What Is a Paladin in D&D 5e?
A paladin is a holy warrior whose strength flows from a Sacred Oath rather than from a god. That distinction is the whole identity of the class in 5e: the power answers the promise, so you can swear yourself to a deity, an ancestor, a cause, or a private code of honour and still call down the same divine fire. Nothing in the rules requires a patron, which is why a paladin can be a temple knight or a lone oathkeeper who has never set foot in a shrine.
Mechanically the paladin is a half-caster — martial first, spellcaster second. You wear heavy armour, carry a shield, and stand at the front of the line, but from 2nd level you also prepare from a devotional spell list and gain the class’s signature trick, Divine Smite, which converts spent spell slots into radiant damage on a melee hit. Around the middle levels the paladin also becomes the party’s spine through the Aura of Protection, which adds your Charisma modifier to the saving throws of you and nearby allies. It is the single feature that most defines how a paladin plays.
Charisma is the engine under all of it. Your smite spells, your spell save DC, your Lay on Hands healing pool, and that game-defining aura all scale off it, which is why a paladin who neglects Charisma is only half a paladin. Optimizers sometimes call the class simple — attack, then smite if the hit is worth it — but that same straightforwardness makes the paladin forgiving to learn and enormously high-impact at the table.
Which Paladin Oath Is Best in 5e?
You swear your oath at 3rd level, and it is the biggest single choice the class offers. The free SRD contains only one: the Oath of Devotion, the classic holy knight built on honesty, courage, and compassion. Everything else is an expansion. Published supplements add the Oath of Vengeance, the Oath of the Ancients, the Oath of Conquest, the Oath of Redemption, the Oath of Glory, the Oath of the Watchers, and the Oath of the Crown — plus the fallen Oathbreaker for a paladin who kept the power and abandoned the promise.
There is no single best oath; the right one follows your concept and your party. Devotion is the flexible all-rounder and the only choice you can build from the SRD alone. Vengeance is the traditional damage oath, a relentless hunter’s kit for running down one marked foe. The Ancients and Redemption lean protective and life-affirming, favouring durability and de-escalation, while Conquest trades mercy for fear-based control. Glory is the athletic, mobile hero, and the Watchers stand guard against what leaks in from other planes.
Because most oaths live in paid books, treat any specific tenet wording or numeric ability as something to confirm in its official source rather than assume. What is safe to plan around is the shape of the choice: an oath decides your Channel Divinity options, your always-prepared oath spells, and the moral spine of the character. Pick the promise you actually want to roleplay keeping, and the mechanics tend to follow.
What Stats Should a Paladin Prioritize?
Build a paladin around one attack stat, then Charisma, then Constitution. Most paladins lead with Strength, which lets you wear heavy armour without penalty and swing the biggest weapons; a finesse build leads with Dexterity instead, trading the heaviest armour for lighter gear and a faster chassis. The common mistake is trying to fund both Strength and Dexterity — pick one, because every point you sink into the other is a point stolen from Charisma or Constitution.
Charisma comes second and is never optional. It drives your smite-spell save DC, the size of your Lay on Hands pool, and above all the Aura of Protection, so a paladin who dumps Charisma gives up the feature that makes the class special. Constitution rounds out the top three: it buys hit points to stay upright at the front, and it protects the concentration spells — Bless, Shield of Faith — that a paladin leans on. Wisdom, Intelligence, and whichever physical stat you did not choose fill in behind.
For weapon layout, sword-and-board is the reliable default even on a Dexterity build. A shield’s armour class plus the Dueling fighting style usually outvalues an off-hand attack, and keeping a hand free leaves room for a holy symbol. Two-weapon fighting exists but competes for the bonus action you often want for Lay on Hands or a spell, so most paladins reach for a shield or a two-hander rather than dual wielding.
What Are the Best Feats for a Paladin?
The paladin’s first ability score improvement lands at 4th level, and it is a genuine fork: take a feat and declare the build’s identity, or bump an ability score and stay well-rounded. Three feats dominate the conversation. Great Weapon Master offers the highest damage ceiling, since its power-attack bonus stacks flat on top of Divine Smite. Polearm Master hands you an extra bonus-action attack and an opportunity attack when enemies step into reach — and every extra swing is another chance to smite. Sentinel locks enemies in place and punishes anyone who strikes past you, which turns a paladin into a genuine wall.
Which one you want depends on the seat you fill. If the party already has a druid, a rogue, and an eldritch knight but no dedicated front-line anchor, the tanking feats — Sentinel or Polearm Master — let you hold the line and control the space around you. If you are the clear damage dealer, Great Weapon Master pushes your nova turns higher, and it pairs well with the Oath of Devotion, whose accuracy-boosting Channel Divinity helps offset the feat’s to-hit penalty.
Beyond the marquee three, Resilient (Constitution) is a near-mandatory mid-game pick because it keeps concentration spells alive through hits, and Fey Touched or a straight Charisma increase both quietly strengthen the whole kit. Note the corner cases: a quarterstaff does qualify for Polearm Master’s bonus attack, but Shillelagh is not on the paladin list, so any combo that leans on it assumes another source for the cantrip.
What Is the Best Race for a Paladin?
Because Charisma is the engine, the strongest paladin lineages either raise it directly or shore up the class’s blind spots. Aasimar is the poster child: it lifts Charisma and its later celestial abilities add radiant damage that lands right alongside your smites, so a shining, angel-touched knight is mechanically as good as it is thematically obvious. Half-Elf offers a Charisma boost plus floating points and a fistful of skills, making it the natural all-rounder and a fine face for the party.
Not every good choice pumps Charisma. Dwarves — a hill dwarf especially — trade a little social shine for Constitution, poison resistance, and a sturdier frame, producing the most immovable tank in the game and a natural fit for a clan-and-forge paladin. Half-Orc brings raw physicality and a brutal critical-hit feature that turns smite dice into a spike of damage. A Variant Human, where that option is allowed, starts with a feat at 1st level, so a build like Polearm Master or Sentinel comes online immediately instead of waiting until 4th.
To assemble any of these from scratch, put the racial Charisma bump to work, commit to a single attack stat, and choose an oath that matches the theme — Devotion for a classic templar, the Ancients for a guardian of wild places. And remember that a paladin needs no deity at all: a dwarf who wants religion can swear to a lawful protector or an ancestral ideal, but the oath, not the god, is what powers the character.
How Does Divine Smite Work (and How to Maximize It)?
Divine Smite is the paladin’s heartbeat: when you hit a target with a melee weapon attack, you can expend a spell slot to deal extra radiant damage, and a higher-level slot deals more. The elegance is in the timing — you decide to smite after the attack roll lands, so you never burn a slot on a miss. That makes the whole feature an exercise in resource management: you hold your slots, watch for the swing that matters, and then unload. The one firm limit is range. Divine Smite fires only on a melee weapon attack, which is exactly why archery paladins are a niche concept rather than the default.
The famous paladin “nova” comes from stacking ways to land and multiply a single big hit. Fish for critical hits, secure advantage, and add Great Weapon Master, then pour several spell slots into smites across one explosive turn — a crit even doubles the smite’s dice. Note the one-smite-per-hit boundary, sometimes phrased as the one-slot-per-turn rule at some tables: you add a single Divine Smite to a given weapon hit, not several slots piled onto the same swing, though nothing stops you from smiting again on a second, separate hit.
Sustained damage is a different question from burst, and paladins have an answer there too. From 11th level, Improved Divine Smite adds radiant damage to every melee hit for free, so your baseline output climbs even on turns when you spend nothing. The honest framing for the mid-to-late game is to lead with burst rather than try to out-damage a wizard every round — and to remember that the Aura of Protection often wins fights not by dealing damage at all, but by keeping the whole party standing.
What Are the Best Paladin Multiclass Builds?
Half-casting plus Divine Smite makes the paladin one of 5e’s best multiclass bases, because extra spell slots from another class translate directly into more smites. Three combinations lead the field. The Sorcadin pairs paladin with sorcerer, feeding a deep pool of slots and metamagic into your smites for the highest-damage paladin build. The Padlock pairs paladin with warlock, whose short-rest slots refill your smite fuel between fights while Eldritch Blast covers the ranged blind spot. A Paladin/Bard dip trades a little raw power for skills, Bardic Inspiration, and extra slots, making it the most versatile of the three.
The guiding rule is to bank the paladin’s best levels before you split. Extra Attack at 5th and the Aura of Protection at 6th are the class’s strongest return per level, which is why so many Sorcadin builds recommend stopping at Paladin 6 before pivoting into sorcerer. A Padlock can begin as either class — starting paladin locks in heavy-armour and shield proficiency, while a warlock start reaches Pact of the Blade sooner — and a two-to-three-level warlock dip is usually plenty to keep the smites topped up.
The combos that disappoint are the ones that fight the paladin’s Charisma. An even Paladin/Wizard split, for instance, plays poorly: wizard wants Intelligence, paladin wants Charisma, and a 10/10 build means neither half ever reaches its strong levels. It also demands a 13 in three abilities to qualify, so a Paladin/Wizard is best treated as a roleplay concept rather than an optimization. When a multiclass pulls your two casting stats in opposite directions, keep the dip shallow or skip it.
What Happens When a Paladin Breaks Their Oath?
The modern paladin is defined by its oath, not its alignment, and that shift is worth internalising. You are not graded against a list of permitted actions; you are measured against your own tenets. That is why saving a chaotic evil creature, or bending a law to fight a greater evil, rarely breaks anything on its own — the question is always whether your conduct honoured the promise you swore, not whether every deed fits a tidy moral checklist.
Breaking an oath, in the rules, takes a willful and serious violation, and that word “willful” does most of the work. An honest mistake, an involuntary act, or a wrong you were dominated, deceived, or magically compelled into is not a genuine choice, so it does not shatter your faith. A true fall has to come from your own free decision to betray what you stand for — which is precisely what makes it a story beat rather than a stat penalty. Most tables handle it as drama first and mechanics second.
When a paladin does fall and refuses to atone, the game offers the Oathbreaker: a fallen knight who keeps divine power but bends it toward commanding the undead and radiating dread. It is written as a DM-facing option, and it shines there — as a recurring villain, or as the dark midpoint of a redemption arc that ends with the character swearing a new oath and clawing the light back. Whether your paladin holds the line or breaks it, the oath is the engine of the roleplay, not just the sheet.