ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, having seen the dual-staff reaver do such interesting things, it's occurred to me that a staff paladin makes a lot of sense. Push lots into magic, relatively little into strength, don't waste skill points on weapon mastery (or perhaps just juggle a few points through it), wield a short starstaff of light damage (once you get your first startstaff) and probably use the chat that boosts light damage. It would severely weaken the shield-based attacks that seem like they're the paladin's go-to damage source, but it would make your magic-based attacks significantly stronger, and you even have blunt thrust to stun with (and defensive stance is probably more useful for you than for the alchemist, too).

If nothing else, not having to burn a whole lot of points into str would free some up for pushing dex. Between shield, dex, and defensive stance, you're in a pretty solid place for defense tanking, to go with all the other kinds of tanking you have.

I'm putting this out here because I've no real idea of how to play a sun paladin, and I suspect I don't have the temperment. I was hoping that someone else might try the experiment, and come back to tell us all how it turned out.

While I've thought of staff paladins before, I highly suspect they wouldn't work very well. Comparing them to reavers, one of the big problems is that sun-pals only have one spellpower damage tree...and it's 1.0 Celestial/Sun. Sun also has rather crappy damage because it's mostly used to generate positive. Compare that to the reaver who has a lot of attack magic at much better category multipliers and...well...

Compared to what you have to put in to make it work, I just don't think they'd be able to leverage the extra spellpower well enough. That said, it -would- be nice to have the extra healing power, and Defensive Posture on an already tanky class. Though not pumping Str would mean skipping Irresistable Sun...

It works absolutely awesomely.
My latest (and only) Sun Paladin winner was a Draconian Sun Paladin that used a shortstaff.
Link to his character sheet is here:
http://te4.org/characters/62972/tome/141dd0c7-f7fd-43b4-9b6c-ef7f5b2c2720

Your points mostly go into Magic (Damage/skills/staffs/spellpower), then as needed between Strength (talents/armor) & Constitution (health/thick skin)

Damage is not a problem once you get a merchant randart staff (I got lucky with a magewarrior's, magelord's, infernal, protective), but until you find a good shortstaff it is often better to 'cheese' three points into weapon mastery and use a high-tier sword, as good shortstaffs are hard to come by.

By going for light damage and magic, these become much more viable for your Sun Paladin:
Crusade is almost as good as assault when your staff is set to light (2 hits of ~170% light base damage, both can crit)
Brandish has a high cost, but deals moderate damage in a radius 5, lighting the area up, in addition to 1 hit of ~150%
Retribution is an awesome shield that turns into a room clearing force of destruction, easily reaching ~800 damage in a huge radius
Celestial/Light (the entire tree!) is even more powerful!
Shield of Light gives better healing for more survivability.

Don't bother for Celestial/Sun. It is terrible for damage, and no damage modifier can save it. The only partly useful skill is sunburst for the blinding effect.

For chants, I liked the first one for the massive saves, but I suppose the light damage boosting one could have also been just as good.


And finally, don't ever forget these:
Block
Assault
Riposte

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When in trouble / or in doubt / run in circles / scream and shout.

Did you have issues finding shortstaves in general (let alone good ones)? If you had to choose between a mediocre early-game shortstaff and a stronger weapon, would you use the weapon until (if) you found a better shortstaff?

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I really wanted to use a shortstaff on my Sun Paladin winner but I couldn't find anything better than a rare t4 that didn't even compare to the 1h weapons I was getting. On the other hand, many other characters had much better luck than my Sun Paladin. I wouldn't count on finding a good shortstaff so be prepared to stick with a regular weapon.

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My wiki page, which contains a guide and resource compilation and class tier list.

I've just won Nightmare Roguelike game with short staff Sun Paladin (it was my first win, never even reached Dreadfall before; used addon to unlock Sun Paladin). Here's my character.

I've found my first short staff in Angolwen shop (still has it inventory), then found literally 0 of them until High Peak, where I found 2 randart short staves. Even then, it was performing much better than normal weapon due to 2.5% proc damage/acc - procs were my main source of damage, and with 69 accuracy that's 172,5% more damage. I was hitting for ~1.3k damage on bump and over 2.5k damage with certain attacks.

IMO, if you can find decent t3 staff early on, roll with them.

When you have 50% or more crit chance, 5/5 in the sun ray thing is actually pretty sweet. It'll do a few hundred damage, and while that's not much compared to the thousands you'll do with each melee talent, it is enough to pick off lesser enemies and ranged monsters as a free action during your normal attack routine.