written in game version 1.7.4
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Welcome to my Sun Paladin and Fallen guide. Feel free to ask anything in the comments.
Content of the Guide
I., Introduction
II., Race choice
III., Escort setup and weapon choice
IV., Stat points
V., Talents, build order
VI., Inscriptions
VII., Items
VIII., How to Play
I., Introduction
In my opinion, Sun Paladin is a very strong and very fun class and the Fallen evolution is also a very strong and very fun prodigy. Choosing Fallen will drastically change our game play, so this will be a very unique build.
Our early game will be relatively weaker, but approximately around level 27-30, the build can offer very strong mobility, defense and detrimental effect handling.
Our damage output will be relatively lower, what will significantly change from the point when we will have access to the Font of Sacrifice. This Fallen build is a complex character, therefore it requires more parameters than a simple spell/mindcaster or a simple weapon user.
Because of this, I strongly advise to side with the Assassin Lord in order to have later the Font of Sacrifice. You have to have the Cults DLC for this.
Because I am playing on the hardest difficulty, I am used the “Select your escorts” addon and also used Wizard Staff as a mainhand weapon. You can ignore these, if you are playing on lower difficulties.
II., Race choice
Ogre, because of Writ Large.
Writ Large is crazy strong with any class that has cooldown altering mechanism, and Fallen have multiple. Suncloak is a huge spell cooldown reduction, and Self-Destruction is another 50% all cooling down reduction. Ogre racials are spells, so they are benefiting from both.
Continuously having Writ Large effect is a huge power boost and we can also frequently remove the inscription saturation effects by activating it. This will result in fully maintainable inscription rotation.
All of our runes will cool down at 3 per 1 turn rate, and our runes will already have a really low cooldown due to the spell cooldown reduction from Suncloak (and possibly from some items).
We do not want to ogrewield at all. That would require 4 more generic points in Grisly Constitution and we are already very strict on generic points. Furthermore we do not want to have a % nerf to our spellpower and accuracy. The damage proc reduction would be also bad for us in the early-mid game.
III., Escort setup and weapon choice
I used the “Select your escorts” addon, you can download this from the official website.
Unfortunately in ToME – totally randomly – some classes have access to a tracking talent (without spending a category point for it), but some classes do not.
Celestials do not have Cunning – Survival as unlocked, and I do not want to pay a price of 1 category point just to have a reliable tracking ability.
In order to have a tracking ability, I set multiple Temporal Explorer escorts and I just chose a +1 level in Precognition talent always as a reward.
In order to enhance my mobility, offense and defense: I chose an early Lone Alchemist escort too and at level 10, I unlocked Stone Alchemy category.
So, we would like to have at least 2 escorts in the first 2 Tier1 zones, before we reach character level 4. This way, we can easily save them and have Precognition and the Stone Alchemy tree as locked from the start.
For my main weapon, I chose to use wizard staves. This is because:
a, I want to have as high spellpower as just possible
b, I want to have an alternative damage option that is non-weapon based,
therefore bypasses defense and armour (Channel Staff)
IV., Stat points
Magic > Strength & Dexterity, rest can go into Cunning.
We will level up our Magic and Strength together, with approximately a 60-40% ratio (depends on items too of course).
Once we reached a nice Strength breakpoint for Wave of Power (39 or 52), we will level up our Dexterity instead of Strength. In my opinion, hitting enemies is more important than dealing a bit more damage.
If we are playing on the hardest difficulty, we would like to be as effective as we just can. Building for primary Magic instead of Strength will offer us some extra benefits:
a, Negating enemies:
Spellpower is way more important to have than physical power. We are using spellpower as an apply power for stoning, silencing and blinding.
Meanwhile we are using our physical power only for stunning and for the pulling with Black Hole Gravity effects. These are way inferior effects compared to the former ones.
b, Damage reduction and Healing:
We are using our spellpower for all the shielding talents (Weapon of Light, Doom Spiral, Bathe in Light, Barrier) and for our healing ones too (Healing Light, Bathe in Light).
c, Non-weapon damage:
Having a reasonable amount of non-weapon damage is essential. Several enemies will simply negate our weapon damage.
Our damaging spells’ (Collapse, Channel Staff, Mark of the Vampire, Sun Ray, Path of the Sun) damage are scaling with our Magic or spellpower.
d, Spell cooldown reduction:
Our whole build is centered around cooldown reduction. Suncloaks spell cooldown reduction is also scaling with spellpower. Spell cooldown reduction is a very strong mechanism, the more we have, the stronger we are.
Prioritizing Magic / spellpower over Strength / physical power results in a way more versatile and way more tanky character, at a cost of less weapon based damage.
And what is the cost of building for Magic / spellpower and using a Wizard Staff instead of a “normal” weapon in our mainhand?
Less weapon damage.
This is a price that I like to pay for the former benefits.
We would like to have Strength mainly for our Wave of Powers range.
We would like to have Dexterity mainly for the accuracy.
The remaining points will go into Cunning for a little bit more generic critical chance. We are using two type of criticals, so this is also useful.
Unfortunately, Fallen evolution has a 50 Willpower requirement and we do not want to spend our stat points on Willpower.
Willpower is a useless stat for us, it’s just needed as a requirement of learning prodigy and talents.
Therefore, we will collect items that gives us extra Willpower through the game play and we will equip them temporarily when we are leveling up and becoming Fallen.
V., Talents, build order
Category point order:
We have several options here. I am using bold for what I unlocked.
Generally, Stone Alchemy is very strong so if you have that early, you should unlock it.
After Stone Alchemy, our strongest option at early-mid game is having more runes.
Once we have at least 5 runes, we can consider unlocking either or both Dark Sun or Crimson Templar.
Level 10: unlocking Stone Alchemy (or a new inscription)
Level 20: new inscription
Level 34: new inscription (or unlocking Dark Sun or Crimson Templar)
Wyrm Bile: unlocking Dark Sun or Crimson Templar (or a new inscription)
We will unlock and upgrade Staff Combat from Angolwen staff shop for 1250 gold totally.
Talent point order:
Again, this is a bit flexible. +1 point here, -1 point there does not really matters in most cases.
As a Sun Paladin
I will calculate here with:
+2 generic points from level 10 from the Arena
+1 class and generic points from level 25 from the Heart of the Sandworm Queen
but of course these bonuses can be obtained a bit earlier or later.
Note: the alchemist quest rewards won’t be included here, so the +2 generic and class points can alter some things, feel free to spend them as you wish.
Level 1:
Shield Pummel – 1
Weapon of Light – 1
Sun Ray – 2
Heavy Armour Training – 2
(Combat Accuracy – 1)
(Weapon Mastery – 1)
Chant Acolyte – 1
Healing Light – 1
L2: Sun Ray – 3
L3: ---
L4: Riposte – 1, Path of the Sun – 1, Chant Illuminate – 1, Bathe in Light – 1
L5: Wave of Power – 1, Path of the Sun – 2
L6: Path of the Sun – 3
L7: Path of the Sun – 4
L8: Shield Slam – 1, Chant Adept – 1, Barrier – 1
L9: Path of the Sun – 5
L10: Weapon of Light – 2, Weapon of Wrath – 1, Extract Gems – 1, Imbue Item – 1, Gem Portal – 1, Bathe in Light – 2, Bathe in Light – 3
L11: ---
L12: Assault – 1, Second Life – 1, Stone Touch – 1, Providence – 1
L13: Second Life – 2, Stone Touch – 2
L14: Weapon of Light – 3, Stone Touch – 3
L15: Weapon of Light – 4, Second Life – 3
L16: Weapon of Light – 5, Bathe in Light – 4
L17: Sun’s Vengeance – 1, Ogric Wrath – 1
L18: Suncloak – 1, Grisly Constitution – 1
L19: Second Life – 4, Scar-Scripted Flesh – 1
L20: Second Life – 5, Suncloak – 2
L21: Wave of Power – 2
L22: Wave of Power – 3
L23: Suncloak – 3
L24: Writ Large – 1
Fallen
Level 25:
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L26: Sun Ray – 4, Writ Large – 3
L27: Wave of Power – 4, Writ Large – 4
L28: Suncloak – 4, Writ Large – 5
L29: Brutalize – 2, Providence – 2
L30: Brutalize – 3, Suncloak – 5
L31: Blood Rage – 1, Providence – 3
L32: Blood Bath – 1, Self-Destruction – 2
L33: Blood Thirst – 1, Self-Judgement – 2
L34: Blood Bath – 2, Providence – 4
L35: Blood Bath – 3 & 4
L36: Blood Bath – 5, Chant Adept – 2
L37: Blood Rage – 2, Chant Adept – 3
L38: Wave of Power – 5, Chant Adept – 4
L39: Final Sunbeam – 1, Chant Adept – 5
L40: Final Sunbeam – 2 & 3
L41: Final Sunbeam – 4, Providence – 5
L42: Final Sunbeam – 5, Stone Touch – 4
L43: Sun’s Vengeance – 2, Stone Touch – 5
L44: Gem Portal – 2
L45: ---
L46: Barrier – 2
L47: Barrier – 3
L48: Barrier – 4
L49: Gem Portal – 3
L50: We have 1 category point, 12 class points and 3 generic points left
Feel free to unlock either Dark Sun, Crimson Templar or a sixth inscription.
Generic-wise, you can improve your weapon damage now and/or Gem Portal.
With Dark Sun, I went for 5, 1, 1, 5.
With Crimson Templar, I would go for 3, 4, 1 or 5, 0 or 5.
Of course if you will unlock both of them, this will alter the class point distribution.
Level 50:
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Description of the talents:
Note: I won’t gonna describe here
- Two-Handed Assault tree, because we are using shields before being Fallen
- Combat Veteran tree, because it gives irrelevant benefits
- Combat Techniques, because do not worth the category point to unlock it
- Survival, because do not worth the category point to unlock it
- Crusader, Guardian and Radiance, because we won’t gonna use them at all
- Gloom, because do not worth the category point to unlock it
Class Talents
1., Technique – Shield Offense
Very strong offensive category. Counterstrike is reducing enemy defense with our Block value (it’s not in the description!) and doubling our weapon damage instances. We will go with a shield and use this tree as a Sun Paladin.
a, Shield Pummel: Useful because it tries to apply STUN on the enemy, if the second shield attack hits. The stun checks stun/freeze immunity, and makes an apply power vs physical save check.
The apply power of this stun is very unique, only this one talent uses this: is is our base accuracy, but instead of our Dexterity, our Strength is added to it and then it’s rescaled.
b, Riposte: Useful because we can apply the Counterstrike effect even on an incomplete block. This is essential if we are playing on the hardest difficulty. Riposte also increasing the number of stacks in our Counterstrike effects, so it will be useful for more weapon hits.
c, Shield Slam: Useful because we can apply the Block effect on us another time in a rotation, meanwhile we are also attacking the enemy.
d, Assault: If the first shield attack hits, there will be 2 weapon attacks and these are automatically criticals. Very huge damage output, our main damaging talent in the early game.
2., Celestial – Combat
This tree has talents that are very useful through the whole play, one of our core trees.
a, Weapon of Light: Useful mainly for the early game, both defensively and offensively. That's why we are leveling this up relatively early. Extra damage and very effective defense, sustain this continuously.
b, Wave of Power: Useful even at the earlier stages, but this will be our main attack after we falling down. We can reach a 1 turn cooling down on this talent, so we can use it every turn.
Strength breakpoints for the range:
19 Strength – 4 range
28 Strength – 5 range
39 Strength – 6 range
52 Strength – 7 range
66 Strength – 8 range
82 Strength – 9 range
100 Strength – 10 range
120 Strength – 11 range
142 Strength – 12 range
166 Strength – 13 range
191 Strength – 14 range
218 Strength – 15 range
c, Weapon of Wrath: Just for unlock.
d, Second Life: Very important life saver layer, especially at the early stages. Sustain this continuously. When a damage instance would reduce our life below 1, the sustain deactivates and nullifies that damage instance. Our life will be set to 1 and then we receiving a healing.
The healed value is scaling with talent level and with our maximum life too.
3., Celestial – Sun
Another of our core trees.
a, Sun Ray: Useful for damage at the early stages and for BLIND enemies in AoE through the whole game. Use this frequently, because it will be instant once we start critting.
b, Path of the Sun: A wonderful mobility talent, that is very underrated. We can use this to close-in to enemies, to escape from enemies, to position ourselves at the edge of our Bathe in Light (to prevent enemies to enter) and even to deal damage to enemies. The damage can be a spell critical on casting.
c, Sun’s Vengeance: Small buffs to our spell and physical criticals what is nice, we are using both. But the Sun’s Vengeance effect is just great. We will use our Sun Ray at instant speed at every other turn at the late game.
d, Suncloak: One of the strongest talents in the game. With a ~46% uptime, we can have this effect and this will make us approximately 3-4 times stronger vs when we do not have it. It gives 3 very strong buffs: spell speed, spell cooldown reduction and flat damage cap. The first two has spellpower and talent level scaling so these are just really effective from mid-game but the flat damage cap only scales with talent level, so for the early stages we would like to have this talent for the flat damage cap. Once, when we have nice amount of spellpower, the spell cooldown reduction is crazy strong.
4., Celestial – Darkside
a, Brutalize: A low cooldown STUN talent that also tries to halve enemy cut immunity. We do not care about enemy cut immunity at all. The stun can be nice is some cases, but when we are Fallen, we have way better disabling options. The stun checks stun/freeze immunity and unfortunately a physical power vs physical save check.
b, Lunacy: Just for unlock.
c, Flee the Sun: A fully controlled teleport talent with 8 range at level 5 that also deals light damage in radius 1 at the destination point (can be a spell critical). Useful for continuous repositioning (e.g. in the edge of our Bathe in Light) and to maintain Out of Phase. Be careful, the damage has friendlyfire.
d, Final Sunbeam: A wonderful late game talent. One of the reason (the smaller reason) why I chose Hidden Resources. At late game, with nice amount of positive energy, we can deal a very huge weapon damage within a radius 8-10 area. Very huge, I mean it can even reach ~600% weapon damage. With Hidden Resources, it’s nice to integrate this into our offensive rotation. With this talent, I could deal ~10 000 damage weapon hits, even with my 125-130 weapon damage staff and with my little dagger. If we have Hidden Resources (or Highborn’s Bloom), we are not losing any positive energy by casting this, and we won’t gonna have the temporary effect that prevents gaining positive energy for 5 turns.
5., Cursed – Bloodstained
Every talent point here gives us 2% damage reduction for our Self-Judgement damage smearing effect, so it’s nice to have some points here.
This build is not focusing on bleeding at all, so these talents are just nice supplements.
a, Blood Rush: A wonderful 1 pointer! A range 8 teleport-attack that passes through the terrain, so does not need line of sight. Great for repositioning ourselves by attacking a weaker enemy, great for traveling quickly in maze-like zones while killing enemies quickly. Great for maintaining Out of Phase and close-in to non-melee enemies too. (The bleed here unfortunately do not takes weapon critical into consideration, but in the next patch this will be fixed, but we do not care about the bleed)
b, Blood Rage: Can be useful if we could land a huge bleeding on a dude with Final Sunbeam. So use your huge weapon hit talent first and then multiply the bleeding with this talent.
c, Blood Bath: We will sustain this continuously. Nice to apply DoT effect on enemies after weapon hits.
d, Blood Thirst: Gives us a little lifesteal effect. It’s not that useful.
6., Celestial – Dark Sun
a, Collapse: A really useful map effect, we can maintain even 2-3 when we have Suncloak. It deals physical damage in a 2 radius area and tries to pull enemies in the epicenter at each turn. The pulling checks for knockback immunity and makes a physical power vs physical save check. We are not relying on the pulling, we are using this for damage. I reached ~900 physical damage per turn with my Collapses, so it can be significant at the late game.
On the hardest difficulty, several enemies will have crazy defense value, crazy armour value or even crazy Crit Shrug.
That means, they will negate our weapon damage and even can negate our Critical Multiplier (e.g. if we are critting with a damaging spell).
Map effects are bypassing enemies’ Crit Shrug, because we are not critting against them. We just critting when we are casting a spell and the map effect will just deal an increased amount of damage because of our crit.
Very good for crowd control and AoE damage when we are fighting with many enemies at once.
Note: the targeting has an oversight, we can place these inside a wall too, so we can damage enemies through walls with it (I did not used this oversight, it’s not that relevant).
Note: the description is currently bugged, it shows only half the damage. So the effect deals twice the damage that you see at the description.
b, Devourer Stance: The healing part is mostly useless, we just rarely take life damage at the late game. I do not like the idea to pull enemies closer to me with my Wave of Power and Final Sunbeam, I always go for safety.
Note: the effect has a crazy abuse with Final Sunbeam, if we can pull the enemy, we can hit it multiple times with our Final Sunbeam (maximum 5 times if the dude is at 10 tiles from us). Yes, this means, we can even deal ~3000% weapon damage to multiple enemies withing radius 10 in AoE (and also apply a ~3360% weapon damage bleeding on them after this).
I did not used this mechanism, it’s not needed at all and it’s not safe to utilize this on the hardest difficulty.
c, Singularity Armor: A nice 1 pointer and we will sustain this continuously. The damage conversion and projectile slowing are irrelevant, but halving enemies knockback immunity is nice for our Collapses.
d, Doom Spiral: A very very strong talent. A radius 2 AoE weapon hit that can hit enemies twice. It has low cooldown, so it fits well into our offensive rotation, but the thing is: this talent is also a wonderful defensive talent.
The damage shield is – similar to Barrier – can be a spell critical, so we can reach really high shields with this, especially if an enemy is next to us. I gained ~2600-2800 damage shields at late game from this talent. Even if there are no enemies around us, this talent is a bit weaker Barrier. We will use this continuously.
7., Cursed – Crimson Templar
a, Shared Agony: A nice defensive sustain, if we could make an enemy bleed. Unfortunately it triggers just after Self-Judgement, but least it’s protecting our damage shields.
b, Splatter Sigils: The best talent in this tree in my opinion. We can simply deploy a Circle around us (like Anorithils do) that applies damage and BLIND at every game turn. Both the damage and the duration can be a spell critical, so we can have many many many of these at a time. This blind is NOT the normal blind effect what is physical effect. This is a magical blind. The effect checks blind immunity and makes a spellpower vs spellsave check too.
Why I am saying, this talent is very strong?
Several enemies have continuous effect clears and some can have this even passively. E.g.: Unflinching Resolve, Vigilance or Providence.
Because the circle reapplies a blind each game turn, this just negates these mechanisms.
Furthermore, we can bypass enemies’ Unflinching Resolve with this and we can simply disarm them. Because blind have higher priority than disarm, always the blind will be removed by Unflinching Resolve (but it will be also always reapplied). So our disarm from Acid Wave will stay at the annoying warrior dudes.
Note: the visual effect is currently bugged and it shows a 1 tile smaller circle. But this is just a visual bug, the circle has the normal radius.
c, Mark of the Vampire: It can be an alternative for Collapse as a non-weapon damage source. It can also reach similar damage as Collapse, but Collapse it just simply better. We can have more Collapse at a time and Collapse is a map effect, so cannot be cleared like this.
d, Rosebloom: I did not found any use of this talent, however I like the concept and I can see the potential in it, if you are not playing on the hardest difficulty.
Unfortunately, when we are hunted, there will be many damaging map effects and AoE damage talents everywhere, so enemies won’t gonna stay asleep at all.
Generic Talents
8., Racial – Ogre
a, Ogric Wrath: With a bit higher strength, we can maintain this effect even at 1 point. Nice for +20% stun/freeze immunity and for a little extra crit chance and multiplier, but it’s situational.
b, Grisly Constitution: Little bonus in our inscriptions’ scalings. Not much.
c, Scar-Scripted Flesh: Nice to have this passive an an extra, but it’s not fully reliable. We can crit also 4 times per turn with Wave of Power, so even a second point could be nice here at the late game.
d, Writ Large: The reason why we chose Ogre as a race. A very unique and very strong beneficial effect. Similar to Self-Destruction (or Invigorate), it will improve the cooling down of our inscriptions with +1 per turn. So, with Self-Destruction only, our inscriptions will cool down 2 per turn, with Self-Destruction and Writ Large, they will cool down 3 per turn.
Applying the effect also clears both inscription saturation effects from us and this makes our inscription rotation FULLY MAINTAINABLE.
9., Celestial – Chants
a, Chant Acolyte: Chants are “just” effect cleaners for me. But they are very good in what they are doing.
b, Chant Illuminate: Useful to have a little mana (if taking Stone Alchemy) and stamina regeneration, especially for the early stages.
c, Chant Adept: The main talent here that I like to level up to make our chants clearing 2 effects.
d, Chant Radiant: Useless for us. Positive energy management is not a problem at all, and we do not want to be hit by enemies. Light damage is not our main damage type also.
10., Celestial – Light
a, Healing Light: A wonderful 1 pointer. It’s not in the description, but the healing can be a spell critical. We will use it a lot in the early-mid game.
b, Bathe in Light: Another wonderful talent. With Path of the Sun (and later, our teleport too) we can set up this map effect, then position ourselves that way to stand in the edge of the effect and bodyblocking enemies to enter. The healing & shielding can be a spell critical and both affected by out healing factor, and the map effect also improves our healing factor, what can be also a spell critical (with diminishing returns). This talent is one of our core talents from early-mid game. This will compensate the self hits from Self-Destruction. At late game, it’s just better to use Barrier and Doom Spiral and just have Bathe in light as an emergency option.
c, Barrier: A late game talent, what is also useful at the early-mid game. It’s a weak damage shield, but with very long duration. We have Weapon of Light to make even a weaker damage shield way stronger, so use this even at the early-mid game.
Once, we reached full spell critical chance, Barrier starts really shining. At late game, I gained ~2600+ damage shields from this talent and I just leveled it up to level 4. And we can even have a 2 turn cooling down on this talent.
d, Providence: Another really strong talent. At early game, it will helps a bit in balancing our detrimental effects, while at late game we can have this almost continuously. Even without Suncloak, we can have a 12 turn cooling down here with an 8+1 turn duration.
11., Celestial – Dirges
a, Dirge Acolyte: We will learn this when we falling down. I like to sustain Famine at early to compensate a bit the possible life loss from the self hits.
Bit later, the Pestilence is better, when we have higher spellpower, so more likely we will continuous have damage shields.
At late game, Conquest is the best because we already having crazy damage shields. The extra 100 energy per turn is nice little bonus.
b, Dirge Intoner: Weak effects, so do not learn it.
c, Dirge Adept: I found this also not useful. We are strict on generic points.
d, Dirge Nihilist: Flat damage armour is not what we want on the hardest difficulty.
12., Cursed – Hatred
An incredibly strong tree even with very low point investment.
a, Self-Sacrifice: We start with a point in here once we have fallen, it instantly generates 8 hate t a cost of a little bleeding (irrelevant cost). Basically we just need hate for Blood Rush, so we just activate this talent if we would like to use Blood Rush and we are out of hate.
b, Self-Loathing: A little generic crit chance bonus, and a crit multiplier bonus what scales with our actual hate. Just for unlock.
c, Self-Destruction: One of the strongest talents in the game, one of our core talents. We would like to sustain this continuously, because the power it provides is crazy. All of our non-fixed cooldown talents are cooling down +1 per turn (even prodigies like Hidden Resources, Cauterize and also our Charm talents), all of our detrimental effects (non-other types) are reducing their duration +1 per turn. The 14-11% max life self hit (it’s not damage, it’s like Static Field) per turn can be easily handled with our multiple damage shields and Bathe in Light.
d, Self-Judgement: Another very strong talent. It’s triggers on callbackOnTakeDamage, after stormshield. This passive protects us against huge damage instances, it negates ~40-55% (depends on talent level) of a damage instance if it exceeds 29-15% of our maximum life, and applies an other type of bleeding effect on use with the negated amount.
So, this is a “damage smearing” effect, we will take this extra damage, but not immediately and also in smaller portions per turn. Why is it good then?
It protects against one-shots very effectively and we can continuously have damage shields and can have healing per turn too. Our damage shields are reducing the bleeding (it’s like Self-Destructions self hit). Furthermore, we will have talent point in Bloodstained talents, therefore we are building up a 2-40% bleed power reduction, what is applied to any bleed on us, even on this one.
13., Spell – Stone Alchemy
a, Extract Gems: Just for early game extra gold and creating gems for alchemist gems.
b, Imbue Item: Just for unlock (but we can imbue a citrine into our robe
).c, Gem Portal: One of the strongest mobility talents in the game. It’s controlled, it passes through terrain, it has a very low cooldown, it has a high range. Probability travel is not a teleport mechanism, but it’s also disabled on vault walls. But we can use on any kind of terrain: walls, trees, even on non-diggable walls. We need alchemist gems just for this talent, but we will have thousands of these, so this is not a problem.
d, Stone Touch: One of the strongest debuffs in the game, if not the strongest. Yes, it makes an instakill immunity, a stone immunity and a stun/freeze immunity check too, along with a spellpower vs spellsave check, but it’s still incredibly strong. Many of our enemies won’t gonna be able to act at all. Be aware, stoned is a stun effect, therefore it can be removed by Unflinching Resolve. Also by Vigilance (or Providence, Cleansing Flames if the dude already activated these).
Even with 20% spell cooldown reduction from items, we will have a 12 turn cooldown talent, what will cool down at 6 turns. And the effect has a duration of 6 turns, so we can keep enemies in a stone-lock. With Suncloak on, we can stone-lock into two directions.
This talent is multi-tasking, it’s:
a, defensive: stoned actors cannot act, so we are safe
b, offensive: we can safely deal damage to them and also if we deal at least 30% of the dudes max life in one damage instance, the instance will be 100% of it’s max life (+1), so we will very likely kill it. Basically this can mean a 3.33 x damage multiplier.
14., Technique – Combat Training
a, Heavy Armour Training: As a Sun Paladin, we starting with 2 points here, what is nice for using shields. I would refund back 1 point once we are Fallen, but unfortunately this talent is unlearnable.
b, Combat Accuracy: 1 point at the start is essential here for the early game, and I was always aware to make this point refundable. You can put more here early if you do not find Dexterity / accuracy on items, just be sure these points are refundable. Later, these points are unnecessary.
c, Weapons Mastery: 1 point is enough here for the most of the play, you should just start leveling up this talent at the later game.
Of course, if you plan on using a Wizard Staff like I did, make sure this point is refundable, and remove it, once you found a one handed staff and you bought Staff Combat.
15., Spell – Staff Combat
If you like to use a Wizard Staff too, buy this tree from Angolwen shop for 500 gold (do not pay the 100 gold), when you managed to find a one handed staff. Later, also improve it for 750 gold.
a, Channel Staff: An extra damage source what is non-weapon based. Okay, the amount of the damage is weapon based, but the damage itself is not a weapon attack.
This is a simple spell, what creates a projectile (e.g. like Soul Rot or Shock). The actual damage is higher what we can see in our character sheet, because with this spell, our staff has +20% Magic Stat Mod for damage calculation.
At early game, the damage is low, but once we reach full spell crit chance and some crit multiplier with some physical damage mode, it is nice.
I had ~ 800 – 1000 physical damage with my Channel Staffs and I just had a level 2 talent.
It has a range 8, it has no cooldown, it do not cares about defense and armour, so it was really nice to have.
b, Staff Mastery: Improves both our weapon damage with melee hits and with Channel Staff. Just put more points in it at late game.
c, Defensive Posture: Weak bonuses, so no.
d, Blunt Thrust: Unnecessary.
Prodigy choice:
In my opinion, we have two nice options at level 42:
Hidden Resources or Cauterize.
We already have many many very effective defensive layers, and even passive one-shot protections (Second Life, Self-Judgement) so Cauterize is not really needed.
Still, it do not have a fixed cooldown, so it cools down at 6 turns, instead of 12 for us, this is a really nice synergy with Self-Destruction.
I went with Hidden Resources.
First, it cools down at 8 turns and have a 6 turn duration, so it has a 75% uptime for us.
I also went with Stone Alchemy, so I continuously used Stone Touch, what is mana intensive.
Any enemy can have arcane resource burn (from items) and a few classes/basetypes and uniques already have that (e.g. Oozemancers, Orc Mage-Hunters, Headless Horrors, Oozing Horrors, dudes at tentacle zones).
Continuously having access to Gem Portal and Stone Touch was really essential for me.
Second, with Hidden Resources we can integrate Final Sunbeam into our offensive rotation, what is really nice to have.
Be aware if you were mana-clashed and lost your positive energy, because if you have Hidden Resources your talent won’t gonna generate positive energy. Those are also talent costs, just negative costs.
Extra, fun alternative build options:
This is the fun section now, so not the strong section.
a, Mindstar build
You have to have Avatar of the Distant Sun unlocked, because the checker is a hidden spell talent, so you cannot enter to Zigur with it. This will be a really twisted and really hard build.
b, Vile Life
This is a bit better in my opinion than the mindstar option.
Because we can even have 2-3 Bathe in Light map effect at a time, we can go for primary blight damage. In this case, we also need a reasonable amount of damage shield penetration, because the shielding will be still applied on the enemies, they just take damage instead of the healing.
A few points are enough in Healing Inversion, to reach ~50% at late-game, but we can even reach here 60+% with high spellpower (and yes, in this case we will be more of a spellcaster).
With enough spellpower, Crit Multiplier and blight damage mode, our Bathe in Light effect can deal 500+ blight damage per turn on enemies within radius 2, and we can even have 3 effects at a time.
Healing Inversion has a low, 10 turn cooldown and a 5 turn duration, so with our talents, we can even have cast Healing Inversion at every second turn.
We will also have Vile Transplant, what is really nice with Fallen. The 15 turn cooldown can be reduced down to even 2 turns, so it will provide us a really effective detrimental effect clearing mechanism, while we also debuffing our enemies.
VI., Inscriptions
A very essential part of this build.
We are starting with a weak Shielding Rune, a weak Blink Rune and a Shatter Rune what is nice.
Due to Weapon of Light, we would like to have a Shielding Rune, so look for a stronger one.
Due to we have a movement based mobility option (Path of the Sun), we would like to have some other mobility options (teleport, probability travel e.g.). From level 10, Gem Portal helps here, but still at the very early stages we would like to have this Blink or a bit better one if we can find one.
When we have Gem Portal, we can switch our Blink to another rune.
Both Biting Gale Rune and Acid Wave Rune are very strong inscriptions, we would like to have both, but of course this will depend on the game. Sooner or later we will find both.
At early-mid game Shielding Runes are better than Stormshields, but from mid-game (before or in Dreadfell) we would like to have at least 1 Stormshield that is at least medicore (so like 40+ threshold and 4+ blocks)
From level 10:
a, with Stone Alchemy: Shielding, Shatter, Biting Gale / Acid Wave
b, no Stone Alchemy: Shielding, Shatter, Blink, Biting Gale / Acid Wave
From level 20:
a, Shielding, Shatter, Biting Gale, Acid Wave
b, Shielding, Shatter, Blink, Biting Gale, Acid Wave
From level 25 (Fallen):
b, we can switch or Blink Rune now, because Fallen have 2 teleport talents
From 34 or later if 5 runes are unlocked:
Stormshield / Shielding, Stormshield / Shielding, Shatter, Biting Gale, Acid Wave
If 6 runes are unlocked:
Stormshield / Shielding, Stormshield / Shielding, Shatter, Biting Gale, Acid Wave, +1 as you wish
Notable fixed artifact inscriptions:
Rune of Reflection Shield: Very nice to have this at the early-mid game, we leveling our Magic. It also improves our damage output.
Mirror Image Rune: Very strong with this build. We can even reach a two turn cooling down Mirror Image Rune … yes: 2 turns!
Rune of Dissipation: On the hardest difficulty, it’s necessary to have this rune from a point. This point can vary from run to run. On lower difficulties, it’s just makes the game more comfortable.
Primal Infusion: Interestingly, with this build this can be a nice sixth inscription. We can have a 6 turn cooling down infusion with 5 turns duration, and we also have Scar-Scripted Flesh so we can have a continuous effect. Even with lower Willpower, we can have a ~17% all damage affinity, what is nice but not necessary or really useful because we won’t take much life damage.
Wild Growth Infusion: Situational, because it’s an alchemist reward. I would still go with Dark Sun or Crimson Templar, but with this build this can be nice. We can reach a 5 turn cooling down on this radius 5 AoE pin infusion (the pin just checks pinning immunity). So, continuous pin-lock in radius 5. The infusion also gives us 50 armour and 30% hardiness, what is not bad.
VII., Items
So, what stats we should prioritize on items?
Staff Build:
Our primary stat is Magic and our primary power is spellpower.
Secondary stat is Strength, but we do not really have a secondary or any tertiary stat.
Once we have enough Strength for Wave of Power, it’s not that important.
Same goes for Dexterity, we just need Dexterity for Accuracy.
Priority is: Magic > spellpower > Dexterity / accuracy > Strength
Weapon Build:
Priority is: Strength / Magic / spellpower > Dexterity / accuracy
(but I would still prioritize spellpower over strength)
We need to collect items that gives us Willpower, to have the 50 Willpower requirement for the prodigy.
Generic priority:
In both cases, we will need:
Spell cooldown reduction. Look for: spellbinding ego on boots, quickening ego on pickaxes and (at the East) the Zemekkys’ Broken Hourglass amulet. We can find even double spellbinding or double quickening ego items, but these are very rare. We can also find Suncloak imbued staves, but these are also very rare (however I fonted one unintended, so I just fonted it away).
Suncloak imbued staves are crazy overpowered, so I do not like them.
Spell crit chance > Critical multiplier > Physical resistance penetration > Physical damage modifier > Physical critical chance. With this priority order.
Our most important immunity is Silence immunity and our secondary immunity is Stun / Freeze immunity. Any other immunity is nice to have but not necessary.
Aim for 100% Silence immunity: of Angolwen ego on robes, Undeterred ego on boots and of arcana ego on rings are nice sources.
Aim for 100% Stun / Freeze immunity at mid-game, what should be a close to 200% when we go into Vor Pride. Undeterred ego on boots, of Perseverance ego on rings are nice sources, but go for ring imbuing with the Angolwen jeweler. Imbue quartz's and later bloodstones.
From level 25, we would like to have the 40% Out of Phase effect from out items. This can be on egos, but also on any item as a random power.
Healing Modifier for the mid-game (after we have Fallen, to improve our Bathe in Lights).
We would like to have some damage shield penetration against crazy Skeletons, Bone Giants at early-mid game, but be careful with it. Too much will make you vulnerable, because it affects the self hit from Self-Destruction. So our damage shields will defend us less against our self damage.
Circle of Sanctity is a very powerful talent and we can have this from a helm with the of Sanctity ego. If you find one, use it. It also gives us +100% Silence immunity while we are inside our circle. Charm talents are affected by Self-Destruction, so this circle will cool down at 15 turns, instead of 30. The circles duration can be a spell critical, so with 300+% Crit Multiplier, we can have a continuous Circle of Sanctity.
Lightning Storm Wand is a really nice, versatile tool for the early game. Locking down enemies (daze prevents movement), AoE damage and we can croner snipe with it too.
VIII., How to play
Just in a nutshell. If you interested more, feel free to watch my game play or ask in the comments.
a, As a Sun Paladin:
Use Precognition, track enemies.
Set up Path of the Sun in order to close-in enemies at instant speed, also you will have an escape route for 4 -5 turns.
Try to Stone it, if you have Stone Touch. Use Biting Gale first if the dude has high Stun / Freeze immunity to halve it.
Set up Bathe in Light. With Path of the Sun you can position yourself to be in the effect, but you can body block the enemy and prevent it from enter.
If you have Gem Portal, always position yourself next to terrain, to enable your escape if needed.
Use Shielding Rune or Barrier if necessary, with Weapon of Light these are really good.
Use Acid Wave Rune against weapon users.
Use your Sun Ray if the enemy can be Blinded.
Use Shield Pummel for Stun.
Use Shield Slam (or Block) and Assault first (when enemy has the Counterstrike) for damage.
Even bumps can deal nice damage early, due to Weapon of Light.
b, As a Fallen, mid-game:
Self-Destruction management:
We would like to sustain Self-Destruction continuously. In order to negate the self hits, we will use mainly Bathe in Light, but also Shielding Rune and Barrier if needed.
At level 25, we will have 628 max life (728 on the hardest difficulty), so that means, with level 1 Self-Destruction we will take 628 x 0.15 = 94 (109) self hit per turn.
Even with just 43 effective spellpower, a raw level 4 Bathe in Light will shield & heal for 32 per turn (affected by spell crit and Healing Modifier). I am not considering now spell criticals, because we have low chance, but BiL also enhances our Healing Modifier with +39%.
So we will receive 44 healing and shielding per turn. So, we already negating 88 from the 94 (109) self hit. And this is just with 43 effective spellpower and no Healing Modifier.
A level 2 Self-Destruction will just deal us 71 (82) self hit per turn, so the second talent point here is nice to have.
Bathe in Light has a 20 turn cooldown and a 7 turn duration. Even without spell cooldown reduction, this 20 turn will be only 10 due to Self-Destruction. For 3 turns we won’t gonna have our Bathe in Light, but we also have Barrier (and a Damage Shield Rune). So use Barrier (Shielding) when Bathe in Light is not on the map. We also have Healing Light, so we can use that too if we are taking life loss.
With a level 1 Self-Destruction, level 4 Bathe in Light, level 1 Barrier and a level 1 Healing Light, we can fully maintain Self-Destruction, even without any spell cooldown reduction.
Suncloak, quickening pickaxe and spellbinding boots will greatly improve this.
Level 3 Suncloak with 43 spellpower is giving us 32% spell cooldown reduction, what makes Bathe in Lights cooldown 14 turns, so it will cool down at 7 turns.
Runes and Defense:
At this point, our runes will become incredibly effective.
Even without spell cooldown reduction, our Acid Wave (15 turn cooldown) will cool down at 5 turns. So this is a full disarm-lock in a radius 5 cone.
We will have a 15 turn cooldown Stone Touch, that will cool down at 8 turns and lasts for 6 turns. Almost continuous stone-lock, even without spell cooldown reduction.
We can have 5 turn cooling down Damage Shield Rune(s), or 4 turn cooling down Stormshield Rune(s), 4 turn cooling down Shatter Affliction Rune.
Cast Writ Large as often as possible and use runes frequently.
Offense:
Use Wave of Power to deal nice damage from range, just go next to melee enemies if the are negated (disarm-lock, stone-lock).
Use Sun Ray not just for Blind, but also for damage fro range. Use Channel Staff too against enemies with full armour or very high defense.
Mobility:
We will have a 12 turn cooldown, range 8 teleport spell (Flee the Sun), that will cool down at 6 turns. So, we can continuously maintain Out of Phase and we can reposition ourselves frequently.
We will have a 12 turn cooldown, range 8 teleport attack that can go through terrain. This will also cool down at 6 turns, but if we kill the targeted enemy quickly, we will reset it’s cooldown. Use Blood Rush to attack weaker enemies through walls. This can be also used as an escape.
We will have a 15 turn cooldown Path of the Sun spell, that will cool down at 8 turns. We can even have multiple of these with spell cooldown reduction.
We will have an 18 turn cooldown Gem Portal spell, that will cool down at 9 turns. Even with 43 spellpower it has a 10 range, what is very strong.
c, As a Fallen, late game:
We will become very strong at the late game. With high spellpower, we can very reliably apply our strong effects, and we will have very high spell cooldown reduction.
Once we have full spell critical chance, I like to switch from using Bathe in Light into Barrier for managing Self-Destruction. At late-game I had around 2600+ shields from my Barrier, and it had a 6 to 3 turns cooling down, with a 10 turns duration.
If we unlock Dark Sun, we will also have Doom Spiral, what is an equal shielding talent, with a much lower cooldown (4 to 2 turns cooling down), but with a shorter 2 turn duration shield. Due to the very low cooling down, this is not a problem.
We can reach a 1 turn cooling down on Wave of Power, a 3-4 turn cooling down on Final Sunbeam, so our offense will increase really well.
If you reach this point with this build, you will experience the power level by yourself.
We have a very effective defensive mechanism, what includes:
Negating enemies:
1., 2-6 turn cooling down Stone Touch, with 6 turn duration Stoning
2., 2-4 turn cooling down Acid Wave Rune
3., 2-4 turn cooling down Biting Gale Rune
4., A very low cooling down and instant Sun Ray, that Blinds for 4 turns in AoE
5., Preferably, a Sanctity Helm for a continuous Circle of Sanctity map effect (Silence)
Damage Reduction:
1., Close to capped All Resistance (with Robe and Out of Phase)
2., 55% Flat damage cap with a ~46% uptime (Suncloak)
3., 2 x 1-3 turn cooling down Stormshield Runes
4., Self-Judgements damage smearing (reducing high damage instances)
5., Very high Damage Shields, continuously
6., Second Life, as a small life-saver layer
Against detrimental effects:
1., 2-5 turn cooling down Chants, that clears 2 detrimental effects each
2., Continuous Providence
3., 40% duration reduction from Out of Phase
4., All of our detrimental effects are reducing their duration by 2 per 1 turn
5. (And we can use a 1-3 turn cooling down Shatter Affliction Rune too)
Annoying enemies:
So, apart from the generally dangerous enemies, which dude are annoying for us?
Is Disperse Magic dangerous for us? Interestingly, not much.
First of all, we can prevent it most of the times due to Stone Touch and Circle of Sanctity.
Also, we will continuously have many many magical effects and sustains (Out of Phase, Spellsurge, Damage Shield, Stormshield, Suncloak, Empowered Healing, Sun’s Vengeance, Providence, Precognition, Weapon of Light, Second Life, Singularity Armor, a Dirge).
Are we in real danger if we are losing most of them? Not really.
Because we are debuffing enemies, we are still in relatively safe. Enemies will be continuously stoned, disarmed, silenced, blinded. They cannot really kill us in a few turns.
Yes, we can lose our Stormhield, Damage Shield or Second Life, but we have 1-3 turn cooling down Stormshields. So, we can just immediately activate a new one, if we are losing it or we can just Gem Portal out.
What is really annoying for us is to: lose our Self-Destruction.
Enemies that can deactivate mental sustains are: Brawlers, Alchemists, Corruptors, Paradox Mages, Ruin Banshees. From these: Brawlers and Paradox Mages can the most dangerous.
Also be careful against enemies with many immunities. E.g.: ghost basetype enemies are immune to almost anything, apart from disarm and silence.
Game play:
Here, you can watch my play. Feel free to ask anything related to it.
This time, it’s with comments – with my bad english.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tk6y4F ... xcy2XTpPFF
Thank you for reading and/or watching. I hope, you will enjoy playing with this unique, fun and very strong class.