My DC's Divinity- & AP-maximizing build (suggestions welcome)

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• fondlez Member Posts: 0 Arc User

  August 2013 edited August 2013

  Good. So-So. Bad.
  
  Healing Action 5/5 (almost no effect. So, really bad)
  Domain Synergy 5/5 (effect so small, not noticeable, especially on top of diminishing returns since it is a rating)
  Repurpose Soul 2/3 (too good to pass up, need 3 points here).
  Battlewise 3/3 (almost bad because it effectively acts against you while kiting in some situations. Yes, healers are sometimes required to take aggro)
  Bountiful Fortune 5/5
  
  Enduring Relief 5/5
  Linked Spirit 5/5 (almost a So-So in practice, but it's a fun mechanic, so why not)
  Power of Life 5/5
  Moon Touched 5/5
  Greater Divine Power 1/1 (get Rising Hope instead, unless you pvp as dps Cleric a lot).
  
  Righteous Rage of Tempus 5/5
  Ethereal Boon 5/5
  
  Hammer of Fate (why would you ever have this on your bars in PvE now, especially with your build?)
  Chains of Blazing Light (Divine Glow much better for group)
  
  Prophetic Action (any little hit will set it off, so almost always wasted)
  Holy Fervor (not as useful as it seems on paper if you have enough, i.e. 2.5-3k+, Recovery already).
  
  I highly recommend all PvE Clerics invest into the Divine Armor power (almost mandatory for Castle Never, especially if not exploiting) and all Clerics at least one point into Holy Resolve heroic feat, you will be surprised how often it saves your life, particularly if you decide to go with Negation rather than Soulforged armor enhancement.
  
  Also, if you are serious about Divinity building given your balanced/STR build, you should not pass up free non-diminishing returns of 3% Critical Chance for only three points into Weapon Mastery.

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• hamji Member Posts: 0 Arc User

  August 2013 edited August 2013

  I've done a little playtesting trying to get a high Divine Power high Action Point build and while I'm not saying it is impossible it does appear to be better to specialize in one over the other.
  
  The main reason being your methods for generating DP and AP vary so wildly.
  
  For an AP fast dailies build the new Hammer of Fate is King and Prophecy of Doom is his Queen. Extra DP can be funneled into Prophecy of Doom and a D-PoD+HoF kill can give virtually 50% Action Points back.
  
  Min-maxing is what stuffs up the high AP build since it is so difficult actually landing a PoD for a Kill and now you are trying to get PoD on at the right time while not holding off on using it too long AND synchronizing it with HoF. In the real(game) world this is virtually never going to happen BUT if you can be content to just use the abilities as is and are happy to treat the bonus Action Point gain from killing with PoD up or HoF as the finishing strike as just that, BONUS action points, then pumping out Dailies is not all that bad a move to make.
  
  High Divine Power gain is a lot more complex since there are a few ways to get it, you can focus on encounters for generating DP in which case you want high Recovery or you can use feated Lance of Faith and just crank out some At-wills for DP. While using LoF to generate DP is slower it allows your encounters to be used as DP sinks rather than generators.
  
  There is no doubt that DP is where it is at, Action Points are great but even before there were mobs that could insta-drain your entire AP pool it was never as good as having extra Divine Power floating around.
  
  So AP build is PoD, HoF, high Power, high Crit. This nerfs Astral Shield more than any other Encounter but they will all suffer.
  
  DP encounter build is High Recovery. Which by default nerfs your At-Wills, Healing Word and Punishing/Soothing Light. Adding Power instead of Crit will yield the most for Astral Shield but since only one enchantment boosts heals(Vorpal) this is a buff you will never see since you either have a Vorpal with low crit chance or an alternate enchantment which does all of nothing to boost your heals. They definitely dropped the ball here for DC's and until we get an enchantment that does boost heals in a direct way or add the ability for AS heal ticks to crit there is nothing that can be done about it and it is just another of the many ways(yes I'm talking about you ArPen gear) that the Devs are trying to push DC's into sucking more at heals(we know why they are doing it, us DC's that can heal have got to go, we let noobs finish CN by healing through their mistakes, much better if we fail and the noobs need to L2P.."Learn to P(L)ay").
  
  At-will DP build is feated LoF, high Power, high Crit. Nerfs all Encounters but Astral Shield suffers the most.
  
  The theoretical highest dps you can get is PoD+HoF build but only when you are reliably timing the kills and not holding off on casts in the mean-time. This needs your dps and mob survivability to be in sync which will virtually never happen however for solo grinding content repeatedly you can realistically set it up to work well. Since this build already comes with High Power and Crit the idea of building DP with at-wills and running Divine Glow with PoD while keeping Healing Word around for when you need it appears to be viable and therefore would grant the high DP high AP that is so desired but in practice I have found it to be too tedious and more often than not you are just better off forgetting about fast dailies and focusing on DP management.
  
  The real(game) world highest dps build is high Power, high Crit, using at-wills to generate DP and encounters and punishing light to dispense said DP.
  
  The main advantage of generating DP with encounters is it allows you to kite more but the downside is you have less than optimal ways of spending said DP.
  
  It is worth noting that I have yet to see on my character the damage from Encounters ever come anywhere near the damage from even at-wills, let alone punishing light for single target dps. At-wills and PL get nothing from Recovery however every single point of Power/Crit/ArPen/WeaponEnchantments buffs them directly. Healing Word fits into this category too as the only Encounter not affected by Recovery. To find out how much better your at-will/PL is compared to your encounters try this, divide Daunting Light's damage by its cooldown and compare it. You will probably find that using encounters is an actual dps loss and not a gain(single target dps of course). This is what makes PoD and Divine Glow so powerful, they buff your real damage dealers(At-Wills and Punishing Light).
  
  ____________
  
  Understanding Crit, Vorpals and alternate Weapon Chants from a Cleric perspective is different than from a Trickster Rogue's. A TR will generally want to frontload maximum stopping power into single abilities which means their Crit is regarded as key to making that happen. A DC however does not have any truly great moves to frontload large amounts of damage, Daunting Light is okay, if you can crit with Daunting Light you may be able to finish someone off a little quicker than they would normally expect but it is still just an AoE attack and not really on par with a true single target high dps ability. The DC's best single target ability is FF and it is a DoT/Debuff so hardly a one-shot killer.
  
  So what does this mean for a DC with a passion for large numbers, don't expect that lucky Crit to do your work for you. If you can not get Crit to a high enough chance then the alternate Weapon enchantments are no doubt much better for single target dps. When you use Punishing Light that +20% weapon damage from a Lightning will strike every single tick(as in, like a machine gun). This is not to say the alternate enchantments are better than vorpals for DC's just that unless you have a high enough crit chance to make a Vorpal worth it, they are. While Crit and Crit Severity is great for DC's it is nowhere near as important as it is for a TR.
  
  To put Punishing Light into perspective, I have a high Power high Recovery build with a lesser Holy Avenger, thanks to being Faithful spec I have the luxury of sitting on 4 pips of DP most of the time and only lose PIPS when people need them. If I choose to(and I do often, hehe) I can dump four PIPS of DP straight into a mob with Punishing Light, at these times I can virtually double the rate at which a 5-man party burns down a mob(yes, you read that right, I can double what the other 4 party members are doing for as long as I have the DP...yes, I run with noobs a lot). This is with all those stat points in Recovery which has no effect on PL so with those points placed into Crit/ArPen instead of Recovery, Punishing Light can become downright evil.
  
  While there is no doubt the aforementioned "At-Will DP generator|Encounter/PL spender" build is the DC's most potent and the new Sharander items cater to it specifically, heals will suffer. In a party of seasoned veterans the heals are sufficient but if any of the party members are found wanting you may find yourself rezzing them instead of healing them. This is in keeping with what appears to be the Devs intentions...Make dungeons accessible only to pro-players with good gear...They can keep trying to nerf the full heals spec DC but at the end of the day a good healer will always be able to drag under-skilled under-geared parties through content they should probably not even be attempting. Not to mention the times when you are one or two men down and about to pick a fight with a T2 end-boss.
  
  Whether or not you build one of the new Sharandar ArPen DC's or not really boils down to what you want to do. It is best for running dungeons with strong parties who know what they are doing and farming content(either solo or in a party). If you are like me however and love PuG'ing MC|CN(or any of the other T2's really) then it's best to stick with old Faithful.

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• debbieharry Member Posts: 31

  August 2013 edited August 2013

  http://nwcalc.com/dc?b=nlp:4wzjr:b5ro,13l3314:6c000:6z50u:6y000&h=0
  
  this is my spec.
  
  3 points in every half decent spell. 1 in all the others just to have them for testing if i ever need to respec. Although i admit PoD could have its uses, i found the mobs died while casting or too late, never in the sweet spot. prob bad play though.
  
  the only feat points i have that i see as not too useful are the 5 in hallowed ground feat, but really the options are so bad that i saw nowhere better to put the points. even if it only comes to a 5k heal, thats still party-wide and free healing you dont have to manually do.
  
  Dailies: HG + DA
  Passives: I tend to run foresight because feated and awesome, then holy fervor for the AP gain (occasionally swapping HF for HL but rarely).
  Encounters: AS + SB + DG/FF/HW/BoH
  at wills: BotS if i know its a fight where i can get a few things things marked, SF otherwise.
  
  For a non-dps healer/support cleric i feel this was the best the tree could offer me.
  
  Linked spirit i came to the conclusion was not worth due to:
  Diminishing returns on stats.
  Not procced by astral shield.
  Best way to proc team from what i can see is with BoH which sucks unless you pretty much dedicate all your perking to suit that play style, probably not an AP gain build in any case as you would be focussing more on geting the LS bastion proc as often as possible? im not 100% on all of this though.
  
  The alternative i saw as too specific and feat-heavy but i did consider:
  feating bastion, taking LS, going into deepstone blessing, using DS over HG (which i sometimes do situationally in any case). SF would obviously be mandatory but i wasnt sure about feating it.
  This was roughly my playstyle in dungeons while levelling before i had unlocked AS and respecced. I found the clutch healing capability of a party-wide LS proc on BoH and mitigation from DA meant i could pretty much save the party form any wipe. This is of course, because LS is more effective the further you are from your soft/hard caps.
  Maybe its doable in higher tier dungeons but i am too much of a ***** to try it out and like it or not AS is pretty much mandatory on us due to how much it outclasses our other spells, so i feated a different (and more commonly used) playstyle and it works for me fine if not better.
  
  I havent been 60 for too long though so if anyone with more know than me can tell me if theres anything im doing wrong i welcome it. Im not 100% on what set of gear i should be aiming for though. Is the new arpen stuff for a different feat structure to mine? i heard that none of the set bonuses are anything to write home about / best to get two half sets?

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• whistlingdixie Member Posts: 0 Arc User

  August 2013 edited August 2013

  hamji wrote: »

  It is worth noting that I have yet to see on my character the damage from Encounters ever come anywhere near the damage from even at-wills, let alone punishing light for single target dps.

  
  What are you smoking? The idea is that you are using At-Wills, you use the encounter in the space of 1 or 2 At-Will casts, then go back to At-Wills. You don't just fire off the encounter then stand around scratching your *** until it comes off cooldown.
  
  While this may vary with Power due to coefficients, my last serious test of Punishing Light showed it doing 40% more DPS than Sacred Flame: 1760 vs 2476. (This was quite a bit ago with much worse gear than I currently have.)
  
  Of course no matter how you look at it, our highest DPS potential is divine Searing Light.

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