Talk:Mercurial's Paladin/@comment-70.39.231.116-20120927144955

Why precisely to stay away from Sacred Servant? You can easily combine it with Oath of Vengeance and leverage your distance and smaller exposure to damage to make up for your decreased smites. At minimum your Sacred Servant is costing you 2 lay on hands (4 at 10th level) rather than 1/2 your smites. Also there are several domains which greatly assist this build (especially with Opportunistic Gambler) not the least of which being Rage (via Ragathiel - Destruction) or Good (for Holy on your bow for free, and Azata subdomain gives you the ability to break several conditions that mercies can't touch). At 8th level you get back 2 of the lay on hands via the alternate divine bond - though some may balk at not getting a free magic sword or pony, the ability to boost CL or use one expendable limited resource to enhance another is nothing to sneeze at.

Furthermore, the addition of both Domain and Oath to your character gives you 2 extra spell slots per spell level (implied but not expressed in oaths by the notation that multiple oaths only let you memorize one oath spell in the oath slot). If you want to go really wild, you can lobby for a Terrain domain, getting Plains for a limited per day pounce, haste as your 3rd level domain spell, and other minor goodies.

Yes, Sacred Servant does give you one of the most broken class abilities in Pathfinder, namely the ability to call an outsider via a free planar ally. If not monitored, a PC could literally call an infinite army of paladins at 12th level (12th level sacred servants calling other 12th level servants like the green lantern corps) but canny GMs will limit players to book options, or take strong oversight over this pseudo-cohort ability. A strong houserule is to either limit the duration on the ally to 1 hour per level maximum, or not limit the duration but state that the power does not recharge until the ally is banished or killed, or the duration ends (whichever comes first).