So I have been seeing a lot of questions about this new class and decided I'd go ahead and answer what I see as the more common ones. I used to play Defiler but recently switched to Channeler main for our guild's raid force on Freeport server. I'll try not to skew things too much towards the raider's point of view but if I do, please forgive me. What is this new Channeler class I keep hearing about? Channeler is the new priest class introduced in Tears of Veeshan. As a priest class, our primary role is to heal their allies, although we have DPS potential on the higher end of the healer spectrum. We accomplish this through a variety of group and raid heals, as well as a pet that intercepts a percentage of damage on the target of Construct's/Overloaded Interception. This percentage is based on both the pet's HP percentage as well as an 2 specific essences. We use leather armor, as well as a bow. We also have a construct pet. What are essences and how do I obtain them? Essences are the portions of animal spirits that you can infuse into your construct to change it. There are 16 animal families (the same as beastlord, with the exception of insects), and each family gives 1 appearance part and 1 essence which can change your constructs combat parameters. A good guide for which animals can be channeled is here: http://eq2wire.com/beastlord-warders/ . In order to channel an essence, you need to first know whether or not something can be channeled. In order to do that, stand near the mob and use Channeler's Sight. If you get green text, you're in business. Initiate combat and cast Channel Essence. If the mob is green you'll need to get it under 25% first. Assuming you don't get interrupted, once the spell is done casting you'll have a chance to obtain the essence. If you fail, just try again. If you haven't got it after 3-4 tries, camping to yourself seems to help fix this. What is dissonance and why is it important? Dissonance is the mystical energy your construct generates whenever a conduit is used. Game play wise, it's a secondary resource for channelers, and is a way of putting a fluid reuse timer on conduits. There are three tiers of it: green, yellow, and red. Each conduit generates so much dissonance. The more of it you have, the slower it dissipates so you generally want to time it so that you're not going into the yellow if you can help it. There are 3 ways to dissipate it: waiting, using the Dissipate ability, or curing detrimental effects with Enhance: Cure AA in the Channeler tab. What are conduits? These are abilities that go on a special hot bar that you need to choose before each encounter. These cannot be changed mid encounter so choose wisely. Slot 1 and 2 are repairs, which are the only way to heal the construct. Generally I use Essence Weave and one of the other 4 hot/reactive heals, depending on the fight. Slot 3 are your big heals that eat 15% of your pet's heal, cost 4800 dissonance, and are instant cast with the right prestige. Which one of these you slot should depend on the fight, but generally Truespirit Defiance will be used more than the other 2. Slots 4-8 are your various things that you're going to be changing a lot on the encounter. Out of these, the only 2 you'll probably want to keep slotted most of the time are Interpose Redirect and Channeled Cleansing. Interpose Redirect instantly heals the target of your intercept for 75% of the intercept amount. Channeled Cleansing is a second group cure which restores a small amount of power and is tied for the fastest group cure in the game. The rest you'll want to experiment when and where to use them. Why does this pet suck? It doesn't do much damage and it doesn't hold aggro. It's meant to proc things and to intercept damage, not to be big DPS or tank. Aggro on the pet will instantly drop and go to the next highest on the list. How does Channeler stack up against other healers? On very trivial encounters with little to no healing involved, it will be on the lower end of the heal parse and probably the middle of the group/raid's damage parse. However, we really shine on very hard hitting content. Due to the nature of the pet intercept, the harder a mob hits the more damage will get soaked by the pet and not Sir Squishalot, the paladin in pure dps gear. We also have the strongest group heal in the game, 1 of the strongest wards, and the strongest per trigger reactive (although only 1 of these at a time can be slotted). We also have a wide variety of group heals, as well as a conal radius raidwide heal. What stats do I need as a Channeler? 100 reuse and cast speed first and foremost. After that, 200 haste and multi attack. Once those are met, get to 600 DPS. After that, everything you can into ability modifier/AE auto, depending on your preferences and what you do in game. When adorning purples/weapons, choose potency for a more heal/ability oriented build and crit bonus for a more auto attack/damage based build. As far as which gear sets you'll want, that's a matter of preference. I believe the auto attack oriented gear loses too much potency which severely weakens your healing abilities. Why is my DPS so low? First off, get your stats capped. Secondly, make sure you slot poison bolt. Once those are done, use construct's sacrifice as often as you can afford to. Then just use poison bolt when you have dissonance, and vengeful arrow when you don't or the mob is under 25% health. Also, with the flood of proc items this expansion, get some. They make up a rather large chunk of dps, especially on encounters/AoE. What is the best AA setup for my Channeler? Short answer? Copy my specs in my signature. Long answer? There really isn't a best spec for everything. DPS spec Channelers lose a lot of healing power, and heal spec'd Channelers lose a lot of DPS potential. Use both depending on the situation, and alter them as you learn more about the class. What works best for me isn't necessarily the best or the right answer, just the one I've found as most effective. Word of warning on this though: my group spec is experimental. The theory behind is it's a balance of the other 2 but so far it hasn't performed as well as it should so I keep tweaking it. What about Channeler epic? What is it and where do I get it? As of 11/24/13, it's still being tested. Word is it's supposed to be out on the 28th, but if it's not ready then it's not ready. As for the buffs, in the beta 1 was the standard add X% of your wisdom as ability mod for heals buff that a lot of healers get. It also healed the pet for 1% every 3 seconds if I remember right. The clicky was a group wide 2 charge stoneskin with non shared triggers that was 3 minute base reuse. Where can I obtain different colors for the Channeler pet? Red is the base color. Yellow and gold are from class trainers in any city. Blue is 500 Marks of Devistation from PvP. Green is a random drop out of ToV heroics. Purple is awarded for clearing the last wing of the Temple of Veeshan raid zone. Cinder and Shadow energy acquisition seem to be unknown at the moment, but I'll update the post if/when I hear any info about it. What if I have more questions? Type /join guk.channelers or send a tell to Freeport.Equilor.
Eh, to each is his/her own. I'm going to tweak my heal spec soon a little bit I think but they're not too much different. Yours is just a hair more dps oriented.
About 1.7m chilling solo. There's something in groups that spikes its HP a LOT. I thought it was being near a tank but it doesn't seem to be so. Maybe it's full group/raid thing. Potency does boost the pets hp more than crit bonus though. Will change the faq to reflect this.
So am I missing something about editing posts older than a few minutes? Just started posting recently and I can't edit my original post.
Indoctrination been comparing our two heal specs .... would love to chat sometime about them and bounce ideas.
you could mention that, but it's a rather mute point to make. the pets health is already an insane amount, and any good channeler won't let the pet reach 25% max health where it would stop intercepting. you could make the argument that the more health it has the better the intercept % is. but again, pretty mute in the grand scheme
There is a short window when you can edit posts - 35 min I think, after that you can't. It makes writng and maintaining guides like these quite difficult. It also means 'reserved' posts are pointless.
Long as I'm not healing something some squishy pug tank through a heroic I'll be glad to talk. I'm usually in the guk.channelers channel. As for what Ucala said, pretty much. It's HP is going to be what it's going to be and there's not a whole lot of point stressing about it. I think they made potency give more hp just because the more HP it has, the less relative damage it takes. The only time the pet gets that low though for me is when I'm DPSing or when the tank is getting the taste slapped out of his mouth, and hard.
Thanks for replying. Whoever came up with their new forum software wasn't quite thinking things through when they came up with that feature.
No - only been that way since they revamped the forums. On the old forums you could edit posts and maintain guides.
How do you obtain the marks of devastation for the blue color you can buy in the Battlegrounds? It's the only thing I saw on the merchants that uses this type of currency and I couldn't find anything about it or how to get it (though my search was hardly exhaustive). I'm guessing they will be hard to come by when looking at how the others become available.
The mark of devastation is the new level 95 PvP token I believe. It looks like all the new gear of that level use the new mark.
Doing both dailies will generally get you around 500 between the marks for completing the bg and the quest completions themselves if you're gold.
Been power levelling my channeled mostly and hit 90 and found your FAQ very interesting and also your AA setup. I am currently running the server basic levelling solo profile and the allocation of points in this profile totally bemuses me. I have no idea why it is setup the way it is. But that's not important. I was curious do you have a particular order for allocating AA's. I am going to use a potion to hit 280 and want to do my own profile so hope you or someone else can offer some guidance. BTW I will prob be doing solo and heroic stuff hopefully if that helps.
