Yeah, I'm in a bit of a thing here.
Also, fair warning: it's another Great Weapon Master build. Generally, I've always liked the aesthetic of wielding a big-old weapon (classically a hammer with a head the size of one's torso - which I realize is not remotely what real warhammers look like because you wouldn't be able to lift it. But this is fantasy!)
The Paladin arguably got nerfed in the 5.5 update, but even still, it remains among the best classes in the game. It doesn't hurt that the class also has spellcasting, of course.
And in this case, this is a build that I basically did play in a Curse of Strahd game. That was 5.0, of course, but the subclass and weapon loadout are the same. I hit so hard that some of the challenges that were meant to be extremely deadly wound up being surmountable - we beat the Shambling Mound in the Death House at level 2 (we were, admittedly, on the larger size of parties, with at that point a Barbarian, Grave Cleric, ranged Fighter, and Fighter/Warlock multiclass along with me).
Funnily enough, my Paladin had rolled stats, and while I started off with an 18 in Strength and 16s in both Con and Cha, I had a 7 in Dexterity. So, she was always last in initiative and got a nickname of "the finisher" because she tended to get crit-smites once everyone else had had a turn. Multiple times I got a -1 on Initiative.
Anyway, for our build we'll assume Point Buy and basically try to start with a 17 in Strength and 16 in Charisma - while it'd be nice to get +3 to Con, I think that the Charisma is going to help us more overall, and we have a d10 hit die, so in terms of HP, it's as good as a d8 character with +3 to Con.
Feats:
So, Paladins are a bit MAD (multi-ability dependent) and so I think we're going to just get the one juicy feat here.
Now, I think you could make a solid argument for Polearm Master, as when we get to level 11 (though this is a level 10 build) you get to add a d8 to that. The thing is, Paladins are now pretty bonus-action dependent, and while getting the Hew attack is great, Great Weapon Master's primary benefit is the ability to add our proficiency bonus to our damage during our attack aciton, which is kind of a big deal. Pole Strike is going to be dropped if we want to crit-smite or if we need a bonus action for something like Lay on Hands. There is, for sure, a world where you grab Polearm Master and maybe Sentinel to get more attacks in, but I think we've got to go simple and straightforward here.
So, at level 8, we'll just cap Strength, and then in a hypothetical level 12/16, we'll be able to take things like Inspiring Leader and another Cha-boosting feat like War Caster.
Subclass and Spells:
We're going Vengeance. The main benefit we get here is Vow of Enmity, which allows us to use Channel Divinity when we take the attack action (no additional action required) to get advantage on attacks against our target. We can also swap it to a new target if our target goes down.
While level 7's Relentless Avenger doesn't really come into play much, we do also get a pretty exciting spell - albeit a risky one - Haste. Haste is a great spell that carries a big risk: if you lose concentration, you're incapacitated and have a speed of zero until the end of your next turn. That is a real risk. If you have an Artificer who can craft a Mind Sharpener (or your DM just gives you one) this would be a really good investment. Also, if you can manage to get Magic Initiate: Wizard, picking up the Shield spell would be very nice (though I don't know if there are any official backgrounds that grant that feat and also boost Strength and Charisma - Genie Touched grants Dex and Cha, which could work great for a Dex-based dual-wielding Oath of Genies Paladin, but that's not what we're doing right now).
If we want to play it a big safer, we could do something like Crusader's Mantle, though this prevents us from attacking on our first turn. Divine Favor doesn't even take concentration, so there's no fear of losing it. Indeed, I might cast this alongside Haste - normally, in order for Divine Favor to become worth more than a simple Divine Smite, you need to hit 4 times. That'll be more likely to happen if you're making more attacks per turn. Vengeance also gets Hunter's Mark, but I think Divine Favor is usually going to be a better option, as you're only dropping 1 damage to no longer worry about concentration or target-switching.
Game Plan:
So, here's what we're going to do: we'll start off on turn one casting Haste. Because we've used a spell slot, we can't cast Divine Favor this turn. However, with our extra hasted action, we can take the Attack Action and thus activate Vow of Enmity. We can only make one attack with this, though. If we've got Plate Armor, our AC is now 20, and we should have a +5 to Con saves for concentration.
Next, we make our single attack.
If this attack crits, we smite. While the Hew attack would hit for 2d6+5, or 14 (if it hits), a crit Divine Smite would hit for 4d8, or 18. HOWEVER: we can only do this with our once-per-day free Divine Smite, as we, again, can't cast a spell with a spell slot twice in a turn. If we've already done that, Hew away.
On our second turn, we'll use a bonus action to cast Divine Favor. This will prevent us from Smiting both because it's a leveled spell and also because we used our bonus action. However, it means that we'll be able to add 1d4 to the three attacks we make this turn.
And then, turn three onward, we can hold our bonus action for smites.
Note that we have some options here: a smite crit is incredible, but if we need to conserve some spell slots, we can just default to Hew. Generally, I think unless our first attack is a crit, I'm going to hold off on smites. But if we get to our second attack and it's just a normal hit, a good option would be to do a 2nd (or 3rd, but those are very precious) level Searing Smite, as this does more damage overall than a Divine Smite when upcast, because its scaling is basically 2d6 rather than 1d8 (divine smite does better on crits, though).
In other words, the actual damage output is going to be a little ambiguous, as there are situational things to consider here.
Mathing it Out:
Turn one: this is when we just cast haste. With Vow of Enmity, we've got advantage, and so our attack should hit for 2d6+9 (5 from Strength, 4 from GWM). We have Graze, so we'll ignore the 5 for now and add it at the end. So, 2d6+4, with a +9 to hit. Against a Wyvern, we hit on a 5 or higher, so that's an 80% chance to hit, or 96% with advantage, and a 9.75% chance to crit for an extra 7. 2d6+4 is 11 average, so 11x96% is 10.56 and 7x9.75% is .6825, so we're doing about 11.2, and then we add in the guaranteed 5 from Strength to give us 16.2 damage on this turn. Not great, but we're ramping up.
Turn two, we now get to make three attacks. We'll start off casting Divine Favor, adding 1d4 to each of these attacks. I believe I can just calculate this separately, as our chance to hit hasn't changed, so we can figure out what this would add on each attack. With a 96% hit chance and a 9.75% crit chance, we can take that 2.5 and multiply it by 105.75%, giving us roughly 2.6. Thus, each attack is now doing not 16.2, but 18.8. And now, we're making three of these attacks (unlike the bonus action Hew attack, we do get to add the GWM proficiency bonus damage to our Hasted attack, as it's still technically the Attack Action). Thus, we're now doing 56.4 damage on turn two. Bit of a ramp-up, no?
Ok, now, let's talk about what we do on turn three.
Now that we have our bonus action free to do other things, as I see it, we have a couple options:
If we crit, we can either Divine Smite or do our Hew attack. Hew is a little better now, as it's got that extra d4. But it's still only doing 2d6+1d4+5, or 14.5. A divine smite on a crit would be 4d8 at 1st level, which is already 18, but it's also guaranteed - that 14.5 is slightly less because of the chance to miss.
We'll hold off on doing anything with a bonus action until we know whether we crit on either attack. So, if we crit on the first one, we'll gladly smite. Thus, it's a simple question of whether we crit on any of our three attacks. With a 9.75% chance to crit, that means a 90.25% chance we don't crit. But across three attacks, that's cubed, so we get more like a 74% chance we don't crit, and thus a 26% chance we do crit. The damage is very consistent if we divine smite on a crit.
Now, we can also adjust what level we're smiting at. But for our purposes, I'll just say it's a base level. So, 4d8 is an average of 18, and thus we can say that this adds 18x26%, or about 4.7 damage.
What if we don't crit, though?
I think I'd try for a 2nd level Searing Smite, which would do 2d6 immediately and then another 2d6 on the Wyvern's turn.
Well, first off, there's a 74% chance that that's there's no crit. But then, we also need to ensure that we actually hit on the last attack, which is a 96% chance (technically 9.75% of that is the crit chance. I think this is covered by the reduction to only 74% of the time, but I could be wrong. I also think it'll be nearly negligible.) So, we're going to 2nd level Searing Smite 74%x96% of the time, or about 71% of the time. Our Searing Smite will do 14 damage total (2d6 now and 2d6 later, and never a crit because then we'd be Divine Smiting) so 14x71% is 9.94, or rounded to 9.9.
So, on turn three, we have the same 56.4 damage we did on turn two, but now we add both of these (notably, their percentage likelihoods add up to 97%, which is pretty close to our 96% hit chance, so I think I'm more or less ok). That means, in total, we're doing 71 damage per turn.
Phew! That's better than anything I've tried so far, and by a lot!
Big caveat here is that if we do lose concentration on Haste, we're in big trouble.
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