How to kit out your Paladin for adventures in Arkesia
What is the best Paladin build in Lost Ark?The Paladin is one of only two dedicated support classes inLost Ark, and as such, he’s often in-demand when it comes to teaming up with other players in thisMMORPG. Like every member of the Warrior base class, the Paladin earns a high spot on ourLost Ark classes tier list, thanks to impressive attack and defence stats that make him suitable for sub-DPS duties in addition to providing protection for the rest of his team.
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Best Lost Ark Paladin build: Overview
The identity skill at the heart of the Paladin’s early game build is thePiety Metre. Like most Lost Ark classes, the Paladin’s identity metre increases every time one of his attacks successfully hits its target, so remember that the greater part of piety is battering the shit out of your enemies, I guess; but the Paladin can also passively gain charge, albeit at a slower rate, if you’re RP-ing a classic atonement seeker (or are just more focused on support than combat). Max out the Piety Metre and you can discharge all that pent-up righteousness with one of two powerful skill effects:
A bit of administrivia: only one Piety skill effect can be activated at a time, and the Piety Metre doesn’t refill while either one is active. Once the skill times out, the Piety Metre resets to 0% and won’t be usable again until it regains 100% charge. You pick which effect to trigger every time you activate the Piety Metre, so no need to worry about locking yourself into a choice in the long-term.
Support characters are a rare breed in Lost Ark. While most optimum class builds are focussed primarily on dealing as much damage as possible, Paladin builds need to strike a balance between offensive capabilities and useful team buffs. This all starts with the skills you begin accumulating in the early stages of the game. To help you figure all this out, the Paladin’s normal skills are all colour-coded: blue forPunish(attack) skills, and yellow forHoly(support) skills.
By the time you reach Level 50 you should have accumulated about 250 skill points, which is enough to put together a balanced normal skill build to take your character into the endgame. For the Paladin, we recommend striking a balance that’s just slightly in favour of Holy skills, since he’ll have plenty of teammates who can take care of the main offensive. However, don’t neglect his Punish skills, just remember that they’re a secondary priority overall. Fortunately, it’s less essential than for many classes to advance most of his skills to Tripod 3, as in a lot of cases you can comfortably stop at Tripod 2, giving you more points to distribute across a wider variety of skills. Consider allocating your points across the following areas:
Lost Ark characters start out with a decent suite of early-game abilities, and new skills unlock fairly frequently as you progress through the first 20 or so character levels. Gaining XP and levelling up gives you skill points that you can spend on improving skill levels and unlocking “tripods”. Tripods are enhancements to skills that become available at skill levels 4, 7, and 10; applying one gives that skill a new secondary function. Every tripod has three options for you to choose from.
There’s a limit to how much you can customise any Lost Ark character’s build until they reach Level 50 and you gain access to endgame Engravings and Awakening skills (see below). Until that point, the path each class takes will be relatively linear; so throughout the early game, selecting your normal skills and their enhancements is the key to setting up a build that’s to your liking.
Once a Lost Ark character reaches Level 50, you can apply Engravings to them. Engravings are part of Lost Ark’s endgame content, and allow you to apply a variety of buffs and boosts to customise your character’s kit a little more. As well as generic engravings available to all characters, every class has two “class bonus” engravings unique to them. Effectively, these let you pick a subclass for them to specialise in.
The Engravings for the Paladin class areBlessed AuraandJudgement, which, as you might expect, respectively hone the character’s focus more towards his Holy or Punish skill specialisms:
It’s important to note that choosing one of these Engravings does not disallow the use of the other effect from the Piety Metre, so while your build from here on in will focus more heavily on one side or the other, you’re still not being forced to straight-up choose between support and attack. Of course, due to the high desirability ofPaladinsspecifically in support roles, most players will default to Blessed Aura, but both are incredibly strong choices. It’s not uncommon to see a player run two separate Paladin builds to take advantage of both.
The number of engravings you can equip is variable, and depends on the engraving slots you have available. Class-specific bonus engravings require LearnedEngravingslots, which you unlock by reading books you accumulate throughout your adventures in Arkesia. The two “generic” engraving types that can be equipped by all classes (damage boosts and utility buffs) are equipped according to how many engraving points you have available through a combination of your character’s equipped accessories (such as necklaces, earrings, rings, etc.) and their Ability stones, all of which can be picked up as loot or from merchants throughout the game. Shuffle your loadout until you’ve maxed out your engravings points to 35 and you should be able to equip about three generic engravings in addition to your class bonus.
Your choice of generic engravings for the Paladin will need to depend somewhat on where your focus is. For a DPS or sub-DPS Paladin, the usual suspects for those roles are ideal for the job:
However, for a support Paladin, you’ll want something more along these lines:
In addition toEngravings,accessory items in Lost Ark (necklaces, earrings, and rings) are your source for Combat Stats. These substats can have a major effect on your character, and it is important to target gear with the right stats for your build. While leveling, Paladins should use Crit to increase critical strike rate and damage, plus some Swiftness to reduce cooldowns. This will help increase your damage output and smooth out the leveling process before transitioning to a more supportive playstyle in the endgame. Once you do reach endgame and start running group content like Abyssal Dungeons, drop the Crit and replace it with Specialization to buff up your Holy Aura.
Like Engravings, Awakening Skills become available once a Lost Ark character has reached Level 50. Again, there are two options to choose from, and unlike with Engravings it’s not an either/or proposition: you can unlock both Awakening Skills if you’d like, although you can only equip one at a time.
The Awakening skills for the Paladin are:
As with most aspects of the Paladin’s build, there’s no bad choice here. However,Alithane’s Judgementis clearly the superior option in the likely event that you’re focussing your Paladin build on support. Even if you’re building a DPS Paladin, Alithane’s Judgement is almost a match for Alithane’s Light in terms of damage, plus has the benefit of the shield; so unless you’re going for a laser-focussed maximum-damage build, it’s probably still the better choice overall.
Since you need to be at Level 50 to take advantage of most of Lost Ark’s character build materials, be sure to check out our guide tolevelling up fast in Lost Arkto help you get there as quickly as possible. If you’re looking for detailed advice on how to build other character classes in your roster, we also have build guides for theGunslinger,Deathblade, andSorceress.
