Arelith

Having played two SMITTER paladins, one that I did manage to cap 5 Years ago and another one from the same era that I play on and off and currently at level 27, I have a question:

Are this type of build not viable on Arelith with all the changes over the years?

I know first hand this type of build is Niche and a notch below bearable, recently I decided to dust off the one at level 27 and it's more challenging to play this type of build now than 5 years ago.

I do know the limitation during my first build [Reliant on spells to do decent damage and AC, only three strikes if NPC is evil, ect]
Most of my gear have level 1 spells so I can use divine Favor but because I can't do any decent damage without divine might or favor I need to rest ALOT so I can refresh my spells.

Are there any viable current builds that I'm not aware of ?

Smiters are not designed with PvE in mind, but rather for PvP.

In PvE they will be below par due to needing 25 base charisma, they will likely suffer from AB and HP issues, only managing due to Divine Might and Divine Shield. They got better with the paladin rework.

For PvP they are very binary, you either kill or you miss. Only works against evil.

If you do mean the 25+ charisma great smite meme type build... If that's really what you want, but I would not be ok with basically being useless except for 3 attacks/day.

Fitting extra smiting into a normal high paladin level build sounds much more playable. It'll just be a smaller damage hit that's probably comparable to might damage.

If you're talking divine favor, do you mean a battle cleric? Yes, battle clerics are still good builds.

Paladins also have access to Divine Favor.