Paladins in MapleStory are formidable warriors, blending powerful burst damage with robust defensive capabilities, making them excellent choices for both solo play and group content.
What is a Paladin?
Paladins represent the pinnacle of the Warrior class, evolving into holy knights dedicated to justice and protection. They excel at delivering significant burst damage, particularly through skills like Blast and Heavens Hammer, while simultaneously maintaining strong survivability.
Unlike other classes focused solely on offense or defense, Paladins strike a balance, offering both potent attacks and reliable crowd control. Their abilities often involve stunning enemies, creating openings for sustained damage. They are known for their consistent damage output and ability to handle various combat scenarios effectively, making them a versatile choice for players.
Paladin Strengths and Weaknesses
Paladins boast impressive strengths, including high burst damage potential, effective crowd control through stunning abilities, and solid defensive capabilities. Their cleaving skills can hit multiple targets, enhancing efficiency in mobbing situations. However, they aren’t without weaknesses.
A notable drawback is a potential reliance on cooldowns for peak damage output. Furthermore, some players lament the loss of elemental damage previously available to the class. While versatile, Paladins may require strategic skill usage to maximize effectiveness against certain bosses or enemy types.
Job Advancement & Skill Overview
Paladins progress through Warrior, Crusader, and finally Paladin, unlocking unique skills at each stage, focusing on damage, defense, and ultimate burst potential.
First Job: Warrior ⸺ Core Skills
As a Warrior, the foundation of your Paladin journey, prioritizing Power Strike and Slash Blast is crucial. Power Strike delivers consistent damage, forming the core of your early attacks. Slash Blast provides valuable utility, offering a ranged attack and early-game mobbing capability. Focusing on maxing Power Strike first allows for efficient training and establishes a strong damage baseline.
While other Warrior skills have their uses, these two are paramount for a smooth transition and effective leveling. Strategic skill point allocation here sets the stage for future job advancements and builds a solid combat foundation.
Power Strike Maxing Strategy
Prioritizing Power Strike to the maximum level as quickly as possible is fundamental for early Paladin progression. This skill forms the backbone of your damage output during the Warrior and Crusader stages. Allocate skill points to Power Strike whenever available, foregoing other skills until it reaches its maximum potential.
This focused approach maximizes your efficiency while training, allowing you to clear maps faster and level up more quickly. A fully maxed Power Strike provides a reliable and consistent damage source, crucial for overcoming early-game challenges.
Slash Blast ⎻ Early Game Utility
Slash Blast, while not a primary damage dealer, offers valuable utility in the early stages of a Paladin’s journey. It provides a reliable method for quickly dispatching weaker monsters and efficiently clearing maps. Invest a moderate number of skill points into Slash Blast – enough to make it a useful supplementary attack.
Its ability to hit multiple enemies simultaneously makes it effective for mobbing, accelerating your leveling speed. Don’t prioritize maxing it, but ensure it remains a functional part of your rotation for optimal early-game performance.
Second Job: Crusader ⸺ Defensive Focus
Becoming a Crusader marks a significant shift towards bolstering the Paladin’s survivability. This job advancement introduces skills designed to mitigate damage and enhance defensive capabilities, crucial for enduring challenging content. Prioritize skills that improve your resistance to attacks and provide protective barriers.
The Crusader job emphasizes a balanced approach, allowing Paladins to withstand considerable punishment while maintaining respectable damage output. Mastering these defensive tools is key to thriving in higher-level areas and group encounters.
Holy Shield ⸺ A Key Defensive Skill
Holy Shield is arguably the most important skill a Crusader Paladin can acquire. It provides a substantial damage reduction buff, significantly increasing survivability against both boss attacks and monster swarms. Maxing Holy Shield early is highly recommended, as it forms the foundation of your defensive strategy.
Effectively utilizing Holy Shield requires understanding its duration and cooldown. Proper timing ensures consistent protection, minimizing incoming damage and allowing for more aggressive play. It’s a cornerstone skill for any Paladin build.
Blade Force ⎻ Damage and Mobility
Blade Force offers a valuable combination of damage output and mobility for the Crusader Paladin. This skill allows for quick repositioning across the battlefield, enabling efficient monster clearing and boss engagement. While not the primary damage dealer, Blade Force provides consistent damage alongside its utility.
Mastering Blade Force involves understanding its range and attack pattern. Utilizing it strategically can enhance your overall combat flow, making you a more versatile and effective Paladin. It’s a key skill for navigating challenging maps.
Third Job: Paladin ⎻ Burst Potential
Upon reaching the Third Job, Paladins unlock significant burst damage potential, shifting from a primarily defensive role to a more offensive one. This stage introduces skills like Blast and Heavens Hammer, which are central to maximizing damage output. Mastering these skills is crucial for efficiently clearing maps and excelling in boss battles.
The Third Job emphasizes strategic skill usage and positioning to capitalize on burst windows. Understanding skill synergies and cooldowns is vital for optimizing your damage per second, transforming the Paladin into a formidable force.
Blast ⎻ Core Damage Skill
Blast stands as the Paladin’s primary damage-dealing skill, offering substantial burst potential and excellent mobbing capabilities. It’s a key component of most Paladin skill rotations, hitting multiple enemies simultaneously with a stunning effect. Maximizing Blast damage through Hyper Skills like Blast ⸺ Reinforce and Blast ⎻ Extra Strike is paramount.
Effective use of Blast requires understanding its range and timing, allowing for optimal positioning to maximize hits. This skill forms the foundation of a Paladin’s damage output, making it essential to master.
Heavens Hammer ⸺ High-Damage Option
Heavens Hammer delivers significant single-target damage, making it ideal for boss encounters and focused attacks. While possessing a longer cooldown than Blast, its raw power is undeniable. Paladins often prioritize reducing this cooldown through Hyper Skills like Heavens Hammer ⸺ Cooldown Cutter to increase uptime.
Combining Heavens Hammer with damage-boosting buffs and strategic positioning maximizes its effectiveness. Mastering its timing and integrating it into your rotation is crucial for optimizing overall damage output during challenging content.
Fourth Job: Paladin ⸺ Advanced Combat
As a Fourth Job Paladin, your combat prowess reaches its peak, unlocking devastating skills like Divine Punishment and Judgment. This stage focuses on refining your burst potential and maintaining consistent damage output. Divine Punishment serves as your ultimate skill, delivering massive damage with a lengthy cooldown.
Judgment, on the other hand, provides reliable, sustained damage, becoming a core component of your rotation. Mastering the synergy between these skills and your existing toolkit is essential for excelling in end-game content.
Divine Punishment ⎻ Ultimate Skill
Divine Punishment stands as the Paladin’s ultimate skill, unleashing a tremendous burst of holy energy upon your foes. This skill boasts incredibly high damage potential, making it ideal for quickly eliminating bosses or dealing significant damage during crucial moments. However, its extended cooldown necessitates strategic usage.
Proper timing and positioning are key to maximizing its effectiveness. Combine Divine Punishment with buffs and supportive skills for truly devastating results, solidifying your role as a powerful damage dealer.
Judgment ⸺ Consistent Damage Output
Judgment serves as a cornerstone of the Paladin’s consistent damage output, offering reliable damage in various combat scenarios. Unlike burst skills, Judgment possesses a relatively shorter cooldown, allowing for frequent use during prolonged battles. This makes it invaluable for maintaining steady damage against multiple enemies or bosses.
Maximize its potential by incorporating it into your regular attack rotation, ensuring a constant stream of holy damage. It’s a fundamental skill for sustained combat effectiveness.
Hyper Skills & Passive Builds
Paladin Hyper Skills significantly amplify damage output, focusing on Blast and Heavens Hammer, enhancing their effectiveness through cooldown reduction and increased critical hits.
Blast Hyper Skills ⸺ Prioritization
Prioritizing Blast Hyper Skills is crucial for maximizing a Paladin’s burst potential. Blast ⸺ Extra Strike should be your initial focus, significantly increasing damage output by adding an additional hit to the skill. Following this, invest in Blast ⎻ Reinforce, which boosts the overall damage percentage of Blast itself.
These two skills synergize exceptionally well, creating a substantial damage increase. While Blast ⸺ Critical Chance is beneficial, its impact is less pronounced than the direct damage multipliers offered by the other two. Consider these choices carefully to optimize your Paladin’s combat effectiveness.
Blast ⎻ Reinforce
Blast ⸺ Reinforce is a pivotal Hyper Skill for Paladins, directly amplifying the damage dealt by the core skill, Blast. This enhancement provides a substantial percentage increase to Blast’s base damage, making it a high-priority investment for maximizing burst potential. It’s particularly effective when combined with Blast ⸺ Extra Strike, as the reinforcement applies to each instance of the skill.
Prioritizing this Hyper Skill ensures that your Blast hits significantly harder, contributing greatly to faster mob clearing and increased bossing efficiency. It’s a cornerstone of any optimized Paladin build.
Blast ⎻ Extra Strike
Blast ⎻ Extra Strike is a crucial Hyper Skill for Paladins seeking to maximize their damage output. This skill adds an additional hit to the Blast skill, effectively increasing the total damage dealt per cast. It synergizes exceptionally well with Blast ⎻ Reinforce, as the damage amplification applies to each hit, including the extra one.
Investing in Blast ⎻ Extra Strike significantly boosts your clearing speed and overall damage potential, making it a must-have for any serious Paladin player aiming for optimal performance in both training and bossing scenarios.
Heavens Hammer Hyper Skills ⎻ Cooldown Reduction
Maximizing the uptime of Heavens Hammer is paramount for a Paladin’s damage output. Hyper Skills focused on cooldown reduction are therefore incredibly valuable. Heavens Hammer ⎻ Cooldown Cutter directly reduces the skill’s cooldown, allowing for more frequent casts during combat encounters. This translates to a substantial increase in sustained damage.
Complementing this, skills that enhance damage, like Heavens Hammer ⸺ Extra Damage, further amplify the impact of each cast, making the investment in cooldown reduction even more worthwhile for optimizing your Paladin’s combat effectiveness.
Heavens Hammer ⸺ Cooldown Cutter
The Heavens Hammer ⎻ Cooldown Cutter Hyper Skill is a cornerstone of optimizing a Paladin’s damage rotation. This skill directly reduces the cooldown time of Heavens Hammer, enabling significantly more frequent use of this high-damage ability. Reducing the cooldown allows for a tighter, more consistent burst cycle, maximizing damage potential within a given timeframe.
Prioritizing this Hyper Skill is crucial, as Heavens Hammer is a core component of the Paladin’s damage output. Lowering its cooldown directly translates to increased DPS and overall combat efficiency, making it a top priority for any serious Paladin build.
Heavens Hammer ⸺ Extra Damage
Investing in the Heavens Hammer ⸺ Extra Damage Hyper Skill provides a straightforward, yet impactful, boost to the skill’s overall damage output. This Hyper Skill directly increases the damage dealt by Heavens Hammer, enhancing the Paladin’s burst potential; While not as crucial as cooldown reduction, the added damage is a valuable addition to any optimized build.
Consider this skill after maximizing cooldown reduction, as more frequent casts of Heavens Hammer are generally more beneficial. However, the increased damage amplifies the impact of each cast, contributing significantly to overall DPS.
Stat Allocation & Equipment
Paladins benefit from prioritizing Strength, followed by Vitality and Luck. Early equipment should focus on enhancing Strength and providing a solid defense base.
Recommended Stat Distribution
For Paladins, a balanced approach to stat allocation is crucial for maximizing both damage output and survivability. Initially, prioritize Strength to enhance attack power, aiming for a 2:1 Strength to Vitality ratio during early leveling. As you progress, gradually shift towards a more balanced distribution, increasing Vitality to improve HP and defense.
Consider allocating points into Luck for increased critical hit chance, but don’t overinvest early on. A typical endgame distribution might look like 40% Strength, 30% Vitality, 20% Luck, and 10% Dexterity, adjusting based on your specific build and playstyle. Remember to utilize stat reset scrolls to refine your build as needed.
Early Game Equipment Choices
During the initial stages of your Paladin journey, focus on acquiring equipment that boosts Strength and HP. The Maple Leaf weapon is a solid starting point, easily obtainable through quests. For armor, prioritize pieces with Defense and HP bonuses, such as the Maple Warrior set.
Accessories should focus on enhancing Strength and Luck. Consider the Beginner Pendant and Ring. As you level, gradually replace these with better options from monster drops or the Cash Shop. Don’t underestimate the value of potential scrolls to improve your gear’s stats!
Leveling Guide & Training Spots
Efficient leveling as a Paladin involves utilizing maps like Kerning Square and Horn Tail Arena, focusing on consistent mobbing and quest completion for optimal gains.
Level 1-30: Early Leveling
The initial stages of a Paladin’s journey, levels 1-30, prioritize establishing a solid foundation through consistent questing and monster hunting. Focus on completing all available Maple World quests, as they provide significant experience and essential starting equipment. Early training spots include the tutorial areas, then proceed to Golem Temple and Curse Eye.
Prioritize skills like Power Strike and Slash Blast, utilizing them effectively for efficient mobbing. Consider joining a guild for potential experience boosts and guidance from veteran players. Don’t hesitate to invest in beginner-friendly equipment to enhance your damage output and survivability during this crucial phase of progression. Remember to regularly check for events offering bonus experience!
Level 30-60: Horn Tail & Kerning Square
Reaching levels 30-60 opens up more efficient training options for Paladins. Horn Tail is a popular choice, offering decent experience and a chance at valuable drops, though it can be competitive. Kerning Square provides a more consistent, albeit slower, leveling experience with its abundance of monsters.
Focus on maximizing your damage output with skills like Blade Force and Holy Shield. Consider party play for faster clearing speeds and increased experience gains. Begin accumulating Meso for essential equipment upgrades, prioritizing weapons and armor. Consistent training in these areas will pave the way for your third job advancement.