Okay guys I said I would give a breakdown of what I'm running and I have the time to do it this morning. I wanted a bit more time to test it thoroughly and I feel that after a night of t2's it is really solid.
Updated * Players have made me question my initial build and I have altered it accordingly.
Build: 01/15/15Feats: Heroic
- 3/3 Toughness
- 3/3 Greater fortune
- 3/3 Holy Resolve
- 3/3 Weapon Mastery
- 3/3 Repurpose Soul
- 5/5 bountiful Fortune
- 1/3 Cleanse
Feats:Paragon
- 1/5 Rising Hope
- 5/5 Deepstone Blessing
- 5/5 Benefit of Foresight
- 5/5 Linked Spirit
- 5/5 Divine Advantage
- 5/5 Righteous Rage of Tempus
- 5/5 Warding Shield
At Wills:Sunburst,Astral Shield, and Bastion of HealthClass Features: Healer's Lore and ForesightDailies: Divine Armor with Hallowed Ground (you want use use DA the majority)At-Wills: Sacred Flame and Astral SealExplanation and Rotation:
At first it felt really wrong to drop rising Hope but I think that is mainly because it's been integral to cleric builds up to this point. The increased stats you'll be running are going to push you well over stat caps for literally every stat you have 1.5k in (no exact math but a guesstimate). It is that strong. The build plays surprisingly well without Forgemaster's Flame. I was a little worried that Bastion of Health would not be able to fill the encounter slot effectively but I was completely wrong. The pure healing you can generate is just amazing and especially on-demand. People were literally freaking out that I was running bastion but quickly realized how good it was to fill that gap. I also did not need to use bastion on cool-down (only for emergency healing e.g. someone just was hit for 70% of their hp, Boss is getting dramatic etc) Bastion when paired with Divine Armor, Deepstone Blessing, and Healer's Lore can crit like a truck despite the 10% reduction from warding shield. Your stats while important are generally less important to cap but always recommended. With this build you will notice less of an emphasis on reaching stat caps as you are striving for 100% up-time on Linked Spirit. Linked Spirit is amazing. There is no other way to explain it. If you haven't tried it even in your own build variation I highly recommend it.
The best thing about this build is it offers substantial healing "NOW". My normal rotation usually Starts with a Sunburst/divine swap combo followed by an Astral Shield the second you see a little damage appear. I follow that With DA when 2-3 people have -20% hp (usually a few seconds after my shield drops). By the time I'm done with those Astral Shield is 2 second or so from refresh and I'm restatting the group with SB/div. swap. When and if you do use bastion; I would recommend only using it when people have temp hit points and are still missing around 30%. With threat changes and teammates with solid thinking and skill; damage seems to be more evenly divided and more manageable. When you have pulled too much, your CW pisses everything off, your melee DPS hit lag spikes ,are low on stam, and &%^$ hits the fan etc; Bastion then steps up to fill the gap. Like I said emergency healing. You never want to use Bastion on cooldown or to fill the 5-6 second gap on your Shield. 18 seconds feels like a lot but honestly it isn't bad at all. You'll be running 6% more damage reduction with how much you will crit and have 10% more for when you need it. Your teammates HAVE to think differently and be proactive about red. They also need to stay in your general area; but I found myself positioning for Sb more then they really worried about their local. As long as you're hitting the melee you should be fine.
Where this build really shines is with a varied group build. Your melee become crackheads with the stat boost and CWs will literally melt everything. It also helps when people have temp hp abilities as they also benefit deepstone. You'll also want to nearly chain cast sacred flame during astral shield to max its healing benefit (mainly why I wait till there is a little damage dished out to use it,during that wait astral seal high health targets) Also it is very nice, if you see someone that will be hit by hands for example, to toss bastion their way. On a crit you're throwing 23% plus damage mitigation their way in a pinch with a chuck of healing. It's generally good to hit DA at those times, wait a second, and then hit bastion. ONLY ever cast Bastion from divine mode. You will have plenty of DP. Sacred flame/SB spam generates it VERY efficiently. Also your Daily will be up 10 seconds after you use it in most cases. Your AP gain shoots through the ceiling when you stack linked spirit correctly (along with everyone elses in your group). More AP for a CW.... well it's my pleasure
You also want to hit as many additions with SB as well while also hitting your group. This will maximize stats for every target you hit; not just each teammate.
If you guys have any questions feel free to contact me here or in-game. The build is not perfect. I am still testing it so more changes are bound to pop up and I will note them here if that happens. Xujarek@Elahndra in-game for questions if I do not reply on here.
Comments
Of course this all works great until the hectic final T2 end bosss. Then my plans of glory all fall apart.
Any thoughts supporting this? Or speaking against?
Edit: nice post of course!
Judith: Also: Human racial helps, as you can still pick up "Cleanse" and "Holy Resolve". Still a huge fan of those.
You could put the other points into benefit of foresight but from my experience it's nice to have those extra ticks in there from it then not. I was really trying to buff up my heal amount as much as possible while not hurting my damage reduction in the process. I wouldn't say no to it but as the build already incorporates so much DR already and I'm losing moontouched I figured it would be good to strike a balance with invigorated healing as it procs off of everything that the build uses.
1-Healing Action is just bad, 5 feat points for 5% more AP gain...and it's only procced from 3 spells I think. You already said your regening AP extremly fast so I don't see the need for it even if it worked for all your spells. Domain synergy is also terrible, even with 5 points in it, 1 is totally usless, I feel that 1 point would be better spent in cleanse maybe or at least toughness. In general, anything that's buffing your stats seems somewhat pointless because because you focus on having linked spirit up all the time.
2-Invigorated healing is pretty underwhelming, 2.5% is really low and it sounds like you have no issues with heals. I'd put those points into Benefit of Foresight, with the healing you can put out it sounds like you overhealing in a sense, so focusing on mitigation would be better. Besides, giving your party 11% mitigation non stop is pretty **** awesome no matter how you look at it.
3-I Find Restoration Mastery to be kind of terrible no matter how you look at it. 5% defense stat just isn't very much (only 100 if you have 2000 defense) and it only procs off of critical heals. Not to mention that with linked spirit people's defense should already be way up. If you're looking for added mitigation I'd say that divine advantage is far superior.
6-I Wouldn't run Healer's Lore either, I find it to be really not that impressive. I prefer HV, of course if you're regening AP as fast as you want it, which it seems you might be then this would be overkill and there's really no other good option for that slot. This comes down to personal preferance anyways.
I'd agree with mrvincent that this build probably loses a bit on end bosses when parties are more spread out and there's a lot more moving/kiting involved. I'm sure it works fine though maybe just changing a skill around or too, or maybe it works well enough for you anyways.
Well looks good man and as long as it's working for you that's kind of what matters. I'm sure a linked spirit build would be fun but I can't bring myself to respec too something I'm pretty sure is gonna get the nerf hammer on or around the full release.
Also, I'd love to know how you feel Deepstone's is working for you. I'd though of taking that instead of enduring relief on my next respec but I'm not sure it's worth it. I prefer HG over DA, especially feated, I'm not as big a fan of Sacred Flame, and I usually use FF/HW for my third encounter (would be nice to have power of life feated for a deepstone's build too). Not sure if I can get enough out of it for my playstyle and I'm thinking that enduring relief is a bit underpowered but I need something to get me to benefit of foresight, after that I'm still deciding if I'll want to put any more points into faithful.
It's claimed here that feat procs off BoH.
Does that extra when-crit Divinity gain outweigh a mitigation boost in case you get flanked?
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. Like I said still working it out. I'll just respond accordingly
1.)yea I totally agree with you when it comes to buffing stats and this build. It's actually something I have considered but just havn't got around to changing. I'm at work now so I will play around later(but am generally not wanting to respec atm for the reasons you state later on :P) Shifting a few points into toughness is really the only option as most of the other heroic feats are quite underwhelming besides yea, throwing a point in cleanse. I stuck a point into domain to get to bountiful fortune but now that you brought it up it would be better suited in toughness.
2.)Well. It is what it is..Its a ~400 heal on me and it does stack up (not sure what the function of that is quite yet but I have seen it stack to 2 and 3 * tested this and the stacks just go off after 6 seconds individually.*
3.) divine advantage is something I have asked and asked about but have never got a straight answer on the mechanics mainly because there isn't a lot of info on combat advantage besides *you do more damage when on opposite sides*, but I may have missed a thread somewhere). I specced for it a bit ago and didn't notice a huge difference but it is definetely worth looking into as I'm mitigating quite a lot. I believe I heard you couldn't mitigate more than 80% damage and I know I am getting close to that so. Also if i hit enough things my crit sits around 60% so the defense sticks for the most part but would arguably be better suited in a more permanent reduction.
4.) I run healer's lore to make bastion a bit less crappy (why warding shield reduces bastions healing by 10 % is beyond me but meh) The Ap gen in this build is definitely really good and is the only reason I don't slot HV) I used to be stuck to HG and have only recently been using DA more only because I have deepstone and it makes it a lot easier to emergency heal people when i hit DA and follow it with other stuff. I have really though about power of life as well. Like it's actually bugging the heck out of me now lol. The only reason I really am liking Sacred flame is because when it applies temp hp it also seems to generate DP as well. Not sure if that is intended. I agree with you on enduring relief. It lasts 3 seconds. I mean I could lag briefly (which I don't really) and sneeze and the effect is gone along with my pip; which is why I chose deepstone so I could be a bit more selective with the bonus healing with DA.
Now the end boss thing I still need to test on more. I run with a great group of guys so that probably contributes a bit to the build success as well. I've done everything except draco fully with this build with no issue solo healing. The only reason I didn't get draco down the other night was because I had two CW that had no clue how to use singularity but I'm definitely up for the challenge
I also wish the cooldown on Holy resolve wasn't so ridiculous. Has anyone done any testing on desperate renewal as well? Does the effect end after you reach 25% health on target or as soon as you stop channeling?
Thank you I was actually wondering about this. I appreciate the insight.
Cons: Almost positive this will be soon nerfed into the stone-age making these builds worthless.
It's been working great, the biggest problem post patch was dealing with big damage spikes in between AS casts and this build is excellent at managing that with all of the damage mitigation from abilities and feats. I still wish that BH's cd was lower but as you said it's not a huge issue.
Hah your heroic feats were exactly what I had assembled in my mach feats in my other tab :P So weird...I'm looking at some other ways to build atm. The hardest part is that there are seemingly no calculations on certain abilities and feats (and/or the feat description is complete garbage and widely incorrect) which would really help me dig my head out of this wall here. I love min-maxing but cryptic should just toss up a list of ability calculations. It would make our jobs so much easier to know what actually factored into each encounter and feat. Or they could just update the feats to state clearly which ability they intended each to effect. Having stuff say *when you Heal* and having it only benefit 1 or 2 things that heal is just frustrating; not that people havn't stated it for some things I just like seeing it myself. OCD GO AWAY
Yeah, it'd definitely be nice if cryptic weren't so...cryptic (sorry, couldn't resist ) with so many of the tooltip descriptions. But I figure as long as a build stays focused (in this case damage reduction, temp hp, crit), you can expect good results.
I'm positive it will actually be fixed (soon) but I do feel there is a good amount of leeway with divinity to allow SB to be cast legitimately. Now...How do you pull it off without making the CW in your group /wrists. That is the question :P
I agree completely. The only change I decided to do different than yours was to go into divine advantage instead of restoration mastery. Punisouffle was spot on about using it instead of the 5% defense bonus. It turns Bastion into quite a crazy thing.
Hmm, yeah I'll switch to that and see how it works out, the defense bonus from restoration mastery isn't exactly a game breaker anyways.
What I do expect is that linked spirit gets capped at like 25% bonus or something, no stacking, etc
yea I was thinking they would do the same amount. It's definitely not supposed to stack with creeps just from the wording.
Given how the Devs addressed the issue related to Guardians' shield raise, I wouldn't be surprised if they will look negatively at this gimmick of fooling the system into thinking your 'using' (read consuming) Divine Power while casting a skill, but then quickly reversing it so you don't actually 'use' any Divine Power. I don't think they will change the way the feats operate (I don't think they need to) -- provided you do actually heal something from Divine Power and consume some of your reserves.
Bastion of Health is an easy way as well. Cast a normal Bastion, change to divinity mode during the spells casting time and presto! you now have a BoH cast that will trigger LS.
I do have another enquiry though, i actually rolled my cleric to run a crit build and now with all the new changes...will my stats be viable for this build? I rolled a 16WIS 16STR 12CHA char with +2 to STR.
Well. Bastion isn't really worth casting unless it is divined unfortunately. The easiest way to sustain it is SB. The good news is the build allows BoH to always be cast in divine mode so no worries.
Your stats are completely fine. The stat boost more than makes up for your low CHA.
I run a critical/AP build and am trying linked spirit in it right now, so bastion for me is basically to get LS rolling at range. I agree however that if I wanted it to heal, it would be divine or nothing.
I see your point for at range targets. DA and Bastion work quite well together for that especially with deepstone.
No CD on ASeal , just spam and get 5% mitigation of the dmg that the mob will do.
You all QQ about the long CD of BoH (not takin the fact that u use it to proc LS) and that it adds pure dmg mitigation (6 secs-and after that?) , but its not enough.This feat is the answer!Plus it dont lower the BoH healing.
There is some situations where u cant hit all your pt members with BoH.You can hit AS anywhere.So spammable and very usefull feat in every situation (boss fight or adds fight) and even in PVP.
Just pop encounters and spam,spam,spam ASeal while they are on CD.The 5% added defence from Restoration mastery is as u said useless.You already hit the DR from LS.
It does.
Also, glad to see the survivability feats taken in this build. Since, often in pugs, it's still the case that you will need to be the last man standing (so to speak), moreso than the tank even.
The problem with power of oppression (apart from being so far into the bottom tree) is that most powers proc foresight, which when feated is already 11% extra damage reduction from all sources not just from mobs you have tagged.
Oh,yes - 16% dmg reduction
Wasnt this the primary goal of being a cleric nowadays - buff and mitigation?
Tbh i would drop Warding Shield as Power of Oppresion seems more reliable to me (no need to be in divinity and spammable).
Wait i am confused why 5 extra % is a problem...