Why are clerics a money sink in this game?

[Galapas]

as for clerics they should probably be carrying for potions...

cure serious (sometimes there's not enough time to self-heal), haste (that the sorc/wiz never targets you with), remove curse (VOD), lesser mnenomic pots (for feeblemind), and as many mnenomic pots as you can get your hands on for emergencies

Minor Mnemonics are for feeblemind, since they'r ethe cheapest. I'd add invisibility potions. Healing doesn't break invisibility. They are useful if you're fighting things that don't see through it, and know you won't be doing any offensive actions, like cometfall, turning undead, meleeing or viciously opening a door.

[Shal]

I'd suggest carrying cure serious potions even if you have wand ability. Potions to self-heal during combat, wand for out of combat or to toss a heal on someone incapped. Switching from a weapon to a wand while in the thick of it can lose some valuable time.

haste potions are for the times your in a group with no caster or bard to haste. clickies help offset the cost of buying potions (because you didn't drink as much) but especially haste, will never last as long as you wish.

i try to use my loh during battles where my health runs low. its a solid one second 120pt heal. if im not using them, they can double as a resurection for others, however ive yet to be able to res myself. lol. ill pick up a few pots just in case though. thanks im sure the need will arise one day.

Wands are far cheaper than pots... For a paladin just carry a couple cure serious wands, 1 wand of lesser restore, 1 wand of remove curse, 1 wand of neutralize poison, 1 wand of remove disease, and 1 wand of remove blindness.

The lesser restore wand you can purchase at the wand vendor in the Rusty Nail.. All of the other wands you will need to purchase in House Jorasco. Look me up in game, Shal.. my bard can purchase anything you need at a discount....

got imunity to disease, and lesser restore spell. i just finished the von series so ill pick up the other items asap. thanks dktr. i put your armor to good use today. i hope that i pulled my fair weight. the communication issue that i spoke of here came into play when the incomming audio got messed up from background noise here at my location. i think it resulted in my death once. at least it was only once.

[Chaos000]

Minor Mnemonics are for feeblemind, since they'r ethe cheapest. I'd add invisibility potions. Healing doesn't break invisibility. They are useful if you're fighting things that don't see through it, and know you won't be doing any offensive actions, like cometfall, turning undead, meleeing or viciously opening a door.

shoot I forgot invis potions. I always keep a stack of 100 on my cleric along with various invisibility clickies.

you're right on the minor mnemonics. my bad

[Junts]

i can use, and do carry cure seriouse wounds wands. along with my 120pt loh. lesser restore is a paladin spell that i have. need remove curse pots (thanks for that!) got disease imunity item and feat to remove disease, been giving all my mnenomic pots to the cleric, but ill keep a couple handy now (thanks for that too!) got resist energy spell ... but need to look into protect energy stuff. got a haste clickie (+1 loot weekend. whoohoo!) need barkskin. have shield of faith pots and a prot from evil wand.

thanks for the input. being a paladin complements any cleric in the group. loh doubles as resurections, resists, disease, ect.
remove blindness and poison ... ill find some of those too.

you dont need a disease immunity item; paladins have it innately

carry lesser restore pots; you're wasting a spell slot on lesser restoration, to saynothing of spell points, that should be spent on resistances and divine favor/zeal; if you arent using divine favor and zeal(once you have zeal) all the time, you're not a very good melee paladin, and you're hurting your contribution to the group considerably.

[Shal]

you dont need a disease immunity item; paladins have it innately

carry lesser restore pots; you're wasting a spell slot on lesser restoration, to saynothing of spell points, that should be spent on resistances and divine favor/zeal; if you arent using divine favor and zeal(once you have zeal) all the time, you're not a very good melee paladin, and you're hurting your contribution to the group considerably.

i use divine favor religiously ... dont have zeal as an option for spell ... what level is that? forgot that i was immunne to disease, my disease imunity ring is equiped because its a +7 to my haggle skill. going to change it out for my grease clickie ring that i just got and only use the disease/haggle ring when im bartering goods.

[Kylstrem]

It's always good to carry around a stack of 100 CSW potions. You may need to heal fast on the run, and swapping between wand whipping and drinking a potion heals you a little faster. And you can drink potions underwater, but can't use a wand underwater... sometimes jumping into water for safety and healing up is a good tactic.

[Riggs]

Havent read thread, just OP and a couple posts down.

*edit - my cleric rarely uses scrolls, mana pots, or even wands often. If I have to spend more than I get out of a quest in looting chests I dont run that quest, or run with that group.

Rule 1 - you zerg - you deal with it.

Rule 2 - dont agro what you cant kill.

Rule 3 - if you die from being stupid, I will use mana to kill stuff INSTEAD of healing you, and res you after the fight is over....maybe. Depends on how stupid your being.

Rule 4 - zerg once and get beat up...ok. But if you get trashed in room #1, you better be using different tactics for room #2 - or you will be dying.

Rule 5 - My mana bar is my resources - once its gone drink pots. I dont blow scrolls, mana pots, and maybe 1 wand I will use to help out. If you, the melee, need more than my mana bar in a quest - then you dont belong in the quest.

Rule 6 - If my cleric can kill stuff better than your melee, then I will spend my mana killing stuff and buffing. If you suck, stay in the back and dont whine about it. Collect your xp at the end and be happy.

Rule 7 - Dont run elite, or quests above your level, unless you can kill stuff at that level. If a group of 10s wants to run a level 13 quest on elite? Sure - if you can kill stuff. If not? We wipe and recall. And if your dont seem smart the cleric is about to drop group so enjoy that 'good elite xp' running the same quest and wiping 5 times.

Rule 8 - Unless your are paying me - then YOUR bad play is not MY responsibility to fix. It is not a team effort if one person is sucking up all the resources - or other people cant handle their role.

A good group will learn when you slow healing down, and adjust their tactics. Bad ones deserve what they get.

Way back in head start days I made a cleric. Deleted him after a few days because healing zerging barbs was a real pain, and not fun. So I made a real melee that could survive while still killing stuff. Second cleric - got to level 6 and deleted him too - still no fun to pug.

My melees tend to be very self sufficient, and my clerics tend to be jerks. My melees can kill stuff, and generally be the last one standing if things go south. My clerics dont coddle bad play, zergers, or morons.

Zergers either learn fast when you slow down on the healing, or die and recall out. I will leave some hints early on if things are getting annoying "I cant heal you I dont know where you are, I am running low on mana we shoudl maybe slow down, or, we need to do things x/y/z or we wont be able to complete the quest".

If people want to give me wands/scrolls/mana pots? Sure I will use em. I have my own, but they are for raids, guild runs, or certain 'hard to find groups for quests I really need to complete even if its ugly' quests.

I will let a group wipe for bad play rather than blow resources on a bad run. It is simply is not worth the time, effort, cost, or aggrivation to let people bully you into spending YOUR fun and resouces to let THEM play stupidly.

Wait for the next run, while pugs can be terrible, many are pretty good or even excellent. It is far better to drop one group and NOT spend the extra hour to do a 20 minute quest than to tough it out and make yourself mad and fed up with the game by staying in a bad group.

Its way more fun in the long run, and its a lot cheaper too.

[Riggs]

Spells and stuff.

Anything available in a wand or potion I generally dont have as a spell.

Lesser restore, potions or a wand, restore scrolls
Remove disease wand (its rare so its ok to swap out a potency item for a second)
Poison, spell - but thats for shroud, below shroud level carry a wand.
Remove curse, low levels a wand, higher pots (need speed in raids)

Most I have had sitting in my inventory for a year or more - because its rare to NEED them, and its a total waste of a spell slot.

In place of those I carry things like Bestow Curse, soundburst, searing light, divine power/recitation/fom etc. A well placed curse or cc spell at the right time works wonders.

Low levels - soundburst, soundburst, soundburst. Dont need healing when 6 monsters stop in their tracks and cant move for 6 seconds.

Greater command - same thing.

Cometfall - my cleric NEVER takes cometfall off his bar, and Symbol of stunning, and Destruction - that means I dont have Resurrection...but I need to res people a LOT less when monsters are lying on the ground or not moving than when they are hitting great cleaves for 40-60 damage a swing. One spell for cc= 5 times less healing needed (I made that number up - but its a a pretty high number). Raise dead can be tricky if mass damage is going on, but most people are not dumb enough to take the res inside a blade barrier, or right beside a orthon cleaving - and if they are they might as well stay dead for a while longer anyway.

If your using too many resources - something is being done wrong, and needs to be looked at before blowing more cash on resources.

[Kalari]

Hehe Riggs reading those two posts makes me like your clerics ya sound just like me

[Chaos000]

That's awesome Riggs I've got a motified version of it myself

Don't aggro anything you can't kill by yourself while self healing.

If you're built to zerg and you're self-sufficient, feel free to set the pace. The more you can make me feel completely useless, the more I have respect for you.

If you're not built to zerg without a cleric babysitting you, unless your dps can justify it, you're not worth healing.

If my cleric can kill stuff better than your melee without taking damage, and you can't hold aggro on the monster I'm attacking, then your health bar is of no concern to me when I'm kiting him through my bladebarrier while manyshotting with my lightning strike bow.

[Voalkrynn2]

You can do all this amazing healing, but can't figure out that you can lead mobs with a cometfall? lol. That's pretty cool

nothing worth commenting on here back to the ignore list with him.

[Gaermain]

I'm sure it's been asked before. But after spending over 2 years playing other toons, I finally started playing clerics.

It was a rude awakening.

So I'm sorry if I'm bringing up points that have been stated before, but since it hasn't been addressed in the 3 years + of the game perhaps it's not bad that it gets brought up again.

I don't believe I've had enough mana to heal the party during an adventure since lvl 1. Maybe 2 at the most.
From that point on, a cleric must rely on wands.
As the levels go on, a cleric finds that wands are way too slow, so it becomes a scroll game. Which are incredibly over priced if the only way to get through a mission is to use them, and not just spell points.

Clerics have to soak up 90% of adventuring costs. If you are playing in pick up groups, that means you will likely be unable to be an effective cleric.


I challenge a dev to try to heal a party in any mission over lvl 10 (random pick up group, not tweeked out) and not have to rely on scrolls or wands. Just the spell points you get as a cleric.


I just think it is ridicules that a cleric doesn't have enough spell points to be able to heal a party through a mission that is level equivalent . I don't think it's over powering to give clerics the spell points of a sorc. Perhaps even more.

Why make clerics take 90% of the brunt of trying to have a money sink in a game? (yes the AH is another one, but as far as players, Clerics are singled out as a class as a money sink.)

-thanks for reading.

Making a cleric for the first time after playing the game for so long can be a rude awakening, as your perception of a cleric's role in the party from a standpoint of playing other characters can be quite different from reality.

I'll just cut to the chase: there is a reason why a cleric has spells other than cure/heal.

Learn them. Learn what kind of save they have. Know your enemy - especially when it comes to will vs fort save.

Soundburst, hold person, bestow curse, greater command, cometfall, blade barrier, dismissal, banishment, destruction, slay living, poison. Know what you can heighten, empower, and maximize. Beef up your spell pen, your DC should be fine with your stated WIS.

They key to having a profitable cleric (and mine are the most profitable of all my characters) is realizing that your strength is in mitigating damage. Dumping a greater command on a group of mobs surrounding your party is cheaper than sitting there and spamming heals on them. Banishing the devils/orthos that are slicing through a paper AC while a melee just whacks away is cheaper than spamming heals on them. Quicken, Maximize, Empower, Blade Barrier, do the "figure eight."

Get a stack of haste and jump potions. Have a batch of the smallest mnemonics you can find in the event you get feeb'd. Also, keep five slots open in your inventory - as it is courteous to actually carry your party members to the shrine.

[Chaos000]

Get a stack of haste and jump potions. Have a batch of the smallest mnemonics you can find in the event you get feeb'd. Also, keep five slots open in your inventory - as it is courteous to actually carry your party members to the shrine.

Words of wisdom. Everyone should have a stack of haste and jump potions on their clerics. I whole heartedly believe that cuz it's not like you're going to get those buffs from your fellow wiz/sorc.

[Fenrisulven6]

Okay, I'm clueless about the need for jump potions. Please advise. And would a jumpx3 clickie be enough instead?

I identify with the OP, mainly because I'm new and trying out my offensive spells to see what fits my playstyle. I've learned to manage my mana enough to almost make it to the next shrine, but thats only when I "know" the quest.
I guess the point I'm making is that the mana limits make it difficult to experiment in-game with offense.

[Girevik]

Okay, I'm clueless about the need for jump potions. Please advise. And would a jumpx3 clickie be enough instead?

Because sometimes you need to Jump! And a +10 really helps.

A jump clickie would probably be fine in 90% of the cases. It really is pretty rare that I suck down more than 3 potions in one rest day.

On the other hand, Jump potions are really cheap. I think they cost about 55 gold each. That makes it 5500 gold or 550 play or 0.55k plat for a full stack of 100. Or about 1/20th the cost of Haste with double the duration.

[LeeRoy]

I have 1 cleric level 16 and i dont complain on him because

i dont have to make 2 min 2 greensteel kopeshes costing like 20m plat plus tons of gear

if you really use to many scrolls go halfing they are easy to heal partys with

[Zenako]

Because sometimes you need to Jump! And a +10 really helps.

A jump clickie would probably be fine in 90% of the cases. It really is pretty rare that I suck down more than 3 potions in one rest day.

On the other hand, Jump potions are really cheap. I think they cost about 55 gold each. That makes it 5500 gold or 550 play or 0.55k plat for a full stack of 100. Or about 1/20th the cost of Haste with double the duration.

I like clickies IF I can find one on something good to double up on space. Like a Stat Item with a CLickie on it, or Feather Fall or Striding Boots with a clickie. Otherwise the flexibility and ease of finding it quickly on a hotbar for potions tend to rule.

[gfunk]

My cleric is turning out to be one of my cheapest alts.. especially since I rolled a WF. In the past, I always had reasonable ways of self-healing my other characters. My ranger has devotion enhancements and a sup potency item they can switch to when healing up. My human fighter has 218% healing amp, so CSW potions are rather practical. My Rogue and Sorc can UMD healing scrolls.

Conversely, my WF fighter/monk must resort to repair pots but without the benefit of any sort of amplification.... I wish healers friend worked on repair pots. (also, max UMD will be a bit low to reliably cast reconstruct scrolls).

Depending on the quest/party configuration, I might chug up to 80+ repair pots. Add that into expense for haste pots (eventually to be replaced with shroud clickies) and barkskin pots, and I might often go through well over 100 pots in a run. At ~700gp avg per pot that would work out to 7K plat. I would never go through that much value in resources on my Cleric (except the occasional raid that goes wonky).

Plus as a melee front liner, I'm taking way more in the way of damage and have resultant repair costs (my cleric rarely has to repair)

Of course, my WF is only at lvl 13 and runs quests several levels above (I anticipate my costs going down as my AC gets closer to my planned self buffed AC of 56 to 60) . I don't beg for heals or haste. Basically, if my hp aren't mostly full I chug some pots, and if I'm not hasted I also drink. I can only imagine what my costs would be if I had no AC, or no evasion whatsover like a warforged barbarian would.

I could save some plat if I waited to be healed, but from experience I have found that clerics are more reluctant to heal WF's fully. (Often they seem to be waiting until I am at my last shread of life so that they can get the most out of their heal spell. It saves mana, but many clerics seem to push it too far, resulting in more frequent deaths. Humanoids don't seem to get this treatment, because they can be efficiently topped off with cure spells).

Also, I don't always run with a cleric in the party so pot consumption tends to be high anyways.

I've also spent way more on equiping all of my melees then my cleric. The most expensive thing on my cleric was the blue dragon scales I picked up. My cleric also only requires a couple single shard shroud items (though I may make a duel shard min II item for hp), so he is quickly becoming a net ingredient contributer.

[negative]

I haven't read the whole thread, but I want to share an experiance with you.

One of the things I do in game is run with a static group. We've been playing for the last 2 years, once a week for 4 hours, no twinking, no passing items to these characters. We only have what we pull. We don't sell much on the AH either. We are level 16 now, etc, etc. The players are vets, and the party makeup is a nice mix.

The cleric is the richest character in the group, with around 300k plat.

My ranger has 17k plat to his name.

A lot of this seems to come down to the need to buy gear on melee characters, while a cleric has less need. The cleric also doesn't use very many resourses, except when we run elite missions or things like SoS. We've ran most of the vale and reavers refugee on hard, and working on elite soon.

Your experiance may vary.

On the other hand, I just got my own cleric to level 11 last night. I burned 40 heal scrolls running madstone crater on hard with a level 10-13 group on my level 10 cleric. That was my choice. I was underlevel to heal 2 barbs and a ranger in that mission. Now that I'm level 11, I know when I go back it won't be an issue. But again, it was my choice to run that mission and spend the 10k plat or so worth of scrolls (because I didn't have the heal spell yet) in order to get the big xp.

[Frodo_Lives]

I don't mind spending plat on scrolls if the situation calls for it. It's just that unless I am trying to do something I know is way over my head then the situation very rarely demands I use much of anything other than my sp.

I have a cleric who is now 13th, but I didn't even touch Gianthold stuff until I was 11th for the simple fact that I'm not even going to attempt keeping a group up for those quests without the heal spell.

There is a ton of xp outside of GH to get to 11th, especially for a cleric. The only reason that clerics are a money sink is if you PuG raid a lot on elite. If not, don't go into quests where you won't have enough sp to fufill your role and you will be fine.