HOW TO PK as a CLERIC - the way I do it
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Quick Introduction:
Many players have not yet learned that, ever since the Morai update, clerics have incredible potential in 1vs1 pk against a range of other classes. In particular, it seems that many of the clerics themselves have not yet learned about what they can do! It is my hope that this guide will help some of those clerics. As well, it goes without saying that a cleric always has been, and always will be, the backbone of any successful group pk, due to a wide range of buffs, heals, long-lasting control skills, and the all important Revive.
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About this Guide:
Information is power.
Alrighty, I'm not going to promise to hammer out all my thoughts all at once, or in a particularly organized manner; I can revise later via editing. This can be an on-going project, and if it becomes good enough, perhaps it can deserve a separate thread or sticky of its own. I believe in details, so if you can't summon enough patience to read through what I write, you don't deserve to learn anyways. I'll try to format stuff so its as easy to follow as possible.
Now, I can teach you all that I know, but I'm not going to teach all of you clerics out there how to pvp like a pro, because to honestly pk like a pro, you do need to sink some coin into your character; some serious coin. Naturally, many tactics and strategies can be done no matter how good or bad your gear is, and this guide will cover those. However, like ANY class, to survive in pk you need a certain minimum level of gear; better gear for opponents who do greater damage. For example, I already employed many of the same tactics back when my gear was still under-developed that I do today (and would pull off nice surprise victories against high level assassins because of this), but when my gear got a bit better, the same tactics started achieving much more successful and reliable outcomes.
If you are a complete beginner, I suggest you start by reading the other guides first. For example, while this guide will have a wealth of information regarding the various cleric skills, the true focus is towards tactics and strategies involving those skills, rather than a simple description of what each skill does. Which is not to discourage you from reading it, but rather to explain the level of detail I am supplying. There is certain information I assume most clerics should know, and such information may not be included in here. However, for clerics with experience playing their class, this guide may be able to help you improve your pk game above and beyond what you thought possible!
As well, as a general practice, to excel in pk you can't be worried about money all the time. In order to clear your mind for the fight ahead, you can't be worrying constantly about how much each hp pot, mana pot, defense charm, apothecary item, hp charm tick, mana charm tick, and guardian scroll are costing you. Doing so throughout the fight will slow your reaction times and prevent you from fighting as you should be able to. This can be a tough adjustment to make, and in order to make it possible, you need to have a decent amount of coin handy. Unfortunately, that means this guide is probably not for those who have difficulty procuring coin. PK the way its meant to be done is not cheap! And yet, if you are willing to adopt the mentality required where you instantly use defense charms and other resources without worrying about cost, you will become a much tougher and deadlier pker for it.
Credibility: I have a lvl 101 demon cleric with nearly all skills learned, and a lvl 102 sage cleric with ALL skills learned (literally all of them; lvl 11s, 79s, 100s, and morai). Thus when I mention any differences between the two in terms of skills usage, I know what I'm talking about!
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Updates to Guide:
This guide is a work in progress. Listed below are the updates and when they occurred.
1. Guide created at the bottom of a different guide. Included the sections 'Minimum Gear Requirement', 'Purify Weapon', 'Debuffs which cannot be purified', 'Suggested Gear', 'Other Requirements'. 01/11/2012
2. Added 'Defensive Skills' including the sections on Plume Shell, Vanguard Spirit, and Ironheart. 03/11/2012
3. Added a color scheme. Started on the section for Purify and 'Debuffs which you should purify'. Subsequently deleted (accidentally) some of what I'd been working on for this section, so it'll need to be re-written >.>; 07/11/2012
4. Turns out that the forum was cutting off the bottom of my post automatically, like some weird character limit. Maybe this limit doesn't exist if you are creator of thread, or else how would the maker of the top stickied guide here in cleric forums post so much text in a single post? Without knowing why it was getting cut off, I have reserved a number of posts for this guide; 7 in total. Will see how many I end up needing. 07/11/2012
5. Added section on Radiant wand, an alternative weapon with Purify Spell. 07/11/2012
6. Completed section on Purify and debuffs to purify/not purify. 10/11/2012
7. Started the section on Genies. This one is gonna take a while to finish I can tell! 14/11/2012
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Minimum gear requirements:
-defined as the gear necessary to handle (aka, not be easily one shot or killed before you can even react) some serious pk against a range of opponents, including +10 to +12 r9 assassins, and all other r9 characters
-+10 armor and +10 or better weapon (full gear set of either rank 9 or g16), socketed as best as you can (my cleric just has r9 with immaculate hp/garnet gems atm, because I'm still aiming for better gear; if you plan on making your gearset more permanent, consider citrine or garnet gems (cheaper option) or jades of steady defense (much more expensive, but much more effective)
Unfortunately, many clerics don't have well-refined armor. This is fairly easy to understand, because in pve, clerics can often get away with very minimalistic gear and still do just fine. However, consider your opponents: most assassins will have all +10 armor, and a +10 to +12 weapon. Going up against a class designed for 1vs1 pk with anything less than what they have is just not going to work very well! To pk effectively, you need to be able to take a goodly number of hits, and your heals have to be strong, so get busy refining!
-physical necklace from cube; g14 minimum +10 (which I use)
-physical defense RING(s): yes, ring. Exchange 1 or both of those magic rings for +10 or better Sign of Frost: Chaos (lvl 95 ring) or Sky Cover (lvl 100 ring); preferably Sky Cover for the 2 attack lvls and slightly better refine rates. Yes, you lose a bit of magic damage. However, in exchange you get vastly more physical defense. Consider: without ornaments, your physical defense from armor and stat point alone will likely total no more than 2000, which is just not going to cut it. The addition of a +10 sign of frost: chaos to my cleric increase physical defense from 7315 buffed, to 8.8k, a % damage reduction of 4% (64% to 68%). Thats a big gain for a mere +10 lvl 95 ring; much better results achieved with +12 Sky Cover. Considering that most of the time, physical damage will be what kills you, this is a necessary sacrifice to your magic dmg if you ever want to survive long enough to kill anything. Giving up the r9 ring is probably not recommended unless you replace it with a +10 or better Sky Cover, because you do lose a lot of damage by not having r9 ring equipped. However, the sky cover will grant better survivability to physical dmg than r9 ring, which is useful when defending against a stealthed sin, or when in TW and your main role is healing only.
*Note: clerics as healers can afford to give up a considerable amount of damage in TW, if it comes with a significant survivability gain, which is something most other classes, barbs excepted, cannot do.*
-a weapon with a stat called Purify Spell
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Purify Weapon
***** I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH how game-changing having purify spell is... ONCE your gear hits the right point, you became much more difficult for dps-users to kill. *****
What does purify spell do? Each attack you receive has a 5% chance to purify all* debuffs from you, and give you 5 seconds of 200% speed and immune to stun/immobilize/sleep/slow. What does this mean? When your gear is good enough to survive a number of hits, you can start relying on your weapon to get you out of sticky situations, provided you employ the right tactics. More on how to use a purify weapon will come later.
Where do you get a weapon with purify spell? There are 4 ways:
1) Reward weapon for tw season winners; clerics from winning faction get a non-refinable weapon with 1-666 dmg, that has purify spell. Yes, you can use it for the purify, but in practice it will be of limited use, because it will have weak healing and damage dealing power.
2) Radiant Wand, a wand obtained from a faction base with lvl 7 weapon storage (the east wing). Costs 170 mil coins and 43750 contribution (obtained from doing faction base quests). Damage is OK, and if you are on a budget and are lucky enough to be in a faction with high level weapon storage, then this may be an option for you.
3) Rank 8 Reforge glaive; obtained using r8 reforge mats that are obtained when factions complete faction trials. The damage is noticeably better than Radiant Wand, but it will definitely cost more to make. Getting purify spell on a r8 reforge glaive is about 6% chance per try, so it could take a number of rolls to get it. I use a +12 r8 reforge weapon with purify spell myself. Plan on spending at least 500mil to get the weapon.
How to go about getting r8 mats for r8 reforge weapon?
-set up a buy catshop near the faction base in Archosaur
-let the main factions on your server that participate in trials know that you are buying at competitive prices
-participating in faction trials of your own---this will give you the opportunity to collect mats like damascene ores (necessary to reforge your r8 wep as you try and get purify) that disappear if you leave faction base.
4) Rank 9 third reforge weapon. By far the best option; you get enormous damage and the purify spell all in one weapon. Only an option for the super wealthy. I am aiming for this weapon as a long term goal, since it will remove the issue of having to switch between r8 weapon and r9 weapon when going from defense to offense during a battle. Plan on spending roughly 3bil to get this weapon.
*****ONCE AGAIN, having a weapon with Purify Spell is CRUCIAL to surviving against assassins. If you do not consider obtaining a purify weapon, then you will be unable to utilize this guide to its full extent. My cleric is able to survive situations clerics with full jades cannot survive, due primarily to the purify stat on weapon.*****
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Debuffs which cannot be purified:
*Not all debuffs are purifiable. And I'm not talking about being unable to purify because you are stunned or sealed, I'm talking about buffs that can't be purified by any means, period. When you encounter these debuffs, you want to ensure you don't waste time and chi trying to purify them; instead, depending on the debuff, you will react in other ways.
Archer:
-Arrow Inferno (the debuff increases charm cooldown by 3s and decreases hp recovery from hp pots by 20%)
Cleric:
-Seal of the Gods (15 second debuff which both seals and immobilizes, while also giving target 90% dmg reduction... more on this skill later)
-Magical Shackles (a MORAI skill; each time target uses a skill, has 30% chance to take physical damage equal to the base magic dmg of the cleric who used the skill... more on this skill later)
-Aurora Array and Absorbing Array (MORAI skills; Aurora Array is aoe, whereas Absorbing Array is single target with lower cooldown; both skills produce a debuff which absorbs healing from charm or hp pots or apoths; this debuff cannot be 'purified' in the usual sense, but the debuff can be removed if enough hp is recovered via heal skills, charm ticks, hp pots, and apothecary items)
Barbarian:
-Berserker's Rage/Wrath (can produce a debuff which will prevent target(s) from being able to fly for 30 seconds)
-Raging Slap (produces a 6 second debuff that prevents you from targeting anybody else except the barb who used the skill on you)
Venomancer:
-Bewitch (essentially a debuff that acts like a seal but isn't a seal, because using anti-seal genie skills does not prevent this skill from working; prevents you from doing anything with skills for 6 seconds)
-Soul Link/Soul Shatter (its kinda a debuff; a little mob is linked to you, and any damage that the mob takes is transferred directly and instantly to you)
Assassin:
-Death Link/Death Chain (some of the damage the assassin takes gets transferred to you, except for damage you do to the assassin, which won't get bounced back to you)
Psychic:
-Diminished Vigor: (similar to Arrow Inferno, increases charm cooldown and effectiveness of hp pots and heals)
-Soulburn (every time you use a skill, for 8s, you take damage equal to the psychic's soulforce... very nasty skill)
Mystic:
-Transfusion/Sublime Transfusion (a portion of the healing you receive [can be your own heals] gets redirected to the mystic who cast the skill on you)
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Suggested gear:
-defined as gear that could be replaced with other options without game-changing impacts, but which has features that make it more desirable than the rest of the available gears
-on my cleric, I sacrifice 50 magic points in order to equip a light armor g16 helm, thus granting me ~1000 more hp than an equally-geared but arcane-helmed cleric. I decided this was an excellent defensive trade-off, because when we divide 1000 hp/50 stat points, it comes out to 20 hp/stat point. This is a better trade-off than barbs get when they allocate vitality points, and is twice as good as if those 50 points sacrificed were placed directly into vitality, which would yield only 500 hp on a cleric. Again, a cleric can afford to sacrifice some damage in order to get better defensive results.
-Matchless Wings (robe): has all the things clerics need in abundance: +speed, +physical defense, +hp, +def level, physical dmg reduction. I compared Matchless Wings to the g16 light armor robe (having 2 pieces would give 700 bonus hp) and concluded that I prefered the physical defense over the extra hp. Unfortunately, the dexterity points on the robe would not be very useful to a cleric, leaving 2 of the 4 stats not very good. In a comparison of stats with similar survivability in each case, I prefer the stats with lower hp and higher defense, since it makes it easier to keep yourself healed.
-the obvious: if you can afford r9 2nd or 3rd cast, you will see leaps and bounds in all of your stats defensive and offensive. Highly recommended if you can afford it.
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Other Requirements:
1. HP Charm: please never enter pk without a hp charm equipped... at least not as a cleric. About the only classes that might conceivably get away with no charm would be full jades +12 r9 barb, or lvl 105 assassins who never leave stealth! Needless to say, a cleric neither has 40k hp nor stealth. Put the charm on.
2. MP Charm: if you truly want to excel, a mana charm is a MUST! Unlike other arcanes, simply hitting mana pots every now and then is not sufficient, because via the effects of Plume Shell, mana becomes a cleric's second pool of life. Without a mana charm, a dps user will drain your mana dry within mere seconds or less, leaving you unable to do anything useful with your skills.
3. Defense charms: Get both the physical and magic defense charms (called Mystic Armor Charm and Charm of Defense, respectively). If you've never used these before, here's how they work. You manufacture them (lvl 8 apothecary required) by trading Perfect Stones at a high lvl apothecary master (I use the one in Snowy Village) under the Charms tab. For example, if you click a Charm of Defense, the next magic attack to hit you will only do 50% of the damage it would have otherwise done. Needless to say, very useful. The magic and physical defense charms share a cooldown of 10 seconds, so make sure you click the right one according to whatever class you are fighting against. To excel, you should: (a) have a physical and magic defense charm clicked (takes 20 seconds to have both of them clicked and cooled down again), and (b) click defense charms throughout a fight whenever the person you are fighting potentially hits you for over half your hp (which can happen when you fight r9 +12 anything).
4. Apothecary items: Keep your inventory well stocked with the ones you'll use most often.
-Ironguard Powder -> lvl 90 apoth often used with genie skill Fortify to get 12 seconds of stun-free immune to damage. Obviously excellent as a defensive move, or when launching a surprise offensive when the enemy thinks you are vulnerable.
-Pan Gu's Essence -> available only if you are in a faction with a lvl 6 apothecary wing: 8 seconds of immune-to-damage with no side effects like ironguard powder has
-Shadow Binder Powder -> lvl 90 apoth which is one of the best offensive AND defensive apoths available to any class, not to mention cleric. This apoth gives 15 seconds of 100% speed AND stun resist. Since being slow is one of a cleric's biggest drawbacks, this apoth is amazing, and much better than vacuity powder, which only gives 20 seconds of stun resist. Used properly this apoth not only prevents the stun, it turns a fight into your favor for 15 seconds, allowing you to keep up from a running enemy, or escape from a pursuer.
-Dew of Star Protection -> sometimes used when you want to fool the enemy into thinking you are going to be easy to kill; the problem with ironguard powder is that people run from you when you use it. However since dew of star, used on a cleric (you'll have your own physical and magic defense buffs in place), is much less noticeable (you have to spot the 'increased physical defense' buff) you can avoid this problem. As well, when combined with a purify weapon, the enemy will hit you a number of times before realizing you have an apoth in (if a dps-user), which increases the likelihood of getting a purify, and thus allowing you to quickly kite and then fire a few attacks off.
-Zooming Thunder Powder -> great for a surprise attack which you think will have a high likelihood of quickly killing enemy; gives 6s of zero channeling on skills like Tempest, Razor Feathers, and Wield Thunder (long channeling skills that are often avoided in a pk fight by enemy because of how long they take to channel)
-White Tea -> regain 2 sparks; essential in TW (use one each time you rez back at base) and in pk can be used to triple spark a 2 spark skill like Tempest.
-Fortification Draught -> a relatively new apothecary item which is very useful at preventing an assassin from killing you from stealth with normal attacks before you can react. This apothecary item puts a buff on you which lasts for 10 minutes (since apoths have 2 minute cooldown, you can put this on, wait for apoth cooldown, then enter the pk area with 8 minutes still left on the buff). If during the period that this buff is on, anything attacks you with a physical melee normal attack (NOT a skill), the buff gets 'triggered', and you get 15 seconds of 75% reduction to physical melee normal attacks (note: skill damage is NOT reduced). The icon doesn't change when this occurs. This means that even high damage assassins will likely not be able to kill you from stealth before you can react; and if they try to use skills, you'll gain more time to react, because of the cast times of these skills.
