help with retraining

[pangelo]

Ok, I"ve been away for quite a while, and have a ton of action points to spend.

My 12 Cleric build so far is as follows:

Level 12 Human Lawful Good Cleric

Str 12 (+3 Enchant)
Dex 12 (+3 Enchant)
Con 9
Int 8
Wis 20 (+1 Feat, +4 Enchant)
Cha 14 (+2 Enchanted)

Feats as Follows:

Empower Healing
Extend Spell
Extra Turning
Heroic Durability
Improved Mental Toughness
Spell Penetration

Enhancements as Follows:

Cleric Life Magic 1
Energy of the Zealot 1
Cleric Wisdom 1
Cleric DV 1
Cleric Extra Turning 1
Cleric Wand and Scroll Mastery 1

Since they now have so many options, and for basically pure healer build, what are your ideas on what I shoud take for my enhancements??

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[STROBE]

Ok, I"ve been away for quite a while, and have a ton of action points to spend.

Since they now have so many options, and for basically pure healer build, what are your ideas on what I shoud take for my enhancements??

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Since we can completely redo our enhancements for about 20,000 gold, I approach the enhancements on a character as a refinement process. I try a setup then redo it, keeping what I got a lot of benefit from and dropping what I seldom used or didn't seem to get much benefit from.

Enhancements choices are really dependant on what you want to do with your character, and therefore, pretty personal. For example, I don't like to use my turns to give divine vitality, so I only take tier 1, and I don't do much to increase my number of turns (I've got 10). In contrast, my wife thinks dv is the second most important thing her cleric does, takes the highest tier of dv, and has 16 turns.

Here are my thoughts, having played my cleric as pretty much a pure healer until around level 12-14, when I began to branch out into some control and damage:

Life Magic enhancements - first priortiy, to the highest tier

If you use healing wands or heal scrolls even moderately, or if you are a hitpoint topper like me,
Wand Mastery - second priority, to the highest tier

Energy of the Zealot - to tier 4, will get you 110 more spell points. Its hard to find much fault with that choice.

After that it gets very personal.

If you want to save gold on wands, and/or want to do take some of the pressure/panic off yourself, you can take divine healing at least to tier 2, and cast it on one or two high damage takers, just as they enter combat. DH at tier 2 provides an average of 60 hitpoints of healing over 30 seconds. Doesn't sound like much, but try it and I think you will like it. For me that's about 600 points of healing per shrine that doesn't have to come off wands or out of mana. 600 points is roughly 30 charges off of a cure moderate wand, roughly 3,000 gold pieces. If you take tier 3, its an average of 90 hitpoints over 30 seconds. Note that this is especially helpful on warforged, as they get the full effect instead of half.

If you want to use your turns to remove a lot of effects, divine cleansing tier 2 can remove blindness, poison, disease, and curse. It removes mummy rot with 1 casting. If you DC to tier 3 it removes flesh to stone, which can be quite handy.

If you do offensive casting, then taking human adaptability wisdom, and cleric wisdom will raise your wisdom, and help you land your spells on foes. There's a variety of opinion on the subject but wisdom of 28 (plus or minus 2) is often cited as a minimum to be fair to good (by no means excellent) with offensive casting.

You will most likely have to take some fillers to spend enough action points to get to the next enhancment or tier that you really want. My fillers (enhancements I might not have taken otherwise) were divine vitality 1 and extra turns 1 and 2.

You didn't ask for advice on your feats, but a thing or two really stand out:

If you are doing little to none offensive casting, then I don't see how the spell penetration feat will be helpful.

Feats can be exchanged in house Jarasco with the mindflayer Fred, for a Syberis Dragon shard and 100,000 gold.

Since you stated you are a healing cleric, and clerics often complain about the expense of healing, I'll share my 'system' of healing with you.

I hardly ever do raids, or quests 4 or more levels over my clerics level. Therefore, I don't need to buy heal or raise dead scrolls - and I don't.

I top hitpoint bars continuously with cure moderate wands. I use them to heal during combat too. I only use mana if somone's bar is getting away from me. A moderate wand is 100 gold per cast and a serious wand is 250 gold. I don't get anywhere near 2.5 times as much healing from a serious. I'm also using my turns in the form of divine healing and diving cleansing, to save on mana use. By these means, I will usually reach a shrine with 120-300 spell points remaining and can buff the others extensively before I rest/recharge. If I run out of mana a good ways from the shrine, then the group is performing very poorly.

Exception is barbarians. Its just too expensive to heal them with anything other than a heal spell using mana. (God knows I have tried, as letting someone's bar intentionally drop below half really gripes my hide.)

I am careful about selecting which groups to join. I always look up the guildname of the party leader, and one or two other members. If its a guild that I don't fit in with their play style, I avoid the group.

I also play close attention to the levels of the other characters compared to the level of the quest. Its quite common to see groups where the leader is four levels lower than the quest, but he wants characters at quest level to join - so he can ride their coattails and power level. I avoid them too. Also, the groups where they 'are legends in their own minds', like level 10's wanting to do GiantHold quests on elite. Yeah, they can do em, if they are willing to die/partywipe enough times, and can find a cleric willing to spend 50,000+ gold.

Using my 'system' I almost always make 10,000-30,000 gold per quest, after expenses of say 12,000 to 25,000 gold. If I only break even, give or take 3,500 gold, then it was a far below average group.

[Zenako]

Divine Healing is a very overlooked enhancement. I find with most casters having more SP these days, I often do not end up needing to use the turns as DV's as much. DH can reach farther and into places that normal healing cannot. Many times a spell is blocked, but DH can affect the target. You can DH through gates and walls. You can DH people inside PotP rooms from outside. You can cast it thru gates that drop like those in Deleras. As mentioned, all that healing is coming from a resource that might otherwise go unused and is "free".

With the changes to number of Turn Attempts per rest now factoring in ACTIVE CHA, not just base CHA, be sure to have some sort of CHA boost item equipped at the Shrine/Tavern. Depending on your level and gear that could be up to 3 more turns. You can also cast DH/DV on the run easily, while casting spells slows you down with the casting animation, and REALLY slows you down if using a scroll. Casting a DH on a scout going forward to flip a lever for example, might give him just enough healing to be able to run back without having to slow down to drink a pot or something along the way.

There are a few spreadsheets out there for working out Enhancements (just goggle them), most are pretty good and can help you avoid the trial and error and frustration that might come from trying to figure it out live. I was recently using them for my CLR15 almost since she is thinking about getting some changes in her focus a bit, given the nature of the mobs in the Vale and Shroud. Dropping a few never used ones (DC II at this point is really never used) for example and picking up more Spell Pen. But changing enhancements is relatively cheap and easy to do so no real worries.