Anybody tried an all-cleric team?

[Apatheist]

I sometimes fail to open the bonus rift stage for at-level major rifts, so yes DPS isn't uberness. I'm still not 50 so I'm still in the exploratory stages. We'll see how things go when i'm able to play again (can't really do much as I just got out of back surgery today).

I just updated Rift to 1.4 today (I had it installed from about a month after release, when it worked fine) and I can't even run the client now. As soon as I enter my login details and click play, the client screen turns black and stops responding

Been through Trions entire support page and tried everything from updating drivers to tweaking the game .cfg file and nothing fixes it.

[JamieW]

I sometimes fail to open the bonus rift stage for at-level major rifts, so yes DPS isn't uberness. I'm still not 50 so I'm still in the exploratory stages. We'll see how things go when i'm able to play again (can't really do much as I just got out of back surgery today).

My experience with 3x Bards leveling to 50 was this:

3x Ranger/MM until about level 12 or 14. This was before they nerfed Motif or restoration to be much further up in bard spec. Switch to 3x Bard/Ranger.

3x Bard/Ranger until about level 34 or so. The pet stopped leveling with me, and the DPS experience was getting worse. I ran in some warfronts in the late 20s and basically used cadence almost all the time, with motifs cycling through. It was fun, and damage was decent. When I hit the 30s, I stopped being able to get through dps checks on rifts for bonus stages, and leveling was slowing down. I swapped to Saboteur.

3x Saboteur/Bard to 50. I kept enough bard to have Motif of Regeneration and Cadence upgraded for heals. But my primary rotation consisted of loading up charges and detonating. I focused on range of charges/bombs, and making sure I had the AE bombs/charges upgraded as much as I could. I also had Riftstalker in there for the extra survivability at times, but ended with MM or Ranger as the 3rd soul, so that damage was calculated off of the bow damage vs. 1-h weapon damage. Leveling with these guys was very quick, I could ae whole groups of enemies down rather well, and could still heal myself up rather well. I had difficulty with bonus stage rift bosses with these, but I'm sure if I'd gone to 5x characters, they would've been no problem.

All in all, the rogues were fun to level up, and much more survivable and had a lot more dps than the 3x warriors I leveled up previously (that is, after the 1.1 nerfs to reaver).

My 3x cleric team, however, is now level 43 and the damage continues to scale well. Survivability is not an issue yet. I regularly open full bonus stages on rifts and drop the boss without an issue. AE dps is even better than with the Sabo rogues, and I get good heals while doing ae damage, rather than having to spend time using cadence. All in all, the clerics are probably the most fun out of the 3 classes I've leveled thus far.

[Apatheist]

My experience with 3x Bards leveling to 50 was this:

Great info! That's exactly what I wanted to hear. I was already leaning towards Clerics. I'm thinking cleric x4 plus one mage, now. Mixing in a mage gives me access to all the great archon buffs, and the option to go either Chloro heals or add another ranged DPS for PvE.

For PvP, 4x cab/inq/x and a stormcaller? You could really rip up big groups of enemies very quickly. Check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRKA6pfuEg8. If a coordinated group can do this, I don't see why a multiboxer with control over all 5 characters couldn't do even better. The precice control means, if you got really good at it, you could even precast soul drain before using maelstrom. As soon as they landed they'd have a massive storm and 4 crit soul drains in the face.

Here's a question. Are archon or bard buffs worth sacrificing an extra cleric for? Or would I simply be better off going 5x cleric? And have you tried multiple chloros?

[Gomotron]

Interesting.

Are you having your bard tank? Pets tank? I'd love to see some vids of you boxing an instance. I just can't see that group working... I don't mean to imply that I don't believe you, I just mean that my Warrior tank seems a little squishy when fighting 3+ mobs in instances. I am amazed that you are able to get it done with your group.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

4x pigs does pretty good with all the healing the bard subspec puts out. I suspect it won't scale well enough to do expert dungeons but for normals it works pretty well so far. I'd record an instance vid but with 4x 47s in the group, it'll be a while before i'm doing at-level instances again.

[Gomotron]

Cool. Thanks for the info. I think I am going to try EQ2 again just for kicks. But I'll keep Rift in mind if I don't care for EQ2.

[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