This is just a public service announcement to all DC's out there.
At the time of writing, there is only
ONE way to spec your Heroic Feats:
The
only deviation from this would be if you are Human. In that case, take 5/5 Bountiful Fortune and 3/3 Cleanse. Though in general, I would not recommend Human since the extra heroic feats are basically useless.
If you think I got something wrong, leave a reply and we can do some testing.
Comments
Kaylee Krankenwagen, level 60 GF | Tavandruil Wayfinder, level 49 GWF | Aldith Langley, level 51 HR
...but in this case it's very close to the truth!
As for feats that reduce aggro, why bother? Especially for such a tiny reduction that we don't even need.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
Kaylee Krankenwagen, level 60 GF | Tavandruil Wayfinder, level 49 GWF | Aldith Langley, level 51 HR
Black Lotus
http://nl.twitch.tv/wixardofoz
sorry got a deviation here.
Healing action sucks but it rounds up so its a one point wonder.
Holy resolve is never used outside of PvP and is worthless if you have soulforged. Placing three points is silly. One point wonder.
Recovery may not be that great, but a little bit of recovery is better than an unused 5 minute cooldown. 2 points there.
If they fixed Armor Pen on some abilities then Templar's would be worth one point as well. Judgement call on that one.
Everything else is how i have it though.
I am sure i am not the norm, but still.
This speaks against Healing Action having any real place in you Heroic feats.
Holy resolve is still better than 5% more recovery for 5 points in my opinion, 5% is, with my high recovery build (I think I'm at about 3.5k without ANY buffs) 3500*1.05 -3500 = 175, that's 175 recovery, for five feat points, that is 35 stat for one feat point. The fact my Ioun stone gives about 10x that to me as well makes it even smaller. So think temporary HP to save me in case a CW push goes bad in CN, I rubber band back into a red circle, or I just basically screw up royally and need 15% more HP to let me stay alive and help fixing the situation. Also, I only pay 3% recovery for my temporary HP, should be around 105 recovery, the fact I plan on getting my recovery down to saner levels just adds to my dislike of this feat (an augmented 3k recovery build with BiS even on pet would get around 500 recovery from the pet, meaning 2.5k base, which means 75 recovery is lost for 15% Temp HP).
For the same reason I'm against the use of Initiate of the Faith, the gain is minimal for a rather high cost in feat points.
Just to make it clear, Augments grants a buff, this buff WON'T be affected by ANY feats, in the same way the feats grants a similar buff, meaning stat increasing feats won't stack with you companion, nor other feats.
Edit: Got carried away with discussing feats so I forgot to mention, the point of this thread is quite clearly to black on white show how extremely broken the cleric class is.
We have ONE valid setup for our Heroic feats, why? Because the rest are either not working, extremely weak or the mechanic they improve upon isn't working. Is this how it should be looking? The only healer class in the game, suffering from feats not worth it, mechanics not working, stats being useless on them, not as in inappropriate to specc in, but doing close to nothing.
Maybe I should just move on to play a TR or CW, at least they get some kind of recognition, instead of being left nerfed again and again, and just as bugged as always...
You made all my points for me lol.
Yea healing action is terrible but you get max benefit from one point. (this can be argued to be negligible if you already own the 2% boon though.)
I never said to put five points in recovery, just the two extra with no home. (holy resolve points).
If i had a choice between having a free 60 recovery vs having a redundant oh HAMSTER button that i dont use (to be clear i use one point so i still have it just not 15%) ill take the extra recovery.
To each their own, but i have yet to ever need holy resolve. I have soulforged for that. Maybe if i swapped to a new armor chant i may reconsider though.
The stat gains from domain synergy and initiate of faith are too low to invest any points into. The only thing they serve to do is boost GS. TBH, I regret going human because the three extra heroic feat points are useless when I can get all the feats I want with a nonhuman (and it looks exactly like the first screenie ... lol).
I just dont get it.
People would rather spend 3 points in something almost completely useless instead of spending 1 in it and still getting the same benefit, plus spending 2 elsewhere to get a small stat advantage.
I know that 3% recovery is not much, but its better than 0% of nothing.
I get that maybe all people dont roll with soulforged, or maybe you are talking that this is purely for a pvp cleric, however for a PvE cleric it is clearly a sub par feat distribution.
I also don't know how you could conclude going human for the 3 extra feats is useful for a DC. There is really nothing else to take. Getting another race that have +2 to a second ability score would far outstrip 3% bonus Recovery. +2 Int or Cha is worth ~600 Recovery if you have ~3000 without it. The 3% Defense is equally useless, it's less than 1% extra DR.
- Some choose recovery
- Some choose Holy Resolve
- Some think 3 points extra is uselss
- Some think 3 points are usefull
Both are good, don't discuss which one is better. I guess if you put 2 exactly the same DC's next to eachother your party won't even feel the difference if one uses Holy Resolve and the other Recovery.
Why I swapped Holy Resolve for Recovery and 1 point in Healing action is because well I 99,9% of the time I don't need the Holy Resolve and then every extra % in recovery....well is an extra %.
Both ways are good.
Black Lotus
http://nl.twitch.tv/wixardofoz
There is no argument about Human. +2 to TWO ability scores is better, in every single case, than 3 extra feats and 3% Defense bonus.
"Why I swapped Holy Resolve for Recovery and 1 point in Healing action is because well I 99,9% of the time I don't need the Holy Resolve and then every extra % in recovery....well is an extra %."
I did specced it but it never procs because i never go down on health that much. Yes, never. So why should I spend 3 points in something that never procs, because for me those 3 points don't have a practical impact, so I rather have some +recovery then +nothing. Do you find yourself sometimes dropping in health and a potion or a heal isn't enough then choose Holy Resolve, a life saver every 5 min.
And the other I said:
"I choose human so I have more points to spend which I think are worth more then everything. But other players have another approach."
And yet again:
- Until 100% proven which is better with actual data form example ACT nobody has the perfect build. And since these are so minor differences, they won't hardly be noticed.
Just do as you like, both ways are good.
Black Lotus
http://nl.twitch.tv/wixardofoz
Even if somehow that's true, I don't think any other DC in the game will experience that. So skipping Holy Resolve for a practically useless amount of Recovery is not "good", it's not optimal, and it's not advice others should follow. All it means is you are an exception.
Of course I think you're just being stubborn and don't want to admit it. Obviously, like everyone else in the game, you do drop to 30% health and/or die in this game sometimes.
Holy Resolve is an excellent emergency ability that comes at the expense of absolutely nothing, except, apparently, your pride.
(Assuming 3000 Recovery, 1800 Defense)
Bonus Feats = 3/5 Domain Synergy = 3% Recovery = +90 Recovery = +0.37% Recharge Speed/AP Gain
3% Defense = +54 Defense = +0.49% Damage Resist
Str: +2% Crit Chance, +2% Stamina Regen
Con: +4% HP
Int: +2% Recharge Speed
Cha: +2% Recharge Speed/AP Gain
Wis: +2% Damage and Healing
As you can see, +2 to Str, Con, Int, Cha, or Wis is better than the human bonuses -- over twice as good. It's not even close. The only thing that might not be better is Dex, but even that's debatable.
The real problem is that "Defense" for Human actually means Defense rating and not Damage Resist. It's 50/50 what "Defense" means in any given tooltip. The same is true of our feat Restoration Mastery, making it equally useless. If it were 3% Damage Resist it would be quite good, and I suspect that's what it SHOULD be, but this game has a real problem with consistency and tooltip text.
Exactly. Holy Resolve may not be amazing, but it's way way way more useful than anything else you could take. Some pidly amount of extra recovery or crit is beyond pointless, just a waste of feat points. The only reason to have a point in healing action is if you're Human, as mentioned. Even though Holy Resolve does have an internal 5 min build in CD it's still better than any other options. It's not going to do much for you in PVP but it Shines in PVE since I almost always have it available for the moments I drop below 30% and then couple that with soulforged and omg awesomeness.
I went 5/5 in bountiful fortune since there's nothing that really needs to be cleansed in this game and after they installed the internal CD's on cleanse it didn't even seem to proc that often anymore.
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
Black Lotus
http://nl.twitch.tv/wixardofoz
The proc rate was 0? In other words you've never gone below 30% HP?
Holy resolve can save you from having to use soulforged at that time, and then the next time you get low SF will go off, saving you again.
Also if you are specced for it you heal yourself for 10% more when you have temp HP, and you need all the healing you can get when you're below 30% HP heh.
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
I still feel kind of uncomfortable with us pointing out there is only one good build*, because it seems to me that the Cryptic way of balancing is nerfing across the board instead of fixing what's broken. So, I fear that some of those feats will be changed to make them less attractive, and the broken ones will stay the same or get a fix that doesn't even work.
*mostly
As for Initiate of the Faith, if the level cap remains as is and we continue getting more of the power stat from items/boons/whatever else then at some point it might actually start to become a good feat. It's the same for Domain Synergy. I've seen clerics running around with 6k power, I don't think I would have believed it possible to have that much power (while keeping everything else decent) just a month ago.
Bottomline is that Cryptic apparently felt that the heroic feats should be comprised to two very specific groups: must-haves and build-specific (perhaps even group-specific) feats. I imagine Battlewise would be great to have on a cleric who plays with GWFs instead of GFs. I agree that the build above should be considered the "standard" build though, for clerics who don't have any particular quirks or focus other than just surviving and healing.
Soothing Light gives about 1% AP per tick. With 5/5 Healing Action, it still gives... 1% AP per tick.
Per average-difficulty encounter I usually spend 1/2 to 1 divinity bar on Soothing Light. I use up at least twice that much for more difficult encounters (or on longer battles/fights that go wrong) and against bosses I pretty much use Soothing Light every chance I get. Going by how 1 divinity bar is worth roughly 6 Soothing Light ticks, I think it doesn't take a lot to make a rough estimate of just how many Soothing Light ticks I actually use per dungeon run.
Considering how you cannot just keep attacking mobs to generate AP instead of healing your allies when they need it most, every little bit of extra AP generation counts. It would be so nice if you could just keep spamming our best AP-generating encounters/at-wills and make the most out of our high AP generation stat + Holy Fervor, but we need to be practical. With builds like mine you cannot afford to not have your daily up every chance you get, and even a few seconds can mean all the difference between most of incoming damage getting mitigated by recently charged up Divine Armor; and a wipe.
What whistlingdixie was trying to point out is that you're getting the same AP gain from soothing light regardless of how many points you've spent in Healing Action. For example, whith holy word, since the AP rounds up you get an extra 1% from having one point in Healing Action. If you put five points you get the exact same bonus because all you're gettnig is a larger decimal number that just gets rounded up. HW generates about 7% AP per cast if I remember correctly, if Soothing Light only generates 1% per tick then you're increases from Healing Action will be even less than for HW meaning that you're back to the same case. 1 point will give you the same benefit as 5 points in that feat. It doesn't matter how many ticks of soothing light you cast because the effect is not cummulative, it's calculated individually for each cast or tick in this case.
Personally I'm not sure why you use soothing light so much for healing, it's incredibly inneficient, but that's your prerogative. You don't need to attack mobs to generate AP, you simply generate AP from casting. Heck, you throw down an AS and it gives you a whole bunch of AP yet it didn't do any dmg or even heal anybody. So doing dmg or healing is not required for AP. Maybe you got confused with DP generation. Also, there's really no need to have daily's up all the time, especially since they nerfed dailys across the board, that was the whole idea of that nerf. Granted if people are undergeared or just standing in red circles then yes it'll make a bit of a difference. But I've always been more of the preferance of use the daily when you actually need it, even before although I used to have such insane AP generation it didn't really matter since it could have like 90% uptime or more
The game does count decimals. The AP Meter tooltip just doesn't show decimals. However if you want to see an accurate value for your current AP, use this command:
/GenAddWindow Playerstatus_Info
It adds some text to the top left of the screen. The "Power" is your AP x10, so 1000 = 100%. To remove the window type the reserve of the command above:
/GenRemoveWindow Playerstatus_Info
As I said, even 5/5 Healing Action doesn't benefit Soothing Light. This is not just a rounding issue with the tooltip text.