Templar shield ally in 2018

Discussion in 'Priests' started by Fistpower, Jul 12, 2018.

  1. Fistpower Well-Known Member

    Back in the days, during RoK, TSO and even SF, Templars used to adorn for block/parry/dodge/riposte for the extra avoidance and the odd piece of gear such as the runed Band of Runed Flesh..

    These days, when you look at the top raiding guild templars, they still do spec into shield ally, but none of them adorn for it or have any odd pieces of avoidance for shield ally, but all spec into potency, CB overcap or amod.

    Is shield ally really worth investing into these days when none of the gear that drops (or players intentially avoid avoidance gear on their templar) or have people forgotten just how shield ally works? OR did they change shield ally in some way im just not aware of?
  2. Mindsway Well-Known Member

    My guess would be they take that line for Holy Shield, and just max Shield Ally because it's at least somewhat useful versus the mez in that line.

    To judge its effectively would require knowing how to read ACT's avoidance report. It probably is still good but dunno if it's worth taking block chance gear over stuff that improves their overall damage. You'd need a pretty high block chance (180+ is my guess) to max out uncontested block.

    Maybe with T2 or higher armor than can swap into block chance armor if the tank is facing a named with really brutal auto attack damage but dunno if there's anything that hits that hard that won't be better served by using wards. I hope I'm making sense.
  3. Beyoncia Well-Known Member

    Shield Ally is useless now, it's value began diminishing quickly after Sentinel's Fate and somewhere around Tears of Veeshan it became complitly obsolete.
  4. Fistpower Well-Known Member

    Why are all templars speccing into it then?
  5. Beyoncia Well-Known Member

    Not all of them. But most are old fashioned, I guess, and because they believe SA is still better for raiding then anything else in that AA tab. Which is wrong.
  6. knine Well-Known Member

    so what all is valuable then... I haven't changed spec on templar for years..mainly because I really don't play much anymore on it.. just curious is all.. maybe time to dust it off a little..
  7. Earar Well-Known Member

    if u want skill increase, u use snacks.

    snacks can give +2k in defensive skills ... way better than any adorn.
  8. Beyoncia Well-Known Member

    Steadfast of course. Exorcise as well. If you really care about buffing your group with more potency and -Divine Recovery. I actually take Divine Aura instead, a very useful thing solo, in heroics and even in raids, though I have some advantage here being an Inquisitor and being able to double my hp with just one buff.
  9. Adoninilol Well-Known Member

    It's still doing a lot on TLE, the thing is none of the current clerics really know how it works.

    If you're curious about the mechanics, a quick google search pulled this up...
    https://web.archive.org/web/2015031...96-shield-ally-tank-templars-best-friend.html

    Keep in mind this is a bit dated, but for the most part it is still accurate, the uncontested avoidance (non block) can still be useful, but hardly any live items have it, on TLE it's kind of a wash, because the game still has the OG mechanics in play.

    I know on some fights we had our Templar avoiding anywhere between 5-10% with it on our main tank, contested avoidance is of course, useless on higher level mobs.

    On live mobs have so much strikethrough it's basically useless.
  10. Beyoncia Well-Known Member

    At the end of RoK, with the best gear I avoided up to 20% of hits. It was so strong and almost unbalanced:)
  11. Adoninilol Well-Known Member

    Yeah, tanks are avoiding a lot more right now which is skewing it heavily, I recall it doing quite a bit in SF iirc for our templar however.
  12. Mindsway Well-Known Member

    If you can get your block chance high enough, you can help the tank avoid 70% of the hits that they don't avoid (which is the max uncontested block you can get IIRC). But like I said earlier that would require getting a lot of block chance armor and/or jewelry and I doubt it would be worth it for any cleric.
  13. Cunning Member

    Block armor is pretty much limited to tanks now. There was a time when getting a tank to throw their avoid buff on you would trigger giving even more avoidance. I don't think it works any more.

    All told, less hits taken is always better. It's just not a thing to focus on, and if you find more benefits from something else it's something you can drop with little real downside these days.
  14. Beyoncia Well-Known Member

    It was already mentioned that mobs have a lot of strikethrough nowdays, making any avoidance attempt meaningless. Tanks relay on mitigation, damage reduction, stoneskin, health pool and wards now day.
  15. Errrorr An Actual EQ2 Player

    There is literally 0 reason for a templar not to have Shield Ally and a shield. It doesn't matter if its a low chance to help the tank, its still a chance.

    There is nothing else in the tree worth you not spending 10 points in it.
    Tigerr and Mindsway like this.