U4GM Diablo 4 Paladin Reforge and Sanctification build tips

Season 11 is live now, and once you dive into Divine Intervention you quickly see how crazy the power curve's got, especially if you are stacking a Paladin and spending your Diablo 4 gold on serious upgrades instead of throwaway blues. The big shift is that gear is no longer just "roll high item power and move on". Reforge and Sanctification push you to sit in town, stare at your inventory, and actually tune each piece so your build feels smooth when you are grinding deep Pit tiers or trying to erase a world boss before it even finishes its intro animation. Dialling In Reforge Most players still get baited by item power and forget what the piece actually does for their Paladin. With Reforge, you are basically rewriting bad rolls, so you want to force in affixes that support your main skills first. If you are leaning into Judgement or leaning on Blessed Hammers, extra ranks to those skills are huge, and they often feel better than a flat damage bump on paper. After that, you start looking at how the build plays in real fights. If your rotation feels stop–start, your cooldowns are probably the issue, so you push Cooldown Reduction on rings, amulet, maybe even gloves. If you find yourself standing still, waiting for Judgement to come back up, something's off. On top of that you do not want to be out of juice all the time, so resource regen or cost reduction needs a slot somewhere. Staying Alive In High Tiers Once you step into the higher Pit levels or stacked Nightmare content, it hits hard enough that a pure glass cannon Paladin just explodes. That is where Reforge on defensive stats starts to matter more than another tiny damage roll. Extra Armor helps smooth out random hits, Barrier related affixes give you a buffer when you jump into a pack, and any kind of Fortify generation lets you sit in melee without instantly regretting it. You kind of juggle these with whatever your Divine Gifts are giving you, so you do not overcap one layer of defence and ignore another. A lot of people skip this and then wonder why they get one–shot while their damage numbers look great in tooltips. Sanctification And Legendary Power Sanctification is where the good items turn into "ok, this is busted now" pieces. It is not just a tiny stat tweak; it cranks the effect of your legendary aspects so they start to define how your Paladin plays. Got a helm that boosts Holy damage or a chest that juiced up Judgement. Once it is Sanctified, that multiplier jumps enough that your main skill begins to delete screens instead of just softening them up. It gets even better on sets or aspect combos that stack, because those bonuses suddenly go from "nice to have" to "this is the whole build now". That is why you generally want to wait for an ancestral item with high item power and the right base before you dump materials into it, rather than burning resources on something you will replace next week. Planning Your Endgame Set If you are aiming for clean boss phase skips or a more relaxed, tanky route through high Helltide tiers, you end up treating Reforge and Sanctification as the core of your progression rather than side systems. You test your build in real runs, figure out if the weak point is damage, uptime, or survivability, then go back to town and re–roll around that problem. Over time you will notice that only a few slots truly carry your build, so those become the ones you Sanctify first while you save your mats and Diablo 4 gold buy for perfect ancestral versions. It takes a bit of stubborn grinding, but once the pieces line up and your Judgement or hammers just erase packs on spawn, the whole season feels completely different. For the latest Diablo 4 guides and tips, follow U4GM.