likewise, has a saturation point.

Offense, the ability to do more damage, on the other hand, has no such saturation point. Every little bit helps in your race to 100% dead enemies.

 

[Gladius Legis]

I'm sorry but a +2 or +3 bonus to concentration saving throughs doesn't make concentration that much easier or harder to maintain. resilient con is a terrible feat to take early. IMO.

I'm sorry, in what world is a +2 or +3 to anything insignificant when we're dealing with a binary pass/fail?

But more importantly, paladins can usually get nearly just as much of a benefit from using a smite as from buffing. So why would a paladin want to use a buff spell that might end when he can just use that spell to smite? In this perspective resilient con is mostly a waste.

Earlier in this post, you recommend Shield of Faith for a more defensively inclined Paladin. Guess what? Shield of Faith requires concentration. Guess what helps with that? Contradicting yourself much?

If you think you can prebuff a bunch then go for resilient con but if your games are like mine then good luck getting up prebuffs before most encounters.

So, basically, if you have no one who scouts ahead and all of your encounters start 30 feet away from the enemy.

Maybe that's your experience, but it is not mine, and I've played with many different DMs.

Resilient con is next to useless at level 4. A +2 or +3 con save at a level when there's not even really a buff spell worth using except in the most extreme situations isn't my idea of a good use of resources.

Bless, Shield of Faith, Wrathful Smite (not a buff but an outright crippler), all available at Lv. 2 ... nope, nothing worth using at all. Two of those aren't even actions and work perfectly in your own typical encounter scenarios.

 

[FrogReaver]

We didn’t look at raw nova. The calculations get a lot more complicated there. I’ll do some samples later when I’m at home.

An example: The character with higher hit chances will hit on more attacks in a given time frame. If all you want is nova damage that means he is smiting more often.

So my goal is to look at the non-prebuffed damage potential of 2 different paladin builds at level 13 after 2 rounds of combat. All damage will be weighted with accuracy. Criticals are being ignored. Smites will be applied. Haste and VOE will be cast the first turn.

One build has PAM and GWM with a glaive/halberd and GWF that only affects weapon damage. The other has PAM only and a spear with duelist. Both have a +1 weapon

vs_AC
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

PAM_Only
164
164
164
163
161
159
155
151
147
141

GWM+PAM
205
200
195
189
181
173
164
154
142
130

Summary: After factoring in smites PAM only wins nova damage over 2 rounds vs AC 19,20. PAM+GWM wins vs AC less than 18. At 15 AC PAM only does about 20 damage less than GWM on the 2 round nova including buffs which is about 11% lower.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm sorry, in what world is a +2 or +3 to anything insignificant when we're dealing with a binary pass/fail?


Earlier in this post, you recommend Shield of Faith for a more defensively inclined Paladin. Guess what? Shield of Faith requires concentration. Guess what helps with that? Contradicting yourself much?


So, basically, if you have no one who scouts ahead and all of your encounters start 30 feet away from the enemy.

Maybe that's your experience, but it is not mine, and I've played with many different DMs.


Bless, Shield of Faith, Wrathful Smite (not a buff but an outright crippler), all available at Lv. 2 ... nope, nothing worth using at all. Two of those aren't even actions and work perfectly in your own typical encounter scenarios.

First, you act like resilient con is what allows you to use buffs. It's not. I'll tell you what let's look at the actual in game difference between having that +3 and not.

Any given attack has on average maybe a 40% chance of being hit * 40% chance of having your concentration broken = 16% chance of breaking concentration. A +3 bonus at that point decreases the chance to 10%.

16% vs 10% per attack isn't a big difference IMO.

Now let's take a look at the difference after obtaining the +3 cha save from paladin aura.

10% vs 4%

Is it beneficial, sure. Is it beneficial enough to give up your level 4 feat for a 16% vs 10% chance per attack to a 10% vs 4% chance per attack. I'm not seeing how anyone could think it was. Now at higher level when you have really good buffs are facing many more attacks or ever harder hitting ones then I can see a reason for it. But not at level 4.

 

[Gladius Legis]

16% vs 10% per attack isn't a big difference IMO.

Now let's take a look at the difference after obtaining the +3 cha save from paladin aura.

10% vs 4%

Which means that first case cuts the raw incidents (as opposed to a mere slide along the percentage scale) of losing your concentration by 37.5%.

In that second case, it's cutting them by 60%. Pretty significant, in either case.

(Same principle as if you increase your crit chance from 5% to 10%, you are, in fact, doubling the number of crits you're getting.)

 

[FrogReaver]

Difference is, defense has a saturation point, a point where enough is enough and any more doesn't really help you in your objective in staying alive. As you level, your party gets more ways of boosting your survivability, you get other ways of increasing said survivability, your party is inflicting disadvantage on enemy attacks more often, you or your party is dealing status effects to enemies that straight ruin their offense, and HAM just ceases after a while to contribute meaningfully to that objective.

Healing, likewise, has a saturation point.

Offense, the ability to do more damage, on the other hand, has no such saturation point. Every little bit helps in your race to 100% dead enemies.

More offense saturates the same way more defense does. If you have enough offense to safely kill the enemy then having more isn't going to make the fight any safer. However, more offense can let you face tougher enemies than you could have faced without it. That's the way in which it doesn't saturate. Defense is the same way. Once you have enough to safely kill a particular enemy then having more doesn't make that fight any safer. However, if you have more defense you can face tougher enemies than you could have faced without it.

The downside with defense is it can be bypassed simply by enemies avoiding attacking the defender.
The downside with offense is it can be bypassed simply by enemies focusing down the attacker.

This is why for any front line character I would suggest focusing on having good offense and good defense. Good offense makes it much harder to just avoid attacking you. Good defense makes it much harder to focus you down.

At early levels HAM reduces about 50% of the damage you take from goblins and other creatures like that. Against Ancient Dragons HAM reduces about 15% of the attack damage of them. As with most abilities there are some enemies its just not going to be very useful on. But on many enemies as you are leveling from 1 to 20 (and most importantly in the level 1-10 range where most people end up spending most of their game time) it has a huge impact.