And the Pious Templar got lost

[XmonkTad]

I really want to like the Pious Templar, but it seems off to me. It has some great things going for it (mettle, paladin spells without alignment/code issues, good BAB/fort/will/HD) but it has a lot of dead levels (except for spell advancement) and no capstone. Zeal's Tier List for PRCs had listed it as "Equal, except for one level dips" which I assume to mean it's much better if only taken for one level, though it's not explicitly spelled out.

And so it seems that the real reason to keep taking this class after the dip is to get the fast spell progression (faster than a paladin anyway) which throws me off again.

So the questions I have are:

1) Does battle blessing apply to Pious Templar spells (if using the paladin spell list).

2) What is the intended entry for this class? What non-fallen paladin would give up all its class feature progression to get 4th levels one level early? The 3/4 BAB classes have to wait to qualify, and there aren't enough skill points for a rogue anyway.

3) How good is the paladin spell list anyway? Surely it's not good enough for an initiator to want to prestige out for 10 levels.

4) Is True Believer a "dead feat"? Is a relic (with connection) better than an ancestral or legacy weapon?

[MirddinEmris]

1) Well, the requirements for Battle Blessings is an ability to cast paladin spell, and PT (non-evil) is explicitly said to cast those, so i don't see any problem.

2) The thing is that a paladin DOESN'T have any class features after 5-6 levels of class, only scaling of the old ones - lay on hands and smite evil. And PT stack with paladin smite (more, it gives you additional ones in this case). So a standard paladin, maybe with a dip in a fighter and Holy Warrior ACF (which trades your spells for feats) will do just fine.

3) The core paladin spells list is mostly bad, though there are some gems (like Death Ward or Holy Sword), but most of them will require you to chose between them and attacking someone, which is bad (not so bad if you have a Battle Blessing, of course). Outside of the core it's much better - many of the spells are swift action, or even immediate and doesn't depend on caster level much (for example, Rhino's Rush is a swift action 1st level spell and will double your damage on next charge attack in current round).

4) There are some very good relic that have nice (for their price) powers when connection is established. I believe there was a handbook for them.

[nedz]

Basically for a 1 level dip you are swapping True Believer for Mettle

For a 4 level Dip you get Smite 1/day, Damage reduction 1/—, Weapon Specialization and your feat back. Oh and you get a couple of spells too.

You get a faster spell progression than Paladin but there are still not too many spells per day.

I quite like PT — it's good at what it does, it just doesn't do anything too awesome.

Relics are in CDiv, the same as PT.

[OldTrees1]

4) True Believer is useful _when_ you have all your items crafted as relics (price of a relic is lower than an equivalent non relic).

[Auranghzeb]

Well, I do like Pious tempar as a Paladin PrC. The trick is the smite ability text in pious templar: it says that if you have another smite ability it advances with pious templar levels and you get two extra uses.

So, If you take 5 levels of paladin and then 8 levels of pious templar (the last two are probably worthless) at lvl 13 you can cast 4th level spells, you have 4/day smite evil with 13 damage and 2/day pious templar smite at +8 damage.

This is a built i made, I was extremely lucky wit the ability rolls and houseruled jotundbrund to work as powerful built, but on the other hand I didn't have access to Battle Blessings.

He uses the charge smite ACF and Feats for spells paladin variant.

http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=924499

[The Viscount]

Pious Templar is also a good way to access the blackguard list with easier entry and entry a level earlier.

The other advantage for Pious Templar is that it's a way to play a paladin-esque character without the need for charisma. The class literally nothing that depends on Cha, so is friendlier to those types of characters (such as the sample half-orc lady).