I’d say this is my favorite ability in Dungeons and Dragons Online. I certainly do seem to play Cleric and Paladin often.

My ‘Banishing Flame’ build uses 3 levels of Cleric and 2 levels of Paladin. The Knight of the Chalice and Radiant Servant enhancement tree bonuses can be stacked to really put Turn Undead over the top.

The build gets better by choosing Animal Domain at level 2 of Cleric. Animals and Magical Beasts added to the list of turnable targets can be immense in the early game.

The problem with Turn Undead is that once you reach Epic quests past level 20, the Hit Dice and Levels of creatures go up tremendously.

Your basic cleric or paladin just doesn’t have the power or level range to affect something of that size. Even with my Banishing Flame build, you can only target 1 or 2 creatures per use of Turn Undead.

It has been one of my goals while playing Dungeons and Dragons Online to make Turn Undead effective at Epic (20) and Legendary (30) levels.

The recent Hardcore server event gave me a chance to play the Morning Lord (Sun Elf) iconic class starting from level 1. I found the effectiveness of Turn Undead was intense with the racial enhancement Bane of the Restless. This adds 6 to your effective level for turning purposes, 6 to the number of hit dice, and does 18d6 light damage per use.

The enhancement does not increase the Maximum Hit Dice, though. Even so, being able to turn at level 7 effectively and do 18-108 light damage at character level 1 was crazy.

My main character for Turn Undead is named Wahida. Playing on Cannith server, I have 3 past lives of cleric and recently TR’d to Sun Elf.

Her build is 3 Artificer/4 Paladin/13 Cleric, using the Inquisitive tree for normal combat and trapping. She is a bit short on Action Points, so I may decide to do some racial reincarnation later on.

10 AP into Radiant Servant tree and 11 AP in Knight of the Chalice, 4 AP in the racial tree. 34 AP into Inquisitive, with the remaining action points going to either Renegade Master-maker in Artificer tree or Sacred Defender in the Paladin tree.

I have the +1 Racial AP and Universal AP tomes.

The points into Renegade Master-maker are optional. 6 AP to get the second core ability, providing protection against magic missiles and a +4 to AC.

The shield spell can be used from a wand as an alternative, though recasting every 5 minutes can be tedious. The points in Sacred Defender give a defensive stance with +25 to PRR/MRR. Ideally, I would have 17 AP in Sacred Defender to get the sacred bonus to run speed and +6 to constitution.

I can’t get everything I want. Taking AP away from Inquisitive would compromise my ability to fight everything else.

Well, that’s probably enough for today. I will go over my actual Turning stats in a later post.

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