The best Paladin leveling build in Diablo 4

A sturdy Diablo 4 Paladin leveling build leans heavily into judgment and gives you multiple ways to deal damage and heal yourself from a distance. It also has minimal attribute requirements, so if your luck with gear drops is abysmal, you'll still be in good shape. This build's rotation involves applying and detonating effects, so your skill cycle looks a bit different from builds where you stack effects and lead up to a big burst. However, the skill choice and upgrades give you several options for applying and detonating, so you'll rarely have any downtime.

Below, we break down the best Diablo 4 Paladin leveling build, including which skills to invest in, when you should get them, and what upgrades offer the most utility.

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Paladin leveling skills in Diablo 4

A judgment Paladin's leveling skills center on — surprise! — judgment skills, so by the time you've got all your abilities slotted, pretty much all of them will apply judgment to any foe they touch. The way judgment works is that it marks a foe and then, after three seconds, explodes, dealing holy damage. Once you hit level 15 and unlock your oaths, the Judicator oath lets you detonate judgment early and increases the amount of damage judged enemies take from you by eight percent, up to 80% total. In other words, you'll melt mobs and have a substantial edge against tougher elites and bosses.

This judgment build has an edge over other strong builds thanks to its low requirements. Blessed shield builds require shields and limit your primary weapon choice, and if you don't stack your blocking stat, you end up taking a lot of damage. It's easier to run if you're playing in a group where others can take the heat off you. Zeal is a powerful skill, but its high resource requirements (or life-sapping effect, if you choose that upgrade) make it better suited for endgame activities. The best Zeal builds require specific pieces of unique equipment that grant healing, life, and critical modifier buffs, and while you might find pieces of equipment with one or two of the desired modifiers during leveling, it's too random to plan a build around.

The only attribute you really want to try to make sure you include in a judgment build is life-on-hit. Your basic and core skills alone will hit multiple enemies, and if you have anywhere from 5-10 life-on-hit (either spread across multiple gear pieces or on a single really good piece), you'll rarely need to use potions.

Basic: Holy Bolt

Upgrades: Judgment, Cast Speed, and Ricocheting Bolt

Holy Bolt is a ranged attack, so you can safely move away from a boss or crowd of enemies and still deal damage or regenerate faith. The Judgment enhancement lets each hit apply judgment, and Cast Speed increases attack speed by 10% when you attack the same enemy, stacking three times. Holy Bolt is pretty slow, so the enhancement helps bump up your damage per second and restore more faith. (That said, this isn't a resource-heavy build, so you likely won't be in danger of depleting your faith very often.) If you're detonating judgment with holy hammers, it also means you can reapply it faster and cause more explosions.

Ricocheting Bolt lets holy bolt bounce to three more enemies before dissipating, with each hit also applying judgment. That's a lot of divine detonations.

Core: Blessed Hammer

Upgrades: Cast Speed, Damage Bonus, and Shattering Blow

Blessed Hammer spawns a divine hammer and sends it whirling around you for a few seconds. The hammers don't follow you with the skill's basic form, so you can use them to hit enemies and keep them occupied while you reposition elsewhere. Cast Speed shortens how long it takes between when you press the skill button and when the hammer appears, but it also makes your hammers rotate faster. Damage Bonus increases each hammer's damage by five percent, up to 25%.

Shattering Blow increases the initial impact's damage and has the hammer create three smaller explosions immediately afterward. This tier's other upgrade has the hammers follow you, though we found that during leveling, it resulted in lower damage output overall in fights against elites and bosses while you reposition. If you find yourself holding your ground more than retreating, though, that upgrade is a perfectly acceptable replacement.

Anyway, Blessed Hammer deals a lot of damage in a short burst and has broad reach, and once you pick your Judicator oath at level 15, the hammers (as your core skill) will gain the power to detonate judgment. Even distant enemies you mark with Blessed Bolt's ricocheted hits will be in the hammers' range.

Aura: Holy Light

Upgrades: Judgment Damage Bonus, Additional Bounce, and Rite of Judgment

Holy Light's passive effect damages nearby enemies when you get close, which makes handling mobs in solo play much easier during the early game. It also helps maintain steady damage output even if you're retreating to heal or attacking from a distance during boss fights. This effect is always active. If you press the aura skill button, Holy Light sends a beam of light bouncing around nearby enemies and deals holy damage. Judgment Damage Bonus bumps that damage higher when the affected enemies are judged, and Additional Bounce does what it says on the label (bounces an additional time). Rite of Judgment is the most important upgrade, as it applies judgment to any foe the aura's active skill touches — useful for affecting enemies your Holy Bolt basic hasn't touched or for just keeping judgment explosions going while you're using other skills.

However, if you aren't using equipment that grants "life on hit" effects, you may want to replace Rite of Judgment with Rite of Mercy. Rite of Mercy adds fortify to your HP when you use the aura's active skill, which helps keep you healthy without having to use potions.

Valor: Skip

Falling Star is a strong skill and has excellent mobility, but it and its upgrades offer little for a judgment build. Instead, we're opting for two justice skills.

Justice skill 1: Spear of the Heavens

Upgrades: Judgment Damage Bonus, Vulnerable, and Pronouncement of Heaven (later, Fist of Heaven)

Spear of the Heavens sends divine spears crashing down where your cursor was pointing when you cast the skill, and those spears create a holy explosion after one second. Judgment Damage Bonus is the same as it was for Holy Light, and Vulnerable makes affected enemies take 20% more damage for a few seconds. Pronouncement of Heaven adds three extra spears that deal additional damage, and the skill can also apply judgment.

Change that to Fist of Heaven when you reach level 38, though, as it causes much more damage and becomes a core skill, which means it can also detonate judgment.

Justice skill 2: Purify

Upgrades: Cooldown Reduction, Size Bonus, and Sentence

Purify calls down a blast of divine light that dazes foes. Dazed enemies can move, but can't attack or use skills. Bosses can't be dazed, but Purify will increase how staggered they are. Cooldown Reduction chops a second off the skill's cooldown timer for every foe it hits, up to three seconds total, and Size Bonus increases its radius by 50%. You can pick Echo instead of Size Bonus if you want to experiment with that instead, though it's harder to manage in our experience. Echo causes two additional instances of purify, but they appear at random and are challenging to predict. They might, for example, fan out to the left of the initial cast point, which would completely ignore enemies to your right.

Sentence lets Purify apply judgment and reduces its cooldown by a further four seconds.

Ultimate: Heaven's Fury

Upgrades: Damage Bonus, Duration, and Walk with the Light (later, Final Justice)

Heaven's Fury might not be a delete button like the Arbiter of Justice ultimate, but its cooldown timer is a fraction of the latter's, which means you can actually use it in a rotation instead of maybe once or twice per fight. Heaven's Fury summons beams of light that seek out enemies and hover on them, dealing holy damage before moving on to the next foe.

Damage Bonus increases the damage enemies take from Heaven's Fury by 20% until they die — it's basically a permanent buff during boss fights — and Duration lets the skill last four seconds longer. Walk with the Light splits Heaven's Fury into five beams that rotate and follow you, closing in on any enemies you approach. It gives you much more control over what the skill targets, and even when the beams close in on a target, the rotation is wide enough to catch other nearby foes.

Swap Walk with the Light for Final Justice when that upgrade unlocks at level 40. It's a much stronger enhancement that pulls in all nearby foes and then creates an explosion before the skill ends.

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How to play the Paladin leveling build in Diablo 4

Since this build skips valor skills, the only thing rotating with your Paladin for a long time is their Blessed Hammers. Your core skill unlocks at level three, and the basic rotation after that will be casting Blessed Hammer three or four times before using Holy Bolt to replenish your faith. Even in Blessed Hammer's unenhanced forms, three casts of it will be enough to wipe out most mobs and put a sizeable dent in elites and early bosses.

Your aura unlocks at level four, which doesn't really change your basic rotation. Holy Light's passive is always active and damages nearby enemies without you having to do anything. Use the active when it comes off cooldown and more than two or three foes are close.

Valor skills unlock at level eight, and if you're bored with the current rotation, go ahead and invest a point or two in Falling Star just to give yourself something else to do before the next skills become available.

That'll happen at level 13. Pick Spear of the Heavens first, just to give yourself some additional damage output, and then grab the vulnerable enhancement before unlocking Purify. Use Spear of the Heavens while you're waiting for judgment to detonate and to deal with groups of enemies in one go. Purify helps take the pressure off when you're surrounded by mobs, since it removes their ability to attack, so use it whenever its cooldown timer ends.

You can pick your Judicator oath at level 15 and your Heaven's Fury ultimate at level 19, which is also when you'll finally have a regular rotation. The idea is to apply judgment and detonate it as often as possible, so once they're upgraded enough to apply judgment (or detonate it, in Spear of the Heavens' case), you want to rotate between your judgment skills and your detonation skills. For example:

1. Purify to apply judgment to a large batch of enemies
2. Blessed Hammer to quickly detonate it all
3. Holy Light aura to judge the next batch of enemies
4. Spear of the Heavens to detonate that round of judgment
5. Heaven's Fury to damage and mark more foes
6. Blessed Hammer to detonate it

And in between or while you're waiting for skills to become available again, use Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer to maintain a steady rhythm of damage output. If you know an encounter will end with an elite or boss, make sure to use Heaven's Fury sparingly. In those situations, you ideally want to use Heaven's Fury early to get that permanent damage buff and have time to cast it more often.