currently i have an 18 human pal kotc..at 20 im going tr
considering either another human pal, but going defender/vanguard....or possibly kotc bladeforge as i may be unlocking it soon.  curious as to where where to toss my extra points...as well as feat selection if i choose the defender/vanguard pal.

From what I could tell the improved shield bash was pointless once you got a +20 shield.

The feats I tried out were as follows:
h toughness
1 shield mastery
3 mental toughness
6 imp shield mastery
9 imp mental toughness
12 tower shield proficiency
15 imp crit pierce
18 precision

21 overwhelming crit
24 epic tough
27 epic mental tough

26 etwf
28 filler

The mana from the mental toughness lines were nice, but I don't know if I'd do it again. I think emp heal/quicken would be more useful, and then the 10 PRR feat.

I tried a 2h kotc, maybe I built it wrong, but it does significantly less damage than my vanguard single target. Against more than one target, it pulls way ahead, but against a single it can't keep up. I can't explain why this is. Another big issue with kotc 2h is the lack of disables. I was stunning everything on vanguard, able to autohit DCs very easily on EE content to take out disabling casters, but kotc doesn't have that luxury. And like I said, their damage at least in my case was worse for single target.

Different builds played at different times in regards to 2h. Like I said in then post, I'd probably take quicken/emp heal, but I don't know. Quicken/emp is almost exclusively for CSW, which I almost never cast.

Haven't looked into PRR too much, but my guess is it actually doesn't have diminishing returns, while more points will effectively add less % reduction, you're also only reducing a smaller portion.

qucangel wrote on Apr 12^th, 2015 at 11:53pm:


Correct, any reduction algorithm that uses Reduction = Armor/(Armor + Constant) to determine mitigation does not have diminishing returns.  A lot of games out there use something like this, so it comes up pretty often.  It's used so frequently because it means that for every Constant amount of mitigation you get, your effective health pool by 100% (stacking linearly, so having 4 * Constant armor means that you have 500% effective health).

See here for better explanation/examples.

Most of the damage I take is physical, magic missile(remedied via clicky), and untyped.

Really isn't much of an alternative to it.

qucangel wrote on Apr 14^th, 2015 at 1:14am:


I think what people were referring to are the various defense options.
By diminishing returns, I wasn't literally referring to the mathematics - read all the threads arguing those points and understand the arguments.

What we were alluding to was if you push maximising PRR so far that you start trading off on dodge/AC/miss chance from displace/blur/concealment etc, then there is a cost to it.

In the case of that feat, being a Pally I'm often short of feats so the +10 PRR is a lower priority than something else (usually increased DPS).
Contextually, I also have no shortage of healing options so mitigating a small amount of extra damage is also a lesser priority one I have my PRR around 190-200.

But each to their own - that's what I love about DDO - there is no right or wrong.  It's whatever is fun and works for you.