How about full dexterity on Paladin? thank you

[Maelwys]

Actually, you would want to do this with crafted jewelry (ideally DPS jewelry 4-5 melded with VIT and Parry).

You can get 40 from accessories (and 40 STR) at the cost of ~25 VIT and some parry.

That plus 30 Dex from distributable points would be 70, plus an additional what, Plus whatever you get for being in a party? That could potentially put you up two teirs in terms of block and parry, which could be between 2-4% additional chance for both, which would be a significant reduction in damage (~2%).

However as you mentioned, that 2% reduction in damage is gained at a cost of 25 Vit from accessories and 30 from distributable points.

55 Vit = ~825HP. That's a lot of HP. At endgame you'll be sitting anything from 5.5 to 7.5k HP as a Paladin - so that's well over 10% of your HP. Which translates directly into extra health buffer for your cooldowns, healing and passive regen... even a little extra damage on "Spirits Within".

Even if we make a leap and assume that the Dex build would grant you a whopping 5% extra mitigation instead of 2%, you would need to be sitting at more than 16550HP for the percentage of extra damage mitigation granted by the Dex setup to the equal the percentage of HP you'd be giving up.

And for those who are saying to go 30 VIT.. you're mistaken. It has been tested over and over again that 30 STR mitigates more damage than 30 VIT will give you more HP. If you really need that 450 HP to stay alive, then you should consider playing a different class entirely.

On solo Warriors, on easy content, sure.

They can use the extra STR for more powerful self heals and reach the immortality line sooner (the point at which they can mitigate/heal all damage received and survive indefinitely)

On Paladins (OR warriors), grouped, on hard content, not a hope in hell.

On hard content, such as Titan HM or Coil or even certain endgame dungeons, you will NOT be able to outheal the incoming damage yourself and will have to rely on external healing. At that point, being able to mitigate the incoming damage as it hits you (and buffing the amount of healing you receive from external sources - see Wrath Stacks!) plays a far bigger role than being able to self-heal after receiving that incoming damage.

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What's better: being able to self-heal 200 points, or being able to resist incoming damage by 20%?

On a 500 damage hit:
(i) you take 500 damage, you heal 200, you're left with -300 HP.
(ii) you resist 100 damage, you're left with -400 HP.
So the Self-Healing is better.

On a 5000 damage hit:
(i) you take 5000 damage, you heal 200, you're left with -4800 HP.
(ii) you resist 1000 damage, you're left with -4000 HP.
So the Resistance is better. Particularly if you had between 4000HP and 5000HP, because (i) would be dead before they could self-heal.

Scaling Mitigation is better at hard content than Flat Mitigation.
More Vit is a higher HP pool for your damage resistance, passive regen and outside healing to act upon.
More Str is only good if you're having issues holding hate (which you shouldn't do, weapon quality being equal) or are doing content that is ridiculously easy (to the point that a Vit build very probably wouldn't struggle to survive it either, and would just complete it sightly more slowly!)

TL;DR: "Nope."

And if you're not referring to the endless "Warriors vs Paladins" debate, and are just saying that a Paladin should invest in speccing STR instead of VIT... then double-nope. Because it HAS been tested and 30 Str will AT BEST move you up 1% Parry and Shield block strength. Which is not a flat extra 1% mitigation, but an extra 1% mitigation (block strength) that you have a ~25% chance (block chance) of getting - assuming that you're fighting every enemy face-to-face so that you're running at your maximum parry chance and also assuming that all the attacks received are non-magic and blockable! And finally; since the distance between parry tiers is quite large, often +30 Str won't be enough to bump you up into the next parry/block tier anyway... in which case that extra Str would be completely wasted.