It’s time to talk about the second of my 5 chosen specs.

To be fair, the cleric specs are the ones I’ve spent the most time considering and the others are just being thrown in for completeness – and because they hopefully show some of the cool things that should be possible in this game. I’ve already shared my tanking cleric spec, and it is proving to be quite successful. I am level 27 now and have tanked invasion bosses with it – but will admit that I’ve not done any instances with this build since I’m uncomfortable tanking pugs in unfamiliar content.

One thing with which I am comfortable in unfamiliar content, however, is healing. At 18, I successfully healed an IT run with a Warden build that I kind of slapped together on my way to the instance. It was not pleasant. Warden healing is very effective solo or on trash pulls, but its lack of mitigation and burst heals make for very stressful boss fights. I found myself depending heavily on my Sentinel off-spec spells to keep the tank standing.

Last night, my guild ran DSM 4 times in succession – after a failed clear attempt the night before where we did not bring enough dps. For three of those four clears, I main healed the group – which shifted membership slightly between each run so it was a unique experience every time. The build I used was level 26 Purifier/Sentinel/Warden containing most of the purifier points planned for the larger level 50 build discussed here and a handful of the sentinel ones. Overall, it went very well and with the exception of the final boss fight, I didn’t have any problems – but even then, I was able to keep everyone standing and had zero problems with threat generation, mana efficiency, or self preservation.

The other thing that last night taught me is that I don’t think I’m going to play any alt very seriously any time soon. With three roles (Tank, Healer, DPS) that I can switch between with impunity on my cleric main, I am getting that variation without having to replay the same content twice. And I like it.

Healing Cleric (Sentinel/Purifier/Warden)

My current impression of the three healing souls is:

• Sentinel – Best general purpose soul. Probably suitable as a primary spec for soloing. Good for group and tank healing. Appropriate as a primary or secondary spec. Lousy as zero-point third spec, passable as 3rd if you can spare 4 points to get the endurance buff and some +healing or +spell power.
• Purifier – Best single-target healing soul. Completely unsuited as a primary for soloing. Good for tank healing, difficult for groups who take a lot of splash damage. Appropriate as a primary or zero-point spec. Unimpressive as second unless at least 20 or so points can be invested.
• Warden – Best at… I’m not sure what, keeping the whole group topped off through aoe and bad pulls? Great when added to anything else. Good for group healing, bad for tank healing, good for self healing. Appropriate as a secondary or tertiary spec. Crazy as primary unless at least 20 points are invested.

The healing build that I’d put together before head-start and am still planning on is 38/24/4 Sentinel/Purifier/Warden:

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00Gej.vxoxMzz.L.E0Ebfotco

I’m not planning on solo leveling with this build, so I’m not going to break it down like I did with the Justicar. Let’s walk through it backward, from least to most invested.

warden

With this build, I’m not really getting anything very interesting out of Warden. It might be possible to swap out Druid for the faerie’s passive heals to similar effect. But what 4 points in Warden does buy me is +8% mana to work with and a mana efficient instant cast HoT.

I find this much more useful than what 4 extra points can buy me in either Purifier or Sentinel. I would really want 6 more points in either one to want to invest in them further.

purifier

The reason for dropping points into Purifier is damage prevention. I want to harden my tank from damage and give myself more breathing room in case the rest of the group needs a bit of topping off.

At tier 1, I am taking +5% to heal crit and am then coming back to drop 3 more points in +wisdom because the 5 point tier 3 talent fails to impress me. I could probably swap the allocation of these 8 points any different way with similar results.

At tier 2, I am taking a full five points in Protection of the Ancestors – +50% to bubble strength because that’s the point of my subbing Purifier in the first place. The other two talents are more soloing oriented – both of them harden the caster from incoming damage. Since the zero point ability is already a better bubble than either of these, and I’m already improving it with the other 5 points at this tier, AND I trust my tank to pull things off of me after too long… I see no point in sinking 3 more here.

Tier 3 has one really cool talent, Caregiver’s Blessing. If I keep this buff up, every single-target heal I drop (including that cheap instant HoT) also procs a small bubble on the target as well. This makes it much less stressful to deal with mages who AoE before the tank has aggro, etc… The other tier 3 talent does not strike me as terribly cost effective – 5 points for a 10% chance of increasing my next single-target heal by 30%? Or in other words, +3% to sustained single target healing for 5 skill points.

Tier 4 is nice, I want it all. Well, except for the improvement to the reactive self-heal that I ignored at tier 2.

Healing Flare is a spammable instant-cast direct heal. It is inefficient and smallish when compared to the zero point Sentinel instant heal, but it has no cooldown. And there are a lot of times when mana efficiency matters less than the ability to float someone for a couple more seconds until the cooldown on something more permanent finishes, or the boss does.

Caregiver’s Grace just buffs the blessing by 2 more charges – meaning 5 single target heals proccing these bubbles. Combined with the spammable nature of the aforementioned Flare spell, this should make it much easier to create breathing room to drop that bigger spell/shield/whatever we’re waiting for. I could have dropped a 3rd point here, but it is a choice between leaving this talent one point short and leaving Ancestral Flame one point short… and the latter is more important.

Ancestral Flame is one of the main reasons I’m in the tree. 60% of spell power into a bubble whenever I drop my big single-target heal (90% after Protection of the Ancestors).

My final point in Purifier goes to the tier 5 talent Latent Blaze. This is basically just a weaker version of the Sentinel 44 point Vigilance but for only 21 points, it ought to be. Latent Blaze drops a single reactive heal charge on the target that lasts until they either drop below 30% health (bad) or the 5 minute buff expires (good). The downside is that it only has one charge and can only be used once per target per 2 minutes. The upside is that it is yet one more buffer between my group and death and I could easily maintain this on two or three party members at once if necessary.

As an aside, Latent Blaze -did- save my group the other night during the final boss of DSM. Three of the party got hit by a fire crystal and while I was busy taking care of them, the tank dropped to 50%. This isn’t terrible by itself, but the boss kept critting him or something and my heals were having a hard time keeping up. He probably hit 10% and popped his Latent Blaze charge before I was able to start catching back up again, so… yeah. I like the spell. It’s not awesome, but it does the trick.

The interesting root abilities I pick up from Purifier are of course the awesome zero point Shield of the Ancestors, which I use instead of healing myself immediately if caught in AoE or while waiting for the tank to pull aggro off of me.

At 4 points, I get a 1.5s cast direct heal. At 8 (and again at 20), I get a party endurance buff. At 10, I get a rez. At 12, I can remove curse, disease, and poison.

At 14 points in Purifier, I get Restorative Flame, the big 3 second heal that works with Ancestral Flame to bubble my target as well as heal them. 16 points gives me Ward of the Ancestors, a straight up shield for those situations where the passive shielding isn’t enough.

Searing Transfusion is available at 18, and is an interesting sort of instant direct heal. It increases the target’s max hp by 25% of my own for 10 seconds while also healing them for that same amount. This is potentially either very cool or exceptionally useless. I’ve yet to see it in action to determine which.

Flashover is the other 20 point root ability and it simply guarantees that my next heal will be a crit. This is just generally happy.

sentinel

With 38 points dropped in a tree, it’s one of those times where the omissions are more interesting than the inclusions. I’ll discuss both here.

I am starting off with 10 points in tier 1. This gives +5% spell power and +5% to healing. What I am not taking are 2 points to add a snare to the zero point sentinel nuke…

Tier 2 is similar, with another 10 points. These increase the crit bonus of my heals by 20% and reduce the mana cost of my heals by 10%. I am not dropping a point in getting a damage over time spell – which might actually go very well with a Justicar healing build, but that’s a different animal

For tier 3, I am not taking Luminous Gaze, a debuff that increases the crit chance against an affected enemy by 5%. Again, this one would probably play nicely with other builds, just not a back row healer spec. I am spending 3 points to increase the radius of my AoE heals by 3 meters and 2 more to increase their effectiveness by 2%.

I’m not in love with either of these, but I don’t have a lot of other choices that directly increase my healing output. The odds that +2% to an AoE heal will make a difference in a fight are only slightly more than the odds that a 3 meter radius increase will catch the party member who actually needed the heal in the first place… so shrug.

Tier 4 is nicer. Two points in Protect the Flock turns my AoE heals into small defensive buffs, reducing incoming damage to all affected by 5% for 6 seconds. That is nice because if I am ever dropping AoE healing… well, stuff has either gone poorly or we’re facing a boss that drops AoE damage. So hardening the whole group makes dealing with this easier.

Healing Invocation is one point to provide a 3 second direct heal for slightly more than Restorative Flame. By itself, it is nice (a tree ability that is slightly better than a lower level root one seems to be standard). But just like Restorative Flame’s main benefit is the upgrade to proccing a bubble, Healing Invocation’s main benefit is that with 5 points on tier 5′s Lasting Invocation, it also drops an additional 30% healing over 8 seconds. Alternating between these two spells means a steady influx of direct healing plus the shield and HoT to buffer any crits or whatever.

I like the other tier 5 spell as well. Empowering Light is just a PBAoE cleanse. It costs the same as the root cleanses. The only reason not to use it is a 10 second cooldown and the inability to target someone who might be out of range. So it is more than worth one point.

Tier 6 is kind of hard as well. 3 points into Serendipity to make my crit heals reduce the cast time of my next heal by 1.5s means that Flashover not only guarantees that one heal will be big but that the one following it will be either fast or instant. Good enough.

I am not taking the other ability from this tier, a 2 second heal that affects both the target and the caster, upgradeable to 1.5 second cast time. This isn’t my style, and while I used the equivalent WoW spell quite a bit, I’m intentionally avoiding abilities that primarily benefit the caster in the hopes that the Purifier’s bubble and failing that, the instant cast heals this build also provides are sufficient for cases where the healer is taking damage.

The tier 7, 31 point ability makes me happy. Healer’s Haste is a 30 second buff to increase healing speed by 30% for up to 5 spells.

The roots of Sentinel give me a number of goodies, even though several are wasted on offensive abilities. At zero points, we get the instant direct heal with the 8 second cooldown.

At 4 (and 20), we get endurance buffs identical to those provided by Purifier. At 10 points, we get another rez identical to the one provided by Purifier; at 16, we get a duplicate cleanse. But that’s it for dupes. The buffs, unfortunately, do not stack, so pick the ones whose icons you like best I guess.

At 6 points, we get Healing Grace, the 2 second cast direct heal and at 12 points, we get Healing Communion, the AoE version.

We get Touch the Light at 14, a cooldown to make the next spell instant. Always a good button to have around. This build winds up with several similar button.

At 18, we get a silence, which shouldn’t really be the healer’s responsibility, but you never know…

Divine Call costs 26 points and is an instant PBAoE heal with a 1 minute cooldown. So while not chainable like Healing Communion, it is good as a big panic button right before/after an AoE bomb or similar.

At 32 points, we get the only combat rez available to healing spec clerics. It’s not as good as that available to Justicars, but it’s better than what mages get.

At 36 points, we get a passive improvement to Healing Invocation of +5% of spell power bonus. Then, we get +3% per additional point, for a total of +11% of spell power applied to this spell. It’s not as good as it could be, but we’re taking other abilities instead.

Finally, at 38 points, we get Marked by the Light. This buff makes single-target heals cascade to other nearby party members… and makes AoE heals cascade even more It is only usable on the primary target but should do nicely for my concerns of keeping others topped off without having to really think about it too hard.

alternate form

After a bit of consideration, and thinking about how cool Latent Blaze really is… I came up with a slight modification to the build that would allow you to carry both Latent Blaze and Vigilance.

This requires a change to 44/22/0 Sentinel/Purifier/Warden:

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00Gej.vxox0zz..E0Exfstco

The points we lose from the original build are the two charges in Caregiver’s Grace from Sentinel and 8% max mana from Warden. The bubble charges aren’t that enormous of a loss, they basically equate to two free small heals every couple of minutes. The real loss here is 8% of max mana, which may or may not be an issue depending on your use of consumables and your group’s pace.

In exchange, we gain Vigilance as well as +3% to AoE healing and turn our zero point Sentinel instant heal into a small AoE instant heal. It’s not a lot of difference, and +3% to AoE heals doesn’t impress me much… but I’m not really sure where else to sink the points. The improvement to the instant heal is actually kind of nice. I’ve found myself using the Purifier’s instant heal a lot – even to the exclusion of this one, despite its being bigger and more efficient. The 8 second cooldown is a deterrent to inclusion in my standard rotation. BUT by specializing the ability as a small group heal? I know I would have used it more, even if the resulting heals are relatively small.

I’d like to take a moment and outline the salient points that make each of the game’s 30-odd subclasses unique and interesting, because I’ve yet to find anything of the sort anywhere. Most wikis just quote the same garbage promotional text that talks about how Champions have “legendary strength” and move with “startling speed” and other such uselessness. My information is from the skill tree itself. I am reporting the trends in abilities, some of which might not fully manifest unless one spends over 30 points in the class, but there you are.

warrior

Warriors can wear heavy armour and use all weapon types afaik. Their basic mechanic is an energy/power bar that regenerates rapidly.

Additionally, most attack abilities generate ‘attack points’, or points for short. Attack points stack to 3 and do not decay out of combat. A number of abilities use points and will consume all of them at once. Attack points are not a buff and they are not associated with the victim that generated them. They’re designated by three very obvious icons on the UI.

beastmaster

This is the pet warrior. They get cats and bigger cats. It is possible to set the cat into either dps or tank mode (as neither of which are the default). Most of their abilities are focused on the pet and improving its abilities.

They get a variety of self buffs and can spend points to turn them into party auras instead. They receive increased stealth detection and can put enemies to sleep.

Otherwise, they have a comparatively poor selection of melee dps options. Their primary combat mechanic (apart from the pet’s damage itself) is a variety of bleed effects – which the pet then capitalizes on.

champion

Champions are the two-handed melee dps specialists and have abilities specializing in single target focused damage. They also have a lot of crit enhancing abilities and a lot of abilities that synergize with this.

Champions get an inexpensive execute attack usable when the enemy drops below 30% health. They also have charge, interrupt, snare, knockback, and intimidation mechanics.

Despite the focus on large hits against single targets, they do get one spammable aoe, but it’s not all that good. Champions do, however, get three aoe attack point consuming abilities that look worthwhile.

paladin

Paladins are not healers. They are sword and board anti-physical/melee tanks. Emphasis on the board. Lots and lots of shield abilities. This is their primary weapon. They deal primary physical damage but some of their abilities also inflict light damage.

One mechanic that all warrior tank subtypes share is increased maximum health from points spent in that tree. You only have to sink a couple to start gaining the benefit.

Most of a paladin’s attacks have increased threat generation components. Now, this is common among the tank subclasses, but paladins felt a bit more so in my opinion. They even go so far as to gain a flat +20% to threat generation very early on.

While paladins aren’t healers, they can heal themselves. They get a big self heal to full ability on a 10 minute cooldown from very early on. They also have abilities that heal them when they block with their shield or use a counterattack style melee ability.

They also get a non-combat rez ability at 16 points. At higher levels, they get a few ways to heal party members but these guys are tanks, nothing else.

paragon

Paragons are the dual wield melee dps varietal. They get bonuses to parrying including some short term parry buffs and abilities that proc off of successful parries.

Their primary combat mechanic is one of follow-up attacks. Certain abilities are only usable after performing another ability that generates attack points but is not itself a follow-up attack. These attacks get some nice buffs and there are a lot of them.

Paragons can also sprint, reflect attacks, get cheap armor penetration and have have what can only be described as a Vulcan neck pinch attack…

reaver

Reavers are tanks that specialize in dealing aoe death damage over time. Many of their attacks also debilitate the target in some way.

They get lots of DoTs. These can spread to nearby targets, can heal the warrior from damage dealt, and can be popped all at once for big damage.

Reavers take reduced damage when close to death and self heal for 9% after every kill. They can break fear, polymorph, incapacitation, and mez effects – and get a fear of their own.

Reavers get the standard warrior tank care package: one single target taunt, one aoe taunt, various other methods of increased threat generation, and +0.46% max hp per point spent in the tree.

In addition to this, however, they also get an extra aoe taunt that does not share its cooldown with those of any other class.

riftblade

Riftblades are elemental melee dps with a lot of +crit synergy. Their single target attacks tend toward fire damage and their spammable aoe attacks tend toward air damage.

They get increased movement speed and can teleport directly to enemies.

Riftblades also get a flat -50% to their threat generation, can guarantee that the next attack directed at them misses, can reflect inbound critical hits as fire damage, and can shock enemies who parry or dodge one of their attacks.

One of their more unique abilities (among warriors) is their set of ranged attacks. Riftblades get three different elemental spear attacks that can burn or root or silence targets and can be upgraded to hit more than one at a time.

void knight

Void knights are tanks, so they get all of those toys. But almost more importantly, they are mage killers. They have a 25% chance per attack of draining mana from their target and absorb up to 20% of all inbound magical damage.

Attacks absorbed in this way are converted into what they call pacts. Pacts can also be generated by being healed or as the result of numerous attack abilities. When a void knight gains a pact, he can also heal and gain a very large stacking buff to armor and strength.

These charges are then used to either improve or fuel other abilities, such as self healing or bubbling an ally.

The sheer number of mage killing abilities at their disposal is kind of obscene. They get mana drain and mana burn abilities. They get an interrupt and an aoe silence. They can reflect spells or slow a target’s casting speed. They can remove buffs from targets and curses from friends.

Void knights also have some subtle synergies with Riftblade abilities and can become “immune to negative magical effects”, whatever that means.

warlord

Warlords are the final tanking warrior archetype. I can only describe them as raid offtanks While they get an impressive variety of tankish abilities – including the ability to ignore being killed… they’re kind of all over the map, and are probably a good second tanking soul for any of the other three.

Warlords are also heavy support types. They get a plethora (I love that word) of aoe buffs and debuffs in the form of auras and short duration abilities. They reduce damage taken and threat generated by the party and have a few ways to increase their damage and healing output.

I’d want one in my raid, but am not sure I’d want him standing directly in front of the dragon – I get the impression that a dedicated warlord is worth way more to the group in a support role than as a meatshield.

rogue

Rogues wear leather and typically dual wield light weapons. Half of rogue subtypes are melee and half are ranged, so work bows in there somewhere as well

Rogues have an energy meter like warriors. They have two kinds of attacks, those that generate combo points on their target and those that consume them. Combo points stack up to 5 and are lost if the rogue changes targets. Just like warriors, a rogue’s combo finishers consume all generated points at once.

Yes, they have energy mechanics just like WoW rogues. There’s nothing wrong with that. Moving on.

assassin

Assassins are traditional rogues. They can poison their weapons four different ways, get a lot of ways of making targets bleed, and get bonuses when stabbing things in the back.

Assassins have the best stealth in the game, with several different bonuses including the ability to remove the time limit – normally stealth has a 30s limited duration. From stealth, they have good incapacitate (sap) abilities and can make very large attacks while leaving stealth.

Assassins get good stun options and at 31 points can vanish from combat for a couple of seconds.

The most interesting ability they get is a weird self heal that poisons them in exchange, resulting in an interesting sort of diminishing return.

bard

Bards are the genetic opposite of assassins. They are ranged healers and buffbots. All of their abilities are naturally music themed and as such tend to have large areas of effect.

Cadence, the bard’s main combo point builder is a channeled ranged attack where they strum a lute at the enemy and generate combo points ridiculous fast. It can be upgraded to heal the entire raid for the damage dealt.

Aside from two separate pools of raid-wide buffs that bards can maintain, they also have what are called motifs. These are inexpensive party buffs with a 15-30 second duration and come in like 6 different flavours.

In addition to the steady flow of healing from strumming cadence, the bard has a number of more traditional heals but they still tend toward aoe.

The biggest gap in their healing arsenal is a rez. I find this almost insulting for some reason. It’s not just that I expect bards to rez from Everquest… or that I expect any self respecting healing class to pack at least a really really bad rez… or that there are non-healers in this game with rez spells. No, I am insulted because the whole story of a musician bringing someone back from the underworld kind of predates THE INVENTION OF WRITING. Anyhow.

Bards rule, they just can’t rez. Their dps doesn’t seem too shabby either. Oh, and they can mez. Maybe someone just misread the memo? Except I kind of expect this of any self respecting bard too…

bladedancer

This is your standard issue toe-to-toe knife fighter. Think WoW’s combat rogue spec if you must.

Bladedancers have a heavy focus on energy efficiency and regeneration, get large bonuses and synergies with dodge, and get an aoe incapacitate ability. They can also sprint, disarm, root, and stun.

One of their primary class-defining mechanics is their set of rhythmic actions, which are short duration buffs that cause the rogue to become exhausted for a time (presumably preventing further rhythmic actions).

Their other big mechanic is chained attacks. There are a few abilities that must be executed in sequence in a similar manner to the Paragon’s follow-up attacks but with a much smaller set of skills and no specific keyword.

nightblade

Nightblades do fire and death melee dps and get to throw knives all over the place. They can also enchant their weapons (similarly to an Assassin’s poisons).

They get stealth and some crowd control. They also get a spammable silence attack and two big panic button cooldowns. But mostly, they spin in circles throwing knives and lighting things on fire.

marksman

Marksman is the archer class. They specialize in mobility and avoiding melee by any means necessary. This is the first archer class in any mmorpg that I feel confident could teach me to enjoy kiting.

While spamming their basic combo they stack a bonus to run speed that grows to 30%. Whenever a marksman is attacked, he gains stacks of another buff worth up to 20% move speed. And of course, there’s the sprint cooldown and the abilities that can be activated on the run.

Marksmen also get knockback attacks, snares, and roots. They get lots of armor penetration, do bonus air damage, and have longer range than other rogues.

ranger

Rangers are assistant pigkeepers with bows. Like the Beastmaster, their individual abilities feel kind of weak when compared to the rest of the class.

Rangers don’t just get pet pigs (tank), they also get wolves (dps), and a blood raptor (blood raptor). Unfortunately, only one pet may be used at a time.

What rangers do get are some abilities that look interesting when combined with one of the other ranged subtypes, including free autoshots, bonuses to ranged finishers, and a good selection of ranged aoe options.

riftstalker

Riftstalker is the rogue tank spec. They intrigue me, and I’ve done a lot of staring at their numbers. It feels like an interesting set of mechanics, and they really do look like they should be able to tank small group content.

When a riftstalker has all of his abilities spinning at the same time, he generates +140% threat with his abilities that already do extra threat. He is also getting good armour boosts (+100%, plus an extra +10% from equipment).

Riftstalkers get a flat -6% to damage taken and can maintain a shield that absorbs a solid percentage of all damage received as well. They also have a large number of panic buttons for when they do actually take damage. I suspect that a lot of the Bladedancer’s defensive bonuses will be picked up by serious Riftstalker tanks.

One of their most interesting mechanics is the ability to plane shift all over the place. The whole shift mechanic can be upgraded and exploited in any number of interesting ways – both in tank mode and in dps mode.

Riftstalkers are teleporting maniacs who don’t tank like Colossus. They tank like Nightcrawler.

saboteur

Saboteurs make me giggle. Bombs and traps and bombs!

The saboteur’s cp builder is one of my favorite concepts in this game. They are light charges that do no damage initially – and can actually be upgraded not to generate any threat at all. Then, when sufficient (max 5) charges have been placed, they press the big red detonate button and set off all charges at once for happy kaboom times. Charges come in all flavours and varieties, so there is a lot of fun to be had with them.

Their traps are of the sort one would suspect. Root, damage, and debuff. They take 1s to cast and last for one minute. All traps have a shared cooldown and only one trap can be placed at a time. Standard stuff here. At 31 points they get land mines, which drop four at a time and blow the enemy into the air as well as doing damage.

Saboteurs also get a vast assortment of bomb attacks that either target an area (like their glue trap that procs a snare or choking gas trap that procs silence in the area), or target an enemy and affect them and any other nearby enemies.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, saboteurs also get Incriminate, a threat transfer ability which I suspect does miraculous things in combination with a big detonation or two

cleric

Clerics wear chainmail and can use shields. They wield maces (both 1h and 2h) and staves.

Clerics have a bog standard mana bar as one would expect. They also have the widest variety of class mechanics available – providing at least one viable option for everything.

Physical clerics all get a passive ability called Faith in Action that adds their spell dps stats to their physical ones (making the physical stats redundant and the spell stats that much more awesome).

cabalist

Cabalists are the AoE death nuke clerics, and are the cleric subtype that I have the least experience with. They have very little in the way of single-target damage ability and are kind of dangerous for that reason – their abilities like to hit nearby targets. My suggestion is to throw in a little Inquisitor to temper this and you should be fine.

Their class mechanic is a Lurking Decay buff that stacks up to 3 times when casting certain spells. They can then consume the stack of decay to deal damage. Additionally, they have no-cost/no-gcd self-buffs called Sigils that are consumed along with Lurking Decay stacks to augment the effect. Most of them cause some sort of cc or debuff but one Sigil procs mana regen for the caster and one heals the caster’s health.

Other than that, they have a lot of passive bonuses to damage output that synergize well with other ranged dps. Their more interesting abilities include a ward against silence/interruption, a panic button to teleport randomly, and an effect that I call gravity well and can’t recall seeing in any other fantasy mmo: suck enemies near the target into a clump to make them an easier target for aoe death and destruction.

druid

Druids are the pet class, and as with all other pet classes so far, are kind of meh in my opinion. They do physical melee damage and as such get a pet faerie. The faerie has a weak heal over time spell and an even weaker ranged attack, and is sufficiently squishy that you need your own heals to keep her alive if she starts taking direct damage.

They do physical damage and get a strong bubble versus physical damage (stronger than the other cleric shield spells, but useless against magic damage). They can enchant their weapon to do earth damage and have a ranged earth nuke that can be upgraded to also snare the target. They have a few CC abilities and spammable melee aoe.

At 31 points, they can get a pet satyr, which buffs the party’s attack power and is probably a pretty decent dps pet, but I’ve not seen one yet to know for sure how useful he is.

inquisitor

Inquisitor is the dedicated single-target ranged dps cleric option. They do both life and death damage and have some vampiric attacks. Early on, they get a quick snare and the ability to remove buffs from opponents. Later on, they get an enormous threat dump.

They both get a fear ward and can drop an aoe fear, as well as some other cc. They get a lot of passive bonuses to spell damage and get a few self-buff armor spells that are useful for anyone. Their most interesting ability is actually their aoe bomb. It is sort of a death chain lightning effect that cascades off of its initial targets to hit a second set after the first one

I am currently playing with an inquisitor in my alternate spec.

justicar

I’ve talked about justicars in depth already so will be brief here. They are the cleric tank class.

They do life damage in melee and heal themselves and their party when they hit stuff. Justicars build up charges of Conviction to fuel some of their abilities (mostly instant heals or attacks that proc a heal).

They have both a tank mode (12 points) and a healer mode (10 points). Healer mode decreases aggro generation from attacks and increases the healing generated as a result. Also, Justicars get the best combat rez in the game

My main spec is the Justicar build I discussed and I have played it to 17 as discussed. So far, I am pleased, but it is becoming more and more obvious that while I am incredibly resilient and have nice heal buttons, I don’t hit very hard and am lacking any sort of rapid aoe threat generation so far. In other words, I am a mid-level tank and dps hits harder than me, which is as it should be. I can’t wait to get my melee aoe attack (18 points). It will be soon…

purifier

Purifiers are fire-themed healer types. They have the least dps options of any class in the game and would quite possibly make for a miserable single-class solo experience. They specialize in keeping single targets alive by dropping big fast direct heals and shielding their targets. They get a lot of shields.

Their zero point heal is actually a self-bubble, a very effective shield for soloing or for surviving boss aoe. I think they go well with any other caster class but their lack of instant heals probably makes them less suited for combining with a melee type.

They get a non-combat rez at 10 points.

sentinel

Sentinels are light-themed healers. They actually have a mix of healing and damaging abilities and are probably the closest thing to the mmo stereotypical priest type that Rift offers. Their zero point heal is instant.

They specialize in aoe heals. Their single target heals aren’t as big as a purifier’s and they don’t have nearly as much in the way of damage prevention. They have some heal over time effects and can aoe remove curse/disease/poison.

They get a non-combat rez at 10 and a combat rez at 32 points.

shaman

Shamans are frost-themed melee dps. They do water and air and physical damage and have a lot of crit synergy. They get several self-buffs and also get raid auras to increase dex, str, or wis.

Shamans get spammable melee aoe and have some nice defensive abilities as well. And while they lack any sort of reliable healing abilities, they receive bonus healing from other targets and provide passive bonuses to healing generated.

warden

Wardens are water-themed healers. They specialize in heals over time and get a plethora of single-target and group heals. They also have a few decent attacks. Their single-target healing tends to be in the form of hots stacked on the target and a big direct heal that scales bigger with the more hots in place.

They can reflect spells and get a silence. They can also grant water breathing and get reactive heal buffs that heal the target after they take a hit.

Wardens go well with any other cleric subtype as they get useful abilities early on and their instant heals work well in melee or at range. Their attacks also fill a niche between other classes and their passives play well with several other souls.

They don’t get their non-combat rez until 18 points.

mage

Mages are squishy, as is custom. In addition to their mana bars they have an additional charge bar that fills up as they perform attacks (similar to rage mechanics in other games). Charge can then be burnt in the form of toggled or channeled special abilities that do a variety of things from sustained fire damage to healing the caster or activating some sort of buff or another.

archon

Archons are control mages. They steal stats from enemies and buff their party. They do earth and fire damage and most of their abilities have a secondary buff or debuff component. They regenerate mana on crits and can heal mana.

I don’t know if archon is viable as a single solo class, but it should work well as a secondary to anything.

chloromancer

Chloromancers are the worst name ever devised for an rpg class, but what can you do? I mean, they are plant mages. This is the mage healer subtype. They don’t get much in the way of reliable healing early on, but at higher levels, their heals really do start to look nice. They are mages too, of course, so chloro do decent life damage.

They get both combat and non-combat rez abilities at 20 – but their combat rez says it restores the target with 0% health, so ymmv.

My most recent experience with chloro is that one wasn’t enough when my justicar heals failed, but he filled the gap very nicely whenever the sentinel in our group went oom during a long fight.

dominator

Dominators are the other mage control spec. They do air and death damage and get a bucket of crowd control, which they synergize off of. Their zero point spell is one of the more desirable available to mages – they can turn enemies into squirrels. They also have a lot of PvP application at higher levels.

They get a number of spells that penalize the enemy for moving or acting and have a threat wipe. Their most interesting looking ability summons mirror images of themselves to cast minor nukes.

elementalist

Elementalists are summoners, and are the first pet class in this list that doesn’t hit like a little kid. They get nukes of all four elemental types and get three types of pets: earth, air, water. My experience is that the earth elemental is able to hold aggro well but isn’t durable enough for sustained combat without healing.

Elementalists also get a number of useful charge dump abilities. Most classes just get a buff to damage from charge. Elementalists can convert it back into mana or buff their spells to do extra damage of a random elemental type or just dump it all into a big sustained flamethrower attack.

They get an ability to break all CC and remove themselves and their pet from combat and at 51 points can summon a swarm of uncontrollable fire elementals

necromancer

Necromancers are the other mage pet spec and has the widest variety of pets in the game. Where Elementalists strike me as a bit more passive and defensive, necros kill things. Their first pet cannot hold aggro, but he does increased damage as the necro nukes his target. Necros get 4 different pets by 27 points.

They can drain life from their pet to heal their own mana and can make their pet explode when it dies. They get a feign death ability and can drop a dot that grows if the victim is healed. At 31 points, they get lich form, which lasts for 30 seconds and is an all around happy self+pet buff.

Necromancers can dump charge into a spell that summons a swarm of 5 shambling corpses and at 51 they can summon two big uncontrolled pets for a short time.

pyromancer

Pyromancers are everything you expect. They drop a lot of damage. Single target and area, direct and over time. They get an intelligence buff and a blink spell. Pyro’s also get bonuses to mana regeneration and have a few crowd control abilities.

They can dump charge after combat into a buff that reduces the cost of their next 1-8 fire spells and get a set of spells that buff the ground beneath them to provide a couple of interesting bonuses.

stormcaller

Stormcallers are water/air mages. They are heavy on the aoe and stack debuffs on their targets which they then exploit further. Because of the whole air == electricity thing that you have to remember in this game, there are a lot of fun rotations to be had here. Stormcaller water nukes like to play off of their electrified debuff

warlock

Warlocks are highly durable damage over time dps with life drain options. Warlocks get a reflective damage armor, an endurance buff, and can drop fear.

They also get bonuses to charge generation that could be useful for any other class. Warlocks themselves have two great dumps for charge. First they can just channel it into their hp, then at 51 points they can dump charge into a buff that provides +75% to their damage output.

Their 31 point bonus is great panic button – reducing incoming damage by 80% for 7 seconds.

conclusion

The game is in a constant flux, and much of this information was gathered during beta and the first day of head start. Some of the classes changed as I was writing about them, but whether some individual abilities come or go, I can’t imagine that their overall flavours will be changing any time soon.

I just wish they had a better name for Chloromancer. Yeesh. Phytomancer? No. Herbalist? Nah. Earth Warden? Too confusing. Healomancer? Heh…

In that time period, I wrote 5 articles that haven’t made it here. Hopefully the time will present itself to re-evaluate 2 or 3 of them in the next month.

But for now, something more current

RIFT is gearing up for what feels to me like it might be the most successful western-style fantasy mmorpg release in 5 years. I am going to play it. And I am going to write a lot about it.

I find this humorous because the game practically blindsided me. I hadn’t read a thing about it until a friend had informed me that she’d pre-ordered it. One does not pre-order something like this lightly and I respect her opinions so… I decided to take a look.

What I found was a lot of incomprehensible nonsense The verbiage around the game’s setting and systems was about as thick as FF13′s at first glance. I tried three or four times to puzzle things out and finally gave up.

Then, more friends started talking about the beta and I tried to read things again – and people had improved wiki’s in the interim. So with the faintest grasp that I might actually be interested in the class system, I signed up for the beta. And didn’t get into that wave.

But the next one I did

And my jaw dropped in a vain attempt to carry the sheer weight of the class system into words. Or some other better metaphor. I like it. But boy is it thick.

rift classes 101

See, the class system is the bog standard skill point allocation tree setup that (to the best of my knowledge) Blizzard pioneered about 10 years ago in Diablo 2 – except it is both simpler and more complex than that.

RIFT subscribes to my favorite school of thought when it comes to character classes. There are really only four classes: fighter, thief, cleric, mage. One of my unfinished drafts is actually on this subject…

At character creation, you select one of these four core archetypes for your new avatar. And other than race, gender, name, and appearance… that’s it. You get into the game and start walking around.

They then use the in-game lore to slowly explain their system of subclasses. Every class has about 8 of these available right now, and it would be easy to add more in the future. By about level 6 or so, the player is gradually given the opportunity to select a total of three subclasses (or “souls” as the lore would have it). These are effectively your skill trees.

In WoW parlance, this translates roughly to RIFT Clerics being able to construct their ability set from any three of: resto druid, beast hunter, enhancement shaman, holy priest, disc priest, shadow priest, prot paladin, ret paladin. It’s like a candy store. Way more options than you can comfortably eat at once, but in a good way.

The game’s level cap is 50, and you receive slightly more than one skill point every level. Abilities are unlocked in two ways. First, there are the abilities you choose to place your skill points in. These are mostly stat bonuses and upgrades to other abilities, but there also a good number of abilities that you have to actively opt into by spending a point directly. Second, you are given access to new abilities based on the number of skill points you put in a given tree, regardless of their individual allocation. These are the class’s core abilities (everyone gets them) and are most liable to be modified by specific talents.

Players aren’t locked into the 3 souls they choose during newbiedom. It is a simple enough manner to unlock access to each of the others – you do this by way of a number of quick quests that available in the capital city starting at level 13. And then, once you’ve got a variety of builds you want to try, buying a second spec slot is downright inexpensive from the skill trainer. A third spec is cheap enough that I anticipate many level 20′s will have them (the cap is 50).

The one thing, however, that isn’t immediately clear is just precisely WHAT the different subclasses can do. I mean really, what can they do? When you’ve got 8 colors of mage, they can’t all just be nukromancers, can they? Well, RIFT made sure that they aren’t. The differences between the souls are sufficient as to stretch the boundaries of what might be expected of given classes in a fantasy rpg.

An oversimplified breakdown in subclass roles looks kind of like this:

Of course, this is an entirely inaccurate and unfair comparison of the classes because everyone has -some- degree of damage output capability (as near as I can tell, only one of the subclasses really suffers in this respect where most of the others are at least mix of support and dps). Every class has various degrees of crowd control, group buffing, and other utility. Because they are so complex, I am planning on doing separate write-ups discussing the actual details on the individual souls. There are some real gems in the mix.

But I’m rambling.

When this game launches, I am going to play a cleric because that is what I do. Specifically, I want to play a cleric who walks up and hits things with a hammer until they fall down, because it has been about 17 years since I’ve done so in any serious way.

So without further sidetracking, I will hereby investigate the Justicar soul and explain my plans for advancement with it.

soul analysis: justicar

The justicar is the cleric’s tank soul. Their basic operating procedure is the combination of four things:

1. a stance wherein they generate 4x threat and double their hp and armor
2. big plusses to shield use to push avoidance
3. an ability that causes all of their attacks to heal them for a percentage of damage done
4. extra bonus abilities (primarily instant cast heals) that are charged by hitting stuff

I played a Justicar/Purifier/Druid for about half of my time in the beta and really enjoyed it. Even with a tanking spec, I could contribute some healing to the group if I wanted by switching stances and through the use of one ability that makes my melee attacks radiate small aoe heals to the whole group and another that transfers my all of my self overhealing over to a designated target.

My second class for that build was Purifier – the big single target heal class with lots and lots of shields. Shields are good, they let my slow passive heals catch up and they give me a chance to overheal and keep the group topped off. However, Purifier wound up being otherwise useless to this build as I leveled up. I believe they are the worst DPS class in the game and didn’t have much that was really suitable for use in melee outside of their basic shield (which is earned at 0 skill points). So, the Purifier has to go. I’ll visit them later when I want to hand out some dedicated heals.

My third class for much of beta was Druid – a melee class with a pet faerie that I thought would be a good mix. And it was, but not quiiite good enough. The faerie provided me with some nice passive heals and could occasionally offtank an annoying add for me if I returned the favor and was in a hurry to drop something for a quest (not that I actually needed an offtank, I could still solo handle about 3 mobs at once quite comfortably). The best thing that the Druid provided was actually a second shield spell (separate cooldown, shared buff slot) that meant I could be invulnerable twice as often… except the druid shield only protects against physical damage, and there is a preponderance of elemental damaging melee attacks in this game.

When I finally decided that something needed shaking up in the build, I tried throwing out purifier entirely in favor of Cabalist – the death magic aoe cleric subtype. Unfortunately, this wound up completely clashing with Justicar MO. First and most obviously, the Cabalist abilities are death magic while the Justicar’s are life, and some basic abilities depend on my doing a continuous stream of life damage to fuel them. Second and more importantly, the Cabalist abilities have casting times while the Justicar’s are primarily instant. This meant less spells per GCD meant less procs for my self healing meant much hairier experiences as I watched my health drop in the absence of the Purifier shield button. The faerie got the bulk of her tanking experience here.

NB: The Druid’s faerie pet is NOT intended as a tank. It generates miserable aggro and is squishy like grape. However, it is a regenerating sack of HP and is able to absorb a few hits while in single-targetted down my primary opponent. The management cannot take any responsibility for terrible horrible faerie dismemberment that may occur by following my example.

My wishlist for leveling and soloing as a cleric tank are thus:

1. instant cast heals
2. a shield spell
3. ways to improve my melee dps

For the job of instant heals, the choice was clear. Wardens are water-themed healing clerics who specialize in heals over time. This meshes well with my Justicar’s natural gradual heals, and their ability to help keep myself topped off without taking my attention away from killing things and holding aggro is a big win. They also have some instant cast ranged attacks and other niceties that should prove convenient.

The other two jobs are both hopefully solved by the Shaman. Shamans are frost-themed melee dps types who get a lot of defensive bonuses early on – including a better shield than Druids. This one requires 6 points in the tree but works against all damage types and reflects a bit of damage to attackers – great for tanking.

With all of this baggage in tow, I planned my spec in 3 phases: where I want to be at levels 9, 17, and 50. Level 9 because it is just a bit after newbiedom and is when the content starts requiring a bit of consideration. Level 17 because it is the minimum requirement for entry into the game’s first group instance, and I want to give that a whirl.

level 9 justicar/shaman/warden (6/6/0)

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00rne.Vo.Mcz

So this layout earns me the foundation of the build. I have all of my most important pieces for soloing.

First, the easy bit. Zero points in warden. This is one of the things I love about the class system. It is possible to cherry pick the starter abilities from a soul if you’re spending all of your skill points elsewhere – and these abilities rank up with levels as long as you visit the trainer, just like anything else.

Wardens start with a dead cheap instant cast heal over time and an equally inexpensive instant cast water nuke. The nuke doesn’t hit hard (not hard at all), but it can tap a mob to get its attention, and I want the ability to do that on the run and without having to wait for the 8s cooldown on my taunt.

thick skinned and glacial shield

Shaman zero point abilities give me a weak melee attack that doesn’t hit as hard as my Justicar zero point attack and doesn’t synergize with my other abilities… and they give me a weapon enchant that adds water damage to all of my melee attacks, which thing I will not actually complain about

The other zero point ability Shamans provide is called Faith in Action and is actually also provided for zero points in both Justicar and Druid – the other melee types. It is a passive buff that translates caster stats (spell power, spell crit, and spell focus) into their physical counterparts (attack power, physical crit, melee hit) at a 1:1 rate so you can wear caster gear and still hit clobber things with authority.

My first tier points in Shaman are going to be allocated thusly:

• 3/3 – Thick Skinned – Reduces the damage you receive by 3%
• 2/5 – Unyielding – Increases your Melee Critical Hit chance by 2%

The Thick Skinned is a no-brainer. So even while it doesn’t do anything meaningful now, I’ll always have that on this character and may as well get used to leaving it on. The two points in unyielding are largely there to make way for my 6th point:

• Glacial Shield – Summons a shield of ice around the cleric that absorbs the next 160 damage in addition to dealing 7 water damage to attackers when hit. Lasts 30 seconds.

This gets me the shield I would otherwise have had to taken Purifier for – and it has the reactive damage component which I adore.

My reasons for choosing Unyielding for the two dump points is dead simple. My alternative was 2 points to increase my physical damage dealt by 2%. So when small numbers are involved, 2% crit is always better than 2% damage. Why? Well, when I’m hitting for 30 damage, what is 102% of 30 damage? 30.6. Which they might be kind enough to round up to 31. Against a mob with 100 hp, this… doesn’t make a difference at all. I still have to hit it 4 times to kill it.

OR I can crit one more time out of 50 attacks, dealing enough extra damage that it will make a difference and probably save me an entire attack. So that one fight where I do crit, I drop the 4 hit mob in 3 swings and can move on.

Of course, the most important point is simply that my only consistent source of “physical” damage is actually my autoattack. And I am going to use the slowest hammer I can find for now. My real damage is all light elemental (or water from the warden pull), and doesn’t depend on my big slow hammer that doesn’t autoattack but once a minute.

These Shaman points unlock the following abilities:

• Courage of the Jaguar – +5 dex to the whole party/raid
• Lightning Hammer – Physical attack that procs an air (lightning) damage over time effect for 6 seconds, which is conveniently the ability’s cooldown.
• Fated Blow – Guaranteed physical attack activated after an attack has been dodged or parried. No GCD. 6s cooldown.

I’m not going to turn my nose up at free stats. The lightning attack is nice because Justicar doesn’t have any DoT’s and anything else to break up my attack rotation is nice. The free attack is a free attack, but I have no idea how useful it will be in PvE and don’t really plan on it making a difference.

life’s devotion and bolt of radiance

Tier one of Justicar talents is kind of a similar choice to Shaman. I can either spend 5 points to increase my melee ability damage by 5%, which suffers from the math I just discussed; or, I can increase my armor value by 15%. This isn’t going to make my chainmail sparkle like plate. But it is a 1/6 improvement in my basic mitigation and is another ability I’ll have for the life of the character.

My sixth Justicar point is going into:

• 1/3 – Life’s Devotion – Increases the chance of your Salvation healing you by 20%. Increases your Salvation’s healing by 5% of the damage done using Justicar abilities, 2% using other abilities.

That’s a mouthful, especially since I’ve not explained what Salvation is yet… Salvation is one of the Justicar’s zero point abilities and is one of the aforementioned bread and butter components. It reads:

Salvation
Infuses the Cleric’s weapon with healing light, causing their damaging abilities to have a 40% chance of healing the Cleric. Justicar abilities heal for 10% of the damage done, all other abilities heal for 5% of the damage done. Lasts 1 hour.

Anything and everything I can do to feed this ability keeps me going longer and eventually feeds my overheal spillover. And, I suspect as a side effect, the self-healing has to add at least some aggro.

Justicar’s other zero point ability is just the spammable melee life damage attack that will be used to feed Salvation every free GCD.

The other abilities unlocked by these points are:

• Cavalier – All life-based attacks grant a ‘Conviction’ for 30s.
• Bolt of Radiance – Ranged life attack. In tanking mode, this becomes an actual taunt (forces the target to attack me). 8s cooldown.
• Doctrine of Loyalty – Burn one ‘Conviction’ to heal party for 51 damage.

Conviction is a buff that stacks to 4 and doesn’t do anything but go away after 30 seconds unless you proc another one to reset the timer. Doctrines are abilities that consume convictions as part of their casting cost. There shouldn’t be much need for this doctrine while soloing (since it is much less mana efficient than the HoT I am already packing) but it will be convenient in groups and mana efficiency isn’t really much of a concern at this point – I won’t be able to burn it quite fast enough to run out yet.

Bolt of radiance is awesome and acted for my primary pull and as a major part of my attack rotation in beta. I was, however, frequently staggered when it was still on cooldown at the end of a fight so I am going to enjoy the water pull (which I don’t really plan on integrating into the rotation).

level 17 justicar/shaman/warden (12/6/4)

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00rne.Vuko.Mcz.m

Okay, ten more points to allocate. First off, nothing changes in Shaman. I needed the shield and I got it asap. At this point, actual tanking is going to be more important since I plan on trying it out in the level 17 instance.

nothing to see here

Four points will go into Warden and give me three things:

• 4/5 – Destructive Tide – +8% instant cast spell damage
• Healing Current – 2s cast direct heal + 14s hot component
• Crushing Wave – instant cast water nuke + knockback, 15s cooldown

The knockback gives me a bit of a panic button in case I need it and the heal lets me attempt to save someone in a pinch faster than my little HoT can manage. I can’t depend on my doctrine for this sort of thing because it only works if I have been in combat for a while recently and if the target is in my party, and besides, it doesn’t heal as much anyway.

I am hoping that my melee abilities count as “instant cast spells” but won’t hold my breath if they don’t. Regardless, my taunt had better count as a spell and making it just that much stickier will be nice.

My alternative here was to spend points to increase my max mana, but my experience tanking rift events didn’t seem to stress my mana, so I’m not concerned about it yet. Besides, I get a better fix for this in the Justicar tree.

precept of refuge and mien of leadership

First priority in finishing out tier two of Justicar talents is Life’s Devotion. Two more points mean my Salvation now has a 100% chance to proc and heals for 25% of my justicar damage and 11% of my warden/shaman damage. That’s way nice.

Second priority is Doctrine of Bliss, which burns a conviction to heal me. This is what I spent the vast majority of my convictions on in beta – spamming self-heals as I ran away from a hairy situation

This leaves one point left that I spend to drop the mana cost of doctrines by 15%. They’re the most expensive thing I have yet, so this can only help.

These four points also unlock two new abilities:

• Censure – Melee attack, increases magic damage taken by the enemy by 3% for 15s
• Mien of Honor – Healing stance, decreases threat generation by 50% and increases healing done by justicar abilities by 50%

Censure is the new start to my rotation, and since it both hits harder than Strike of Judgment (the zero point attack) and debuffs the enemy, it is win-win.

Mien of Honor is interesting. It lets me switch into healing mode if a group needs that more than my tankly awesomeness. I used it two or three times during rift events in beta (when a warrior larger than me was there to tank) and felt like it did actually have a meaningful impact.

Tier three is made out of love. This is where the Justicar really starts to shine.

• 1/1 – Reparation – Attacks heal nearby party/raid members for 25% of justicar damage done and 10% of other damage done.
• 1/1 – Precept of Refuge – Shield bash, burns a conviction. Deals nice (physical) damage and increases my block chance by 15% for 8s. Always hits.

These are amazing. Reparation basically means my Salvation effect now affects up to 10 other party members every time it procs – which is every GCD in combat

Precept of Refuge starts making my attack rotation more interesting. I need to swing it once every 8 seconds to maintain 15% damage avoidance. I can do that. I don’t blame them for making it deal physical damage since that avoids the issue of costing a conviction and then generating it right back. I also applaud the silly name (precept == doctrine).

These two points unlock the two remaining pieces to the lowbie justicar tanking magic.

• Mien of Leadership – Tank mode. +300% threat generation. +90% endurance. +100% armour + 1% per point spent in justicar (so 112% minimum). -40% healing and damage from non-justicar abilities.
• Purpose – Mana regen button. All melee attacks for 10s restore 10% mana. No GCD. 1m cooldown.

Purpose pretty much equals free mana potions and Mien of Leadership is what it’s all about. The downside is that it nerfs non-justicar abilities so heavily. But honestly, I’m not going to be depending on them actively for health and dps while tanking, and it’s a small price to pay for upgrading my chain to plate and doubling my hp pool.

level 50 justicar/warden/shaman (39/16/11)

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00rne.Vuksqee0oo.mcdz.Vgbzo

Ahaha! See what I did there? Shaman tops off its usefulness to me pretty early on, but Warden has some cool stuff deeper in. I would really like to drop two more points into it from somewhere, but don’t know where I’ll find it just yet.

I’m going to go a bit quicker here and only pick out the highlights of each tree now because you’re already bored and I’d like to go to bed tonight myself.

vengeance of the frozen earth and favored of the valnir

First, let’s discuss the 5 more points that I’m dumping into Shaman.

• 2/2 – Favored of the Valnir – +10% incoming healing
• 1/5 – Unyielding – (1 more point) for a new total of +4% melee crit chance

The reason for the first point in unyielding is to unlock tier 3, where I pick up:

• 1/1 – Vengeance of the Frozen Earth – All melee attacks now proc a 50% snare for 6s

An automatic snare that’s always on to prevent runners or to control things better when the mage drops a string of crits and steals something enormous from me? Yes please.

This unlocks two more abilities in the roots of the Shaman tree:

• Massive Blow – Melee attack, 15s cooldown
• Courage of the Bear – +5 strength to entire raid/party

Shamans can upgrade Massive Blow to give it +30% crit chance and make the target bleed, so it rules for them… but it is largely useless in this build. There’s already no room in my single target rotation for it without the long cooldown and damage type mismatch.

Courage of the Bear is great. I can always use another buff.

It is worth noting that one more point in Shaman would unlock a high efficiency self-heal that is activated after receiving a critical blow. However, we actually pick up an automatic version of this later on in the Justicar tree.

restorative tide and orbs of the stream

My remaining points in Warden are similarly focused on unlocking tier 3 and then grabbing the tier 4 ability after that. The lower tier points:

• 5/5 – Destructive Tide – (1 more point) for a total of +10% instant cast damage
• 5/5 – Surging Rapids – +15% to instant cast heals
• 2/5 – Fluidity – +4% heal over time

Surging Rapids can only help since my main heals are all going to be instant. Fluidity isn’t as important but it’s better than the alternatives and can’t hurt.

The three abilities that I am digging this deep into Warden for are:

• 1/1 – Dissolution – Break snare/root effects, immune for 8s
• 2/2 – Restorative Tide – When you are Critically Hit, you heal 150% of your Wisdom over 12 seconds
• 1/1 – Orbs of the Stream – Buff with 3 charges. When the target takes damage, orb pops and heals them

This gives me critical mobility on the battlefield in case I need to save my healer from being eaten by a dragon and I’ve got my foot in a trap. It also gives me two more sources of passive healing that I don’t have to think very much about.

These 12 points unlock several new abilities:

• Tidal Surge – +50% to next heal spell
• Cleansing Waters – Remove curse/disease/poison from target
• Healing Flood – Proc a HoT on the entire group
• Deluge – Big direct heal that gains bonuses with active HoTs
• Drown – Water DoT + silence

The only one I’m not really excited about is Deluge. While amazing as a dedicated healer, it is useless while tanking and isn’t that spectacular while doing the Justicar aoe melee healing thing – Healing Flood plays much better into that and probably will be used aggressively in those cases.

Two more points in Warden would have unlocked two more excellent abilities, and if I have to, I will steal two points from Shaman in order to get them – water breathing and a basic rez spell. However, by stealing those points, I would have to lose the snare enchant and the strength aura… so I’m sticking with this plan.

so many toys…

And now to the pudding of the matter. Twenty seven more points in Justicar. Every soul’s skill tree has exactly 51 slots, and particularly large abilities become available starting at 31. I am putting enough into the tree for the 38 point ability (which I really want) and for one more to acquire all of the extra happy abilities remaining in the point allocation matrix portion.

Allocated points:

• 3/3 – Stalwart Citadel – Increases Block Rating by 30% of Spell Power
• 5/5 – Shield of Faith – -15% damage taken
• 5/5 – Safe Haven – +5% block from Precept of Refuge
• 1/1 – Doctrine of Valiance – Melee attack, burns all convictions, heals cleric for 200% of damage dealt
• 3/3 – Vengeful Justice – Even Justice (see below) hits 3 additional targets
• 5/5 – Commitment – Regain 5% mana when you Block
• 3/3 – Devout Deflection – Increases Parry Rating by 195% of Spell Power
• 1/1 – Reprieve – Heals the cleric and the target of Righteous Mandate (below) for >2k
• 1/1 – Absolution – Combat rez

The only talents that I did not pick up are a snare+root and a stun, and the 5 points in tier 1 to increase melee damage by 5%. The snare is already handled more effectively by the Shaman’s Vengeance buff and a stun is nice… but I am guessing that it won’t really be vital considering I will have an interrupt (below) and a silence (above).

Shield of Faith, Safe Haven, Stalwart Citadel and Devout Deflection are kind of no-brainers. They provide flat % damage mitigation and give me a massive increase in avoidance.

Commitment means I can keep ignoring my mana bar while tanking. Vengeful Justice means I can hold aggro on multiple targets more easily. Doctrine of Valiance and Reprieve are good self heals.

Absolution, the 31 point talent, is without contest the best combat rez in the game. There are a handful of others available but none of them heal the target to full and some of them have longer cooldowns. It would be criminally irresponsible of me not to pick this one up – especially since I am kind of ignoring the Warden’s non-combat rez ability in this build.

The 27 points also unlock 7 new root abilities:

• Righteous Mandate – Buff a target. Salvation overheals are transferred to them.
• Doctrine of Righteousness – Heal the target of Righteous Mandate, costs 1 conviction.
• Even Justice – Melee life damage to up to 2 enemies (5 with the talent above).
• Sovereignty – Ranged life damage, 20s cooldown.
• Righteous Imperative – AoE taunt.
• Interdict – AoE interrupt, no GCD.
• Just Defense – Shield for 1840 damage for 10 seconds.

Righteous Mandate is a great way to help keep the healer alive, I think. And in healing mode, it’s a way to help the tank – everybody wins. Mostly I used it in beta to keep my faerie alive while I let skeletons chew on it, but I did use it on a real player once when he took over tanking crazy invasion bosses that I couldn’t hit – I ran around beating up adds

Even Justice is the Justicar’s first answer to group tanking. It does not have a cooldown and doesn’t look too heinously expensive and has the nice side effect of potentially healing the user for quite a bit of damage.

Sovereignty is the aforementioned stun that I am not turning into a stun. As it stands, it is just a big instant-cast life nuke with a long cooldown, so I’m not sure if i’ll be using it at all.

Righteous Imperative. Nothing to say here, AoE taunt is the other answer to group tanking. Interdict will also help.

Just Defense is the panic button and extra bubble I’ve been waiting for. It’s also the primary reason I’m spending 38 points in Justicar instead of stopping at 32 and taking the other 6-7 points to another tree perhaps.

insufficient bang coefficient

The two Justicar root abilities that I did not pick up are the 44 and 51 point monsters. It could be that I decide that I really need to move 12 points out of my other trees to get these… but for now I don’t expect I will.

The 44 point Justicar ability, Resplendent Embrace, is a panic button for when your healer just isn’t keeping up with the pain. It increases his ability to do his job for 10 seconds every 2 minutes. This is the kind of thing that I suspect needs coordination to make really worthwhile… especially considering that Just Defense arrives 6 levels sooner and can be used twice as often. Besides, if you have a good healer that you can coordinate this sort of cooldown with, I imagine that he won’t really need this kind of help to keep your group standing. And hey, even if he dies, you can always combat rez him

Doctrine of Authority is the 51 point Justicar ability and is really quite sweet as far as 51 point abilities go. Some are downright disappointing. But this one… is just too expensive for now. It is an attack on a 15s cooldown that burns a conviction to heal 5 party members for 300% of the damage done. This would make Mien of Honor much more appealing as a viable group healing solution but if you’re going to that much trouble to heal a party, why not just respec Sentinel and be done with it?

checklist

If this build can’t tank casual instance content, then I will be quite surprised and even more disappointed.

Passive bonuses include:

• -18% damage taken
• +10% healing received
• +15% armour (before mien of tankitude)
• 30% of spell power to block rating, and 195% to parry rating
• +4% melee crit chance
• +10% instant cast damage
• +15% instant cast healing, +4% healing over time
• +5 dex or +5 str to raid

Healing options includes:

• all attacks heal cleric and nearby raid members for 25% of damage done with justicar abilities and for 11/10% of damage done with other abilities
• overheals from attacks transfer over to a designated party member
• two different bubbles help guarantee some degree of overhealing occurs regularly
• critical hits received heal cleric for 150% of wisdom over 12s
• two buttons to heal righteous mandate target
• mien of honor
• a short cooldown to increase the next heal cast
• remove one curse/disease/poison
• two combat self heals, and one combat party heal
• one single-target hot, one single-target heal + hot, one party aoe hot, one big single target heal that scales off of hots
• the best combat rez in the game

Mana management options include:

• regen mode once a minute to regen 10% of mana per melee ability attack over 10s (probably translates to 50% of a mana bar)
• blocking regains 5% mana
• -15% casting cost of doctrines

Crowd control options include:

• knockback
• silence
• interrupt
• snare

Tanking options include:

• mien of leadership (+300% threat, +90% endurance, +139% armour)
• precept of refuge (+20% block)
• break snare/root
• taunt
• aoe taunt
• aoe melee

And there you have it. This class system is deep and full of interesting synergies that will take a lot of getting used to. I can’t wait to slog my way through crowded newbie zones with the rest of the preorders as I put this to the test… and as I find out what rugs they have pulled out from under me since last weekend

Today, I am going to try to confine my ramblings to the subject of the hunter talent tree upgrades. Pet changes, new spells, and upgrades to old spells will have to wait until a future post or two. And of course, I’ve also got to write about the priest changes. Hmm… And I’m trying to get my warlock to 70 before the expansion as well… Anyway. Hunters. Talents. Go.

Beastier Mastery

At present, my hunter is a pretty heavy beast mastery spec. If things remain largely unchanged, he will likely become even heavier beast spec immediately upon getting the expansion. Of course… there is so much goodness in the pending changes that I might not actually stick with beast spec much past 70, but this is my current plan for day one in Northrend.

First, let’s discuss what I’m planning on giving up (initially). In order to get 53 points in beast mastery, I will have to give up 11 points from marksmanship and survival. The talents that are going byebye:

• Humanoid Slaying (3 points, T1 survival) – No real pain here. This reduces my damage & crit damage caused to Humanoids by +3% each. Of course… this talent is gone in the expansion anyway. It’s being replaced by the 5 point Improved Tracking ability which gives you +5% base damage to whatever you’re tracking. It’s nominally an upgrade, but it’s not worth the points.
• Improved Hunter’s Mark (5 points, T2 marks) – Shrug. This talent causes my mark’s +AP bonus to apply to melee damage as well (ie, my pet’s). That means -110 AP that my pet would normally enjoy against a target I’ve marked. That’s roughly 8 dps + whatever specials might gain from AP. In the expansion… the talent gets a major buff. Cost is reduced to 3 points and it also gains +30% to resist dispel. I like the improvement, but it’s still not earthshaking.
• Go for the Throat (2 points, T3 marks) – This one makes me cry. Go for the Throat causes my pet to regenerate 50 focus every time I score a ranged critical hit. Getting this talent back will probably be my first major focus – with the planned build, I’ll be able to get this back at level 77.
• Aimed Shot (1 point, T3 marks) – This one also makes me cry. I refuse to explain aimed shot. Anyone who’s read this far knows exactly what it does. I might pick this back up, but it will take some careful juggling.

But oh… oh what am I going to get in exchange It’s gonna rock.

Aspect Mastery is a new T3 beast talent. For one point, it buffs your 3 basic aspects. Viper gets +10% to its mana regen rate. Monkey gets 10% damage reduction – that’s right, flat out absorption when the dodge fails. This also means monkey now helps when you’re getting hit by spells. Hawk gets +50% to its AP bonus. At level 70, hawk is worth +155 AP, so this talent is worth +77 AP. At level 80, hawk will be worth +300 AP…

While I’m going this deep in the tree (and since I don’t need the point for Aimed Shot any more), I’ll also be picking up a 3rd point in Catlike Reflexes for an additional +1% to my dodge and +3% to my pet’s dodge.

Invigoration is a new T8 beast talent that for two points causes you to instantly regenerate 2% of your mana every time your pet scores a crit with a special. My pre-existing talents already give my pet +10% crit chance and double focus regen. I’m losing the focus regen from Go for the Throat but am also picking up both of the new T9 talents…

Longevity costs 3 points at T9 beast and reduces cooldowns on Bestial Wrath, Intimidation, and all pet special abilities by 30%. Intimidate’s cooldown goes down from 60 seconds to 40; Bestial Wrath is down from 120 seconds to 84. These cooldowns were already short enough that I have macros that ensure I am able to burn them almost every time they’re up. The buff makes me giddy.

Reducing the cooldown on pet specials by 30% means I don’t have to rely on my pet’s focus dump ability any more. 30% more frequent crits from specials means 30% more frequent procs of Invigoration and happy joyful mana regeneration.

Cobra Strikes costs 3 points at T9 beast and gives me a 60% chance when I crit with Arcane, Steady, or Kill shot to cause my pet’s next 3 specials to crit… In conjunction with Invigoration, this effectively reduces the mana cost for my Steady shots into the realm of the microscopic.

And of course, then there’s Beast Mastery, the new T11 talent. This will allow me to tame exotic pets (devilsaur, chimera, silithid, etc…) and effectively gives all of my pets +20 levels worth of talent points.

The only new beast talents that I’m not actually picking up with this build are:

• Animal Handler (T6, 2 points), which gives my pet +4% to hit (that’s never been a problem) and reduces the cooldown on the new Master’s Call ability by 10 seconds (from 60 to 50). I don’t think I’ll be using Master’s Call much. I’ve already got 84 second Bestial Wrath.
• Separation Anxiety (T10, 5 points), which is quite probably very cool, really. Fully trained, it gives your pet +10% movement speed when <=20 yards from you and then turns the speed bonus into +10% dps once it gets 20 yards away. This makes interception time even faster and generally translates into an almost permanent +10% pet damage (since 20+ yards is a quite normal range for hunters to shoot from).

I’m vaguely torn by Separation Anxiety. Insert pun here. To pick it up immediately upon WotLK launch would mean foregoing +5% crit chance, and my crits already give my pet huge bonuses that I wouldn’t want to go without.

Of course… the other two talent trees have gotten an even bigger upgrade. Beast was already terribly overpowered, so it is only fair. If it weren’t for the lure of exotic pets, I’d be all over the other trees. As it is, I’m having a hard time deciding what I want out of their first 3 tiers.

Marksmanship

The changes to the marks tree mean major improvements to hunter shots, reliable improvements to baseline DPS, and absolute gobs of bonus mana efficiency.

One of my longstanding gripes has been Improved Concussive Shot. In BC, it was a 5 point talent that gave the dubious benefit of a 20% chance of proccing a 3 second stun in addition to the daze effect. There are numerous problems with this that I really don’t want to get into since the bad talent is finally going away. In return, we get a sleek new 2 point talent that increases the duration of the daze by 2 seconds. This is pure awesome. If I were leveling a newbie hunter, this would be my first talent, hands down.

T1 marks also gets the 3 point Focused Aim talent, which gives hunters the same sort of 70% interruption resistance (while charging Aimed & Steady) that other mana-using classes have traditionally been able to buy for low tier talents. I find this to be of questionable usefulness, however – especially since it’s a T1 talent that buffs abilities that aren’t available at level 10. Aimed shot is a T3 talent, so it is first available at level 20. Steady shot rank 1 is level 62…

T2 marks gets some amazing changes, I’ve already mentioned the buff to Improved Mark.

Careful Aim makes an appearance at T2. All the way down from T7. Yup. They moved a tier seven talent down to tier two. And then they buffed it 3x. In stead of a puny +45% of your int converted into RAP, it now gives a full +100%. Epic win.

They have also switched the locations of Mortal Shots (+crit damage) and Efficiency (-mana cost). Mortal Shots is now T2 and becomes Aimed Shot’s pre-req (in stead of the other way around). Efficiency wasn’t very important at low levels, so moving it up to T4 makes more sense (when it’s saving you more than 1 or 2 mana per spell).

In stead of Careful Aim at T7, marks hunters now get Piercing Shots for 3 points. This gives Steady and Aimed shots the ability to ignore 6% of target armour. Very unshabby.

Rapid Recuperation is a new 3 point T8 ability that helps mana efficiency. While using Rapid Fire, both the hunter’s and pet’s abilities are 60% cheaper. This makes for a lot of focus dump happiness for your pet. Additionally, Rapid Killing (which already reduces Rapid Fire’s cooldown) is improved by giving you a mana regen tick that heals you for 150% of the damage dealt by the +20% damage shot you fire to use the Rapid Killing charge. This is quite probably enough to keep high level hunters at full mana forever, so long as things keep dying.

Wild Quiver is a new T9 (3 point) talent that gives you a 10% chance to fire an additional auto shot at 60% damage. Combine this with the fact that heavy marks hunters will likely be using Improved Hawk in stead of Viper (since the marks tree is really taking care of the hunter’s mana needs without it now)… and you have a LOT of extra arrows flying.

T9 also gets Improved Steady Shot (3 points). This gives your steady shots 15% chance to increase the damage of your next aimed/arcane/kill shot by 15% while reducing its mana cost by 40%. See? I told you. Mana efficiency.

The new T10 marks talent is Marked for Death (5 points). It gives your already improved hunter’s mark an additional +10% damage dealt by the hunter & pet and increases your critical strike damage bonus of all shot spells by a further 10%. This really encourages the hunter to mark their targets but I wonder how it plays out with multiple hunters firing on the same target. Do they all get the bonus, or does only the hunter who placed the mark?

And Chimera Shot is the new T11 talent. It’s a 10 second cooldown shot for 125% damage that refreshes your current sting and procs an additional bonus depending on which sting was active. Serpent deals 40% of the sting’s normal damage instantly. Viper heals you for 60% of the amount it drains (mana efficiency). Scorpid procs a 10 second disarm attempt that can only occur once a minute. All told, way cool.

Survival

The big change at T1 for the survival tree is that the former pair of 3 point talents Monster Slaying and Humanoid Slaying have been replaced with the 5 point Improved Tracking. I’ve already discussed this above, but just to reiterate:

• Only costs 5 talent points in stead of 6.
• +5% damage in stead of +3% damage and +3% crit damage.
• Works on whatever you’re tracking in stead of just 4 different creature types.

T2 gets a new talent called T.N.T.. Hehe. This gives your fire traps 15% chance to deal a 2 second stun when they do damage (I assume this means 15% each time the dot procs…). It also increases the crit chance of your explosive trap by 15%. And… the talent also extends these bonuses to your Explosive Shot (which is the new T11 talent that effectively acts as a ranged explosive trap). I could live with this.

Tier 2 also gets Survival Instincts. Yup, another high tier talent moving down into cherry picking range. They didn’t even nerf it in the process (but they didn’t buff it like they did Careful Aim). This formerly 5th tier talent gives you a whopping 4% damage reduction and 4% AP for 2 points.

T3 sees an upgraded version of Deflection. This talent previously cost 5 T2 points for +5% parry bonus. Now it costs 3 T4 points for +6% bonus. Deflection also becomes Counterattack’s new pre-req (since the old pre-req, Deterrence is becoming a baseline ability now). Win.

T3 also gets Trap Mastery, which is currently unimplemented. But I believe it is supposed to be a combination of the previous T3 Clever Traps talent and the previous T4 Trap Mastery talent.

And… T3 also gets an improved version of the formerly T4 Improved Feign Death. Survival Tactics (2 points) is Improved Feign Death (+4% to difficulty to resist feign) plus a 4 second reduction to Disengage’s cooldown.

At T4, Surefooted is slightly changed to cut the duration of snares in half. Previously it supposedly gave you a +15% chance to resist them, but I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a lot of CC/snare/etc… type effects are, well, simply irresistible. So this is a nice improvement. They’re actually doing this sort of thing all across the board (changing chance to resist effects that weren’t ever actually resistible to a reduction in that effect’s duration).

Lock and Load is a new 3 point T4 survival talent that gives you a crazy weird clearcasting type effect that procs whenever you trap a target or 15% of the time you sting something. The proc is that your next 3 arcane and explosive shots are free to cast and have no cooldown (they normally both have a 6 second cooldown). I really wonder if successive explosive shot dots stack… because explosive trap + 3x explosive shot = actual big boy aoe dps. This would actually make hunters vaguely useful in situations where previously only mages & warlocks would do.

Hunter vs Wild is a new T5 talent for 3 points that increases you and your pet’s AP by 30% of your total stamina. 5 points in Survivalist are the nominal pre-req, but when considering taking a talent like this, who’d pass up a +10% stamina bonus anyway?

Noxious Stings is new at T8 and has Wyvern as a pre-req and gives your wyvern sting a backlash effect that hits the dispeller for 50% of the remaining sting duration. In addition, it also increases all damage dealt to victims of your serpent sting by 3%. This really improves the usefulness of wyvern in pvp and makes serpent a nice addition to an improved mark in group situations. I don’t think this should be a T8 talent with a pre-req… but there really isn’t room to put it anywhere else

Point of No Escape is a new T9 survival talent that costs 3 points and increases the crit chance of all attacks on victims of your ice traps (and possibly bear trap, but I think they’re doing away with that one). This is very nice for frost trap and potentially very very fun with the rumored changes to freeze trap (it won’t break on any old damage now). This means you might get to cycle off two big crit shots into something when breaking its freeze now.

Sniper Training is another new T9 talent (3 points). This increases the damage dealt by steady, aimed, and explosive shots by 6% when you are >30 yards away from the target. It also (possibly more importantly) improves your chance to crit by 15% when executing with Kill Shot. It’s kind of a shame this is so mutually exclusive with Separation Anxiety (+pet dps at long range).

The new T10 survival talent is Hunting Party (5 points) and serves as an awesome hunter version of Vampiric Touch (shadow priest spell that dots an enemy and turns the damage into mana for the party). Hunting Party has Thrill of the Hunt as a pre-req (regen 40% of shot costs when you crit) and heals your whole party’s mana/energy/rage/runic power slightly whenever you crit with an arcane/explosive/steady shot. Hehehe. Oh, and remember, TNT gives explosive shots +15% to crit while Lock and Load makes them subject to chain clearcasting

And of course then there’s Explosive Shot at T11. We’ve already seen numerous other talents that improve it, but what is it? It’s a ranged explosive trap on a 6 second cooldown. It hits the primary target for a good chunk of fire damage and then splashes everything within 5 yards with a dot for half of the base damage again over 2 seconds.

And so… with so many wonderful options, I am really starting to wish for the first time that they will let us dual spec somehow. It would mean I can keep my insanely heavy beast spec for soloing and take something from marks and/or survival for groups/pvp. Mmm. Happy ideas.

Anyhow, I’ve spent entirely too long on this, and now I’m less sure than ever of what I’ll be doing with my 10 shiny new lvl 71-80 talent points. Oh well. Respecs aren’t really that expensive after all.

I did it right this time. Kiki spent the vast majority of her post-newbie levels as a holy/discipline hybrid build and eventually ended up at 28/33/0. Smite and mana efficiency FTW.

I also planned ahead. Not only did I have 5 pieces of lvl 70 eq waiting for me (including the Primal Mooncloth set). Not only did I have enough money saved up to buy my flying mount, but I actually “camped the chicken spawn”. I hit level 70 less than 30 yards from the riding trainer in Wildhammer, bought my chicken, and flew away.

Kiki currently has 6741 hp, 9266 mana, just shy of 1250 bonus healing and 154 mp5 while casting (354 while not casting). She has over 400 int and spirit. Her /played is just over 10 days.

boring history

(Seriously, I’m about to ramble for a few hours… Hey, I said this took 12 years…)

I’ve always enjoyed healing in RPG’s, and I like to think that I’ve gotten fairly good at it over the years. I play clerics and druids in pen and paper RPG’s. I cried like a baby when Aeris died – and not just because I was emotionally involved in the story (which I was), but also because she was my healer. My first MUD character became a priest on September 10th, 1996.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about healing in games that I enjoy so much, but I like it more than summoning (a close second – playing healers who can summon makes me giddy). I’m pretty sure my original obsession with clerics was strictly the result of numberchasing munchkinitis. In AD&D, clerics felt like the most flexible class to me. They could heal, they could smite, they could summon at very low levels, they had good hp and could wear heavy armour and hit things with big hammers. My online handle “Allaryin” comes from my first successful D&D character, a chaotic good dwarven cleric of Tempus – the Forgotten Realms god of war.

However, in subsequent games, I recanted this position. Somewhere along the line, the idea of being able to do anything and everything at any time started losing its appeal. I became less interested in whacking things with hammers and calling down fire to consume my enemies whole… and more interested in passively altering events. Why wield the hammer yourself when the fighter can do a better job at it – especially with my help keeping him alive?

Future incarnations of Allaryin stopped following warrior gods like Tempus and started following Lathander the god of light and creation… and eventually evolved into followers of Ilmater the martyr’s god. I became obsessed with keeping my party members standing, even if it meant they had to find another priest to raise me when I fell.

When ’96 rolled around and I was introduced to muds, it was a happy coincidence that the guys who kickstarted the addiction were a knight and a priest. I quickly gravitated toward the priest’s guild and when the time came, chose to play as a priest of Morike, the game world’s goddess of healing. Though I eventually played almost every other class in the game, I always came back to Morike. If I logged into the mud right now, Allaryin would still be there, a very dusty and unplayed but still very fervent follower of the light.

Fast forward to March of 2004, FFXI hit my PS2 and I was all ready to reinvent Allaryin again as a Tarutaru white mage, but the game’s user interface had other plans. I was unable to figure out how to choose a name of my own, and after several attempts finally gave up and decided to use the random generator. Kikichikki was born.

Kiki was also doomed to failure by a game that made solo play absolutely impossible, especially for the entirely defensive white mage class. I don’t think I ever hit level 21, but I hit level 20 about 50 times… having not quite mastered the fine art of controlling aggro in order to avoid getting killed in groups.

Kiki saw a brief reincarnation as an Agatean Pishite on the Discworld mud that lasted a few months before real life conspired to prevent me from playing. When I returned, the character had been wiped for inactivity

In early 2006, Kiki’s next stop was City of Heroes. I rolled the character four or five times but never really got into it – however, when City of Villains came out, I rolled Columns, a Necromancy/Poison mastermind who spent most of his time keeping people alive (or reanimating them as the case may be).

When World of Warcraft launched, I was unimpressed with my options for healers. During the open beta, I determined that paladins, druids, and shamans were too confusing and priests were too squishy. Summoning was where it was at, and a few months later when I was finally bullied into opening an account, I rolled Allaryin as a dwarven hunter.

In the intervening years, I have tried leveling healers several times, but the closest I ever got was a 40 paladin (who isn’t even healer spec any more). Priests were always squishy, I hit level 15-20 with several attempts but always gave up at my inability to solo with the class – but I had always tried to level as a shadow priest since that’s what common convention states is the best build for soloing.

shadow is overrated

I repeat. Shadow is overrated.

I originally (like 2 months ago when the topic was fresher on my mind) meant for this to be a separate rant, but as I never wrote it I may as well go into the subject briefly here.

Again, this time with feeling. Shadow is overrated.

Maybe I’m just complete noobsauce, but I just couldn’t make a shadow priest work. I’ve got a level 50 warlock, which you’d think would be comparable. But it isn’t. In World of Warcraft, playing a low level shadow priest is more like playing a melee hunter. Just because the game lets you spec for stupid doesn’t mean it actually works.

I’m not saying that the shadow talent tree is worthless. I’m not saying that high level shadow priests aren’t amazing and viable in groups. Nor am I saying that shadow priests can’t be obnoxiously effective in PvP, and I am certainly not suggesting anyone try to solo to 70 w/o picking up any offensive talents.

I am saying that shadow priests are pointless in low level (<50 or so) PvE solo content. I am saying that the holy and discipline talent trees have much better options for solo players at lower levels.

When Kiki was in her early 40′s, I figured I’d give shadow another chance. I had been a holy smite build until this point and had intentionally waited to respec shadow until I could buy enough talents to make it worthwhile. I advanced two levels as a shadow priest before giving up in disgust.

What is wrong with shadow priests? Let me count the ways.

At level 10, a priest is highly squishy. They’re going to be healing themselves a lot – their fights take longer since they do less damage and they’ve got less defense (not getting the first rank of their personal armour spell until level 12).

Going immediately into either of the available shadow talents means delaying or neglecting Healing Focus (2 points for 70% resistance to interruption while healing). Time wasted trying to heal through interruptions means a corpse run.

Waiting until level 12 to take your first shadow talent point means you can’t get Mind Flay (the first really useful shadow talent) until 22.

Everyone talks up Spirit Tap (increased mana regen for 15s after a kill) but water really is very cheap and low level priests really shouldn’t be using mana to kill things anyway. Wand DPS is much more reliable and even outperforms smite at low levels. Lowbie priests should never run out of mana since they’ve offloaded their spells to before the mob closed into melee and are spending the rest of their time in combat wanding and regenning for the next fight.

Blackout is even more useless at low level. 10% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds with your shadow spells? There is only one direct damage shadow spell before Mind Flay, and it’s on an 8 second cooldown.

For the same five talent points that would have been wasted in regen you don’t need or stuns that you can’t depend on… you could have 70% resistance to interruption while healing AND one of:

• +15% wand dps (up to 25% after 2 more points).
• +15% healing over time from your renew spell (which should be your most commonly cast spell at this level).
• +3% crit from your holy spells (up to +5% after 2 more points, this includes heals and nukes).

Shadow damage can be mitigated. There is no such thing as holy resistance. Smite always works. And it’s not on a cooldown, so you can actually spam it.

Shadow priests’ damage output is highly equipment-dependent. To truly be worth the pain of playing a shadow priest, you need gobs of +shadow damage equipment. The soonest a character can be effectively loaded up with +shadow gear is level 40.

Shadowform requires level 40 at the absolute minimum. That’s if you completely ignore the other two talent trees…

Can’t cast holy spells while in shadowform. Since you still have access to discipline spells, this isn’t a huge nerf (unlike a druid’s specialized caster forms which pretty much limit you to nuking or healing)… but it is still inconvenient. If for whatever reason you do need to cast a holy spell while soloing in shadowform, switching back costs a huge amount of mana.

DoT’s don’t crit.

Shadow priests blow through mana like nothing I’ve ever seen before. With one’s primary sources of damage being a DoT and a channeled DoT, you waste a lot of mana. Shadow Word: Pain suffers from the same problem that all DoT’s have – it rarely has a chance to tick to conclusion. Likewise, with Mind Flay, any hit you take while channeling will reduce the damage/mana ratio of the spell dramatically.

When hunting trolls as a shadow priest in Arathi, Kiki had to stop and drink after every other kill, even with Spirit Tap. As a smite priest, both her dps and her mana efficiency were higher. She could take 3 or 4 mobs before resting.

After the failed adventures in shadowform, Kiki gave a heavy discipline build a whirl. It too was disappointingly less effective than the heavy holy build had been – but, while she did less damage and her heals were weaker… at least she was sturdier and had more mana to cast the weaker spells with.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that from a purely munchkin standpoint, shadow spec is not a good idea for solo PvE before level 50, and is just… well, unplayable before 40.

If you want to play a shadow priest, do yourself a favor and either always party or level a hybrid build of some sort or another and respec to shadow when you get to Outland.

Let the flames commence.

Oh wait, that’s right. You can’t do that in shadowform

(Yes, I know the pun was horrendous. I’m sorry. Kind of.)

In the games we’ve watched, discussed, and played over the last week or so, several interesting observations have been made:

• Infantry are way overpowered.
• The game is all about money, but then again, lots of games are.
• Light artillery is useless.
• The RNG hates me.
• Alliances win.
• It’s dangerous to be identified as the big threat.

infantry == free money

When we say infantry are overpowered… there really is no easy way to describe just how overpowered they really are. Light infantry cost $75 and heavy infantry cost $100. The difference is that light infantry move 2x as fast as heavy and heavy infantry hit vehicles 2x as hard as light (the game says that heavy have 4x the offensive power vs vehicles as light do… but that doesn’t seem to translate to 4x the damage potential). Infantry can capture bases. Infantry can cross mountains. Infantry get substantial offensive and defensive bonuses for being in heavy terrain. They suffer penalties in swamps, but then again, so do vehicles.

Compare this with your basic light tank. The tank costs $300 to produce, moves like light infantry, cannot cross mountains, suffers offensive and defensive penalties for being in heavy terrain, and will come out hurting very badly if it tries to solo a heavy infantry unit. Two heavy infantry who get the drop on a tank are assured a win. And it’s entirely possible that both units will survive – allowing them to heal up and fight something else.

This is where the game comes down to money. If $200 worth of infantry can beat $300 worth of vehicles, then the player with the infantry has tipped the money scale dramatically in his favor. To further illustrate the scenareo (which is not 100% realistic, but still illustrates my point), I present the following detailed example. Much of this example is just an extension of ideas Adam expressed a few days ago, so I take very little credit here

Player A and player B are playing a game on a very small map consisting entirely of basic grassland, no fancy terrain bonuses here. Both players control two bases and the battle front is incredibly close. Each base produces $100 per turn. Let’s begin the scenareo with $300 per player and no units.

Turn 1: Player A moves first and creates two heavy infantry, bringing his money down to $100. Player B creates a tank for $300, wiping his money out.

Turn 2: Player A moves his two heavy infantry forward and creates two more. He is spending exactly as much money as he is earning, so his balance remains at $100. Player B had $0 coming into this round, earns $200 for his bases, and decides to keep that money in favor of producing a tank next turn.

Turn 3: Player A attacks the tank with his two foremost infantry and almost kill it. He then moves his second pair forward and creates a third pair of heavy infantry. Player B gets his second tank, dropping his balance down to $100. He attacks one of the infantry that attacked his first tank and kills it, but also takes some damage in the process.

Turn 4: Player A moves his injured infantryman back and attacks the injured tank with one of his fresh units. The tank dies, barely scratching the full strength infantry unit. He moves his 5 other infantry forward and creates two more. Player B attacks the unit that just killed his first tank and injures it fairly badly, dropping it down to 4/10 health, but not after taking 3 damage himself. He creates another tank and is back to nothing in the bank.

Let’s take a moment to count score. Money in the bank doesn’t count, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, since both players have similar amounts of money on hand and coming in. However, compare the monetary value of their units on the board.

Player A has 7 full strength heavy infantry worth $700. He also has one more unit at 40% health for a total value of $740. Player B has one full strength tank on the board worth $300 and one unit at 70% health for a total functional value of $510.

Turn 5: Player A swarms the injured tank with 3 of his uninjured units and kills it. He then moves his 4 remaining uninjured units forward, they are on B’s doorstep by now. His one previously injured unit rests for +1/10 health. He creates two more heavy infantry, bringing his population up to 6 uninjured, 4 moderately injured infantry.

Player B has one solitary tank now. He cannot afford another one. He cannot reach any of player A’s injured units to attack them, his only choice is to attack one of the uninjured units, which he does, injuring it heavily, but not enough to destroy it, and not without taking damage himself.

Turn 6: Player A stomps the injured tank, clearing the board of player B’s units. He moves one of his remaining uninjured infantry ont o each of player B’s bases and begins capturing. All of his injured units rest for +1/10 health. He creates two more units, just to be cheeky about the whole situation. Player B earns $200 more, bringing his money in the bank up to $400, but he can’t do anything with it since both of his bases are occupied.

Turn 7: Player A creates two more units, finishes capturing player B’s bases, and wins the game.

The final tally shows player A having not even broken a sweat. He has 14 units on the board and $100 in the bank, compared to player B’s zero units on the board and his useless $400 in the bank.

So… while it was a slightly unfair example, the point stands. Hordes of infantry are worth way more than their equivalent weight in tanks. Put them in rough terrain and the difference becomes even more marked, the infantry may move slightly slower through rough terrain, but they become significantly tougher. Of course, infantry through rough terrain are usually faster than vehicles through rough terrain anyway… What then, is the counter to heavy infantry? An equal or greater quantity of light infantry. They cost 25% less, move faster and hit heavies just as hard as the heavies hit them back. No contest.

Resting is free money. Remember, the only money that really matters is money that’s already been spent to produce units. If you can get more use out of your units…

There are only two other unit types in the game worth discussing.

Raiders (recon bikes) are the fastest units in the game, they cost $200, and they hit infantry as hard as light tanks. They are great at closing gaps, blocking bases, and picking off solitary infantry. A small group of raiders can hit and run a poorly organized group of infantry into oblivion w/o taking any permanent casualties.

artillery

And then there’s artillery. In basic games, there are only two varieties of artillery. Light and heavy. Light artillery cost $400, move rapidly, and have an attack range of 2-3 hexes. Heavy artillery cost $600, move slowly, have a range of 3-4 hexes, and hit much harder. They have very little defense, so once a normal unit gets next to it, the artillery unit is pretty much dead. “Pro” games have a few more types of vehicles, including more two more varieties of artillery, both of which are quite nifty.

A wall of cheap infantry takes time to carve through, especially if they’re rotating their wounded out to heal. Stick a few heavy artillery pieces behind them and they’re unstoppable.

Why did I say that light artillery is ~useless? Well, for one, it only has an offensive rating of 4|4 (vs infantry|vehicles). Heavy infantry have an offensive rating of 3|4 and you can field 4 of them for the price of one light artillery, or you could get yourself a pair of 5|2 raiders for the same money. The other problem with light artillery is that they have a short range and cannot move and attack on the same turn. Thus they must get very close to the enemy to attack anything at all. That, and despite their speed, they’re pretty much incapable of attacking heavy artillery w/o getting blown to pieces along the way.

Heavy artillery have 5|5 offense, 2x the range, and 1 more armour than light artillery for only 50% more money. Thus, for $1200 you could either field three light artillery and have a hard time positioning them in such a way that all 3 can attack on the same turn w/o being exposed to attack themselves… or you could field a pair of heavies and slowly creep across the map flattening all who oppose.

What’s the solution to heavy artillery? Raiders. Large quantities of infantry. Anything that can close into short range and kill w/o being killed first.

How do you keep your artillery from being killed? Keep a thick wall of cheaper units in front of them. Remember, you can buy 8 light infantry for the cost of one heavy artillery. Nothing in the game has AoE attacks… so 8 cheap units take a very long time to carve through… especially if you’re able to cycle the injured ones back to rest.

unbalanced dice

One gripe I have about Weewar is that the random factor really is a bit too random for my taste. I like my tactical games to depend more on tactics than luck. Right now… it is too easy to have a run of bad luck and get knocked out of the game for a few bad rolls.

In Advance Wars, the attacking unit always gained an advantage. Healthier units always did more damage than injured units. Not so with Weewar. It is not unusual for a pair of fully healed infantry to attack a raider and both wind up taking the same amount of damage.

Infantryman 1 attacks the raider, does 3 damage, takes 4 damage.

Infantryman 2 attacks the raider – which should now be operating at only 70% power, does 2 damage, takes 5 damage.

To compound the situation, the game’s official documentation says that multiple units attacking the same target from multiple angles get bonuses.

With small numbers like this, slight variations due to a fickle RNG are still large enough to make any such advantage very hard to notice. It is there. It must be. I’ve convinced myself that it is. But the numbers only occasionally support this.

If you could see the dice, maybe? At least then you could brag about the crits when they happen and blame losing an attack on obviously poor rolls.

I don’t mind randomness… but the game doesn’t even keep a text log of attacks and their results (much less the numbers involved), and I think that makes the occasional spot of ill fortune seem even more pointless and arbitrary than it might otherwise. It’s not unheard of to attack a unit that you should by all rights be able to kill with minimal injury and wind up losing your attacking unit in the process – despite supposed terrain modifiers in your favor, etc…

Shrug. For now, the wide range of possibilities from the RNG are just one more reason that infantry are superior. You don’t feel so bad when the game throws your infantry away as you do when you lose a heavy tank to bad dice

strength in numbers, sometimes

Another thing we’ve noticed about the game is that teamwork really makes a difference. Not only does an alliance mean you don’t waste your time killing each other’s units… it typically means ~2x the units pointed at your enemies.

I recently lost a game rather soundly because I was winning. Yup. Lost because I was winning.

See, it was a four-man match on a square board. Each player started in one quadrant of the board. I started in the NW and made a tentative peace with the player to the NE while I built up units along my southern border. The SW player provoked both myself and his other neighbor, the player to the SE. Meanwhile, NE and SE had some minor tussles but nothing too major.

SW made a mistake and I sort of crushed him up against SE and took most of his bases. This left me in control of something like 10 or 12 bases while NE and SE only had 6 or 7 each. This worried them, so they stopped their minor border conflict and charged west at me. Every turn for 4 turns in a row, my line was pushed back by one hex. I didn’t have time to repair any units, the push was too strong.

When I finally surrendered, I had captured SW’s remaining bases but had lost several of my other bases along the border. Between the two of them, they held 15 bases compared to my 11 – a 36% advantage in production capacity. I had started the conflict slightly depleted because of my successful campaign against SW (who had actually held the biggest army before I overtook him), and their collectively superior income were sufficient to give them an overwhelming majority of numbers.

It doesn’t pay to be too big. One-on-one, I could have mopped up either one of them. Unfortunately, because I had such an enormous lead on either one of them individually, they realized the obvious and allied against me. Like lobsters in a tank who can’t stand to let another one climb out…

I think I could have had a chance at the game if I hadn’t taken all of SW’s bases. In stead, I was greedy and took off a bigger bite than I could keep down.

ideas

So, aside from the issues discussed already (infantry need a good nerf batting and the RNG is too random), there’s only really one problem with the game. It’s written in clingy, needy, zero self-esteem sort of AJAX. It’s the kind of code that feels the irrational compulsion to phone home to the server every time you click a unit to select it. I mean… if you’re going to wait for the server to do all of the thinking, why bother with any sort of client-side logic at all? The game could be so much faster, and the server could handle so many more players if they moved most of the incessant click management logic to the client where it belongs and only sent final moves to the server for validation.

And, aside from that little gripe… I’ve a few other things I’d like to see in the game.

Namely, I want to see a greater variety of units. The game is already a paper-rock-scissors contraption, let’s make units even more specialized, eh wot?

A few new types of infantry, perhaps?

• demolitions squad – normal movement, 1.5x cost of heavy (bazooka) infantry, 1 defense, 0|6 offense (useless against infantry – death to tanks), unable to capture bases, ability to “sabotage” enemy bases. Sabotage destroys the demo squad and reverts the enemy base to neutral – instantly, in stead of having to wait 2 turns for a capture by a normal infantry unit.
• flamethrower squad – slow movement, 3x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 4|2 offense, deal splash (reduced, indirect) damage to the two hexes behind and to either side of their primary target. Splash damage always happens and attacks any units in the area, regardless of team affiliation.
• mortar squad – slow movement, 2.5x cost of heavy infantry, 1 defense, 3|5 offense, attack range of 1-2. Attacking adjacent units still counts as indirect fire. Only artillery that can cross mountains. Do not get offensive bonuses or penalties for terrain.
• recon team – fast movement, 1x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 2|1 offense. Reduced movement penalty for moving across otherwise slow terrain.
• engineering team – normal movement, 3x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 1|1 offense. Ability to build bunkers that act as immobile 3|3 retaliatory units until destroyed. Building a bunker costs the team 6 health. Bunkers have 2 defense and cannot be repaired once damaged.
• skirmishers – normal movement, 1x cost of heavy infantry, 3 defense, 2|2 offense. Can use any remaining movement after attacking.

Of course these numbers aren’t really balanced. At least, they’re not balanced any more than the current ones are

If we allow flamethrower infantry, we probably want flame tanks as well. Perhaps cluster bomb artillery that randomly hit 2 or 3 hexes adjacent to their target? Maybe some type of AoE that is good vs vehicles but not against infantry? Maybe give a unit the ability to deal damage that tunnels on to the unit behind it, but only on a kill? Rail gun?

How about special map restriction options or victory conditions? No artillery allowed, no infantry allowed, no recon bikes allowed? Game ends after 10 turns, with whoever controls the most of the map wins? First player to cap 7 bases wins? Etc…

Fog of war? Probably not. It could work, it does in Advance Wars… but I don’t see it working very well in this sort of environment. It’s too easy for players to share intel, it drags the game out too long if they don’t, etc…

I like the idea of adding shallow water to the game that only infantry are capable of crossing. It would slow them down just as much as mountains would and it gives an offensive and defensive penalty worse than swampland.

If we’re allowing infantry to move in water, how about naval units? That would require a whole new set of maps, but no harm there. Air units? Those would be nice too.

Other terrain types? Jungle is thicker than forest and is the ultimate entrenched position for infantry. Artillery cannot target units in the jungle. Roads give vehicles a bonus to movement but make you terribly vulnerable to attack. Bridges function exactly like roads except they make you even more of a sitting duck.

Could possibly allow engineering units to terraform the map, changing forest to plains to roads and building bridges across rivers, etc…

Mobile factories? Very slow, non-combative units that can only move along roads and over grass. Able to build units wherever they are for 50% extra cost. Can’t drive and build on the same turn. Possibly cost resources to maintain?

But, what I’d really like to see would be troop transports. Infantry are slow. APC’s are not. They’ve got no offense and minimal defense, but they’re cheap and they’ve got movement like a raider. What better way to deliver your bazooka wielding guerrillas to the jungle outside of your enemy’s base

math

The quick math shows that fel iron prospecting produced 1.13 (35/31) uncommon gems per attempt.

Adamant gave me a 1.14 (40/35) uncommon gems per attempt and 0.26 (9/35) rare gems (total of 1.4 gems per attempt). Getting two uncommon gems at once is not unusual, and getting an uncommon and a rare gem together is also not unusual (looks like what’s guaranteed in the new math is at least one uncommon gem, anything else is extra).

I also had one adamant prospecting attempt out of the 35×5 adamant that produced three gems at once (2 uncommon, one rare). This could be a case of the two different chances (14% chance for an extra uncommon gem and 26% chance for a rare gem) both rolling at the same time. The small numbers math says that there’s a ~3.5% chance of both coming up at once, which jives neatly with my experience (1/35 ~= 2.8%).

One point of interest is that the uncommon gem production seems to be roughly even now between the two ore types (roughly 4.5 uncommon gems per stack). The only difference giving adamant a higher drop rate is its production of approximately 1 rare gem per stack of ore.

The sample isn’t big enough to make any definitive statements about individual gems having higher drop rates than others but my sample at least does seem to hint that orange gems are slightly more likely to drop than average and that blue and red are less likely. The difference here is well within statistically meaningless fuzzy grey territory, however, so don’t complain if you prospect 100 stacks of ore and get all azure moonstones

old math

By popular request, I have hunted down some of the old prospecting math. Kaliope has a wonderful blog on WoW crafting issues and recorded some numbers on the subject. She also has posts on mithril, thorium, and lowbie ore prospecting results before patch 2.1.

Her numbers use smaller sets than mine and are therefore even more prone to the vagaries of the random number deities. What she did notice was an 83% drop rate on gems from thorium (15/18), 1.35 gems per prospecting with mithril (27/20), and 1.29 gems per attempt with adamant (18/14). These numbers jive with my memories of the experience. She reported rare cases of getting 3 gems per attempt and several attempts w/o getting anything.

These are all over the charts but show two things:

1. the results from prospecting were much more random before this recent patch
2. rare gems really were pretty rare

Her one talasite from 3.5 stacks is a 7.1% drop rate… compared to the 26% drop rate that I noticed under the new math. The higher randomness prior to 2.1 meant it was possible to burn an entire stack of ore and get only dust. I remember very acutely a stretch of 6 adamant prospectings where I got no gems.

If her rate of ~1.3 gems per prospecting (assuming the thorium exercise was a fluke) was accurate, then the numbers are similar enough to mine to assume that no real change in the overall rate of gem production resulted from the patch… they just normalized things a bit, and I like it

thottbot

It just occurred to me (4pm, May 23rd) that Thott might have some data on the subject. Turns out they do. I’ve saved a snapshot of the data before it becomes too corrupted by the changes in this patch, but the trends they show are pretty easy to spot.

The adamant prospectings show a rate of 2.2-2.4% for each rare gem and 18.8-19.7% for each uncommon gem. Add things up and they give a 13.8% chance of getting any rare gem and 115.6% chance of getting an uncommon gem for a grand average of 1.29 gems per prospecting – confirming Kaliope’s numbers but showing that rare gems aren’t quite as rare as in her experience.

The fel iron attempts have about half the sample size, but are still quite statistically valid. Rare gems had a 0.7-1.0% chance of dropping (5.3% total) where uncommon gems had a 15.5-16.8% chance (97% total). So with fel iron, people were getting ~1.02 gems per attempt. Fel iron clearly had a lower drop rate.

So in conclusionary fashion, I will finally give a rest to this post by stating that my current guesses as to the changes to the new math:

• Both fel iron and adamant have been given the same base chance to prospect green quality gems. This chance is probably similar to the old adamant rate of 1.15 gems per attempt.
• Adamant rare gems look like they might have had their drop rate doubled. Clearly, making this statement from only 35 samples isn’t as accurate as it could be… but something like 0.25 rare gems per attempt sounds like a perfectly reasonable number to me – especially if I were the one pulling these numbers out of the proverbial hat when tweaking the algorithm

With the advent of Burning Crusade, I was pretty torn on how to respec my hunter. I’d played up into my 50′s as a heavy marksmanship build before switching to heavy survival. I’d meant to post my build ideas before the expansion landed, but I was otherwise occupied.

Currently, I am back to a very heavy marksmanship build (43 points). I’d planned on spending the remaining 18 in survival, but decided against it when I dinged 61. At present, I have a 1/43/9 build and am planning on spending my remaining points in the recently upgraded low tier beast talents in an attempt to increase my general durability.

== current build – 9/43/9 ==

The general thought behind my current build is reliable damage. I don’t crit nearly as much as I used to, but I hit hard and I hit consistently, and I can continue doing damage even when low on mana.

Beast Mastery (9 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    1/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide

There’s not a whole lot to say about these talents except that they’re much better than they used to be. Endurance Training and Thick Hide together give me +5% hp and +10% armour from eq and give my pet +10% hp and +20% armour.

The point in Focused Fire is planned as my my lvl 70 talent. It gives +1% damage output and +10% crit to kill command. It might almost be worth getting two points in Focused Fire for the additional +1% damage in exchange for a small loss in defense.

Marksmanship (43 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience
    5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization
    1/1 Trueshot Aura
    5/5 Master Marksman
    1/1 Silencing Shot

Not a lot to say here. My goal here was to get Silencing Shot. It’s nice. I like it. I wish the cooldown were a bit shorter, but it does still work well as a ranged interrupt (the only reliable ranged spell interrupt in the game, I believe). More importantly, it allows you to pull casters. This has always been a pain, LoS pulls not generally being possible in wide open places

Efficiency is critical. Every build should have it. 10% reduction in mana costs to shots and stings (where 99% of your mana is going in the first place…) are not to be underestimated. Especially for a hybrid class that gets way less mana than full caster types.

Rapid Killing is nice. It’s only two points and it gives you a 20 second buff when you kill something that gives you +20% damage to your next hit. This encourages opening combat with Aimed Shot. In addition, these two points also reduce your Rapid Fire cooldown by 40%.

Rapid Fire is amazing. +40% ranged attack speed for 15 seconds in exchange for 100 mana. So… in stead of firing one arrow every 2.5 seconds, you wind up firing every 1.8 seconds. What that really translates to is an extra 2 shots for 100 mana. The single most mana efficient attack ability hunters ever get.

Concussive Barrage isn’t that impressive initially. Woo hoo. It dazes your opponents. Occasionally. This sort of thing would be nice while kiting… but you’re prolly already using concussive shot and frost traps already… No, what Concussive Barrage is really all about is the new shot that hunters get at lvl 62.

Steady Shot costs 110 mana and can be fired off once a second. It does (RAP * 0.3) + 150 damage and an additional 175 damage to dazed targets. Thus, if you pay attention and spam steady whenever your concussive daze goes off… you can get 3 or 4 hits in on the dazed target for some happy bonus damage.

Survival (9 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye

The nine points in survival go well with any build.

Hawk Eye is absolutely critical, however. With it, hunters have the longest attack range of any class in the game. Without it… shrug.

Monster and Humanoid Slaying give +3% to all damage dealt to beasts, humanoids, dragons, and giants and an additional +3% to crit damage against them. These mobs make up the vast majority of the killable things in the game. You can do a lot worse than to spend points here.

== heavy crit – 0/20/41 ==

The general idea behind this build is to crit hard and to crit often.

Beast Mastery (0 points)
    None

Marksmanship (20 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    2/5 Improved Arcane Shot
    5/5 Efficiency
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots

Survival (41 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye
    5/5 Deflection
    5/5 Survivalist
    3/3 Surefooted
    3/3 Killer Instinct
    5/5 Lightning Reflexes
    3/3 Thrill of the Hunt
    1/1 Wyvern Sting
    3/3 Expose Weakness
    4/5 Master Tactician

Wyvern Sting is great (12 sec crowd control, 2 minute cooldown). Now that you can use it in combat, it’s even better. It’s awesomely fun in PvP, and is one of the only ways I know of to reliably take people down as they fly past you on their epic mounts. If you go anywhere near this deep into Survival, it’d be a crime not to pick up Wyvern.

Killer Instinct is an additional +3% to crit rate on top of the +5% you pick up from Lethal Shots. With the +3% to hit from Surefooted, you will be scoring dramatically more crits with just these few talents alone. Add in +15% agility from Lightning Reflexes, and that crit chance goes up even higher.

Thrill of the Hunt means that any time one of your shots (aimed, arcane, steady) crits, you get 40% of the mana back.

Expose Weakness means that 30% of your crits cause everyone attacking your victim to get a heavy bonus to their attack power for 7 seconds.

Master Tactician means that every time you land a ranged hit, you have a 6% chance of getting a +8% buff to your crit chance for 8 seconds. I’m only grabbing 4 points here because I think the 5th point in Mortal Shots is worth slightly more than it would be here. Ie, that is a +2% to crit chance that is effective for 8 seconds after every 6% of your hits versus +6% to crit damage every time you crit.

== chainmail tank – 11/27/23 ==

This build is meant for hunters who somehow manage to keep taking damage. It’s not enough to make you tank better than, oh, say… a shaman… But it gives you some incredible survivability when you do wind up getting hit. The goal here is to avoid dying long enough to either kill your enemy or to run away.

Beast Mastery (11 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    3/3 Improved Aspect of the Monkey
    3/3 Thick Hide

Marksmanship (27 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    1/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience

Survival (23 points)
    1/3 Monster Slaying
    1/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye
    5/5 Deflection
    5/5 Survivalist
    1/1 Deterrence
    3/3 Surefooted
    2/2 Improved Feign Death
    2/2 Survival Instincts

4% damage reduction from Survival Instincts is not to be underestimated. That’s four percent of every hit from every source you ever take. This is better than getting +4% max hp. Much, much better.

Deflection is a very nice toy. +25% to both parry and dodge sounds like +50% to avoid getting hit to me. It only lasts 10 seconds, and is on a 5 minute cooldown, but 50% damage avoidance for 10 seconds can make an enormous difference. Throw improved monkey and deflection into the mix and you are now dodging at +39% and parrying at +30%.

Add do this the numbers I’ve already talked about from the other low tier beast talents and +10% more hp from Survivalist… it’s still not always enough.

There’s nothing shameful about running into a corner and playing dead.

Feign rarely fails against stuff of your own level or lower, but it frequently fails vs stuff that’s bigger than you. Improved Feign Death pretty much reduces your chance of failure to zero versus mobs of your own level, and gives you a very good chance against things 1 or 2 levels higher.

Scatter Shot is a great stalling tactic when running away. It works within the dead zone and as an instant cast, you can fire it while jumping around a corner.

Finally, the +15% chance to resist movement impairing effects (snares – daze?) from Surefooted can’t hurt when trying to get out of a crowd of uglies in order to find a safer place to fall over.

== machinegun dps – 7/45/9 ==

With the death of the old 10 second cycle and the improvements to arcane shot, I like the idea of a hunter build that can not only keep up with a rogue for burst dps, but can make the rogue look like a paladin by comparison. This is the closest I’ve come up with. Of course, it makes an OOMkin druid look like a Dark Pact warlock, but shrug

As long as you keep yourself well hydrated, load up on mana regen eq and take advantage of Aspect of the Viper between fights and when low on juice, it can work.

Beast Mastery (7 points)
    5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk
    2/2 Focused Fire

Marksmanship (45 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    5/5 Improved Arcane Shot
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience
    5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization
    3/3 Careful Aim
    1/1 Trueshot Aura
    5/5 Master Marksman

Survival (9 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye

We’ve seen most of these talents before in the other heavy marks builds. But the philosophy behind this build is a bit different.

Improved Arcane Shot means a 16.7% increase in the rate at which you can bombard things with arcane damage. In addition to loading up on mana/5 eq, a healthy smattering of +spell/arcane damage eq would not be entirely wasted either. You’re still doing a mix of physical and arcane damage and should be switching over to Steady Shot whenever you daze an enemy, but the arcane shot damage is pretty impressive when you speed it up.

Rapid Killing is also still important in this build, much more so because of the 2 minute cooldown reduction on Rapid Fire. The extra 2 or 3 shots you get from Rapid Fire are two or three chances for physical damage crits on top of whatever you’re getting with arcane. When you have the Rapid Killing buff in place, consider opening fights with arcane in stead of aimed shots, a crit with magical damage can be a lot more impressive than with physical. And it’s faster.

In addition to spamming Rapid Fire and Arcane Shot, the other important part of this build concept is Improved Hawk. I’ve talked about this talent before (in basically every other post I’ve ever made on hunters), but it bears repeating here in context.

Improved Aspect of the Hawk gives you a 10% chance with every normal ranged attack of getting a +15% attack speed buff for 12 seconds. The 10% chance means that this effect should proc roughly once every 25 seconds of combat if you’ve got a 2.55 normal ranged attack rate (that’s a 3.0 second weapon and a +15% speed quiver). 12 second buffs proccing every 25 seconds = 50% of the time Plus, of course, there’s also the slightly increased chance while the buff is active that the effect will proc again.

With a +15% speed quiver and a 1.8 speed weapon, you get a normal attack rate of 1.53 seconds. Improved hawk should proc roughly once every 15 seconds in this case, ie, it should be an almost constant effect that gives you an attack speed of closer to 1 second. Throw Rapid Fires off whenever you’re under the influence of the improve hawk effect and … your attack speed number suddenly becomes something closer to 0.36 for 15 seconds. That’s 41 arrows.

War Master Voone drops a lvl 55 green 1.6 speed bow. It’s only 36 dps, but…

== animal trainer – 46/12/3 ==

I am strongly tempted to play with this build, and I’m probably going to at least give it a whirl when I hit 63 and catch myself a warp stalker…

The goal is to stand back and let your pet do all of the work. Fire normal shots with a fast bow and concentrate your mana on keeping your furry little assassin friend alive.

This is the only beast spec I’m going to discuss, so pay attention

Beast Mastery (46 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    2/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide
    2/2 Improved Revive Pet
    5/5 Unleashed Fury
    2/2 Improved Mend Pet
    5/5 Ferocity
    2/2 Spirit Bond
    2/2 Bestial Discipline
    2/2 Animal Handler
    5/5 Frenzy
    3/3 Ferocious Inspiration
    3/3 Catlike Reflexes
    5/5 Serpent's Swiftness

Marksmanship (12 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    2/2 Go for the Throat

Survival (3 points)
    3/3 Hawk Eye

First off, the things I’m not picking up. I’m not grabbing Efficiency, I’m not grabing Rapid Killing, and I’m not grabbing the Human/Beast Slaying talents. You don’t need these as much here. You’re relying on your pet to do all of the work. Firing your own weapon (ideally something fast) is just a way of scoring crits in order to proc the 50 point focus regen bonus from Go for the Throat.

I’m also ignoring the whole Beast Within chain because I see it as primarily useful in PvP. The goal with this build is not to send a pet charging through fear spells to eat mages, it’s to let the pet eat mobs for you.

Ok, grabbing Improved Revive and Mend should be a no brainer for any beast spec hunter. Keeping your pet alive and getting rid of nasty debuffs is essential… Spirit Bond is also incredibly nice, 2% max hp regen every 10 seconds for both you and the pet equates to +40/5 hp regen if you have 4000 hp. This regen continues during combat.

Unleashed Fury means +20% dps. Ferocity means +10% crit rate. Bestial Discipline means 2x the focus regen (+whatever you’re giving your pet from ranged crits). Animal Handler means +4%. Catlike Reflexes means +9% dodge (on top of the +10% hp and +20% armour already mentioned). Improved Hunter’s Mark means your Mark is suddenly quite useful to your pet (increases their damage).

Serpent’s Swiftness means +20% to attack speed for both you and your pet. More attack speed for you means more frequent crits and more +50 focus heals to your pet means more often your pet can use its own attacks.

+20% attack speed for your pet means a vicious feedback circle of destruction. With Frenzy, your pet gets an additional +30% buff to attack speed that lasts for 8 seconds after every crit the pet lands. By giving your pet +10% to crit from Ferocity… the faster attacks are much more likely to crit, which procs more faster attacks, which are likely to crit and maintain the maniac attack speed…

To top it all off, Ferocious Inspiration gives your entire party (self and pet included) an additional +3% to damage done for 10 seconds after the pet scores a crit. This is phenomenally better than Trueshot Aura’s +100 AP (~7 DPS), especially when you consider you don’t have to actively cast it, and that it improves damage for casters as well as physical types.

update – Feb 4th, 2007

I was sick most of this weekend, so naturally I had to do something silly when not curled up in bed. That something silly was a respec to the beast mastery build above. I’m lvl 63 at this point, and have only purchased the one point in Serpent’s Swiftness (so am missing the 4 points in swiftness and 3 points in Catlike Reflexes). And… the build is useful.

I feel much more durable in general than the other build (I’ve got about 5000 hp and 50/5 hp regen). However, not having Aimed Shot or Wyvern or Silence is weird… In fact, I don’t have any abilities gained from talents. My personal DPS (ie, that achieved by shooting arrows into things) has decreased by about 20-30 since the rebuild. However, my pet’s DPS has increased by 40-50 points. Plus the pet’s inspiration buff is almost always active… for +3% DPS to the entire party.

The beast build kills slightly more quickly than my “reliable” build. But it feels VERY different, and takes a very different mindset to play effectively. I am also basically guaranteed to die when my pet dies. I’m planning on trying to stick with this build until 66 or 70, depending on my mood. I suspect that the final 4 points in swiftness will make an enormous difference in my attitude, but I’ll have to wait and see.

My general experience is that in instance runs, my hunter would be forced into operating at some sort of really low damage output level because despite mage waters, he’d be perpetually drained of juice. I now have some +regen gear (a whopping +11/5 atm) and am loving it to death – because it’s SOMETHING.

The normal procedure for a hunter in general bombardment mode is to use a big, slow weapon and fire off aimed and multi shots in what some people call the 10 second cycle (even though the cycle actually works out to be much longer than that).

So the question is this. What do I (and most other hunters) do wrong with my mana?

disclaimer

My math here isn’t perfect, in fact, it’s kind of lazy. But, even considering that, the point should be pretty clear and valid.

the ‘experiment’

Supposing 100 spirit on hunter with all the right talents for max damage and efficiency with shots and stings in question and no +regen eq.

Mana regen is 100/5 + 15 = 35 every 2 sec tick. 5 seconds after casting a spell that uses mana, this regen is disabled.

Aimed has a 6 sec cooldown and a casting tim of 3 seconds. Multi has a 10 sec cooldown and replaces your normal auto-shot. Aimed shot fires in addition to auto-shot and does not interrupt the auto-shot cooldown.

We will assume that there is only one target and that there’s no kiting or any other silliness going on, and that the hunter is using a weapon with an approx 3 second rate of fire.

The number in brackets is the approximate timestamp in seconds of the action, the column to the right shows what would happen if multi shot were not used.

[00] aimed start
[01]
[02]
[03] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)
     auto
[04]
[05]
[06] multi (+172 damage, -217 mana)               auto
[07]
[08]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[09] auto
     aimed start
[10]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[11] regen (+35 mana)                             (no regen)
[12] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)               auto
[13]
[14]
[15] auto
[16]
[17] regen (+35 mana)
[18] multi (+172 damage, -217 mana)               auto
     aimed start                                  regen (+35 mana)
[19]
[20]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[21] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)
     auto
[22]
[23]
[24] auto
[25]
[26] regen (+35 mana)
[27]
     auto
     aimed start
[28] regen (+35 mana)
[29]
[30] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)

So, over a 30 second period, it is reasonable to fire off 4 aimed shots and 2 multi’s for a total of +2745 damage +4 extra normal hits worth of damage (from the aimeds). It cost a total of 1550 mana and the player regenned a total of 140, bringing the cost to 1410 mana.

If multi-shots are removed, the amount of damage inflicted is reduced by 345 and the amount of mana spent is reduced by 434 AND the amount of mana regenerated is increased by 3 more ticks of 35 (105) for a total overall cost of only 766 mana.

verdict

Using multi-shot more than doubles your mana cost over time and if used against a single target, only increases your damage output by the equivalent of one extra normal shot (your normal shots -do- hit for 300-400 damage each, right?).

Just to grind the numbers a bit further… 10+4 shots in 30 seconds for an average of say 350×14 = 4900 damage (barring criticals) + 2745 from the spells gives us a total of 7645 damage (255 dps) for 1410 mana. 5.42 damage per mana.

Removing multi from the mix, we get 7300 damage (243 dps) for 661 mana and a ratio of 9.53 damage per mana.

Figure the average hunter has 4000 mana. Using aimed+multi, he only has enough juice to go for roughly 90 seconds this way (it’s actually a bit less because after the first 30 end, his next shot is a multi, which slows the regen down even more).

Using aimed alone, he can go for 180 seconds of solid bombardment w/o potions or other sources of mana regeneration.

stings

Throwing stings into the mix makes hunter mana efficiency even worse.

Over the 30 second period, assume a hunter fires off two serpent stings (one at 4 and one at 22 seconds). This costs him an extra 450 mana for a maximum of 1221 damage with a few gotchas.

1. sting damage is nature type, which is subject to resistance.
2. dots don’t crit, so the 1221 is the absolute max you’ll inflict with a pair.
3. because sting is a dot, that also means that the mob has to last for the entire duration to take all the damage.

In addition to costing 450 mana in the 30 second period to fire off the two stings, it also eliminates another mana regen tick, effectively costing 35 more
mana.

7645 damage + 40.7x(15+8)=936 from one and a half stings = 8581 damage total in the 30 seconds if the hunter uses sting (286 dps). But it costs 1860 mana to do it, giving us a ratio of 4.61 damage per mana spent and an approximate burn time of only 65 seconds before drained.

+regen/5

As I mentioned earlier, I finally have some +regen/5 eq and I love it. Tony brings up the point that a lot of the endgame hunter gear has this sort of buff on it (not to mention trinkets, etc…).

Most notable among these options would be the new Cryptstalker set (Tier 3 raid gear), almost every piece of which grants +mana/5 (to a total of +26/5). Completion of 6 pieces of the 9 piece set means you get 50 mana back every time you land a crit (which happens a lot since the set has +7% crit in addition to the +283 agi from the entire set for an additional +5.4% crit). Completing 8 pieces of the set reduces the total costs of your aimed and multi shots by 20 mana each…

Of course, I’m never gonna even see a piece of cryptstalker gear, much less ever wear it, much less ever see any of these set bonuses, so why do I care?

So, I corrected the math and it turned out that over 5 minutes, the 3.0 second xbow could hope to get an extra 3 arrows. From 100 in 300 seconds to 103 in 300 seconds So, yeah.

But that also got me to thinking that the speed of the bow really does make an enormous difference in how useful this talent can be. So, I’m going to figure out how good the fastest weapon in the game would be…

According to Thott, they ship a few bows with base attack delays as low as 1.6 seconds, but it looks like there is an epic rifle with a 1.5 second attack speed. So, I will do the math given the unlikely event that you somehow managed to score a Precicely Calibrated Boomstick and are using an ammo pouch that gives +14% attack speed – lowering your delay to 1.32 seconds.

20 shots * 1.32 sec/shot = 26.4 secs
8 seconds / 0.92 sec/shot = 8 shots + 0.64 seconds toward next shot
12 shots * 1.32 sec/shot – 0.64 sec = 15.2 secs until next buff
8 shots/8 secs + 12 shots/12.2 secs = 20.2 seconds for each additional 20 shots

Without improved hawk, the boomstick is delivering 227 shots in 5 minutes. With improved hawk, you’re looking at 288 bullets. That’s a blooming 27% increase in sustained damage output with this baby. Of course, this machine-gun comes with a heavy price tag.

The boomstick in question is an epic world drop – which means there’s no realistic way to get it short of paying 100-200g for it. It is also only a level 43 item (despite its purpleness), which means that there are about 50 other weapons (both blue and purple) that deliver more damage, including a few with only 1.6 or 1.7 second base delays.

The +14% attack speed quiver/pouches aren’t difficult to get. I’ve got one. They’re 16 slot. Apparently, with a bucketload of Alterac Valley reputation, you can buy one with +15% to attack speed, but that one is also still only 16 slots.

16 slots x 200 rounds/slot = 3200 rounds on your person at a time (unless you’re packing multiple quivers…)

3200 rounds consumed at a rate of 288 per 300 seconds? 3328 seconds of combat before you are 100% out of ammo. That’s 55 minutes – iff you don’t actually use rapid shot as well. You’ll be running out of juice during each and every instance you try to run

Back when I was running around with my 1.7 second bow and a 12-slot quiver. I remember having major problems keeping myself from running out of ammo. And this was before improved hawk worked like this (it used to just be a +attack power buff).

My final analysis? I think this would be a very fun toy to play around with in a straight PvP build hunter. Get yourself a Bloodseeker Bat from ZG, move into Alterac Valley and mow down those pesky mages and priests like nobody’s business.