Paladin?

Hiya,

I'm a returning player...was still a newbie when I stopped playing so bear with me. I'm considering making a paladin. The idea just seems interesting to me. I've only ever played a dragon. Any tips as to how I should allocate training points? I know I can always reset points, but I'd rather start out strong instead of fumbling around.
I plan on starting as a warrior and starting cleric at 20.

Just keep in mind you're mainly a melee/tanking class, with access to some basic heals. Even if you were to continue to level Cleric alongside Paladin, you can still only cast Revitalize and Improved Revitalize healing spells (so make sure you tech them with Heal Recycle and Cleanse imho).

You get most of the good melee abilities like Cleave, Critical Strike, Multi-strike and Melee Flurry, which are very handy, as well as the Paladin's Life Strike (which may or may not share a timer with other attacks like Cleave). I haven't played as Paladin in a long while, but I always enjoyed going with the 2-handed sword setup, rather than the 1-handed plus shield, but you might want to try both and see which you prefer.

If you like the 2-handed sword setup, you might also want to consider leveling Beserker (at some stage) to boost your attacks. Beserker will increase your strength, 2-hand slash skill and armor use.

As for training points, probably invest in your chosen attack skill. Some into evasion is a common strategy as well.

If you want to get really creative, Paladin can use Nature, Spirit and Blight spells IF you were to level another school to get those skills. E.g. Druid and Spiritist would give all 3 of those skills. Spirit has a nice AoE Life steal, Nature has some nice AoE spells and stuns, while Blight has some DoT's and debuffs.

Hope that helped, good luck and have fun :)

As Hallucin8 said, you don't get many of the heals from Life; the spells you do get that non-Mystic fighters don't are:
Mystic Blaze (can be used to pull),
Cure Poison,
Purify (nice for removing Blight debuffs), and
Resurrection.

Paladin differs from the other tank warriors in two ways; party buffing and protection, and fighting the Withered Aegis undead. Paladins can use all the Augmentation spells, which are pretty nice. If you're going to focus on fighting the WA, Blight's Resistance and Ward spells would help a lot. The Blight spells Rust and Soften help increase your party's damage, too.

If you decide to add Blight, there are two ways to go for maximum Blight: Spiritist, or Shaman. Spiritist probably fits the noble Paladin role better, since Shaman focuses on debuffing opponents. Spiritist gives Ethereal Armor (very helpful!) and armor-ignoring damage spells as well as the lifesteals hallucin8 mentioned. But Shaman gives a number of masterable stat stealing skills, and Shaman will give you the Instant Heal skills (as will Druid), to help your Paladin's healing aspect.

If you go for all 3 of Spirit, Blight, and Nature you can play Blood Mage and Shaman rather than Spiritist and Druid for maximum skill scores. Blood mage puts you on more of a 'caster path; it's the only Mystic 'caster that gets good Power (9). While you're a Druid, you'll have good party-buffing skills, though.

Paladin strength gains are mediocre (8) -- Berserker will give you the best possible Evasion (10) in addition to the Strength 10, Armor Use 10, and 2-H sword 11. If you multiclass, there's not a lot of benefit in putting points into Evasion unless you've got a good base score. A Paladin-zerker will have good heavy armor, dodge, parry, and block. With heals, that's about as tanky as it gets.

To actually address your question: put your training points into one attack skill, and into Shield if you're doing sword and board. You'll want to boost your Strength a lot, but boost it with teched gear instead of TPs. I'd skip points in Evasion, unless you multiclass to Berserker or Spiritist and get mastered Dodge skill. Instead, put TP into Health, after combat skills.

Most efficient way to get
Health: TP and Health jewelry;
Skills: TP and teched gear
Stats: teched gear (so Health/Armor + Stat tech jewelry)

Hope this helps.