Upcoming Devoted Cleric Changes

dreadnaught

Please discuss in the preview thread: UPCOMING DEVOTED CLERIC CHANGES

dreadnaught#5263 said:

As part of the ongoing effort to balance classes in Neverwinter, we are looking at the Devoted Cleric and its role and viability in group and solo content. The main issues being addressed are Daily power imbalances and the solo experience.

In group content, Devoted Clerics rely too heavily on Anointed Army, which is almost always the optimal Daily power of choice. Furthermore, Anointed Army has trivialized a lot of endgame content (even before it was broken), so it has been on our list of powers to address for a while now. One of the intentions of this pass is to put Anointed Army in line with other dailies so that players need to make a choice of which Daily powers to use depending on the situation. In addition to this, a number of other Daily powers that were either not working as intended or just not very useful have been adjusted.

In solo content, Devoted Clerics can be painful to play relative to other classes due to their low damage output. This pass should address Clerics’ overall self-sufficiency.

Here is the list of changes being made to the Devoted Cleric:

• The following powers have had their damage increased by 30%:
  • Sun Burst
    
  • Searing Light
    
  • Chains of Blazing Light
    
  • Daunting Light
    
  • Forgemaster’s Flame
    
  • Divine Glow
    
  • Break the Spirit
    
  • Prophecy of Doom
    
  • Flame Strike
    
  • Hammer of Fate
    

• Lance of Faith
  • The third hit of this power now deals damage to nearby targets.
    

• Anointed Army
  • The amount of damage absorbed by each charge of Anointed Army has been capped at 20% of the target’s maximum Hit Points. While the bug for this power was that it was mitigating 100% of incoming damage rather than the original 90%, the power will be left at 100% absorption for damage amounts at 20% of the target’s maximum hit points or below, now that the amount absorbed has been capped.
    

• Hallowed Ground
  • Clerics can now gain Action Points while Hallowed Ground is active. To compensate for this adjustment, this power now has a 45-second cooldown (can be shortened with cooldown reduction). Ideally, we would like to get rid of these “AP gain blocks” from most, if not all, Daily powers. In cases where the intent is to make a Daily non-spammable, a cooldown allows players to at least have the option to build AP to use their other Daily, if they so desire.
    

• Divine Armor
  • Clerics can now gain Action Points immediately after using Divine Armor.
    
  • Divine Armor no longer grants Damage Resistance. Instead, it grants targets 50% of their maximum hit points as Temporary Hit Points (up from 20%) for 5 seconds, plus an additional 10% per rank, to a maximum of 80% of the target’s maximum hit points.
    
  • Fixed a bug where Divine Armor was not granting additional Temporary Hit Points at additional ranks.
    

• Guardian of Faith
  • This power now heals targets for 500% of its original amount.
    

• Templar’s Domain
  • Fixed a bug where this feat could only proc once every 5 minutes. There is no longer a limit on the amount of times this feat can proc, and successive procs will refresh its duration (does not stack).
    

This thread is being posted in advance to putting the changes up on the Preview Shard, so now is the time to give feedback on the proposed changes. The overall intent is to increase the number of choices Devoted Clerics have rather than restricting them to a single optimal power and to improve their solo experience.