Explain it to me like I am a child! I’ve been curious about the Channeler class but I don’t understand it. I was wondering if there were any valid guides out there that help show how the class works. What spells/abilities are staples for heroic group content? Reading spell list descriptions have me scratching my head wondering how I’m supposed to keep folks standing when damage is coming in hard and fast. Hopefully someone can help by share some insight before I waste time leveling one. Thank you!
I have a Channeler. I have not used him in raid or heroics, however. I have used him in a duo group. They are a combo class and very balanced. That makes them difficult to run sometimes. My advice is to solo with it a bit while leveling it. They do become rather awesome at around level 80 or so. But sadly, for me anyway, it was almost painful for a while getting there. In my opinion they aren't really meant to be the primary healers in a group and certainly not one running heroics or raids. They do decent DPS, but you need to have a best friend who loves making you thousands of arrows. Another bit of advice, have your construct protect you and help you, if you're soloing send it to attack the mobs rather than you pulling them this will allow you time to get into a position where you will survive and not spend all your energy healing yourself. It's a challenging class, I admit I hated it for a while, but in the end, it can be worth the frustration.
Super easy class. keep construct alive, which isn't hard to do these days. Your potency and crit bonus give your construct health, so you want as much as you can there. Depending where you put AA, you can cast heals or have high reactive heals. I prefer the route of reactive heals. My AAs go into overloaded intercept, the heal component added to overloaded intercept and seeking cascade with arrow bulwark. Cast seeking cascade soon as it's up and you're pretty much covered. Your construct is not meant to do dps or hold aggro. Infact, it will never take aggro. Don't go in thinking it'll tank in anyway. It's sole purpose is to intercept damage.
Basically Channelers use there construct as a healer by intercepting incoming damage initially u will get an ability called channelled interception i think its called which is single target interception, in time there is an aa on the shaper page called overloaded interception which is group intercept < main source of group heals. you then have healing arrow which is a group heal attached to a dps spell interesting thing about it is its actually heals 6 people closest to the named so if you in raid the raid 6 closest get the heal, u have 2 blue aoe heals and a heal that will come from your conduits if u choose to take it called true spirit defiance(level 66) works well in oh sh*t situations as its a 50 trigger reactive heal also at level 40 you get a conduit called impose redirect its a passive ability that uses dissonance but it makes healing easier so use it 100%, you will also want to pick essences off of some mobs think avian one gives construct a passive group heal and theres one that increases the interceptions but cannot remember it off the top of my head think its simian maybe, they are the basics to healing for a chan chan you just to manage keeping your pet alive with essence weave and the pet heal over time.
Channeler is a very odd class and it seems there are less and less of us playing every time I ask for advice....which is part of why most of my Channeler knowledge applies to soloing :/ Overloaded Interception is absolute game changer and your best buddy though, hands down. Channeled Cure is also a great cure, as it also powerfeeds for your group if an ailment is bumped off. Because I have not grouped too much, I mostly use my single-target Conduit heal for "ohshoot" moments where my health actually moves. On the DPS side, while we can't do a lot in one burst as Vengeful Arrow and Precise Volley (Initially Fusilade) are our main CAs, the Conduit DPS abilities do a lot of instant damage. Building for Dissonance reduction is a good way to be able to balance conduit ability usage, and a high reuse is a great boon due to increasing the frequency of Dissipate casts. Construct is very much like a Platypus at first, it looks like he does nothing. But play around with the construct abilities and you might find something that works pretty well for you.
Look into rotating in Construct's Sacrifice into your fastest/instant cast hostile abilities. That will give you great burst.
I can see it - I didn't think much of it at first, but with the insane powerdrain on the overworld bosses while I was gearing (finally up to 429k pot/6500 resolve) today I actually did use it several times. Makes a noticeable difference.
Interesting thoughts you have expressed. I have a channeler I roll out occasionally and work with and I find them fun to play. That said, I personally know two people who run H1s, H2s and raid on their channeler and do a heckuva great job on their toons and make a big contribution.
Channeler is easy at the lower end of the scale, and gets progressively tougher the further you go into high end content. The premise of it is "I can do things right now, but do I need to?". Where every other class is absolutely striving to maintain some resource (power, savagery etc.), the Channeler is the one class that's trying to stop accumulation of a metric (Dissonance). The more Dissonance you build up, the harder it is to get rid of (if the bar is green, the Dissonance vanishes quite quickly, as you get more and it goes yellow, it reduces a lot more slowly than green, and if it goes red.. Then it just hangs around and takes ages for the bar to reduce at all). Almost everything you do has a Dissonance cost. The really nice stuff (Truespirit Defiance, a group reactive heal) costs a LOT of dissonance to use. But it's really good. A single target regen costs about half of that. There are two focuses of healing: One is the party (for which you have the interpose 'absorb' that your construct does) which is backed up by other healing abilities (always have "Interpose Redirect" active, as takes some of the damage absorbed by the construct and feeds it back to the group as a heal, which is pretty awesome). The other is the Construct itself. As it interposes itself to absorb damage, it takes that damage itself, so there's a separate set of abilities that need to be used to keep that healed too (and guess what, they use Dissonance when activated). The party heals/absorbs/utility (channeler isn't just about heals; it can run debuffs, drop group members down the threat list, etc.) can be run from either the 'channels' segment (the Channeler specific skills) or a set of healing skills based around bow use (healing barrage, soulshot, etc.) and a directional heal (vector of life) which is pretty efficient and also a regular AoE group heal (Salubrious Invocation) or any mix you choose, depending on your channeler bar loadout. The construct heals can only be performed using channels, so your channeler bar will likely have a predominance of things that look after your construct in the way of heals and damage absorbs; there's one that will prevent all hits that would take more than 20% of your construct's health in one strike, and also, oddly, one that prevents all hits that would take less than 15% of your construct's total health in one strike. Those two only last 8 seconds, but if you know you're in for a maelstrom of damage of all sorts in that time frame, those two together make sure you don't toast your construct absorbing all that damage, and let you concentrate on the bleed through that reaches the party. So far, so simple. When you're running an easy to middling environment, it's fairly easy to keep the Dissonance bar in the green while using some of the nicer abilities once in a while to keep things tidy in the party health wise. The "Dissipate" ability (a necessity) gives you a little more wriggle room as you can dump some dissonance now and then using that, which becomes more important when you enter the 'middling difficulty' combats. This is where you need to plan a little bit as to when you'll use the Dissipate ability and maybe cut back a bit on the 'nice ability' use.. Then you get the serious combats. In these, it really is all about forward planning. You have to plan how you'll be repairing your construct (instant recover, regens, absorbs) and making decisions about whether to let the party soak a bit of damage now, so you'll be able to heal them more effectively in ten seconds time or whether to prevent it now, but impact your ability to sustain heals for the next 15 seconds. And how much damage you let seep through, and just how much you want to heal. Too little intervention and the party wipe. Too much intervention and you quickly max out your Dissonance bar, and effectively shut down your ability to do anything for a significant period of time (including heal your construct, and if that falls too low or fails, it stops some of the skills working, which is bad, or vanishes, so everything starts hitting the group). That's where playing one is a real skill, as you can plan for certain fights (knowing what you'll be up against, and making it seem easy), or go with a generalist approach on unknown ones (you can do a lot, but it'll carry more risk) down to the AA builds slanting towards certain approaches as well. So, easy to play at the low end. But there's a steep learning curve to be able to play one well as you're eternally trying to find your balance in the combat so you neither under nor over react to the situation as it is (and is expected to become).
I *really* appreciate the replies here. They definitely helped me. I broke down and paid for the access to the class myself a few days ago and have been trying to noodle through it. Superficially, it seems like a very cool cross between a WoW (and forgive me for even mentioning the name of that game, lol) Shaman and a Ranger. Just from my limited exposure thus far, it seems like the only real trouble with the class is it's true strength; versatility. It can do dang near anything, which makes it complex to play. With the right build and some mental flexibility, I can see the class being a real powerhouse though.
It can be. It takes quite a while to learn to use it properly. (Hence my prior comment about hating it for a while.) But now that my guy is maxed out he is an amazingly fun char to play, can wipe the floor most of the time without working up a sweat. I hope you enjoy yours.
There are less and less channelers because any guild would only ever use one and because they have some of the worst offensive buffs in an expansion where DPS checks seems to be the gimmick. They work for what they were intended to do in MT, outside of that though, there is zero reasons to ever pick up a channeler. Its by far the best healer for MT if all you worry about is survivability. Priests with strong offensive buffs is just in general in higher demand.
(Setting aside that Mythology), channeler is also well suited in tandem with other healers. The right co-op of say Warden + Chany is most agreeable, regardless of what group they are in. The group dynamic possibilities with channeler are very interesting and only have a few details to worry about. There is no one size fits all in EQII, run your Chany & have fun.
I have to say, out of all my Horde, I have TWO, count 'em, two, Channelers, one of each gender (both Aerakyn, come to think), both in their mid-ranges for levels (40s and 50s, respectively; all levels soloed, since I figured, "Hey! Pet class!" ). Like a fool, I started them at level 1 instead of level 85, like I was "supposed to." X-P I'm waiting for them to stop sucking, frankly. Maybe I could try another on Test (since they give us all sorts of free Boost Tokens there ) at the level it's "supposed" to be at and think better of them. :-/ I'm also waiting for DBG to finally remove those stupid Shadow Beasts that scale to everyone from the lowbee "teenager" zones, since they basically don't do any good for anything other than Channeler characters (and iirc, Channelers are the only ones who DON'T see them and therefore don't have to put up with being gang-...loved by the bloody things) and introducing the concept during a World Event kind of thing. We get it now, Channelers exist, thank you. Can we go now, o Powers? :-/ Uwk who, nonetheless, is saving this... ;->
I enjoyed your reference to a channeler as a cross between a ranger and a shaman as that was somewhat my initial impression. The beastlord and the channeler have much in common. They are quite versatile and they are both powerhouse classes with this caveat--in the hands of the right player. I've known exceptional players who understand the mechanics of how to play these classes and it's awesome to behold. I've also seen these classes in the hands of others who think they play like every other class with a pet and they suck. Get next to a channeler who knows how to play the class and willing to share the information. Have fun!!
Heh! Wiser words were never spoken (or emphasized)! ;-> Uwk "You know what these are, Doctor? The wrong hands! " --Dame Diana Rigg, as Winifred Gillyflower in "The Crimson Horror," Doctor Who
Uwkete, mine stopped sucking at level 25 or so. I have to throw in the caveat that thus far I've strictly been leveling her via the Agnostic Dungeon solos. Between the two AOE arrow attacks and the poison cloud (off the construct bar), she's my second fastest killing machine in the dungeons while paired with the 10 year vet Merc. Granted, learning them as a DPS doesn't fit their ideal role, but it's a role they can do well, esp in a solo environment. You can always juggle the construct bar and practice in other roles as well. Agnostic solo dungeons are a low risk way to get a handle on a character. Yeah, I know... Capt. Obvious stuff, lol. A little reminder occasionally never hurts though. I've occasionally overlooked the obvious. As far as the hardcore nay sayers go though, I have to disagree. A channeler may never tank as well as a Guardian, as one example. But if an ideal class is a 10 for a role, a Channeler SEEMS to be capable of fulfilling any role at an 8 on that 1 to 10 scale, IF properly played.
