H-Wis or H-Sta

Hey Clerics and others, we have the Discussion Going in our Guild for a couple of Days, if we should go Full H-Wis or Full H-Sta.
We are not to sure, what H-Wis does besides increasing the Mana Reg and Mana Pool.

But i wanted to know what you think, and it would be nice if someone could give us some insight into what H-Wis does excatly

Greetings Dezzan

Are you running out of hps? HSta. Are you running out of mana? HWis.

Are you running out of neither? Just doesn't matter...

As far as secondary effects, HWis will help spell/dot shielding and HSta will help melee shielding and stun resist.

Clerics are in an odd boat because current mana efficiencies make it hard to run out of mana and they have enough tricks to keep healing themselves through most things. Go HCha!

Edit - Going HCha is a bit of a joke ... since there actually aren't HCha primary augs, it means to go balanced.

I do get the Ocassional Hit now and again on Raids, and as im Standing on Top of the Tanks, also almost all AEs too

Druid - Hwis
Shaman - Hsta
Cleric - see Brickhaus above, I like a good balance on my alt cleric

HSta / AC. There are definitely times where I survived only because I had more HP /AC. It’s not a huge difference but it is enough to give you more time to heal yourself / have others heal you, DA, FD potion, sanctuary, fade, have a tank pull a mob off you, etc. In contrast I can’t recall the last time I needed more mana. You run out of mana cause you die, not because you spent it all. HWis won’t help with that. But more HSta / AC might at times.

LR are one of the guilds that raids on AB, so I'll come at it more from the raiding Cleric angle.

For mains I'm partial to HSta. ToL was heavier on stun AoEs which made resisting them more helpful, while NoS lacks them, but I appreciate having the extra HP in general, along with a Tank or Healer PS while learning events just to ensure best odds of survival. Once content is more on farm, you'll see me don on a Caster PS just for the spell damage.

Heroic Stamina (Melee Shielding/Stun Resist) and Wisdom (Spell/DoT shield) give their benefit 1:1 until 35%, then it's 400 for 36%. 800 for 37%, 1200 for 38%, etc. For hSta to +HP I believe it is 16 per point, for hWis to + mana regen, it is 25 per point.

Given the linear benefits of the stats to the % functions, the difference between going full hSta vs hWis in NoS augs for Spell/DoT shield and Melee Shielding/Stun Resist is really going to be 3-4% (e.g. 38-39 vs 42-43), so it's not like going one or the other is having you extremely vulnerable to magic, or far more likely to have stuns resolve on you.

With the HP and Regen benefits, it's like an extra >20ish K HP vs > 50ish mana regen. Small drops in the ocean vs our vastly bigger HP and mana pools.

For boxes who aren't seeing as much focus in play you can argue to some amount of HWis so their mana is better as they likely will not be doing everything that will help their mana throughput.

The argument for having enough effective HP for AoE DDs and DoTs is mostly solved by just having solid base gear to begin with, then it makes the aug choice not matter.

Raid geared mains in particular should not be having mana problems with full hSta augs, even on encounters with mana drains like Dance of the Demiurge. Even without C and SE for mana regen after a death, Yaulp, Arms procs from spells and melee is enough to recover you back up. Before we had to pay more attention to GoM procs but now it doesn't matter anywhere near as much. Furthermore, the Tome of Manipulation aug is also key to having good healer mana and is absolutely worth the slot.

It's why we're good for funneling mana into people that are starving with QP, like a good Hybrid that knows how to burn well, or someone who has died who could really need it. I'll happily run on <10% mana to start with for encounters in general and gradually recover back to full.

If a Cleric is spamming multiple Renewals in a multi-bind, then not only is that excessive single target overhealing a ton, it's also burning through mana needlessly. The main use case of spells where mana can get quite spicy is multi-DoTing undead targets.

P.s. Don't forget to consider a Frosty Gem of Enhanced Protection in your Shield's Type 5!

Little bit of AGI helps the Avoidance stat too.

Heroic DEX and STR can maximize melee DPS for the cleric. Since the game is all about who wins the DPS parse, then you can always be the highest battle cleric if you focus on those two.

Or you can literally pick anything and go with that. Cause none of it matters for a cleric in InflationQuest

... and combat effects too of course. Clerics proc-ing Hand of Holy .... like mad!

Hsta in case the next expansion comes out with high AE.

You're not technically wrong, and I wish there were more avenues we could go through to improve what we're able to do but it's very reliant on synergies. There's more of an emphasis on spell uptime than the melee side (sadly!). Our base melee is just that bad that even if we went full hDex and had synergies from the likes of Beastlord, it'd still be bad.

Here's a somewhat recent example of an alt fun raid doing Swarm Commander with a healthy amount of melee uptime and lots of memes and experiments. All I had for synergy was a Bard that I was boxing (with a terrible melody that has since been fixed), and I'm sure I could have glyphed and padded a lot harder during add waves, but I still had to heal. If I had a proper caster synergy group with at least a bard and enchanted, wasn't boxing and I glyphed sensibly, it probably would have pushed well towards 400k vs an undead raid with multi-DoTing, and I'm sure there's a good amount of room for improvement in spell use.



The main point of focus in the image above being how low crushes (and bashes) are, although the hammer bane procs are alright. This is with the Summoned Hammer Rk3 and Divine Avatar paired with every Quick Time window. It's that bad with the insane bane damage ratio that real DPS would drool at. We don't swing enough, we don't have the damage multipliers, the melee crit rate, the attack nor accuracy.

This becomes a lot worse vs living targets where our only hope for some semblance of damage is AoE for add waves, or several high hp targets that live for a while together.

Below is Myconid Mutiny from one of our regular raids and I didn't have any synergy, I was earthquaking a bunch and DA blocked everything that wasn't Yellow. Mostly used my 2h for Arms procs. I remember that raid had serious lag where it'd take 1-2s for spells to do their effects after having finished casting them, which made splash heal timing feel impossible.



While I don't have the damage breakdown offhand, I remember that the overwhelming bias was to all the cast DDs.

Single target damage with a chunk of raid healing to do, now, I hit around 75k +/- a bit, I can push that to 100k +/- with some synergy. I never get the whole synergy package but I can guestimate. Crushes and procs against living are pretty awful. Positioning isn't so difficult for melee uptime, but you get a bigger payoff by making sure GCDs are rolling as best as you can.

Pretty much! Spell uptime is vastly more important than any heroic bias

if an expansion includes high AEs, that incentivizes the other path, hWis, for spell+dot shielding

Currently it's pretty close comparing value for a singular damage event. An extra 3% mitigated of a 600k base DD or Tick is only 18k. Going for full hSta in NoS gives more HP than that. So in an absolute case, it's in favour of the stamina. Idk if there are harder hitting AoEs, but I remember that one that's just over 600k in Dance. AoE bases would have to be so high that after mitigation on a DPS their HP would be brought down to single digit%. I don't think the team wants to create scenarios where the difference in a few % is life or death even with decent gear.

The value for the extra Spell and DoT mitigation comes from repeated damage instances in closer succession where you are not necessarily topped back up to full (because timers decided to align everything to hit you at once. Hi Doomshade), especially when your HP pool from base gear is large enough to take multiple hits. After all, mitigation and health work so well together for effective HP. Then there's the point where the choice doesn't matter, which we easily hit with enough upgrades.

They're continuing to give more heroic stats expansion to expansion, so we may eventually see a point where we hit the % function cap, or get pretty close to it. So in theory there's a point where the extra HP would keep on giving, just like when we hit the original mod2 caps.

That caps at 4000. The game leaders (according to Magelo) are certainly hitting that cap when they turn their trophy benefits on. They're reaching those heights with strong commitment to building up hWis, though, so they're running 2.2k-2.4k ish hSta instead of the 3.4k hSta of leaders along that axis.

Yeah, with 36% to 45% it's every 400 up until 4k. It makes sense with the best 8 trophies, max AP, cloak slots, Vanquisher augs etc that it's started to hit those limits already. At the current rate it'll be a good number of expansions before our worn totals are 4k in general where it's back to everyone being capped in everything.

In my experience Clerics tend towards Heroic Agility, Heroic Stamina or Heroic Wisdom - as Lluianae pointed out, Cleric melee is very bad, and in my experience Heroic Dexterity or Heroic Strength can't make up for it.

By all means, if you want to rock either HDex or HStr go ahead, because as Clerics it doesn't really matter too much what we choose to focus on - nobody cares as long as we don't die and we heal our groups. It's not a choice that directly impacts our ability to do our job to an extent where it makes enough of a difference for people to care unlike most classes.

Personally I focus on a mix of Heroic Agility and Heroic Stamina because it makes the most difference for me in non-raiding environments. They directly impact my ability to tank things (which if I'm solo or molo, I'm tanking).

Heroic Wisdom can make sense if you're having mana issues (which is uncommon these days with all our recovery tricks), or if you're a raider and want to take less damage from raid AoE's. I personally have zero issues surviving NoS raid AoE's despite my focus on HAgi and HSta as my guild tends to have enough AoE heal coverage going consistently for it to be a non-issue. Lluianae already went into the math for the Stamina and Wisdom side of things, so I won't rehash those in my post.


As Allayna pointed out,

Druids tend to focus on HWis because of their chronic mana issues.

Shamans tend to focus on HSta as they tend to also be in the thick of things like us clerics right up next to the boss with their groups, and they turn their HP's into mana.



Heroic Agility is tied to Avoidance and Strikethrough.

Avoidance adds to the “melee avoidance” part of AC, which is the portion that allows you to avoid incoming attacks entirely. Each point of avoidance is an additional 0.1% chance to avoid a hit. The Avoidance Heroic Mod is capped at 300 points (30%).

AC is and has always been an important stat for Clerics, as we're classified as light tanks, with AC returns only below tanks and rangers, and equal to bards and monks. The AC soft-cap return varies for each class at every level, though for a 120 Cleric our base cap is 670, and our post cap multiplier is 0.30 (Source: EQ Folder --> Resources --> ACMitigation.txt).

If you like EQMath and want to learn more about AC, I'd suggest checking out Rexa's: https://rexaraven.com/everquest/how-stuff-works-armor-class/

Strikethrough gives you a chance to ignore a mob’s roll to block, dodge, parry, or riposte, and thus landing a hit anyways. This does nothing if you’re attacking from behind. You don’t get to skip your accuracy check, so this can still miss. This is capped at 45 (45%).

Heroic Charisma is tied to no mods.

Heroic Dexterity is tied to Accuracy and Combat Effects.

Heroic Intelligence is tied to Spell Shielding and DoT shielding, but only if your HInt is higher than your HWis since we're Wisdom casters.

Heroic Stamina is tied to Stun Resist and Melee Shielding.

Heroic Strength is tied to Damage Shielding and Damage Shield Mitigation.

Heroic Wisdom is tied to Spell Shielding and DoT shielding, but only if your HWis is higher than your HInt (which it should be in modern live EQ as a Wisdom caster).

H Sta all the way, i replaced all type 5s with Hsta, and made all my type 7s Sta strong and raided this way high end for years ... i NEVER had mana issues.

On my SHD in ToL, I decided I had 3 main stats, DEX, AGI and STA in that order. I posted a Type 5 augs writeup in the tank section if anyone wants more information on ToL type 5 augs.

When looking at type 5 augs during ToL, I noted that Tier 2 and Tier 3 augs had more total combined stats in my 3-primary stats than tier 1 augs did. I also noted that CoV tier 3 harmony aug was the same. From this, I decided that 9 augs were decided, 3 of the tier 3 and 3 of the tier 2 which had my 3 primary stats and all 3 harmony augs (3rd being CoV Tier 3, not talking about any Tier 1 atm). This covered 9 of my Type 5 augs slots.
(I don't know if the numbers for these slots work out exactly the same for the CLR stats, someone would have to compare.)

For raiders, another slot is filled by the EoK type 5 aug. Now the NoS type 5 aug, so somewhere around 1/2 of the slots were filled.

I haven't looked closely at NoS tier 2 and 3 augs because of the abysmal Tier 3 drop rates but I would assume it follows a similar pattern.

The last thing to look at was the tier 1 type 5 aug distribution of stats. Looking at the 4 options for clerics, the augs are....

AGI | STA | WIS (as per Zam)
103 | 31 | 41 = 175
48 | 103 | 48 = 199
41 | 48 | 103 = 192
66 | 66 | 66 = 198

From this, my conclusion is that the best option is STA and the worst option is AGI. Given that harmony only gives up 1 heroic stat per slot, then anyone wanting to focus AGI should go harmony, and possibly even those wanting to go WIS should go harmony. Anyone who considers any of the stats other than the 3 primary stats should go harmony.

So, my answer is, for Type 1 augs in NoS, STA or HAR are the best 2 options. STA for anyone wanting to get an extra, maybe 10-15 total extra heroic stats in the 3 primary stats, and Harmony for everyone else. Anyone going AGI focused would end up with the same total heroic stats, but would be giving up 24 heroic stats in the 3 primary stats per slot, roughly 300 less combined STA|AGI|WIS, which doesn't seem like a great choice to me.

Sorry, the t1 Aug is 60 | 60 | 60, 66 is the tier 2.
So Harmony is 180 combined, not 198. Sorry for that error. Adjust accordingly

1 each AGI, STA, WIS = 192 | 182 | 192
3 HAR = 180 | 180 | 180


T2
AGI | STA | WIZ
110 | 34 | 44 = 188
51 | 110 | 51 = 212
44 | 51 | 110 = 205
66 | 66 | 66 = 198

T3
AGI | STA | WIZ
115 | 35 | 46 = 196
54 | 115 | 54 = 223
46 | 54 | 115 = 215
73 | 73 | 73 = 219

If I made any errors in my numbers, please post a correction.

Not really an error but keep in mind that the T2 and T3 augs are Lore. You're not going to be able to stack them.