Pugsneeze is slowly moving to that level 20 mark and I’ll go into working on my legendary dreadnaught ED and gathering Tokens of The Twelve. Despite how much I despised being a paladin, I will actually miss certain aspects after this TR.
Here is just a little recap on Pugsneeze’s paladin life. First and foremost he had 2 levels in Rogue and made a fairly decent trap monkey. While I lacked a good lock pick skill I was able to find and disarm just about every trap I came up on. Pugs also went through a number of enhancement respecs. I started him out focusing on more damage out put that survivability and at low levels this worked out extremely well. Only a few times I worried about him dying due to his lack of defenses which was close to none. I continued this way up until about level 16 when I was getting destroyed by even the smallest of kobolds atlevel.
I spent more points in Stalwart Defender and he was able to stand amoung the most powerful of dragons and take a beating while poking away at his enemies HP. This was slow but somewhat effective until I came across a few quests where Pugs had to both live and kill things in a somewhat faster way then he was killing things. The Dryad in Outbreak comes to mind here. I was slowly taking her down to get her to jump in that stupid tree so I could take it out. Well she went into the tree and I started waking away. After a bit, I had the tree at about ½ health and she shows her face again. I’m not half way spent on resources and I have to take her down again. She goes back into the tree after a number of hits and now the tree is back to full health. I could not kill the tree fast enough but I could live for just about ever smacking both the Dryad and the Tree. So back to the drawing board.
I respected him once more. This time about the same amount of Defenses, with more focus on DPS. This did the trick. I saw a lot larger numbers from my hits. I was still staying alive while soloing atlevel quests and I was feeling good about how Pugsneeze had evolved into a well-balanced paladin. I could see while being in groups a majority of the time a pure DPS face bashing build of mass destruction could be viable. But the hours I play and the amount of time I have to dedicate to the game I find myself soloing a lot. I just have to work on balancing both survivability and damage. By next week I do foresee Pugsneeze dungeon crawling the lower levels again as a barbarian. I just have to find that balance and try and maintain it from the start so I’m not trying to learn the character over again at level 18 when I should have things completely down by then.
Thank you for reading and I hope that this may help or be somewhat informative to someone out there.
Anitcs ~ Pure Ascentions 
Often repetition helps in some quests, especially if you move fast and don’t notice how some enemies move to anticipate attacks. Barbarians make great damage at the expense of defenses, so try isolating enemies rather that taking on larger groups.