Finger of God - Healing Hands Paladin Build Guide

Can face tank nearly everything, and in some circumstances you are unkillable.

Damage scales nicely from level 25 all the way to empowered rifts

Extremely helpful support build that can make you and your friends shine.

Cycle Starter SSF and Hardcore viable. No required uniques or exalted stats.

Can be started immediately once you unlock Paladin and Healing Hands.

"1 Button" build.

AOE is on the small side, not a screen wipe or auto-bomber build.

Not top tier damage, but can certainly clear up to 200 corruption easily.

Mana can be tricky, you'll have to slip in some extra mana and mana regen,

Can get into situations where it is hard to kill ranged enemies and heal yourself at the same time.

Sentinel's movement skills are a bit clunky, and hold this build back from being an S Teir clearer.

Explanation of each skill

Healing Hands - Our bread and butter, it deals great damage and heals us insanely fast. It starts as a golden ring before turning to an Golden F5 Tornado once you get Skyfall 1/1. The radius of the ring is the limit of it's damage and heal, so for play style you want to be up close and personal to make sure you're getting healed as well as doing damage. It's locked to cast at 4 times per second, however cast speed does effect the initial cast, so it would be wise to stack a little bit in your gear. The animation for Skyfall will look slow, but the damage starts as soon as the golden rings appear.

As for nodes, I choose Searing Light 1/1 then rush to Unbroken Prayer 1/1. Then Bane of Evil 2/2 & Cleric's Wrath 2/2. This will get you through the campaign. Get Purity of Thought 1/1 & Blessed Parish 3/3 before you get Skyfall 1/1 so you can sustain it. Virtue of Patience 2/2 for big damage then Halted Scourge 1/1 & Turn Undead 1/1 for their damage and damage reduction. The last 4 I throw into Prayer of the Fallen 4/4, and if you have more from gear you can play around with it, I threw mine into Consecrated Storm 1/4 to go with my spoon.

Holy Aura - The Paladin's utility belt. It gives us great defensive and offensive buffs as well as a cool down to push the buffs a little more. Take the left side defenses before the right side offenses. Use the CD when your killing thick boys.

Sigils Of Hope - Mostly used for an offensive buff (+15 spell fire damage and 125% increased damage). With the Last Wish 1/1 node, you'll keep most of your stacks up while clearing, but you will need to self buff before bossing. Since mana is an issue with this build, use Volatile Reversal right after getting your stacks to get your mana back.

Volatile Reversal - There's a reason every Sentinel build uses this, it's just too damn strong. Use this spell to get mana back, and to debuff the enemy, causing them to take an insane amount of extra damage. It can be tricky to use, but trust me, learning to use this skill properly will propel you into a DPS powerhouse.

Shield Rush - I'm not happy about this skill, but I prefer it over Lunge for a traversal skill. Lunge is faster and moves farther, but it requires an enemy or ally to use, and there are too many situations where neither are around. Shield Rush can only move in a straight line, but it's CD is relatively short and there's no limit on it's distance. However, its nodes are also pretty bad. You wont do any damage with it so best we can get is less mana usage and a chance to stun. Honestly Sentinel needs a leap slam or something better for a traversal skill.

How to play

Keep that big beam on your enemy's head as well as your own and you can't go wrong. Sigils Of Hope & Volatile Reversal for damage CD's, Holy Aura for defense CD.

How to scale damage

Flat spell damage is applied at 200% effectiveness, but flat spell damage is hard to get for a Sentinel, but some genius thought up Bane of Evil 2/2. Get Healing Effectiveness (10% equals +2 flat spell damage) on whatever you can to pump your flat damage, then focus on crit chance & crit multi, then Fire/Ele % Damage.

Flat Spell Damage > Healing Effectiveness > Crit Multi > Crit Chance > Increased AOE> Fire/Ele/DoT Damage > Attunement (1 Attunement acts as 5% Healing Effectiveness)

Super Secret Super Saiyan Level 3 Mode

So Exsanguinous has an interesting feature. It converts health into ward, but if you gain health while doing so it will convert the new health into more ward. Ward has no cap, but it does have diminishing returns to how high it goes. But because we can heal really, really fast, we can spike the ward really high and maintain it, giving us an effective health pool the game is not designed for.

TLDR: Put that chest on and face tank a boss with your beam on you. You will bring yourself up to at least 10k ward and will not be able to be killed. If you're really snazzy, you could make an endgame build around this mechanic and break the game. But that's for you to discover.

I leveled with Rive, aiming for Focused Strike 1/1 then Coup de Grace 1/1. It was a bit slow as are most melee builds. 2 hander Warpath with Void Spiral 5/5 & Quicksilver Wind 3/3 is pretty good too, try out a few skills and see what you like, you only need to get to level 25.

I'm still working on a endgame item hunt setup to complete this guide, but this is my current setup to farm at 200 corruption, it's basically the standard low life setup. Ward retention is the only ward stat you need to look for on affixes, this setup peaks around 20k ward and idles at 2k ward (I don't have the slam for the gloves yet)

Mad Alchemist's Ladle - With our build this is only normally giving us 6 stacks of negative ailments, so for LP slots try to slam Chance to Ignite on Hit. [Big note, Healing Hands counts as a HIT, not just a Spell Hit. This is massive because it opens up many more doors]

Exsanguinous - This is item 1/2 for good low life, for LP slots try to get Cold resist > health % > flat health > high Intelligence (for Ward Retention)

Last Steps of the Living - Low life item 2/2, LP slots use the same as the body armor or movement speed

Frostbite Shackles - Gives us another negative ailment and % ward retention based on our cold res, so stack cold res for insane ward retention. The key slam would be "Experimental Ward per Missing Health"

Cradle of the Erased - An all around solid shield for defense. Soul Bastion - For high DPS, LP slots you want +All Res > Healing Effectiveness > Health...ect

Omnis - Is a great chase item, it has a chance to solve a lot of you resist problems or break your heart.

Further Theorycrafting Section

This area is not to be taken as part of the guide, I am writing down further interesting things I have discovered and might test out.

Divine Catalyst 5/5 - Currently does not continue to spam Divine Bolts while you channel. I only casts on the initial cast, I'm not sure if that's by design or not, but in it's current state it is a useless node for us.

Gladiator 1/1 - Is an interesting node, it allows us to off-hand a sword, but only swords and we can still main hand anything else. There's only 2 unique swords that grab my attention: Rainbow Edge for crit multi & ailments, and Transcriber's Graver for ele pen and flat spell damage. I tried both out and the DPS seemed to improve a bit, maybe 10-15%, but I don't think is enough for losing a shield slot.

Opulent Focus - Is actually a really strong contender for an offhand slot. A high rolled one has 86% Ward Retention, which when tested, gave me about 8k more ward. It can roll Fire damage, fire pen, spell damage/crit/multi in prefix, and not much in the suffix. If you're okay with giving up Shield Rush and all chances to block,