Review - Pallegina as a Beckoner/Goldpact Herald

[crdvis16]

I really liked this build and I don't usually like either of these classes very much.  My main focus was to try to get my armor as high as I could through the Paladin side because the damage reduction from causing under penetration is so good.  The nice thing about Beckoner in this build is that Chanter doesn't suffer much from wearing heavy armor and having slow action speed since their chants just keep going and once you get the summons out they do their thing too.  I imagine I could have gotten the armor even higher had I gone with another multiclass option (maybe Thick Skinned from Barbarian or Unbroken's Shield Mastery).  A Wizard's Ironskin cast is (I think) the biggest armor active ability but it's harder to keep up all the time with a Wizard's limited number of casts. 

At some point more armor is probably not really beneficial, though- you just want enough to cause max underpen against any given enemy attack and going beyond that doesn't help you other than maybe still causing crit attacks to underpen.  But it's still fun to see how high you can go!

This build also forced me to try to understand armor stacking rules.  They are, as best as I can make them out, the following:

Normal Armor from items always stack and don't suppress anything- in my case, Legendary Patinated Plate (13 base, 9 Crush/Shock) and Blunting Belt (+1 Slash/Pierce).  Stoic Steel (armor gain every 6s up to +3 for standing still) seems to be treated as normal armor as far as I can tell so it stacks and doesn't suppress.

You can only get the best of any special conditional armor bonuses (Patinated Plate's Bronze Juggernaut +2 armor against melee attacks suppresses Inspired Defense's +1 against most recent damage type).  So in my case Inspired Defense is only useful against sequential ranged/magic attacks of the same type... not sure how often that helps.

You can only get the best of any active ability bonuses (Sworn Rival Gilded Enmity's +4 armor suppresses the Zealous Endurance +1 armor aura and Lay on Hand Robust's +2 armor).  So if you keep Gilded Enmity up you're most likely not benefitting from those other two but at least they can affect your allies.

In a crucible fight I'm seeing the following when attacked by melee pierce damage:

+13 total from Legendary Patinated Plate

+1 from Blunting Belt

+2 from Patinated Plate's Bronze Juggernaut

+3 from Stoic Steel

+4 from Sworn Rival

Total = 23

20+ armor should be forcing max underpen against the vast majority of enemies I would think.  I imagine some bosses might be able to avoid max underpen at this level of armor, maybe?  In any case, forcing underpen on attacks just makes this build take so little damage because of the way the -75% damage penalty actually works.  You can often stand in the middle of enemies and easily out heal their attacks which is kinda fun.