Abbot

An Abbot is an unusual PvM build, focusing on high Damage Reduced By X, resistances, and healing from Prayer. The equipment needed for this build is very cheap, can generally be gambled easily or even shopped by a high-level character, but might be difficult to pull off untwinked. It is good for party play, where the Abbot serves as the party's tank while the rest of the party kills monsters; in solo play, Abbots kill slowly, but you can leave the Abbot in the middle of a mob, go prepare a sandwich, and come back and continue slowly killing monsters (but note that the mob may damage your worn equipment, so you can't leave for more than 10 minutes or so).

Equipment
The defining property used by Abbot is Damage Reduced By X. This property is primarily acquired on three possible slots:


 * Helm - Sol Rune, suffixes on magical Circlets, particularly Life Everlasting.
 * Armor - Sol Rune, suffixes on armor, particularly Amicae.
 * Amulet - suffix in magical Amulets, particularly Life Everlasting.

With the above slots and some luck on the suffixes, Jeweler's prefixes on the Helm and Armor filled with Sol Runes, you can easily exceed a total of damage reduced by 100 or more. For reference even Hell minotaurs will deal up to around 120 damage; this is roughly equivalent to getting 83% damage reduction, which is the entire reason why pumping Damage Reduced By X is a fairly good strategy. Yes, monsters deal only relatively small amounts of physical damage.

There are really only 3 things an Abbot needs on non-weapon equipment:


 * Damage Reduced By X.
 * Resistance.
 * +Skills, especially to Defensive Auras.

Your endgame target for Damage Reduced By X is to get at least Damage Reduced By 90. More is always better, but if you can achieve > 90 in your Helm, Armor, and Amulet, you might want to get resistances and +skills from a rare shield instead of trying to push more Sol Runes in a magical Jeweler's shield Of Amicae. You could socket Um Runes or Perfect Diamonds in a +skills shield as well, instead of putting Sol Runes on the shield. Or you could eschew a shield and use a 2-handed weapon, because your damage is not that high due to your primary focus on defense.

Try to get resistances and +Skills on the prefix of the amulet slot. You might be able to get by with one less Sol Rune in your Circlet by finding a nice magical Circlet Of Life Everlasting with a good resistance or +skills prefix, then punching two holes in it at Larzuk. Half of the Paladin-only shields will have +all resistances, and you might get a nice magic Jeweler's of Amicae, or one with further resistance or +skills prefix, or a good rare shield.

Damage Reduced By X is the hardest property among the above 3 properties to get: you can get + Defense Auras in Grand Charms, +skills on unique rings, and resistances in random rare equipment and charms and rings, but the high amounts of Damage Reduced By X are most easily gotten on the amulet, armor, helm, and shield slots. So generally you will plan your build around what you can acquire for those slots.

A nice Jeweler's armor Of Amicae can be bought from a shop by a level 51 or higher character. You can gamble the circlet and amulet, and if you have a good supply of perfect gems you can try cubing magical circlets and amulets until you get properties you want.

The hardest piece of equipment would be the weapon. Because you will be mostly focused on defense, and nearly all the Paladin combat skills hurt exactly one target (except Zeal, but the requirements for a good Zeal weapon are pretty stringent and you will not have Fanaticism to help your damage and speed). Try to find the best DPS one-handed weapon.

Properties You Don't Need
The Abbot is about reducing incoming damage and then healing any damage it received, but the properties below, while they help with these, simply do not help enough and you are better off getting +skills, resist, or Damage Reduced By X instead:


 * 1) % Damage Reduction. Damage Reduced By X is handled by the game before any % damage reduction (or any % damage increase such as by Amplify Damage), so if you are reducing a 120-damage attack with a Damage Reduced By 100, if you have a 50% Damage Reduction, the 50% Damage Reduction will only further reduce the remaining 20 to 10 damage, thus equivalent to only an additional Damage Reduced By 10.
 * 2) Replenish Life +X. With maxed Prayer, a +1 Defensive Auras will net you the rough equivalent of Replenish Life +15, which is not going to appear on a single piece of equipment, whereas unique rings and magic Grand Charms can get you +1 Defensive Auras easily.
 * 3) Defense Rating and Shield Blocking.  With the high Damage Reduced By X, getting hit is not likely to interrupt your attacks --- you will get interrupted on being hit only if the incoming damage is high compared to your life, and with the large damage reduction you will not be interrupted at all even if you get hit.  Shield blocking is even a negative, as blocking interrupts what you are doing, and your damage output is low enough that getting interrupted in your attack will be annoying.

Skills
Abbots primarily focus on the Defensive Auras tree, and select one Combat Skill for offense, usually Vengeance.

Defensive Auras

 * Prayer - Max, highest priority. You will not be using this directly, instead you will use it via the Cleansing or Meditation auras.  Note that unlike most synergies, +skills on Prayer will also be reflected on the healing effect added by Prayer on Cleansing and Meditation. Using Prayer directly costs mana, but using it via Cleansing or Meditation has no mana cost.
 * Cleansing - one point. Use this when receiving incoming poison damage.
 * Meditation - one point. This will usually be your main aura, to power your combat skill and heal yourself as well.
 * Defiance - 0 or 1 point. Largely depends on whether you find Vigor and Redemption to be useful enough to dedicate two points for them or not.
 * Vigor - 0 or 1 point. Utility for running around large maps, or in town.
 * Redemption - 0 or 1 point. While most Paladin builds will definitely have this at 1 point for recovering after fighting a group of monsters, an Abbot running Meditation will be getting a similar effect continuously in the midst of battle anyway.  You might still want to spend a point in this to get rid of corpses, but Redemption is not ideal for this (it has a random chance per corpse) and you might need another aura during combat.
 * Resist Fire, Resist Lightning - Max. These are the most likely non-physical damage types you will see, and hard points in these skills will translate to increasing your MAX possible resistance when you enable that aura.  With a small base resistance, you can achieve, with maxed skill, 95% resistance against one element.
 * Resist Cold - 0 to 1 to Max. Lower priority than your other skills.  You might want to put 1 point in the rare case incoming cold damage is high, if you have low cold resistance.
 * Salvation - 0 to 1 to Max. Useful in the rare situations where more than one elemental damage type is incoming, but note that the increase in MAX resistance of the element-specific Resist Fire and Resist Lightning auras is greater benefit.  Basically, getting from 0% resist to 50% resist, is the same as getting from 90% resist to 95% resist: in both cases, you reduce incoming damage by half.  If you are at 75% resist and then move to 95% resist, you will reduce the incoming damage by 80%.  So increases in MAX resist are generally significantly more beneficial; only use Salvation in the very rare case where there is a mix of incoming damage that is roughly equal.

Combat Skills
You will probably use Vengeance, because you will be boosting Resist Fire and Resist Lightning, and will probably put any spare points in Resist Cold and Salvation, all of which are synergies of Vengeance.

You could use Blessed Hammer, which at least deals damage to many opponents, but you will not be using Concentration, and you are unlikely to want to put points in Vigor (you need to max Resist Fire and Lightning as well, so spare points in Vigor will be hard to come by).

Mercenary
Normal Act II Combat mercenary, which will provide its own Prayer for a mild boost of healing on top of your Meditation. You could try a Nightmare Act II Offensive for some damage bonus, or a Nightmare Act II Defense to further reduce incoming damage rather than improve your healing.

Try giving the mercenary some Damage Reduced By X circlets and armor as well; you could give it equipment you have replaced. Getting 70 to 80 Damage Reduced By X will be possible if the mercenary helm and armor is similar to yours.