I've always been a fan of mutant togballs. Hibi is cool, and they're fun to hunt. Especially if you can get access to a bless spell. They're cursed/undead but not non-corp so you don't need it, it's just extra damage.

But I also did the boars on a thief, and they're good. You should be fine either place, given Paladin high durability. If you can't hit them, a snap of stun foe should cure that.

Just a word of warning about tresses: They don't move from room to room, so you'll have to wander around to find them as you kill them or hope one happens to spawn in your room every time one of them respawns after they despawn. This has the implication that you'll likely only ever be hunting more than one or two at a time, so they're quite safe to hunt but don't teach defences very well.

Note that this is all from my experience hunting them in 2.0, so things may have changed since then.

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Thugs in the Crossing sewers are great until 150-160, and then you can move to river sprites --> dryads/priestesses after that. All have boxes, but no skins. If you want skinning, you might try vipers/leucros, although that's a trickier transition.

Paladin with pretty similar skills here, and dire bears, out the Crossing west gate past Wolf Clan, are working very well for me. Elanthipedia has them capping out on defense around 160ish.

And are you actually able to cast Holy Warrior? I went to the trouble to pick up a scroll of Bless instead, since E-pedia has Holy Warrior needing around 250 in magics just to cast...

Turns out dire bears cap out a little higher than vipers now it seems, for anyone interested.

I went to check out the thicket vipers by leucros earlier since I was hoping they might move armor/shield etc while I'm waiting for evasion to catch up. Dire bears have my armors 166-168 at dabbling all the time, vipers didn't move them from clear. Dire bears can still lock my weapons at 155-158 and they were moving much slower in vipers. Still lock evasion at 135, but other than that if I had to guess the soft cap for vipers is ~155, dire bears soft cap is exactly 165 from my experience. In either case I'll be sitting here for a few weeks waiting for evasion to get into the 150s or so.