Paladins?

[Xanthine]

Where do Paladins fall in the divine calculus of powerful vs. weak classes? They seem sorta middle-of-the-road to me, but I'm curious what the pros think (so to speak).

[Sradac]

meh, a glorified fighter thats about it in my eyes. Slightly better at magic than fighters, not as much protection as them. fair trade off. but they loose all class abilities if they piss off their god.

[tapi]

If you get justifier as the crowning gift, you'll basically have ToTRR as one-handed weapon damagewise. They are are bit slower starters than barbs etc, but have no problems mid-late game in my experience. The ability to learn teleport darkness etc pretty early on obviously helps also.

[Ars]

Quite good. Basically good melee fighters with spells, and the possibility to get pretty much the best 1-hander in the game. No moving energy discount though, like most other strong melee classes get.

[Bengali]

Out of curiosity, what race would you couple them with? Or is there any race that has a significant enough advantage in relation to paladins to really matter?

[Silfir]

Dark elven paladins - Paladins have Athletics and Dodge, dark elves add Find Weakness and Alertness. You still get an elven chain mail too!

Dwarven paladins wear what is probably among the heaviest starting armour in the game since it includes plate mail. Skillset less than impressive, however.

In general I'd consider paladins superior to fighters, and more versatile than both fighters and barbarians thanks to their spellcasting abilities. They even get increased effectivity training with clerical spells.

If there's one thing I had to name that fighters can do but paladins cannot, it's Archery. To fix that, you can choose a hurthling paladin, but that means you do miss out on Find Weakness and Alertness, which for instance a drakeling fighter wouldn't have to do. For this reason, Drakeling fighters rate about equal to any kind of paladin to me, because of their stunning skillset that misses nothing except that pesky Concentration skill - and Healing or Herbalism. Okay, paladins are probably still superior even though they don't get Archery.

[Grey]

Dwarven paladins are awesome - start with around 8 PV. Most races would suit the paladin class pretty well though.

[_Ln_]

Out of curiosity, what race would you couple them with? Or is there any race that has a significant enough advantage in relation to paladins to really matter?

Orcish paladins appear to be very good with their Find Weakness and high St and To for beginning.. Gnomish are nice too

[Gulfd'An]

My best game was gnomish paladin. I ran into a lot of blink dogs, got eleport control, and found a spell book shop with a teleport tome. I think it was my first game with working teleport. Needless to say the teleport saved me when my fighting could often not.

[gut]

> Where do Paladins fall

Usually around the ToEF's : )

Seriously though, when it comes to versatile fighters, they
fall short of healers and possibly even weaponsmiths. I
suppose they are meant as a 'holy' fighter rather than a
spellcasting fighter. If one wanted to rely heavily upon
piety, I suppose paladins might be great. The problem as I
see it, is that no one wants to.