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Clerics needs some SERIOUS attention!
sumrrain
Member Posts: 3 Arc User
let me say, after playing my cleric up to level 30, I absolutely HATE this character and it is because you have inherent problems with this class. As a cleric, my role is to heal and buff my group but I have zero Z.E.R.O. targeting ability! in the heat of the battle I have NO WAY and I mean Absolutely NO WAY to target who I want to heal. WTH? Really? Let me grab the guy from my list of team members but requiring me to try to grab a figure in the ebb and tide of battle, I would say almost 50% of the time the guy I am trying to heal is NOT the guy that gets my heal! That is so absolutely frustrating out of the blocks, I dont know how many of the rest of these issues are real or just the spawn of frustration in not being able to cast a single thing on the target you are after. and the alt ability? Dont EVEN get me started!! more than 50% of the time, my alt does NOT come off when I click it, so I throw a heal, try to go back to battle only to find my alt keystroke was not recognized and I just burned all my healing! WTH? Why is the major healing ONLY done when alt'd but the rest of the alt abilities SUCK? they have 0 ability to stand on their own and 0 ability to do ANYTHING other than heal and healing SUCKS! Buffs are a joke. Maybe they get better at higher levels but at a 30, there is not one that appears to do <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> for team members. So frustrated! soo frustrated! I will leave this class to those of you with higher resolution playing abilities and more patience than I have to burning my very limited healing ability on the wrong characters!
Post edited by sumrrain on
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Comments
Sounds like rolling your face on the keyboard for epics might be the path your interested in.
IMO, I LOVE the priest.. because it requires me to be on my toes.. seeking line of sight to heal my members. It actually makes me FEEL like I'm involved in a battle. It does take getting use too, but I can easily say, its NOT for everyone.
Good luck in your adventures!
Trith : Fury Soulbinder :
Soloing, I was not able to take down the giants alone in Hotenow, and if I tried with a team, I could not dps enough to get credit for the quest. But as soon as I got Astral Sheild, that was no longer a problem. I solo'd them with minimal effort. I was one or two levels higher, but I still think it was AS that made all the difference.
They DEFINITELY get better once you reach 60, but I can see how hard it must have been to play on a team as one leveling.
If anyone comes in here and tells you its unusual to have the problem that you did, they might be lying, or maybe they had material help from alts or other players (such as a super pet, high ranked enchants, etc.)
When you hit 60 and get outfitted, and tweak your build and get boons, etc.. you will enjoy playing your cleric. Then later, the buzz will wear off some as you start to run with other really well built/tweaked chars that don't really need you that much anymore. But you will still have plenty of good days, and will still be useful.
P.S. I think it would be totally cool if they came up with a 'holy vengeance mode' for clerics, when it turns out the party doesn't need so much healing. Like, this could be toggled, and it dampens healing powers but boosts DPS or other support powers. I do think clerics need attention, as they should be made a bit more versatile.. in each build, not just paragon choices.
Roland Mac Sheonin GF | Tarron Direheart SW |
Cleric healing changes dramatically in later levels. You won't even use any of the spells you use before 30. You never need to target people to heal.
I hate to say it, but it's not so much as Clerics need work as mush as it's you needing to hone your skills and learning more about what Clerics can do.
It takes practice to be able to get up to the point where you can pick people out in battle and heal them with single target heals. It'll get there with time.
CRazy..
I leveled my GF and then my DC.. It's all different once you get into epics etc.. but neither are close to my GWF who is just a blast of fun.. It has soured me that my GWF doesn't need a healer with low heals or a tank without decent dps comparable with every other class in the game to get the job done.. What's the point of tanking or healing when the game is based on high dps and high levels of skill if 2 of the 6 classes have nothing to feel excited about!
Healing word is surprisingly useful once you get a better understanding of the classes and their relative strengths/weaknesses, but the main problem with it is that you get it so early, when both you are your team are much more likely to be clueless zergspam people.
Your main heal in parties up until you get astral shield should really be astral seal. Never take that off your bar. Seal as many monsters as you can and you'll be supplying the guys hitting them with constant, low-level, per-hit tickheals. Use sunburst constantly, as in non-divine mode it's a spammable AoE heal that doesn't cost divinity, and if you pop it when a lot of monsters are around (i.e. let the melees engage the pack of bads, skoosh in, pop sunburst, skoosh out) it also does damage and generates a ton of divinity. And if you get surrounded you can always use it in D to push everything away.
Forgemaster's flame, which you should get around 30, is a great heal in divine mode, plus it has the advantage that it heals anyone around the monster you cast it on. Stick it on an elite that's hassling your party and it'll turn that elite into a mobile heal station.
Other than that, stick with things like chains and daunting light and just lay out the deeps. If people complain about lack of healing, tell them to stop standing in red. If you're sealing and sunbursting and FFing, you're basically doing the best you can.
All this obviously changes once you get astral shield, because then you become a blue-circlebot.
Healing word is a situational heal that really comes into its own in later parties with mixed composition. If you have a party of 4 GWFs, then you don't need HW, because they will all be bunched up in a blue circle anyway, and this should be more than enough (to be honest, in a 4 GWF party you might not even need to heal at all). If you have two tanky melees, a HR and a CW, however, then bringing HW might be useful: astral shield will take care of the melees for most of the time, but the CW and HR will be on the periphery, usually drawing ungodly amounts of aggro, so might need regular HW top-ups. Targetting is less of a problem here, because you're no longer trying to aim into a pack of party members, you're just picking out a single guy who's managed to aggro the entire room.
By the way, I rarely use HW as a primary healing tool, its not needed, most DDs I use Divine Glow, SB and Asheild then spray aseal around. There is nothing else I need to do until boss fights, some boss fights I drop DG for HW (or even FF, love that more in FH where I drop it on the pack the GF is kiting, keeps him up better then me running around spraying HWs there) depending on whats going on in the situation and how much more healing my team may need vs my debb/buff of DG. I will use Soothing light as a quick cap up heal for the HRs , as they cant seem to bother to move to a glowy circle (or let them die a few times till they rage quit or learn the lesson to move to a glowy circle.. )
The good news is until people get in teh 15kish or higher range in terms of gear score, they will still want a cleric to run with them, so there are always people asking for DCs, so usually getting a spot isnt as bad as being one of the other classes that are now a CW or GWF.. however, if you ALWAYS want a spot , just roll a CW.
an additional effect; healing depression, has been added to the game. If a player has been struck by another player within the last 10 seconds, the potency of incoming healing and temporary hit points will be reduced by 50%.
Healing Depression + Righteousness = why they just don't remove the class. At least that would be more honest than this ongoing kicking.
"Mod 6. Oh my f****** god. It gutted the game pure and simple. And what wasn't gutted was messed up by the poorly thought out new level cap and equip. The game never recovered from that atrocity".
..............not this one then.............
ah OP - ignore my bit about -40% healing on top of -50% healing. What? You're having trouble getting that out of your mind?
ok, well look into this light - BOOM! - now listen, everything's perfectly ok with the Cleric.
"Mod 6. Oh my f****** god. It gutted the game pure and simple. And what wasn't gutted was messed up by the poorly thought out new level cap and equip. The game never recovered from that atrocity".
..............not this one then.............
However, when you do use HW or the Divine R-click heal, when you get used to it it's like the guy above said - you are more active because you have to actually run around and get into position to heal a guy. i.e. the fact that you can't stand back and click a bar and autoheal a person is a disadvantage in one way, but an advantage in another.
The sense in which it would be a disadvantage (i.e. in a game where lots of emergency healing was needed) doesn't apply to this game, as the Astral Seal and AoE DoT heals from Sunburst and FF (and later Astral Shield and traited Hallowed Ground for example) are quite sufficient. Usually there will only be the occasional guy who gets into a bit of trouble, and it's easy to just run over to them and give them a quick heal if you have one of those on your bar, and it's actually more fun and active to do that, you're more in the gameplay.
But even then, later in the game, the AoE heals are so powerful and flow so constant, it usually brings them up anyway.
And remember, Ceric in this game is a melee position/midrange position healer, you're right in the thick of it, moving around constantly, very active playstyle. Also you are fairly tough with chainmail and if you gear for good Defence, so you can stand in damage-only (not CC of course) red attacks without too much worry, and your teleport ability is strong, so positioning (e.g. for good coverage for Sunburst) is facilitated by these two capabilities.
Very nice post. I'm glad there are some people who can provide an objective class analysis and discuss how the class fits into the game mechanics and not just say "this suck" because it's not the playstyle they were looking for
I like that you make special mention of positioning. This is key to playing any DC well, and especially so for ACs.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
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