Looking for guidance on a paladin build as a new player.

[Sunsetwaltz]

Hey everyone and thanks for taking the time to read this! I started playing the game last week and am currently nearing the end of act II. I've been following crpg bro's weapon bond paladin build but found out that you can't proc elemental barrage in melee and thus am considering doing a respec to grab the horse companion instead and swap my first mythic too. My question is what are your suggestions for a horse paladin? I'm playing a human iomedae paladin and am also tempted to either stick with longswords or swap to scimitars or falchions. Happy to receive suggestions for leveling/multi classing/ feats, anything really. Thanks for your time!

[Korriban]

If you picked up Radiance early on and aren't using Seelah as well, go longsword for yourself and you'll be set. The horse gives immense speed and added tankiness and will make your character very strong. You can get some very good paladin items from Seelah's quests that you can take for yourself as well. And I'd just go full paladin personally, because the divine spells and Mark of Justice immensely useful in every situation, on top of being a peerless frontline warrior with a big ol' horse.

Be sure to get the Mythical Beast ASAP, it will not only make your horse better but make it very effective at damaging stuff like swarms that are otherwise a nuisance to fight. You want your horse to tank primarily but it can still put our respectable damage. It's only really particularly vulnerable to things attacking its will save, like Stinking Cloud.

And btw before you start finding horse armour, use Mage Armor to boost its AC. The armour is really gud but will only really shine later on.

[Drake]

The most important thing is to have an arcane caster have animal growth and enlarge person to grow your horse and yourself one size larger.
If you have seelah in your party, have both of you enlarged with you and the horses loaded with teamwork feats and one of you with a glaive or another reach weapon. And get combat reflexes

Attacks of opportunities will trigger left and right, it going to maw anything trying to bypass the frontline. Have the mounted chars be enough appart to let mobs pass through and get killed by the attacks.

If you have one or 2 snapshot archers with Attacks of opportunity builds just behind it's gonna be a fun ride.

[jonnin]

the horse is a pretty fair tank / off tank by itself. It gets a lot of attacks per round, and can be used to bust up mirror images or given an anti-swarm amulet etc but generally speaking its better than most summoned meat shields (because gear) and worse than full characters (because its 'class' has less than a cav's for perks). So option one is to build the horse around it being an extra character.

option 2 is to ride it, which begs charging into combat to get full attacks after, and it counters the need to deal with slowness from heavier armors. The speed from riding it gives you a super mobile tank or dps which is a big tactical advantage.

looking for a weapon idea, consider a reach weapon. Glaives are common because its the opponent's weapon of choice: you find 3 excellent ones by the end of act 2 while your only decent longsword at that point is acquired by murdering someone who is technically an ally. Fauchards have that 18 crit range but are rare and the first one is electric which 99.9999% of your enemies are immune to. Reach weapons and great cleave when enlarged is an amazing tool.

Longswords catch up fast, though. The second good one you find is only useful for evil characters, as its unholy tagged. After that it gets better rapidly.

scimitars are an odd weapon; there are a lot of good ones (a not exactly hidden good one in the market square) and none of the NPCs favor the type so its all yours.