My opinion of Sacred Fist has been waffling back and forth between: “this archetype is meh” and “this archetype is dogshit.” After thinking about it more, I learn towards the former, although I still say it’s horribly designed. Anyway, let’s first keep in mind the GOOD things you get from Sacred Fist:

Evasion. This is the biggest one IMO; Evasion is the single best defensive feat in the entire heroic/epic games
+1 BAB/level. This is especially good when compared to Sorc/Wiz EK, specifically with regards to obtaining feats at reasonable levels
Cha to Hit/Damage at level 6, while centered. This is not so great when you consider that Feydark gets this for 7 AP. But if we want to conserve that 7 AP and spend it elsewhere, while still doing a Cha build, then this is worth noting. So let’s keep this in mind
Cha as an AC bonus
Wand and Scroll Mastery for 4 AP from Radiant Servant
Access to the normal Paladin spells at their respective levels

…Yeah, that’s about it. Nothing really great, aside from Evasion.

And now for the bad, in case it wasn’t obvious:

NO DIVINE MIGHT, seriously wtf lynnabel?
NO HOLY RETRIBUTION. This is lowkey the single biggest thing holding back Sacred Fist. Smites are the single biggest component of Paladin DPS, therefore being unable to regenerate 1 every 30 seconds is a HUGE disadvantage for Sacred Fist. Not to mention, Holy Retribution is an amazing cleave attack/insta-killer. Lynnabel REALLY dropped the ball on this one; no Holy Retribution singlehandedly makes SF unviable IMO
No Divine Sacrifice
No Lead the Charge
Fewer +damage compared to KOTC
30 fewer Heal Amp compared to KOTC, and of course SF’s only heal amp is all locked to the cores…
No Censure Outsiders, instead Sacred Fist gets a lame one which only works on Demons/Devils. This is especially noteworthy because KoTC will stun REAPERS on Vorpals; something SF cannot do. PSWF KOTC has a 10% chance of stunning any Reaper, even higher if using a Paralyzing weapon. SF is naturally that much worse in Reaper difficulty because of this.
No Ascendency, which means SF situationally has anywhere up to -75 fewer MP compared to KOTC, and 15% less fort bypass at all times

In other words: Sacred Fist tree is hot garbage.

Keeping all this in mind, it seems fairly clear to me that SF is NOT suited for a pure build, or going T5 in it. It’s a very, VERY bad tree; ALL of the good stuff you get from SF are extrinsic to the tree itself, e.g. evasion, cha to hit/damage, cha as an AC bonus… these are all obtained with ZERO points spent in the tree

The following build is a real abomination of class splits and serves more as an indictment on how badly-designed the archetype is, but here we go. This is one of the strangest splits I've ever come up with:

”The Sacred Eldritch Vistani Fist-That's-Actually-Not-A-Fist" 14 Sacred Fist/5 Sorcerer/1 Cleric

8 Str, 16 Dex, 16 Con, 8 int, 8 Wis, 18 Cha

1 SF: SWF
2 Sorc: access to Eldritch Cleave; you want at least ONE AoE for early leveling
3 SF: free Evasion, take Precision
4 SF
5 SF
6 SF: Toughness
7 SF: Divine Dream (keep 7 points in Feydark until you get this)
8 SF
9 Sorc: ISWF
10 Sorc
11 Sorc
12 Sorc: Unlocks T5 EK, take Improved Critical Piercing
13 Cleric for Divine Might
14 SF
15 SF: GSWF
16 SF
17 SF
18 SF: Offhand Versatility
19 SF
20 SF
21 Overwhelming Crit
22 PSWF
24 Epic Toughness
25 Elusive Target
27 Force of Personality
28 Embodiment of Law
30 Arborea (as if there’s anything better to pick…)

For Destiny: this is a no-brainer. Go Fury of the Wild for burst-DPS with Eldritch Tempest’s insane crit multiplier. Divine Crusader could also work I guess, but the Smite stuff is kind of worthless on Sacred Fist because of no Holy Retribution, so I don’t think Crusader is a very good destiny for this build.

AP breakdown:
37 AP Eldritch Knight: you get wand mastery from this tree, so no need to dip 4 points in Radiant Servant. For T5, I would take Improved Knight’s Transformation, Knight’s Arcanum for +20 MP, and Eldritch Tempest
41 AP Vistani for a truckload of dagger enhancements + the Capstone
2 AP Warpriest for Divine Might. Yes, only 30s trance sucks, but we need to make room for the Vistani capstone. If you want to get a full 2-minute trance, you’ll unfortunately need to sacrifice 20 Melee Power from either EK or Vistani. On the positive side: if you have a +1 Universal AP tome, then you can save 1 AP on Vistani, put it into Warpriest, and get yourself Divine Might for 1 minute. i feel like I would NOT do this build unless I had that +1 universal AP tome, personally.

Yes, that’s right: not a single AP spent on the Sacred Fist tree. In essence, this split would take advantage of the fact that Daggers are Centering Weapons w/Vistani Deadly Blades. With this in mind, this build milks the best parts of Vistani/EK, while still being Cha-based; this is something which was previously IMPOSSIBLE before SF.

Uniquely, this build can take advantage of Vistani Capstone + Eldritch T5 + be Charisma based + have Divine Might; going 7 AP Feydark on any other build would render this impossible because then you’d be at 87 AP. Honestly, I feel this is perhaps the ONLY unique niche that SF has right now, and again: IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SF TREE FOR PETE’S SAKE!

Go SWF to take advantage of Vistani T4. Here are some of the things this split gets you:

Very good melee power: +20 Vistani capstone, +20 EK t5, +20 Vistani T4, +14 righteous command (74 total). This is before factoring in Mythic Boosts, Reaper Power, Crown of Butterflies, Set bonuses… with good gear, you’re probably sitting at >100 MP as soon as you hit 20. Plus, you'll have 45% standing Attack Speed + 30% haste boosts.
+1 Crit Multiplier/Threat Range from Vistani Core 4 (the 14 Pal is for ZEAL, not Holy Sword). Granted, dagger crit profile is very “meh,” but with all the melee power and other goodies like Eldritch Tempest +3 multiplier, it’s excusable
A shitload of doublestrike: 5% Vistani T4, 5% Vistani Core 3, 20% Rapid Attack, 10% Zeal, 3% Knight’s Transformation, 2% Eldritch = 45% before factoring in a set bonus, doublestrike item, reaper bonus, +15% past lives
A decent amount of PRR: 22 PRR/MRR Vistani, 10 Improved Shield Elritch, 14 angelskin, + past lives and items and whatnot
Eldritch Tempest, nuff said

Offensively, we have stupidly high attack speed, stupidly high doublestrike, good melee power, cha to damage, Eldritch Tempest, and a 16-20 x3 multiplier on basic daggers. Level 20 has some really good daggers too, so going 20-30 in one day would not be a problem at all.

Defensively, we have decent PRR, Radiant Forcefield SLA, 2 LoH uses per rest, Immunity to Energy Drain (from Vistani, so no need to spend any AP in SF), and +75% recovered with heal scrolls/wands for topping off in-between battles. Your saves will be through the roof, as expected of a Cha-based Paladin. The most glaring weakness with this build is lack of Heal Amp when compared to KOTC, but there’s no real way to remedy this, no matter what other multiclasses we take. Congratulations Lynnabel: you managed to make a Paladin tree that’s somehow worse than Kensei. Wow. 

For race: if you have racial AP to spare, Aasimar could be good for supplemental healing, considering that healing is something that this build doesn't really have. Human or Helf could net you some much-needed Healing Amp, plus 1 extra point of Charisma. If you don’t have any racial AP yet, then the more obvious choice would be something like Tiefling or Dragonborn for the +2 inherent cha. Dragonborn nets you -1 dex modifier however, so I would prefer Tiefling for this build.

Is this build optimal in the grand scheme of things? Hell no. But it’s probably one of the better DPS-ing Sacred Fist builds I could think of. It could feasibly perform well up to 20 or 30, assuming you want to get that past life feat. That’s the main goal anyway: I doubt ANY Sacred Fist build is optimal for endgame, so the main goal here is just create a build that could sail to 30 smoothly before reincarnating. Which I believe this build should be able to do.

Any other thoughts/builds are appreciated. I really do not know the best way to work with SF seeing as it’s such a badly-designed class.

What are your thoughts on going THF with power attack for 15-30 leveling, and using SOS/Epic SOS mainly? Way i see it, power attack is more important for 15-30 leveling than precision, and strikethrough is better than SWF for clearing. You would have whirlwind attack + exalted cleave.

The downside is that you don't get additional strikethrough in either kensei or sacred fist so you are limited to a max of 140% strikethrough till you can take perfect THF.

Hmm, i do recall that red names in epics have obscenly high AC and hitting them became a major problem. Not sure why they went that route, i think someone tried to stack as much to hit as possible and still couldnt hit better than a 6 or 7 in end game, something like that?

I guess i could do power attack in heroics then use a free feat swap to swap to precision in epics.

The whole sliding scale used for AC is a clusterfuck anyway, all they had to do was keep the original system and not give mobs insanely high AC or to hit. The entire reason why they had to switch to a sliding scale was because they gave mobs too high AC and too high to hit so people couldnt dodge bosses or hit them (and thats still a problem in epics).

Imagine if saves used a sliding scale system too. Dumb.

Incidentally, at what point would you say that its worth it to swap weapons to bypass DR? In heroics, is SOS or barovian better for undead, given that you have low fort bypass in heroics and barovian does more raw damage?

DR is after crit multiplier. This is easy to demonstrate on any big DR mob where only the crits do any damage at all when regular hits are reduced to zero.

ManyCookies wrote on Sep 10^th, 2022 at 6:23pm:


Say you're critting for 1k on a 14-20x4 SoS, then you're doing 750 extra damage 35% of the time. That's 262.5 on average vs 42 on average from 12d6. Vs 100% fortification you can simply divide to see how much AP it takes.

42/262.5=.16

You'd need 16% armor piercing to break even if everything else is equal. (It isn't, but that gives you a ballpark figure.)

The general gist of new Erectile Dysfunctions is each tree has 1 "Epic Strike" and 1 "Epic Mantle." You can mix and match, e.g. use Dreadnaught Epic Strike while in the Sentinel Epic Mantle. However, using a strike puts every other strike on cooldown, so it's advised to only really use one strike. Same with mantles: you can only use 1 mantle at a time. And honestly? I like the new system a lot more. Much more streamlined and simple.

For THF SF, I'd probably go some cross between Grandmaster of Flowers for Drifting Lotus primarily, Unyielding Sentinel for heal amp + extra LoH at 26, and either Dreadnaught or Divine Crusader. I like Sentinel because it gives you loads of sustainability.

Crusader has especially good synergy with Smites because you get +7 extra attempts/rest, extra damage, and faster regeneration. However, without Holy Retribution from KOTC T5, Sacred Fist can't really smite infinitely. Still, 15 smites/rest +1/minute is a decent amount of smites.

Whatever you do, make sure that for leveling, you have enough for the core enhancements; they grant +5 melee power/each. Really adds up.

ManyCookies wrote on Sep 12^th, 2022 at 3:38am:


Core 2 of DC provides:-

Confront any Foe: Your weapons are immune to durability damage. +3 to all saving throws.

18 sadfist, 1 mnk, 1 fvs. -
Divine Might, Wraps, Cha-based and Grandmaster Air-stance (requires 3 feat upgrade).
Dont bother with Whirlwind Attack since you get it in T5.
GMoF ED T5 or maybe DC T5 - one requires Stun tactics, the other Sunder. Kinda have to play around to see which you like more.

Unfortunately, you're still gonna do less damage than even an average joe monk cuz no Jade strike, unbalancing strike, porous soul, etc.

For race, I'd say its a toss up between Tiefling for immunity stripping and Aasimar for MP stance.

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Forgetting about the Exalted Whirlwind are we?

What other weapon you had in mind? you cant even take another favored weapon on Sadfist. You're better off just rolling a proper KotC build instead.

tapster wrote on Sep 12^th, 2022 at 4:23am:


Yea, i saw that. My bad, should have specified before level 23. Feydark tree seems to be the only alternative?

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I guess it's more of a hybrid ED I suppose, but why does that matter? Your other two trees including the one you use the strike from will give you the melee stuff. If there is another mantle that adds more damage on a melee hit I don't know it

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Because you can easily get a respectable enough spellpower with just a potency item which is pretty easy to fit in, it doesn't matter. SP goes so much higher than MP so most people will be better off that it scales with SP.

If you said to a barb that they can have an extra blood tribute on a longer timer that also happens to hit six random targets for about 1k damage each over six seconds they would probably take it, that's shard storm. I don't see many people using it though and I don't really get why when so much other ED stuff, especially in melee trees, is just so lackluster.

Binkey wrote on Sep 13^th, 2022 at 9:59am:


According to the description, it is a rng chance for 1d6 damage per character level, scaling with spellpower, with a cooldown of 5 seconds.

Is this not basically what the fatesinger mantle does, except that the fatesinger mantle scales with 200% melee power and fatesinger can apply up to 3 stacks of sonic vulnerability and -5 AC per stack?

One thing just occured to me...12 sacred fist lets you take incinerating wave which is an AOE spell. Do you guys think thats better than taking 8 levels of fighter?