Cleric can't DPS the sad priests

Keywords: well played raid tank. Guess what: most groups aren't fronted by a raid tank.

Yeah, there is way more than this 90%/10% difference for groupers, and even more for tanks during their progression.
Not even talking about the merc outstanding dumbility (yes, it's a word, I just invented it ) to mess up as soon as you really need them.

Side note to you : any melee class that has access to full melee ADPS support do great DPS. You should play better your other melee DPS toons (zerker, rogue,monk, whatever) if your warrior is doing the most DPS in the group. That include knights in the melee classes, that don't DW but 2hander tank content.

Yeah, I know, but the topic of this thread is cleric DPS. If you have a weak tank and are busy being a strong cleric, then it's not your turn to DPS and that's not what this thread is about. This thread is about clerics getting bored, and if your group can't survive with a merc cleric, then this thread is probably not about you.

I guess the argument is to be made about the ability to molo, but clerics don't use cleric mercs, they use warrior or rogue mercs, so the performance of cleric mercs is still irrelevant. A strong cleric with a rogue merc is very effective moloing.

Happy to jump in here. You're wrong.

I have a completely different view and perspective on healing mercs. They cast the wrong spells at the wrong times at all times. They cure when they should be healing with a cure, they buff before rezing the next person and sometimes just don't rez at all. And then they run oom. WTF. I main a cleric. I 6 box with same cleric just a macro- solo healing. I recently brought up a second cleric so I could help a pickup force without lockouts. The second cleric without the raid gear continues to VASTLY outperform a healer merc. I can run any and all missions in TBL or ToV with either cleric solo healing without issue, including all of the /achievements without running low mana. My maxed AA healing merc runs out of mana while helping a guildie camp a few named PH's in Kael. My healer merc doesn't cast Retort, single elixirs, group elixirs, group cures with heals, Shining Aegis and it's heals aren't critting at neary the rate a real players does. The difference between a played (even a boxed one) cleric and a healer merc are night and day. The crazy thing is I've met players on Tunare who have never even grouped with a real cleric before. It's a shame that long time players of Everquest can have no idea what a player cleric can and should bring to any situation. Almost equal? I threw up in my mouth.
Conq

Let's take another look at that uber cleric just described above. If said cleric had invis drop while running across a zone full of green mobs he/she will probably have to gate because the routine spell load for grouping or raiding hasn't enough killing power to even handle a single easy mob.

In order to solo or molo a cleric has to have a unique spell set loaded that would never get loaded in a grouping situation.

And chances are that cleric was depending on another class for invis, levi, and run speed too.

I'm just like Yoda in the Mandalorian.

No, we have pretty much the same view and perspective on healing mercs. You just completely missing my point.

No one has posted numbers yet so I tried my best to get some.

I only had time tonight for 5 mobs + writing this out.

My ENC and Mage just stood by doing nothing. No auras, no synnergy, no slow, nothing. Just a cleric merc and a tank merc with me driving my cleric casting about as fast as reasonable.

My cleric is 115, fully AA in healing and defense but almost no AA in DPS.
DPS spell focus AA = None
Destructive fury = Autogrant
Twinproc = autogrant
Etc. Basically, only DPS AA is autogrant. So with proper AA should be about +20% to spells and a few points to melee, etc.

I didn't buy any of her type 3 augs so add those numbers to the DPS.

She is all but fully raid geared. Raid helm gives her raid DPS focus on spells.

Her 2HB is TBL raid so a 12k DPS proc, which is the same as the ToV raid proc on my ENC from Kael. The summoned hammer proc is slightly better on undead than the 2HB raid but switching to the summoned hammer and getting bash made a minimal impact on her DPS.

For skills, well, I don't DPS with her, so I got a lot of skill ups in a short time, but her bash and 1HB and 2Hb were from 375-425 range.

She has the ToV group aug at 7% to DPS.

She's weaker on type 5 and type 7/8 than a main should be.

So she's a little oddball to work the numbers off of, but really for a medium playtime raid player she's probably a good representation of how a cleric would DPS, but a lot less than a maxed out cleric.

For spells I used... (Rk 1 for all of these)
Reverse DS
Undead DoT
Contravention
Obliterate undead -> Rk 3
Unyeiling censure
Summoned hammer
Aura purified ground

I did not use any AA abilities. No Turn undead, etc. Turn undead is, iirc, about 20-30k DPS. Not sure about the hammer. Again, I used neither.

Tash and twincast / MR aura didn't make a significant impact to DPS.

Anyway... 5 mobs...

56k
DD - 31.2
DoT - 16.1
Crush - 2.9
DS 1.5k -
Pet 4.5k

68k
DD - 44.7
DoT - 16.6
Crush 2.7
DS - 1.9
Pet 3.2

Last 3 mobs...

50.5k, 48.8k, 39k (Add about 5k to each for pet and reverse DS)

The biggest amount of DPS from my cleric on the 1st 3 mobs was Arms of the holy wrath which is the proc off the Ralafin's Dogma, at 25-30% of her total damage. On the last 2 fights, with the summoned weapon, I don't see any procs of Obliteration strike, which makes me wonder if I am looking at something wrong or if the summoned hammer is bugged.

Anyway, that's the best I can do atm. Cleric taking a vow and giving 100% to DPS on undead mobs only getting 50k is definitely too low, even with the limitations I mentioned above to type 3 augs, DPS AA, etc. these are undead mobs and using vow.

Totally not even shown if that is Yoda or not. My opinion is it is not, just a juvenile of the same race

I'd suspect Yoda ordered a clone of himself while he was visiting kamino

A lot of it depends on who and what classes are available when a group forms. A lot of times when there is no healer available we run with 2 healer mercs one on balance and the other on reactive. Mercs are temperamental and have a tendency to stop healing. As soon as we get a real healer we try and drop the 2 mercs and get real players.

That said we did ToFS a couple of weeks ago with our top raid cleric and a healer merc, the cleric was pulling and dpsing (not healing), he had a whale of a time. The merc was only used because you cannot heal when not in camp! Also there was no one else lfg at the time.

Those that are bored of the cleric class maybe need to look at changing their group role.

Clerics heal while they are dpsing, generally during group trash mobs real heals aren’t needed. Melee’ing, casting a dot, some undead nukes, and some contravention heals.. changes their role.. but the dps output needs to be increased dramatically. That’s the issue we are evaluating here.

Off topic, but it is not yoda. Yoda died of old age in Starwars. One of the characters state in the show something about the second death star had been blown up in the past. The empire has fallen. etc. Plenty in the show set the timeline far enough ahead of Yoda's death that it's pretty clear it is not yoda.

Baby yoda is just a reference because we don't know enough about Yoda's race to call it anything but baby yoda.

Yes, thank you.

So back on topic...

SHM and DRU DPS isn't that bad compared to other support classes but their Raw healing power isn't as good as clerics. Clerics need a tradeoff to justify a DPS increase. This already exists. Vow. The problem is that is just doesn't do much.

Vow of Vituperation...
25% decrease in healing
Add proc rate 200 for 58k.

I don't have the numbers infront of me but Vow on undead dwarves in EW was only about 15k DPS (I previously mentioned my lack of AA, etc).

I propose these adjustments to Vow AND adding a new activated AA (0 cost)...

The AA is just activated and doubles the impact of the spell.

35% decrease in healing
Add proc as current, 58k
Increase melee/base by 500%
Increase DD/DoT damage by 75%
Increase Summoned hammer by 100%

With the AA activated it would just be doubled...
70% decrease in healing
Add proc, 106k
Increase melee/base by 1000%
Increase DD/DoT damage by 150%
Increase Summoned hammer by 200%

The AA could always be left active if desired, because it would have no effect when Vow is clicked off.

The numbers I gave above are very rough, and they would need a lot of tweaking to create the right balance, but the idea is that a cleric could be in a primary healer role without vow, in a secondary healer role with Vow and a DPS role with Vow+AA activated.

I think this is a good solution because it's easy to implement (spell already exists) and easy to tweak (adjust vow, not everything about the current cleric.).

What do you think Metanis?

And sidebar, I haven't played the other 2 priests, but I think it would be cool to add Vow to the other 2 priests. They do more DPS, so their reduction in healing would be similar but their DPS increase would be less because they have more base DPS. So put a CLR and SHM together and the SHM can take a vow, or on undead mobs the Cleric could take a vow and the SHM can MH.

Baby Yoda is a cleric for sure! Nonchalantly opens the proverbial hornet's nest and then needs the group to bail him out!

I agree that cleric is boring. I used to be able to do much more expansions ago.

In group game, I have more fun boxing my cleric and playing another class.

Raiding is still fun. If this wasn't true, I would just play another char. When I'm not raiding, I do just that.

My opinion. Have fun.

I feel for clerics, I mean was the CH chains part of the idea for the clerics? If so worst idea ever. Thats just me but.. I could never play one because of this play style. Now I did play a Templar in eq 2 that was OK.

I think this would be a good start.

You can jump on all you want, i'm right.