Those who would strike the emissaries of the Light had best take warning, for retribution shall be swift and certain. Is there a Paladin specializing in Thorns, or maybe an Iron Maiden Necromancer I could see it being effective early on, but after youd need tons of HP. This in turn is a problem, for while monster damage doesn't increase proportionally to their hp, the damage increase is noticeable for the player, and since Thorns requires the monster to deal damage in order for it to be returned, this tactic becomes quite deadly for the Paladin in the long run.Īn eye for an eye is sometimes not enough. The higher difficulties give massive boosts to monster hp, whereas their damage doesn't increase at the same rate thus it takes longer for monsters to die, meaning they have to hit the character more. It does however lose its use as the player progresses into Nightmare and Hell. The damage returned gets insane at higher skill levels, and it is a perfectly viable strategy to use to complete the entire game. Thorns is capable of being quite a powerful skill in Normal Difficulty. I'd guess that it'd work pretty decent through Normal, maybe a bit slow in Nightmare and really slowing down in Hell.Enemies take damage when they cause melee damage to party members. As for the question regarding viability, I'm actually not sure since I didn't play this build untwinked. I really like the mechanics and all these things to consider on this build haha. The effectiveness depends quite a bit on the enemy types for an area, like ranged attacks or mages are obviously no bueno and others with high physical resistance like ghosts or death lords can be annoying.Īt the same time though I really like the sort of strategy to this character, like the ideal monster type to convert (thinking about how much life a monster has, how much physical resist they have, their block chance, etc.), the ideal mercenary (melee mercs have a good chance to kill themselves if a monster unconverts since the Thorns aura sticks for a few seconds), etc.Īlso stuff like Cursed affix monsters which curses your converts making them reflect more damage (if you have a source of Amp like Lacerator or Brand you can even double dip because both the convert and the attacker will be amped) and trying to minimize slowing effects like cold or Decrepify because you don't want to slow down attackers. I've been playing a Thorns/Conversion/Vengeance paladin through /players8 Nightmare, it's been working pretty good but I'm also twinked with fairly powerful gear (Atlantean, Vmagi, Herald of Zakarum, etc). Last updated at 14:00:17 UTC Weekly Help Desk RAGE Loot Thread Trade Thread

Diablo 2 thorns paladin build