The Spirit Realm

My guild just broke into DP. At this point we've only beat Hatchet and Granite Claw, but we'll be on the way to the rest of them soon. Are there items that I should specifically be on the lookout for? Would you suggest fallen saint or last blood auged cultural as a general rule.

At first glance it seems like Avoidance and Shielding are fairly hard to come by in DP, so I just want to make sure I'm not putting myself in a hole on those type of fx in exchange for a few hp/ac upgrades. Also, if there are any other obvious, fairly easy to get upgrades, please let me know. We use a fixed cost DKP kind of system and I do plan on getting the Vish mask if it ever drops and the Dawnseeker's BP.

Any advice would be nice!

Quilious

If you're already planning on the Dawnseeker BP, go for the mishmash plan on the rest. Like, Fallen Saint Legs, Dawnseeker Sleeves, Cultural hands/wrists/feet, hat is a tossup, CoA for haste or demi for Parry, or cultural for phat AC. The compelling reason to go with Fallen Saint armor is to garner the extra hp on Echo Trinket, but if your plan from the start occludes maxing that (since you're not looting FS BP), then screw it. Loot Batskull Fetish instead and just take the armor that's best on its own. Cultural armor is the highest AC option, great all-around style mods, and also quite adaptable, accomodating hard to find effects (specifically Ferocity). If time/plat resources aren't a barrier, GM armor blows most Fallen Saint pieces out of the water imo. Only stellar bits of other stuff should be worn instead, like Dawnseeker arms & Fallen Saint Greaves.

Looted a 10 minutes ago, yay!

Parry IV is also available on the Redfang Cloak which has excellent spell/dot/stun besides stats. You could go with that for that particular focus. Possible important items it would conflict with are the haste cloak from Suchun, the Endurance cloak from Mayong, or the Invisibility cloak from Deathknell. Haste is better found on the DK neck or shoulders I think, and Invis is on all kinds of things, including instant potions, so I don't think that's a good discriminator on gear. While Endurance is a nice effect to have, I think the mods on Redfang/Suchun cloak are more important, personally.

Oh for the love of pete...

See if you follow: we're discussing items for paladins, and I mention a cloak that Mayong drops that has something to do with Endurance. Looking at Mayong Mistmoore's loot list, we see exactly one cloak, and it has Form of Endurance (FoE) click on it. Some crap about paladin discs is interposed? 1) I'm not an idiot, 2) every cloak has +endurance as a stat, clearly I wouldn't use that as a discriminator. Moving on, a valid point is raised about Form of Defense (FoD) being more desirable than FoE for paladins. Naturally, they conflict, so the value of an item with FoE is thrown into question. Here I bring up something called Ward, which apparently matters to the discussion. I even mention stacking, and I call Ward a click, when I use the mysterious "ward" word. I guess I assumed too much, but shouldn't that lead one to think that maybe I meant something other than a spell paladins cast which has no stacking issues? That, perhaps, I meant a click that does have something to do with stacking issues on Form Of buffs?

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don't stack with . They stack with .

When Brohg says Ward Click, he means the clickies on
Prismatic Ring of Resistance (Eternal Ward)
Necklace of the Steadfast Spirit (Chaotic Ward)
Doomstone Band of Seeing/Ali-ani, the Eyes of Mayong (Unliving Ward)

My plan:
Dawnseeker arms (superior combination of shielding, spellshield and dotshielding)
Fallen saint bp (mana pres and haste, free accuracy!)
Fallen saint legs (60% healing focus and nice mods, free accuracy!)
Vermilion Batfur Cape (Imp Parry IV)
Band of Shattered Stone (detr extended range)
Last blood for the rest: Imp Dodge III, Fero V, Extended Buffs (good enough, better than Qvic boots), Magic focus (only needs to work on our level 68 spell, and I'm banking Tacvi gloves), and finally Detr mana pres (just to add flavour, really)

On top of that I already got beneficial haste from Vish quest shoulders and Cleave V from Vish mask. I think it's impossible to boil it down to a discussion of only one versus the other, because of effects. I really find that a decision for one slot has a chain of effects to the other slots, but that's because I wanna max everything. It's easy enough to max shielding and avoidance, but after that is done, you'd want to add other things like spellshield and dotshielding to decrease the amount of damage you're taking, stun resist to help you on those annoying stuns like hanvar (prolly not the last encounter in the game with long stuns), some combat effects (especially for the DA hammer people) and a bit of accuracy if possible (if you got 150+ avoidance on your gear, it's definitely worth looking for items that add less of this and maybe bring other things).

Our two main focii (beneficial preservation and improved healing) is located on bp and legs, which both come with amazing mods. Our secondary focii, like extended buffs and magic damage come on gloves and boots, which don't have that nice mods (altho the 20acc on gloves look nice), and in the case of the helm, we can get Imp Parry IV on a cloak that, if you take away the parry, is about as hot as it gets with 13% mods (spell+dot 4 and stun 5) and nice hp/ac. A case could even be made for considering the helm from Shyra due to a hard-to-get focus (heck, I'm still using Cragbeast Queen ear for extended range).

The clicky wards that bring resist still bring less that the dod mask and don't stack with it. DoD mask stacks with for of defense (sorry I misinterpreted the ward).

According to lucy, the wards do stack with dod mask, but form of protection doesn't. This is how I remember it from ingame as well..