Sanctuary is an extremely underrated aura and if it affected Demons, you’d pretty much turn the game into easy mode. The only monsters that would give you trouble are the Itchies/Swarms(who are naturally PI) and any Animal Unique that happens to roll with Stone Skin(becoming PI in the process). Those enemies would require that you debuff them with a curse, else you couldn’t harm them with Physical Damage.
Yet what Sanctuary aura does is two things. 1) Ignores Physical Resistance. I cannot stress to you how broken this perk is. Enemies typically have 50 Physical Resistance and in the case of Wraiths, who are naturally PI, it ignores it. Meaning you don’t need to curse them to break their immunity and you do full damage to all Undead targets. People complain about Elemental Immunities and yet the Paladin has one that outright ignores Physical for Undead… 2) Can leech on any enemy affected by it. Since PI normally prevents leeching, by ignoring immunity means that you can leech from them, provided they have positive or non-zero Drain Effectiveness. I’ve contemplated proposing that any enemy affected by Sanctuary should have Drain Effectiveness set to 100. It still wouldn’t change the Nightmare/Hell Difficulty penalty for leeching but it’d certainly help in leeching Life/Mana.
If you don’t believe me, I did math calculations in another thread: Sanctuary aura calculations
When it comes to Blessed Hammer, I opted for Sanctuary aura to replace Concentration for “buffing it”. At the same level, Sanctuary has roughly double the % that Concentration does. Meaning you’d have to set Sanctuary at 25% to maintain current Hammer output or set it to 12.5% if you wanted to nerf it by roughly 50%. With Sanctuary as the primary aura, it gives Hammerdins a bone for dealing with Baal’s Wave 2 by allowing them to ignore their Physical Resistance(and for dealing with the MI Undead in Act 2).
Furthermore, if you had Holy Bolt and FoH affected by Concentration or heck Sanctuary, they would crush Blessed Hammer so hard at present levels it’s not even funny(FoH would do upwards of 17k with no GC’s(24k with 9)… Holy Bolt would do 25k with no GC’s, 33k+ with 9 GC’s).
I plan on playing a specialized FoHdin in Season 2 because Holy Bolt/FoH, despite it’s Animal limitations, is pretty darn strong.