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should i give up on cleric as dps?
pariswinters
Member Posts: 858 Arc User
mod 16 brought some big changes.....many of them to the classes and how they perform their roles. I have always played my cleric as dps because when i 1st made her my healing was irrelavant and without dps I couldn't carry new/low groups. now her dmg is far outclassed by thaumaturge wizard. should I consider changing to wizard as my main character because of the way the developers are obviously leading this game to favor this class+path above all others for dps?
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Class envy..just live with it like I do...a fellow Arbiter
Maybe DPS cleric will get a buff. Maybe not. I would love to see them get some DPS buffs, same with fighters and barbarians. But im patient and none of them are at a place where they are unplayable for any content, so its not like u have to change to play.
With that said, I know a handful of DPS clerics that have wiped the floor with other DPS classes in LoMM. Skill over class anyday.
I just dusted off my DPS Cleric after shelving it for a bit. Not because I think it should be top DPS. But to see if I'll have fun playing the class. I'm not concerned with beating out wizards and eventually the wizards will get the nerf bat like everyone always does.
It's the cycle of life.
It's so nice to see someone not in shiny pants, courtesan jammies, or a mini jester skirt.
Anyway -
I don't know what it's like in the tougher content, but people often seem a little tetchy when my Arbiter focuses on dps. They still expect heals. Part of me doesn't mind. If people are struggling, I'll switch in Bastion. But part of me resents it 'cause the moment they start getting their heals they get lazy and start playing stupid, then I'm stuck kissing boo-boos.
I've only seen an Arbiter in pug LoMM once. And he rage-quit before the first boss because the tank out-DPS him by a lot. I've never seen an Arbiter in RAQ though.
We can be a good class if they at least first make divinity more manageable in long fights. Then they can target our damage etc if we are still far behind. Single target damage is key in higher up dungeons and clerics have massive divinity issues if they run the most dps route otherwise they just have to sacrifice dmg for better divinity management.
Now, that goal is really not reachable, as you cannot balance for all types of content at the same time:
- Solo play (some classes have an advantage, for example because they have powers that provide CA.
- Single target (Some classes have better single-target powers than others)
- Trash cleaning (Some classes have better AoE powers than others).
- PvP (Not my area of expertise, but I understand there are various issues).
Overall, though, things are decent - yes, Arbiter may be 20% below an equally geared/skilled Thaum Wizard, but we can match Rogues and Rangers and easily outperform the other DPS classes - at least that is my experience from LoMM runs.Personally I am happy with the performance of my Arbiter - if I can have the second-highest DPS on a smooth, fast LoMM run, it tells me the class is in a fine shape. I actually like how demanding the class is to play well - you cannot use just a mindless A-B-C rotation, and proper divinity management requires attention.
I'm not saying the Arbiter is perfect - the pips give us a disadvantage when clearing trash, we cannot easily get CA in solo play, and some of our feats are spectacularly useless, but compared to some of the other classes, I don't think we have much to complain about.
I know that Fighters are probably the ones that have the right to complain the most, maybe Warlocks after because they are below in healing and dps route but their dps path is not far off from us and doesn't require as much effort too. Then i would say that Arbiter cleric has every right to complain as pallies are doing fine in every route. DC is way too boring for us to play all the time and pallies still beat us at higher lvls of play and AC at higher level really needs to play at skill ceiling to be effective.
You can test the most dps build for single target on your AC, using ACT, and tell me what damage per second you get. Now try to maximise this damage by pumping more divinity and tell me how hard it becomes and what your dps now is? It's simple, all we need is more divinity and its a damn easy change for Cryptic. Simple ways of doing this are:
1) Reduce divinity cost on some encounters i.e. DL costs way too high and FF is a tad bit higher than acceptable.
2) Allow us to get more divinity back when we tab. The class feature that gives you back 10% divinity everytime you tab could be changed to 25% and/or Critical insight could provide 25 divinity back instead of 10. The other useless class features could provide alternative form of damage instead of the awful Divine Equilibrium feature, as if we don't have enough to deal with, they now put another requirement of keeping our divinity close to half (ufff).
3) They could alternative remove some feats like angle of death though PB is way too good to let go. But i have previously mentioned that reducing Angle of deaths stacks to 10-15 or so would open many build paths by itself.
4) I would say that our at-wills should be made faster for how reliant we are on them. We are way too squishy to be building pips whilst standing still and getting beaten up. This would also help to regen div using pips.
Lastly, another thing we lack is aoe burst damage, flame strike daily just lasts way too long and is not effective at all on trash. On bosses we have enough ST dailies. Celes Prom is also way too slow and 600 AOE is not good at all. Number 4 above could also help with this as we can release SJ with more stacks faster that way.
I am really looking forward to Mod 17, because the CA radius changes will allow me to engage in my favourite ranged playstyle full-time, without suffering from a penalty, compared to the melee classes. The same will apply to others who enjoy ranged combat, which might make the melee DPSers fall a bit behind...I expect fighters in particular to complain louder after mod 17 arrives.
What I do notice, however, is that your Power rotation seems VERY different from what I am using, so, maybe that's the basic reason for the difference we are seeing.
This just goes to show that 99% of the time when a class cant do dmg its because of player error.
> I am really looking forward to Mod 17, because the CA radius changes will allow me to engage in my favourite ranged playstyle full-time, without suffering from a penalty, compared to the melee classes.
>
> could be a game changer. I do ok with my dps, but i always play at range, I know I don't have CA like 90% of the time, but hey, i'm not getting attacked or if I do I can see it coming and dodge. I am really hoping this makes the clerics dps much more even with the other dps classes. It's 100% more damage.
>
> So u complain about the cleric doing to low dmg. And then u tell us u play without CA 90% of the time.
>
> This just goes to show that 99% of the time when a class cant do dmg its because of player error.
And they expect to still outperform the damage of tanks/healers with all max enchants and everything even with their poor performance as a dps just because they are a "dps" class role?
Thats like playing darts at point blank range, and then expecting to still do better/stay the same at lets say, against someone who has always been 1 meter away and the said player has changed from point blank to like 5 meters.
That doesnt happen overnight, not without tons of practice and advice from other players but it requires you to be open to changes and criticism, which you made clearly with all these recent posts, that you are not and just cannot accept the fact that the problem lies not with the class, but on how you utilize it.
As I said, I am looking forward to this, because I really like that playing style - I just don't use it at the moment because the loss in DPS would be too significant.