We've been good and so far survived this crazy pandemic mostly unscathed though we know plenty of folks have have been hurt financially or personally. The serverwide channels have had some really weird things going on like that. They disappear off my autojoin one day, back the next, gave told me I'm a 'channel' and 'I'm not found' and other weird things. How many people (including me now) have asked you if you've put in an application for the CRC since they opened up applications right now? I can tell you, your knowledge would be so useful! But no pressure, I promise. I typically only play on the weekends, so will look for you next weekend when I get back on next.
We've been good and so far survived this crazy pandemic mostly unscathed though we know plenty of folks have have been hurt financially or personally. The serverwide channels have had some really weird things going on like that. They disappear off my autojoin one day, back the next, gave told me I'm a 'channel' and 'I'm not found' and other weird things. How many people (including me now) have asked you if you've put in an application for the CRC since they opened up applications right now? I can tell you, your knowledge would be so useful! But no pressure, I promise. I typically only play on the weekends, so will look for you next weekend when I get back on next.
Some of what you've experienced is as it has been for me. I guess serverwide channels have been fairly unstable for a time. You would be the first as I haven't really publicised being back. It was more of a quiet return with a friend on AB. Replied to a thread elsewhere, saw this one and here I am. It'd be interesting to consider, the old knowledge never went away even after over a decade, however, that is such a gap in time in terms of things I have missed out on. There was a steep relearning curve coming back. The twitch reflexes are still there at least! My work commitments have me raiding a handful of days a week given the website work I do for another game, but we'll see. Tentative maybe!
Motivation to play Cleric ...non existent ...give them some undead dots and nice hammer swings and we talk ...but if ya going to revamp cleric may as well revamp warrior and rogue ..LOL
Guildy shaman just now parsed 1.01 MILLION DPS over 1118s on Primal Vamp raid... Plus far, far more utility, much better debuffs, and just as good (or better, when consider AE) healing ability... ABSOLUTELY ZERO reason for anyone to want to play a cleric nowadays. /crying over
Single target healing ability of clerics is unparalleled. There is no class, not shaman or any other, more capable of countering boss damage. That the shaman AE healing role is well represented by popular parse programs due to an algorithmic understanding of tactics being Hard is a red herring.
Szilent, you're right. The raid game still needs clerics, and warriors. The group game, however? Newp.
1. Change all normal heals (at least from ToL and going forward) to target target if hostile. 2. Remove the debuff on Extirpate Destruction line of spells (12 second debuff that blocks any cleric from landing this proc again on the same mob). Would help cleric dps a little on undead, and help very slightly with the debuff cap problem on raids.
Having spent more time on raids and becoming increasingly more aware of the current debuff cap issue (some things never change!), even with Destruction procs our expected damage with banes is not going to be insane if they removed the debuff limiter, but it'll be a lot nicer if we happen to get a luckier run as a whole. That will not be the typical experience, and as is the current content where we're able to bane is sparse compared to ToV and CoV.
This is taking it too far, and this is also an argument as old as time. Clerics have always been the one dimensional healer where Druids and Shamans when able to DPS more will blow us out of the water. Now, I would argue that the chasm in damage potential is a very real issue, but stating there is 0 reason to play us has always been the exaggerated claim. We still have the edge in emergency measures and single target healing (as much as things like triple remedies make me feel gross). We are also the recovery experts with how many mechanics you can just ignore with one of several DAs on short cooldown and run back in while most others will just have to eat being CCd/silenced for the full duration. Other priests do not have the abilities to recover from a major screw up as we do. Run said raids without any clerics and see how much harder it becomes for the guilds. In fact, few HC raiding guilds ever had to experience what it was like raiding with 1-2 clerics and 4-6 priests online total but let me tell you, it's an eye opener and you feel the lack very much. The group game is different and as is people are more likely to run mercs and multibox anyway. To that end, the DPS chasm could be narrowed some in ways that would fit us best. That way grouping, moloing and even raiding would benefit.
Pretty old topic but first time seeing it. I've played many clerics through the years but never past GoD so my experience in later game is very limited. In my experience there are two kinds of clerics. There is the dedicated healing cleric who acts as a protector to the group and really shines and there is the cleric who plays a cleric but isn't really a cleric at heart. For the dedicated healing cleric, that is what we do, we love it and could care less about anything else. We're resourceful and masterful at our class and accept our roles as nexus of any amazing group. I off tank, I root park, I kite, I heal and I stun the heck out of things at critical moments. For all the other clerics, either they were forced to play a cleric, played a cleric to get attention or just wanted to be included. The only way to keep these people playing cleric is to make the cleric class OP. The answer is really to either create a second class like a Lich that has its damage return health to the group or give the cleric the opportunity to fall from grace and become a fallen cleric that has a reduced healing capacity but can do damage that returns health to the group.
I started playing EQ just before the launch of DoN as an Sk made some great friends early on and had a solid group then our cleric retired and i drew the short straw so i rolled a cleric and we leveled him upp pretty fast at the time we were still in our 40's and 50's grinding Ldons constantly. Then I joined a guild raiding pop and eventually god and omens. i loved being a cleric ( i was in elder care and it seemed to be a natural fit) there were a few zones I could solo play in and have fun (veksar especially). I grouped and raided as a cleric main up until Badgers in underfoot when it had become so monotonous I could no longer take it. I had been hiding out on my sk slowly grinding gearing and improving my skills that I finally decided I wanted out. and with one giant blast 10 minutes after winning badgers I abruptly spoke my mind in /raid and guild chat and walked away from my guild. as I had applied to main swap shown proficiency in my sk and was still denied because they needed Clerics not sk's even after just taking in 3 new ones (while my app was still pending. Hiya Valorguard members from way back! My cleric is still at my side as a bot because Yeah i know tricks and ways newer players don't seem to get and a merc just doesn't have the logic processing capabilities to succeed. Could I jump into almost any guild as a raid cleric these days absolutely but I wont even box a cleric on raids anymore. last time i saw that my sk got sat in a corner with nothing to do in CotF raids.
It has been a number of months since my previous post on this thread and my experiences of current day EQ have broadened and my familiarity with current numbers has increased. Cue another stream of thought, so please forgive if it meanders. From experiencing every ToL raid to most of the content I had missed out on prior, to alt raids of current content with skeleton crews of decent players, the one thing that was true in the old days and is even more true now is how pivotal having higher DPS is, and just how behind a Cleric's potential contributions are even with full DPS uptime while using every tool available in a given encounter and situation. With that in mind, damage potential is going to be the focus of this post. In the cases where we have to do a modicum of healing, even with optimising every bit of melee uptime in between casts and toggling targets between contravention and intervention casts, our resultant values are honestly laughable. We can always find times in whatever we do where we aren't having to heal, and thus, contributing to the group/raid is ideal. I remember when full burn in a short-term encounter without Intensity that a Cleric could do around a 7th of a top DPS, now against non-undead we're lucky if it ever converges to 10% be it in a burn or longer-term sustained encounter (with competent DPS, not even 5% of them depending on the encounter and what's happening). The more we have to heal, the worse this gets as we trade our potential damaging GCDs for more pertinent heals. We can slightly mitigate this with Rapidity, but that's on a 10 minute cd. Our pets, AA and regular, are fragile and do little. Even if you had a regular hammer with a boss' back 100% of the time, it's never going to clock at much, and that's assuming it never dies. This line could easily be revamped into a longer cd temporary higher damage swarm pet where at least the hammer can stand to take some hits, not unlike the AA. No one is using their pet to tank anything, and so many things kill it with ease (especially when it somehow rips aggro). VS undead is another matter and at least there is some hope there in terms of how much more we currently can do. With and sometimes without some buff assistance I've found I can hold up against tanks or even do a fair bit better on prolonged sustained fights where the tanks are busy and not with full DPS uptime (AD is a mid-tier guild where current fights take far, far longer than for most raiding guilds). We can DoT and have damage ticking as we do other things. One Sermon without the same DoT AAs as other classes get is very weak and not only is its mana cost still quite high (this only really matters in multi-target), but its duration is short. We can't stack sermons anymore, the least that could be done is to increase the duration and retune it so that the one DoT we can do is at least more worthwhile to cast. The extra bane portions on our non-bane spells is convenient, but if we're actually trying to do damage, we're also fishing for Destruction procs, however, only one Cleric can land one of each type every 12s! Or if you're lucky with Improved Twincast, you'll see one land then the second one showing you a "did not take hold" message from being blocked by the first. The limiter really doesn't make much sense in an era of hundreds of thousands and millions of damage being casually thrown around like confetti. It's all a matter of statistics where damage and rate could easily be tweaked to allow for other clerics to also enjoy having the occasional boom and actually stack more beneficially on a raid with their fellows. We have Turn Undead, at least this is every 2m30 and now we can better use it with the debuff limit having been upped. Nothing to really say about this as it can be a good chunk of damage when used on cooldown, and a serious aggro generator if you're not careful. The Consecrated Ground line? This came out before I retired and this barely, if not ever, saw use. I've tried to make good use of Venerated Ground and it's awful. Not to mention is takes up a valuable aura slot and only lasts 2 minutes. We could easily have a target AoE/ring version of this as a spell or AA that would see more use if it was more meaningful. I've always found the concept of good hammers fun, and I do enjoy the bane hammer we can summon and wield. The proc doing more vs target types is a nice addition. It helps, marginally. We may have a crazy high 1H ratio with the Undead +bane damage, and the 1hb +% helping us connect better, but our melee multipliers are still going to be atrocious with or without Divine Avatar active and any support. We don't swing enough, nor hard enough, for it to be significant. Additionally, there's my old beloved VoV line with buff base procs, which could also benefit from the bane damage treatment. I still believe that procs can be part of a viable avenue that's different to how Druids and Shamans model their damage and this hammer, and 2hbs, in order to do more if we get melee uptime without having to even think about the melee damage portion. Higher twinproc rates, higher base proc rates (already exists in Yaulp/Avatar), increasing the base/crit damage of the procs that we do, etc. Most of these SPAs already exist, either as AAs or as foci on gear. The other part would be in ensuring that our nukes (and DoT) enable us to better value our time. Front loading damage spells with higher bases, shorter casts and longer recasts would work well with the above idea of meleeing more, while not taking up as much valuable time that could be spent healing. Everything is much faster paced now that you really feel how slow 3s base cast spells are vs the current game. Our bane nukes can focus down from 1.5s to 1.2s normally, but our Contraventions and Interventions are stuck at 1.5s and cannot be focused down unless we use Celestial Rapidity to reduce Interventions down to 0.75s (but not Contraventions!). With the hasted delays on our weapons, having things be in the range of <=1.5s casts works out nice enough for 2 handers, faster would work even better for 1h use. There could be some synergy in the damage toolkit that makes sense so that it's more connected, not just the Unyielding line for a chance of healing Twincasts. Things that give Clerics a reason to actually be other than glorified healing boxes. There are many ideas that can work and be on point. In my retirement may have missed the conversations that lead to the creation and balancing of concepts as I would have back when I was CC, but I'm happy to be a part of that conversation for how things could be even better. Time in other games has given perspective on just what could be done still within the scope of what EQ is capable of. Don't let things languish and stagnate for us as one the more one dimensional of all classes. We're dead last on the damage totem pole by such a margin and it doesn't have to be that bad. It can be better, without overtaking the potential of other classes (we're nowhere near close to anyone/the other priests in full DPS mode) and no one would be the poorer for it. At the end of the day we all work together and DPS still reigns supreme after all these years. Give more reasons for people to want to enjoy and be motivated to play a Cleric.
I agree with everything Lluianae has said here 1,000,000%. In addition, it'd be nice to see some things that have been neglected over the past decade addressed. The last time clerics were in a good place outside of the healing department was back in Rain of Fear era - in 2012; a decade ago. In a raiding environment, I believe clerics are still able to deliver what is expected of us, though more DPS would definitely be a benefit. In a grouping environment, we lack almost all of the utility we once had and druids are shamans are the preferred classes because they can actually meaningfully contribute to more than just healing. We're still able to limitedly pacify pull (white con or below), and single-target root things... and that's about it. The ability to function as a 'light tank' for a group has been made significantly more difficult with the addition of strikethrough a few years ago, and through general developer neglect. We're not able to hold aggro well enough, even toggling Spell Casting Subtlety off, and with the procs from our 'Vow of Perniciousness' line of spells - because there is such a huge DPS disparity between clerics and all of the other classes. This is mitigated somewhat on undead content, as Turn Undead helps us, but still not where it should be, and impossible on non-undead content. Our aggro issues would disappear if the DPS disparity was addressed. The problem here isn't our aggro tools, but our DPS tools. Some try to argue that clerics have never been light tanks, but those people are ignorant of the class and it's design over the years - all it takes is one look at the AC_Mitigation.txt file to see that we are in fact supposed to be able to fill that role and have been since 1999. Why else would they give us plate armour and self-buffs with aggro procs? Unlike all the other light tank classes (monks, rangers, bards, etc) that we should be able to keep up with, we don't have anything like Deftdance, Whirlwind Disc, or Weaponshield - which was fine... until the addition of strikethrough to the game. Cleric mitigation prior to strikethrough was always agility, dodge, and mitigation based, and strikethrough was a massive nerf to agility's usefulness, which minorly affected most other classes but was a significant blow for clerics. DPS stagnation also hugely impacts this, as the longer we can't kill a mob, the longer we have to tank the mob. Something new could be considered to address this gap, or beefing up the self-only portion of Spire of the Vicar to keep up with mudflation and strikethrough would help. The self-only portion (formerly our Second Spire) is supposed to be our Deftdance, Whirlwind Disc, Weaponshield, etc. It's largely ineffective in modern content due to mudflation and neglect. I'd say being able to actually fill the role effectively in a group has been relegated to the 1% superstars of the class that know it inside and out, and are willing to put the insane amount of effort in to do the job. Even then, we do a significantly worse job than the others through the neglect the class has received over the years. It's inaccessible to the average player, which is a horrible design choice. Some of us do NOT box and are reliant on soloing, moloing, and whatever random pick-up-groups we can create - restoring our ability to fill a light tank role properly would help us be able to create more groups for players to enjoy, and thus do more things and be more useful and desirable outside raids. It would also enable us to actually be able to go do old content on our own again. At this point in time, mostly due to the DPS disparity, I can't pop my merc and go play in the higher tiers of EoK content - which is nearly six years old. Every single other class can go waltz into those zones kill whatever they like, including nameds, and do whatever quests they like. A cleric can't due to the DPS disparity and lack of undead creatures, which is poor class design. I don't care about topping DPS parses, but I should be able to pop a merc and go kill trash mobs in six year old content just like all the other kids. Lluianae's comments on what our DPS used to look compared to what they look like now compared to other classes is the sad reality we currently live in. Our DPS has been allowed to stagnate for a decade now without being addressed, and has effectively been unintentionally nerfed through exclusion on several occasions, including recently with our exclusion from the new 'Sympathetic Amplification' AA in the July 20 patch. Solo ability, and thus DPS is the largest barrier to people wanting to play the cleric class at all, and those of us that do being able to play it outside of a raiding environment. I'm not suggesting clerics should be topping parses, but I believe a cleric on undead content should be at 80-90% of what a druid or shaman can do, and on non-undead content it should be around 60-70%. Through parsing, you can easily see that it's nowhere near that - even when a cleric is able to go full all-out DPS mode and ignore needing to heal the group entirely. We're lucky to be around 10-20%. For awhile, Clerics bridged the gap with swarming, until the great swarming nerfs. The devs of the time told the community that swarming isn't intended behaviour and is bad for zone performance, which I can completely understand and sympathize with. I'm not asking for a return to swarming and adding on more server/zone instability - but.... it's way overdue for the issue of our DPS disparity compared to every other class in the game to be looked at and addressed. Also, there are still classes out there capable of swarming, so the nerfs weren't very effective. Swarming isn't very feasible for a cleric anymore as the devs have seemingly discontinued our viral reverse damage shield spell line. As for what tools we have, I think they are designed fairly well - it's just the realistic implementation sucks, and a large part of that is exclusion from passive AA that the other two priest classes benefit from that isn't accounted for in spell design. This exclusion has happened multiple times over the years, with the most recent being in the July patch. Every single time the clerics are excluded, it may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but as more levels and AA's are added it just exponentially magnifies the DPS disparity. Even if we get less ranks of these AA than the other priest classes, we should be included - not only to fix the problem, but to prevent it from getting exponentially worse over time like we've seen happen this past decade. Exclusion from passive AA that the other two priest classes benefit from is, in my opinion, one of the largest reasons that the massive DPS gap exists in the first place. When you look at comparable spells for a cleric, druid, and shaman - the spells are tuned fairly well. The spells just aren't getting focused or amplified anywhere near the same way through AA's. Our already previous limited ability to DoT things has been almost entirely removed with the DoT revamp, and even if that was fixed, there's still the massive gap created by AA exclusion. I would consider giving clerics another line of DoT's or two (keeping them limited to undead is fine), or splitting the ones we do have in 2-3 stacking groups instead of one, so that we can have our ability to even cast multiple DoTs like all the other kids restored. It'd also be nice to have access to some of the DoT AA lines we're excluded from, like 'Destructive Cascade', to lessen the exponential DPS gap. I don't care whether clerics are given the same amount of ranks as the other DoT classes or not, but at least include us and continue to include us going forward to get us back to where we should be and prevent such a wide gap from reoccurring. Extending the duration of our Sermon DoT's so they last for a similar time-frame to other class' DoT's would also be a very nice change. If you played back in the day or on an early TLP, your pet can actually survive and contribute for a whole mob - it can even offtank a mob if we heal it. It's stats are so outdated due to AA exclusion, and changes to mob designs (things like adding mechanics to trash and named mobs, like ae rampage, minor AoEs and such) that it's not worth casting. It takes longer to cast the spell than our pet actually survives 99% of the time. Giving clerics access to the 'Companion's Fortification' AA so our pet realistically has similar HP's to all the other kid's pets so it can actually survive and be used for the duration of a whole mob like it used to would be a very nice change. If the HP disparity isn't adjusted, a re-tooling of this line somehow to be useful is necessary as it's currently completely worthless. If we're given access to that, it'd also be worthwhile to look into giving us access to some ranks of 'Companion's Fury' as well. As Lluianae pointed out, the consecrated ground line is also very unappealing. I agree 100% with the addition that it'd be a lot more appealing if I could cast it without having to remove my HP or Mitigation aura - like we can with the Circle clickies (Circle of Mana, Power, Life, Guardian Circle, etc). I also agree with everything Lluianae mentioned about our procs, melee, and direct damage capabilities - with the addition that we should not have been the only caster class (CLR, DRU, SHM, NEC, WIZ, MAG, ENC) excluded from the new Sympathetic Amplification AA. Excluding us only provided a new way to further exponentially increase the DPS gap as time goes on. We likely should also have an AA like 'Wrath of the Forest Walker' which we were excluded on to help close the gap on direct damage DPS between clerics and druids which isn't accounted for in spell design. Giving us more DPS, not enough to be at the top where we shouldn't be, but enough to actually be useful and correct a decade's worth of stagnation would go a long way to having people want to play and enjoy playing the cleric class.
I agree that fixing things to help solo and group game would be nice. I love my cleric but its just too slow to do anything. A lot of classes have spells that became useless over time and a rework of those would be nice. One of the issues with giving cleric real decent dps in raids is that they will be asked to use it even if some players would rather focus on healing and not having to worry about which mobs to dps without breaking mez or something else. A DPS increase would also require a whole rework of the class. DPS for druids comes at a high price in terms of heals, mana, effort, recast times and spell gems. Single target heals are too slow for today's game so we can't really heal tanks effectively in raids besides our remote sunbolt. Our raid healing is also useless and is better covered by splash/rain. In the end we can put out some HPS on parse but its low quality healing with little actual value, and we are really just a DPS class that goes oom very fast and can't sustain long fights. Sometimes i wonder if having those crappy heals is worth the limitations in DPS, but i think its fair for versatility to come with a price. I don't think looking at the shaman capabilities for comparison is good, they are just overpowered like SKs and they shouldn't be IMO.
I've got no problem with the devs also addressing some of the druid's healing or mana issues as I also agree druids are in need of some TLC as well. I don't speak to it as I've never mained a druid character and personally don't have the required class knowledge on how druid issues should be approached. I do believe it's wrong for druids to be excluded from the AoE healing game, and this imbalance should be corrected. AoE heals aren't everything though; if your guild is only looking at the AoE healing parse to judge people, they're doing it wrong. As for cleric DPS, as Lluianae already pointed out, that 60-70% mark is where we used to be when well balanced, and should have been this whole time - and likely would have been if the devs would fix the AA exclusion issues - both our DoT DPS and direct-damage DPS need to be fixed, and have needed it for a decade. I also really fail to see how anyone other than a cleric would care if the cleric pet suddenly had proper HP's again. Our melee DPS is approx where it should be in comparison to the other priests, though for the sake of preventing this same issue going forward we really should have been granted some of the ranks of the new proc AA. If we don't because of our summoned hammer - make an exclusion for it... it'd still be good to have this AA for the times when we're using other weapons (such as our raid/group healing weapon, or a 2h). When looking at DoT DPS and AA, I only mentioned the one every other DoT caster class has in common that clerics are for some reason excluded from; I didn't mention shaman specific or necromancer specific ones as that would be going too far - we should have access to the common one though as we are a DoT class (vs undead). If we're excluded to it because of Turn Undead, they could simply add an exclusion for TU, like they have excluded our Complete Heal spell from many things throughout the years. When looking at direct-damage DPS disparity, we have the common Direct Damage AA, but there are so many ranks now of 'Wrath of the Forest Walker' (and other classes versions of) that it's a significant difference that isn't accounted for in spell design, which is where our DPS variances should be accounted for in my opinion. Again, every direct-damage caster DPS class has a version of this sort of AA - except the cleric. I'm not advocating for clerics getting exactly the same thing here, but a new thing that is about 60-70% of the boost druid's gain from WotFW would make sense to restore the balance to where it always should have been. My comparison was based on the other priest classes as it makes more sense to compare a cleric to a druid or shaman than a cleric to a magician, rogue, necromancer, beastlord, etc; we priests are siblings. When doing a comparison, one compares apples to apples, not apples to oranges. Cleric DPS already comes at a penalty of 25% of our healing so we don't focus on it during raids, and requires meleeing, which also makes it unappealing for most clerics for raids - I could see that penalty going up to 30-40% of our healing in return for restoring us to that 60-70% DPS benchmark. I imagine it's just as, if not more high-effort as druid DPS as most of our direct damage spells are mirrors of each other with slightly different numbers to reflect our slightly different roles and we have to melee for all our proc effects (like our Vow line) to function. Meleeing as a druid is an option, not a requirement for most of your activated DPS (like Divine Avatar, Improved Twincast, etc.) to function. It also comes at a significant mana cost; I constantly run out of mana when trying to run my pitiful DPS tools to solo/molo. It really does need to be addressed though. I firmly do believe that the cleric should be at the bottom of the pile as far as DPS goes, but that it's unsustainable for a cleric to be 80-95% lower compared to every other class as this is what's made it impossible to solo/molo anything meaningful and makes us less desirable for groups. An 80-90% gap doesn't make sense; a 30-40% one does; a 30-40% is where we used to be and should always have been. They don't need to re-design the entire class from the ground up, merely address the unfair imbalance created by lack of inclusion in common caster DPS AA design (at minimum), and look into addressing the gap in our self-mitigation ability compared to the other light tanks created by the strikethrough/agility nerf. Clerics really just need the DPS conversations to stop being "everybody but clerics" and start being "everybody including clerics." DPS matters for every class.
In the "Be Careful What You Wish For" category, I wouldn't be confident any current Dev could make the Cleric class better without damaging our last single area of undisputed expertise, end-game raid MT healing. Because you know in the interest of "balance" they would have to nerf some perfectly fine capability before they'd grant an improvement in another. Maybe it's better to play the cleric as a favored Alt and roll something else for actual fun.
We have plenty of tools where short of their absolute removal would still have us favourable for tank healing. Us having that focus is fine, I've always felt that having Druids pairing better with Casters, Shamans with Melees and Clerics with Tanks has been a fair split for role-based synergies and I'm glad they were expanded upon further to a point (it's not perfect, but the direction and precedent exists. Also fix/rework the Druid 1.5/2.0 effect to work in a level cap agnostic manner. DD casters would love you). The issue is that the game ever remains so DPS focused and it is night and day to play with a lack than to have a more expected amount present, whether it's in solo, grouping or raiding. That is the area where we really have fallen vastly behind in multiple regards. Earlier Kaeladar wrote about the notion of Clerics being asked to DPS on raids. I would say that they already should be, and should have been since before I retired 14+ years ago. Everyone contributing makes raids go faster. The same for groups. We have the tools and they should be used. Sure, you could just focus on healing but then you're playing an incomplete class. Every MMO has healers contributing where they can as a standard (especially FFXIV, where GCD healing is minimised as much as possible at higher end play!). The healing purist mindset is literally what held the class back for years and I did have to argue against it over and over, especially with the old guard in the sw.Archon/Exemplar channel. There were times when some would ask me to relay back to the devs to restore us back to being CH chainers. I appreciated their input, but I still argued and disagreed very much. So it became that lines were introduced which were not purely focused on healing and it brought a much needed breath of fresh air to a one-note class. I listened to as many real players as I could, as did other CCs and CLs because at the end of the day, the majority of those still playing are the ones an MMO should be shaped around. Listen to what they want and would like and from that feedback the best ideas were filtered and relayed back to the dev team. It's interesting that the Vow line had its penalty adjusted to 25% as it was originally designed with 50% in mind. I also showed how ludicrous our healing was back then where you could still perform healing miracles with that handicap active for an entire raid. The DPS it gave us was not game-breaking, but it did help lift us up. That was the point. Our full healing power typically has not been required of us and that still applies to this day. The main exception would be in running with a skeleton crew of healers where everyone gets to do more in the role they genuinely want to play. The issue is when you start to stack more healers, with how the amount of healing required is always finite it becomes a means of figuring out what to cut to streamline the raid for more DPS. This is what has been done for years. Not all guilds have this luxury now, especially in the low-midcore end of the scale. You run with what you're able to get. EQ just does not have the playerbase anymore for a vast pool of people to pick from. So this means there will be the guilds with a bloated number of Clerics and minimal Druids and Shamans. (Admittedly, I can't say how raid forces look for the game as a whole these days. I haven't been as involved and I play with the only MC EU guild left. High-end guilds are the exception and not the norm.). Emilari's points about being excluded from more universal AA lines are very valid and I do very much agree that the conversation should be looking at things as a whole, not Clerics versus, but Clerics AND. I was gone for 14 years and coming back was quite a rude awakening. A rework is not necessarily required, but some facets could certainly be reviewed, tweaked and retuned. Such can certainly extend to other classes, but I'm focusing on the one I know best in the context of the game as a whole. Some things have changed for the better but much has stayed the same, and that's a problem.
I found this post searching for reasons to play cleric. There are a lot of good ideas here. Do we know if any of them are getting considered? One note to the devs - if you fix the problem of clerics feeling bad for groups and being incapable of soloing, please remember that this isn't a new issue. Don't just fix it for level 120 clerics. For example, if you revamp the Vow line, please do it across all levels. There are a lot of clerics coming up on TLE servers that don't want to suffer for 2-4 years to catch up to live.
