Ill go with whoever said you are either a cleric or you are not. I played cleric from day 1 launch up until about a year after mercs were introduced. I was max aa and raiding and a pro cleric but mercs ruined it for me watching everyone else have fun with mercs while I had nothing to do. Mercs just offered so very little to a cleric. I had the first j5 merc on my server and could keep him alive but his dps was so sad it was boring. . So...I threw my hands up and quit cleric life deleted characters and quit EQ for almost a whole month.After that I decided id try the classes id always envied. So I maxd out a necro and got bored. Maxd out a bard and had fun for a while but got bored again. Maxd out a wiz got bored and just quit eq altogether again. Now with heroics im starting all over as a cleric today after I get home from work because at the end of the day , after building and raiding with all those classes ,its the only class that gives me that adrenaline rush that we search for in gaming. Watching health bars gets old in group game but saving lives and preventing wipes on a raid is more rewarding to me than topping a dps parse. The grass isnt always greener etc etc. Its up to you to have fun and that can be done with any class. That said im sure clerics need some love. I saw rampart and ward got nerfed but not sure how badly so I may be back here in a week and angry haha.
I strongly disagree with the 'either you're a cleric or you are not' mentality. That's all a load of bull. Especially if you feel that having a 'cleric' mentality makes you a good healer. I know many that feel they are 'good,' have been a cleric main for over a decade, and don't want to have any other class as a main... yet continue to think Light is a great heal, when in reality it shouldn't even be used at all, for most content.
I dont think anyone thinks having a cleric mentality defaults into making a skilled cleric. It simply makes it pleasurable. My point is you either enjoy it or you dont just like you are either heterosexal or you are not. Degree of skill is a topic for an entirely different thread.
I'm trying to pound this into the head of a few clerics right now who still think they can just alternate Light and remedy on raids. Light is still on my spell bar, but only fires if everything else is down. It really is terrible for today's content.
Light series issues were raised in the last dev chat. Hopefully Aristo will take a gander and get it back into useable shape. If not next level expansion I will probably axe it from my bar along with a couple other spells.
A not uncommon issue. It took a while for most for most of the clerics I know to fall in line with a faster spell setup. All you can really do is show them logs and parses and show them how much better a fast heal rotation works. Sometimes they may need a little more hand holding and you have to walk them through the steps of setting things up. Some, on the other hand, just don't like change outside of their realm of familiarity, and because they have been playing a cleric "forever" and this was always "how things were done." They also tend to also be unnecessarily wisdom / mana geared clerics, rather than survivability geared, again because of tradition, but that's another issue.
Ultimately (to the last point) if someone doesn't die, rarely pulls aggro and when they do they don't die ... it doesn't matter what they're geared for as it works for them. There is no "right" way to go on this folks. Let's not give the impression that wis/mana clerics are inherently wrong. (I'm not a full wis/mana; I'm a mix myself - just in case folks think I'm responding for myself here.) ~~ With the light spell, again it isn't wrong to use it, but knowing if there is a better way that's needed. To the overhealing point here. There may be faster and more healing output spells - but if it's not needed, then there is more than one way to play that's acceptable. Using the mix of spells does generate better results; that's proven. But based on what you're doing, who else is with you and what they're casting, there are several acceptable healing routes to go.
Clerics are a powerful tool at it is, depends how you play them. I enjoy mine for the last 12 years and he does all the work a group could dream off!
I would like to see a DPS increase to Clerics melee ability. It fits the class, you wear plate, can use a shield and mace, or a huge two handed hammer. Give the clerics some tools to do some decent melee damage, that would definitely make the class more appealing and unique from the other two priests.
Of coarse everyone is entitled to their opinion, and my statement of "you either are a cleric or your not, you'll know" wasn't meant to have any Bearing on skill level. It's meant as a state of mind, forgoing thoughts of loot or personal safety, in favor of keeping everyone else in perfect working order, having a mini stroke when multiple people set off a mod rod at the same time, spending your off time researching any way of being the best cleric you can be. The topic isn't about being the most awesome cleric in all of EQ, it's about why you'd want to play a cleric. And everyone plays it differently, I don't even have "light" in my rotation.
I regularly win raid heal parses with just light, (very occasionally) remedy and 15th (mainly just spamming light).
I haven't read this entire thread, but... I raided a cleric for the better part of a decade and for me it was always the fact that 75-90% of clerics are absolutely mediocre. And, they can get away with it because guilds aren't going to boot those mediocre clerics, at the end of the day, pressing light over and over again IS good enough to keep a tank alive, assuming the tank has the gear.(You cannot argue this. On more than one occasion during farm I turned on light autofire, no one can tell the difference if they aren't looking). I thrived on being at the top of my class and showing people how well a cleric can perform if played to their max potential. If you want to measure a cleric's skill a good way to go about doing it is simply to look at cast parses. With a cleric, spell diversity really does help to set you apart. Using those interventions, renewals, and lights on cooldown maximizes your healing potential; and at this point in the game(when I last played, and from what I understand it's still this way) mana is an absolute non-issue, between huge mod rods, glyph of lost secrets, and miracle(?). Unfortunately for clerics to reach their max potential events really do have to be HARD and require the class to pull absolutely everything out of them. Triunity, Tunat, OMM, Vish, Commodus, and TFC all come to mind .. I loved being absolutely out of every cooldown I have at the end of a fight, , I remember dying on purpose then bannering in and divine rezzing myself to keep going. tldr: If you suck as a cleric - it's boring. If you strive to pull everything out of the class, it's fun as hell. Caveat: We didn't get a whole lot of cooldowns until SoDish(?).
On raids? And what setup are your other healers using? And who are they healing? What role are they taking? That's good and all, but has more to do with what your other healers are using (same setup or not) and what role they are taking (OT healing, AoE healing, utility / rez, anything other that MT healing that won't be reflected in the parse but none the less are vital for the raid). That's why people look at cast logs, not raw heal parses. You lose all that context otherwise. And, cast for cast, on the same target, a 6 heal rotation (or 7 if we include ward) is going to outpace just light, light + remedy, anything else really. If you're talking group content, light is fine.
Like many others have said, heal parse doesn't mean squat. You can be casting nothing but lights and if your heals happen to hit at just right time sure, you can top the heal parse, but if tanks are dying and you're just light spamming the "MT" you're as worthless as <fill in colloquial idiom here>. It's all about variety. In my opinion, if you're not using all the spells in your arsenal AND coordinating with the rest of the heal team to make sure things are efficient, you're not doing your job. Am I the best cleric in the game, no, I'll easily admit it, but I am constantly working to try to make things more efficient on raid and trying different set ups to work with.
Our wars have asked us to take Ward out of normal spam lineup due to it overwriting their Blade Guardian. They let us know when guardian drops and we cast on them then.
Want to bump this and point out that PoWar provides content that heavily rewards having real priests and clerics. Druids and Shm can keep groups alive, but there is increased survivability in having a cleric.
