The Quack-adin

The Quack-adin. A paladin and their trusty Duck.

Disclaimer: This build is for fun, and while it has a certain purpose and can achieve it well, i wouldn't call it optimized for various reasons (playstyle choices). User discretion is strongly advised

Concept: A paladin build (not a Paladine build) that relies on Heal Preens as a sort of "Lay on Hands" healing effect. You are playing a front-liner with a strong amount of staying power, but you can also benefit from healing potential in a pinch.

Gear:
Any Shield weapon fits, my choice here is Lyke-Wake because it can have Savagery. Along our use of Forburn it gives use two statuses, Bleed to help the team with DPS and Fire to strip the enemy armor in case the boss is a bit too beefy for your DPS player/s.
We are going with Mora's Hand as a Pact due to how well it places itself between the unstoppable Tethren and the unkillable Bromius. It lacks a taunt or an armor buff, but Ember provides a Stability buff alongside a weapon damage buff by virtue of proccing Hungry Flame on cast. This means pressing Ember translates into a 25% damage increase, see the wiki page for more detailed info.
Inferno is just utility, it provides decent ranged damage even on low grace and applies a short Fire proc, helping strip armor. Ignus Wroth is our bread and butter arcanic, due to it's scaling on courage for the damage ticks and the crowd control it provides.
For Totems we are going with Heal Preens as explained before, Rivers Revive for personal sustain, Stocky Lodge for additional armor on rune and finally Thunder Tail as an additional interrupt. Our rune of choice is Forburn due to it applying Fire (therefore stripping armor) and because it's our shield bash attack.
Tempers on the weapon are up to preference mostly, my setup utilizes 2xUnencumbered for damage, Swift Strike for a bit of attack speed, 2xSavagery for extra DPS, then i have Fortified, Follow Up and Bounding Swipe to help with my running heavy attacks, which are how i usually engage the fight.
For armor we are using a full set of Arbearer armor. While it is true that this set provides marginally less physical defense than the Mendicant King set, it also provides higher Stability which is a very useful stat to have, especially since we are playing an aggressive "in-your-face" build.
Talisman is Molten Mora for as much HP as possible.

Pup stats: 5 Guts, 5 Endurance, 5 Heart. All of these help us, Guts gives Stability, Endurance is a huge HP buff and Heart makes us heal for 60% more on our Heal Preens procs.

Gameplay: You are the frontline of the team, you want to use Thunder Tail from your rune activations and your Ignus Wroth casts to disrupt enemy maneuvers and pressure them. When something is too tanky for you to manage by yourself, strip their armor with either Forburn or Inferno to help your party members with their damage. Use your Ember to become an absolutely uninterruptable tank. Unless you have a dedicated healer (unlikely but not impossible) you should have good priority on smite pulls. Of course you should coordinate with your team about that, I am not in any way telling you to steal smites from allies that require them for their builds to work. But if your team is struggling, start pulling smites with confidence.
Remember to summon and unsummon your wolf pup before fights, that way you're sure of having both the virtue buffs and the Endurance's 50% HP buff active.

Variation:
Since the healing aspect of the build can become more important depending on your team's performance, you can certainly look into striking Sullying Force on your weapon, making your healing output more reliable and also helping the team with more consistent smites if that is required.