***OUTDATED***Neverwinter: Oathbound Paladin Guide

**This guide is outdated**

  

  This guide will mostly cover tanking and soloing moderately high-level content with your Oathbound Paladin. There're some tips on stats you should be working towards, what skills are valuable and a sample build.This guide won't delve into the super high-end stuff, by the time you're ready for that you should know what stat and builds you want. Keep in mind this was written fairly early into Module 6, so some things are certain to change. Let's get started.

Tanking 101

  There are some conventions in tanking that you should be familiar with. This section will apply to almost any game you play. If you are seasoned in tanking you can probably skip this section or better yet, read on you may find out something you didn't know.

• You should be the one to start the fight...sometimes.

  This may not always be true as far as trash mobs go, but for a good 80% of bosses you will want to be the initiator. It is your job to control the mobs, but sometimes it is better if a DPS can take some of the heat from adds that may be with the boss while you focus on getting the big guy's attention.

• Positioning is important.

  Some enemies will have huge frontal cone attacks that can one shot your squishy DPS and heals. so as a general rule you will want to face the mob away from your party, of course, some enemies will have back attacks or side attacks, so you will have to use judgement and adjust. Also, stay out of the red (or fire), a lot of the red zones and fiery spots made by enemies can one shot even a tank, so you will want to be light on your toes and stay moving.

• You can't always tank everything.

  Don't feel bad if an enemy runs away from you and goes for your healer or a DPS sometimes. Some enemies have secondary aggro attacks that are designed to target people other than the tank. Designers use these attacks to mix things up a bit and keep everyone on their toes and interested in the battle.

• You REALLY can't always tank everything!

  I just want to restate this, sometimes another party member will have to kite or tank some of the adds. This is especially true in higher tier content in Neverwinter. It is also slowly starting to happen a great deal in other games. Some of the bosses hit so hard by themselves that if you try to tank the other elite mobs they summon you will be dead in a flash. So it's fine to let someone else tank a few adds every now and then.

• Your gear is paramount to success.

  Other party members may be able to get by with less than optimal gear, the tank, however, can't. As the tank, you will need to have tons of HP, tons of defense as well as some damage to keep threat. In Neverwinter, you will notice that there are minimum item levels (ilevels) to enter certain instances. These are misleading for a tank. For example, if you try to go into an ilevel 1600 dungeon at ilevel 1600, you will likely get owned at every pull<This has been fixed a bit>. A good rule of thumb is to be at least 100 or 200 ilevels above before attempting to tank these...especially in a PUG (pick up group).

The Gear Makes the Paladin

  There is not really a hard-n-fast rule for gearing with a paladin. They have a couple different builds that I find pretty effective, and the stats you need will change based on what build you go with. For this guide, we will focus on what I like to call, the Templar's Wrath Paladin. Yes, just as the name suggests this build is made around that one skill, but more on that later. Instead of giving you exact gear, I will instead give you a stat scale by importance. Your stat choices will look something like this (in order of importance):

• Hit Points
• Critical
• Armor Penetration
• Power
• Defense
• Deflect
• Recovery
• Any other leftover stats you get

So you may be wondering why so many DPS stats. Trust me, we will get into that in the skills section.

How'd you build THAT?!?

In this case, screenshots speak a thousand words, so here you go (you can click the image to enlarge it):

Templar's Wrath Paladin Build Feats.

  This build is fairly flexible though there are a couple of feats you will want to make sure to grab and I will cover mostly those.

Must-have Heroic Feats

• Toughness (1st tier, bottom feat).  You will want this maxed, I'll elaborate a bit later on the why's.
• Wrathful Strikes (2nd tier, bottom feat). This will need to be maxed as well.
• Steadfast (4th tier, top feat). Max this feat out also.

  Those are the main ones you'll want maxed out, the others will be based on your taste. I would recommend that you take the points out of Divine Attunement (3rd tier, bottom feat) and place them into Weapon Mastery (1st tier, middle skill) and Light's Shield (2nd tier, top feat), but it really doesn't matter that much.

Must-have Paragon Feats

We'll start with the Justice line:

• Echoes of Light (4th tier, top feat),  maxed
• Vengeful Judge (Ultimate Feat, capstone or whatever they're called.)

Bulwark line now:

• Holy Resurgence (1st tier, top feat), maxed.

  Ok, so those are the most important feats. Feel free to use the exact build I have in the screenshot, I find it really fun. For those who mostly solo but like to run the occasional instance, this build performs just fine. Now let's delve into the skills that are used in this build.

Mad Skills...Bro...

  This build won't really use that many different Encounter Powers. Of course you will have the occasional time when you will need to have something else slotted, but for the most part, especially when solo, you will keep these skills on your bar (ideally these should all be at rank 4 but rank 3 will suffice):

• Templar's Wrath: This skill should NEVER leave your bar, plain and simple. This is why you want your damage to be very high. When you hit enemies with it, you will gain temporary HP equaling 3x the amount of damage you caused with the power. So big crits, big damage = big temporary HP. This is your lifeline and the only reason you are sustainable despite low- raw mitigation numbers. It also provides a short daze, so you can interrupt some enemies casting skills...like...stopping Poweries from draining all of your hard earned AP, as one example.
• Burning Light: This is a great AoE skill that will also give you a second layer of CC on top of Templar's Wrath's CC. This skill is great to have, but you can swap it out depending on the situation...Though, I've never had a situation where this skill wasn't awesome to have.
• Smite: This skill performs well for the most part, however sometimes you will want to switch it out.

Now let's look at some of the other powers you will sometimes want to swap in as the need arises.

• Circle of Power: If you have an enemy or group of enemies that hit really hard, you can use this in the place of Smite or Burning Light. This build is pretty squishy for a tank, so every little bit of damage resistance helps.
• Vow of Enmity: This can be a great damage boost, but is mostly only useful if you are having problems keeping the enemies focused on you. Best used when you know you will only be fighting 1 big mob and very few adds.
• Blinding Oath: This can be a life saver at times. If you have a big pull coming up, swap this in the place of Smite, and use Circle of Power in place of Burning Light.

Your At-Wills are also pretty straight forward.

• Shielding Strike: You will want to use this mostly for the shield it gives you. The shield is not much, but like I said every little bit counts. The damage on this power isn't too bad either.
• Radiant Strike : This is the Paladins only AoE at-will, so you always want this one, it also provides a damage boost buff.

Your class features will probably be the thing that changes most often:

• Aura of Courage: This should always be used when solo, and most of the time in instances. This is one of the main reasons you want your HP high, other than obvious reasons. This buffs the damage of the party and yourself, by adding bonus radiant damage to the tune of 1% of your Max HP.
• Aura of Radiance: I like the passive damage boost, one last thing to have to worry about. It can also help you maintain threat in large groups of mobs.

As the need arises you may need to use these instead:

• Aura of Truth
• Aura of Protection

  Those 2 can be real life savers, especially in large pulls, or very hard hitting bosses. You will definitely lose some damage, but you and your party will not take as much damage. Here's a good rule of thumb, if you are going to be using Blinding Oath, use the aura of Truth and Protection.

Daily powers, these are almost always gonna be situational, but...

• Divine Judgement: When you are solo or really need to pop a group of mobs hard!
• Divine Protector: Helps out your party by giving them all a shield but be warned this can kill you. Your party will still need to avoid taking excessive damage, as when the bubble ends, you will take a portion of the damage absorbed.

Let's Talk Tactics 

*PRO TIP: Check out the video below if you want to skip all the reading that is to follow.

  Now that we have the build and skills out of the way, we can discuss some tactics and miscellaneous tips. Before combat begins you will want to use your 'Tab' ability. You will have the buff Judge which increases your damage. Remember, getting our damage as high as possible is the name of the game.Then you will want to charge into the group of enemies using Radiant Strike.

  If the enemies are not very powerful, let them get you to about 75% HP then pop Templar's Wrath, if your foes are strong pop Templar's Wrath immediately. Then Immediately charge Blinding Light to the full charge time, you can then press 'Tab' again, and strike with Smite. Hit with your Shielding Strike to stack your shield, and continue using your powers as needed (mostly on cooldown) and remember, your 'Tab' skill will shorten the cooldown of your powers by 35% each time you press it.

  Your encounter powers have a chance to instantly restore a pip of Divine Call and your at-wills have a chance to proc Echoes of Light which will make the next encounter power you use instantly refresh the cooldowns on any recharging powers, so keeping your temporary HP up shouldn't be an issue unless you are getting hit really hard! If you are having trouble keeping your temp HP up, you should be holding down 'Shift', that will help to regain some life and grant you some more damage resistance.Don't be afraid to really lay on that 'Shift' key, thanks to Holy Resurgence you will regen your stamina much quicker when it is very low.

  You can watch the video below for an example of the different tactics you can use. Have fun! Let me know if you guys have any awesome builds you want to share or if you have some ideas to improve this build!