Paladin oaths, weapon of choice, feat support, race and action economy

[Corran]

The aim of this thread

This thread is meant to evolve into a disussion about how to best optimize the various different paladin oaths. I suspect that most of what will be discussed here is already covered by the paladin guides that already exist in this forum, but I was hoping for us to go a bit further and potentially expand on the optimization advice offered by the guides (at least that is what I hope for), by going into a lot of detail about the class and oath features, about how we can combine them with feats, spells and other features to produce a very effective combination.

So this is an optimization thread. And more specificly a character optimization thread, about the paladin of devotion, ancients, vengeance, crown and the oathbreaker respectively. I am talking about the kind of optimization that is carried out in a white room (is that the expression?). Without taking into account the party or the enemy's setup, and most importantly without optimizing on how best to fill a certain role (tank, dpr, etc). Instead let us just try to make the best out of the different paladin oaths without thinking of the aforementioned parameters. We will however look how things like the use of class and oath powers, spells and fighting styles shape or interact with the action economy of the character, and how feats and races affect our build. For that same reason let us restrict our discussion on singleclass paladins. Multiclassing introduces a plethora of other parameters, but it mainly defeats the purpose of this thread, which is to better understand the different paladin oaths (mechanic-wise) and to how to best optimize them. And by doing so, in the end, we will hopefully have a better idea about multiclassing too, in the sense that we will know better what we will be giving up in order to multiclass.

So, pure paladin builds. And remember, this is about optimization, not about our favoutrite choices when creating or playing a paladin, however feel free to drop your favourite builds and showcase their strenghts and weaknesses if you believe this will contribute to our optimization efforts.

Ideally, we will be able to shoehorn each paladin oath to a single paladin build to the extent that this is possible (race and feats predetermined), with no or very few choices left to be decided when party comp is known or to suit the preferences of the player.




Paladin features and figthing style

Before going into the oaths and into creating builds, lets talk about the paladin chassis, so that we will have a good understanding of the foundation upon which we will build and before going into a lot of detail. Admittedly, this is covered in more detail and better than I could explain in the paladin guides in this forum, but here is my poor attempt to sum it up, in regards to figthing style.

S&B
The paladin does have several options on which to use his action, other than taking the attack action. Between lay on hands, cleansing touch, channel divinity options, castiing spells and other choices (dodge, help, use object, etc), one can see that optimizing for a strong attack action can be problematic, given the potential opportunity cost. Moreover, taking into account the good AC a paladin can achieve, given his proficiency in all armor and shields, and his acccess to defense-minded fighting styles and spells, and his traditional role in a party (tank), one can come into the conclusion that going S&B is a very good choice for a paladin. Optimizing for a good AC (that is hard to come by due to bounded accuracy) to round up his already good defenses (aura of protection), and reducing the opportunity cost that presents itself when the paladin is not taking the attack action, are the two main reasons that make this figthing style seem appealing. Throw on top of that that a S&B paladin can still produce a good damage output due to IDS and by burning through his spell slots to smite, and this iconic for a paladin fighting style becomes one of the best choices to consider. And ofc, it allows for dex-based paladins as well.

Polearms
Polearm master is excellent on a paladin. Generating a consistent use for his/her bonus action, which becomes even better once improved divine smite comes into play, adds a lot of dpr to the build. Same holds true for the reaction that occurs (more rarely) when an opponent enters the paladin's reach of 10 feet. Throw sentinel on top of that, to make the use of an enhanced by IDS reactionary attack even more frequent, and to create a character that can excercise some battlefield control with his/her increased reach and his sentinel OAs. Sure it restricts you to being a str-based paladin, and it requires two feats and an ally fighting by your side to be most effective, but it is one of the best options for most paladins.

Edit: qs+b (quarterstaff + shield)
Combines the benefits of a good AC (shield) and of a consistent use of our bonus action (IDS). Polearm master feat mandatory, as with the polearm above. Potential drawback is that we dont increase our reach, which remains 5ft. Suggested fighting style: dueling.

Of course the oaths might shift the validity of the above observations, by providing some features that potentially favour different fighting styles. Nevertheless, it is good to keep the above points in mind.



Optimizing the oaths

I will start with the oath that is the easiest one to optimize, due to how all the oath features synergize with the class features and with each other, and present a very clear direction, as far as optimization is concerned. I am talking about the oathbreaker paladin. So, without further a do, here it goes:

OATHBREAKER
Keeping in mind what I said previously about how S&B and polearms both make good choices for a paladin, let us examine if the oath features of the oathbreaker make any other fighting style a better choice, and if not, which one from S&B or polearm makes the best fit.
Edit: Whenever we mention polearm in the oathbreaker's section, we refer to either a glaive or a halberd.

Let's start with the channel divinity option dreadful aspect, which is essentially a mass fear effect (30 feet radius) and imo one of the best tools an oathbreaker has access to. Lets look action economy. It takes an action to use, so that means one round of not taking the attack action (remember earlier that I mentioned sth about opportunity cost, that is just one example of it). Naturally, that makes us think that this particular oath feature favours a S&B fighting style, just because of the opportunity cost it comes with. But let us have a better look at it. It lasts for one minite, and anyone frightened by this power can only attept another saving throw only if he ends his turn 30 feet away from the paladin, otherwise they dont even roll to break free of the fear effect. This pairs inredibly well with the sentinel feat, and as we know, the sentinel feat pairs well with the polearm master feat, and thus with using a polearm. Moreover, using a polearm with the polearm master feat, has another advantage too (except using sentinel to keep enemies within the desired 30 feet radius). Using reach against a frightened target, means that the target cannot even attack you in melee, since being frightened denies him moving towards you. And if he attacks with a ranged atack, he does so at disadvantage. What about action economy? Assuming we are using our action to use dreadful aspect in the first round, that means that we have a bonus action left. And though this bonus action cannot be used to make a butt-end attack with our polearm since we did not take the attack action this turn, we can still use it to cast a bonus action spell, such as shield of faith. The best choice is probably going with the 1st level spell wrathful smite, which is an incredible paladin spell and which also pairs well with our combat tactics and with the theme of the oathbreaker.

So, combat would be like that:
Round 1: Use action with dreadful aspect, and cast wrathful smite with your bonus action, position yourself adcajent (or within 10 feet) to the enemy you are most keen on keeping inside the 30 feet radius so that he wont even roll against the fear effect again for the whole minute of the duration of dreadful aspect, or adjacent (or within 10 feet) to an enemy no affected by the fear effect, so that you can try to frigten him with dreadful aspect next round. From round 2 nd thereafter, use the attack action and your bonus action to attack with the polearm, and make sure to keep your reactions available to use against enemies who try to flee from the aura in order to attempt new saves.

Conclusion: So despite the opportunity cost and the disadvantage from the fear effect, that both work better with a S&B approach, I believe you can do much better by using a polearm and by finally getting access to the polearm master and sentinel feats. Another thing to take into consideration, is that it is important to have a good spell DC, for dreadful aspect and wrathful smite to have a better chance of sticking, thus added value of charisma.

What about the control undead channel divinity option? Well, that is your alternative use of channel divinity when fighting against undead that cant be frightned. Not much to say about it, or how it affects our optimization efforts, other than highlighting again the importance of a good spell DC, and thus a good charisma score.

Aura of hate clearly promotes the use of a polearm, and having a good charisma score. Clearly an attack-minded feature, that works even better if you have a couple of undeads via your animate dead spell following you.

The level 15 oath feature, supernatural resistance, comes to secure our build defensively, by providing resistance against non-magical weapon attacks (plenty of them out there, even in high levels, from what I hear). And it works even better assuming a non-S&B approach, as increaed AC lessens the times you need to rely on this feature, and thus its usefulness, if only by a tiny bit.

Let us look at the capstone, the dread lord ability.
The first thing to notice is how well dread lord combines with the amazing dreadful aspect. Same radius, same duration, but most importantly how the mass fear effect triggers all the area damage granted by the aura of the dread lord feature. Sure the bonus action overlaps with the butt-end attack from the polearm, but this is a one per day feature, meaning that in all other combats during the adventuring day you will be making the most out of this butt-end attack. And dont forget, in order to use dread lord in an effective manner, you need to make the best of dreadful aspect, and in order to make the most of dreadful aspect, you need the feats polearm master and sentinel.

Lets look at the action economy of when we use dread lord.
Round 1: Use action to activate dread lord, and use bonus action to make the melee spell attack, keep reaction to use if an enemy enters your reach, tries to leave, or with sentinel.
Round 2: Use action to activate dreadul aspect, so that frightened enemies can start taking damage from dread lord ability when they start their turns. Use bonus action to concentrate on wrathful smite if there was an enemy that was not affected by the fear effect from dreadful aspect, else use your bonus action for a melee spell attack granted by dreadful aspect.
Round 3: Attack a non-frightened enemy with your infused with wrathful smite attack, so that you can frighten him and so that he starts taking damage from dread lord, and use your bonus action for melee spell attack.
Round 4: Resume attacking, using your bonus action with the charisma based melee spell attack.


Some conclusions about the oathbreaker:
1)Dreadful aspect is very crucial in your combat tactics, use it as often as you can, but make sure you have it handy for when you plan on using the dread lord capstone. Moreover, wrathful smite, which is already a fantastic paladin spell, works even better for you, given how you use a polearm and being a sentinel, and later on with how your dread lord capstone works.

2) Charisma is important for paladins (mainly but not only, due to aura of protection), and for you, this is even more true. You rely heavily on the DC of some of your abilitites, and with aura of hate in play after level 7, it makes sense to finish an oathbreaker build at 20 level with a charisma score of 20, even if that is to the expense of having a lower strength. I hope I could convey how important I think of dreadful aspect to be.

3) Use a polearm and make sure to grab the feats polearm master and sentinel. A powerful combo, and I honestly think that none can use it in a more effective way than an oathbreaker.


Where does all this leave us? We look at a strenght paladin build, with the aim of having a charisma score of 20 at some point (even if we accomplish this at level 19 - we'll talk about progression later), and with the feats polearm master and sentinel. So let us look for a race. Naturally, we look for races that boost both charisma and strength. So, here are the available choices:
1) Human (variant)
2) Dragonborn
3) Halfelf

Before going through the pros and cons of each choice, I will remove the dragonborn from the scale. Despite netting you bonuses in the relevant stats, and one elemental resistance, the race is a poor one, and does not provide enough benefits to consider selecting it, from an optimization perspective. Feel free to argue with me on that, or on anything else I've said so far and I am about to say, I may well be wrong.

That leaves us with the halfelf and the vhuman. With polearm master, sentinel, and 2 ASIs spent on charisma to max it at 20, that leaves just one ASI/feat in the case of the halfelf, to potentialy use it to boost str at 18, or in some other feat. Assuming this last ASI is spent to boost str, and assuming point buy (obviously, as we are talking about optimization), a 20 level halfelf oathbreaker has probably the following stats: 18str, 8 dex, 16 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 20 cha, and the feats polearm master and sentinel. A vhuman oathbreaker who follows in the footsteps of the halfelf's build, will instead have stats of 20 str, 8 dex, 14 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 20 cha, and ofc the feats polearm master and sentinel. Judging by this example, we have to decide if the vhuman or the halfelf fits better to our oathbreaker build. The human gives us +2 to str and a more free progression since we can select to start with a feat at level 1, while the halfelf gives us +2 to con, 1 extra skill, elven as an extra language, darkvision and advantage on saves against charm effects and immunity to magical sleep. Enter variant halfelf, and the comparison becomes like this: vhuman gets you +2 to str, and one extra skill, and the halfelf gets you +2 to con, darkvision, elven language, and fey ancestry (advantage against charms and immunity to magical sleep), plus one benefit according to the variant (1 cantrip, or 5 feet of extra movement, or dorw magic, etc...). In every case, I think that vhuman is the better choice, though not so far ahead from the halfelf which does provide us with some very good benefits. The main reason I suggest vhuman is the better choice, is because it allows us to spare an ASI for an extra feat (besides polearm master and sentinel), and still have a str of 18 and a charisma of 20. This extra feat gained by setting our str at 18 instead of 20, is probably better than all the minor benefits granted by the tempting halfelf.

So, based on everyhing I said during this post, my final oathbreaker build would follow the following route (I highlight wih bold the parts I feel most confident about):
Race: Human variant
Stating stats: 16 str, 10 dex, 13 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 16 cha.
Starting feat: Polearm master
Stats at 20 level: 18str, 10 dex, 14 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 20 cha.
Feats: Polearm master, sentinel, resilient con.
Strengths of the build: Very decent dpr without reliance on smites for burst damage, through using a polearm (butt-end attack included) with IDS and the bonus from aura of hate (+5 eventually), and a very frequently occuring reactionary attack via either polearm master or sentinel. Also, very good battlefield control, through the use of the fantastic dreadful aspect, of a polearm wielding sentinel, and through wrathful smite. Good tanking, saves are as strong as they could be, AC is quite decent, resistance against non magical weapon attacks, fear effects to give enemies disadvantage, even reach to keep (mostly) frightened enemies at bay, or to keep ranged enemies from escaping your reach. And ofc everything else that comes from being a paladin (mainly the support aspect through auras, lay on hands and similar in nature abilities). Last but not least, having a few minions around through the animate dead spell, can prove useful both in term of tanking and dpr, but also in term of battlefield control too.

Final critique: I see the oathbreaker as a fear-producing machine, which utilizes terror as his main weapon to defeat his/her enemies. Fares equally well both against hordes and single targets, though he struggles when against undeads and enemies that cannot be frightened, such as constructs, undeads(?) and adventuring groups led by paladins with access to aura of courage! But who better than a paladin and his/her allies to bring down an oathbreaker?
From a mechanics point of view, I wonder if it would be wiser to spend a feat on mobile rather than on resilient con (ofc that would make us reduce our dex from 10 to 8, so that we can afford the extra 2 points to pump con from 13 to 14). The added movement speed is very desirable, so you can ensure that very few can exit the radius of several of your powers (dreadful aspect, dread lord), so desirable in fact that I was considering to choose the wood elf variant of the halfelf as a race instead of human. That and the fact that mobile can play well with polearm master and sentinel in play. Though I am just not sure, as resilient con is very important, with so many nasty things forcing con saves.


Anyway, this is my attempt at an optimized oathbreaker build. Not completed by any margin, but the basics of my idea are all there, as is I hope my justification of why I went with my choices. I have several thoughts about the rest of the oaths too, but I mumbled for too long already, and this thread is meant ot be a discussion.


TL;DR
So go on, pick an oath and tell the rest of the community about how you would optimize it and why. It does not matter if you end up being wrong, this is meant to be a discussion that will lead us to conclusions about how the oaths best perform. So feel free to contribute, either through talking about the different paladin features in general, or by producing solid optimized paladin builds, or by any other way you can think of.

[Grixis]

Oath of Devotion
Great Weapon Fighting style
Use a Great sword
Great Weapon Master feat

Your Sacred Weapon channel divinity reduces or completely nullifies the penalty from using GWM feat. Cross class into 2nd level barbarian to use reckless attack at will. So now your attacks roll is Proficiency + Strength mod + Charisma mod with advantage. Chances are you aren't going to miss very much and are adding +10 damage.

The action economy of this isn't great since your first round is dedicated to using your Vow.

A Dex based ranged fighting paladin could use Channel divinity to Sacred Weapon a Hand Crossbow. Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert will have you dealing similar damage but...

Your bonus action attack is dependable for use age and you can cross class to level 1 Fighter to take the Ranged fighting style.

You may be giving up your first turn but you probably won't be missing.

[2D8HP]

That leaves us with the halfelf and the vhuman. With polearm master, sentinel, and 2 ASIs spent on charisma to max it at 20, that leaves just one ASI/feat in the case of the halfelf, to potentialy use it to boost str at 18, or in some other feat. Assuming this last ASI is spent to boost str, and assuming point buy (obviously, as we are talking about optimization), a 20 level halfelf oathbreaker has probably the following stats: 18str, 8 dex, 16 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 20 cha, and the feats polearm master and sentinel. A vhuman oathbreaker who follows in the footsteps of the halfelf's build, will instead have stats of 20 str, 8 dex, 14 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 20 cha, and ofc the feats polearm master and sentinel. Judging by this example, we have to decide if the vhuman or the halfelf fits better to our oathbreaker build.*The human gives us +2 to str and a more free progression since we can select to start with a feat at level 1, while the halfelf gives us +2 to con, 1 extra skill, elven as an extra language, darkvision and advantage on saves against charm effects and immunity to magical sleep I must be misreading something.
Why do the half-elf and the Vhuman have different STR & CON?

:confused:

[Klorox]

Corran: one criticism of the Oathbreaker you propose.

While I'm sure that resilient CON is a great feat, if you were to play this character from level 1, waiting until level 8 until you get your 14 CON is tough on a melee character (polearm master at 1, sentinel at 4, resilient CON at 8).

If you were building a character who starts at a higher level, that's a different story.


Personally, I think you want to get that CHA to 20 as a paladin ASAP. The benefits on saving throws at level 6 are amazing.

[Corran]

Oath of Devotion
Great Weapon Fighting style
Use a Great sword
Great Weapon Master feat

Your Sacred Weapon channel divinity reduces or completely nullifies the penalty from using GWM feat. Cross class into 2nd level barbarian to use reckless attack at will. So now your attacks roll is Proficiency + Strength mod + Charisma mod with advantage. Chances are you aren't going to miss very much and are adding +10 damage.

The action economy of this isn't great since your first round is dedicated to using your Vow.

A Dex based ranged fighting paladin could use Channel divinity to Sacred Weapon a Hand Crossbow. Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert will have you dealing similar damage but...

Your bonus action attack is dependable for use age and you can cross class to level 1 Fighter to take the Ranged fighting style.

You may be giving up your first turn but you probably won't be missing.
Well, most paladin builds will probably end up using the first round of combat to do something other than attacking. And when using their capstone, it may as well be the first two rounds of combat. Even the vengeance paly whose oath features are designed so they dont interact with action economy all that much (so that they will be able to focus on attacking and dealing a lot of damage), is likely to spend his first round to haste himself. Anyway, it is true, that the channel divinity sacred weapon, is designed to help the devotion paly with a more attack-minded approach, and it works quite good with the GWM feat. The barbarian multiclass certainly provides a good boost, though I recall some time ago an idea by Foxhound who suggested adding some sorcerer levels to a GWM devotion paly. The trick, if I remember correctly, was to use your action with sacred weapon, and your bonus action to quicken upcast elemental weapon (or alternatively, quicken bless). Anyway, I will not elaborate on multiclassing, as this opens a whole new discussion entirely, and it would make more difficult to appreciate the oaths and our efforts to optimize around them.

Back to devotion paladin, I can see how sacred weapon and bless (I mean using bless when sacred weapon is no available) could potentially make a GWM devotion paly possible, though I am just not sure about it. You see, this oath is the trickiest of them all to optimize imo, I mean, you need both good (if not maxed) scores in strength and charisma, and then you have several feats that work great with the devotion paly (GWM, resilient, PM, sentinel, inspiring leader, mounted combatant, etc). Also, look at the capstone, holy nimbus. It is essentially a similar version to the capstone of the oathbreaker, meaning that polearm master and sentinel would work great with it too. So, should we go for vhuman and sth like GWM, PM, sentinel, +2 cha, +2 cha, and one more feat/ASI (possibly spent on +2 str or on some other of feat)? The sure thing is that with so much stat increase and feat pressure, and given that from level 7 and onwards the devotion paly and his close allies are immune to charm effects, I would say that vhuman is the most optimal choice. But as for the rest, I am at a loss.

Agreed about sharpshooter and sacred weapon. If someone wanted to play an archer paladin with one of the existing oaths, devotion would be the best pick. Though I dont think an archer paladin, however nice of a concept it might be, has anything to do with optimization. I would suggest to anyone looking to play an archer paladin and who has a permissive DM, to look at the homebrew forum, some nice stuff there.


I must be misreading something.
Why do the half-elf and the Vhuman have different STR & CON?

:confused:
Well, in that example, a halfelf starts with 15+1=16 str, 8 dex, 15+1=16 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 14+2=16 cha. While a vhuman starts with 15+1=16 str, 8 dex, 14 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 15+1=16 cha. Essentially, in the end, the halfelf ends up with a +2 con and some extra racial benefits, while the vhuman ends up with an extra ASI/feat, which if used to boost strength, would net him a strength of 20, contrary to the halfelf's strength score of 18. We had assumed that PM and sentinel would be taken as feats by both the halfelf and the vhuman.


Corran: one criticism of the Oathbreaker you propose.

While I'm sure that resilient CON is a great feat, if you were to play this character from level 1, waiting until level 8 until you get your 14 CON is tough on a melee character (polearm master at 1, sentinel at 4, resilient CON at 8).

If you were building a character who starts at a higher level, that's a different story.


Personally, I think you want to get that CHA to 20 as a paladin ASAP. The benefits on saving throws at level 6 are amazing.
Yes, I was thinking about that. I didnt like the idea of having a +1 con mod for at least the 7 first levels, let alone how that would make me delay my cha bumps even more. I was and still am very confused if I should have resilient con among the feat selection for an oathbreaker, given that I could spend this last feat on other useful things (like mobile, alert, mounted combat, insiring leader with a cha of 20!, lucky, or even boosting str to 20). Then again, I think that eventualy, resilient con will pump my con saves from a +7 to a +13, which makes me think that I should go through the trouble of making room for it in the final build, and thus making the necessary sacrifice of having a lousy con score of 13 for several levels.

As for the feat/ASI progression, I was planning to include it initially, though I didnt as I was not 100% sure of which would be the best way to deal with it. I agree that boosting charisma is extremelly important, especially for an oathbreaker (everything keys off charisma, emphasis on the crucial spell DC for abilities like dreadful aspect or spells like wrathful smite). Anyway, I am still very undecided on which order the feats and ASIs ''should'' be taken, but since I am still unsure about stuff like if resilient makes it to the build or no, the progression is of secondary importance. Thanks for pointing this out, it is always nice to see that there are people who take the effort to read through my rambling. About resilient con, how would you handle it, would you include it in an oathbreaker build? Or do you see a better option?

Edit: Assuming resilient con does not make it into the build, do you think that a vhuman with sentinel as his starting feat, and with cha bumps at levels 4 and 8 would be the best way to go? With sentinel you would be able to try to keep at least one enemy inside the radius if dreadful aspect, and by 8th level you would have your charisma maxed, for maxed boost to saves and maxed DC's. And picking up PM at level 12, just one level after IDS, to make the most of the butt-end attack with IDS on?

[Klorox]

As for the feat/ASI progression, I was planning to include it initially, though I didnt as I was not 100% sure of which would be the best way to deal with it. I agree that boosting charisma is extremelly important, especially for an oathbreaker (everything keys off charisma, emphasis on the crucial spell DC for abilities like dreadful aspect or spells like wrathful smite). Anyway, I am still very undecided on which order the feats and ASIs ''should'' be taken, but since I am still unsure about stuff like if resilient makes it to the build or no, the progression is of secondary importance. Thanks for pointing this out, it is always nice to see that there are people who take the effort to read through my rambling. About resilient con, how would you handle it, would you include it in an oathbreaker build? Or do you see a better option?

Two ways I'd do it, depending on vhuman or half elf.

Vhuman: 16/8/16/8/8/16 (resilient CON). +2 CHA at levels 4 and 8. If you really want PAM/sentinel, you can grab them at 8/12.

Half elf: 16/8/15/8/12/16. I'd have a 20 CHA at level 8, resilient CON at 12, and the PAM/sentinel.

I honestly don't think I'd ever play a level 20 paladin though. I haven't taken a hard look at Oathbreaker, but I'm a fan of the good guy most of the time, and never a villain. If I were to optimize a paladin, I'd probably stop at level 6 (7 for Ancients), add 2 or 3 warlock levels, and the rest in sorcerer (wild magic if point buy, possibly draconic if using rolled stats and I wanted to have the option to take off my armor and stealth).

[djreynolds]

Awesome thread. Though not my favorite class, but I must concede paladin and barbarians are just so well put together.

I think we must focus in the channel divinity portions. Short rest dependent means you can use this all day by breaking after batlles, if possible of course.

OoV is awesome and I would max out his attack stat and this archetype could even focus on dex and TWF, strength and PAM, really anything that can make use of IDS in combo with hunter's mark. Most hits should land with a maxed attack stat.

OoD, Humbly, sacred weapon, maxed charisma, and GWM are awesome. A 20 charisma is obtainable by 8th level, making this huge and allowing you to really manage spell and smite resources. Novaing when you want or need to.

OoO I personally haven't seen in game, so it's speculation, so conjuring undead allies and bolstering them is a must. Adding charisma and attack stat to damage at 7th level I think, powerhouse. If possible using the undead to either funnel prey to you or simply impede foes or slow them down.

I recommend, and nothing is cheesy, a 1 level dip of sorcerer for the shield spell and feather fall. And 1 level dip of warlock for EB. Though cheesy, the shield spell lasts your whole turn, once enacted, move as you wish not many AoO will hit. EB allows for one or up to 4 targets.

[Corran]

Awesome thread. Though not my favorite class, but I must concede paladin and barbarians are just so well put together.

I think we must focus in the channel divinity portions. Short rest dependent means you can use this all day by breaking after batlles, if possible of course.
Thank you for the kind words. Agreed about the channel divinity options being detrimental to how each oath performs and how it ''should'' be optimized. In some oaths this holds more true than in some others (for example while the channel divinities of the oathvreaker and of the devotion shape to a pretty big extent the build, I cannot say as much about the channel divinity of the oath of the ancients, but perhaps I mght be lacking imagination). Anyway, this is certainly the case for the oath of devotion, and more specificaly for the channel divinity sacred weapon, which is what I am planning to discuss right below.


OoD, Humbly, sacred weapon, maxed charisma, and GWM are awesome. A 20 charisma is obtainable by 8th level, making this huge and allowing you to really manage spell and smite resources. Novaing when you want or need to.

I've seen many in this forum swear to a GWM devotion paly. The ''why'' is easy enough to understand. Sacred weapon reduces and with a maxed charisma of 20 even nullifies the penalty of the GWM feat, allowing the paladin to hit often enough for some big damage. Add on top of that the damage from IDS and from possible smites, and you've got an impressive nova too. But is GWM such a good fit to a paladin, even to a devotion one? Or one such paladin could do better without it? Before going in more depth with this one, lets have a quick look to the oth of devotion as a whole.



OATH OF DEVOTION

At the start of this thread, I made a quick mention to why I believe that the paladin chassis is best supported by either a S&B or by a polearm approach. It is when the oath features kick in, that make one choice a better option than the other. And in some rare cases, there is an oath feature or two, that seem to make a different approach in regard to fighting style seem like the ideal choice. Such is the case for the oath of devotion and its sacred weapon channel divinity, that suggets taking the GWM feat. Whether this is an optimized choice or not, I am not exactly sure as I am writing these lines, but I expect to have reached to a conclusion by the end of this post (conclusion which might change based on your input in this matter). However, before going deep into the sacred weapon + GWM territory, lets have a quick look at the rest of the oath features.

Let us first look at the capstone, holy nimbus. A very similar ability to the capstone of the oathbreaker that we discused earlier, but relatively weaker. Not much you can do to optimize around it, other than fighting against certain types of enemies. This does not help us a lot in regard to how we should go about building a devotion paladin, meaning that no matter what choices we make when creating our build, this ability will work more or less the same. The only thing we could potentialy do in order to use this capstone in the most effective way, would be to grab the sentinel feat, so that we could keep enemies inside the radius so that they will take the radiant damage each round. So this oath feature, slightly advocates taking sentinel (which pairs well with PM as we know).

Purity of spirit, at level 15, is basicaly an ongoing protection from good and evil spell cast on us. How does this affect our build? The answer is, insignificantly. I would say that the disadvantage from incoming attacks advocates the need for a high AC, and thus a S&B approach, but truth is tht this ability only works against certain types of enemies, so it is not optimal to base your whole approach in regard to fighting style on such a situational power. Unless perhaps we are playing in a campaign where the players alwys fight the types of creatures that the oath of devotion excels against. So... no great insight about how we should go with our build gained from this feature either.

Aura of devotion, ie charm immunity. Again, no indication as to which fighting style we should follow, although, this power negates the better part of the halfelf feature fey ancestry, thus making the halfelf lose a tiny bit of its steam, as race selection goes. This detail might be of some value later on.

Turn the unholy (channel divinity), falls into the geeral territory of abilities that exactly because they require an action to use, make a S&B approach ideal, exactly because of the reduced opportunity cost. Though since it is a situational ability that competes with the always useful sacred weapon channel divinity, I wont put any weight on how turn the unholy affects our build making.

So.... only sacred weapon left to put on the scale. What do we have so far? That maybe sentinel might be a good pick just because it might make the capstone work a bit better under certain circumstances, and that halfelf loses some of its steam as there is an overlap between aura of devotion and fey ancestry. Not a whole lot to proceed with.

Now let us look into the sacred weapon channel divinity.
Takes an action to use, produces light (that can penetrate even magical darkness as a sidenote), adds chrisma mod to atack rolls, and weapon is considered magical for the duration. Clearly an attack-minded feature. Forgeting about GWM for a moment, and going back to the start of the thread where I talk about the S&B and the polearm approach, I would say that this feature alone (perhaps with some help from the capstone that utilizes sentinel to a small extent), would suggest that from a character optimization perspective the polearm approach sightly edges the S&B approach.
The question now becomes, is GWM worth taking? Can I do better with GWM than with PM? Could I potentially make room for both?


Before we go into this, lets have a quick look at the races.
Again, like with the oathbreaker, vhuman and halfelf are the main contestants. And though for the oathbreaker it was a very tough call imo, I think that for a devotion paladin the choice is somewhat more clear (but still very close). You see, in addition to the reasons I chose vhuman over halfelf for the oathbreaker build, we have two extra small deciding factoes in the case of the devotion paly. Aura of devotion overlaps with the better part of the fey encestry, as I said earlier, and we can also use sacred weapon (and holy nimbus when we hit 20) to cancel out the biggest drawback of the human, that is the lacck of darkvision. Well, cancel out might be an exhaggeration, but producing a non-dispelable light effect even for a brief duration, can prove quite helpful. The choice becomes even more clear if we choose to select to include GWM to our feat arsenal, as we will see in more detail later, but whatever the case may be regarding whether we will or will not choose GWM, I would say that the variant human is a slightly better choice than the halfelf for our str-based devotion paly.


Anyway, back to sacred weapon. I promise, I am about to make my point.
There are two ways to look at sacred weapon. You can either look at it and say ''I will grab GWM, max out strength and charisma, and try to kill everything with my mighty blade'', or, you can look at it and go ''Hmmmm, now I do not necessarily need to max out strength, and I can instead spend those ASIs on something else''.

Let me say why I think that GWM on each own is bad on a devotion paladin.
(ie ''I will grab GWM, max out strength and charisma, and try to kill everything with my mighty blade'')
First of all, action economy. Forget the fact that it takes an action to activate your sacred weapon ability and thus not attacking during the first round of combat (try to imagine what that will be like if you roll low on the initiative order), and even forget for a moment that sacred weapon will not always be available for you to use (it wont always be possible to have a short rest between combats - you can use bless instead when sacred weapon is not available, but that is half the benefit in regard to the use of GWM). The fact is, that a paladin can use his action in several other ways than just attacking. I am not saying that you will not take the attack action more often than not taking it, but there will be times, every now and then, when you will need to spend your action on something else other than attacking. For example casting spells that take up an action, using lay on hands, cleansing touch, even the capstone takes up an action. That's already a big opportunity cost, and with GWM in play it becomes a huge one. Best case scenario, you are lucky enough not to have to use your action to anything else other than attacking all that often, but even if that is the case, you are still restricting yourself horribly (greatest example is how you will almost never use the alternative channel divinitym ie turn the unholy, since you based your whle approach to combat to the sacred weapon channel divinity). Playing a paladin means having several options to choose from, at least more so than the average barbarian or fighter. It is how this class is built, how the class and oath features work within the game. It is no coincidence that the respective class and subclass features of the fighter and the barbarian dont interact that much with the action economy of their builds, as they are intended to swing a weapon non-stop when combat breaks out. This is not the case for the paladin, and even if you try to push it, there will always be those times when you will just have to use an action for something other than attacking (with most characteristic examples, using your action with sacred weapon or with holy nimbus).

But put action economy aside for a moment. Lets try to focus on the positives. Say you grab GWM and use your ASIs to max cha and str, and do not plan for any additional feat support (remember, I am talking as to why GWM is a bad choice if selected on each own, without a plan on how to make the best of it). What do you have working for you? The answer is, sacred weapon, ie +5 to attack rolls. That's it...! No 3rd or 4th attack, like the ones the fighter gets, no reliable source of advantage like the one the barbarian gets, not battlemaster maneuvres to help you land your hits. In fact, you have IDS, which means you are risking even more damage in order to potentially profit from the +10 damage if you strike, which makes GWM even more problematic in its use. And the funny thing is, that at the end of an adventuring day, a PM paladin would most likely still come on top in terms of damage dealt. All in all, a trap choice, given this simple but popular approach.

Can we make GWM a worthwhile choice for a singleclass devotion paladin?
Imo, no, we cannot. In order to do so we would leave the build very open defensively, we would still fall into problems regarding action economy, and the worse thing of all would be the build's progression in regards to ASIs and feats. You see, in order to make a relatively decent use of the GWM feat on a devotion paly, we need tons of investment. Ideally we need to max out both str and cha, and we need a lot of feats to generate the conditions under which GWM would begin to make sense. The only thing going for us in this case, is that the ideal choice for race is again a vhuman, thus 1 extra ASI/feat.

So, how do we make GWM better? Well, first of all we need more attacks, that's the biggest balancing factor. That definitely means taking polearm master, for the bonus action attack with the butt-end, and for a rare reactionary attack which occurs when someone enters your reach. I will go as far as to say that we need sentinel as well. Sentinel makes a great match with PM, and it works well enough with our capstone as I mentioned earlier, but most importantly as far as GWM is concerned, it generates a reliable reactionary attack with which you can also use GWM. So, with GWM, sentinel and PM, that means up to 4 attacks per round. Make no mistake, this is far from optimal, as it still suffers from a lot of the problems I described above, regarding action economy. And it also is not enough. You need something more. With 3 feats gone already, we have only another 3 ASIs/feats to go, so that we can make the best of GWM on a devotion build. Naturally increasing our charisma to 20 is the way to go, for reasons that I think I dont have to explain, and that leaves us with 1 more ASI/feat to take. Mounted combat, you need the advantage. The end. That ofc means leaving your str to 16, and it also means that whenever sacred weapon is uncharged or whenever you cannot bring your mount with you, you will have some issues. Same holds true for when you simply have to tae actions other than attacking. The synergy is not good....
And the worse thing of all, in what order do you take these feats/ASIs? This is a true nightmare figure out. No matter what you choose, you will always be missing sth essential. I would probably go with sth like: 1)PM, 4)+GWM, 8)+2cha, 12)mounted combat, 16)+2cha, 19)sentinel. But then again, I would very unlikely play a GWM devotion paly. You know what I would do? I would do this...



''Hmmmm, now I do not necessarily need to max out strength, and I can instead spend those ASIs on something else''
Final thoughts for an optimized devotion paly - no GWM
I would pick the polearm approach, just because sacred weapon, which is the only tactics-defining feature of this oath is so attack-minded, and therefore benefits from increased dpr, so that means polearm instead of S&B. So that means polearm master. I would also pick sentinel, just because it works so well on a paladin with the PM feat, and also because it has a slight synergy with the capstone. I would also take human variant, for the reasons I detailed in the race selection part. I would naturally increase my charisma to 20, and I would also not spend an ASI to bump str, as I would have sacred weapon to take care of the high AC opponents. So a str score of 16 would be enough. As for the rest two feats, I would spend one on resilient con, just because a +6 eventually on con saves is a lifesaver, even with aura of protection and a cha of 20 (resilient con also allows me slightly better stats). And for my last feat, I would take inspiring leader because it is so thematic for a devotion paladin (or even mounted combat), though this is not strictly speaking optimization (although it can be under the right conditions), so I leave one feat/ASI open for discussion or for selection according to other paramaters of the campaign.


Anyway, this is my analysis for the oath of devotion (it lacks things such as what do I do with my last ASI, or which spells do I end up using and how that shapes my action economy in combat, but this is all I've got for now for this oath), if someone was patient enough to read through this whole wall of text, I would be glad to see what you think an optimized devotion paly looks like. Or any other oath for that matter.

Edit: I am torn if a quarterstaff plus shield (qs+b) would work better than a halberd/glaive for a devotion paly. It heavily depends how soon you will take sentinel, and how often you will end up using the spell wrathful smite. The only thing that this decision influences, is the choice of the fighting style at level 2. It is completely viable to carry both a quarterstaff with the intention of using it with a shield, and a halberd/glaive, and to choose what approach you will take just before entering a fight. In this case however, I would suggest taking the defense fighting style, so that you can make use of it no matter which approach you take.

[Foxhound438]

OATH OF THE ANCIENTS

Defensive boons

Tanking of course requires good AC, so you're probably going str build for heavy armor. Dex builds for the better save are definitely a thing, but with aura of protection and aura of warding, even a strength based paladin will be surviving most dex-save effects. Personally I like a shield on this build, as it's about 20% less hits from a basic shield, depending on what you're fighting, and +x shields increase that effect tremendously. Between plate armor and a shield, your AC sits at a 20 before any magical effects are applied. Depending on your campaign pace, you'd have this by level 5 or 6 easily, when enemies are having around a +8 to hit on a "strong opponent", while average foes and mooks will have a much harder time getting anything to connect with you, at +4 to +6 (as suggested by DMG pg. 274)

as with all paladins, Lay on Hands will occasionally come in handy to boost your HP by about half. This still leaves you a tad behind barbarians in shear damage-sponginess, but not by too much.

For your fighting style, it might jump immediately to mind to grab defense or protection, but personally I would take duelist. A tank that deals no damage is really no more interesting to your foes than an ordinary pile of rock, while one that can punish enemies will likely draw their attention a lot quicker. More on this choice later, but dueling or defense are generally the best.

As with any paladin, Aura of Protection is king. As such, it is entirely viable to leave strength at 16 until level 12, so you can get those sweet +4 or better saves as soon as possible.

As mentioned above, you also get aura of warding. This can be great, but in some campaigns or worlds it will be as good as a blank line on your sheet. If your DM is notorious for not using spellcasters at all ever, this is dead weight, but if they do like to throw the occasional mage at you, it's a ton of extra tanking power that those mages really can't get around easily.

Cleansing touch is similar to aura of warding in that where it counts it's great, but where you're fighting progressively bigger dumb beasts it's another blank line.

Undying sentinel gives you some breathing room with simple damage, but not enough to be care-free about your health. It can save you once, but in a world of multiattacks and mooks, it's more a safety net than a "I'll use this to tank another round of attacks when I'm at 7 hp". Use wisely.

As with most paladins, going all the way to 20 is a great choice in a campaign that lasts that long. Personally I think that the ancients' capstone is the most powerful, or at the very least being on-par with dread lord, but with a different effect. Read closely, friends: "at the start of your turn, regain 10 HP". More importantly, nowhere on the ability does it say it ends if you're unconcious, meaning you can activate it after your free death ward saves you, cast a spell, go down to zero, and on your next turn stand back up and Lay on Hands your way back up to 110, and then still cast another spell with your bonus action. Because of this capstone, that's any spell you want: plant growth really stands out, since after you go down your enemies might very well walk away from you to pick on someone else, not knowing you're going to get right back up.

There is of course still danger here, in that a smart foe who knows your tricks, or just a dm who likes to metagame around your abilities, can hit you while you're down twice to finish you off.



You get a good few spells from paladin and your oath to help you tank harder as well. Here's a list of my favorites:

Ensnaring strike: a restrained creature attacks with disadvantage, so in a situation where you're effectively squaring off against one foe, you have a massive advantage if this lands.

protection from energy: requiring concentration to have resistance to one element that might hit you once per turn can be rough, but if that one hit in a turn is going to be hard... better to have it than not.

stoneskin: not getting this until level 13 means it's pretty niche for you, but if a pile of veterans and their pet dire wolf decides to pick a fight with you, you have a good spell to deal with that.

bless: your already awesome saves are now a bit better, along with some other areas of application, such as getting to hit things.

compelled duel: do what a tank is supposed to do and draw their attention away from the squishies.

wrathful smite: similar effect to ensnaring strike, just on a different save.

protection from poison: see prot energy, less the complaint about needing concentration.

aura of vitality: nothing says "hit me" quite like picking up allies the moment they go down every turn for a minute, while still applying damage of your own. Moreover, once you have everything's attention, you can heal yourself a decent amount every turn.

death ward: what's better than a safety net? TWOOOO SAFETY NETS!!!



feats

so we have all kinds of not-dying going on so far, what else can we do?

Your kit is currently heavy armor and a shield. A decent way to boost your damage enough to draw attention to yourself is to pick up polearm master and use a quarterstaff, especially if you pick dueling fighting style. If you can set up a divine favor for yourself, or some other damage-per-hit boost early, the extra attack on a s+b style build can boost your damage significantly. However, make sure to weigh in your head the benefit of foregoing attacks for a round to set up bless; with the improved hit chance, you will do about the same average damage (target AC dependant) as a +1d4 to damage would do, while also giving that boost to a couple of allies. If something looks weak enough to one hit with 10ish damage however, divine favor may be the better choice to mess with the enemies' action economy. Other spells that work well for sustained damage from PAM are crusaider's mantle and elemental weapon, though those both require an action to set up- mantle being an aoe team damage buff, while E. Weapon is a boost to both damage and accuracy for you alone.

some other feats to consider:

Inspiring Leader: an extra bit of HP can go a long way. Maxing out at 25 points every short rest for the entire team, this certainly can make a difference, especially in a more attrition-style grindy game.

Lucky: compounding great save bonuses with free re-rolls is a great option.

resilient: personally I think cha mod to saves is a good enough boon, but if you want stupidly good con saves, go for it.

sentinel: obligatory consideration for anything wanting to be a tank. Not an auto-first pick choice in my mind, especially if you already have PAM (as these conflict in reaction economy), if you aren't using a polearm with reach anyways.

shield master: while it's not great for the quarterstaff idea, if you prefer to shove prone for advantage that should do about as good, while also granting you some neat bonuses for dex saves (and not being "cheesy" if anyone has complaints about that). So while the two aren't inherently mutually exclusive, I'd say pick one. Extra points if you can find a way to get a bonus to athletics, a bard dip sticks out to me albeit at a hefty long term cost if your campaign goes all the way to 20; but if your dm plans to have the campaign conclude earlier, a fine option that is.

spell sniper: pick up an okay ranged option if you take this, because otherwise you're stuck with moonbeam. While moonbeam is a truck if upcast, it does require you to have a slot for it, and takes concentration off of things like bless or aura of vitality. Eldritch blast comes to mind as a good choice, while you lack the warlock's combo pieces it's still a scaling d10 multiattack with good range and a great damage type.

tough: yep. not much to say here other than "it's kinda okay". personally I'd just tick up constitution if I could, but maybe someone wants to go to the next level and have 20 con and a bunch of extra HP...

war caster: advantage on saves is good, albeit probably unnecessary, and few paladin spells worth casting have somatic components that can't be dealt with by having a holy symbol on your shield, but for the occasional spell that you like that has S without M, this is here for you.

races

simple vuman/half-elf/dragonborn choice, pretty much. OP has already covered these well when applied to oathbreaker, and honestly it's no different here. A few honorable mentions though- Mountain dwarf for poison resistance is potentially good, drow is fine if you go dex build, and half-orc is okay for the sake of having triple safety net.

something sad

by the way, your channel options are trash. the one abjure option is niche in that it can only be used on specific, rare creature types, while the other allows the victim to chose their save stat- meaning most things have a pretty strong chance of just ignoring the effect that you had to burn your action to use. Only real use for it is maybe trapping some commoner that you need to interrogate, in combat it's absolutely atrocious.

play

essentially at the start of every combat, you need to try and discern whether to cast divine favor or bless, anything else is probably going on the back burner. Maybe open with ensnaring strike if you think it'll be good, but otherwise it's one of those two most of the time. Later on parhaps crusader's mantle, especially if you have a summoner on the team that can conjure up a pile of things with decent attack bonuses.

so turn one is either going to be bless->end or favor-> attack-> end, and after that it's mostly going to be full attack sequences. PAM gives you a good chance of getting in another free attack on your reaction, so your action economy for sustained damage is pretty good. If you have to, misty step next to something that's hitting your squishies and give that a wallop. If you ever get to a point where you can blow your entire LOH to heal yourself, and it looks like the fight will continue for some time, use it early rather than late. keep your HP high.

That pretty much doesn't change with the addition of new abilities, the biggest change is getting Improved Divine Smite making it almost worthwhile to just jump right into full attack sequences every turn. all there is after that is special cases. Some things to keep in mind:

1) moonbeam is your primary ranged weapon, but don't bother using it until you're out of melee targets. better to keep up bless, and maybe by the time you're done with the mooks, the ranged things will be close enough to wiped out that you can let your rangers and rogues clean them up. If it looks like maybe a couple rounds, stand in front of someone and be half-cover for them.

2) casters can still be a pain in the butt- however, you have some methods to deal with their bullcrap. If their plan is to force wall you off and counterspell your attempts to misty step out, remember that they can't counter you if they can't see you cast the spell. anything from sit down behind a rock or table, to (in extreme circumstances) set up your tent. Something that might work for some dm's would be simply hold up a blanket in front of you. Use discretion there. A slightly more dangerous thing is for them to wall of stone around you, since if you fail the save you can't just see out. It would have to be indoors, or else you would just teleport to the top of the wall, but in the case of stone wall prison, you can always fall back on the old "luckily I carried a tree inside and can tree stride out". But for real, the best thing you can do here is cast moonbeam on a point inside and then move it to where the guy was on your next turn. Depending on the exact situation, you might be able to hear your allies so they can guide you onto them. that is of course dependant on whether or not your DM will allow you to hear the other guy, but if they have some spell or feature to communicate that might help you out as well. For most other things, you're relying on your good saves, and bless is going to make all the difference. with save stats maxing out at +5, +11, and +16 for your mental stats, it'll be difficult to apply hard control to you, and with aura of warding damage spells should be cake to deal with.

3) you aren't a cleric. your healing abilities are best used ooc, or in specific cases where it can be used to draw attention (as with aura of vitality, as described above). Lay on hands is about the only thing you should do mid-fight, and you should generally use all of it in one go (cause action economy). DPS and tanking is your game, stick to what you're good at.

4) smite sparingly. one or two to start off an encounter all good like, but after a bit of early damage, save your spells for more long-term value buffs. I honestly can't say how many times I've seen someone blow all their slots on smiting in the first 3 rounds of the first combat, only to have a harder fight before they recover slots. Moreover, smite at the start, not the end. that way you never kill the thing with weapon damage but still waste the slot because you have to declare smite before you know if it'd die from the weapon damage.

Overall build

Vuman, L1 stats 16/8/14/8/10/16, polearm master, AC 18 (shield, chain), quarterstaff

(alternatively, a half-elf would have 16/8/16/8/10/16, and needs to take PAM at level 4, starting with more HP early but less damage, while a dragonborn would start at 16/8/14/10/10/16, take PAM at 4, and not worry about ever getting con to 16. benefit to the last part being no negative int. Similarly, a half elf could have 14 con and 10's in both dex and int.)

stat increases go cha->18->20, then str->18->20, and finally bump con to 16.
(Having low-to-average con on a tank can certainly feel weird, but remember that you secretly have an extra 5*level hp that's always one action away, and you have a pretty high AC out the gate as well, which should do a decent job of mitigating damage.)
any additional feats you chose to take should replace a non-charisma boost in your end stat line.

you of course take dueling fighting style to boost your damage, basking in the value of applying that to your bonus action attack whenever you use it.

key spells: bless, divine favor, ensnaring strike, wrathful smite, moonbeam, misty step, protection from (x), Aura of Vitality, crusaider's mantle, elemental weapon, revivify, Aura of Life, Aura of Purity, death ward, banishment, circle of power, command

(edit: added command for synergy with capstone)
(edit 2: added elemental weapon; works decently with capstone if you apply in first round, as both can be applied in same turn)

by level 5 you should have plate armor, or at least splint and a pile of gold building up to buy plate. later on you should be able to find +x armor and shields, but otherwise no big deal. if you don't have them, no one does, and your AC will still be higher than anyone else on the team.





some additional info on "why qs+b"

for melee martials, as paladins kind of have to be, there really are only 3(.5) options, being sword+board, greatsword, or polearm master (the .5 being dual wield, but as we all know this is strictly worse to PAM on str builds, and bad entirely on paladins). Ancients doesn't really have anything to support GWM, while devotion and vengeance both have decent channel abilities to mitigate the loss of accuracy; ancients is stuck with bless and nothing else. A "full-size" polearm build is potentially in a give-or-take situation compared to quarterstaff and shield, depending on whether you want to have reach and eventually take sentinel. But personally I think 2 feats is a bit steep for something as mad as a paladin, especially when you also lose your shield that would mitigate the damage that you take to make up for having so low a con score. Moreover, unless having the extra 5 feet of range consistently gives you an extra attack, you really aren't gaining any damage from the larger weapon due to dueling style being the way it is. This is why I think s+b is best for ancients paladins, especially if they want to take the "tank" role.

[Foxhound438]

The barbarian multiclass certainly provides a good boost, though I recall some time ago an idea by Foxhound who suggested adding some sorcerer levels to a GWM devotion paly. The trick, if I remember correctly, was to use your action with sacred weapon, and your bonus action to quicken upcast elemental weapon (or alternatively, quicken bless).

this is correct. Janky, yet potentially potent.

Personally I'd say at this point that the best approach to GWM OoD is to play "smart", as in start any given encounter with conversation, bs for a while to try and buy an extra bit of time to apply your buffs while talking ****.

polearm+not actively using GWM is certainly a thing as well, for when you either don't have the time to apply all your buffs or don't have the channel to use. let GWM take the back burner and just push moderate-to-good dpr. Opening with bless would still probably be a good choice when you don't want to channel (ie random fights against wildlife that is ultimately a filler encounter that you see so much of in adventurer's league).

[Corran]

Ancients Paladin, Tanking specialization
snip

I have to say, this was very informative and quite an interesting read.
I was very torn between either using S&B or a polearm for this oath, leaning a bit towards S&B due to the defensive nature of the oath, but I now can see how a qs+b (if I may borrow the term) fighting style combines the best elements of both styles. I had completely forgotten how you can combine PM with a quarterstaff (for some reason I only had the shillelaugh trick memorized, of which I was not a big fan). That is why I was of the opinion that an ancients paly would do best by going S&B and by snatching scag cantrips to help them with their damage output, while using his bonus action with spells, mainly thinking with the healing effect of the aura of vitality, once he gets access to it (cause as you said, nothing draws more fire than someone who can keep healing and possibly bring his fallen allies up, than a paladin with aura of vitality on). Anyway, after your excellent analysis, I can now see how qs+b (quarterstaff and shield) is the far superior choice for a paladin of this oath (ancients).


In fact, I am so impressed, now that it was brought to my attention, about how qs+b works on a paladin, that I am considering whether it would be a superior choice regarding the previous oaths that I mentioned, that is devotion and oathbreaker. Before attempting to deduce which one of qs+b or polearm works best for a devotion or an oathbreaker paly, I think it is good to highlight the part where you talked about the benefits of qs+b and touched the comparison with a polearm, so that we can have a better understanding of what is being discussed (emphasized the part that I consider the most relevant). Here goes:


some additional info on "why qs+b"

for melee martials, as paladins kind of have to be, there really are only 3(.5) options, being sword+board, greatsword, or polearm master (the .5 being dual wield, but as we all know this is strictly worse to PAM on str builds, and bad entirely on paladins). Ancients doesn't really have anything to support GWM, while devotion and vengeance both have decent channel abilities to mitigate the loss of accuracy; ancients is stuck with bless and nothing else. A "full-size" polearm build is potentially in a give-or-take situation compared to quarterstaff and shield, depending on whether you want to have reach and eventually take sentinel. But personally I think 2 feats is a bit steep for something as mad as a paladin, especially when you also lose your shield that would mitigate the damage that you take to make up for having so low a con score. Moreover, unless having the extra 5 feet of range consistently gives you an extra attack, you really aren't gaining any damage from the larger weapon due to dueling style being the way it is. This is why I think s+b is best for ancients paladins, especially if they want to take the "tank" role.
First lets see the numbers. Assume a qs+b with the dueling fighting style, and a glaive user with the great weapon fighting style. Modifiers aside, the average damage of the main end of the polearm will deal 0.8 more damage (6.3 compared to 5.5), while the butt-end attack will be stronger for the quarterstaff by a margin of 1.5 damage (4.5 compared to 3). So each time we take a full round attack (swinging both with the main and the butt end), the polearm user deals 0.1 more damage assuming all attacks hit (this value becomes even smaller if we weight it down due to hit chance). And when we are not using our bonus action to attack with the butt-end, the glaive user will deal 1.6 more damage, again weighted down because of the hit chance. In return for his slightly reduced damage, the qs+b user has increased AC because of the shield, so +2 AC minimum. Alternatively, a glaive user with the defense fighting style instead of the gwf style, deals 2 less damage than the qs+b user (weighted down by hit chance) and the same damage when they are not using the bonus action to attack with the butt-end, and he also has 1 less AC than the qs+b user. A clear win for quarterstaff and shield over the halberd/glaive in both cases.

The only extra factor in favour of the halberd/glaive that we didnt take into account, is the increased reach (10 feet). Can a devotion or an oathbreaker paly make such good use of the extra reach so that a 2 handed polearm would be better than going qs+b? Well, reach by itself has some advantages, which can prove really useful in corner cases. Such as when fighting standing exactly behind a solid line made up of several minions or NPC allies (assuming armies and large scale war). Same goes for when figthing in long 5ft corridors, and you are standing behind your ally who is positioned on the choke point. But all these are very situational applications, upon which we cannot base optimization. What we can base the optimization of the increased reach on, however, is things like the sentinel feat, or things like fighting against frightened enemies on a regular basis.

Lets examine the oathbreaker first. The oathbreaker gets dreadful aspect as soon as level 3. Fighting against frightened enemies at reach 10' can be very beneficial. And considering that you gain that power (to try and inflict mass fear effect) that early in your career, and also considering that is short rest rechargable, I woud say that this fact alone is enough to decide to forgo the AC boost we would gain from a qs+b approach, so that we can exploit the increased reach a halberd/glaive provides (given how we can exploit the 10ft reach when fighting against frightened opponents). Moreover, it is not entirely unreasonable for an oathbreaker to prioritize taking the sentinel feat early, given how it can stop enemies from getting out of his auras' radius. Considering that a +2 to AC corresponds roughly to a 20% reduced damage, as you pointed out, stopping an enemy on his tracks, thus avoiding some melee hits from him this round, while also inflicting damage with the OA, I would say that succeeding in this once against a strong opponent could be on par, or even slightly better than the increased AC. Though this depends heavily on a lot of factors, such as how many attacks will have targeted you until the end of the encounter, what is your hit chance against the opponent you aim to stop in his tracks, how powerful this opponent is compared to the other bad guys you are fighting, etc. Though it is not unreasonable to assume that the beneffit of the reach with sentinel on, is almost on par with the increased AC. Anyway, I say that in the case of an oathbreaker, the increased reach makes a big difference and can be used to great advantage often and reliably, so imo one should stick with a two handed polearm if oathbreaker.

Lets go to the devotion paladin now. The sentinel feat has some synergy with the capstone of this oath, though let us not fool ourselves, a player playing a devotion paladin would base their decision of taking or not taking sentinel, mostly on if they had or not a dedicated melee buddy who uses to fight beside them. Anyway, assuming that the devotion paladin will grab sentinel at some point, we should examine if a halberd/glaive is better or worse than qs+b. To ascertain this, it is important to have an idea of when a devotion paladin is most likely to take the sentinel feat. Contrary to the oathbreaker, who has reason enough to consider taking the sentinel feat from eraly on (cause dreadful aspect kicking in as soon as lvl 3), and because of the added importance placed on charisma bumps (added because of sacred weapon), I personaly cannot see a devotion paladin taking sentinel before level 12. In fact, I consider level 16 or even 19 as the most probable point at the career of a devotion paladin that it will be when he will take sentinel. So, it is safe to assume that for the (vast) majority of his career, a devotion paladin will not have access to sentinel. If sentinel is missing from the build, the devotion paladin can only rely on wrathful smite, to potentially make good use of the extra reach. It is true that wrathful smite fits the action economy when the devotion paly uses sacred weapon, and it is also a very good paladin spell. But then again, considering that there will be fights when the devotion paly will not have available his channel divinity, thus he will not be restricted to using a bonus action concentration spell, it would be a poor choice to restrict our choices for concentration to wrathful smite, so that we could make the best use of our range. The way I see it, ideally, a devotion paladin would carry both a quarterstaff and a two handed polearm, and would choose to use one or the other, depending on the fight ahead. The bad thing about this versatile idea, is that this way, we would have to commit our fighting style to defense, so that it will work no matter how we choose to fight. Do you think that maybe this middle road is the best answer in the dilemma qs+b or two handed polearm for the devotion paly? If I had to stick with one of them, I would probably go with qs+b, under the assumption that sentinel would come late in my career (most likely at level 19, just before the capstone), but I would make a note that if for any reason sentinel was picked a lot sooner, then it might be worth it to go with a two hander polearm. Thoughts?
Nothing to do with optimization, but I have to say it. While in the case of an ancients paly, qs+b might be more easily ''justified'', due to the nature them of this oath - you could even go as far as to say that your character is not using an edged weapon on purpose, as he does not want to take lives, and have him deal non lethal strikes with his last hits, for the other oaths it is a bit more stretched, as this image does not exactly fit the themes, at least in my mnd. I however, would gladly refluff, DM allowing, the quarterstaff into a shortsword, and the glaive into a spear, thus ending up with a paladin that has adopted a fighting style very similar to the one used by the unsullied in GoT, or the spertans in 300. Nothing to do with optimization, just had to say it.



Finally, let me discuss sth about the final build, I think I have something interesting to add, please tell me if you think it makes sense and it is worth the investment. Let me just post your final build before I propose my idea. Here goes:


Overall build

Vuman, L1 stats 16/8/14/8/10/16, polearm master, AC 18 (shield, chain), quarterstaff

(alternatively, a half-elf would have 16/8/16/8/10/16, and needs to take PAM at level 4, starting with more HP early but less damage, while a dragonborn would start at 16/8/14/10/10/16, take PAM at 4, and not worry about ever getting con to 16. benefit to the last part being no negative int. Similarly, a half elf could have 14 con and 10's in both dex and int.)

stat increases go cha->18->20, then str->18->20, and finally bump con to 16.
(Having low-to-average con on a tank can certainly feel weird, but remember that you secretly have an extra 5*level hp that's always one action away, and you have a pretty high AC out the gate as well, which should do a decent job of mitigating damage.)
any additional feats you chose to take should replace a non-charisma boost in your end stat line.

you of course take dueling fighting style to boost your damage, basking in the value of applying that to your bonus action attack whenever you use it.

key spells: bless, divine favor, ensnaring strike, wrathful smite, moonbeam, misty step, protection from (x), Aura of Vitality, crusaider's mantle, revivify, Aura of Life, Aura of Purity, death ward, banishment, circle of power

by level 5 you should have plate armor, or at least splint and a pile of gold building up to buy plate. later on you should be able to find +x armor and shields, but otherwise no big deal. if you don't have them, no one does, and your AC will still be higher than anyone else on the team.

My idea is to go with halfelf variant (the one that nets you a cantrip to the expense of extra skills) instead of variant human. Stats would be as you show, meaning we start with 16 str, 8 dex (I like how we can dump dex without worrying too much for failed saves due to aura of warding), 16 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 16 cha. We take polearm master at level 4, naturally adopt the qs+b approach, and generally follow everything else you proposed in the build. The only difference is that with our last ASI, instead of maxing str to 20, we take warcaster. So we will end up with stats like this: str 18, dex 8, con 16, int 8, wis 10, cha 20. And we have taken polearm master at level 4, and warcaster at level 19, just one level before the capstone. The cantrip we took from the variant halfelf, and which costed us two skills, is Booming blade. It wont see much use during the campaign, but after taking warcaster at 19 level, we will be able to use it with a OA. The reason I am suggesting this, is not simply because I remembered at the 19th level that my OAs should hit hard, but rather because in the next level, we will be able to use this ability along with our capstone in a very effective manner:

First round of combat: Use your action to activate elder champion, move up to your enemy, use your bonus action to cast command on the enemy, the enemy rolls the save with disadvantage. Command the enemy to flee. If the enemy fails his save, we use BB as an opportunity attack, dealing [d6 + 2]+ str mod + d8 (IDS) + 7d8 (BB) + whatever other adds to our damage (from spells to magic items). So we inflict all that damage with just our reaction, and the enemy even loses his turn. All at the cost of a 1st level spell slot, and a bonus action. Meaning that we can continue doing that in the following rounds (as long as we have spell slots to use for command), and on top we can use whatever we want with our action (save for casting spells, as we use ourr bonus action to cast a spell). And the enemy rolls with disadvnatage his save. How awesome is that?!!! Even against enemies with legendary resistances, that means that we can very quickly burn through those resistances (due to disadvnatage on saves, meaning that they should fail more often that succeeding), and we can burn through the legendary resistances at the cost of 1st level slots and a bonus action, meaning that we are still attacking with our action.
A little overlap with our butt-end attack, though nothing to worry about, the benefits are massive imo. Assuming ofc that the enemy is a valid target of the command spell.

The halfelf is already up there as the best race (along with variant human) for paladins, and because of this small trick (ie the ability to net us BB), I think that it edges vhuman as far as the ancients paly is concerned. Consider warcaster as a late level investment (literally, it's the last feat you take, at level 19) to make the capstone shine even more. The price is maxing our strength at 18, instead of 20. I consider it a very good deal overall. Thoughts?


ps: Edited previous posts to include the qs+b approach.

[Foxhound438]

I have to say, this was very informative and quite an interesting read.
(snip)

Finally, let me discuss sth about the final build, I think I have something interesting to add, please tell me if you think it makes sense and it is worth the investment. Let me just post your final build before I propose my idea. Here goes:

My idea is to go with halfelf variant (the one that nets you a cantrip to the expense of extra skills) instead of variant human. Stats would be as you show, meaning we start with 16 str, 8 dex (I like how we can dump dex without worrying too much for failed saves due to aura of warding), 16 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 16 cha. We take polearm master at level 4, naturally adopt the qs+b approach, and generally follow everything else you proposed in the build. The only difference is that with our last ASI, instead of maxing str to 20, we take warcaster. So we will end up with stats like this: str 18, dex 8, con 16, int 8, wis 10, cha 20. And we have taken polearm master at level 4, and warcaster at level 19, just one level before the capstone. The cantrip we took from the variant halfelf, and which costed us two skills, is Booming blade. It wont see much use during the campaign, but after taking warcaster at 19 level, we will be able to use it with a OA. The reason I am suggesting this, is not simply because I remembered at the 19th level that my OAs should hit hard, but rather because in the next level, we will be able to use this ability along with our capstone in a very effective manner:

First round of combat: Use your action to activate elder champion, move up to your enemy, use your bonus action to cast command on the enemy, the enemy rolls the save with disadvantage. Command the enemy to flee. If the enemy fails his save, we use BB as an opportunity attack, dealing [d6 + 2]+ str mod + d8 (IDS) + 7d8 (BB) + whatever other adds to our damage (from spells to magic items). So we inflict all that damage with just our reaction, and the enemy even loses his turn. All at the cost of a 1st level spell slot, and a bonus action. Meaning that we can continue doing that in the following rounds (as long as we have spell slots to use for command), and on top we can use whatever we want with our action (save for casting spells, as we use ourr bonus action to cast a spell). And the enemy rolls with disadvnatage his save. How awesome is that?!!! Even against enemies with legendary resistances, that means that we can very quickly burn through those resistances (due to disadvnatage on saves, meaning that they should fail more often that succeeding), and we can burn through the legendary resistances at the cost of 1st level slots and a bonus action, meaning that we are still attacking with our action.
A little overlap with our butt-end attack, though nothing to worry about, the benefits are massive imo. Assuming ofc that the enemy is a valid target of the command spell.

(snip)

I'm glad you liked it

For your suggestion, however, there is one breaking problem... Unfortunately Elder Champion only allows you to cast "paladin spells" as a bonus action, meaning that the spell has to be either on the paladin spell list or on your oath spells list (pages 87, 85 for clarification on oath spells). You unfortunately cannot use a cantrip gained from your race with it.

Good thinking though, I guess I hadn't really thought of trying to use a cantrip with it... it's just unfortunate that the feature specifies a paladin spell.

For the command part, that is definitely a good plan if the enemy doesn't have a ridiculous bonus to the save, even without the BB value. Definitely a good choice.

[djreynolds]

For me, I think the players all have to look forward to level 11 and IDS.

It is big, yet a paladin aside from channel divinity is a long rest character and must find away to maximize resources.

Say you go S&B, I see you using the bless spell a lot, while going great weapon shield of faith will be used. And now we come down to the big feature, smiting. The way I see, GWM damage out put can help reduce the amount of smiting needed over all and allow you the freedom to smite hard when necessary, or nova. Where as a S&B paladin may end using a smite a turn, 1st or 2nd level spell slot to keep up.

Action economy is something about the game rarely discussed, but very important. A fighter is really always set to go, as is a rogue. A barbarian is almost there as raging is a bonus action. But a paladin is going to lose an action, whether casting or using channel divinity and that is tough.

One of the reason's I love resilient con is the paladin has a game plan and losing a concentration spell really hurts.

Now there is something about maxing out your attack stat pronto, in that, you only need to connect to drop a smite.

And so its a dilemma, if I max out strength, every turn I have a chance of landing a smite and I can not even worry about spells period.

If I grab resilient con, by 6th level, most concentration checks will be made and that bless spell or shield of faith will either draw every enemy to me or send them away.

I like PAM, why? An extra chance to land the smite if I missed and for IDS.

GWM, and you are correct that most paladins are stuck casting bless or sacred weapon to really make this functional, and that action could be painful waiting.

That's why I recommend 1 level of sorcerer and quickly, the shield spell is really AWESOME, almost better than the capstone.

This is a good guide, because we just look at the damage and Mr Kryx charts, which are rock and are awesome, but you forget that if you stumble for one second... my wizard will always drop his highest level spell first and I'm going to disintegrate you.

So maybe stuff like lucky, making that save is good, resilient con, shield master might help on that save, mage slayer, etc... because you paladins are designed to fight that BBEG, like my wizard.

Never forget team work, having a fighter with protection style is nice and a wolf totem barbarian are really good friends.

[Corran]

I'm glad you liked it

For your suggestion, however, there is one breaking problem... Unfortunately Elder Champion only allows you to cast "paladin spells" as a bonus action, meaning that the spell has to be either on the paladin spell list or on your oath spells list (pages 87, 85 for clarification on oath spells). You unfortunately cannot use a cantrip gained from your race with it.
I dont think this is a problem. I was thinking of using command, which is a paladin spell, with my bonus action, when Elder champion is on. The BB would just take the place of the opportunity attack (because warcaster), when the enemy spends his turn to flee (ie command the enemy to flee). I think it's legit.


Good thinking though, I guess I hadn't really thought of trying to use a cantrip with it... it's just unfortunate that the feature specifies a paladin spell.Yeah, I know.... my first though was to nab poison spray with magic initiate, as it targets a save (disadvantage cause of elder champion), and it has the appropriate range so that the target is within the 10 feet so that he rolls with disadvantage his save. I loved the idea of 4d12 poison damage with just one bonus action. But yeah, the restriction in place does not allow for sth like this...


For the command part, that is definitely a good plan if the enemy doesn't have a ridiculous bonus to the save, even without the BB value. Definitely a good choice.Yeah, it has to be used wisely, cause even with the disadvantage, an extremelly good wisdom save can lead us burning our spells slots rather quickly. What worries me even more, is if the enemy is not able to undestand the language and thus command wont affect him.

[Foxhound438]

I dont think this is a problem. I was thinking of using command, which is a paladin spell, with my bonus action, when Elder champion is on. The BB would just take the place of the opportunity attack (because warcaster), when the enemy spends his turn to flee (ie command the enemy to flee). I think it's legit.


Ah, I see. I misunderstood your intention there.

certainly potent. Now it's a matter of deciding whether it's worth a +1 to your strength mod for it. You still get to use it on entry OA's (thanks, PM+WC) even where you're not using your capstone for command, but that will only happen so often. Once for the first enemy that comes in to fight you, and then all his friends run in after you've already used your reaction, so after that it's more or less a crapshoot if you'd get another chance to use it in that encounter. Also not having reach for this case means you lose the rider effect damage. So in most cases, it's going to be an extra 3d8 for at least one, maybe again on a few more OA's, and in the case where you go for EC you're doing an extra 7d8 each time the thing fails its save. Possibly worth it, I'll do some more thinking and/or math on it tomorrow.

Edit:

at level 20 you probably won't be fighting many big dumb beasties, you're probably on a mission to go assassinate a specific thing that has the power to destroy the world and is crazy enough to maybe do it, so at the very least the BBEG probably knows one or two languages. Within a working world, it's probably viable that you would be able to research your foe and figure out what language they speak, and at that point all you need to do is learn one word from it. easy. any nerd who's played overwatch for an hour or two probably knows how to say all of "let the dragon consume you" in japanese, so unless it's like phyrexian or something where the noises you need to make are literally impossible for humans to do, you can probably get away with it pretty easily.

[djreynolds]

You know what is good about this thread, is this is 20th level no multiclassing.

You get to see just how powerful these capstones are and to really maximize them.

But races, I must say any of the elves are good if your are doing point but, take that 8 and throw it in dex and now you have a 10 and no negative to initiative. Throw a 9 in intelligence or wisdom, now you have a 10.

Free perception means you are not stuck with sailor as a background. Darkvision, humans and surprisingly dragonborn do not get this. Fey ancestry isn't bad, though your wisdom saves rock.

Cantrip is a waste, unless you like mending to look good and mold earth, or bladeward can be helpful

Mountain dwarf means you can throw 14s in strength and con, or even a 12 in con. And since you will have advantage on poison saves and such, now you can use that lay on hands to help a buddy.

But humans and half elves and dragonborn do fit the best.

But like I said I like seeing a paladin without warlock or sorcerer or bard. It is a great class and the spells are just awesome.

[Corran]

For me, I think the players all have to look forward to level 11 and IDS.

It is big, yet a paladin aside from channel divinity is a long rest character and must find away to maximize resources.
Agreed, IDS is a great class feature and can help a lot in the dpr department, and consequently in being able to manage resources better (meaning that if you manage to produce a decent dpr by using features like IDS that dont cost resources in an efficient way, you will feel less obliged to spam smites). Still, and I would like to think that this is part of what is generally being discussed here, IDS will only be as useful as you make it to be, meaning for example that IDS would be of different value to a PM ancients paladin than to a GWM ancients paladin. Much like in the case of a fighter, the 3rd attack he gets at 11th level will be of more value to, say a SS fighter than to a S&B fighter. But yes, it is certainly a big level for the paladin.


Say you go S&B, I see you using the bless spell a lot, while going great weapon shield of faith will be used.
While certainly different fighting styles do utilize in different ways several paladin spells, I do not think that it is the fighting style itself that determines which spells are used. At least that's the case most of the times. You see, the paladin spell list has several spells that are good under almost every condition. So even if spell X fits better than spell Y, to the fighting style Z, it is the action economy itself that determines if we will actually use the better spell X, rather than the slightly worse for our fighting style, spell Y. An example: say we are playing a GWM devotion paladin. Naturally, using bless is a better option than using divine favour, due to the nature of how GWM works. However, if we use our action in the first round to activate sacred weapon, one can see that we will be better off casting divine favor, rather than spending another turn not attacking, just so we can cast the better spell bless. Action economy is usually determined to a great extent by stuff like the channel divinities and what weapon and feats we selected. After these important choices are locked, then come the spells to finalize our build. And we look to choose at the spells that fit with our already determined action economy. To look at another example, take aura of vitality. Aura of vitality is of different value to a S&B paladin who has no reliable use of his bonus action, than to a PM paladin who can use his bonus action each round to inflict some damage. So my thoughts on this are, first we look at the oath features, see what kind of weapons/feats they favour, and after deciding on this, which will have determined our action economy to a great extnet, we finally look at which spells we can fit into our action economy.


And now we come down to the big feature, smiting. The way I see, GWM damage out put can help reduce the amount of smiting needed over all and allow you the freedom to smite hard when necessary, or nova. Where as a S&B paladin may end using a smite a turn, 1st or 2nd level spell slot to keep up.
While this is very true, I think the best way to handle your smites, is to think about it hard beforehand, making a plan about how many spell slots you are willing to spend per encounter, and making sure that you wont exceed that limit, unless absolutely necessary (for example if you realize that your group is starting to lose the encounter). Ofc, this is far different in paper than in practice, as predicting the exact number of encounters and their respective difficulty can be nigh impossible, and then there are other factors that can upset this calculation, such as losing concentrration on spells and having to recast them. But all this aside, I think it is generally accepted that burning spell slots to smite is not a good use of resources. Ofc that comes with certain exceptions, such as critical hits, or things like if the target of a potential damage is a glass canon. But I agree, finding ways to increase your dpr can help a lot with the smite spam. Whether GWM is or is not the way to boost your dpr, that is very oath dependent imo (for example, oath of ancients cannot support GWM efficiently imo, and an ancients paly has a better chance of improving his dpr by going PM and using spells like bless or divine favour, as Foxhound mentioned in his analysis).


Action economy is something about the game rarely discussed, but very important. A fighter is really always set to go, as is a rogue. A barbarian is almost there as raging is a bonus action. But a paladin is going to lose an action, whether casting or using channel divinity and that is tough.Yes!!!! This is a major point! When we understand this, that the first round will almost always be devoted to some sort of buffing, the next thing to do is see for each oath which is the best way to optimize this first round. For example, when the oathbreaker is using dreadful aspect, we must find which bonus action spell is the best one to use with dreadful aspect on and with our halberd/glaive. And when dreadful aspect is not available or we just want to keep on it, we must think which is the best way to use our first turn. Same thing with the other oaths, take for example the oath of the ancients, for which Foxhound made different cases on how we should spend our first turn, based on what we are facing. Bottom line, figuring out how to best spend our first round, even if it is strictly meant for buffing, is still a challenge and requires some thinking and optimization.
To add to that, once capstones come into play, you might find yourself spending the two first rounds of combat buffing, since activating a capstone takes up an action. Though in most cases, there is always a way to deal damage during these two first rounds that you spend buffing, so it's not that bad. For example, the oathbreaker spends his first turn to activate dread lord, and his second turn to activate dreadful aspect. However, during both turns he can use his bonus action with a melee spell attack (granted by dread lord) to deal damage. Same goes for the devotion paly, who stills deals damage even while buffing, due to the area effect of holy nimbus. Same goes for ancients, who can use his bonus action to cast a damaging spell, even during the same turn that he activated elder champion. The fact is, action economy is complicated for a paladin, as you so rightly mentioned, but there lies a great deal of optimization. You dont have to just optimize a fighting style, much like a fighter or barbarian would, you also have to find the right balance between using your fighting style along with all your class and oath features, and even more importantly, with your spells too.


One of the reason's I love resilient con is the paladin has a game plan and losing a concentration spell really hurts.Yeah, losing concentration certainly hurts, given how crowded is the paladin's action economy, especially if the spell the paladin was relying was one that takes up a whole action to cast. That and the fact that spell slots are limited ofc. Personaly I also love this feat because I am extremelly fearful of things that force con saves. Maybe it is just an urban legend spread in this forum, but it has certainly taken a hold of me. There comes a ''but'' though... Take for example the oath of the ancients. If the idea of getting warcaster at level 19 just because of how it combines with the capstone and with BB (from variant halfelf) is indeed an optimized one, then upon taking warcaster at level 19 would create some redundancy if we had picked resilient con in a previous level. Not saying that resilient con wouldnt still be useful or a good choice, but it would certainly lose steam because of the advantage on concentration checks granted by warcaster. And vice versa, warcaster would immediately become a worse choice, if we had already resilient con on our build, no matter if it synergized perfectly with the capstone. So what I am trying to say, is, that resilient con would not be as good for an ancients paly (if warcaster is indeed the ideal level 19 pick) as for a paly of another oath. And this is exactly what I am trying to figure out in this thread. Such slight differences and variations between oaths.
Another thing that troubles me with resilient, is that it is a bit difficult to plan beforehand. Meaning that in order to make the most of it, you have to leave an odd score at constitution. That is not difficult to accomplish (if anything it spares points to use elsewhere), but the trouble is that exactly because of this (ie starting with a reduced con score to make the best of resilient con when you finally take it), you might be forced to take this feat earlier than you would like, and push more important ASIs/feats to be taken further down the line. As an example, I am perfectly happy with a final score of 14 con on my ideal oathbreaker. And ideally, I would love him to take resilient con as a feat too. So, planning ahead for that, I can start with a 13 in con. Now, the problem is that I cannot hope to spend a lot of levels with such a low con score, so I have to grab resilient con relatively early, thus pushing further PM, sentinel, and the charisma bumps, which are imo all more important than resilient con. I would be perfectly happy with delaying resilient con until late enough in the game, but I cannot do so in good conscience while leaving my con at 13, and if I start with a con of 14 by reducing dex from 10 to 8, when I would finally take resilient my con would be 15. What I am trying to say, is that upon reaching the level when I would ideally take resilient, my character will be less optimized if I started with a con score of 14, since my final con score would be 15 (so I am suffering a loss in dex for no apparent reason at that point). But if I optimize for the level upon which I take resilient, and I do take resilient later in the game when it would make the most sense according to my planned progression, my hp will suffer throughout this whole time.


Now there is something about maxing out your attack stat pronto, in that, you only need to connect to drop a smite.I am not sure I agree with that, though it is sth the guides generally suggest. I find charisma bumps and 1 or 2 feats depending on the oath, to be a bit more important than a str boost. At least as far as the 3 oaths we have talked so far about (devotion, ancients, oathbreaker) are concerned. Even in the final build of these 3 oaths, I would rather have a 20 cha and 18 str, than the opposite. Maybe that (increasing str asap) will be the case for the vengeance oath, but until me or someone else makes an optimization effort for that oath, I reserve to say it for certain. Moreover, since smites are a finite resource, I think there is no real synergy between your attack bonus and the divine smite. Meaning that you will almost always have enough chance to burn through ll your slots smiting, even if your hit chance is not maximized.


And so its a dilemma, if I max out strength, every turn I have a chance of landing a smite and I can not even worry about spells period. This doesnt sound all that good to me. I mean, I get it, smiting is awesome and fun, but spamming it is not optimal as I have come to think after reading it repeatedly (and thinking it on my own too) in this forum. Though it would make for a very fun playstyle, and it would certainly help if the DM used few encounters per adventuring day.


I like PAM, why? An extra chance to land the smite if I missed and for IDS.
Yes, PAM is a must-have, at least for the 3 oaths we have discussed so far (devotion, ancients, oathbreaker). To add to that, it works really good with sentinel (which devotion and othbreaker have enough reason to take), and a good reach is very helpful to an oathbreaker (because of his fear effects). Also, have a look at Foxhound's first post, down at the end where he says ''why qs+b'', in case you haven't already. Makes a very good case on why PAM with a quarterstaff and shield is an optimal choice for an ancients paly (and quite possibly for a devotion paly, I add). This feat has paladin written all over it.


That's why I recommend 1 level of sorcerer and quickly, the shield spell is really AWESOME, almost better than the capstone.Depends on the capstone, some of them are trully great (ancients, oathbreker). But yeah, I can see that a sorcerer dip has advantages. You can even advance even further, for example sorcerer 3 gives you access to some very nice second level spells, and to some metamagic that can help you greatly (namely quicken, so that you can improve your action economy, and also extent to use with aura of vitality). Though that way you lose the improvement on the auras, apart from the capstone. I am not a very big fun of paladorcs (sorcedins:smalltongue:), at least not so much as I was when I first started playing with this idea. Though I admit that such a dip has its uses.


This is a good guide, because we just look at the damage and Mr Kryx charts, which are rock and are awesome, but you forget that if you stumble for one second... my wizard will always drop his highest level spell first and I'm going to disintegrate you.

So maybe stuff like lucky, making that save is good, resilient con, shield master might help on that save, mage slayer, etc... because you paladins are designed to fight that BBEG, like my wizard.
If Mr Kryx did any more than he is doing now, I suspect that we would have to start paying him!:smallbiggrin:
As for the feats mentioned, apart from lucky which has a good application (given that rerolling saves in which we have good bonuses -aura of protection- is optimal), and apart resilient con for which I made a mention earlier, the rest are situational imo. I dont mean bad, but certainly their value varies according to the opponent you are facing, or according to the allies that frame you.


Never forget team work, having a fighter with protection style is nice and a wolf totem barbarian are really good friends.The teamwork element might end up changing half or more of the ''optimal'' choices that I suggest, and rightly so, as this is not a bad thing. For example, if I play a vengeance paly, it might be far from optimal to go S&B and take shield master, due to how the oath features of this oath work better with ther figthing styles. But of say, my group consisted primarily of melee heavy hitters, then going against character optimization by going S&B and taking shield master as a fear, might be the optimal thing to do, given such a group. What I would like for us to do here, is forget about these external parameters for a moment, so that we can achieve a better understanding of character optimization and of how the oaths best work. This way, if you had to join a group with a specific set up, and you wanted to play a paladin, and moreover party optimization dictated that you should play a S&B paladin with shield master, you could look at the oaths and say ''Oh, it's the oaths of the ancients that makes the best use of a S&B fighting style with the shield master feat''. Ofc, the purpose is not to say to people play this oath of you want this fighting style, and play that oath of you want the other fighting style, still it is interesting to see how the oaths were meant to be of maximum efficiency.


You know what is good about this thread, is this is 20th level no multiclassing.
....
But like I said I like seeing a paladin without warlock or sorcerer or bard. It is a great class and the spells are just awesome.
Ideally we might eventually expand this conversation to discuss multiclass builds (though I suppose that would be better accomplished in a new thread). But before even starting to think the potential benefits of multiclassing, it is important to see what you are losing by multiclassing out of the paladin. And in order to appreciate this, one should have a complete picture of a devotion, ancients, ... paly. Up to level 20, with an good idea of level-to-level progression.


You get to see just how powerful these capstones are and to really maximize them.Yes, this is interesting, at least to me, seeing as I will most likely never get to actually try one in practice (though that is what oneshots are for - should try more of those).


But races, I must say any of the elves are good if your are doing point but, take that 8 and throw it in dex and now you have a 10 and no negative to initiative. Throw a 9 in intelligence or wisdom, now you have a 10.

Free perception means you are not stuck with sailor as a background. Darkvision, humans and surprisingly dragonborn do not get this. Fey ancestry isn't bad, though your wisdom saves rock.

Cantrip is a waste, unless you like mending to look good and mold earth, or bladeward can be helpful

Mountain dwarf means you can throw 14s in strength and con, or even a 12 in con. And since you will have advantage on poison saves and such, now you can use that lay on hands to help a buddy.

But humans and half elves and dragonborn do fit the best.
True, there are not bad races or unplayable choices. Though since we are optimizing, there are ceratinly some red flags. To touch on one example you mentioned, that is the high elf. Some time ago I was creating a high elf oathbreaker, mostly for fun. I reached the conclusion that the race was one of the worst choices for an optimized (by my standards) oathbreaker build. Sure, my dex was pumped to 10, instead of being an 8. Though, in the end, selecting the high elf was pretty much like if I had selected a human, and I was constantly 2 ASIs/feats behind.
Another minor note, is that since customizable backgrounds are a thing, I personally dont worry too much about which the extra skill (or rather, about which one is the extra skill, having an extra skill is all that matters, as long as it is not a completely irrelevant skill).

[tieren]

Great thread, I am enjoying the analysis and discussion.

I know you haven't gotten to OotA yet, but I wanted to make mention of my character build, which is not really optimized but synergizes well.

Hes a forest gnome OotA pally MC'd with a fey patron warlock. Warlock lets him take pact of the tome to get shillelagh as a Cha based cantrip.

Generally gnome is a horribly optimized choice for paladin. It is literally impossible for a forest gnome with standard point buy to get 20 in Str and Cha with only 5 ASI's. However the gnome racial trait "gnome cunning" gives advantage on all the mental saves against magic, combo with the level 7 OotA aura that gives resistance to all magic and the 6 aura that adds Cha to all saves, makes him a tough little nut for casters to crack.

Because of his small size I can use the find steed spell to summon a medium mount that I can ride through dungeons and stuff, and use a shield and staff combo that is not completely silly because I wield the staff like a lance. I can then use the shillelagh cantrip to increase the damage die of the staff, make it a "magical" attack for purposes of resistance and make Cha my only combat stat making me SAD.

This build lets me get to 20 charisma with two feats left over, one will go to warcaster, and the other is open. If a DM would allow it one handed PAM would be neat, but because of the magic resistance and awesome saves I am even considering Mage Slayer for more thematic reasons than optimization.

[Foxhound438]

Great thread, I am enjoying the analysis and discussion.

I know you haven't gotten to OotA yet, but I wanted to make mention of my character build, which is not really optimized but synergizes well.

Hes a forest gnome OotA pally MC'd with a fey patron warlock. Warlock lets him take pact of the tome to get shillelagh as a Cha based cantrip.


We have looked at ancients paladins, above.

this is certainly a multiclass I can get behind, but I'm not entirely sold on the race. Gnome is great for something like an Eldritch Knight, where you're actually getting the stats you need, but on a paladin the cost is too high. Multiclassing for shillelagh does lessen the pressure there, but it's three levels before you get that and eight before you get extra attack (or alternatively, standard 5 to extra attack and 8 to shillelagh). This not only has a high end cost in shutting you out of your capstone, but also delays every ASI you would get. Moreover, you only get 4 ASI's unless you decide to take a fourth warlock level- which means no 5th level spells. Not too big a deal there, as the paladin's 5th level spell options aren't anything to swoon over, but something to keep in mind.

Overall Warlock/Paladin is a decent multiclass (largely due to short rest spells), and it's worth analyzing exactly where the split should be- 17/3? 16/4? 15/5? 13/7? those have always seemed like the numbers to me, and I'd be happy to share my thoughts on each split, but this early in this thread we should focus more on the pure paladin builds to have a solid reference point.

[Foxhound438]

I'll do some more thinking and/or math on it tomorrow.


So here's some math, ignoring spell effects since both options have the same spells at their disposal. The end numbers might be offset a bit from where they are at no spells included, but would be offset an approximately equal amount in the other direction if a thing has more than the standard recommended 19 AC for a CR 18+ creature.

So with the BB WC PM 18 str build, it looks like this:

+10 to hit, needs 9 on the die means 60% hit chance

attack sequence on your turn is 2d6+1d4+3d8+18, average 41, or 24.6 after hit chance is accounted for

opportunity attack of 1d6+1d8+3d8+6 for the first enemy to approach you each turn, average 27.5, goes to 16.8 after hit chance.

Switching over to the 20 str PM only option:

+11 to hit, needs 8 on the die means 65% hit chance

attack sequence 2d6+1d4+3d8+21, average 44, or 28.6 with hit chance

OA is just 1d6+1d8+7, so 15, 9.75 with hit chance

So the difference is +4 in the favor of 20 str for the main attack sequence, and +7.05 in favor of BB on opportunity attacks.

What this means is that in a combat that you don't use you capstone, you lose damage unless you're getting an OA every other turn. How reasonable is it to expect that? I don't know. However, even if you lose out on a bit of sustained damage, it may very be well worth it for the one combat a day that you do get to use your powerful command combo (that will undoubtedly deal leagues more damage than a Vuman if it works). But again, it's impossible to predict if you'd actually be able to get that to work. Something like a Pit Fiend or Balor that doesn't understand common might pop up with a few friends, and when you tell it to flee, it'd just kind of squint at you... while probably stomping you guts out... Even if you know the words to shout at them however, a decent number of high CR creatures have magic resistance to counter out the disadvantage you impose, so you're looking at maybe a 40% chance of success each time you cast command against some foes.

So my final conclusion is that it's a gamble to take it. A gamble with a lot of reward, but I'd say it's not for everyone. Everything that would put BB WC PM ahead of just higher stats is dependent on what your DM throws at you, and how they fight. Pick it if you want, but understand the risk. For me it's a long time to get online, and the whole time you're an ASI behind the Vuman option, so I'll probably stick to Vuman myself.

I would say however that if you do chose to take the BB WC PM route, it might be worth it to grab warcaster a bit earlier than level 19. 16 would probably be fine, and even delaying a charisma boost to get it at 12 might be worth it. Otherwise you're just losing efficacy for your entire career up to the very last few sessions of a game for a 20th level combo.

[tieren]

We have looked at ancients paladins, above.

this is certainly a multiclass I can get behind, but I'm not entirely sold on the race. Gnome is great for something like an Eldritch Knight, where you're actually getting the stats you need, but on a paladin the cost is too high. Multiclassing for shillelagh does lessen the pressure there, but it's three levels before you get that and eight before you get extra attack (or alternatively, standard 5 to extra attack and 8 to shillelagh). This not only has a high end cost in shutting you out of your capstone, but also delays every ASI you would get. Moreover, you only get 4 ASI's unless you decide to take a fourth warlock level- which means no 5th level spells. Not too big a deal there, as the paladin's 5th level spell options aren't anything to swoon over, but something to keep in mind.

Overall Warlock/Paladin is a decent multiclass (largely due to short rest spells), and it's worth analyzing exactly where the split should be- 17/3? 16/4? 15/5? 13/7? those have always seemed like the numbers to me, and I'd be happy to share my thoughts on each split, but this early in this thread we should focus more on the pure paladin builds to have a solid reference point.

I understand, and I know the stats are not mechanically optimal, I do intend a break point that will still allow me 5 ASI's. I mentioned it because while the stats are not optimal the abilities synergize well and I thought readers should consider some types of ability optimization that are not necessarily stat dependent.

The advantage on spell saves as a racial combos well with the magic resistance from OatA paladin and the cha to saves from the base paladin.

[djreynolds]

The spell list rocks. I mean it is just full of juiciness. Divine Favor, magic and elemental weapon, and I like the smite spells.

But its the buff spells, the paladin is really set up to be able to lead a group into battle. Not to mention Oath spells.

If you roll well, everyone should try out a paladin just once and find some demons and undead and go to it.

They can tank, strike, buff, and even control almost simultaneously.

Its actually one reason I like shield master, coupled with aura of protection and the shield's +2 you might make a lot of saves. Add in resilient con and you have almost 4 saves locked up tight.

[Corran]

So here's some math, ignoring spell effects since both options have the same spells at their disposal.
....
So my final conclusion is that it's a gamble to take it. A gamble with a lot of reward, but I'd say it's not for everyone. Everything that would put BB WC PM ahead of just higher stats is dependent on what your DM throws at you, and how they fight. Pick it if you want, but understand the risk. For me it's a long time to get online, and the whole time you're an ASI behind the Vuman option, so I'll probably stick to Vuman myself.
....

You forgot about calculating the extra damage on OA's, in case they are done against enemies leaving your reach, upon when the secondary effect of BB activates. That would improve the overall damage of the 18str-warcaster-BB build, especially in the encounter when we use elder champion + command. I was thinking of trying to make, based on your numbers (which ofc check out), a more general analysis about the dpr of the two builds based on a whole adventuring day. Though that requires some precise assumptions (such as finding a good estimate for the total numbers of full attack sequences or attack sequences without the butt end, and consequently the rough number of actions dedicated on things other than attacking, or even number of potential OA's), I was finally dismayed from doing so, because it dawned on me that optimizing around the damage of that OA which occurs from when we pair elder champion and command with warcaster and BB, essentially means that we are optimizing around the lesser of the benefits of elder champion and command. I mean, the main benefit of when this thing works, is that the enemy is denied (kind of) a turn. Sure, doing better damage on that OA's caused of him fleeing is quite nice, and that extra damage is nothing to sneeze at (and extra 7d8). But as I said, this is not even the main benefit. Naturally, we should expect that a 20 level ancients paladin, would try to pull sth like this against very powerful enemies, against who it would make sense to use his capstone. Such enemies have all kind of tricks to resist to this trick of ours, as you mentioned, with legendary resistances coming to mind as well. And it is very logical for the DM to make an enemy spend a legendary resistance so that this enemy does not lose his action. Hence all this optimization around the damage of this OA goes to waste against anyone with things like legendary resistances and such, that means against enemies against who it makes sense to use this power in the first place. I still believe that even with legendary resistances and magic resistance it would make a lot of sense to try to use command (of possible), because even a 40% chance of a dangerous enemy losing a turn, or at least losing one of his legendary resistances, at the cost of a bonus action and a 1st level spell slot is worth it. Though as I said, optimizing around the lesser benefit of this combo, which will not occur even all that often, at the expense of a lower str and of a less optimal feat/ASI progression (halfelf is like picking the +2 con as the first choice, instead of as the last), is not all that good. So I think that I would stick with the variant human too.



We have looked at ancients paladins, above.

Since this thread consists of some very long posts (I blame myself), and it's easy to miss out on the important parts, maybe you should put a headline above your post, so that someone having a quick look would spot it more easily? Something admittedly distatsteful but practical, like this?
OATH OF THE ANCIENTS

[Corran]

....
Generally gnome is a horribly optimized choice for paladin. It is literally impossible for a forest gnome with standard point buy to get 20 in Str and Cha with only 5 ASI's. However the gnome racial trait "gnome cunning" gives advantage on all the mental saves against magic, combo with the level 7 OotA aura that gives resistance to all magic and the 6 aura that adds Cha to all saves, makes him a tough little nut for casters to crack.
....

Gnome cunning a certainly a very strong racial feature. But for a sigleclass paladin build, the question beomes if all the gnome traits add up to a similar value of two ASIs/feats. Starting as a gnome instead of starting as a vhuman, is like putting yourself behind by 2 ASIs/feats, as it would take exactly this number of ASIs/feats to put you on par with what a vhuman starts with (16 in both str and cha, plus a feat). All this concerning a singleclass paladin build, for which both str and cha matter. So, is gnome cunning, +2 int, +1 dex, darkvision, and being able to have a medium sized mount due to your small size (plus whatever else I am forgetting right now), adds up to 2 ASIs/feats? This is somewhat difficult to compare directly, but I think it is safe to assume that the answer is ''no''.
Moreover, something about the synergy gnome cunning has with aura of warding and with aura of protection. Given that most damage effects from spells target dex and con saves, it is nice that gnome cunning gives advantage on the mentl saves which mostly associate with control, meaning that with both these features in play you create a solid defense against casters. The advantage maximizes at a 25% increased chance of saving against a spell that targets int,wis or cha. Excluding corner cases, it is safe to assume that this value will mostly move around 20-25%. At least this is going to be the case for your wisdom saves, which are by far the most common. And that is mainly what the gnome cunning offers you, a better defense mostly against spells that force wis saves. Intelligence and charisma saves are so very few, and while the advantage on int saves might make the difference for the rare cases you are up against a spell that forces an int save, for charisma it will hardly make a difference (cha saves fall to that corner cases I mentioned earlier). This will become even more noticable as you gain levels, with your charisma bumps and your proficiency bonus increasing. Finally, with a charisma save at about +16 territory, it will hardly even make a difference if you have advantage on this check.

Ofc, this whole analysis changes, if you put multiclass at the scale. With the warlock multiclass you mentioned, that almost nullifies the importance of str (set it at 13 to qualify for mc'ing out of paladin - attack and damage rely on cha, movement speed penalty due to heavy armor and lower str, and due to gnome, is offest by the mount's speed), the gnome starts looking all that more desirable. If you manage to start with a 15 both in charisma and con, and thus it will tae only one ASI to increase both charisma and con to 16, that only puts you 1 ASI/feat behind the optimal vhuman, and all the gnome traits that now matter even more (due to having more cha related powers, and mount's speed is also imperative, so small size matters), and can perhaps add up to sth more than the value of a single ASI/feat.

I guess, my point is that I dont believe the unconventional choice of a gnome can really make up for the ''wrong stat bumps'' for a singleclass paladin build, though multiclassing can change that significantly. I think singleclass character building is pretty straightforward, and unless you multiclass there are not many unorthodox choices that somehow end up being better.

ps: I remember you Tieren talking about this character in some old thread, certainly remember the ''using the qs like a lance'' bit. Very distinct and flavourfull character! And certainly the bane of many a caster!!!

[tieren]

I guess, my point is that I dont believe the unconventional choice of a gnome can really make up for the ''wrong stat bumps'' for a singleclass paladin build, though multiclassing can change that significantly. I think singleclass character building is pretty straightforward, and unless you multiclass there are not many unorthodox choices that somehow end up being better.

ps: I remember you Tieren talking about this character in some old thread, certainly remember the ''using the qs like a lance'' bit. Very distinct and flavourfull character! And certainly the bane of many a caster!!!

I agree with your points and analysis. I just hate when mechanical optimization limits character development. If you rely solely on the combat math and come up with a conclusion that all pallys need to be human or elf, there are so many interesting character ideas out there that you are going to miss out on.

My gnome is not mechanically optimized. I completely get that he is less powerful than he would have been as a Vhuman with higher bonuses and an extra feat.

My point is that looking at him as building a mage slayer, wanting to combine the racial spell defenses with the class spell defenses and the oath spell defenses is a type of build discussion that shouldn't be overlooked just because he'll do x% less damage.

I am enjoying him tremendously and its a ton of fun. Someone else might like to consider something similar and shouldn't necessarily be stuck with "anything other than elf and human is a bad choice".

[Georlik]

I was actually looking forward for this thread for almost a year since Corran has found his WC+BB combo.

Here are my 2 cents on OATH OF THE ANCIENTS:

It might be the best choice for Mounted Combatant Feat, as it grants an additional layer of protection to your mount (we know how squishy they are) and meshes quite well with your 10ft range abilities.

I also enjoy my Nature Friendly Tank you might have seen in other thread:
Half Elf (for Stealth and Perception)
Medium Armor Master
Defensive Duelist
Inspiring Leader
Maximized Charisma
Between Max AC, decent DEX saves, Magic Resistance and Temporary Hit Points - it's a tough nut to crack. And paladins are naturally hard to ignore due to their spells. (Additional points for pissing the DM off by roleplaying Inspiring Leader).

Overall:
The default choice here is Weapon and Shield fighting style. It is almost a necessety due to our Capstone. You may squeeze in a Warcaster Feat, but in my experience concentration is rarely interrupted thanks to Aura of Protection and other benefits of this feat are wasted (sans the Corran combo above, for which I'd recommend full Dex Paladin with dueling fighting style and no additional feats).
Dex saves are very important. And no, Aura of Warding does not cover all the bases. Traps and Breath attacks will take a chunck out of your HP pool, so for a Strength based paladin you might consider a Shield Master feat. It also provides you with good use of a bonus action which can still be easely sacrificed for your spells.

On maxing stats:
Maximized Charizma is very important, but it is not a top priority.
Maximizing your primary Offensive Stat is important, but not as means of improving DPR. You need to connect those Smites and Spellls when it counts. Nevertheless the difference between 16 and 20 is barely noticable.

On DPR:
I am aware of the fact that Vengance Paladins are considered to be the most damaging class. But let's leave it to them. No matter how much you build up your consistent damage, you will always feel overshadowed by that Orcish Barbarian or your Surged Fighter. Mostly because you have more important things to do in battle than hitting stuff. Actually that is why I think that Defense or Protection styles are superior for Paladins. Especially so for Ancient ones. Between laying on hands, casting spells, grappling enemies into submission (or restraining them with spectral vines) and handling negotiations I hardly ever find a time to dish out damage. Paladin is a mindset afterall.

On defenses:
And here is a sensitive topic. You may have thought that all that armor, health, saves, healing and charms might save you in the end of the day? It depends, but you will certanly be proved wrong on more than one occasion. You are to be the first into the fray. You are to be the shield for your party. You are to look into the Abyss so others would not have to. Strategy tells us that it would be better to set an ambush and pincushion an enemy with arrows from afar (or even better stay at home and have no enemies). But that is not always the option. Braving the unknown you will be lured into ambushes, you will trigger traps and you will draw attention of mighty adversaries. And you will suffer for it. In my parties the last man standing is mostly the wizard or an archer. But paladin goes down first.


So should you optimize for Defense over Offence? Currently I am inclined to say "yes". It is true that encounters are short, and it is generally better to act swiftly and surely. But offence oriented approach costs you more resources. Not only you require more healing (as your effective HP is lower with less defense) but you also spend those precious spell slots on smites or DPR improving spells. And that is just to be on par with your fellow fighter, who is fresh again after he takes a breather.

Generally you do not need additional defense when things go according to plan. But, alas, they rarely do. So I would prefer to have an additional round to bring my healer back from the brink of death than deal 1-2 (or even 3-4) extra attacks to the dragon who surprised us.

[Klorox]

I thought it was impossible for "medium armor master" and "Max AC" to go together.

Half plate plus 16 DEX: AC 17
Full plate: AC 18

[Georlik]

I thought it was impossible for "medium armor master" and "Max AC" to go together.

Half plate plus 16 DEX: AC 17
Full plate: AC 18

That's the whole point of MAM.
15+3=18
And a sweet sweet stealth for escort missions.
The best fight is the one not fought ;)

[Klorox]

That's the whole point of MAM.
15+3=18
And a sweet sweet stealth for escort missions.
The best fight is the one not fought ;)

Gotchya. So, in a straight up fight, the MAM fighter relies on a slightly better stat (DEX v STR), but is limited to finesse weapons and has to use a feat.

I can see arguments for both sides TBH.

[Foxhound438]

On DPR:
I am aware of the fact that Vengance Paladins are considered to be the most damaging class. But let's leave it to them. No matter how much you build up your consistent damage, you will always feel overshadowed by that Orcish Barbarian or your Surged Fighter. Mostly because you have more important things to do in battle than hitting stuff. Actually that is why I think that Defense or Protection styles are superior for Paladins. Especially so for Ancient ones. Between laying on hands, casting spells, grappling enemies into submission (or restraining them with spectral vines) and handling negotiations I hardly ever find a time to dish out damage. Paladin is a mindset afterall.


I'm not convinced that that level of specialization is always best. sure this or that will "always do more damage", but that's not a good enough reason to simply not bother being able to do damage yourself.

As with engineering a real tank, having an impenetrable wall isn't going to do as much good as a wall that's hard to penetrate but can punish attackers as well. Especially when you consider that you may as well be left for the last target if you're fighting intelligent foes, since if you aren't contributing reasonably to your team's damage it's more beneficial for them to focus down your casters and archers.




But offence oriented approach costs you more resources. Not only you require more healing (as your effective HP is lower with less defense) but you also spend those precious spell slots on smites or DPR improving spells. And that is just to be on par with your fellow fighter, who is fresh again after he takes a breather.


I have to point you now to the build I recommended above. It deals significant damage without the need for any smites to be expended, and gives you more opportunities to do so.

The biggest difference between my build and yours is that you chose to go dex-based, and I chose Str-based. You spend a feat to get to top AC, while I spend a feat to have better damage (and the same AC, mind you). The benefit of yours is limited to better dex saves, but remember that there are in fact things that will target a strength save as well- not as commonly, but such things do exist.

there is in fact give and take between the two:

Yours:
1 better AC, if defense is taken
significantly better dexterity save

Mine:
1 additional attack
2 additional damage per hit
possible reaction attack



However, I would have to say that I don't think building entirely around defense is best; as I said in my own post, a tank that can deal damage is far more likely to keep foes off of the squishier casters and such, and even when defense is more heavily focused, the difference is marginal in comparison to picking up something to boost your damage. Law of diminishing return, if you will.

[Georlik]

However, I would have to say that I don't think building entirely around defense is best; as I said in my own post, a tank that can deal damage is far more likely to keep foes off of the squishier casters and such, and even when defense is more heavily focused, the difference is marginal in comparison to picking up something to boost your damage. Law of diminishing return, if you will.

You are absolutely correct. And still I don't quite get why you opt to optimize for damage. We are talking paladin optimization, correct? I do see the point of optimizing Fighter's damage with his awesome 4 attacks + action surge combo. QS+PAM would look even better on him.

But paladin has lots of options which fighter does not have. So I think we should emphasise the uniqueness of this playstyle. In my opinion Inspiring Leader with Protection fighting style is more optimized as a Paladin than any of the suggested options.

[Foxhound438]

You are absolutely correct. And still I don't quite get why you opt to optimize for damage.

it's not optimizing purely for damage, it's overall optimization. Take the options that give you the absolute most return out of your resources. You end up somewhere in between pure damage and pure defense. If I were to optimize purely for damage, I would have taken Great Weapon Fighting and stuck to a full polearm, but as the increase in damage is far less than the decrease in defense from losing a shield, I pick QS+B. Similarly, if I were to go purely defense, I would indeed go dex build with MAM, and focus on upping con at the end instead of my attack stat; but again, the increase in defense there is far less than the decrease in damage compared to getting 3 attacks with boosted damage.

In this case specifically, a middle of the road endpoint is where your resources are best allocated. In other builds, going pure glass cannon is better (IE all the polearm GWM fighters you see), and some are better with a slightly more defense oriented approach (life cleric heal bot comes to mind).

[Hooligan]

Eagerly awaiting your analysis of Vengeance oath

[Corran]

Eagerly awaiting your analysis of Vengeance oath
Aaaah, my favourite oath...! At least thematically. Because mechanically, I consider it to be one of the weakest ones. But more on that later, when the real post begins. For now, let me just reminisce my first 5e character, well 5e playtest character to be more presice, who was a vengeance paladin in all but name. You see, the oath of vengeance was not out yet. Still, lady Shiva was the very embodyment of the tenets of the unreleashed at the time oath of vengeance. Orphaned due to a war conflict between her country (Nirvan) and a neighbouring kingdom (Valoreign - one of Perkin's campaign settings), she dedicated her life at working to bring down this rival nation. Long story short, I shamelessly stole parts of the plot from 300#2 and Salt, and there I was, with a character that was fighting what appeared to be the greater evil (according to her own disturbed opinion), using any means necessary (pretending to be someone else, spying and lying, even murdering- no mercy for the wicked), and doing all that in the name of the greater good and with the hope that when nothing but ashes remained from what once was the evil kingdom (Valoreign) no compatriot of hers would ever come to harm again (meh, she did it purely out of hate and despair, but she didnt realise this back then). I guess it makes sense to say that the whole campaign was taking place there (at Valoreign), and that all the other party members were descended from that kingdom too. Back then I was very into playing with the trope that one nation's traitors are another nation's heroes. And though I was initially envisioning this character to evolve into a sinister version of Jeanne of Arc, I finally planned another path for this character to follow. Seeing as the rest of the party members were all good aligned and trully brave, honest and decent fellows (with the exception of one wild card guest star who rocked the campaign in a very entertaining way), I would finally have this character abandon her spying career, shady dealings, and generally her hatred and her quest for vengeance, and I would have her good nature get the better of her, due to the influence her allies had on her. Alas, I never got to play up to that part, as life got once again in the way, as it often does, but still, this is one of my most memorable characters, despite being such a huge cliche of a character. I love cliches.

Personally, I cannot imagine creating a vengeance paladin in any other way, other than going for a lightly armored (though I quite like medium armor master with halplate too, I guess it would depend on the image I have in mind when creating the character) mobile dex-based character, who gets access (from race and background) to at least the skills stealth, survival and perception, and quite possibly capping them with intimidation and insight from the class skills. S&B, or TWF, or even sword and one free hand, if I can squeeze athletics or acrobatics in my skill list, but this doesn't make a huge difference in my book. Because that is how I see the vengeance paladin, as a dude(/tte) who can track down their prey (all rangery like if you will), can stealthily approach it, and then try to take it down hard and fast, while also being able to stop it from trying to escape, if that is indeed what the target tries to do. Punching people in the nose for information about their prey (hence intimidation and insight) is just part of the whole process. But all that is just personal preference, and has very little, maybe even nothing, to do with optimization, which is what is being discussed here.

So, if you can forgive my rambling, lets talk a bit about the oath itself.


OATH OF VENGEANCE
Let us have a quick look at the oath features first.

Oath features

Oath of enmity: Ok, this feature is the best this oath has to offer us, and it is going to heavily influence our build. On the plus side, it only takes a bonus action to use, so it does not mess up too much with our action economy. The feature by itself, limitations aside, screams for a very strong attack sequence, which will capitalize from the advantage. That essentially means two things, GWM and consequently strength bumps. The downsides are that you cannot move it around from target to target, and that it is short rest rechargable. Sure, recharging in a short rest is much better than recharging in a long rest, but optimizing hard around a short rest rechargable feature can be tricky (meaning that we might end up with a problematic build in the cases when this power has not recharged or when faced with encounters where you would not make good use of this feature, like when fighting against hordes). But this is a general problem of the vengeance paladin, who is mechanically designed to shine against one big enemy, and doomed to be mediocre or even struggle against several equally powerful enemies and hordes respectively. Throwing polearm mastery on top of GWM and the str bumps could probably be very important, as PAM not only strengthens our attack sequence (especially with GWM in play) so that would play really well with the advantage from oath of enmity, but also it could prove a very crucial investment for when we are out of uses for oath of enmity (as PAM plays well with IDS, to keep our damage up there when we are not using oath of enmity and/or GWM). Of course, if we indeed invest in all of the above, that is 4 out of our 5 (6 if vhuman) ASI's/feats used already. That is a bit problematic, especially if we start wondering the order with which we should take them. More on that later. For now, let's just point out the obvious, that oath of enmity, due to its benefit and its action economy, is best supported by a very biffed up attack sequence.

Abjure enemy: Lets face it. We will only use this when we really need to stop someone who is trying to escape us, or alternatively, when we are being chased by something we cannot kill and we are the ones doing the fleeing. And even then, assuming we have our channel divinity available (which is doubtful to say the least), we have other means to use in both eventualities (things like, hold person/monster, misy step, dimension door, relentless avenger, haste, even hunter's mark has some value when chasing someone). Considering it a valid tactical in-combat option is a stretch. Maybe if you want to kind of take out a major opponent who relies on speed (though you are good at catching up with such opponents) so that you can take out the minions first, but then again why risk it when you can use vow of enmity to bring said big opponent down? And besides, you already have things for that, like banishment. Anyway, I can see it having some very situational usefulness (I know I have used this against a bulette in a fight that called for it), though we can safely assume that this feature will not be used all that often, due to the fact that it competes with vow of enmity. All in all, a decent secondary option for our channel divinity, but there is not really anything we can deduce as far as our build making process is concerned. I could go as far as to indicate that boosting charisma is essential for raising the DC of that power, but it is so situational that I am not going to suggest that.

Relentless avenger: Not a lot whole to say about this feature either. The best thing to do would be perhaps to play a race with a flying speed (aarakockra, tiefling), take the polearm master feat, and the be able to fly upwards every time an enemy enters our reach, thus before that enemy has a chance at attacking us. Though this accomplishes little more than the well known PAM+sentinel combo. Besides, this goes into a different territory, as if one was into these sort of shenanigans, playing a race with a flying speed and equping a reach weapon is just better. Anyway, back to the feature and away from the silliness, this feature allows us to follow on the footsteps of someone who is trying to flee from us. So, theoritically anything that adds to our movement speed makes good use of this feature. So things like mobile, or something as simple as playing a suboptimal wood elf, or more likely a halfelf variant (wood elf), or if we have cast haste on us. There is some overlap between this feature and the sentinel feat, in the sense that if we have enough movement speed (possibly true with haste on alone) to catch up to the fleeing enemy, then being able to stop him in his tracks with sentinel would offer us less than if we didnt have this feature in the first place. Of course, the importance of the sentinel feat is not limited to that single benefit, nor is not allowing the enemy to move at all worthless, even if we are indeed able to follow him to an adjacent square. Just a minor overlap I wanted to point out. Again, not much to say optimization-wise, as this feature alone does not justify either taking mobile as a feat, or playing a race with improved movement speed, or even not taking the sentinel feat. One last thing. It is important to note that while all other oaths offer an aura of some kind in this level, the vengeance paladin grants us an ability that focuses around mobility, more specifically being better at chasing something down.

Soul of vengeance: This feature is keyed off from the oath of enmity channel divinity (another reason to think twice before using abjure enemy on anyone), and it basically grants us a reactionary attack (notice that it is not an OA) against the target of our oath of enmity. Once again, we can make the best of this feature by having a strong attack (IDS helps here), so mainly we are looking again at stuff like GWM and strength bumps, just like in the case of the oath of enmity. However, unlike the case of the oth of enmity, it is important to notice that this feature overlaps with anything that makes use of our reaction. So there is definitely some overlap between this feature and feats like sentinel and PAM. This is the second ability (after relentless avenger) that has some overlap with the sentinel feat, but unlike with relentless avenger, the overlap here is more significant. And though PAM does has some overlap with this feature, there is still enough reason to consider taking it, even when GWM and the strenght bumps seem so important. However, more on PAM and why I would include it in the final build later. Something to notice. While all other oaths give a feature at this level that adds a defensive boost, the vengeance paladin is still getting things that advocate an all-out-attack approach.

Avenging angel: Finally the capstone. And it is a dissapontment.... well, imo. And that is because a creature that fails its save ends being frightened if it takes any damage. Anyway, the way this capstone (which takes up an action - ouch! - as every capstone does) is meant to be used, is to activate it in order to potentially cripple all the minions while you AND the rest of the party try to take out the big bad. Now, since it takes up an action, and that is hurting you and your mighty attack sequence, you should only use it cautiously and wisely, and most of all, as part of your whole group's strategy. Meaning it woud do you no good if you were to spend your action on that, just before the caster throws an AOE to try and dish out some damage on the enemies (the minions plus the big bad), as that would practically negate the use of your capstone. Bottom line, it requires teamwork to use effectively. Still, the conditions under which this capstone is best used, contradict a bit your game plan, which as a vengeance paly, is to proceed to the BBEG and start pounding him with all you've got. Wasting actions on activating a capstone goes against what a vengeance paladin should be doing, still, there might be cases when it might be justified to do so (but most of the times the controller will have this handled). So no matter how cool the fluff of this capstone is, it makes for a very weak capstone imo (heck, the oathbreaker can do this and do this better from level 3). The augmented duration does kind of make up for this fact, as it allows for easier precasting. So that potentially negates the opportunity cost, so we are back into planning for a very strong attack, without having to worry too much about the capstone. Got to give it to WotC, they put some good effort into this, I mean, it is certainly no accident that they tried to free-up the vengeance paladin's action economy, as it was clear that this oath was meant to optimize around a very strong attack. I mean, the increased duration of the capstone (1 hour, while all other paladin capstones last for a minute) is clearly not an accident. Also, wings are cool. Notice how even the capstone adds to the mobility of the whole build? See the pattern yet?


An overview
So, it is not difficult to realise that the vengeance paladin was designed around a few key aspects. To focus fire, to be mobile enough so that he can focus fire where he must and to be a pain to run away from, and to be able to hit really hard. It is rather apparent that all the oath features focus on attack and mobility, and the only thing that could pass as a defensive boost is the fear effect of the capstone, though the main purpose of this is to just be able to focus fire where you must without minding the other enemies. Oath of enmity, soul of vengeance, haste, hunter's mark, even the capstone with the 1h duration which means we can easily precast it, and IDS as well, all these provide the right incentive for building for a strong attack. Relentless avenger, misty step, dimension door, haste, capstone (wings), and aura of courage to some extent, all these deal with accessibility (it would be a real problem if we could not approach the target of our oath of enmity). So does the fear effect of the capstone in a slightly different way, meaning that it allows us to focus fire on the BBEG without worrying too much about its minions. And we have things like abjure enemy, hold person/monster and hunter's mark, that makes us a real pain when we are chasing someone who tries to flee. If not for the mobility potential, I would say that the vengeance paladin would be only good for duels, though what he really seems to be, is the bane of a single foe, whom he has various tricks to use if approaching seems tricky, so that he can sut him down.


So, if we are to optimize, we need to do it primarily around the oath of enmity feature. And we need to guarantee somehow that when this feature is not ready to use, our build wont be completely worthless. A two-step process.

Optimizing for when oath of enmity is not available.
So, no channel divinity, and no soul of vengeance (since it triggers from oath of enmity). What is left to optimize around? The paladin chassis. So that basically means IDS, a good base AC and action economy (with the difference that we wont be having any channel divinities available to present any additional opportunity cost to that of the rare-occuring spellcasting and the even rarer lay on hands. So that lessens the value of a S&B build, that benefits from a packed action economy and from frequent occuring opportunity cost. All that remains of value to a S&B approach is the +2 AC from the shield, which we can add on top of an already good base AC (thanks to the armor proficiencies and possibly to the defense fighting style). But we can do better than S&B. And since we have no significant way to take advantage of the increased reach of a polearm (ie halbeard or glaive), as the sentinel feat is not on our plans due to how it conflicts with soul of vengeance and due to how many feats we need to invest into (more on that later), it makes sense that the best approach for a vengeance paladin who is not using his oath of enmity, is that of using a quarterstaff along with a shield (qs+b), and also having access to the PAM feat. Have a look at Foxhound's post where he talks about the oath of the ancients for a more in depth analysis as to why qs+b is better in this case, or at the very first post where I talk about fighting styles. Fact is, that an oathless paladin (which basically the vengeance paladin is if you take out oath of enmity), will perform best if we take the PAM feat and equip a quarterstaff and a shield (top AC and regular use of our bonus action). This has already been discussed in this thread, so if you are not convinced have a look at the previous posts, though feel free to disagree and provide counterarguments. So, if this paragraph is to leave us with something, this is that PAM is essential when we cannot use our oath of enmity. And since PAM is still quite useful (even more useful I would say) when we are using our oath of enmity (as we will see in the next paragraph), I would say that PAM is a definite pick for an optimized vengeance paly.


Optimizing (mostly) around oath of enmity.
Consider this. At level 15, against the target of our oath of enmity, and with haste self-cast on us, we will be doing 3 attacks (4 with PAM) during our turn, and one reactionary attack during the enemy's turn (assuming the target of our oath of enmity attacks, which is a fair assumption). That is a total of 4 attacks per round (5 with PAM), all with advatage. An ideal setup for having the GWM feat handy. Now, that is something we should look forward to. I know that haste takes an action to cast, and that it will take away one attack from our first round, and I certainly know how major is the drawback of losing concentration to it, but I will refer to haste extensively in each own section. So for now, take it for granted, that we will be using haste whenever we are up against a target of our oath of enmity. Even before level 15 (when soul of vengeance kicks in), and as low as level 9, we will be rocking 3 attacks (4 with PAM), all of which have advantage (due to oath of enmity). Since this is the purpose of the vengeance paladin, to lock down a target, mark him, and pummel him to death, and since oath of enmity is the only real feature we can trully optimize around (before we saw that when oath of enmity is in play, we only need PAM to optimize the vengeance paladin, along with a quarterstaff and a shield), we can easily see that GWM will trully make a difference when against a target of our oath of enmity.


Haste
Arguably the best spell to use when oath of enmity is active. More on tactics later, but for now, let's just examine this oath exclusive spell. First of all, it takes an action to use. That means, that since we are using it in a fight when we are also using oath of enmity, we will spend our first round casting haste with our action, activating oath of enmity with our bonus action, and making a melee attack (granted by the action provided by haste). That means that during the 1st round of combat, we ended up attacking one time less. By round 2 we will have caught up to the numbers of attacks we would normally have done by then if we had not bothered with haste, and by round 3 and every round thereafter we will be gaining one extra attack per round. So it takes till round 3 to see the offensive benefit of haste come to life. Luckily, the defensive and utility benefits (+2 AC, advantage on dex saves, and doubled movement speed - which can be really useful to a veneance paladin, especially during the first round of combat) are in effect from the 1st round when we cast haste. Also, it is nice to see that our AC will not suffer when changing back to using a heavy polearm from the qs+b style. That essentially will put us at AC 20, without having taken fighting styles into consideration yet, almost all the time (as the plan is to use haste and a heavy polearm when we activate oath of enmity, and to use qs+b when we re not using oath of enmity).
Now, something else that we need to consider, is that haste comes with a serious risk. At least when we are talking about a melee character who casts haste on himself. The risk of losing concentration, and thus losing a whole turn is especially painful for a vengeance paladin, who has invested so much on his attack sequence. The point is, since haste takes a while to come online, at least that is the case with the offensive benefits of haste, then there is no point using this spell if there is a good chance to lose concentration on it. It is like wasting spell slots (3rd level spell slots!) and delaying our damage output for a round, in order to lose a whole turn later when we lose concentration on it. No, if we are to use haste effectively, heck, if we are to even use haste at all (and we should!), we need to make sure that we wont lose concentration on it that easily. Luckily, unlike most other melee casters or melee hybrids, paladins do have a feature that makes selfcasting haste a lot more viable, than in those other cases. And that feature is aura of protection. But is that enough? Consider a charisma score of 18 and a con score of 14 (and I was probably generous with the 18 in charisma, considering all the feat and str investement we have before us). That puts our con saves at a +6. Seeing as you will be in melee, and lets face it, when you are casting haste, ie when you are using oath of enmity, you will be facing a big bad, or at least a very powerful opponent (or else why else did you use oath of enmity, and thus haste -oath of enmity and haste go hand in hand)? Is +6 con save good enough to risk losing haste? When losing haste hurts our dpr sooooooo much? My answer is a non-negotiable and firm no! So, resilient con is a must, unfortunately. I say unfortunately not because resilient con is a bad feat or a tax feat or anything like that. It is a great feat, that most paladins should consider taking. Though with that much feat and str bump pressure, it wont be easy to come up with a convenient progression. For good or bad, it is a fact that we really need this feat.
Edit: Also, Haste + find steed = hasted mount!!!


What about charisma?
Let's see what keys off charisma. First and foremost, aura of protection, one of the best paladin features. Othen than that, well... we do have some spells that rely on DC (such s banishment), even some oath spells (such as hold person and hold monster), though to be honest, no matter how good those spells are, when you have oath of enmity activated, you should just cast haste and attack non-stop. Still, it is not that these spells wont see the light of day, but keep in mind that using your action to cast presents you with a very significant opportunity cost, as you are foregoing taking the attack action (and this is what you are optimized around). So yeah, we do have some good spells that rely on a good DC and thus on a good charisma, but ideally you will use them as rarely as possible, so they end up having a more situational value for you, due to how biffed your attack action is. And of course you have some minor things that depend on charisma, such as how many uses per day you have for the divine sense ability, or how many spells you can prepare, or the DC concerning abjure enemy and your capstone (perhaps I uderestimate this a bit). But you get the picture, nothing else so major as aura of protection. Unlike for example the devotion paly whose main oath feature (sacred weapon) keys off from charisma, or like the oathbreaker with his dreadful aspect. Your corresponding in importance feature, that is oath of enmity, does not rely on charisma at all. And unlike the oath of the ancients who follows a more defense minded approach, and thus can afford increasing his charisma prior to his attack stat, the vengeance paladin is not in a place to do so. Grabbing the feats you need to boost your attack sequence, and the str bumps you obviously need, that leaves little room for charisma bumps, or at least to take charisma bumps early on. This of course does not mean that charisma is not an important ability to the vengeance paladin. Even with only aura of protection benefiting from a good charisma score, it is such an important feature that you cannot afford starting with anything lower than a 16 in charisma, especially considering that with all that pressure for feats (GWM, PAM, resilient con) and str bumps it might take a while before your can raise your charisma. This is in fact one of the reasons I consider the vengeance oath a bit on the lower side of power. The fact that your really need to spend your feats/ASIs on stuff other than raising charisma, really sabotages your aura of protection, which is a trully great ability. Take as an example the devoton paly, who despite having an oath feature very similar to the oath of enmity (that is the sacred weapon), so it would make sense for the devotion paly to follow a similar attack minded feat/ASI investement, as the vengeance paly does, the fact that sacred weapon keys off from charisma allows the devotion paly to prioritize charisma bumps over strenght bumps, thus assuring that his aura of protection is very efficient. Anyway, an optimized vengeance paly should start with a good charisma score (16), as he still needs a good charisma, though it will probably take a long time to raise it (if ever). So, charisma is still useful (and moe important than constitution obviously), though not as much as for the other oaths, and certainly not more important than strength (it is the only oath so far - we've seen devotion, ancients and oathbreaker) for which strength is more important than charisma.


Race
With GWM, PAM, resilient con and two strength bumps, all considered definite picks, we see that unless we go with vhuman we wont have room for a charisma bump or any other feat. And so it happens that vhuman is the most optimal choice, but not because it allows for a cha bump/feat. Well, that's part of why we go with vhuman too, but the main reason that we are going with vhuman is because it allows us to take all the aforementioned very important feats/ASIs (GWM, PAM, resilient con, str bumps) at a faster rate, than any other race. You see, we need all these for our build, and each and every one of them is essential to an optimized vengeance paly. So we need to get them asap. Thus vhuman.



So, lets summarize and go through our choices, briefly touching why we selected them.

First, lets take the stats.
You are a heavy hitter, hence strength takes priority over charisma for you. Charisma follows, as aura of protection is enough alone to make it more important than constitution, though you have other features and powers too that rely on charisma. After strenght and charisma, constitution follows, obviously. Usually wisdom is a bit more important than dex for paladins, seeing as most paladins dont make good use of dex skills, not to mention that they wear heavy armor so dex does not affect much. However, in your case, you have a unique chance to pull off some good dex saves, as apart from aura of potection, you will be having haste regularly on, thus, with both aura of protection and haste, you will have a solid chance at succeeding at some of those dex saves. But this is not the main reason that dex is a bit more important than usual for you. You are a heavy hitter, thus initiative is important to you. So dex is as important, if not a bit more, than wisdom for you. Finally, int is a dump stat. So I would rate stats as follows: STR > CHA > CON > DEX = WIS > INT. And with vhuman as a race, I would expect our starting stats to look like this: STR 16, DEX 10, CON 13, INT 8, WIS 10, CHA 16, and with resilient con and 2 str bumps our final stats would look like this: STR 20, DEX 10, CON 14, INT 8, WIS 10, CHA 16, with one feat/ASI remaining, using it for a feat or to bump charisma to 18 (in the last case, final stats would look like this: STR 20, DEX 10, CON 14, INT 8, WIS 10, CHA 18).

Lets see our choices for feats/ASIs.
GWM: Necessary to be considered optimized. With oath of enmity, haste, soul of vengeance (and PAM - see below), you will be rocking up to 5 attacks per round at the target of your oath of enmity, and all of which have advantage. Clearly a definite pick.

PAM: Plays well with oath of enmity and GWM, and obviously with IDS as well. Meaning that creating one extra attack with advantage (due to oath of enmity), upon which you can add IDS and GWM, is really a huge benefit. Also, it can generate an OA at the first round of combat, before using your oath of enmity and thus being able to capitalize on your soul of vengeance OA. So that is a nice complement to your soul of vengeance feature, as long as you do not go before your target of oath of enmity. Otherwise, there is some minor overlap. Also, equally important, that you can make a great use of this feat when you cannot use oath of enmity, specifically by using the qs+b style (but even if not, it still offers a regular use of your bonus action upon which IDS is applied, and it offers every now and then an OA which again makes use of IDS).

Resilient con: Necessary for being able to use haste in a productive way. If we do not take this feat, haste is a huge risk that we should probably avoid taking. And with haste being so important and such a great fit to our strategy (oath of enmity and GWM), it would be a huge blow if it was not worth using just because of the risk of losing concentration on it. Moreover, boosting concentration saves cannot be underestimated. This feat is already up there as one of the best feats for paladins to grab, but for you this is even more true. The only real problem is that we need it relatively fast, same as we do regarding GWM, PAM, and the str bumps, yet we will have to take it and figure out the order in which we will take the feats later. Consider it a must have feat though. Moreover, that +1 to constitution, allows us to spare some points for a better dex score, and we showed why this is important 2 paragpraphs above when we were talking about stats (namely how the combination of haste and aura of protection boosts our dex saves, and especially how initiative is very important due to us being a heavy hitter).

Two strength bumps: To raise strength to 20. Naturally that goes without explanation.

As for our last feat (cause vhuman), the obvious choice seems to be to raise our charisma to 18, though there are some other good choices too (alert, mobile, sentinel and ofc lucky). Whatever we end up choosing, it is important to know that this last feat will be the last one to select (ie at level 19), as everything else we have mentioned so far takes priority. Lets examine the benefits of each choice.
-alert: +5 to initiative, which is important to aa heavy hitter like us. Going first matters! A lot! Not being surprised is a nice bonus too, although a bit situational.
-mobile: Definitely some synergy there between this feat and PAM, especially when we are not using oath of enmity. When we are using oath of enmity we will want to stay close to that target, so we can profit from soul of vengeance. But when we are not using oath of enmity, we could make the best of mobile+PAM, potentially allowing us to get an OA attack (from PAM) every round, by just moving away from the enemies. Also, the added mobility (increased speed and being able to move without provoking OA's from targets you hit), pairs well with relentless avenger (minor benefit) but most of all fits well with the philosophy of vengeance paladins, which is to be mobile enough to engage targets that could be potentially difficult to approach.
-sentinel: Sure there is some redundancy between sentinel and soul of vengeance, same goes with sentinel and relentless avenger (although this is just a minor one), but since we've got PAM, sentinel can always be useful to us. Just not so much after level 15 and when we are using oath of enmity. Still, a decent choice.
-Lucky: Generally a very good feat. For us it is important to be able to reroll potential bad attack rolls, especially when you consider that the effects of both GWM and IDS will be at stake.
-charisma boost (raising charisma from 16 to 18): We improve aura of protection, our spell DC which also influences some of our oath features, plus other minor benefits (better social skills, more prepared spells).
Personally, I would go with either the charisma boost, or with lucky.


Regarding race, vhuman. Not only because we can nab an extra feat, but because of the faster pace with which we acquire feats/ASIs. We need all of GWM, PAM, resilient con and +2str and we need them ASAP!!!!! Dont know how else to emphasize this enough!


Now let's talk feat/ASI progression.
We need resilient con before getting access to haste, so we need resilient con by level 8. And since having a low con of 13 for 7 levels is pretty bad, I would assume that we would not want to delay resilient con past level 4. So resilient con will either be our 1st level pick, or our pick at 4th level. Now, which is better to take sooner, PAM or GWM? For GWM, it would seem that the 4th level would be an ideal point to select it, as it is just after we gain access to oath of enmity, and just before we get our extra attack. However, since both haste and PAM provide us with another instance of extra attack (sort of), it would make sense to take GWM just before either of these two options come into play. A major point that will help our decision making, is that GWM does not work all that well when we cannot use oath of enmity. For that reason, it will be closer to a waste of a feat rather than to a terrific choice, when we cannot use oath of enmity and consequently haste. For this reason, I would delay GWM bit (as it is an optimization choice only when oath of enmity is active, otherwise it is not an optimal choice). On the contrary, PAM is great from the get go, especially as a first level pick. And it becomes even better once we get access to GWM and IDS. Also, I value PAM more than a str boost, for the reason that PAM will be better than +2 str when we are using qs+b (and thus we are not using oath of enmity), and it will also be better when we are using GWM and oath of enmity (as another chance at a -5/+10 attack with advantage, is better than one less even if all attacks have a +1 to hit and to damage. For this reason, this is the feat/ASI progression that I consider optimal:
1) PAM
4)resilient con (con 14)
8)GWM
12)+2 str (str 18)
16)+2 str (str 20)
19)+2 cha (cha 18) or lucky.


Tactics
Clarification: At level 8 we will grab GWM. Up until level 7 we are using qs+b, and from level 8 and onwards we are using a heavy polearm (whether vow of enmity is up or not).
As we have already said, whenever you use oath of enmity, also use haste. Otherwise do not, and try to hold on to spell slots to be able to cast haste when you will use your oath of enmity. With haste and oath of enmity on (and obviously PAM according to the feat progression I showed earlier), you will be attacking your oath of enmity target 4 times by level 9, and a 5th if said enemy entered your reach, and from level 15 and onwards you will be able to use in a regular basis one reactionary attack (from soul of vengeance) against your vow of enmity target (all with advantage, and IDS applied).
Before level 8, when GWM kicks in, use the qs+b approach (quarterstaff + shield) along with PAM. Rely on either bless, divne favor or hunter's mark for concentration, each has its own advantages nd disadvantages. Wrathful smite and shield of faith are solid choices too. But make sure to use a shield and a quarterstaff.
From level 11 and onwards, after IDS kicks in, it will be geberally better to forget that you have GWM when you are not using vow of enmity (and thus haste). Again, qs+b with one of the aformentioned spells (bless, divine favor, hunter's mark, shield of faith or wrathful smite) for concentration.
For levels 8-10, it might be better sticking with a heavy polearm and using bless along with GWM, when vow of enmity is not on, instead of going qs+b, though I haven't really checked the math. But it doesn't matter, because even if this is the case, it is still a fact that for the majority of our career (levels 1-7 & 11-20) we will be better off using qs+b instead of a heavy polearm with GWM, that is ofc when vow of enmity and thus haste are not activated. Never forget, vow of enmity and haste go hand in hand.
Of course, this last observation, that whenever we will not be using vow of enmity we are better off with qs+b, helps us decide on the fighting style we will take at level 2. Granted, gwf can do quite well when spamming 5 attacks per round against our vow of enmity target, but it will have no effect half of the time, when we will not be using vow of enmity. For that reason, and also because our AC will be at 20 both in the case of qs+b and in the case of heavy polearm with haste on, I would say that the defense fighting style is the ideal choice. Add to that that in the qs+b case, we can even use shield of faith, for a total AC of 23, and that is without any magic items. So that means that we can tank really hard when we need to or when we dont want to use vow of enmity + haste.
Additionally, never ever use spell slots to smite. Unless we are talking about critical hits. Or unless you are losing the fight. Or unless it makes a lot of sense to go nova (eg, you want to quickly drop a glass canon).
Every other spell, other than haste, and the one you are using with your concentration when you are not using vow of enity, and thus haste (that spell could be one of bless, wrathful smite, divine favor, hunter's mark, shield of faith), will be situational. Meaning that it should not be used unless faced with a situation that specifically calls for it. Remember, your best bet is to never stop attacking, so cast only when it is really appropriate.



Final build
Race: vhuman
starting stats: str 16, dex 10, con 13, int 8, wis 10, cha 16.
starting feat: PAM
fighting style: defense
feats/ASIs: 1)PAM, 4)resilient con, 8)GWM, 12)+2str, 16)+2 str, 19) +2 cha/lucky.
Final stats: STR 20, DEX 10, CON 14, INT 8, WIS 10, CHA 16 or 18 (depending on if we chose +2 cha or lucky @19lvl).
Feats: PAM, resilient con, GWM, (and perhaps lucky, if we choose it instead of boosting charisma @level 19).
Spells to use: Haste (always use it with vow of enmity, otherwise do not!), bless, shield of faith, wrathful smite, divine favor, hunter's mark (choose which one to use from the last 5, when you are not using haste+vow of enmity). Every other spell should only be used in situations that specifically call for it. So complete the list of your prepared spells with the ones that can prove extremelly useful under specific situations that you think you might find yourself against (such as spells like aura of life, revivify, dispel magic, etc). Hold on to your smites for critical hits, with advantage and that many attacks per round (max at 5) you will crit enough, so hold on to your smites to use then.
Revised Tactics:
A.) With vow of enmity
Levels 15-20: Vow of enmity, soul of vengeance, IDS, haste, PAM, GWM, extra attack, use heavy polearm. Try to activate the capstone outside of combat, it has a duration of 1 hour.
Levels 11-14: Vow of enmity, IDS, haste, PAM, GWM, extra attack, use heavy polearm.
Levels 9-10: Vow of enmity, haste, PAM, GWM, extra attack, use heavy polearm.
Level 8: Vow of enmity, PAM, GWM,extra attack, use heavy polearm. You can use one of hunter's mark, divine favor or bless with your concentration, pick on usually in that order of significance (secondary choices include wrathful smite and shield of faith), or pick none and go into this fight without using any concentration spell at all. It will depend from fight to fight.
Levels 5-7: Vow of enmity, PAM, extra attack, use one of bless/hunter's mark/divine favor or even one of wrathful smite or shield of faith (emphasis on the 3 first, as they are more attack minded), use qs+b (quarterstaff + shield).
Levels 3-4: Vow of enmity, PAM, use whichever of bless/divine favor/hunter's mark/shiled of faith/wrathful smite with your concentration, use qs+b (quarterstaff + shield).
B.) Without vow of enmity
Levels 11-20: IDS, PAM, GWM, bless, extra attack, use heavy polearm.
Levels 8-10: PAM, GWM, bless, extra attack, use heavy polearm.
Levels 5-7: PAM, use concentration with one of shield of faith, divine favor, bless, wrathful smite, or hunter's mark, extra attack, use qs+b (quarterstaff + shield).
Levels 1-4: PAM, use concentration again with one of the above spells (emphasis on shield of faith and divine favor), use qs+b (quarterstaff + shield).



Anyway, that is what I think an optimal vengeance paladin looks like.

ps: Used the term oath of enmity instead of vow of enmity a lot in this post, I hope it is clear that I meant vow of enmity.

[Foxhound438]

A bit of a late response, but here are some thoughts on your vengeance build.

First thing that jumped out at me was the plan of "qs+b when not using vow". My thought on this is that you should default to having the heavy polearm out once your build is at a point that facilitates it, and only switch to qs+b after you've used vow. The reason being, it'd probably be better to be a bit sub-optimally equipped during the easy fights where you don't need vow and have it ready at a moment's notice, than to unexpectedly wander into a deadly encounter against a fire giant or something and have to spend an action to get to halberd setup or be in the sub-optimal loadout for that more difficult encounter. Granted, scouting can be done when you have a good shadow monk or rogue in your party, but a well-set trap could even then catch your party off guard. So my suggestion is, once your build is complete enough to make full polearm worthwhile, the full polearm should be your default, while qs+b is something to do after the combat that you pop vow. The big catch here is, if you've correctly assessed that you need to vow to come out in a favorable state, there's a good chance that someone will be hurt enough to warrant a short rest anyways. Thus, it's quite likely that shield and stick will take the bench for most of your adventures.

Moving on from weapon choice, I have to say I agree with your assessment about this oath largely being a "basic paladin" while you aren't using Vow. All of the oath features (save cap, but how many characters actually get there?) are basically "vow of enmity V. 1.x". Moreover, I don't think the spell list does much for most of your career. Hunter's mark is only marginally improved divine favor (or a side grade in a world with PAM), and bane is basically only as good as bless, except that it can fail. Hold person seems like a hard gamble in combat, especially with a charisma stuck at 16 for most of your career. Even when it lands, it's only better than smiting with that slot if you manage to hit multiple auto-crits during the duration- low chance of that when you aren't likely to get the biggest thing in the combat. Of all the spells on this oath's list, misty step is kind of the best thing short of haste. And, once you get haste, you're probably not casting anything else at third level. You save your slots for the fight that you have to vow, since your hastes won't always recharge at the same time vow does.

Overall, I'd say the saddest part of this whole thing is that it's basically a less consistent version of a minimally optimized barbarian. You do marginally better with all of your buffs up (haste giving one more attack, vow not giving enemies advantage back, capstone keeping away mooks), but you can only do that once per short rest (long on the cap), while a reckless attacking mindless barbarian does it every fight no problem. You do have much better saves, but that's about the end to the constant advantages you would have over that build.

[Corran]

A bit of a late response, but here are some thoughts on your vengeance build.

First thing that jumped out at me was the plan of "qs+b when not using vow". My thought on this is that you should default to having the heavy polearm out once your build is at a point that facilitates it, and only switch to qs+b after you've used vow. The reason being, it'd probably be better to be a bit sub-optimally equipped during the easy fights where you don't need vow and have it ready at a moment's notice, than to unexpectedly wander into a deadly encounter against a fire giant or something and have to spend an action to get to halberd setup or be in the sub-optimal loadout for that more difficult encounter. Granted, scouting can be done when you have a good shadow monk or rogue in your party, but a well-set trap could even then catch your party off guard. So my suggestion is, once your build is complete enough to make full polearm worthwhile, the full polearm should be your default, while qs+b is something to do after the combat that you pop vow. The big catch here is, if you've correctly assessed that you need to vow to come out in a favorable state, there's a good chance that someone will be hurt enough to warrant a short rest anyways. Thus, it's quite likely that shield and stick will take the bench for most of your adventures.
I knew that this part was not clearly written by me (I assume you were refering to the tactics section). This is why I included the revised tactics under the final build section. Perhaps I should have gone back and edited the tactics section so it would be more clear. Anyway, I added a clarification. Basically, I suggest grabbing GWM at level 8, so up to level 7 one should use qs+b, and from level 8 and onwards heavy polearm pretty much always (due to how we have inevitably invested in GWM at that point).
The thing that troubles me, is which fighting style is the best choice. Meaning, that eventually we will be doing 5 attacks per turn with vow of enmity up, so gwf seems like a solid choice. But when VoE is not up, then it is just 3 attacks per round, not exaclty bad for gwf, but then again, it is those first 7 levels that we go with qs+b. So I thought defense would do the trick. Do you think that gwf would perhaps end up being the better choice? Should we suggest fighting style having in mind the starting level? How would you handle it?


Moving on from weapon choice, I have to say I agree with your assessment about this oath largely being a "basic paladin" while you aren't using Vow. All of the oath features (save cap, but how many characters actually get there?) are basically "vow of enmity V. 1.x". Moreover, I don't think the spell list does much for most of your career. Hunter's mark is only marginally improved divine favor (or a side grade in a world with PAM), and bane is basically only as good as bless, except that it can fail. Hold person seems like a hard gamble in combat, especially with a charisma stuck at 16 for most of your career. Even when it lands, it's only better than smiting with that slot if you manage to hit multiple auto-crits during the duration- low chance of that when you aren't likely to get the biggest thing in the combat. Of all the spells on this oath's list, misty step is kind of the best thing short of haste. And, once you get haste, you're probably not casting anything else at third level. You save your slots for the fight that you have to vow, since your hastes won't always recharge at the same time vow does.
Well yes. The opportunity cost is just too big when spending your actions with casting a spell. So apart from the concentration spell that makes sense at the differenet stages of your career (ended up with haste and bless, when VoE is up and when not respectively), you are better with keeping your spell slots for smites or for out of combat casting. (I consider haste to be worth of the opportunity cost, when VoE is up, and I think bless is essential in order to GWM when VoE is down). Especially when you are hasting + VoE, casting a spell is very constly. So yeah, spellcasting to be used only situationaly and if your party can do it for you, let them.


Overall, I'd say the saddest part of this whole thing is that it's basically a less consistent version of a minimally optimized barbarian. You do marginally better with all of your buffs up (haste giving one more attack, vow not giving enemies advantage back, capstone keeping away mooks), but you can only do that once per short rest (long on the cap), while a reckless attacking mindless barbarian does it every fight no problem. You do have much better saves, but that's about the end to the constant advantages you would have over that build.
You also have better AC (substancially better if the barbarian is using reckless attack). Then again the barbarian has resistance. I get what you are saying, and I have to say that I agree. A lot of a paladin's strength, when compared to other martials, is how he can be more versatile. And the oath of vengeance essentially prompts us to restrict them to just using their action to attack. Sure, they have other ways to spend their action with, but doing so goes against the very direction to which the oath features are pointing us, optimization-wise. At least, when up against a single opponent, vengeance paladins can do amazingly good. It is just that this is not the case always. How did you put it...? Ah yes, consistent... they are not consistent due to that restriction in how vow of enmity works. And also because when VoE is down (short rest rechargable), you are stuck with a feat (ie GWM) that is not ideal for the paladin chassis and you have to put some effort into making having it viable (thus PAM and str bumps). For me, the biggest downside is that this oath highlights strength over charisma. That and the fact that it is feat heavy (PAM, resilient, GWM - none works well without the other in the case of this oath imo), leaves you with a charisma of only 16. And that is a biggie imo.

ps: I was also having second thoughts regarding the order of PAM and resilient con. Thinking if I should have resilient con at 1st and PAM at 4 instead.

[Finieous]

I'm not going to write a long-ass post, but I'm playing a Crown paladin and currently have him at 6th level.

* Variant Human
* Str 16, Con 14 (Resilient), Cha 16
* PAM, Resilient (Con)
* Defense fighting style
* I'll take Sentinel at 8th level

Observations:

* Channel abilities are very situational. The limited mass healing word has been nice at low level in a party with no cleric. My guy has the City Watch background, and Champion's Challenge has mostly been fun for stopping things from running away: "Halt in the name of the Law!" In theory, it provides a little more battlefield control, ultimately paired with PAM + Sentinel. In practice, I don't seem to have much trouble getting enemies to stick to me even without the ability...

* I took Defense style and still wish I had more than AC 19. Party is a bladesinger that can't be hit, lore bard, hunter ranger, ranged rogue. As "the front line," I take a lot of abuse. My 7th level ability might not get much use, since I'm usually getting beat up anyway. Again, in theory, I'll be able to use it to protect the bladesinger if he ever does get hit, since he has **** for hit points. ;)

* I feel like Resilient (Con) is a must-have due to the above noted level of abuse. As it is, bless is now auto-save for me at less than 20 damage.

* I'll also be in "auto-save less than 20" territory when I pick up spirit guardians at 9th level. This was the primary mechanical appeal of the oath (apart from the RP concept of a City Watchman turned Crown paladin, which I thought was cool). Obviously, hordes and AoE are one of the paladin's only real drawbacks, so this will be nice, at least for two or three appropriate encounters in an adventuring day.

* OTOH, I'm not at all convinced that shoring up that weakness is optimal for a paladin. The other oaths seem to do a lot more playing to the paladin's strengths. By 9th level, I'm expecting the lore bard and bladesinger to do a lot more than I can cleaning up hordes. Wouldn't I be better off with stronger auras, increased capabilities in boss fights, etc.? I kinda think so, but we'll see. It will be nice to inflict some additional pain on the enemies who currently abuse me so unfairly.

In any case, while Crown may be one of the weaker oaths, it's still a great character. I more than hold up my end in combat with damage, buffing, and a bit of healing, and I have good social interaction and investigation abilities. It's fun.

[Foxhound438]

(snip)

Spirit Guardians seems to be the best thing going for crown. Aside from that, I might put a bit more into building for HP, by bumping con and taking tough. Warding bond is okay early on, especially on a class with d10 hit dice and an extra 5*level HP on reserve, while divine allegiance is a great way to protect squishier wizards once the campaign starts to ramp up. While you specifically don't seem to need it in your party, it seems to me that it would be a great feature in a party with a utility caster.

Past that, I'm sad to say that it doesn't bring a lot to the table. Advantage on saves vs. stuns and paralyzation is cool, but not entirely necessary when you already have a great save line, while the capstone is bar none the weakest paladin capstone. Resistance to damage that you probably aren't seeing anymore is kind of a waste, advantage on death saves feels really weak when you have aura of life on your class spell list, and advantage on wis saves is pretty much redundant, as with the unyeilding spirit. I mean, congrats on not being able to fail a wis save, but you've already got so much against the worst wis save effects (on top of a +11 or better) that this is really only going to help your allies.

That's not to say that it's bad overall, it's just limited in how many useful benefits you get.

[Mandragola]

Alternative OOV suggestions

I’ve been playing a vengeance paladin for quite some time now, currently at level 11. I have some thoughts on this guide as there are actually a lot of things I’d do differently to the advice presented above.

The first thing I’d say is that PAM is overrated for vengeance paladins, especially if you have GWM. There are two key reasons for this: action economy and the requirement to find a magical weapon. Magical polearms seem to be very rare. I’ve never actually seen one. YMMV on that, obviously, but I wouldn’t take the feat before finding a magical polearm.

The action economy of PAM is bad because vengeance paladins actually have a lot of uses for bonus actions already. You’ve got channel divinity, hunter’s mark, GWM attacks and misty step, and maybe other stuff like aura of vitality (best out of combat, but a combat might start during it!). If you’re facing a boss you might put channel divinity on it in round one and hunter’s mark in round two. Against mooks you’ll often kill them, so you get a bonus attack greatsword swing.

Of course the other side of PAM is the OA as people move close to you, and that’s undeniably good. But it’s best of all for people like battlemaster fighters, who can frighten or knock over a target that comes into reach, preventing them from attacking. A vengeance paladin, whose main features are around getting to a priority target and then hitting it very hard, doesn’t benefit as much from this. He tends to move towards people rather than let them move to him. And then of course eventually this starts to get overwritten by soul of vengeance.

On balance therefore I do not rate PAM for a low level paladin. I don’t think you should take it at level 4. Increase your strength instead, or get GWM if not a vuman. Simply increasing your strength will have at least as big an impact on you in fights as PAM, since better accuracy means it’s more often a good idea to actually use the “power attack” feature of GWM. If you’ve got an awesome magical halberd then that changes this, obviously.

With the two-handed fighting style, a greatsword does 8.333 damage per hit on the dice alone, and a halberd does 6.3. So for the ability to sometimes get another hit from PAM you’re trading in doing 2 less damage per hit, or 3 less damage and -1 to hit on all your attacks until your strength catches up to a guy who just raised his strength instead of taking the feat. On the rounds where PAM goes off it will be better, especially after IDS kicks in.

My in-game experiences with haste have been pretty uniformly bad. Haste gives me one more attack per round, but costs me two or three attacks to set up (the two from my action and the one GWM might get me). Then if I fail concentration I lose those two or three attacks again, and people pound on me. So if I cast it on turn 1 it has to keep going for ~5 rounds just to break even, from my perspective. It’s a lot better if you can precast haste, but it only lasts a minute and you aren’t likely to be sneaky, so that’s not something you can count on.

This presents two options. You can either invest very heavily in haste, with warcaster or resilient: con (warcaster almost always better in my opinion) or you can ignore it and do other things. I’ve chosen to ignore haste as too much of a liability, after failing concentration rolls too often. It’s just never going to be reliable to keep haste running at higher levels, as monsters start to either hit you very hard or very often.

So instead of casting haste I’ll more often just get stuck in straight away smiting people. If the BBEG is far away I’ll misty step up to him and deliver a couple of smites to open, while my friends deal with the chaff.

Another thing I don’t agree with is starting with a minimum of 16 charisma. I realise that part of the reason for taking that is that you plan to take PAM and resilient con as feats, so you’re low on ASIs and need your critical stats as high as possible from the start. Since I wouldn’t take those feats, it frees up the opportunity to raise charisma later, as well as of course letting you cap strength many levels earlier.

But also, charisma doesn’t mean as much for a vengeance paladin as it does for most others. It’s extremely rare for me to use an ability that allows the enemy a save. I mainly just hit them, sometimes with power attack. Spell slots go to smites and misty step most of the time, with the occasional hunter’s mark, aura of vengeance or revivify (always keep a revivify handy). So charisma does nothing for my offence, and all it does for my defence is improve saves.

That’s a very nice ability of course, but actually I find myself getting low on hit points a hell of a lot more often than I find myself failing saving throws. This is partly because my AC isn’t very good and partly because paladins are immune to loads of stuff anyway.

Oh and it’s not as much difference to the rest of the party either, because a vengeance paladin fairly often isn’t there to protect them in his aura – he’s up in the BBEG’s face. The worse your charisma score is the less your party will whine about it when you run off and do your actual job.

All of which is a long-winded way of going about saying that starting out with 14 charisma is totally, totally fine.

So this opens up playing as a mountain dwarf, half-orc or goliath and starting with 16 con instead of 16 charisma. I think that any of these would be at least as good as a dragonborn for vengeance, though a variant human probably remains the optimal (and most fun) choice due to starting with GWM and capping strength sooner. I think a hill dwarf might theoretically work, because all those hit points would be awesome, but then you'd only get capped strength at level 16 - very late in the day.

Capping strength matters enormously for anyone with GWM. Any shred of extra accuracy you can find will up your dpr. It’s great when you’re accurate enough to use power attack a lot, so honestly I don’t agree at all with the original levelling guide.

Accordingly my levelling plan would be like this:


All stats to be even numbers, since it will be ages till you can take a feat that would fix uneven ones. Possible exception if you can get 17 strength and feel like grabbing something like heavy armour master, but that’s not optimal in my view.

Strength minimum 16, con and cha minimum 14 and would be nice if one of these was a 16.

Get GWM as soon as you can, either through being a human or your 4th level ASI.

Cap strength using your next two ASIs.

And then do what you want, based on how you’re finding the character. By this point we’re talking about the ASI you get at level 12 or 16, so you probably know what you’re doing. If you’ve got a good polearm then this is the time to take PAM. If you fall over a lot then increase your con, or just take toughness. Charisma and hit points are the defaults but don’t let that stop you taking a fun feat that you like the idea of.

For what it’s worth, with my own character I didn’t go for a min-max build and I don’t feel like it’s hurt me. Starting stats were 16, 8, 14, 10, 12, 14 with GWM, perception, athletics, survival intimidation and insight. Soldier background fitted for me with a guy who was a bit more wise and a bit less “lawful stupid” than some stereotypical paladins.

At level 11 I’ve capped my strength and was lucky enough to find a +2 charisma book so that’s now a 16. Honestly I’d rather it had been strength or con, but the charisma does definitely help. My main weapon is a +1 greatsword that becomes +2 against bloodied targets. I’m attuned to a ring of necrotic resistance, a cloak that gives me fire resistance and a swim speed and a stone of luck. I have an outrageously good charisma save, which I’m hardly ever required to use!

Anyway that’s a lot of text, in keeping with the rest of this thread. Hope it’s of interest.

[Foxhound438]

(snip)

So the reason people like polearm master is because it's more consistent than just GWM. Sure you might want to do a hunter's mark with your bonus action, but that's generally no more damage than just getting a third hit and doesn't require a spell. Similarly, even though the opportunity attack gets overridden with vow up, for all the times that you don't have vow the PAM attack is pure value.

Oh, and for the magic weapon argument, the base assumption for optimization threads like this is that there are no magic weapons. The reason being, even though your campaign hasn't seen a good magic polearm doesn't mean no one's will. It's an uncontrollable variable.

[Mandragola]

So the reason people like polearm master is because it's more consistent than just GWM. Sure you might want to do a hunter's mark with your bonus action, but that's generally no more damage than just getting a third hit and doesn't require a spell. Similarly, even though the opportunity attack gets overridden with vow up, for all the times that you don't have vow the PAM attack is pure value.

Sure, I do see that. My point on PAM is that I feel like it gets treated as being near-obligatory. I value it less than that. I'd cap strength first, especially for a vengeance paladin, and especially if I had GWM.


Oh, and for the magic weapon argument, the base assumption for optimization threads like this is that there are no magic weapons. The reason being, even though your campaign hasn't seen a good magic polearm doesn't mean no one's will. It's an uncontrollable variable.

You're right that it's uncontrollable, which is why I don't recommend taking PAM early - precisely because you don't know if you'll ever find a good polearm. If you find a holy avenger longsword then you're going to use it. Capped strength will help but PAM won't. On the other hand if you've got a flaming +2 halberd then you should take PAM at your earliest opportunity, but if you've put an ASI or two into strength already then it's still not wasted.

My suggested levelling plan is deliberately flexible to allow for uncontrollable variables, like magic item drops and the campaign you're fighting. +2 strength will always be good even if it isn't totally optimal. I'm basically saying that the only things an optimised vengeance paladin really needs are 20 strength and GWM. There are loads of good options from that point onwards.

By level 12 you'll have some kind of magic weapon (if not, moan at your DM!), so you can specialise into PAM if you want.

[Lollerabe]

If you look at Kryx' DPR of classes,GWM beats PAM on OOV Paladins by a fair margin IIRC. That's including the OA from reach etc. so there's that..

And the magic weapon thing is kind of silly IMO, if your paladin uses a maul why give him a holy avenger longsword/glaive? That's being a bit of a d*** for no reason if you ask me.

[Foxhound438]

And the magic weapon thing is kind of silly IMO, if your paladin uses a maul why give him a holy avenger longsword/glaive? That's being a bit of a d*** for no reason if you ask me.

Exactly. A good DM will make some adjustments to make sure that the players have a good time. If that means putting in a magic holy polearm instead of the cliche avenger sword, then that's what happens.

However, this is outside the realm of optimization, and heading towards DM/player relations.

[Mandragola]

Certainly true. I've mentioned before elsewhere that the guy who usually DMs for our group seems not to like the idea of vengeance paladins and thinks we should go sword and board all the time. The magic two-hander I've got only came when someone else DMd an adventure. I actually think it's more that our usual DM just gives out fairly random stuff that isn't designed for any particular character. So right now our half-orc fighter/cleric's main weapon is a +2 dagger that does 2d6 fire damage on a hit, and that's sort of fine as he's got duelist style. But it's just the item that was in the module.

I do think this is a relevant consideration for an optimisation thread. Different tables play magic items differently. Probably the best advice I can give a player building a character is to have a conversation with your DM before starting out, so you know what to expect. My table gives out very random magic items, which are typically better suited to the bad guy who's using them than to the PCs. Trouble with that as a paladin is of course that the kinds of people you're fighting are fairly unlikely to go around with holy avengers, magic full plate and horseshoes of a zephyr.

So to conclude, PAM is a good option if you've got a reasonable expectation that you'll find a magic polearm. Otherwise it's a lot less good. The more you specialise your character towards a particular thing, the less flexible you can be.

[WereRabbitz]

What about Paladin Reaction economy?

Not sure Paladin's have a whole lot in that department without picking up Sentinel or PAM.

Thoughts?

[Foxhound438]

So to conclude, PAM is a good option if you've got a reasonable expectation that you'll find a magic polearm. Otherwise it's a lot less good. The more you specialise your character towards a particular thing, the less flexible you can be.

I mean, it's a good option with a magic weapon or not. You have the spell "magic weapon" if you come across something that has resistance to non-magical weapons, but in any case I think it's generally a reasonable assumption that even if you don't randomly roll one you could go out of your way to find someone who can make one.


What about Paladin Reaction economy?

Not sure Paladin's have a whole lot in that department without picking up Sentinel or PAM.

Thoughts?

there's not a ton for pallys. Vengeance in particular has soul of vengeance to shore that up, but the problem there is that's against one enemy per short rest. Not even necessarily one per fight. And although paladins have some good bonus action options, most of them are spells, the big standout being Vow. Thus PAM is kind of a go-to, since it fills out your action economy without costing any spells or other resources. Even for vengeance paladin, you generally won't kill the BBEG in one round, so the PAM bonus action still works well there. Not to mention that it plays well with IDS, and SUUUUPER well with GWM.

[Corran]

I’ve been playing a vengeance paladin for quite some time now, currently at level 11. I have some thoughts on this guide as there are actually a lot of things I’d do differently to the advice presented above.
That's good to hear. Playing experience certainly can change your perspective, and I admit I that I have only played one vengeance paly so far (till level 9), and that one used twf, so all my points above regarding how an optimal paly should be are only theoritical.
Moreover, feel free to use headlines at the start of topics that analyse a particular oath, so that they are easier to spot by anyone who might be looking for advice regarding that specific oath. That of course goes for everyone. (Just because I started this thread does not mean that I would mind if people highlighted their analysis by putting a headline at the start of their post, so it is more easily spotted, in fact I welcome it -it's nice to see many different opinions- also for practical reasons -one gets easily lost in this thread with all the long posts.)



The first thing I’d say is that PAM is overrated for vengeance paladins, especially if you have GWM. There are two key reasons for this: action economy and the requirement to find a magical weapon.
Regarding magical weapons, I chose not to include them as an optimization factor. I think this was addressed in the previous posts in a way I can agree with. Generally, I try to never optimize even a single aspect of a character I am making around a magical item (even if the campaign is one with magic items).
But let me move away from this and focus on PAM. Action economy can be worked in a way to suit our style (action economy depends a lot on the optimal use of spells, so this ties with the points I will make when addressing the part where you talk about haste), but for now forget about action economy too. Lets examine if PAM is optional, mandatory, or even a burden.

Think for a moment of the paladin chassis. No oath features at all. Only class features. Is GWM a worthy investment for the core paladin? I dare say no. It just doesn't fit all that well and it isn't greatly supported either. It is not exactly bad, but you can do much better by either going S&B, or qs+b, or with just a polearm. So it is not optimal. Think about it. You only gain one extra attack and you can cast bless to mitigate the -5 penalty. No 3rd or 4th attack, no precision maneuvre or trip attack, no constant advantage from reckless attack, no darkness-devil's sight shenanigans or some other obvious way to gain advantage. And on top of that you have IDS, which by itself is a feature that goes against an effective function of GWM (as with IDS you are now risking even more damage in order to get the +10 damage bonus). Throw on top of that the potential opportunity cost from casting spells, from lay on hands, etc, or alternatively the restriction not to use your versatility in order not to trigger this great opportunity cost (from forgoing attacks with the +10 bonus), and you have my mini analysis on why I think that GWM is not a great fit, and certainly not optimal, for the paladin chassis. I even think that GWM is not optimal for the devotion paly with access to sacred weapon, though this is a much more controversial opinion I expect. As far as the core paladin goes, GWM is not optimal. Essentially this is the point I try to make here.

Now think of a vengeance paladin fighting against his VoE target. I think I can spare the reasoning and proceed staright to the conclusion: GWM begs to be chosen. Optimization demands it!:smallsmile:

Now think of a vengeance paladin without vow of enmity (ie think of your vengeance paladin when not fighting against an enemy that is under his vow of enmity effect). We are suddenly back to the core paladin case (well, at least as far as GWMastering goes). What do you have? Two attacks and bless. Would we take GWM with only 2 attacks and bless, and with the aforementioned things going against it? Ofc not, it is not an optimal feat in this case. But with a vengeance paladin we already have taken it, so we are stuck with what naturally seems to be a suboptimal choice whenever VoE is down. We have to work in the direction of making it more useful, of boosting it, of creating the conditions under which it makes some sense that we have this feat. That is where PAM comes in. PAM gives you another attack on top of which you can use GWM. Is that (GWM + PAM) optimal for a core paly? I still say no, but it is the best you can do out of a bad situation (the bad situation translates to when VoE is down, as then the GWM vengeance paly loses all the reason he invested on GWM in the first place). Also dont forget that on the butt-end attack you can add IDS apart from GWM. So is that the sole reason as to why PAM is mandatory? No, but that is the reason why I prioritize PAM before taking GWM (I want to avoid having GWM in play with only 2 attacks and bless supporting it, it is not enough). To see the whole reason as to why PAM makes for an ideal choice, examine also how the butt-end attacks performs when VoE is up. With VoE, IDS, and GWM, the butt-end attack has advantage and you add the d8 from IDS and the +10 from GWM, so if this butt-end attack is useful to anyone, that is the vengeance paladin (preferably after 11 level) when fighting against his VoE target (cause the butt-end attack benefits from all of GWM, advantage and IDS).



The action economy of PAM is bad because vengeance paladins actually have a lot of uses for bonus actions already. You’ve got channel divinity, hunter’s mark, GWM attacks and misty step, and maybe other stuff like aura of vitality (best out of combat, but a combat might start during it!). If you’re facing a boss you might put channel divinity on it in round one and hunter’s mark in round two. Against mooks you’ll often kill them, so you get a bonus attack greatsword swing.
If someone reaches the conclusion (as I have) that PAM is mandatory, then the action economy should be worked to be made to fit our needs. Fortunately, you dont have to do much, as the optimal spell selection and usage pairs quite well with our action economy (that against has to do with why I consider haste to be optimal, so more on that when I tough this subject below). Essentially, the only real problem regarding action economy, is when you have to cast bless when VoE is down. The rare-occuring redundancy between the bonus attack from GWM on crits or kills, and the butt-end attack from PAM, is greatly offset by the synergy between the other benefits of the two feats. In fact, I expect that most otpimized barbarian or fighter characters take both feats too. As for bonus action spells, well, they will only be used very situationaly (hunter's mark is there only for utility after GWM kicks in, never for combat, but again this ties with why I think haste, or even bless is better than hunter's mark). But this is the whole premise of the optiization of the vengeance paly. Build for a strong attack, use action for anything other than attacking with extreme caution, so that you dont provoke opportunity cost. No misty steps unless absolutely necessary, generally no spellcasting (apart from one self buff at a time) unless absolutely necessary. No aura of vitality in combat (well, if combat starts while aura of vitality is going, you just roll with it I assume). Just attack, attack and attack more. It plays like a barbarian, as the focus is on dpr (still, you have utility and versatility, but choose to use the non-attack options wisely).



Of course the other side of PAM is the OA as people move close to you, and that’s undeniably good. But it’s best of all for people like battlemaster fighters, who can frighten or knock over a target that comes into reach, preventing them from attacking. A vengeance paladin, whose main features are around getting to a priority target and then hitting it very hard, doesn’t benefit as much from this. He tends to move towards people rather than let them move to him. And then of course eventually this starts to get overwritten by soul of vengeance.I agree with this. That benefit of PAM will be situational, and we wont optimizing around it. Still, even when soul of vengeance kicks in, we might see some use out of it. But yes, this is not even close to the reason as to why I consider PAM important.


On balance therefore I do not rate PAM for a low level paladin. I don’t think you should take it at level 4. Increase your strength instead, or get GWM if not a vuman. Simply increasing your strength will have at least as big an impact on you in fights as PAM, since better accuracy means it’s more often a good idea to actually use the “power attack” feature of GWM. If you’ve got an awesome magical halberd then that changes this, obviously.
Str bumps are definitely very important. But I think PAM offers more in regard to GWM. Obviously I also find it important to not be stuck with GWM without PAM as I explained above (as I said, GWM with 2 attacks and bless is not enough). Moreover PAM plays better with the advantage from when VoE is up. I haven't done the math, but I am pretty sure that PAM + GWM is better than GWM + str boost in term of dpr. Perhaps I have to look at Kryx's dpr charts to be sure, but it feels very obvious to me.


With the two-handed fighting style, a greatsword does 8.333 damage per hit on the dice alone, and a halberd does 6.3. So for the ability to sometimes get another hit from PAM you’re trading in doing 2 less damage per hit, or 3 less damage and -1 to hit on all your attacks until your strength catches up to a guy who just raised his strength instead of taking the feat. On the rounds where PAM goes off it will be better, especially after IDS kicks in.Agreed. Though I think defense is a better fit, however strange that may sound. This has more to do with my progression, which introduces GWM at 8th level and up until then we play using qs+b. It has also something to do with how often I suggest using haste, putting your AC to 21 with defense (hence adding +1 AC on top of a 20 instead of 18 AC half of the time). Hmmm, I have to take a closer look to fighting styles, I am not very happy with my suggestion.


My in-game experiences with haste have been pretty uniformly bad. Haste gives me one more attack per round, but costs me two or three attacks to set up (the two from my action and the one GWM might get me). Then if I fail concentration I lose those two or three attacks again, and people pound on me. So if I cast it on turn 1 it has to keep going for ~5 rounds just to break even, from my perspective. It’s a lot better if you can precast haste, but it only lasts a minute and you aren’t likely to be sneaky, so that’s not something you can count on.
It is essentially as you say below. You either invest a feat to make using haste safe, or you dont and go with some other spell instead. How do we gather which of these two options is the optimal choice? Well, we have to look at what haste offers us. Since spell slots are limited assume we are using haste when vow of enmity is up. So, apart from the defensive boons (advantage on dex saves, +2 AC), haste offers us one action that can be used to make on attack among other things. Since we aim for a very offensive build anyway, assume that this action is used to make that extra attack. Now, obviously haste works really well on anyone with the -5/+10 feats, so that includes us since we have GWM. Moreover, we also add IDS on that extra attack. And last but not lease, this extra attack has advantage. So, a vengeance paladin, is one of the best possible recipients of the haste spell (even the defensive boosts will be much needed). Moreover, due to aura of protection, we are already half of the way of making using haste extremelly safe. We just need one feat, namely resilient con (I prefer it to warcaster but that is besides the point I want to make). Does the benefits of haste justify taking resilient con to make using it safe (ie to use at all). Imo yes, very much so. Either way, resilient con is a very good feat, and it is not like we are going out of our way to take a useless feat just to set up a gimmick. We are investing in a very good feat (a bit sooner than expected admitedly) and as a side benefit we have set up our character to use haste effectively. The action economy does not suffer that much from castng haste during the first round of combat. During the first round you use your action to cast haste and you bonus action for VoE, and you also make one attack due to being hasted. After the first round you play normaly, using your action with the attack action and the bonus action with the butt-end attack, and each round you also use the hasted action to attack. So at the second round you catch up with your number of expected attacks if you had nnnot cast haste 9you essentially lose on just one attack during the first round), and from the third round and each round thereafter you get one more attack. So, if the round lasts, say, 5 turns, with haste cast on the first round, you will finish the encounter with 3 more attacks than if you had not used your action to cast a spell in the first round. Compare it with if casting, say, bless, and you end up with 5 more attacks. I refrain from comparing it with other concentration spells, as none of the rest concentration spells makes good use of GWM.
As a suggestion, do compare the dpr of a hasted paladin using VoE, with a vengeance paladin using VoE and some other concentration spell. Then consider the defensive benefits of haste too.
It is just too good to pass up when you have GWM, IDS and VoE.


This presents two options. You can either invest very heavily in haste, with warcaster or resilient: con (warcaster almost always better in my opinion) or you can ignore it and do other things. I’ve chosen to ignore haste as too much of a liability, after failing concentration rolls too often. It’s just never going to be reliable to keep haste running at higher levels, as monsters start to either hit you very hard or very often.With resilient con and aura of protection the concentration checks are taken care of, at every level till 20. My suggestion is, before ignoring it, do some number crunching to make sure you have a very accurate idea of what you are passing up.


Another thing I don’t agree with is starting with a minimum of 16 charisma. I realise that part of the reason for taking that is that you plan to take PAM and resilient con as feats, so you’re low on ASIs and need your critical stats as high as possible from the start. Since I wouldn’t take those feats, it frees up the opportunity to raise charisma later, as well as of course letting you cap strength many levels earlier.

But also, charisma doesn’t mean as much for a vengeance paladin as it does for most others. It’s extremely rare for me to use an ability that allows the enemy a save. I mainly just hit them, sometimes with power attack. Spell slots go to smites and misty step most of the time, with the occasional hunter’s mark, aura of vengeance or revivify (always keep a revivify handy). So charisma does nothing for my offence, and all it does for my defence is improve saves.

That’s a very nice ability of course, but actually I find myself getting low on hit points a hell of a lot more often than I find myself failing saving throws. This is partly because my AC isn’t very good and partly because paladins are immune to loads of stuff anyway.
Well, you followed my reasoning very accurately, and I get your reasoning too. Ofc race selection has a lot to do with this, but yeah, it all boils down to me thinking that taking certain feats asap is mandatory.
What I would like to argue about though, is that while I agree that charisma will mostly affect aura of protection (as using your action to cast spells is not recommended due to the heavy opportunity cost - though do not discount on the rare castins of spells like banishment, but agreed, one should avoid if possible), aura of protection alone is important enough for charisma to be considered more important than the extra hp per level. That is why I essentially say that CHA > CON.


So this opens up playing as a mountain dwarf, half-orc or goliath and starting with 16 con instead of 16 charisma. I think that any of these would be at least as good as a dragonborn for vengeance, though a variant human probably remains the optimal (and most fun) choice due to starting with GWM and capping strength sooner. I think a hill dwarf might theoretically work, because all those hit points would be awesome, but then you'd only get capped strength at level 16 - very late in the day.
As I said above, I am of the opinion that cha is more important than con, but this is not even the reason as to why I consider every other choice than vhuman suboptimal for the vengeance paly. It is because of the fact that I consider vengeance palys to be feat hungry, in GWM, PAM and resilient. And they need all those feats before str bumps and before level 9, when haste kicks in. So that is the main point of vhuman, faster ASI progression. Ofc this whole point goes to waste if somene does not agree on the necessity of PAM and resilient, but if one agrees that a vengeance paly should get these two feats asap (along with GWM), then it just follows that vhuman is the only optimal choice.


Capping strength matters enormously for anyone with GWM. Any shred of extra accuracy you can find will up your dpr. It’s great when you’re accurate enough to use power attack a lot, so honestly I don’t agree at all with the original levelling guide.
Tried to expalin my reasons for my choices above, though I admit I am terribly at explaining stuff (certainly my line of thinking). I will just partially agree with what you are saying here, in the sense that I consider str to be more important than cha as this specific oath goes.


Accordingly my levelling plan would be like this:


All stats to be even numbers, since it will be ages till you can take a feat that would fix uneven ones. Possible exception if you can get 17 strength and feel like grabbing something like heavy armour master, but that’s not optimal in my view.

Strength minimum 16, con and cha minimum 14 and would be nice if one of these was a 16.

Get GWM as soon as you can, either through being a human or your 4th level ASI.

Cap strength using your next two ASIs.

And then do what you want, based on how you’re finding the character. By this point we’re talking about the ASI you get at level 12 or 16, so you probably know what you’re doing. If you’ve got a good polearm then this is the time to take PAM. If you fall over a lot then increase your con, or just take toughness. Charisma and hit points are the defaults but don’t let that stop you taking a fun feat that you like the idea of.

For what it’s worth, with my own character I didn’t go for a min-max build and I don’t feel like it’s hurt me. Starting stats were 16, 8, 14, 10, 12, 14 with GWM, perception, athletics, survival intimidation and insight. Soldier background fitted for me with a guy who was a bit more wise and a bit less “lawful stupid” than some stereotypical paladins.

At level 11 I’ve capped my strength and was lucky enough to find a +2 charisma book so that’s now a 16. Honestly I’d rather it had been strength or con, but the charisma does definitely help. My main weapon is a +1 greatsword that becomes +2 against bloodied targets. I’m attuned to a ring of necrotic resistance, a cloak that gives me fire resistance and a swim speed and a stone of luck. I have an outrageously good charisma save, which I’m hardly ever required to use!

Anyway that’s a lot of text, in keeping with the rest of this thread. Hope it’s of interest.
I disagree with much of what you are saying here and I have to say that I still stick with my initial plan, as optimization goes. That is not to say that you input is bad or wrong or anything like that, just that there are aspects where I think a different approach would be better (mainly the PAM and haste thing is where we disagree, and that defines the rest of the choices, so it is natural that if we approach PAM and/or haste differently, the whole build making process changes significantly).

Anyway, it was certainly an interesting read, and I thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and actual gaming experience with the class (that counts a lot!).
ps: Out of curiosity, how do you usually end up using your 3rd leve slots? Also, how are you thinking of progressing with your character, assuming you dont multiclass?

[furby076]

Great thread. Can we get an acronym dictionary? Also, what does novaing mean?

[Fuzzy Logic]

Great thread. Can we get an acronym dictionary? Also, what does novaing mean?

Novaing is when a character expends a lot of their resources in a short length of time to do high damage, which for pallys I'd argue is dropping high level spell slot smites on all their attacks.
PAM- Pole Arm Master
GWM- Great Weapon Master
IDS- Improved Divine Smite
TWF- Two Weapon fighting
ASI- Ability Score Improvement
Hope that helps!

[Corran]

VoE - Vow of enmity (level 3 feature of the oath of vengeance)
SoV - Soul of vengeance (lvl 15 feature of the oath of vengeance)
S&B - one handed weapon (d8) and shield
qs+b - quarterstaff wielded one hannded (d6) and shield

[Lollerabe]

I understand your position Corran but I simply don't think that PAM + GWM is feasible on a paladin, between being MAD and loving res con they end up ASI starved.

If one is to talk optimization regarding DPR then obviously math done on the subject helps, a lot. From Kryx' sheet GWM just straight up beats PAM on OOV paladins, no and ifs or maybes.

The math (from what I understand) is based around a full adventuring day, so its not just nova DPR, its average DPR throughout a day and GWM comes out on top.

There is obviously many reasons to this being the case, the biggest one being that GWM + advantage is just that devastating.

I understand why some people prefer PAM and it does indeed play nice with IDS, but in the case of the OOV paladin its not the optimal damage choice.

Regarding your OOD breakdown (it's been a while since i read it) did you cover that GWM becomes ALOT more fun when multi classing with sorc?

[Corran]

I understand your position Corran but I simply don't think that PAM + GWM is feasible on a paladin, between being MAD and loving res con they end up ASI starved.

If one is to talk optimization regarding DPR then obviously math done on the subject helps, a lot. From Kryx' sheet GWM just straight up beats PAM on OOV paladins, no and ifs or maybes.

The math (from what I understand) is based around a full adventuring day, so its not just nova DPR, its average DPR throughout a day and GWM comes out on top.

There is obviously many reasons to this being the case, the biggest one being that GWM + advantage is just that devastating.

I understand why some people prefer PAM and it does indeed play nice with IDS, but in the case of the OOV paladin its not the optimal damage choice.
Wait, wait... If I had to choose GWM or PAM for a vengeance paly I would instictively pick GWM. I am not 100% sure if this is the better choice, since there is a lot to be said I haven't compared how the increased dpr (as per Kryx's dpr charts) of the GWM compares to the +2 AC from a shield (quarterstaff and shield). But as I said, instictively I would go with GWM over PAM, since the point of this oath (at least mechanically) is to excel against a single foe, so then with advantage as you say, GWM seems like the best choice. But I am not advocating one or the other, I am suggesting that both are necessary. I understand how this seems like a stretch for a paladin who is MAD and needs the boosts, and I also understand how grave is to be stuck with a 16 charisma in a paladin (this is one of the reasons that I am not a fan of the OoV mechanically, that it does no utilize aura of protection to the maximum), or to delay boosting your main stat (in thhis case str). But I really think going the extra mile for GWM, PAM and resilient(con) while delaying your stat bumps really pays off.

I will do my best to back it up mathematically and come back with what I find (I will try to compare different builds over various key levels, for a course of a whole adventuring day, ofc that means trying to quantify the difference between +X damage and +y AC in some cases). This may take some time, but I will come back with some numbers eventually so that we can discuss on a more solid basis (and also so you can correct on my silly mistaes while crunching the numbers:smallsmile:).


Regarding your OOD breakdown (it's been a while since i read it) did you cover that GWM becomes ALOT more fun when multi classing with sorc?
That is certainly true! I was tempted to include it, at least as a side note, but I really wanted this thread to focus just on the oaths themselves, so that we (I:smalltongue:) can get a better understanding of how they are supposed to be otpimized, or their strengths and on their weaknesses, etc. So I purposely left out anything that had to do with multiclassing.
ps: Hopefully, Gastronomie will include this in his guide that is on the making as we speak, that talks exclusively about paladin/sorcerer multiclasses.
Beware the birthblades!!!!!:smallsmile:

[Lollerabe]

Awesome, I must have misread your post a bit it seems.

While I won't make bold claims before I have seen the math (I suck at advanced math myself, only tablecloth math from my side) im almost instinctively against PAM + GWM in almost any build, while I understand its merits, especially when compared to a strength bump (since strength does very little besides boosting DPR) I can't help feeling its a bit of overkill since the BA's kind of overlap and well.. I guess I find it boring, but I digress.

Anyway awesome job on the entire thread. Even though I don't min/max once I sit at the table I very much enjoy theory crafting and this thread is like a candy land for that, so kudos man :)

[Foxhound438]

I will do a crap ton of math and edit into this comment later, currently I have to go to a class. You will have numbers though.

Alright, here it is. This is all under the assumption of Vuman, thus feat at 1, feat or str at 4, and str at 8, and assuming that you're targeting the BBEG. Thus, you're in engagement with it (no PAM OA), you aren't getting a kill every turn (no GWM bonus attack) and not assuming any crits (as in, still no GWM bonus attack, and no crit smite). If I had to guess, I'd say that the difference between just GWM and just PAM would be minimal, since PAM will have more attempts to get a crit smite in, while GWM has an extra swing on crit. By the way, I did calculate with crits for my own curiosity at the end, and the results are there for you to see as well; and a bit surprising, to be honest.

How it will be set up is line one is PAM, line 2 is GWM, and line 3 (level 3+) is having both. At level 2, PAM users start using divine favor, while GWM users start using bless. After the average damage with the extra spell up, damage with no spell is listed after a comma. For this math I assume defense style, so dice are normal average (2.5, 3.5, 4.5, 5.5) instead of GWF average (3, 4.167, 5.25, 6.3). GWM w/o PAM uses a greatsword or maul. Calculations are (attack1 + attack 2 + attack 3) * (hit chance)

Target AC values are assumed to be 14 for level 1-4, 16 for level 5, and 18 for levels 9 and 11. The exact AC value is not going to create huge changes in the comparative damage that the styles do, but with lower AC, GWM damage will increase at a slightly higher rate than non-GWM damage. By the way, the AC values I use are potentially a bit on the low side for a BBEG throughout this analysis.

Edits: To explain, part of the reason for putting spell-less damage is that you might lose concentration. I'm not sure how exactly you would account for how likely it is for that to happen, since that would be so situational that it's more or less a rogue variable. Second, I've added damage with spells but without vow, for the sake of seeing what it looks like after the vow target dies.

Level 1
(8.5 + 5.5) (.6) = 8.4
(20) (.35) = 7

Level 2 (add spells)
(11 + 8) (.6) = 11.4, 8.4
(20) (.425) = 8.5, 7

Level 3 (Vow for advantage; note, I didn't change PAM from using divine favor to hunter's mark because I don't like mark, personally)
(11 + 8) (.84) = 15.96, 11.76; 11.4
(20) (.669) = 13.38, 11.55; 8.5

Level 4 (add strength or combine feats. Hit chance is slightly higher here, but again a change of 1 AC point doesn't hugely affect the comparative damage)
(12+9)(.8775) = 18.43, 14.04; 13.65
(21)(.724) = 15.2, 13.44; 9.98
(18.5+15.5)(.669) = 22.75, 19.64; 14.45

Level 5 (extra attack, increase target AC)
(12+12+9)(.84) = 27.72, 21.42; 19.8
(21+21)(.669) = 28.1, 24.26; 14.7
(18.5+18.5+15.5)(.609) = 31.99, 26.78; 19.69

(so levels 6 and 7 have nothing that effect DPR, and level 8 is kind of boring since the only change is one damage per hit, not exactly exciting on its own.)

Level 9 (includes increased str from level 8, access to haste; assumed AC is now 18; GWM hit chance drops due to lack of bless)
(10.5+10.5+10.5+7.5)(.84) = 32.76, 23.94; 23.4
(22+22+22)(.5775) = 38.12, 25.41; 23.1 at this point it's getting real close to not worth using GWM -5/+10 without vow
(19.5+19.5+19.5+16.5)(.51) = 38.25, 28.31; 22.5

Level 11 (IDS)
(15+15+15+12)(.84) = 47.88, 35.28; 34.2
(26.5+26.5+26.5)(.5775) = 45.91, 30.61; 29.7 here you don't use GWM -5/+10 without Vow
(24+24+24+21)(.51) = 47.43, 35.19; 29.15 again, skip the GWM -5/+10

Level 15 (PAM+GWM gets to max str, assume that the BBEG is making attacks to proc soul; assumed AC is now 19)
(15+15+15+15+12)(.84) = 60.48, 47.88; 34.2
(26.5+26.5+26.5+26.5)(.5775) = 61.22, 45.91; 29.7
(25+25+25+25+22)(.5775) = 70.46, 56.02; 34.2

Past here there's nothing to boost DPR.

For my own curiosity, I'll compare crits between GWM and PAM, with various smite levels, just to see how they compare. First will be the PAM crits, at 1st level slot, 2nd, 3rd, 3rd with IDS, and 4th with IDS (thus, level 3, level 5, level 9, level 11, and level 13). Same will be done with GWM, adding average damage of the bonus attack multiplied by the chance for that bonus attack to hit.

PAM: 32, 42, 52, 61, 70 (3+str boosts+2d10+2*[x+1]d8), or 26, 36, 46, 55, 64 with the d4 end.

GWM: 58.38, 69.05, 79.72, 91.73, 100.73 (13+str boosts+4d6+2*[x+1]d8 + [normal damage * hit chance])
Damage per hit therefore increases by roughly one tenth of that damage (a bit less).

Adjusted for crits at levels 5 , 11, and 15:

PAM: 37.8, 67.87, 89.38; increases of about 10, 20, and 30

GWM: 37.33, 61.68, 84.32; increases of about 10, 15, and 23.



Honestly I was surprised as hell to see that solo GWM actually does worse than solo PAM with crits counted... I even accounted for the extra swing. To conclude this, I still think that criticals are a bit too rare, and extremely swingy on paladins thanks to smite, to be including them on DPR calculations. On paladins specifically, it's almost like with each swing you have about a 10% chance of cutting the boss in half, but for the most part you're doing pretty normal expectable damage.

So to me it seems that solo PAM is sometimes better, sometimes worse than solo GWM, dipping below in DPR at a few places (notably, the end of your build), while PAM+GWM performs best at all points that you can have it, even with lower str until level 12.

As a final observation, GWM only without Vow active, and with haste up, is only about as powerful as qs+b with bless. Food for thought.

[Foxhound438]

At this point it's worth mentioning that my numbers are probably different to Kryx's, but my calculations are (probably) on different assumptions to his. That said, I'm not entirely certain of his methodology, either.

[D.U.P.A.]

The reason I prefer polearms over great weapons for Paladin is because you then do not need to be in front line all of the time, provided there is already one tank in the party, which makes you easier to mantain concentration for your spells by not being hit. You can hit&run this way if the enemy has no reach.

[Corran]

Right. Here I'll be doing pretty much what Foxhound did in his previous post, just to see if on my own I can come to the same conclusions as he did. I'll be using pretty much the same parameters that he used, though I might differentiate things a bit here and there (I will give my reasons whenever I do something differently). Also, I will not calculate crit chances for now, though I might edit this post to include them at a later point (probably not though, tbh).

First, lets do the PAM vs GWM comparison.
For reasons that have to do with other aspects of the vengeance paladin's optimization, and which will not be debated at this part (but at a later point), as this comparison revolves around GWM vs PAM, I will assume the following:

1) Vuman

2) Resilient con is an optimal choice (to be debated at a later point, for now go with it so that we dont have to worry about how to determine what effect does losing concentration have on our dpr). I will unrealistically postpone its selection significantly, so that we can have a better picture of the GWM vs PAM comparison over all important levels (1,2,3,4,5,8,9,11,15). That means utilizing our ASIs to boost strength.

3) After vow of enmity (VoE) kicks in, I will compare GWM vs PAM for both when VoE is used or for when it's not, so that we can have a rounder picture. Since not all groups follow the DMG guidelines regarding # of encounters, it is up to each individual to use the results and with the magic of addition apply them according to the number of short rests and encounters their group is usually having, to see how the results apply in his/her case (for example, if you are having an average rate of one encounter per adventuring day, just look only at the calculations that utilize VoE, if you are having an average rate of 3 encounters and one short rest per adventuring day, then double count my calculations regarding when VoE is not being used and count only once my calculation for when VoE is used. Easy and practical).

4) I will not go into the horrible details of calculating crits and how smites interact with them, or the occassional OA from PAM. The reason for that is what Foxhound said. Crit damage favors a bit GWM (better weapon dice and better bonus attack), while the regular bonus attack from PAM offers a greater chance to crit and thus use a smite on a critical hit for double effect, while also benefiting from the occassional OA too. So these minor factors kind of balance out (I think), and I dont think they affect our calculations significantly enough to justify going into the trouble of accounting for them. So they will be ignored, for the sake of me not getting a terrible headache.

5) I will assume that resources are abstractly limited. Meaning that I will be not be tracking spell slots usage with extreme accuracy, though I will assume that resource management is in play (so for example I wont be using haste when VoE is not used, as it is not an efficient use of resources -as already suggested by Foxhound. Meaning, that when I only have two 3rd level spell slots per day, and since it is more optimal to use haste when also using VoE, it wont be realistic to assume that I will also use haste when I am not using VoE). So no counting beans, but resource management is implied and resources are limited, thus used in an efficient fashion.

6) Action economy matters. Think of this with an example. If I did calculations about the dpr of PAM + divine favor + vow of enmity, I would be presented with a very pleasing as far as, say level 3, goes (that is compared to the other options). However, once I start looking into the action economy of this plan, I realize that it wont be until the 3rd round of combat when I will first use my butt-end attack with my bonus action from PAM. So while this combination of abilities lead to a phenomenically good result, realisticaly it is a very suboptimal combination. Same goes for example with bless + GWM before I get access to the extra attack feature. The action economy is not favourable, and from a dpr perspective our dpr will be better over a proper whole encounter by just using divine favor instead of bless. Naturally, it is not all about dpr, so I will make mention of additional boosts that are relevant to each case, though keep in mind that dpr will be analysed from a realistic and practical point of view, meaning that action economy will be a major factor in our calculations.

7) I'll be assuming that encounters last for 5 rounds. Moreover, I will use Foxhound's AC values for enemies, so that is an AC of 14 for levels 1-4, an AC of 16 for level 5, an AC of 18 for levels 9-11, and an AC of 19 for level 15.

8) Assume defense fighting style and a starting score of 16 for strength, and that the target of our VoE provokes an OA every round because of Soul of vengeance.

*) I consider 40% to be a good estimate of the frequency of attacking against an enemy that is under our VoE. Meaning that during the whole adventuring day, I think 40% describes pretty well how often we will be attacking with advantage due to VoE. That consideration might come in handy later on, during the comparison of PAM and GWM on some key levels, as based on that I will decide which of the two options ends up being better.
Edit: As a continuation of 7) from the above spoiler, I will use red to highlight which use of resources (ie spellcasting) I consider to be optimal under the various breakpoints, in short, I will assume that under the average case scenario it is optimal to use bless with concentration with the exception of using haste when VoE is active. This may change the conclusions (which were drawn from simply comparing the best dpr options) at some breakpoints, so whenever that happens I will add it in red text.
Ofc, in some cases (mainly in the case of the PAM build when using VoE), using divine favor instead of bless adds significantly to our dpr, so a direct comparison between bless and divine favor may be more tricky than just saying ''bless is better''. Though, whenever you see red text, assume that due to other parameters (ie party composition) bless is the optimal choice.For example, the collective benefit of bless when including two allies, will be assumed to outdo the increased dpr of another concentration option (eg divine favor), that is the assumption whenever I use red text anyway.
Level 1
GWM: 20 * 0.35 = 7 dpr. Hence, a total of 35 damage dealt during the whole encounter.
PAM (halberd): (8.5 + 5.5) * 0.6 = 8.4 dpr. Hence a total of 42 damage dealt.
PAM (qs+b): (6.5 + 5.5) * 0.6 = 7.2 dpr. Hence a total of 36 damage dealt. Additional benefit: +2 AC from using a shield.

Conclusion: PAM > GWM.
More specifically, PAM (qs+b) is the most optimal set up at this level, as in most cases +2 AC > 1.2 pure dpr (or equivelently 2 damage unmodified by hit chance).
Level 2
GWM ( bless): 20 * 0.475 = 9.5 dpr. Hence a total of 4*9.5 = 38 damage dealt (notice how action economy, due to spending an action to cast bless, changes what we expected to see). Additional benefits of bless (stretched to include possible allies).
GWM (divine favor): 22.5 * 0.35 = 7.875 dpr. Hence a total of 39.375 damage dealt. (Note: if we were calculating for less rounds, divine favor would gain value and bless would lose value, so keep in mind how the balance changes regarding the number of rounds we are accounting for).
PAM (halberd, bless): (8.5 + 5.5) * 0.725 = 10.15 dpr. Hence a total of 40.6 damage dealt. Additional benefits of bless regarding saves and allies.
PAM (halberd, divine favor): (11 + 8) * 0.6 = 11.4 dpr. Hence a total of 52.2 damage dealt.
PAM (qs+b, bless): (6.5 + 5.5) * 0.725 = 8.7 dpr. Hence a total of 34.8 damage dealt. Rest benefits of bless and +2 AC from using a shield.
PAM (qs+b, divine favor): (9 + 8) * 0.6 = 10.2 dpr. Hence a total of 46.2 damage dealt. Benefits of a +2 AC from using a shield.
PAM (qs+b, shield of faith): (6.5 + 5.5) * 0.6 = 7.2 dpr. Hence a total of 32.7 damage. Benefits of a +4 AC from using a shield and from shield of faith.

Conclusion: PAM > GWM.
More specifically, and for reasons explained previously (at level 1 breakdown), the most optimal set up is qs+b. Use divine favor to increase dpr, bless to support, or shield of faith to tank. Choose the one that applies best to the situation you are into.
Note: Now that voe of enmity (VoE) is about to kick in (level 3), I will have to calculate both when using and when not using it. To avoid writing more than necessary, I will focus on dpr tactics from now on, as we are interested in the GWM vs PAM comparison mainly from a dpr perspective. So, even if during the previous level I gave you a more detailed review for the use of concentration, including several choices such as shield of faith and bless (which up to this point, we see that it is not optimal regarding increasing our damage), from now on I will focus to the ones that do the best work as far as increasing damage goes.

Level 3
Note: I will avoid using hunter's mark with PAM (though it is definitely worth doing so if fighting one big bad).
GWM (vow of enmity, bless): 20 * 0.724375 = 14.4875 dpr. Total of 57.95 damage.
GWM (vow of enmity, divine favor): 22.5 * 0.5775 = 12.99375 dpr. Total of 63.524 damage.
GWM (vow of enmity, hunter's mark): 23.5 * 0.5775 = 13.57125 dpr. Total of 65.835 damage.
PAM (halberd, vow of enmity): (8.5 + 5.5) * 0.84 = 11.76 dpr. Total of 54.18 damage.
PAM (halberd, vow of enmity, bless): (8.5 + 5.5) * 0.924375 = 12.94125 dpr. Total of 51.765 damage.
Note:Using bless at this point ends up reducing our dpr due to action economy.
PAM (halberd, vow of enmity, divine favor): (11 + 8) * 0.84 = 15.96 dpr. Total of 64.26 damage.
PAM (qs+b, vow of enmity, divine favor): (9 +8) * 0.84 = 14.28 dpr. Total of 55.86.
PAM (qs+b, vow of enmity, bless): (6.5 + 5.5) * 0.924375 = 11.0925 dpr. Total of 44.37 damage.
Note: When we are NOT using VoE, we get the same results as in level 2 (ie that PAM is the better choice).

Conclusion: PAM > GWM.
GWM cathes up with PAM when VoE is in play, but when VoE is not being used, PAM is clearly the better choice. Even assuming that during a typical adventuring day you will be attacking your VoE target 50% of the time (which is a very generous assumption), PAM still pulls ahead at the end of the day. Qs+b still remains the most optimal set up, both with VoE and without (+2 AC better than 1.68 pure dpr, or euivalently +2 AC > 2.8 unmodified extra damage.
Additional note of interest, is that bless does not pair well with VoE (especially in the PAM case), at least before the extra attack kicks in.
Conclusion: PAM (qs+b) > GWM > PAM (halberd), with bless in play. Tiny differences though. Essentially PAM (qs+b) comes on top of GWM since I consider +2 AC to be of marginaly better value than an increased pure 1.4704 dpr (translating to about +3 damage before calculating hit chance).
Level 4
Note: Use ASI to boot strength to 18. Since not much else changes, I will just re-evaluate the best options of GWM and PAM respectively, both when VoE is up and when it's down.
GWM (divine favor): 23.5 * 0.4 = 9.4 dpr. Total of 47 damage.
GWM (bless): 21 * 0.525 = 11.025 dpr. Total of 44.1 damage.
PAM (halberd, bless): (9.5 + 6.5) * 0.775 = 12.4 dpr. Total of 49.6 damage.
PAM (qs+b, bless): (7.5 + 6.5) * 0.775 = 10.85 dpr. Total of 43.4 damage.
PAM (qs+b, divine favor): (10 + 9) * 0.65 = 12.35 dpr. Total of 55.9 damage.

GWM (VoE, hunter's mark): 24.5 * 0.64 = 15.68 dpr. Total of 76.16 damage.
Note: Notice how the str bump adds to the dpr of the above option (compare with the same option at level 3). So, as a mini conclusion, keep in mind how effective str bumps are for a GWM build.
GWM (VoE, bless): 21 * 0.774375 = 16.261875 dpr. Total of 65.0475 damage.
PAM (halberd, VoE, divine favor): (12 + 9) * 0.8775 = 18.4275 dpr. Total of 65.90625 damage.
PAM (halberd, VoE, bless): (9.5 + 6.5) * 0.949375 = 15.19 dpr. Total of 60.76 damage.
PAM (qs+b, VoE, divine favor): (10 + 9) * 0.8775 = 16.6725 dpr. Total of 65.37375 damage.
PAM (qs+b, VoE, bless): (7.5 + 6.5) * 0.949375 = 13.29125 dpr. Total of 53.165 damage.

Conclusion: When VoE is up, GWM pushes ahead of the PAM builds. In comparison to the qs+b (which is still the best option regarding PAM builds), the GWM deals an extra 2.15725 dpr that you have to balance out against the increased AC from using a shield (in the case of the qs+b). So you compare +2 AC against 3.318846 extra damage (unmodified by hit chance). When VoE is not being used, PAM (more specificaly qs+b) is clearly better than GWM. Even assuming that 50% of the time you will be attacking a VoE target, PAM still comes ahead when you factor in the extra AC along with the damage outputs. And since attacking 50% of the time against a VoE target is a bit too optimistic (more likely that will be 40%), then I think it is safe to deduce that PAM wins this level overall. Hence PAM > GWM (once again, qs+b is overall the better choice). Notice however how GWM is really starting to catch up, essentially because of how a str bump pairs better with GWM than with PAM.
Level 5
GWM (bless): (21 + 21) * 0.475 = 19.95 dpr. Total of 79.8 damage.
GWM (hunter's mark): (24.5 + 24.5) * 0.35 = 17.15 dpr. Total of 85.75 damage.
PAM (halberd, bless): (9.5 + 9.5 + 6.5) * 0.725 = 18.4875 dpr. Total of 73.95 damage.
PAM (halberd, divine favor): (12 + 12 + 9) * 0.6 = 19.8 dpr. Total of 93.6 damage.
PAM (qs+b, divine favor) : (10 + 10 + 9) * 0.6 = 17.4 dpr. Total of 81.6 damage.
Note: Due to the extra attack, we notice that the qs+b starts to lose steam when compared to a heavy polearm. Now the +2 AC is up against a theoritical +4 damage (or euivalently against an increased 1.6 pure and actual dpr). There is no clear winner, as sometimes the additional AC will be more useful, and other times the increased damage output will be more useful (party comp is the most deciding factor ofc), but generally I think the increased damage output is enough for us to consider droping the shield and grab a halberd/glaive. So I will consider that qs+b's superiority over the more traditional halberd has run its course, and from now on I will only refer to halberds when talking about PAM.

GWM (VoE, hunter's mark): (24.5 + 24.5) * 0.5775 = 28.2975 dpr. Total of 137.445 damage.
GWM (VoE, bless): (21 + 21) * 0.724375 = 30.42375 dpr. Total of 121.695 damage.
PAM (VoE, divine favor): (12 + 12 + 9) * 0.84 = 27.72 dpr. Total of 119.28 damage.
PAM (VoE, bless): (9.5 + 9.5 + 6.5) * 0.924375 = 23.5715625 dpr. Total of 94.28625 damage.

Conclusion: We see that PAM does better (roughly by a magnitude of 7.85 dpr) when VoE is not used, but GWM is superior (roughly by 18.165 dpr) when VoE is used. To reach a conclusion, you have to make an assumption regarding how often you will be attacking an enemy under your vow of enmity. The two options become pretty much equal, under the assumption that we will be attacking a VoE target 30% of the time. If this frequency is higher then GWM is better, if this frequency is lower then PAM is better. Personally, I find it more possible that we will be attacking a VoE target more than 30% of the time (worst case would be around that), so my money is on GWM. So, I would say, GWM > PAM.
Level 8
We saw before that str bumps pair better with a GWM build, rather than with a PAM build. And since my conclusion for level 5 was that GWM is better than PAM (with the worst case scenario being that they are more or less equal), then the str bump at this level will only push the balance more in favor for GWM. So, following my thought process that I used for the level 5 comparison, I will inevitably conclude that GWM > PAM.
Level 9
GWM (bless): (22 + 22) * 0.475 = 20.9 dpr. Total of 83.6 damage.
GWM (hunter's mark): (25.5 + 25.5) * 0.35 = 17.85 dpr. Total of 89.25 damage.
GWM (haste): (22 + 22 + 22) * 0.35 = 23.1 dpr. Total of 100.1 damage.
PAM (bless): (10.5 + 10.5 + 7.5) * 0.725 = 20.6625 dpr. Total of 82.65 damage.
PAM (divine favor): (13 + 13 + 10) * 0.6 = 21.6 dpr. Total of 102 damage.
PAM (haste): (13 + 13 + 13 + 10) * 0.6 = 29.4 dpr. Total of 125.4 damage.
Note: With resources being finite, I dont think that at this level it will be often that we would be using haste when VoE is down. That said, I chose to include it here just to get an idea of its effect on dpr.

GWM (VoE, hunter's mark): (25.5 + 25.5) * 0.5775 = 29.4525 dpr. Total of 143.22 damage.
GWM (VoE, haste): (22 + 22 + 22) * 0.5775 = 38.115 dpr. Total of 165.165 damage.
PAM (VoE, divine favor): (13 + 13 + 10) * 0.84 = 30.24 dpr. Total of 130.2 damage.
PAM (VoE, haste): (10.5 + 10.5 + 10.5 + 7.5) * 0.84 = 32.76 dpr. Total of 139.86 damage.

Conclusion:
PAM is better than GWM when VoE isn't used, as anticipated. But GWM pulls significantly ahead when VoE, particularly when we choose to use haste with our concentration. Ofc this is not news, as we knew that premise from the previous sections. It balances out like this. If we are attacking with advantage (ie using VoE) at least 66% of the time, then GWM is better. If not, then PAM is better. Due to these proportions, and also because I think it is a benefit to be able to pull ahead significantly when you choose to (ie when you choose to use VoE), I would be once again inclined to say that I consider GWM > PAM. Notice though how compared to ever since the level 5 comparison, PAM is starting to close in on GWM slowly.
Level 11
GWM (bless): (26.5 + 26.5) * 0.475 = 25.175 dpr. Total of 100.7 damage.
GWM (hunter's mark): (30 + 30) * 0.35 = 21 dpr. Total of 105 damage.
PAM (bless): (15 + 15 + 12) * 0.725 = 30.45 dpr. Total of 121.8 damage.
PAM (divine favor): (17.5 + 17.5 + 14.5) * 0.6 = 29.7 dpr. Total of 139.8 damage.

GWM (VoE, haste): (26.5 + 26.5 + 26.5) * 0.5775 = 45.91125 dpr. Total of 198.94875 damage.
PAM (VoE, haste): (15 + 15 + 15 + 12) * 0.84 = 47.88 dpr. Total of 204.12 damage.

Conclusion: PAM > GWM !!!
The above observation surprised me somewhat, as I did not expect IDS to boost PAM by that much so that it would come on top of GWM at this point. Meaning that I thought that haste was enough to keep GWM on top of PAM, even with IDS in play. I did the comparison for fewer rounds, but I got pretty much the same results for this one.
Level 15
GWM (bless): (26.5 + 26.5) * 0.475 = 25.175 dpr. Total of 100.7 damage.
GWM (hunter's mark): (30 + 30) * 0.35 = 21 dpr. Total of 105 damage.
PAM (bless): (15 + 15 + 12) * 0.725 = 30.45 dpr. Total of 121.8 damage.
PAM (divine favor): (17.5 + 17.5 + 14.5) * 0.6 = 29.7 dpr. Total of 139.8 damage.

GWM (VoE, haste): (26.5 + 26.5 + 26.5 + 26.5) * 0.5775 = 61.215 dpr. Total of 275.4675 damage.
PAM (VoE, haste): (15 + 15 + 15 + 12 + 15) * 0.84 = 60.48 dpr. Total of 267.12 damage.

Conclusion: PAM > GWM.
Soul of vengeance does not give anough boost to GWM to catch up to PAM, which became once again the better option since level 11, because of the effect of IDS.

Overall conclusion
So, as far as PAM vs GWM comparison goes, PAM starts out stronger and remains the better choice up until level 4. Also, at level 4, if the ASI is spent to boost strength, then GWM closes in the difference (but still remains inferior to PAM overall), as str bumps have more value for the GWM build. At level 5, with the extra attack kicking in, it is safe to conclude that GWM becomes better than PAM, and that continues to be the case up until level 10, with every str bump, and with haste along the way to even further upset the balance in favor of GWM. But at level 11, with improved divine smite kicking in, PAM once again comes on top. That remains true up until the end (ie level 20), although soul of vengeance at level 15 helps GWM somewhat to close the difference with the superior PAM build.
Even restricting ourselves to always using bless apart from when using haste with VoE, the above results hold true.




Now let's examine the PAM + GWM case, and see how it measures up against the pure PAM and pure GWM builds respectively.
I will use the same assumptions as I did previously (look at the ''setting the parameters'' spoiler at the start of the post if you haven't). So among other more important things, that means str bumps at level 8 and 12, and also we are using a glaive/halberd along with PAM and GWM for our calculations below. Obviously we start at level 4, when both feats become available.
Level 4
(bless): (18.5 + 15.5) * 0.475 = 16.15 dpr. Total of 64.6 damage.
(divine favor): (21 + 18) * 0.35 = 13.65 dpr. Total of 61.95 damage.

(VoE, bless): (18.5 + 15.5) * 0.724375 = 24.62875 dpr. Total of 98.515 damage.
(VoE, divine favor): (21 + 18) * 0.5775 = 22.5225 dpr. Total of 90.37875 damage.

Comparing to the results for the (GWM + 2 STR) and for the (PAM + 2 STR) builds respectively, we see that the PAM + GWM build outdamages both considerably. So the combination of PAM + GWM is worth delaying the str boost at this level. Moreover, it does so, by utilizing bless instead of divine favor/ hunter's mark, and bless is admittedly a better spell than those other two. So not only we are outdamaging the other builds, but we combine maximum efficiency with making optimal use of resources (ie we use bless).

Out of curiosity, I will compare the PAM + GWM build with the PAM + 2 STR build that uses qs+b, as at level 4 qs+b was the strongest option due to how the increased AC came on top of the slighlty increased damage output. I want to see how the increased AC compares to the vastly superior damage output of the PAM+GWM build. When VoE is not being used, then +2 AC is measured against roughly an increased dpr by 1.89475 damage, so it is like comparing +2 AC to a theoritical 3.5 - 4 damage boost. So very much comparable. When VoE is being used though, +2 AC is forced to compete with a massive dpr boost, roughly about +6.62825 pure dpr (or 12-13 theoritical damage boost). Hence it is safe to assume that PAM + GWM blows out every other option at this level.
Level 5
(bless): (18.5 + 18.5 + 15.5) * 0.425 = 22.3125 dpr. Total of 89.25 damage.
(divine favor): (21 + 21 + 18) * 0.3 = 18 dpr. Total of 84.6 damage.

(VoE, bless): (18.5 + 18.5 + 15.5) * 0.669375 = 35.1421875 dpr. Total of 140.56875 damage.
(VoE, divine favor): (21 + 21 + 18) * 0.51 = 30.6 dpr. Total of 132.09 damage.

The only damage output that can beat one of the above (using bless), is that of PAM + 2 STR, when VoE is not being used (ie, total damage of 93.6 > 89.25). But then comparing what happens when VoE is in play, the GWM+PAM builds comes way ahead of the PAM build (ie 140.56875 > 119.28). It is easy to see, that again for level 5, as previously for level 4, PAM + GWM is better than the PAM or the GWM build. And significantly so. And again, we have combined efficiency with optimal spellcasting (bless).
Level 8
Since GWM + PAM is the best option at level 5, then this is the case for level 8 as well. In fact, even more so, as the str boost gained at this level favors GWM + PAM more than GWM (and thus more than PAM consequently), as not only are we using GWM, but also we are adding str to our bonus attack from PAM.
So PAM + GWM remaines the superior option at this level too.
Level 9
(bless): (19.5 + 19.5 + 16.5) * 0.425 = 23.5875 dpr. Total of 94.35 damage.
(divine favor): (22 + 22 + 19) * 0.3 = 18.9 dpr. Total of 88.8 damage.:
(haste - I dont consider this to be a good use of resources, but I present it just for comparison purposes, since I calculated haste w/o VoE for the previous 9th level builds): (19.5 + 19.5 + 16.5 + 19.5) * 0.3 = 22.5 dpr. Total of 95.85 damage.

(VoE, haste): (19.5 + 19.5 + 16.5 + 19.5) * 0.51 = 38.25 dpr. Total of 162.945 damage.

Conclusion: We see that the pure PAM build performs slighlty better than PAM + GWM when not using VoE, but PAM + GWM vastly outdamages it when VoE is active. Overall, PAM + GWM is still better than PAM at this level.
We also see that the difference between PAM+GWM and the pure GWM is minimal, both when VoE is on and when it is off, with as having a slight advantage (roughly about 1.02 dpr) when VoE is off, and with the pure GWM build having an even slighter advantage (roughly about 0.444 dpr) when VoE is on. So we can see that overall, PAM + GWM outdamages the pure GWM build at this level too.
Level 11 & 12
(bless): (24 + 24 + 21) * 0.425 = 29.325 dpr. Total of 117.3 damage.

(VoE, haste): (24 + 24 + 21 + 24) * 0.51 = 47.43 dpr. Total of 201.96 damage.

Comparing with the pure PAM build (which is the best from what we examined so far at this level), we see that the pure PAM build is ahead of the PAM+GWM build at this level, both when VoE is used and when not. Lets have a closer look. PAM deals a total of 139.8 with divine favor and w/o VoE, which is noticably better than the total of 117.3 we found above for the PAM+GWM build, calculated for using bless and w/o VoE. The pure PAM build has an increased dpr of 4.5, which is not major, but significant. One could argue that the use of bless instead of divine favor as far, as the PAM+GWM build is concerned, makes up for the reduced dpr, simply because bless is a better spell than divine favor. But even in that case, a pure PAM build that uses bless (and w/o using VoE), has a total of 121.8 damage, which is still better than the 117.3 damage we found for the PAM+GWM build. Almost insignificantly better, but better nonetheless.
Even with VoE (and haste) in play, the pure PAM build still comes ahead in term of dpr (204.12 > 201.96, ie increased dpr of about 0.432).
Conclusion: It appears that IDS is playing badly enough with GWM, to guarantee that the reduced hit chance (because of GWM mainly, and less so because of the reduced str -as this was not important enough on its own to push the PAM+GWM build below the pure PAM and pure GWM builds) will hurt us. So while the lower str was not a factor on its own, now that IDS adds to our regular damage, we see that GWM'ing (and consequently the PAM+GWM build) has trouble to keep up with the pure PAM build. Hence, PAM (20 STR) > PAM + GWM (18 STR), at least this is the case for level 11.

Since we are only shy of 1 level for the PAM+GWM build to take the last str boost and thus equalize its hit chance (unmodified by GWM) to the hit chance of the PAM build, I wonder how this factor (equal hit chances before GWM, and thus an increased chance for the PAM+GWM build, would influence the above observation, ie that PAM > PAM+GWM). For this reason, I will examine level 12 too, for the PAM+GWM case, and I will compare it with the PAM case, so I am assuming that the only thing that changed was the +2 str on the PAM+GWM build. I am essentially giving the PAM+GWM build an advantage one level ahead of time, to test my previous result, because it surprised me, and I essentially want to see if it is a one level thing, or if it carries on until level 15 (when SoV kicks in).
Hence:
Level 12
(bless): (25 + 25 + 22) * 0.475 = 34.2 dpr. Total of 136.8 damage.

(VoE, haste): (25 + 25 + 22 + 25) * 0.5775 = 56.0175 dpr. Total of 238.5075 damage.

Comparing again with the pure PAM build, we easily see that PAM+GWM > PAM after level X (where X>11), where at level X the PAM+GWM build took its last str bump and thus has equal str with the PAM build.
Level 15
If by this level the PAM+GWM build has maxed its strenth, then it is obvious, based on my conclusion for level 12, that since Soul of Vengeance is more beneficial to a GWM than to a non-GWM build, and thus soul of vengeance is more beneficial to the PAM+GWM build than to the pure PAM build, we will have that PAM+GWM > PAM > GWM (the last inequality follows from the PAM vs GWM comparison at this level).
Conclusion: If the PAM+GWM build has 20 strength, then PAM+GWM is the best option at this level, and consequently till level 20 too.

But is this the case if the PAM+GWM has not taken all its str bumps, and thus has an inferior str score compared to that of the PAM build? Lets examine that (ie the PAM+GWM build has a str of 18, and we will compare it to a pure PAM build with a strength of 20).
(bless): (24 + 24 + 21) * 0.425 = 29.325 dpr. Total of 117.3 damage.

(VoE, haste): (24 + 24 + 21 + 24 + 24) * 0.51 = 59.67 dpr. Total of 263.16 damage.

Comparing with the damage output of PAM (20 STR), we see that even with soul of vengeance, if the PAM+GWM build has not maxed strength, and thus is 2 points behind in the strength score, then the pure PAM build still outdamages it. Thus, and combining with our findings for level 11, we see that the PAM+GWM < PAM for levels 11-X, where X is the level at which the PAM+GWM build takes its last str bump.


Overall conclusion (regarding the comparison of all of PAM, GWM and PAM+GWM)
PAM (qs+b) is the best option for levels 1-3, PAM+GWM is the best option for levels 4-10 (with PAM being better than GWM for level 4, and GWM being marginally better for levels 5-10), PAM is the best option for levels 11-X, where X is the level that the PAM+GWM takes the last str bump, so X will be either level 12, or level 16 (with PAM+GWM being better than GWM for levels 11-X), and PAM+GWM is the best option for levels X-20, ie either 12-20 or 16-20 (with PAM being better than GWM for X-20).
Note: Even when restricting ourselves to always using bless with our concentration, apart from when using haste with VoE, the above hold true. However, the superiority of PAM over PAM+GWM for levels 11-X, and the superiority of PAM over GWM for levels 11-20, while still true, has diminished quite substancially because of using bless instead of divine favor (when VoE is off). In fact, in the case of PAM vs PAM+GWM, PAM is only insignificantly superior for levels 11-X (where X is the level at which the PAM+GWM build takes the last str bump, so either 12 or 16). Meaning that from level 11 and onwards, GWM is a burden overall if we already have PAM, until ofc we take our last str bump.

So, based on the above conclusions, one easily sees that the optimal feat selection for a vuman vengeance paly, would be: 1) PAM, 4) GWM, 8) +2 str, 12) +2 str, .....
I wish it was that easy. You see, it is that damned resilient (con) feat that complicates things. But I am going ahead of myself. First I will have to explain (preferably with math, although that would involve calculating kpr and I have to ''study'' in order to learn how to do this properly) why I consider resilient con to be a mandatory feat for the vengeance paly (it has to do with concentration and in particular haste mostly, so showing if a paly can live optimaly without haste needs to be examined too). So, next step is to establish beyond reasonable doubt if resilient con is optimal or not, and if it is, we have to find the best way to fit it with our feat selection (naturally you can assume that it will be taken before level 9). If anyone is willing to tackle this, please, feel free to do it!!!

[Lollerabe]

Super interesting read. However I'm afraid that GWMs BA on crits/kills is a much bigger DPR boost than you might assume, thus leaving your comparison a bit undone.

Still gj - PAM and IDS really do work well together, but no shock there.

[RulesJD]

Fantastic discussion, but poor optimisation from an actual gameplay experience. Examples:

1. You're a Paladin. If the very first thing you're doing at the start of a combat ISN'T casting Bless, you are wrong. This can (sometimes) be subbed out once Haste comes online but I digress.

Bless is the game changer due to GWM. Suddenly, you don't need to boost STR anymore, +3 from the start is fine. Never mind that several magic items can boost STR anyways. GWM level 1 + Res Con level 4 + Cha boost level 8/12. Additionally, discounting magic items isn't a good idea in terms of optimization. Almost all magical weapons will have at least a +to hit, making GWM more likely to land. Almost no magical items boost CHA or give proficiency in Con saves, thus making those ASI more important over +Str.

2. You're not counting the single greatest feature of being a Paladin. Find Steed. Haste + Find Steed = terrifying additional damage + de facto unlimited movement speed. That alone puts OoV Paladins way ahead in terms of optimization and damage.

[Corran]

Super interesting read. However I'm afraid that GWMs BA on crits/kills is a much bigger DPR boost than you might assume, thus leaving your comparison a bit undone.

Still gj - PAM and IDS really do work well together, but no shock there.
Yeah, you may be right about the GWM's BA on crits. I probably have to add it to the mix, and recalculate for at least when PAM and GWM are really close regarding their damage output. Foxhound did calculate crits in his post and his conclusion was that they dont affect the results so much as to shift the balance in favor of GWM. Now, I haven't checked myself, but we pretty much reached the same results for the most part, so I dont think I will find anything different there when/if I do this.

Regarding IDS and PAM, yeah, everyone knows that they play well together. Still, the shock for me was that PAM plays better than GWM or even than GWM+PAM after level 11 and for level 11 respectively. Doesn't feel right. But then again, this may be because I based my results partly on the use of admittedly suboptimal spells that tend to work better for PAM rather than for GWM or for PAM+GWM, And that brings me to what RulesJD is saying.


Fantastic discussion, but poor optimisation from an actual gameplay experience. Examples:

1. You're a Paladin. If the very first thing you're doing at the start of a combat ISN'T casting Bless, you are wrong. This can (sometimes) be subbed out once Haste comes online but I digress.
I agree with what you are saying about bless. Cause even if you have another caster who can cast it, you may as well be the one concentrating on it than a full spellcaster who will have better concentration options. I did include damage based on bless for all (if not all, then for most) breakpoints, but I will admit that I based some conclusions on spells like divine favor rather than on bless. The most noticable case is the pure PAM build at level 11 and when not using VoE. Using divine favor instead of bless increased my dpr quite significantly, that led me to the surprising (and admittedly feeling out of place) conclusion, that a PAM build beats GWM and PAM+GWM at level 11.
You know what? I will edit my analysis (most likely tomorrow though), to make sure that I base my conclusions almost entirely on bless (and haste when VoE is up obviously), and see how this changes things. I expect that the pure PAM build will suffer a bit from it, though I dont know if that will change my conclusions significantly. I guess I will find out when I do it. Thanks for the input.


Bless is the game changer due to GWM. Suddenly, you don't need to boost STR anymore, +3 from the start is fine. Never mind that several magic items can boost STR anyways. GWM level 1 + Res Con level 4 + Cha boost level 8/12. Additionally, discounting magic items isn't a good idea in terms of optimization. Almost all magical weapons will have at least a +to hit, making GWM more likely to land. Almost no magical items boost CHA or give proficiency in Con saves, thus making those ASI more important over +Str.
I disagree that bless is enough on its own to make str bumps irrelevant. Every str bump counts (and significantly so) when GWM is in play. In fact the str bumps count so much (or the damage output difference is so tiny for the PAM, GWM, and PAM+GWM builds at certain breakpoints), that having or lacking one str bump might shift the balance from one in favor of another (see my comparison in the PAM+GWM at levels 11 & 12).

The above holds true even when magic weapons are in play (also, a +X magic weapon, if available, works better for when GWM is in play than for when it's not, agreed on that -that uses the same premise as str bumps).

Regarding magic items that boost str, yeah, you are right that they can lift the need for bumping str, but I cannot think of a reliable way to include this possibility (which varies so much from one campaign to another) to an optimization analysis. At least, I take confort that my initial optimization plan has me taking str bumps at levels 12 and 16, so hopefully by then the character will have got such str-boosting magic items if the campaign uses them.

Aside for how important it would be to boost str, I think it is a mistake not to involve PAM on your feat selection (I still agree with GWM and resilient con). The increased dpr (from adding PAM) is too much to ignore imo.


2. You're not counting the single greatest feature of being a Paladin. Find Steed. Haste + Find Steed = terrifying additional damage + de facto unlimited movement speed. That alone puts OoV Paladins way ahead in terms of optimization and damage.
Hmmm.... this is great! I had never thought or heard of that. This..... complicates things somehow. I have not looked at mounted combat in this edition, so I wouldn't know how to best optimize a whole character build (stats, feats. etc) around this, but I'll sure go back to m initial post about the vengeance paly and include it as a tip (edited it under the haste section). Thanks!!!



As a final observation, GWM only without Vow active, and with haste up, is only about as powerful as qs+b with bless. Food for thought.I have to say that I found different results regarding this one. Essentially, my results showed me that GWM is worth using (assuming you have selected it) even with IDS on and VoE off (assuming bless). I think you concluded differently because you miscalculated(?) the hit chance (modifed by both GWM and bless).

[Lollerabe]

Again take this with a grain of salt as I haven't done the math myself, but I seem to remember that the cleave part of GWM was a huge DPR part of the feat according to Kryx.

The fact that crits wouldn't change the scale all that much surprises me. With VoE up crit chance becomes what, 9,75% ?

So the BA from PAM has an avg damg of 2,5 while the BA from GWM has an avg damg of 6,5 or 7 but the GWM BA can most likely throw on -5/+10 without major problems due to advantage.

I can't say for certain though, I just recall both Zman and Kryx concluding that GWM becomes a 'problem' in conjunction with certain classes/archetypes those being barbs, OOV palas and to a lesser degree BM fighters and darkness + devil sight bladelocks.

As rather or not GWM+PAM is worth it on OOV palas - so many variables right? I might as a player conclude that my DPR is doing just fine of GWM alone, maybe the more optimized play would be inspiring leader or a charisma bump since my party is suffering from bad saves.

Anyway keep up the good work.

Oh as a side note do most table allow the qs + shield combo? I understand it's included in a optimization guide, but that would never ever fly at my table.

[Citan]

Oath of Devotion
Great Weapon Fighting style
Use a Great sword
Great Weapon Master feat

Your Sacred Weapon channel divinity reduces or completely nullifies the penalty from using GWM feat. Cross class into 2nd level barbarian to use reckless attack at will. So now your attacks roll is Proficiency + Strength mod + Charisma mod with advantage. Chances are you aren't going to miss very much and are adding +10 damage.

The action economy of this isn't great since your first round is dedicated to using your Vow.

A Dex based ranged fighting paladin could use Channel divinity to Sacred Weapon a Hand Crossbow. Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert will have you dealing similar damage but...

Your bonus action attack is dependable for use age and you can cross class to level 1 Fighter to take the Ranged fighting style.

You may be giving up your first turn but you probably won't be missing.



Now let us look into the sacred weapon channel divinity.
Takes an action to use, produces light (that can penetrate even magical darkness as a sidenote), adds chrisma mod to atack rolls, and weapon is considered magical for the duration. Clearly an attack-minded feature. Forgeting about GWM for a moment, and going back to the start of the thread where I talk about the S&B and the polearm approach, I would say that this feature alone (perhaps with some help from the capstone that utilizes sentinel to a small extent), would suggest that from a character optimization perspective the polearm approach sightly edges the S&B approach.
The question now becomes, is GWM worth taking? Can I do better with GWM than with PM? Could I potentially make room for both?


First of all, action economy. Forget the fact that it takes an action to activate your sacred weapon ability and thus not attacking during the first round of combat (try to imagine what that will be like if you roll low on the initiative order), and even forget for a moment that sacred weapon will not always be available for you to use (it wont always be possible to have a short rest between combats - you can use bless instead when sacred weapon is not available, but that is half the benefit in regard to the use of GWM). The fact is, that a paladin can use his action in several other ways than just attacking. I am not saying that you will not take the attack action more often than not taking it, but there will be times, every now and then, when you will need to spend your action on something else other than attacking. For example casting spells that take up an action, using lay on hands, cleansing touch, even the capstone takes up an action. That's already a big opportunity cost, and with GWM in play it becomes a huge one. Best case scenario, you are lucky enough not to have to use your action to anything else other than attacking all that often, but even if that is the case, you are still restricting yourself horribly (greatest example is how you will almost never use the alternative channel divinitym ie turn the unholy, since you based your whle approach to combat to the sacred weapon channel divinity). Playing a paladin means having several options to choose from, at least more so than the average barbarian or fighter. It is how this class is built, how the class and oath features work within the game. It is no coincidence that the respective class and subclass features of the fighter and the barbarian dont interact that much with the action economy of their builds, as they are intended to swing a weapon non-stop when combat breaks out. This is not the case for the paladin, and even if you try to push it, there will always be those times when you will just have to use an action for something other than attacking (with most characteristic examples, using your action with sacred weapon or with holy nimbus).

Hi all.
Interesting thread, but this bit always puzzles me.
People seem to consider that Devotion Oath is worse at action economy than Vengeance, but it's very rarely true.

Because, while people always look at the "bonus action cast" they forget that 1) it does not change targets 2) it has to be activated within 5 feet of the desired creature.

Realistically, a Paladin won't be good at Stealth, so there is very little chance he manages to surprise an enemy. He is also not especially mobile. So in most cases, he will start the fight at a reasonable distance, between 40 and 100 feet away.

If he Dashes, he cannot attack anyways.
And a Devotion Paladin does not need Bless because he has a good chance to hit with CD.
So, first round...
- Devotion Paladin can close in (move), cast Sacred Weapon (action), and maybe cast a Smite spell (bonus action).
- Vengeance Paladin can close in (move), cast Bless or make a ranged weapon attack by throwing a javelin, ???.

Does not see much difference. :)

[Mandragola]

/snip

Does not see much difference. :)
Misty step is one of the differences. It is both a bonus action user and a fantastic addition to mobility.

Of course, combats do very often start much closer than you suggest. In a dungeon crawl you often open a door to find a monster right there.

As I've said before its the OOV paladin's frequent use of bonus actions that reduces the value of PAM - to me. But having said that now that I've got to lvl 11 and my strength is capped it's certainly an extremely tempting use of my lvl 12 ASI.

This is a good thread. I expect most of us have learned something from it. Thanks Corran for starting it up.

[Lollerabe]

AFB but citan dosent VoE have a greater range than 5ft? And as mentioned you do actually often find yourself within melee range from jump street. So a OOV can throw up VoE and proceed to smack twice with -5/+10 on both hits.

A OOD ? Not so much, and activating a smite spell dosent allow for an attack it simply activates the 'on your next hit you X' part of the spell. Plus it takes up concentration, so if worst comes to worst you use sacred weapon and use your BA on preparing a smite spell (thus disabling yourself from using shield of faith fx) and then the creature smacks you and breaks you concentration.

IF you find yourself in situations where your dm allows prebuffing then OOD is awesome, or you can do the classic sorc dip after lvl 6/7 and abuse the synergy that is sacred weapon + quickened GFB.

[Citan]

Misty step is one of the differences. It is both a bonus action user and a fantastic addition to mobility.

Of course, combats do very often start much closer than you suggest. In a dungeon crawl you often open a door to find a monster right there.

As I've said before its the OOV paladin's frequent use of bonus actions that reduces the value of PAM - to me. But having said that now that I've got to lvl 11 and my strength is capped it's certainly an extremely tempting use of my lvl 12 ASI.

This is a good thread. I expect most of us have learned something from it. Thanks Corran for starting it up.
If you use Misty Step, you cannot activate Enmity. So moot argument. ;)
And, seriously, dungeon crawl? Yes, sure, but you can also fight in castles, forests, roofs, outdoor...


AFB but citan dosent VoE have a greater range than 5ft? And as mentioned you do actually often find yourself within melee range from jump street. So a OOV can throw up VoE and proceed to smack twice with -5/+10 on both hits.

A OOD ? Not so much, and activating a smite spell dosent allow for an attack it simply activates the 'on your next hit you X' part of the spell. Plus it takes up concentration, so if worst comes to worst you use sacred weapon and use your BA on preparing a smite spell (thus disabling yourself from using shield of faith fx) and then the creature smacks you and breaks you concentration.

IF you find yourself in situations where your dm allows prebuffing then OOD is awesome, or you can do the classic sorc dip after lvl 6/7 and abuse the synergy that is sacred weapon + quickened GFB.
Nop, it's 5 feet, and everyone forgets that "slight" detail.
What you say about losing concentration is moot. Because it's a risk every Paladin has, unless a single Attack of your part would dispatch it in the case you can attack first (which means it's usually not a real threat anyways).
The example I gave used a Smite spell because it's a pretty good way to use a bonus action for a Paladin that isn't in range yet, meaning you have a chance to disable an enemy on next hit without necessarily spending slots to smite.

And, to take back the example of "we open a door we find a monster behind", well, if you are the kind of people that just opens the door as a tourist, I cannot do anything to help you. Normal adventurers would use a way to determine whether there is a presence or not, so if you know there is someone you can choose to activate it BEFORE opening the door. If the DM agrees to (not sure how to rule that as RAW), you could even activate, sheathe the weapon to mask the light and try to stealth (obviously, does not work for a STR Paladin ;)).
The only true question is "is it worth activating my feature"?
In that regard, Vengeance has a slight advantage because he can wait to see the creature and still attack if in range. Whereas Devotion will have to choose whether to activate "just in case", risking using it for a trivial fight, or keep it and in the end lose an action because there were indeed tough monsters. Of course, if you get a way to scout and get a good information on enemy types, there is no problem.

When outdoors, the only option Vengeance has to start a fight and make a melee attack while activating is to cast Haste on himself as an action, rush towards an enemy, cast Enmity then use the "Haste action attack". Great if he manages to dispatch it with this, and he was a lone enemy. Otherwise, you are now in the middle of enemy ranks, so unless you have friends that can come by your side quickly, you risk being targeted by all ranged and melee enemies alike, sustaining several instances of damage that may break your Haste, making you easy prey as a result. Yay! o/

Of course, everything I say here is viable critic for pure Paladin. Once you get into multiclassing, you can wash away most of the problems, whatever Oath you choose.
(I'm particularly fond of Paladin / Sorcerer for that reason, because you can just quicken that spell that should have used your action, and you get very potent combinations).

[Mandragola]

Right, so perhaps it's necessary to clarify that you actually don't have to activate VoE in order to use the attack action.

In play I quite often use misty step to get at mooks I wouldn't have used VoE on anyway. For instance in the last session I used it to hop around a ruined building full of assassins (yay heroes' feast!), which would have been a real problem otherwise.

And obviously we don't just kick doors open and roll initiative (most of the time!). I was just making the point that dnd often involves fights that start at all kinds of ranges. Sometimes you'll get a round or two to prepare. Other times you'll find that a fight begins when your character is asleep, or when a flying mind flayer with improved invisibility up hits the party with mind blast, and follows up with a cone of cold.

In those situations it's really no good if you spend your first round blessing your weapon, or even casting bless. An OoV paladin can grab his greatsword, misty step to the bad guy and start doing damage from turn one if he needs to. He certainly doesn't need to cast haste - though of course he can if that looks the best option.

On the subject of haste, I'd be interested to see some numbers on whether resilient con is better than war aster - particularly for someone who has an even-numbered constitution to start with.

[Corran]

On the subject of haste, I'd be interested to see some numbers on whether resilient con is better than war aster - particularly for someone who has an even-numbered constitution to start with.
Emphasis mine.
If we are to optimize (and under the assumption that we are using point buy), we have to work the other way around. We first need to check what each of these feats (warcaster, resilient con) offers us, decide which is best, and then plan stats accordingly.

I am saying that, because part (although a small part) of the reason I find resilient con better, is becaue it allows us a minor boost in stats, compared to if we had taken warcaster instead. Different people can use this opportunity to boost stats in different ways. So assuming variant human and resilient somewhere along the way, one could have stats like this: str16, dex8, con15(16), int8, wis8, cha16, or like this: str16, dex8, int8, wis12, cha16, or in various other combinations. Now, each one of these combinations adds some minor benefits, which have to be taken under consideration and added to the value of resilient con when comparing it to warcaster. Personaly, I think the best way to benefit from the +1 con of resilient, is to have stats like this: str16, dex10, con13(14), int8, wis10, cha16. That is because I find dex a bit more useful for vengeance paladins than for most other paladins, for the simple reason that OoV paladins are mainly strikers, and strikers benefit from advancing their initiative (initiative affects dpr, which is what OoV paladins are specializing for). Also, because I do not consider dropping both wis and dex to 8 is a good price to pay for +2 con.

Even with an even con score, I still suspect that resilient con is the better choice, but although I am not geniunly interested in this case (even con score) from an optimization perspective, for the reasons I mentioned above, one has to examine the rest benefits of resilient and the benefits of warcaster to come to a solid conclusion.

Edit (correction): As far as concentration goes, assuming 16cha, 14con, and the most common appearing DC 10 for concentration checks, warcaster starts with 87.75% and that increases at 96% at level 6, with further minor increases every time you bump charisma. Alternatively, resilient starts with 75%, increases to 80% at level 5, increases to 95% at level 6, with minor increases from then on every time yur prof bonus increases and with every charisma bump.
With bless on, that is roughly a 95% starting chance for warcaster, with minor increases from then on, while resilient starts with a 82.5% chance, increases to 87.5% at level 5, and going into autosave territory at level 6. With haste at 9th level, warcaster has a 96% chance to succeed in concentration checks, while resilient is in autosave territory (assuming DC 10). End of correction.

But other from boosting concentration, I fail to see what else warcaster can do for us. I mean, we have no BB or any other spell that would seriously benefit from casting it with OA's due to warcaster (not to mention that from some point on you will want to keep your reactions available for just attacking and thus spamming one more of your biffed attacks per round. The free hands for casting limitation is waved due to using a two hander (not everyone agrees with that, but I think paladin spellcasting (ie divine magic) is free from that restriction because of how holy symbol intercts with somatic components. So yeah, besides the concentration benefit, I dont see much value in warcaster (at least for a singleclass paladin that is). Even with an even con score I would probably aim for resilient to be honest. Arranging your stats to benefit from the +1 con can be put into very good use if you do it ''correctly''.

Last but not least, constitution saves are crucial. Even assuming a charisma of 20 (which imo is not very likely for OoV paladins generally), there is a huge difference between a +7 con save and a +7+prof bonus con save, obviously becoming better and better as you gain levels.

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@Citan: Action economy aside, I still find issues in how advantageous GWM would be for a devotion paly. It has so few things working for it (and a couple of things -aside from action economy- even working against it). Even the OoV paly, which imo is the exception regarding paladins and GWM, has trouble pulling his weight with GWM sometimes. What does the devotion paladin have to support GWM? Either sacred weapon or bless, and only one extra attack. Imo that is not near enough, especially when considering what works against it. What works against it? Improved divine smite (it acts counter-efficiently to the -5/+10 aspect of GWM), and action economy. The problem regarding action economy is not limited to pre-activating or not sacred weapon. Even something as simple as being limited to bonus action spells for concentration when you use sacred weapon is a factor that has to do with action economy and which does not help us. The OoV paladin was designed with attention to details in regards to being able to minimize the action economy problem and to be able to spam strong attacks, and still falls into problems with GWM if not built and played very carefuly. The fact that the capstone lasts for one hour and thus allows much easir precasting, the fact that almost nothing (at least nothing major) coming from the oath requires charisma and thus you are allowed to focus on strength, the fact that the oath spell list is equipped with haste, and the fact that vow of enmity is admittedly easier to include regaarding action economy (well, in the general case), all that are not random I think, all of these minor details were very much needed to facilitate and make having a very biffed-up attack viable.

It is true that you can create a devotion paly with GWM and still perform quite ok, that is why it is a popular idea. In fact, I gave my thoughts on how one should probably go about it in the devotion post (I didnt put much thought into it since I was biased against it before hand, so I am geniunly interested to see if someone can provide a more optiml approach that would perhaps make me re-think the whole devotion-GWM idea. But I trully think that the devotion paly (singleclass) cannot optimally support GWM. And in regards to sacred weapon, I believe that its most important function, is that it allows you to focus and prioritize charisma over strength and thus combines dpr efficiency with overall efficiency.

ps: Btw I just checked, and VoE range is 10 feet. So double what you were suggesting...!:smallbiggrin:



Again take this with a grain of salt as I haven't done the math myself, but I seem to remember that the cleave part of GWM was a huge DPR part of the feat according to Kryx.

The fact that crits wouldn't change the scale all that much surprises me. With VoE up crit chance becomes what, 9,75% ?

I will give it a try and if I can figure it out, I will include it. I will have a look at how Kryx does it to see if that can get me in the right track. But before I even do that, I will just check how my conclusions change under the assumption that only bless (w/o VoE) and haste (with VoE) use my concentration. Maybe that will hurt the pure PAM build a bit, and put it more in line when optimal spellcasting is in play (ie bless > divine favor/ hunter's mark as a general rule - although it can be debatable in some rare cases). Anyway, first I will provide the alternative conclusions from just taking under consideration only bless and haste (haste after level 9, only with VoE up), and then I ll try to do the crits.

[Mandragola]

I'm interested in even-statted characters because my character has 14 constitution now. So the question of what I should actually do now is quite relevant. I'll soon have to pick my lvl 12 feat and options could include war caster, polearm master, resilient, or just +2 cha/con.

My actual experience is that, on two of the three occasions that I've cast haste, I have then failed a concentration check very soon afterwards. I've lost attacks as a consequence, rather than gain them. So I've stopped doing it.

Right now I have +6 to my con save, including my con and charisma bonuses and +1 from a stone of good luck. In my opinion a 15% chance of failing a DC10 save is still too high on haste. The action economy cost of casting it in the first place, and of failing a save, are both too severe.

There's also the problem of getting hit for more than 20 damage in one hit. This does happen quite a bit at my level. If a fire giant crits you and you fail your save, you're in a seriously awful situation. So as well as considering the action economy and ASI economy of making haste effective it's also necessary to consider the risk of finding yourself heavily damaged and unable to act for a turn.

So for instance if I take a 30 damage hit my chance of saving is only 60%. I encounter monsters now that can do that without critting - indeed I can easily do it myself when I smite and use GWM.

So all in all I tend to think that bless might remain the best use of a paladin's concentration slot - or at least for my own character's. It buffs the party as well as the paladin, it works nicely with GWM and it actually helps to keep itself running by improving my con save.

A further consideration is the AC of the targets that an OoV paladin is attacking - or at least the ones he ought to be attacking. I like to use my ability to do burst damage to get next to casters and chop them up. Often, these casters have fairly low ACs.

At that point GWM is a hell of a lot better than PAM. I've used my bonus action already getting next to the guy, and if not I'll use it on VoE. I can easily hit him even with -5 (especially thanks to the party's bard and bless if I've got it) and I want to do as much damage as I can in a single round. If I'm still next to the guy the turn after then I'll probably use my bonus action on VoE. For this kind of fight I think that GWM is far, far better at this than PAM could ever be.

I do like having the two-handed fighting style too. It's not so much about raising your average damage, though of course that does help. It's more about not fluffing your attacks when you do get next to the thing you've got to kill.

So overall, I don't really consider it to be my character's job to do consistently high dpr. PAM definitely does that better than GWM. Instead, I think it's my job to do the maximum possible damage against the highest threat target in the shortest possible time. It's more about what I can do in the first 3 rounds of a fight against the BBEG, so as to kill it before it does anything really awful, rather than what I can do in an adventuring day.

So for instance not long ago we met a Lich, or something a bit like one anyway (it had an eye for a head, and called itself the Eye of Vecna, though actually it didn't have the artifact by the same name). I misty stepped up to it, bashed it a couple of times and our bard put a spherical wall of force around the two of us so the rest of the party could deal with mooks. So it then misty stepped out, which was a bit annoying but meant it couldn't drop one of its other major spells that round, and I chased it around the place and continued to bash it until it died. As I recall I actually used divine sense to locate it after it put up improved invisibility - since my VoE advantage cancelled out the disadvantage it had. It failed concentration when I hit it the following turn :)

The good thing about this was that by putting the caster under pressure it was forced to use its actions and spell slots to escape and defend itself, rather than to blow up the party. If it had been able to stay up on its dais behind the two earth elementals it had as guards then the fight would have gone very differently. I used misty step at least twice in that fight as well as VoE, so I don't think I would have had many chances to hit anyone with the back end of a polearm.

[Citan]

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@Citan: Action economy aside, I still find issues in how advantageous GWM would be for a devotion paly.
ps: Btw I just checked, and VoE range is 10 feet. So double what you were suggesting...!:smallbiggrin:

Well, I didn't want to intervene into the whole "GWM for Devotion" discussion, because I really don't have anything constructive to add. I was just pointing out that the difference in action economy between Vengeance and Devotion Paladin could be ironed out in many situations, and each was better than the other in different situations.

Also on Enmity range... Dang, I should have double-checked!!!! Was so sure of myself also. Shame on me, shame! (thanks for the correction, does not invalidate my point though ;)).



But other from boosting concentration, I fail to see what else warcaster can do for us. I mean, we have no BB or any other spell that would seriously benefit from casting it with OA's due to warcaster (not to mention that from some point on you will want to keep your reactions available for just attacking and thus spamming one more of your biffed attacks per round. The free hands for casting limitation is waved due to using a two hander (not everyone agrees with that, but I think paladin spellcasting (ie divine magic) is free from that restriction because of how holy symbol intercts with somatic components. So yeah, besides the concentration benefit, I dont see much value in warcaster (at least for a singleclass paladin that is). Even with an even con score I would probably aim for resilient to be honest. Arranging your stats to benefit from the +1 con can be put into very good use if you do it ''correctly''.

On that part... Well in core, I'd tend to agree with you, it is hard to use good spells on a reaction when an enemy move.
Still, I see some uses for Command (stop an enemy that wants to go hit a squeezy, or better, let him go but drop a weapon on the way. Although I'm not sure how to rule the result as a DM now that I think about it) and Compelled Duel (that one should work without problem).

EDIT: Sad, not even Command, because spell says "the target must... follow the command on its next turn". Since you would be casting it during the creature's turn, it would only affect it next round by RAW. I could totally houserule that it takes care now though as a DM, if the player took Warcaster for this specific use. ;)

Absolutely nothing that would justify taking War Caster though, no argue there. And taking Magic Initiate would look like much as a feat tax.

So, for pure Paladins, Resilient:CON is probably the better choice in most cases. Very different case with multiclassing though obviously. :)

[Corran]

I was just pointing out that the difference in action economy between Vengeance and Devotion Paladin could be ironed out in many situations, and each was better than the other in different situations.
Yes, I have even seen DM's handwaving completely the action cost of sacred weapon, and under the conditions I saw this (game didnt focus a lot on combat, relatively new players, essentially there was less focus on mechanics) I considered it a good move on the DM's part. So for example, when the DM was calling for initiative, the player playing the devotion paly would just say sth like ''I did activate my special sword power right before talking ended and combat started'', the DM would agree and the devotion pay would start combat with sacred weapon on. I realise you were not advocating such scenarios, and that yours are much more widely applicable (even in campaign where DMs pay close attention to details, actually, especially in campaigns where DM's ay close attention to details, as then initiating combat will not be always sth as simple as ''you are 10 feet from the enemy, roll initiative''), but even if that happens to be the case, say, 50% of the times you are activating sacred weapon, hmmm, it still doesn't look good enough to me. But yes, I might be horribly wrong about the whole GWM-(devotion)paladin thing.

Something else. Regarding distance when combat starts and the vengeance paly, I initially thought of haste, exactly like you suggested in your example. It is a bit dangerous, for the reasons you explained (though haste does add +2 to AC, still, a dangerous idea), but there are a couple of tricks that could probably deal with this, in the case of the vengeance paly. One of them is obviously the capstone, but that assumes character level 20, so it is limited in its applicability. The other way, is to use your mount, as RulesJD suggested. Casting haste on yourself allows for a hasted mount (assuming it is the mount from your find steed spell), so that would perhaps deal efficiently with the starting distance problem (edit: while also keeping you safe because the mount can disengage and move away with its remaining speed, via the hasted action) regarding the OoV paladin and would keep the dpr high despite lacking a good ranged attack option. Ofc that wont apply always, but ime starting distances are more of a problem when fighting takes place outdoors, so having the mount wont be an issue in that case.


Also on Enmity range... Dang, I should have double-checked!!!! Was so sure of myself also. Shame on me, shame! (thanks for the correction, does not invalidate my point though ;)).
Yeah, VoE's range has nothing to do with your point, agreed.
Btw, your 5 feet were a closer guess than what I remembered. For some reason, I though it was 30 feet...:smallconfused: Had confused it with sth else probably. And to think that I had read through the OoV paly's mechanics very recently...


EDIT: Sad, not even Command, because spell says "the target must... follow the command on its next turn". Since you would be casting it during the creature's turn, it would only affect it next round by RAW. I could totally houserule that it takes care now though as a DM, if the player took Warcaster for this specific use. ;)
I would houserule this the same way. It just seems silly for it to interact that way. It isn't broken with the houserule you suggest, at least imo, and the limitation only applies because of how the command spell is written so that it is balanced in its more general use (ie when casting it with an action). So the limitation imo is a bad side effect due to keeping balance under exactly different conditions.

Hold person falls into the same pitfalls, though with hold person and warcaster, you can at least replicate the sentinel effect (to a greater extent though, as you are denying the whole action, and not just movement). Still, a suboptimal use of resources, as the enemy must fail two consecutive saves in order for anyone to start capitalizing from the status effect andthus score crits/ use dex save spells, but situationaly it can be very useful (enemy tries to run past you to press the destroy-the-world button). Still, not enough imo to justify taking warcaster over resilient.


So, for pure Paladins, Resilient:CON is probably the better choice in most cases. Very different case with multiclassing though obviously. :)
Yes. A completely different story regarding which one of those to pick then.
I am still debating with myself the benefits of resilient con over warcster for a GWM paladin/sorcerer (assuming we are allowed to change grip with the two hander as a free action -if that is not true, then warcaster all the way!!!).

[Citan]

Yes. A completely different story regarding which one of those to pick then.
I am still debating with myself the benefits of resilient con over warcster for a GWM paladin/sorcerer (assuming we are allowed to change grip with the two hander as a free action -if that is not true, then warcaster all the way!!!).
Definitely Warcaster imo. Even while it seems RAI that you can drop a hand just for spellcasting, thus being not impeded when wielding two-handed. And for whatever weapon you are using.

Why?
- Advantage is usually comparable to a bonus between +3 and +5 (if only I could find the thread -not on this forum alas- which studied the difference very extensively). So for a good part of your career it would be better than proficiency bonus.
- Voiding somatic components is meaningless for Two-handers, but great otherwise.
- Just the ability to cast a weapon cantrip is great.
- BUT, you can also cast one of the many great Sorcerer spells AND you can stack a Metamagic on top of this. Meaning an off-turn chance to finish off a nearly down enemy (Magic Missile) or Sickness/Hold/Blind/Levitate/Banish/Polymorph/Dominate/Disintegrate him... Or, special cherry for Storm Sorcerer, cast a Chromatic Bolt to automatically inflict damage to everyone around you in addition to your target (works by RAW because the auto damage is a feature that is triggered by the cast, but independantly).

So imo, Warcaster is a feat of choice for any Sorcerer, but more particularly...
- Storm Sorcerers.
- S&B Sorcerers.
- Striker (single-target) Sorcerers.
If you check all three, bravo! :smallbiggrin:

[Corran]

- Just the ability to cast a weapon cantrip is great.
Wait,do you mean that you cannot use a weapon cantrip with a two-hander if you dont have warcaster? Or did I completely missed your point regarding the above?


- BUT, you can also cast one of the many great Sorcerer spells AND you can stack a Metamagic on top of this.
.......
So imo, Warcaster is a feat of choice for any Sorcerer, but more particularly...
- Storm Sorcerers.
- S&B Sorcerers.
- Striker (single-target) Sorcerers.
If you check all three, bravo! :smallbiggrin:
I would be interested in finding potential good uses of spells with OA's via warcaster, that offer sth other than good damaging reactions. I am not that impressed with damaging reactions via warcaster (such as warcaster + BB) when considering a GWM build, because the GWM build has already a good damaging reaction, through GWM. Perhaps not as damaging as warcaster + BB (or some other spells), but they are not lacking in that department, so the overlap kind of disuades me. So, unless I could think of other strong uses of spellcasting with OA's because of warcaster (preferably uses that do not focus on damage), I wouldn't pay that much attention to that benefit of warcaster.
Ofc I haven't looked at how to potentially exploit this aspect of warcaster, but I wouldn't pay much attention to damaging options just because I have GWM (even if those options ended up better -such as BB- than GWM in regard to damage).

Then again, warcaster is better at lower levels regarding concentration, fact which changes considerably once aura of protection kicks in. So if a pal/sorc was to delay his aura of protection signifiantly, and depending on what concentration spells he uses till then, it might just be better to take warcaster without asking any questions.

[Corran]

I'm interested in even-statted characters because my character has 14 constitution now. So the question of what I should actually do now is quite relevant. I'll soon have to pick my lvl 12 feat and options could include war caster, polearm master, resilient, or just +2 cha/con.
Well, my opinion regarding feat selection is this: If you want to boost conentration, then prefer resilient con to warcaster (resilient con, especially at this level, is better than warcaster in every possible aspect, even with an even con score). If you want to boost stats (I assume your str is maxed), then prefer boosting charisma over boosting con, charisma is generally better for palys, even for vengeance ones who perhaps make the least use of it. Between boosting charisma on one hand, and either taking resilient or taking PAM on the other hand, they are not directly comparable, but I would say taking the feat (ie resilient or PAM) is better due to the focus of a OoV paly on dpr (though it would be important to know how many allies of your tend to stay within 10 feet of you during fights, just so I could have a better picture of how important aura of protection is in regard to your allies).

So, if it were me, I would either go for resilient con, or for PAM.
Without resilient con, that means (practically) limiting yourself to bless for concentration, which is not eexactly bad, but I would say that it is half bad since you are not using haste with VoE. Without PAM, you lose a considerable chunk of dpr, some of it comes from consistent damage dealt over various different opponents along the adventuring day, but make no mistake, quite a lot of it comes from focused concentrated damage that you deal against your VoE targets (bosses).
We can compare these two options (resilient con and PAM) to some extent (regarding dpr only, leaving out the benefit from better con saves). One (resilient) allows for haste, and thus allows for better dpr against VoE targets (not that you cannot use haste when VoE is not up, but save it for when it matters), and the other (PAM) allows for increased dpr spread throughout the whole day (though as I said, it does make a difference against the serious opponents too).
Just set an AC value, give me more info about your attack bonus and ay special damage boost, and we can start quantifying the benefits of each one of these choices.


My actual experience is that, on two of the three occasions that I've cast haste, I have then failed a concentration check very soon afterwards. I've lost attacks as a consequence, rather than gain them. So I've stopped doing it.

Right now I have +6 to my con save......
You are right about that. If you dont get resilient con, casting haste is a risk you shouldn't take. With resilient con, I think you will be ok. Yeah, sometimes the DC might increase, but I think a +10 con save (which will increase at levels 13 and 17 no matter wht you spend your rest ASIs on) will be enough.
We can try to see the dpr difference from sqitching from bless to haste, just to get a better idea of what you would be partly investing into (I say partly, as better con saves account for more things other than concentration, and also haste gives you more benefits other than increased dpr, but since dpr is easy to calculate, we could start by calculating the dpr difference from switching from bless to haste). Again, give me the details regarding your attack and any special damage/atttack bonuses, and set a target AC that you feel matches that of your usual opponents, and we can run it.


A further consideration is the AC of the targets that an OoV paladin is attacking - or at least the ones he ought to be attacking. I like to use my ability to do burst damage to get next to casters and chop them up. Often, these casters have fairly low ACs.

At that point GWM is a hell of a lot better than PAM.
Agreed. But now consider (especially in the case of the low AC that you mention), how much improvement there would be if you had just included PAM instead of a +2 str. The superiority of adding PAM to GWM over adding +2 str to GWM, is even more noticable when testing it against lower ACs.


I do like having the two-handed fighting style too. It's not so much about raising your average damage, though of course that does help. It's more about not fluffing your attacks when you do get next to the thing you've got to kill.It's also the optimal choice, cntrary to what I first suggested (I have to go back to my first post about the vengeance paly and change that). That was because I was under the impression that qs+b outprforms the glaive for the first 7 levels, but this is not the case (more rather qs+b is better for the first 3-4 levels, mainly for levels 1-3). So I was thinking defense because I wouldnt want to take a fighting style that I wouldnt use till 8th level. Vut this is not the case. Worst case scenario (according to my suggestions) would be that I might not use gwf for 1-2 levels tops. So yeah, GWF is probaby the best choice (especially if you consider that you might end up doing 4-5 attacks per round against your VoE target at higher levels.


So for instance not long ago we met a Lich.....
.....
I used misty step at least twice in that fight as well as VoE, so I don't think I would have had many chances to hit anyone with the back end of a polearm.
I think misty step is more situational than what you give it credit for. So are most other bonus action options regarding a OoV paly imo (assuming you stick with bless and/or haste for concentration).
Regarding the overlap between the bonus attack from GWM (crits/kills) ad the bonus action attack from PAM, yes, that sometimes might happen, so there is overlap. But the benefits of the combination of these two feats for an OoV paly (especially when compared to a GWM OoV paly who took +2 str -or any other feat- over PAM), are so massive that this overlap doesn't bother you at all.
ps: That must have been a very nice fight!!!

[Citan]

Wait,do you mean that you cannot use a weapon cantrip with a two-hander if you dont have warcaster? Or did I completely missed your point regarding the above?

Nonono, sorry if my writing made it look that way. I just meant that, as you said, a pure Paladin has no weapon cantrips nor spells (barring two situational ones) to use on Warcaster, whereas a Sorcerer will certainly get at least one weapon cantrip and plenty of valid spells.
So combining the usual weapon build of Paladin with Sorcerer cantrip creates a great regular use for Warcaster. :)


I would be interested in finding potential good uses of spells with OA's via warcaster, that offer sth other than good damaging reactions.

Well, I thought I did give some few ones. :)
For example, Hold Person. If for any reason you couldn't (or wouldn't) cast a spell during your own turn, you would be glad when a big guy with axe tries to move away from you to attack squishy, to cast Heightened Hold Person on him instead of just whacking him. Because just whacking him may not have been enough to finish him off, so he could have gone and destroy friend. Now he's very probably stuck (because Heightened) and ready to get blown to bits. You not only successfully protected your friend, but you also gave a decisive edge in the fight because this enemy is no more a threat. Either you are confident in maintaining the spell for 1mn, meaning you can focus on others. Or you are not, and whomever is first after you can auto-crit him, meaning it will be dead soon enough.

Otherwise said, with a minimum of tactical thinking and a bit of luck (or several friends with push abilities), you can get to whack things and cast spells in the same round, or cast 2 spells in the same round.

Also, you seem to forget the Booming Blade...
- Extra damage: 3d8 (average 13,5) in the end: meaning either "double GWM" damage, or "normal" damage without the -5 penalty.
- Rider: 4d8 damage if the creature moves.
It means you can replicate the Sentinel feat when using Warcaster with BB, because it effectively discourages it to move.
Just that could be incentive enough for a multiclass geared towards frontline management.
So now take into account all the other spells... :)

[Mandragola]

So it’s still quite hard to decide what I should do at lvl 12!

PAM certainly does look like a good option. Now that I’ve got GWM and IDS, it’s clear that it would substantially increase my damage. On the item issue, I don’t actually have a particularly good two-hander (basically just a +1 greatsword) so I don’t lose out hugely there. Maybe I’ll even find a great weapon – though more likely I’ll carry on finding longswords so long as this guy DMs!

I think I’ll stay away from resilient for now. Haste is great, but too risky with my saves as they are, and I’m concerned that the problem will get worse as I level instead of better, as monsters hit harder. It’s always hard to argue for resilient for a paladin instead of a cha bonus – raising a single save for me by a lot, rather than raising all saves for the whole party by a little.

There are also a lot of other good uses for 3rd level slots. Aura of vitality is very popular amongst the rest of the party, as is revivify! It feels better to save resources and ASIs and not use haste.

By the way, I wouldn’t usually share haste with my mount. Instead I’d use the mount as an escape plan for if haste went wrong. It could take me out of danger if I couldn’t do anything myself. I’m not too concerned about the horse’s attacks itself.

Of course, that introduces the idea of taking mounted combat as my feat. Decisions decisions! I do like the idea of having advantage all the time with GWM, and there would definitely be points for style, especially when sharing misty step with the horse.

[Foxhound438]

I have to say that I found different results regarding this one. Essentially, my results showed me that GWM is worth using (assuming you have selected it) even with IDS on and VoE off (assuming bless). I think you concluded differently because you miscalculated(?) the hit chance (modifed by both GWM and bless).

Not quite necromantic thread bump

Yes, I did in fact miscalculate. I for some reason was using .075 instead of .125 for the bless accuracy bonus. Regardless, the ultimate conclusion that GWM+PAM is good remains true, unless I misinterpreted your post on the calculations.

In any case, thus far we've looked very in depth on Oathbreaker, Ancients, and Vengeance, and have reached some kind of consensus for each of them, with minor disagreements still had here and there (IE, wanting to go dex for ancients, disputes on what feats are right for vengeance).

Thus far we have some decent back and forth, although it has died down a bit, on the subject of devotion paladins, and I'd like to see a comprehensive build on it, what to use and why, as well as eventually get to Oath of the Crown. We'll have to look at devotion in much the same way we did for Vengeance, comparing GWM to PAM to both, and what spells to use to improve each most effectively.

[Mandragola]

Thus far we have some decent back and forth, although it has died down a bit, on the subject of devotion paladins, and I'd like to see a comprehensive build on it, what to use and why, as well as eventually get to Oath of the Crown. We'll have to look at devotion in much the same way we did for Vengeance, comparing GWM to PAM to both, and what spells to use to improve each most effectively.

To me, the first thing is to look at the roles that the different subclasses are intended to perform in the party. Vengeance paladins are intended to be heavy-hitters, so conversations on their dpr are most relevant. I don't especially think that's the case for crown or divotion paladins.

Both of these subclasses will tend to cast spells in combat and actually use their spell slots for stuff other than smites - far more than a vengeance paladin does. And many of their other features, key off their charisma score too, such as their channel divinity abilities. And you won't be misty-stepping off to batter enemy casters at the back of the room, so you'll be giving your party-members your charisma bonus to their saves, and they'll appreciate it if that's a good bonus.

All of which leads me to suggest that one of these guys might want to prioritise charisma, perhaps even above strength. And it seems reasonable to get a bunch of constitution as well, especailly for the crownadin.

I see devotion as a decent all-rounder option, and this means that you could reasonably pick any weapon to specialise in, or not pick one at all and switch to whatever you think is appropriate. Any of the fighting styles could work with devotion, in my opinion. You could legitimately go for GWM or PAM, since adding your charisma to hit with either weapon is pretty cool. But you could just as happily take neither and spend your ASIs raising your charisma or strength, or maybe on feats like sentinel. You can kind of pick any role, or even dabble in various roles.

Oath of the crown on the other hand is clearly designed to be a tank and healer. Accordingly your charisma (so your abilities work) and constitution (to keep you alive) are very important. Strength is... not irrelevant, but not the most important thing. Crownadins want really good concentration saves, to keep their various concentration spells running - especially if they're at the front getting hit a lot. +1AC for fighting style seems a clear choice.

I imagine a crownadin could well play rather like the fighter/cleric in my group. He quite often casts spirit guardians and then dodges, initially using action surge to do on the round he casts SGs. Sometimes he has a spiritual weapon bashing stuff at the same time, and sometimes he doesn't bother. I can see a crownadin doing something similar to this. Champion's challenge and then dodge, for instance, while your friends beat things up. Spirit guardians and champions challenge is a pretty nasty combo, even at quite high level. No escape!

I'd consider something like a vuman with resilient: con as their feat. A Hill dwarf would be an interesting option too, for the mountains of hp, though the lack of either strength or charisma would be a bit of a pain. I somehow can't put together a hill dwarf points buy array that I'm happy with (the +1 wisdom is awkward!). You'd be one tough paladin, but not all that strong on the offense. Vuman would start 16, 8, 14, 12, 16 - which would be less tough but better at concentrating and having people fail their saves against you. Mountain dwarf, Half-orc, dragonborn and half-elf options could all work, and a tiefling's fire resistance makes them a reasonable choice too.

I think that crownadins definitely want to be strength-based so as to wear heavy armour. Your place is front and centre in the party, spreading various nice auras around you, not sneaking about the place. The same probably goes for devotion paladins, though again their multi-role-ness makes dex a reasonable option.