Guide
Intro
Inara is, arguably, the most versatile front liner in Paladins; due to her unparalleled damage mitigation ability "Earthern Guard" which cannot be countered or canceled with items or specific abilities, add to that her CC ability "Warder's Field", which slows enemies by a whopping 60% while dealing slight damage in an area that can destroy/damage other nearby deployables efficiently like Kinessa's mines, Barik's towers, Ying's illusions, etc., making it a great ability for point control. Her unique impasse ability can also be game-changing depending on its deployment and timing.
Loadout
The loadout at hand is all about making Inara as tanky and versatile as possible by making use of her legendary card "Mother's Grace". The Loadout also includes:
- Geomancer: Allows using Earthern Guard more frequently.
- Standing Stones: Allows using Warder's Field more frequently.
- Stone Bulwark: Provides self-heal to Inara during Earthern Guard.
- Caretaker: Provides self-heal to Inara within Warder's Field.
- Steadfast: Increases Inara's maximum life providing more survivability.
The "Mother's Grace" legendary provides an extra 20% damage mitigation at level 4 over Earthern Guard's base 30%, making you receive about 28.6% less damage compared to a vanilla Earthern Guard use! This is a game-changing drop in received damage that can be abused, and to elaborate further, please read the following example:
With this loadout at level 4, Inara self-heals 100 points per second, which is further increased all the way to 160 points per second with Earthern Guard's secondary effect. With the legendary "Mother's Grace", she mitigates 50% of incoming damage, while without it, she mitigates only 30% of incoming damage. Assuming she is receiving 1000 damage per second, and she's not equipping any defensive items, being healed by support, or enemy preventing heals, the final received damage per second with and without the legendary will be as follows:
- With Mother's Grace: 1000*0.5-160= 340DPS.
- Without Mother's Grace: 1000*0.7-160= 540DPS.
- Total damage reduction compared to vanilla Earthern Guard in this particular example: 1-340/540= 37%
- Total damage reduction overall: 1-340/1000= 66%
Mother's Grace benefits are twofold: alongside the downright insane damage mitigation the legendary card provides, it also provides complete CC immunity, preventing stuns, knockbacks, slows, polymorphs, etc., which is definitely another game-changing boon to have, and saves you the pain of buying Resilience over other defense items when in dire need of it.
Important Note (Edit)
It's a common misconception that the card "Sacred Ground" will giver Inara more survivability over "Steadfast" with its extra 10% damage reduction, but this is false, however, due to diminishing returns. If we were to take the above example with the same criteria:
- Without Sacred Ground: 1000*0.5-160= 340DPS
- With Sacred Ground: 1000*0.5*[1-(0.1*0.5)]-160= 315DPS
- Total damage reduction in comparison in this particular example: 1-315/340= 7.35%
The difference gets even smaller if we add defensive items like Haven and Blast Shield into the equation. "Steadfast" increases Inara's maximum health by 6.38%(300) at level 4, and it's a passive increase that stays there the entire round, unlike "Sacred Ground".
Items
Defense:
- Blast Shield: If the enemy team has heavy AOE damage champions like Drogoz, Bomb King, Willo, etc.
- Haven: Otherwise.
Utility:
- Master Riding: Allows you to get to the objective first, sneaking in a wall and gaining some objective points for your team.
- Chronos: Less CD means less received damage and more CC.
Healing:
- Rejuvenate: Allows even more healing from support.
- Others are not recommended for a front liner as they get the majority of their heal from support champions.
Attack:
- Cauterize: Decreases enemy team heal effectiveness.
- Others are not recommended due to Inara's average damage output.
Playstyle
Focus fire at enemy frontlines and support to reduce their healing with your Cauterize while spamming your Earthern Guard and Warder's Field abilities for damage mitigation and zone control on the objective.