Paladin Guide for Lost Ark

Paladin is a support class with a simple playstle centered around buff uptime and management. A Paladin's identity centers around generating Piety to activate Holy Aura to buff your party or Sacred Executioner to increase individual damage output. While it primarily focuses on being a support, Paladin can have moderate damage output through the Judgment. Almost all Paladins will be playing with Blessed Aura, as such, it is up to the Paladin to increase the damage of other players, offer sources of healing, and reduce incoming damage with buffs and shields.

Your Piety will fill as your attacks hit a target and passively over time. Some abilities will be dedicated to generating more Piety than others and will be necessary when trying to effectively maintain buffs, use Identity skills to support a team or increase damage output. A Paladin will typically cycle between abilities like Heavenly Blessings and Wrath of God to increase damage for their party and generate large amounts of Piety. Abilities such as Holy Protection and Godsent Law will be used proactively to help with damage mitigation. Typically, a Paladin's Holy Skills will buff allies, or be a significant source of Piety generation. Its Punish Skills, such as Executor's Sword or Holy Sword will be present for damage output, staggers, and counters. Paladins offer a diverse array of buffs to capture the essence of what it means to be a support, but they also break out of the standard healer stereotype, as they are very naturally tanky due to higher defensive stats.

Most of your time spent playing Paladin will be with Blessed Aura. This will cause your Holy Aura to heal and reduce incoming damage, while also increasing damage of those within its radius. The main focus of the Paladin is to buff party members. You will be responsible for increasing damage of the party, reducing incoming damage, and healing anyone who has lost a significant amount of health. As a support you will need to know the mechanics of a fight so that you can optimize your buffs. It is critical to amplify group damage during burst windows where bosses are vulnerable. It is just as important to know when there will be times of high group damage so that you can prepare to prevent it, or when certain mechanics will apply detrimental debuffs to your party members so that they can be removed or mitigated. A Paladin has a low skill floor and can be easy to play as a new player, and its skill ceiling is arguably the lowest amongst the three support classes. The skill gap between players rests upon positioning and understanding of buff management.

Judgment is mainly used when doing solo content such as Chaos Dungeons or Thronespire. It will increase the damage of all Punishment skills, increase the duration of Sacred Executioner by 100%, and increase the Piety generation of all Punishment skills by 100%. It is extremely rare to see a Paladin in endgame who is playing in a party as a DPS, but it is possible. It strays away from the norm of group buffs, shields, and healing. Instead, it looks to take hard hitting Punishment abilities to maximize the Paladin's sub-par damage potential to the fullest extent possible. Your rotation will center around generating Piety and maintaing as much uptime with Sacred Executioner as possible to increase DPS.