Sacrifice

Sacrifice allows you to do a large amount of damage without spending mana. Paladins that focus on this skill and Auras (except

Prayer) don't have to spend any points in Energy for increased mana, use mana items, or worry about using Mana Potions. This may be appealing for some Paladins.

The first thing to understand about

Sacrifice is that the more damage your weapons do, the more life will be drained from you. It's possible to increase Attack Damage so high using

Sacrifice, a good weapon, and Might or

Concentration, that you will be losing huge amounts of life each time you hit a monster. If you plan on using

Sacrifice as your main attack, you will have to balance the loss of life with items or you will have to use a lot of Healing Potions.

Items that "Steals % Life" work well with

Sacrifice. Find a weapon and ring that steals life. If you can steal enough life per hit with high life-stealing percentages or a combination of life-stealing items, you can make up for the loss of your health and actually use

Sacrifice attacks to heal yourself.

Items that Replenish Life can also help make up for the loss in life when using

Sacrifice. It can, however, take a while to regain life such that Replenish Life may not alone be enough to make up for the loss of life. However, they can be used in combination with

Prayer, Healing Potions, and Life Stealing items to make up for the time it takes Replenish Life to work.

The

Prayer Aura can be a good skill to use with

Sacrifice initially. You can use

Sacrifice on the left Action Button, and have your

Prayer Aura active healing you at the same time on the Right Action button. You will have to devote points to Energy to increase your Mana to support

Prayer or use magic items that add to Mana. Later on you will probably want to upgrade to

Redemption which although doesn't help party members, can make up for

Sacrifice hit point loss much faster and better than

Prayer.

Be careful when using Combat Shrines. Combat Shines will greatly increase your damage, which will greatly increase the life lost when using

Sacrifice. You may want to avoid Combat Shrines when using

Sacrifice, or use them then switch to another skill.

Powerful Two-handed Weapons
By using

Sacrifice and Might or

Concentration at the same time with a powerful two-handed weapon, you may notice you will do a lot of damage. This looks very attractive at first glance. You may do so much damage that you can kill many monsters including Uniques in one or two hits. However, you may also notice that you are losing a lot of your life with each

Sacrifice hit. At first, you may believe this is caused by giving up the defense and blocking of a shield to wield a two-handed weapon, but the increased loss of life is really caused by the increase in damage of your new two-handed weapon. The more damage you do, the more life you will lose. Another problem with high damage weapons when using

Sacrifice is that you may be doing more damage to the monsters than you need to. A monster may die in one hit with a Two-handed weapon damage of 538 but 200 damage might also be all you need to kill the monster. The extra damage caused by your powerful weapon will cause an increased loss in your life needlessly. Try finding a less powerful weapon. Although you will not kill the monster as quickly, you will be draining less hit points.

To make up for the life lost when using

Sacrifice you will have to find the right balance between the damage of your weapon compared to the monsters, life stealing items, Potions, Replenish Life items, and

Prayer.