The Paladin has several strong meta builds in Last Epoch’s Season 2 Tomb of the Erased. Luckily, its leveling strength is impeccable because it boasts excellent defensive capabilities with average clear speed and great single-target damage.
Here’s a leveling build that is a surefire way of progressing smoothly through the campaign, leveling from Sentinel to Paladin in Last Epoch.
Complete Paladin Rive Leveling Guide in Last Epoch Season 2
Paladin Leveling Summary and Playstyle
This leveling guide will make use of the Rive skill throughout the campaign. You’ll gain access to the Rive skill at level 5, and you can use any skill like Vengeance or Hammer Throw until you reach that level.
Your skill rotations only revolve around using Rive to clear single or multiple targets and Healing Hands for sustain. It is almost a one-button build, but you’ll use skills like Lunge to go through the enemies quicker and maybe even Rahyeh’s Chariot from the Paladin’s Healing Hands for a more reliable traversal skill.
Rive goes through a “1, 2, and 3” combo where the third slash is a round sweep, dealing damage to every enemy around you. Try to remember your combos and time your attack when there are many enemies nearby. It isn’t as big of a deal since we are taking Candence and Double Slash, along with adding more attack speed, so you’ll often use a round sweep when clearing.
You’ll use a 2H weapon, getting ailment modifiers from the weapon and possibly other sources to deal more damage. Stacking those ailments on bosses clears them as quickly as rare or elite monsters.
Gearing is also quite one-dimensional, so you’ll find the leveling build easy to follow.
Active Skill Tree
Rive and Specialization:
- Bound Weapon 3/4
- Foe Cleaver 1/1
- Sever 2/3
- Flurry 4/4
- Iron Reach 1/4
- Challenge 1/1
- Rending 1/2
- Candence 1/1
- Double Slash 1/1
Foe Cleaver is crucial for your overall damage setup, and you should equip a 2H weapon to make it work. It helps you inflict more of those ailment effects. Sever is great if you don’t have a weapon that has any ignite chance. If you already have an Ignite chance stat, you can add the Sever points to Champion instead.
Challenge helps you clear packs of enemies faster and more efficiently because you are pulling them to your center. The rest is mostly for more damage.
Healing Hands and Specialization (Paladin):
- Divine Barrier 1/1
- Synthesis of Light 3/3
- Homeward 1/1
- Cleric’s Hammer 4/4
- Prayer of the Fallen 4/4
- Searing Light 1/1
- Rahyeh’s Chariot 1/1 (if you don’t have a traversal skill)
- Free to choose with whatever is left.
Most of these points are mainly for your defensive layer. You can heal yourself quite often in battle using Healing Hands.
Holy Aura and Specialization (Paladin):
- Vital Boon 2/4
- Purification 1/1
- Redemption 4/4
- Shelter from the Storm 5/5
- Rahyeh’s Devotion 1/3
- Fanaticism 3/3
- You can add whichever you need more of. Fire and lightning penetration nodes could be good.
Holy Aura gives you a mix of both defense and offense. You can get more health regen, poison resistance, ailment cures, elemental resistance, and endurance for your defense.
It really depends on what you are lacking in your build at this point. If you need more damage, get those fire and lightning penetration nodes.
While you can add more skills, you can mostly plow through all the early content until you reach the endgame and change to a much higher-end build.
Passive Skill Tree
Sentinel Passives:
- Judgement 8/8
- Armour Clad 5/5
- Valiant Charge 2/5
- Time and Faith 5/5
Time and Faith adds a ton of survivability through leech when using Rive. The rest are mostly to increase your defense.
Paladin Passives:
- Defiance 5/8
- Honor 1/5
- Valor 9/10
- Conviction 8/8
- Phoenix Strike 2/10
- Holy Icon 5/7
- Faith Armor 5/8
- Righteous Firebrand 5/5
- Covenant of Light 5/5
- Weapons Master 5/5 (Forge Guard)
Most of these points will go toward more defensive stats and buffs. You won’t be going for shields, so options like Heaven’s Bulwark and Sanctuary Guardians are off the table.
Weapons Master helps with your damage, but pay attention to what type of weapon you are using. You can get your bleed tech from this node if you use an axe.
As most of your passive skills boost your defense, you’ll rely heavily on your gear to improve your damage.
Early Gear Stat Priorities
The most important gear to look out for is a decent weapon. You want Ignite, Poison, and Bleed ailment chances, and there are many ways to get this. You can basically take any 2H with an open modifier and open the forge to craft one ailment on it.
There are also weapons like a 2H Cultist Chopper axe that has an innate mod to inflict bleed on melee hits. You can get some of these ailment mods on your neck and maybe even unique items.
You want a Jade Amulet because it has a natural or implicit melee attack speed roll on it. Once you have all the ailments, though not mandatory, you should look for increased damage over time, melee attack speed, and physical damage mods.
The rest of the stats can almost be anything useful, like health, health regen, attributes, and resistances.
You could also get lucky and get a +1 Rive from your chest armor piece. You’ll also want to get Silver Rings because they have a fixed increased movement speed mod. You just have to hit a few good mods to be great.
A movement speed mod on your boots is almost mandatory because everybody wants to be fast, right? It is also worth noting that you can also get most of the mods mentioned above from your idols. However, it is hard to find the right one, especially when you also need to find one that can fit in your idol inventory slot.
You should continuously breeze through the campaign, even faster when you get the perfect stats.
Published: Apr 18, 2025 1:10 AM UTC