How much do Clerics need CHA?

[tadkins]

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That's a huge oversight on my part, and super valuable to some people. I really should smith up the bertox cleric just to be able to do that stuff. It's already high-ish from the sanctum earring quest. Great observation!

A while back I saw an Erudite Pally wearing a full set of Imbued Steelsilk, the Quellious version. Which means somewhere out there is an actual Erudite Cleric who actively chose Quellious as their deity. Just ignored all the min/maxxing and went for that choice, probably for RP reasons. I'd love to know that story. Just kind of cool to think about.

[Gustoo]

They have similar critical stats to humans with the addition of I think better resist bonus? Not bad.

[Zuranthium]

Well to me the Snare clicky is a critical part of picking Human if I were going to, and the Erudite doesn't get it. +5 magic resist (but also -5 disease resist) isn't exciting in comparison at all, especially when you also have to suffer the lower strength stat.

[zelld52]

Cleric get mana free pacify. With 200 cha you won’t get many critical resists.

I was my groups puller and healer 55-60 with Donal bracer. Thurg BP to Mark of Karn the mob and then out to pull again while the group killed. Thurg legs to heal the group, or a Celestial Heal to top off the tank before back out to pulling.

Works really well.

[Solist]

You wont convince shit players there is a better way.

CHA is the only stat that matters and in a duo that's even more so. Yes there is exceptions, like duoing prot/tola, and nothing but your manapool matters. Or monk epics. Or you could have basic farming all broken up and it's all singles etc. But for a group, for crawling, for duoing and seal teaming around zones, for duoing chardok royals, fungi's, etc....cha is king. For CR's it's king. For breaking into camps it's king. For leapfrogging shitty groups it's king.

Sadly there is a point if you play the class reactively and miss out on playing it well that you hit 60 and become a ch bot, and then for 10 years you tell people on forums the class is a healer only. So much more to do and be active (and it's not rocket surgery).

There's very few group compositions that suit the cleric healing primarily; it's pretty rare occasion I identify the best thing to be doing is sitting and medding then healing; controversially heals are the least efficient thing a cleric can do in most groups. When compared to controlling all pulling and CC, and leaving the DPS to do dps instead of run about collecting mobs...not attacking. Even stuffing about with CC is more expensive to do anything except a mana free pacify and atone on an add like an illis shaman or some shit. Fighting mobs while a cleric is sitting there staring at a rooted add that's free casting everything in it's arsenal is incredibly frustrating.

Per above, a cleric breaking rooms with pacify is infinitely better than an enchanter. The enc is free to cast and CC as much as he likes while the cleric DA's the crit fail. 55+ with stun command is pure cheese for HS as an example (where 6 HT's do zero damage to the cleric). There isn't an enc on the server that wouldn't give that job up to a class with far more survivability and also allows the enc to freely fix it. The opposite is the cleric is reactively trying to heal, while also trying to pull aggro against colour/aemez resists/rooting mobs and closing the melee gap to buy enc ability to cast. Velks same deal. Gnome cleric BiS for this for wall vision for targeting.

If you wanna sit and med, click greater heal and root mobs the warrior pulled in sol b or something while he gets wailed on by 3-4 at a time thats fine. Most people do. Most people suck. Or you can spend 30 mana casting 3 lulls at close to zero risk. You spend far less mana keeping single mobs in camp and lose far less mobs to rival groups if your kill order is consistently the same and kill on respawn etc (like sequentially doing every warlord PH so noone else gets one).

[Zuranthium]

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Per above, a cleric breaking rooms with pacify is infinitely better than an enchanter. The enc is free to cast and CC as much as he likes while the cleric DA's the crit fail.

If your plan is to DA a camp to break it, then you don't fucking need Lull at all (and thus Charisma is again irrelevant). That is the inherent flaw with Lull - it's not guaranteed, so if you *need* it to do a camp, then you are simply rolling dice on whether or not it will actually be a benefit. This is especially true in actual Classic EQ; p99 has far lower critical resist rates.

If the Lull is indeed needed to break the camp, then it needs to be the Enchanter doing it. That way the Cleric can rez them and the duo can keep trying until it's successful.

Max mana (Wisdom) on a Cleric impacts their potential ability to do the hardest content and keep a group alive in the most difficult points. Charisma does not impact their ability to actually win fights as much. It is instead a time-saving measurement: "how many lulls will be successful so we don't have to root + camp." Ideally a Cleric would want max in both stats, but more mana is ultimately the more critical thing to have.

[Toxigen]

Agreed, Solist. Just the vast majority of players are shitters and just want to sit there and watch health bars (netflix).

[Vexenu]

No one is saying that CHA is useless, or that Clerics can't do a lot of cool stuff with their spell line. We're just saying that CHA is literally ONLY useful in the following circumstances:

1) When you are casting Lull in a situation where a crit fail is guaranteed to kill you.
2) When you are trying to CR yourself naked.

These situations certainly happen, probably to some players more than others depending on their playstyle preferences, but they still represent a tiny fraction of overall playtime. Conversely, max mana is useful 100% of the time, as it functions as a deeper gas tank that you always have available. HP, resists (and even AC to a point) are similarly useful. More is always better.

Is more CHA always better? Sure. But it functionally has no benefit unless you are heavily utilizing Lull in the scenarios outlined above, which means that you have a really strange and risky playstyle and seemingly don't know any good Enchanters, and that you're going on a hell of a lot of solo CRs.

To summarize:

Mana, HP, resists, AC = always useful for keeping yourself and your group alive.
CHA = only useful if you are relying on Lulls to stay alive.

[Solist]

Originally Posted by Zuranthium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If your plan is to DA a camp to break it, then you don't fucking need Lull at all (and thus Charisma is again irrelevant). That is the inherent flaw with Lull - it's not guaranteed, so if you *need* it to do a camp, then you are simply rolling dice on whether or not it will actually be a benefit. This is especially true in actual Classic EQ; p99 has far lower critical resist rates.

If the Lull is indeed needed to break the camp, then it needs to be the Enchanter doing it. That way the Cleric can rez them and the duo can keep trying until it's successful.

Max mana (Wisdom) on a Cleric impacts their potential ability to do the hardest content and keep a group alive in the most difficult points. Charisma does not impact their ability to actually win fights as much. It is instead a time-saving measurement: "how many lulls will be successful so we don't have to root + camp." Ideally a Cleric would want max in both stats, but more mana is ultimately the more critical thing to have.

Again, I apologise that you likely don't play with competent people. If you step outside the mindset you've shoehorned every class in to there is a different, more efficient way to play. There is two tenets to think about which is reducing RNG to the lowest portion of any outcome in your actions so the player has the most control, and when RNG happens negatively be in a position to be better off. It is very often (but not always) the best bet for the cleric to do those, allowing the enc freedom to cast. It is very often (but not always) best for the cleric to have the highest stats that serve them the most for the given task.

High manapools serve little purpose except in the most protracted fights. If your mana never hits zero, you had too much mana and that was a total waste of stats equipped. You could fight for 10 hours crawling around HS and never go under 40m...You had too much mana. Your enc probably died 4 times from shit lull fails though. If you're smart you kept the pet pacified for free the entire time so the CR didn't involve backtracking to find a pet or losing 5k of gear. If the cleric did the room breaks, noone ever dies as cleric gets the same RNG for critical fails as the enc. But the cleric survives them every single time. A critical fail for the cleric can be significantly worse and be survivable for the group, than if it happens to the enc.

Those long protracted fights are generally the result of poor players not tracking spawn/spawn timers, mass pulling rooms etc. You never need those mana pools outside of raiding except in some super unique situations (like I said, duo chardok royals, duo monk epic fights, etc).

Again you really need to elevate your play to appreciate how to control what can be controlled, and mitigate RNG that cant be the best way either class or group composition allows. Emp in seb is an

Can I also raise the point that the enc doesn't need to cap cha when generally charming and fighting around, 205-210 is fine. That leaves a LOT of extra AC and HP available to gear if your regular partner is a capped CHA cleric. Totally changes the gear dynamic for a pair of buddies or a husband/wife team etc. Enc survivability goes through the roof with AC.

Originally Posted by Vexenu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

No one is saying that CHA is useless, or that Clerics can't do a lot of cool stuff with their spell line. We're just saying that CHA is literally ONLY useful in the following circumstances:

1) When you are casting Lull in a situation where a crit fail is guaranteed to kill you.
2) When you are trying to CR yourself naked.

These situations certainly happen, probably to some players more than others depending on their playstyle preferences, but they still represent a tiny fraction of overall playtime. Conversely, max mana is useful 100% of the time, as it functions as a deeper gas tank that you always have available. HP, resists (and even AC to a point) are similarly useful. More is always better.

Is more CHA always better? Sure. But it functionally has no benefit unless you are heavily utilizing Lull in the scenarios outlined above, which means that you have a really strange and risky playstyle and seemingly don't know any good Enchanters, and that you're going on a hell of a lot of solo CRs.

To summarize:

Mana, HP, resists, AC = always useful for keeping yourself and your group alive.
CHA = only useful if you are relying on Lulls to stay alive.

You're claming there is only two situations. I'd say those two situations are wrong you've mentioned. But until you go and do it yourself, you're just commenting from the sidelines.

My own experience has changed in a dozen years. Early on P99 I deliberately played a low cha cleric, avoided the stat as much as possible. My entire meta for playing as a cleric revolved around being a hillbilly and just healing. Then realising there is more to do and play with, so built the toon around duo/trio comps where we could invis pull, so would rely on my low CHA, & land invis while lull cast, and single pull fungi king/HS nameds/drusallar necks/emp/etc. I stopped farming fungi's when they went under 115-125k or so if that's a reference as to when on p99 that was. It worked well as I could duo king with any class that could survive 20 seconds between ch's and could invis me (mage/war/ranger/etc), then the invis pulling was patched.

A week after that patch I delevelled & deleted my (vp geared) 60 cleric, rerolled max cha halfling. It wasn't a good trade losing snare for sneak, deleted him at 60 (rip another hosh stick). PS. you can't loot a dead corpse of an identically named player if you delete and reroll with same name.

Got the dark elf back and relevelled with max cha gear...even with the shit race I found it was game changing at that point. A few friends cottoned on to it and all did the same too. So I made plans for green human/inny for green launch. The combo was amazing, but I missed wall vision too much and it was very time and mana consuming recasting IVU to get next two targets in guk, or during the rubi farming process wall vision would have been huge while calm moving around cazic thule. So I've kind of landed on bertox gnome being best possible for my play style (ideally you want a tunare snare 1hb), and I appreciate the human inny as well almost as much as I do very occasionally wish I had a castable snare. But nowhere near as much as I missed wall vision. Gnome easier/cheaper mobility through doors with aon/probes, easier targeting and scouting. Wall vision for me is just huge though, for others they don't use it or miss it.

In summary
So I've tried the 3.6k mana near BiS kunark cle with low cha. (server first hosh staff, 4th? donals bp, manastone etc)
Tried the 2.8k mana cha kunark cle with high cha (hosh staff, donals, manastone etc)
Tried the full cha set vanilla cle (with full hp set obvs as AC was dogshit, and manastones duhh)
Tried the full cha set velious, and settled on a 3.7k mana alternate or 240cha primary gear (all the usual clickies)
And have played plenty of 4k-4.1k mana velious cle as a reference point.

The velious cha set one is by far the best. You give up almost nothing and absolutely trivialise group content. You allow your group to be almost any composition and you can make it work. Thats at all game levels and content releases through velious. In classic/vanilla on green I was the 2nd? cleric to 49 behing bayleigh and being able to be super mobile and CR groups in efreeti/lguk/etc was lucritive on its own. Let alone able to pac rooms and just manastone/HP set/undead nuke frenzy/undead tower nameds all night. Controlling all the pulls in highkeep so we could keep it as a duo/trio and not need a half dozen idiots riding coat tails pulling 3 at once inefficiently. I do remember only maybe 3 or 4 clerics on the server went that route and we all did the same dumb shit no other cleric could and I think it changed a lot of peoples minds who were around.

So for me cha is the primary stat. Especially in velious when you don't sacrifice that much and maintain a workable amount of AC/HP too. As I said you could have 8,000mana and if you only ever used the first 2,000, you had 6k mana of wasted stats and probably had a real shit time not being able to spend it; watching people die in botched pulls etc. CHA isn't always the best stat, and sometimes full mana is, I don't think anyone could argue that. There has been times on P99 where we sacrificed every stat for others like pre velious even max MR and at times we ran max PR and FR sets on P99 with 355 resist caps but those days don't exist. But I'd say for almost every person playing a cleric that isn't a dedicated CH bot on protracted mana intensive fights like unslowable raid content... You can get along just fine in full cha set and by the time you're 60/collect some raid pixels, your mana is appropriate to be better than most guilds cleric bots anyway.

Huge swing...
There is absolutely the same argument for others classes I'll also say but for the sake of a paragraph, discussing AC vs HP on a warrior. Parsing some of the raid content on p99 over the years it's just laughable how much bossses are over-tuned from 'live' figures and thus how irrelevent AC is when you are a raid tank at any content above vindi and kunark dragons. But if you get in an xp group there is some 65-6700hp tanks on p99 that are significantly worse than a 6k tank in a ridiculously high AC setup. Wearing the AC gear on anything resembling a raid boss is a mistake (to make that clear, doubly). One of my warriors has a few gear swaps for a quick 250AC change and the difference is incredible (+50 from ears swap, +20 from ring swap, +35 offhand swap, +45 range swap, +20 from neck) if you tank a dracolich, VS, or group content/chardok stuff/run around seb for fun etc. It goes against all of the p99 obsession with maximum HP warriors but reality is all those group tanks should care about nothing but AC for maximum exp/hour/efficiency. But that change is measurable, instantly recognisable.

Anyway I'm done preaching, I'd rather just see people experiment with it themselves and test it out and come to whatever conclusion the data and empirical feel of the gameplay is. Some just want to sit in the corner, med, click the box with the shorter green bar and click a heal. That has worked fine for clerics on everquest for years, still does today on EQ. Some wizards want to sit and nuke, some enchanters would rather have someone pull 6 mobs and they CC it rather than them leaving camp and pre pacifying a few, some warriors cant taunt mezzed mobs and cycle targets mid fight and just hope for the best. There are many different ways to play, and a high cha cleric is a way to turn a reactive class into a very active one. Thats why I say cha is the dominant stat. And I keep a high mana set for those times I need long CH endurance, but I just log on one of my other clerics for that anyway. Easily is just about perfect as is, for anyone that's played with him [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Zuranthium]

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Again, I apologise that you likely don't play with competent people.

Stop repeating useless phrases, it doesn't give you any real point. The FACT of the matter is that if Lull is needed to break a room, it should not be the Cleric doing it, when there is someone else there with the ability. It's a simple single point of failure scenario. The encounter is won or lost based upon Lull being successful or not, so the Cleric should not be the person doing it. You put another person in that position, and keep bringing them back with Cleric rez as needed, until enough Lulls are successful such that the encounter can be won.

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

High manapools serve little purpose except in the most protracted fights.

Those are the fights in the game that actually matter. Most players want to be able to raid or do other challenging group content in order to get the best loot. Telling a cleric to chase after CHA stat instead of getting mana is hindering their ability to be successful in the most important modes of the game.

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Those long protracted fights are generally the result of poor players not tracking spawn/spawn timers, mass pulling rooms etc. You never need those mana pools outside of raiding except in some super unique situations (like I said, duo chardok royals, duo monk epic fights, etc).

Inaccurate. Long protracted fights can be the result of needing to pull a large number of NPC's so that another group can't tag them before your group. A VERY COMMON scenario in this game.

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Again you really need to elevate your play to appreciate how to control what can be controlled, and mitigate RNG that cant be the best way either class or group composition allows. Emp in seb is an

There is nothing elevated about your play compared to mine, stop thinking that. You've said nothing new of value and "high skill" Cleric play in this game pales in comparison to what it is elsewhere; you would be lost in Guild Wars 1 PvP. Love how you just ended this paragraph mid sentence.

Racing to 50 on a new server, you could have an argument about prioritizing Charisma. But that's not what the game is right now. It can also be helpful to prioritize CHA if you're playing the character for a specific small group purpose. But again, that's not what most Clerics are trying to do in the game.