Anybody tried an all-cleric team?

[JamieW]

I've been leveling up a trio of clerics (they're 36 now). I was doing Inquisitor/Cabalist/Sentinel for a large amount of their leveling. I tried Warden for HOTs, but the healing wasn't good enough with just 3, whereas a burst heal from 3 sentinels could top off any 1 character pretty well.

With the recent changes, and as the levels have passed I have gone more heavily into Cabalist and swapped Sentinel out for Justicar. Take Inquisitor at least high enough to get Soul Drain. Get Justicar high enough to get the AE insta-heal with Conviction, and the conviction builders. Then Cabalist to get good ranged AE/damage bonuses. With the armor/endurance shield from Inquisitor and the survivability buffs from Inquisitor, I can take some damage. With AE pulls, the Justicar heals pretty well from just my outgoing damage, but I can always throw ae heals if needed by using some life-based abilities to work up a conviction. I also got Harsh Discipline and Aggressive Renewal from Inquisitor to help regen power and give myself a nice health boost mid-fight if necessary.

I do swap out to an Inquisitor/Justicar/Sentinel role when I am going into a big single-target fight (like the big-game MOBs in Scarwood), so that I can have additional healing on-demand from Sentinal, and since I don't need all of the AE.

I would say the most disappointing part of the clerics, even more-so with the recent Cabalist changes, is the amount of ground-target based spells. I'm used to DAOC where you can /gset <range> a ground target and then /gassist to pick it up on your other teammates. Unfortunately with Rift, trying to manage ground targets is a bit more than I like to do... which made the top-tree Inquisitor spell no fun for me.

[lofblad]

Did you try ISBoxer for those ground based spells? ISBoxer has a pretty nifty feature for that, worth to try out.

[JamieW]

I normally run ISBoxer for my setup.

I've used the mouse repeater a bit, but in the heat of battle, I prefer to not have to try and choose a ground target manually. If there's some better way to bring it in with button-presses, I'm all-ears. If you're just referring to the mouse repeater ability, I've tried that and do not care much for it.

[Oatboat]

Clerics are fun.

I'd run Inquisitor/warden for pvp and then switch one to tank for 50 rifts and it worked just fine. I didnt like the melee cleric builds i stuck purely with casters. Cabalists are okay but i found they werent as useful as Inq.


my clerics back when i played

http://youtu.be/eVzg45Gh1h8

[Ughmahedhurtz]

My desire when doing my multibox groups has been to have enough passive healing while DPSing to survive instances. So far, the clerics and bards have been the only fully successful groups at this, though the bards are the only ones that reliably survive the final encounters of zone invasions. My cleric group can heal passively enough to keep my justicar tank alive but there isn't enough group passive healing to keep the other 4 alive. I'll admit I haven't tried inquisitor builds because they seemed too squishy. I may have to retry them with a different spec and see how it goes.

The other consideration is extended battles. My clerics were having mana issues, though I think a split spec where I had two of the mana regen abilities would probably solve much of that. My bards have zero issues with mana, even moreso once one of them got the -12% ability cost aura.

[Oatboat]

Inqs get a mana drain that restores about 50-75% of mana channeled.

[JamieW]

The Aggressive Renewal channeled damage ability in Inquisitor fills my power bar up about 75% of the way if it is allowed to channel for the full time. That being available every 30sec along with the power reduction ability in inquisitor will keep you from being power hungry. The Harsh Discipline channeled damage ability is much less useful in healing, but it does help a bit. Being on a 1min cooldown also makes it less useful. I put them both in a macro with shards of light (Sentinel) or distorted shadows (Cabalist) as the fallthrough channeled ability depending on the build. The armor buff in inquisitor also helps keep you from being so squishy with a nice endurance and armor factor buff.

But, I agree, for boss battles, the passive healing available in a cleric build isn't enough. However, their access to effective instant active heals more than make up for that, depending on the numbers in your team. I have a much easier time with rift bonus bosses in my trio of clerics than I had when leveling up my trio of rogues. But I'd assume that scaling up to a full group, the passive healing capability of the bards would work good enough.

[Oatboat]

muahahah beat ya to it

I think I'm going to resub this upcoming week during the 7 day free play week.

[Apatheist]

Eventually 4 ranger/bard split specs and 1 full bard spec. My newbie (26 at the moment) will be a ranger/bard split spec. Basically, gives you full pet/DPS abilities while getting most of the healing-via-cadence/Coda of Restoration from Bard.

My question is, what's your DPS like with bards? I imagine 4x cadence spam would make you very hard to kill, even in PvP, but while you're using cadence you're doing next to no damage. So you can really only heal *or* DPS, not both. If that's the case, wouldn't it be better to have 1-2 dedicated healers and 2-3 dedicated DPS?

I'm only going by what I've read, though, I haven't actually played yet. Downloading it this weekend and I can't decide between a tank (Justicar) and either 4x chloro, 4x bard or a mixed group. Seems like stacking classes in this game loses a lot since many heals/buffs don't stack.

[cichard]

i use warrior tank 3 mages and a cleric now and it works out great i run a chloro as full time healer and a inquiscar for support and 2 mage dps every expert is cake with this set up if anything needs more healing i put 1 of the dps mages to party aoe healing (lifegiving veil) while the other chloro is tank healing (lifebound veil)