My number one wish as a raid cleric would be some easy way of comparing clerical effectiveness during an encounter. Yes, I know that a tank running a parser could post an after-action report of Healed HP but for "political" reasons most tanks don't want to cause dissension in the cleric team so they won't do it. Yeah, I don't know any simple way to accomplish it, but Healers would like some simple way to compare themselves just like dps classes. At least I do. Number 2 would be Mass Rez. OK, I know that many events will pop all the corpses out on a common pile and that's a big time saver. Why not go the extra mile and give us a Group (massable) Rez AA effect? OK, I understand, no love for clerics with this Dev team... so if we can't have Mass Rez will you at least double (or triple) the timer during which the Rez message appears on a player's screen? You know that 75% of the raid runs for the toilet or the kitchen during a wipe. So they miss the first Rez box... and the 2nd... and the 3rd. Meanwhile I'm clicking like a trooper and delaying my own urgent need to "AFK Bio" because I'm still clicking corpses that won't take the Rez box because they're AFK. Leave the box on their screen for 20 minutes so when they finally do drag their lame carcasses back to their keyboard they can take the first Rez I presented them instead of berating the cleric crew because they no longer have the Rez box. I joke here but this is a cause of great distress among raid clerics. Or add a new setting to "Take Rez automatically while in Raid" so they can run to relieve their bodily functions while not causing hate and disapproval among the clerics! Number 3 would be to re-work the whole concept of understanding and deploying cures. It's challenging for sure because we rarely understand the power or necessity of cures until someone posts their cheats on the web. I mean how am I supposed to figure out multiple negative effects on both my own character and a tank while I'm so busy threading heals that my chat windows are a blur? Yeah, I know I'm whining but without the use the 3rd-party sites a cleric has no chance to understand or respond to negative effects during a raid encounter. There is almost no visibility into this portion of an event while the event is underway. I need a little imp on my shoulder whispering in my ear, "That's a really nasty DOT you have on you there big boy, maybe you should try a bit of Perfected Blood!". It's either that or maybe a pause button so we can stop the event mid-way and parse our logs to try and figure out what's hitting us and what works and what doesn't work.... Number 4 is seriously guys, first you give us Shining Rampart and then you cause untold AAs and spells to overwrite it AND then you don't give us a new version of it? And where's my upgrade to Galvos Retort? It's not nice to take away the VERY VERY few toys you gave us clerics. Very disappointed here to say the least. Geez Louise, way to take away every last bit of incentive to play a cleric in the modern world. Number 5 World Peace! (Just joking about number 5 of course! There wouldn't be a need for clerics if we had world peace!)
3) DoTs that can be cured with perfected blood have the counters on the debuff in your buff window. Nothing mysterious about it. Green = poison, Yellow = disease, Red = curse, Orange = corruption. Find your own audio trigger for the effects after your first attempt. Look up the spell name that you see in your buff window and you can find the text for an audio trigger. For AE dd's you can use a parse program and find the spells and text for triggers. You want to be spoon fed strats by the dev team? And I'm sorry that there's no pause button in EQ. Must be devastating 4) Olsif's Retort
Thanks! I did not know about the color coordination of the debuffs. I did not see Olsif's Retort on the spell vendor. I'll look again.
They are still working on vie stacking. Part of the stacking issue with Vie and Shining Armor line has been fixed. However, not in the direction we had asked. Vie will block Shining from being cast (whereas before both would overwrite each other). Now if we can just get shining to take precedence instead of vie.
My raid cleric is on permanent vacation but before I went rogue I was doing the cleric thing since 2000 or so so hopefully that is credibility enough to comment here 1) Healing is difficult to parse, because so much of it is just wasted. Your heal crits for 50k but the target is only down 25k, well you only healed for 25k as far as what registered. A wizard nuke when it crits it lands for whatever that number is on a parser where as a heal is only what is actually used. Otherwise the metric for healing is whatever a tank reports from their parser, number casts or simply the fact that people are alive. 2) Sounds good. Have to get past those who would say it is easy mode though. Maybe have it only work out of combat would be enough to shut up any nay sayers. 3) Each affliction is color coded as a border color around the icon as to what it is. Red for Curse. Yellow for Disease/Corruption. Green for Poison. I might be wrong but that gets you in the ball park and the newest cure lines should be the best counter number. 4) That has much to do with mercs and how they are stupid. Also, it is still on the cleric as to what to use. Sometimes the mitigation Vie makes more sense if the stun part of Shining Armor won't work, such as on raid mobs and so on. Otherwise there is nothing more infuriating than having a back up healer in a group be a merc and your tank doesn't have mitigation Vie blocked. That makes the difference between easy street and stupidly difficult in of itself. Past that, I dunno how to fix raid clerics. I voted with my feet and rerolled. Soloing is fun at times but you can even ask any Eskay how long they can tolerate just swarming all the time. That is about the only respite for raid clerics to escape the grind, as raid healing is a thankless job all too often and it used to be the cleric was the first to take blame for wipes. Granted, not so much now since we have all become more enlightened with our years of experience but that has not changed the fact that clerics are critical for raiding and yet trumped for everything else outside of raiding. Just due to the fact that it is a one dimensional class designed for a social group setting with other players. That does not translate well into a merc/box dominated game. So most anyone who raids can attest that the majority of your clerics log on for raids and then log out once they are over, never to be seen until the next raid unless they have their own boxes to fall back on.
Shining Armor has the mitigation as well. It doesn't have an absorb limit. That stun proc has a heal recourse which makes it inifinitely better than vie on tanks. The short duration is the only downside.
3) Try learning as much as the encounter through players and online resources. If you really have a difficult time tracking when you cure (sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it's not), you can use an external parser or audio triggers to try to alert you when something needs to be cured.
Be interesting to see but good guess is normal mitigation Vie has to be cast more often than SA just due to how much mobs hit for tearing through the limit. Ultimately, at least in theory, normal Vie is supposed to mitigate more than SA and the stun proc with heal recourse is not powerful until being beat on by multiple targets. That is the only reason for the two separate lines. Well that and one has a group cast and the other doesn't but that is just details. Probably there would need to be real quantitative proof to verify any of this. Qualitatively you might not need to look too far past what was continued to lvl 100 versus what has been allowed to stagnate for picking the overall best choice.
I have Olsif's Retort now. However it was the Shining Rampart line which has no current replacement. I stand corrected but still unhappy.
I can 100% confirm that the normal Vie will wear off in less than 4 rounds of any group named hit and 1-2 rounds of a raid named. Shining however, will only wear off when the 9+ minute (it's extendable by the back item focii and AA's) ends. In every instance listed in the post, Shining is better.
Nothing you have to guess at. Bastion of Vie Classes: CLR/98 Skill: Abjuration Mana: 889 Target: Single Range: 100 Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 4s, Recast: 1.5s, Quiet: 1.5s Duration: 72m (720 ticks), Extend: Yes 1: Absorb Melee Damage: 10% Total: 37981 6: Cast on Rune Fade: Light of Vie Light of Vie Target: Single Range: 1000 Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 0s 1: Increase Current HP by 4110 Shining Armor Classes: CLR/94 Skill: Abjuration Mana: 500 Target: Single Range: 100 Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 3s, Recast: 1.5s, Quiet: 1.5s Duration: 4.5m (45 ticks), Extend: Yes 1: Absorb Melee Damage: 10% 7: Add Defensive Proc: Crippling Glare with 400% Rate Mod Crippling Glare Target: Single Range: 100 Resist: Magic -25 Casting: 0s Duration: 18s (3 ticks) Recourse: Shining Health 1: Stun for 1s up to level 95 Shining Health Target: Self Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 0s 1: Increase Current HP by 2005
Well, that explains why it was not given a tiered up version. SA is still better than than the new Vie. Too bad they nerfed it by farming it out to some classes, such as warriors which can overwrite it now. Still great to use on paladins and yourself to swarm.
Warriors could always overwrite it from the inception expansion Shining was created. But the warrior one is not overall superior. It takes more damage off the initial hit but shining takes more damage off over the duration of shining being on the player and has the extra stun/heal benefits. Paladin also have something that blocks it. As a cleric, you just tell them not to use that particular ability (most raid tanks will already know this but occasionally you come across some who don't.)
The paladin ability is a ToT heal/mitigation buff with that buff being 15% mitigation with an absorb limit similar to vie but a 1-2 minute duration. I don't know the exact duration. But yes, as a cleric you ask them to not cast it. For warriors (as well as everyone I suppose), I use a trigger that lets me know when shining fades and on whom.
It is precisely because Shining Armour and Rampart have a mitigation total of 0 ( to stop them fading from specific damage increments, and rather from duration) that they are overwritten, and have ALWAYS been overwritten, by vie effects, with a limit, on the same slot- because codewise, the game sees 37981 > 0, and so the spell with 37981 takes precedence. As to the OP... (next post)
1. I think part of that comes down to adding more filters. There's an awful lot that goes into "other" for example. Can try PMing about it. 2. This was mentioned at fan faire- they're looking at it, actually, according to the dev panel. They don't know how to make it work yet. If code can get it to work, it will probably take time. Who knows how many things they have in their queue? 3. Others have mentioned colour coding. You can also right-click on a debuff and inspect it, and they will usually have a big empty box with "Curse 50/50" or whatever on it- but sometimes, they also have a description, or a hint... it's worth checking. Although, if you're using perfected blood, and it has counters... you'll pull off anything eventually (since it removes every kind of counter there currently is). 4. As per Aristo's responses in beta, Shining Rampart/Armour is not discontinued, it just wasn't in at launch. From beta parsed spell file: [34287/4555] New Shining Armor Classes: CLR/99 Skill: Abjuration Mana: 500 Target: Single Range: 100 Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 3s, Recast: 1.5s Duration: 4.5m (45 ticks), Extend: Yes 1: Absorb Melee Damage: 10% 7: Add Defensive Proc: New Crippling Glare [Spell 34290] with 400% Rate Mod Text: You are surrounded by shining armor. Everyone is currently missing some spells- be it wizard magic instant, mage fire rain, druid big magic nuke, chanter fast nuke, shaman recourse group heal. Clerics are currently missing Shining, Blood (viral dot), undead trap aura, and both single and group target heal proc buffs (Infusion of the Faithful et cetera - the missing spells are listed in the Rain of Fear cleric spell thread further down in this forum).
