Divinity for Days: Paladin Healer Build

I've had several requests for my Oathkeeper (paladin healer) build, so I'm going ahead and posting it here. It's a build of my own design that works for my style of play. Hopefully it works for you, too.

I've broken this guide up into several sections, so you can skip to the content you care about.

The first sections answer the biggest questions for players thinking of starting a paladin healer: Why play and Oathkeeper? and Why not play an Oathkeeper? Although I love playing my pally healer, I think it's good for anyone thinking of spending the time and resources to build up a new healer to understand the pros and cons.

With that out of the way, I move on to the Goals for the Build before heading into details about Powers, Feats and Stats.

While I added a section of Companions that have good bonuses for paladins, I'm not planning to go over gear, mounts and artifacts in this post. Since they have broad applicability across multiple healers and multiple roles, I plan to do separate topics for each. If/when I get around to it, I'll update this post with a link.

Why play an Oathkeeper?

Paladins are good now, and are only getting better

Personally, I feel like Paladins are in a pretty good place at the high end. Some people do struggle with the class, so the Neverwinter devs are currently working to give paladin healers a boost. While we can't rely on that 100% (it's possible that they might make us worse by mistake), seeing how much they improved wizards makes me pretty optimistic that we're going to get even better.

Save your team from one shots with big, blue shields

You can't heal dead. With a well-equipped paladin healer, you can reliably shield all of your allies for 25-30% of their hitpoints and 75-100% for your marked target (usually the tank).

This is very helpful now, and it's likely to get even better with every mod. Why? As item level goes up, the stat rating required to maintain the same % stat goes up as well, and I don't see a lot of dps shifting their points into defensive stats. The new executioner's covenant mount bonus is yet another big hit to survivability. That means dps will only get more fragile as time goes on, and extra protection will only get more valuable as item levels climb.

Never wait for a random queue again

Paladins with both tank and heal builds have the best qps in the game (queues per second). Just flip to the current role bonus, and most of the time you'll get an instant queue pop. The astral diamond bonus isn't huge, but over several queues it can really add up (especially if you run more than one queue per day).

Why Not Play an Oathkeeper?

Less forgiving at the low end

In my opinion, paladin healers don't really come in to their own until they are pretty high end. Of all the healers I've played, the paladin is the least forgiving when it comes to stats not being in the right place. The good news is that it's easier than ever to get your stats right. The wide availability of outgoing heal stats on gear and the increasing popularity of raptor builds really helps. Don't get discouraged, you'll get there!

The Shield of Death bug isn't just for tanks

When you die with your shield up, you can't scroll. If this happens, you just have to hope that someone picks you up. It's one of the worst, oldest bugs in the game. On the plus side, the block is much more efficient than a dodge, so you can amaze your friends in Ancient Dragon Queues with your ability to heal them while they're still flying through the air on those big knockbacks.

Our cure is the worst in the game

The paladin healer is the only healing class that has only a single target cure. It is terrible. While most of the places you had to cure aren't really an issue anymore (ye olde Tiamat, Hati, and the manticores in Svardborg), one of the reasons I recommend a Dedicated Squire companion especially to new paladins is that it removes some detrimental effects.

Paladin Healers don't work well together

This usually only comes up in random trials, but two paladin healers in one trial does not work well at all because bolster does not stack. In fact, a less powerful paladin can overwrite the bolster of a more powerful paladin and actually make things worse. I've never had a trial queue fail because of a lower paladin, but it can lead to a frustrating experience. In my experience, the less powerful paladin will not generate divinity fast enough to be too much of a problem.

Solo questing is slow

Paladins are the only class in the game without a dps option. Things are much better than they used to be given the boost on our class feature that increases our damage when we're by ourselves. You would expect the paladin healer to be better at soloing because the have higher base damage, but I find that with the right feats the tank loadout works better for me in solo content.

Goals for this Build

This build is designed to perform equally well in group and trial content. It focuses on solid shielding for all allies, and a big blue shield for the tank. It also provides solid spike healing for the entire party by allowing you to regenerate divinity fast enough that you can spam Divine Shelter (our big AOE heal) when things get interesting.

Powers

At Wills: Cure Wounds and Valorous Strike

It feels like in every group, there is a TOD: that one dps that needs an extra heal over and over again. While you could move your mark to them, in high end content like MTOS your tank needs that mark to live. That's where Cure Wounds comes in. You can top up TOD without breaking the divinity bank. It's also my goto power for heal check mechanics like the ghosts in MToS (see the entry in the FAQ for more info on that).

In order to proc the Battle Focus feat, we need to do damage to enemies. This means we need to be running a damage at will every 6 seconds. I prefer Valorous Strike over Divine Fulmination. Valorous Strike hits much faster, and can be animation cancelled to build AP. Divine Fulmination's only benefit is that it is ranged. Since I tank as often as I heal, I'm very comfortable being up close and personal with a boss. If you can pay attention, stay out of the red or use your shield, you should have no problems staying alive.

Encounters: Sacred Weapon, Circle of Divinity, Divine Shelter

Sacred Weapon and Circle of Divinity are fantastic for generating divinity. Circle of Divinity has the added benefit of increasing your outgoing heal by 15%, but it requires you to stand in the circle. It also has a nice effect of attracting dps to it, since they don't know it only buffs you (which does actually help keep them in heal range).

Divine Shelter is an AOE heal centered on you with a huge range. Any time you heal, you have a good chance of triggering the Critical Touch feat, which makes it crit on every target it hits (you'll see an animated dashed rectangle on Divine Shelter indicating that Critical Touch is active). It raises Divine Barriers (shields) on every target you hit. Unfortunately, it will overwrite the larger shield from your RB heal, so if you expect your tank to take heavy damage, plan to recast RB after.

Our other AoE healing encounter, Divine Touch is similar to a cleric's Bastion spell. It's a ranged spell with a medium area. The healing from the spell is divided by all of the targets in the spell's area. That means if you cast it on just one person, it raises a large barrier similar to the RB heal. If you cast it on a trial group, you will barely be able to see the blue bar. I personally find Divine Shelter to be more practical in most situations, but for the right healer in the right situation Divine Touch is a good alternative (I would generally run one or the other, as I don't want to give up either divinity regen power).

Feats

These feat choices are all about divinity regen and raising the biggest Divine Barriers (shields) possible.

	Critical Touch: Grants your healing powers a 10% chance to bestow the effect of Critical Touch which guarantees that your next Divine Touch or Divine shelter will critically strike (Duration: 10 seconds).
	Battle Focus: Whenever you deal damage to an enemy, your divinity regeneration rate is increased (Duration: 6 seconds).
	Enduring Spirit: Sacred weapon now reduces damage taken by 10% and restores divinity over time.
	Divine Intervention: Lay on Hands now raises a Divine Barrier on the target that absorbs damage equal to half the hit points healed (Duration: 20 seconds).
	Emissary of Warding: Whenever your spells which generate a Divine Barrier heal critically, the effect of the barrier is increased by an additional 50%.

Critical touch allows us to get consistent shield coverage across the entire party. Since the maximum possible crit rate is 90%, you would have to get very lucky to crit on every member of the group. Because the Neverwinter devs decided to make heal crits half as good as damage crits, heal crits are usually a bit sad. But for a paladin, heal crits really are critical because the Emissary of Warding feat gives our shields get a 50% bonus, but only when we crit. Battle Focus and Enduring Spirit significantly increase divinity regen, which is crucial for this build. Divine Intervention is the best of two nearly irrelevant choices, but can be useful in some circumstances.

Ratings/Stat Priorities

I'm not going to go into specific gear and companion recommendations in this guide, as BIS is always a moving target (I may do a gearing up a new healer guide in the future as a separate post). Instead, I'm going to lay out the general priorities I use to select gear/companions/etc. Hopefully this should be useful until Neverwinter decides to their dev resources on yet another mechanics overhaul that no one asked for.

The priorities for a paladin healer are:

• Power and Outgoing Healing (tie)

• Critical Severity

• Crit

• Forte

Power and Outgoing Healing are the most important stats for healers. If you can't cap them, having them balanced will be of more benefit than having one higher than the other. Also note that while Circle of Divinity is not up 100% of the time, it will provide you with 15% Outgoing healing, so you may want to prioritize other stats (power or critical severity) when you get to 75% outgoing healing.

Critical severity is very important for a paladin, as we get free crits on our group heals and it allows us to raise the best shield for our marked target.

Although crit is not as important as critical severity, you need to have a decent crit to proc a good shield on your marked target.

I often find myself double tapping divine shelter, one to heal and one to shield. If your natural crit is not high enough, you may need a third cast to top everyone up. Additionally, the more you crit on your party, the more you help activate buffs that depend on getting hit critically (crit heals generally count). If my divinity is riding high, I usually throw out a shelter periodically to keep those buffs fresh.

Forte is my last priority for my paladin build. In my testing it does increase divinity regen, but only by a sadly meager amount. Putting on a ye' olde dragon hearts set for the 7.5% recharge speed buff gave me far more divinity regen than stacking 10k more forte. Given how much of a hit we take by not having power for our primary forte stat, it is very disappointing that we don't get a meaningful boost to divinity regen to make up for it. Luckily, we have other tools available to keep our divinity going.

Companions

You can get only up to 50% of the stats you need from ratings. A large portion of the stats over the cap come from your companion bonuses (up to 48.75% total, if you are in a raptor group).

Deciding which companion to use depends mostly on what stats you need and what you can afford/obtain. The cost of companions varies quite a bit, so it pays to keep on the lookout for bargains. Make sure to keep an eye out for ways to obtain them including battlepasses, event rewards, and the reaper store. If you're lucky, you might get some out of juma bags or dragonflight (juma provided quicklings for 3 of my healers). Some of them are also available on the trade bar merchant, although it may be cheaper to buy them from others, depending on how the steep the price is at the time.

Make sure that you're planning which slot you're using it in (offense, defense, utility and universal). I can say from personal experience that it's pretty disappointing to upgrade a new companion, only to realize that you'd have to drop one that's equally good or better to slot it.

NAME	STAT	SLOT
Tamed Velociraptor	3.75% to 18.75% Power	Offense
Alpha Compy	7.5% Power	Utility
Deep Crow Hatchling	7.5% Power	Offense
Kenku Archer	3.75% Power, 3.75% Crit Sev	Offense, Utility
​Golden Bulette Pup	7.5% Outgoing Heal	Defense, Offense, Utility
Wolf	7.5% Crit Sev	Offense, Utility
Dog	3.75% Power, 3.75% Crit Sev	Offense
Linu La'neral	3.75% Forte, 3.75% Outgoing Heal	Defense, Offense, Utility
Cunning Mimic	3.75% Forte, 3.75% Outgoing Heal	Offense
Fawn of Shiallia	3.75% Crit, 3.75% Power	Offense, Utility
Ghost	3.75% Crit, 3.75% Power	Offense, Utility
Quickling	3.75% Outgoing Heal, 3.75% Crit	Offense, Utility
Soradiel	3.75% Crit, 3.75% Crit Sev	Defense
Drizzt Do'Urden	3.75% Crit, 3.75% Crit Sev	Offense
Polar Bear Cub	3.75% Outgoing Heal, 3.75% Defense	Defense, Utility
Neverember Guard	3.75% Outgoing Heal, 3.75% Awareness	Offense
Hawk	3.75% Crit, 3.75% Crit Sev	Offense
Lighfoot Thief	3.75% Crit, 3.75% Crit Sev	Offense

Conclusion

Hopefully you found something in this guide that you found helpful. I'm sure there are improvements that can be made. If you're a member of Owlbears or our alliance, please feel free to reach out to me via discord or in game with any questions or concerns.

Cheers!

~charlotti

FAQ

What do mean by stats and ratings?

The terminology that Neverwinter uses is inconsistent and confusing, in my opinion. This is because we have two numbers - the normal stats that come on gear and a percent stat that includes stats from ratings and all other bonuses. In general, I try to use "stat rating" or "ratings" when I'm taking the kind of stat displayed in the left column of your character sheet, and stats or percent stats for the numbers displayed in the right column.

Can paladins heal the Ghosts on the 2nd Boss in MToS?

Yes. If you animation cancel your Cure Wounds power, you can heal the ghosts so fast clerics will say it's not fair how easy it is (true story). To do this, hold down the trigger for your Cure Wounds at will and quickly tap the RB. You'll likely lose your mark on the tank, so make sure to put it back on them when you're done. You can also use your shield to animation cancel. It's much slower, but it has the advantage that it won't mess up your mark on the tank.