Advice needed on mental toughness

[BladedThesis]

No reason not to have Radiant Servant and even w/out the PrE empower healing is a must for a healbot cleric. It is more mana efficient for heals that empower or maximize spell. As many have said already, Radiant Servant gives you an AoE burst heal and also a regen aura. You use turn undead for it and not SP so with your high CHA you will get a fairly good amount and they also come back w/ time. Radiant Servant II acually makes the bonus to healing spells from empower healing 75% instead of 50% at the same cost. I'd say altogether that would save a considerable amount of SP which you can then blow on whatever the heck you want.

[der_kluge]

My cleric got by just fine without empower or maximize. No one recruits a cleric for how much damage their BB's do. But definitely take empower healing, extend, and quicken - which you can put off to last, since it's really an end game thing, IMHO.

Mine also took Extra Turning, which rocked for the radiant servant abilities, and mental toughness.

[samthedagger]

Cleric-building is fairly straightforward now that the Radiant Servant PrE exists.

1) Take Empower Healing
2) Use healing burst and healing aura as primary healing and save heal spells for emergencies/bosses

Mastering 1 is easy. Mastering 2 takes a wee bit of practice, but since you get the healing burst at level 6 where cure wands are cheap, plentiful, and a viable substitute for actual healing you have lots of time to get this practice.

Whether you take Mental Toughness or not is up to you, but first you need to go visit Fred and swap something--anything--for Empower Healing. I am of the opinion that the only two feats a cleric needs are Empower Healing and Quicken Spell. The rest is flavor. However most powergamers (of which I am one) will tell you (as I will do) that Mental Toughness is a suboptimal choice compared to Toughness/metamagics. You don't have to be a powergamer of course. Not everyone has to be able to solo epics to have fun.

[Tiro]

I started a dorf cleric and made some terrible mistakes (because I did not consult these forums for one). So I am stuck with mental toughness until I **** out the money or farm a million fragments. At level 18 I rarely am in a situation where spell points are a problem, with the exception of raids when I need to use scrolls to supplement (VOD comes to mind).

You are better off taking quicken, there are a lot of situations you will need this feat(in raids for mass heal and in using BB's)

Empower healing is simply a must with RS now in the game, to do so is giving up so much healing. I tend to lean towards spell casting (implosion, destruction, greater command) so I took spell pen as well. Something to think about if you intend to stay pure cleric. Hope you enjoy it, clerics are way better than those damned favored souls and their huge sp pools!

[NaturalHazard]

Im a level 11 cleric and I feel my sp is lacking at 774 I have power pearl x not sure what else to stack it with to get me to the 900-1k

feats are currently empower, toughness, extend, Maximize

should i take mental toughness I was planning on taking quicken but I burn through sp as it is with BB heals ect

I am currently a healbot, buffer/offensive caster.

str 14
dex 8
con 16
int 9
wis 23
cha 25

forgive my noobness but why do you have so much charisma? I know you need it for the aura burst but to have it higher than wisdom?

[Pewf]

I only have 850, at Level 12, and I feel it's more than enough. I always have empower healing on, working on getting it reduced to just 6 extra SP. I have second tier of Wand/Scroll mastery, which also helps. I am usually casting cure light wounds, that hit for about 30-40 HP per cast (No potency item yet), just for the squishies in the group. :P Other than that, I usually either cast from cure mass scrolls, or have a cure serious wand at hand. The healing burst has come in handy too, and the Aura. When I'm low on SP, and don't feel like chugging a pot, I usually just say "Gather for healing burst.". It usually tops everyone off.

I probably have 26 WIS right now. I don't think I ever took a mental toughness feat, will have to check later.
Hope this has helped.

[Flugzeug]

I have a level 20 cleric, a level 18 cleric, and a level 20 favored soul. My cleric are healers with mediocre melee ability, since I made healing my primary focus. My favored soul is melee focused since I wanted some variety. I also have fighters, wizards, etc, but these are my healing toons.

Mental toughness is very nice. In fact, both of my clerics also have improved mental toughness. By taking both of those feats, you end up with 1100 spell points at level 11, and 2,252 spell points at level 20 if you are Human and have archmagi and Greensteel +150sp. I can't tell you how many Tower of Despair runs on Hard/Elite or Shroud Elite where I end up with only 50-100 spell points left when quest ends. On Devils Assault Epic, having 200 more spell points is going to save you a pot, and also allow you more time to build up sp from torc/con opp. You really don't need empower spell, unless you really want blade barriers and other offensive spells to do more damage.

Do realize however, that even if you have an amazing blade barrier crit, let's say 600-700 damage, when enemies in level 18-20 quests have 10,000 to 100,000 hit points, 700 damage is not going to make any difference at all. You would have to run the enemy through the blade barrier 1,000s of times, and in that time, you will have to eat dinner...if you are soloing the quest. If you aren't, the other people in your party will be mad at you for running the enemy around while they can't hit the enemy, or perhaps they will just steal agro from you and ignore your blade barrier.

I have a wizard that can do massive damage with polar rays and disintegrate. Empowered, maximized, superior effects, etc. They will do 700+ damage often. Even with that said, there's no way I would consider building my character for that purpose primarily.

My melee favored soul can do more melee damage in 3 seconds than either of my clerics could do with blade barriers maximized, empowered, superior potency, etc in 10 seconds.

Empower really is useless because you have to have empower heal for radiant servant, which is awesome. And empower burns through SP very fast. So unless you have an unlimited amount of money for mana pots, not having mental toughness and improved mental toughness, and using maximize, empower, and empower healing you are going to run out of sp fast. Also, you will be overhealing everyone. With empower healing and superior ardor/potency, my mass cure moderates will usually fill everyone up. if they don't, a mass cure light will top them off if needed. A quickened mass heal will fill anyone up if they are at 25% or lower even. I've never seen my mass heals not fill someone up on hit points. and that is with maximize turned off and I don't have empower.

When I want to go all out on offensive spells, I play my wizard or my sorcerer. My clerics/favored soul do not do as good of a job doing offensive spells. It's like trying to build a barbarian that heals the party. You could take empower heal and take 3 levels of cleric, but you would never be as good of a healer as a true cleric/fvs.

These are all my opinions and they are based on my experience. If you disagree that is fine with me. However, having the best healing capacity I can have means I will fail quests/raids very rarely, and the game is certainly more fun. Yeah, I'm not going to be doing bladebarriers in Epic Devils Assault, but hey, I can take my blade barriers into Sins of Attrition Elite and still kill the boss easily even without empower. So empower really is not something I use on my cleric. But improved mental toughness and mental toughness I love. and yeah, they may not add that many mass heals, but 200 sp is quite a few cure mass moderates or regular heals. If you solo a lot, the level 6 heal spell, having several more of those per rest is very useful.

When you run shroud, part 4 is a pain if you don't have a lot of sp. You will run out of SP and your group will be mad at you for not having sp to heal them. Sure, you can blame the melee, but when they add you to blacklist and you can't get in a shroud group because they don't think you heal well, that could become a problem. I've never run out of SP in Shroud Part 4 or 5, and once in a while, a favored soul or cleric who is with me will run out of sp and because I have 2,252 spell points, I can just use quickened mass heals to solo heal the bosses...and I have yet to run out of sp doing that.

More sp for a cleric is like more hp for a melee.

[Flugzeug]

on a side note, my favored soul does not have mental toughness but that is a whole different issue. He has 2,700 sp at level 20 (with only a 22 charisma), and spell points are not an issue on a favored soul.

Also, maxing out wisdom on a cleric is good, since it affects your spell points and your spell's DCs, unlike a favored soul where charisma affects spell points and wisdom affects spell DCs.

Lastly, at level 20 I have a 20 charisma, with a +6 item and +2 tome. I started with a 12 charisma. With extra turn feat, I have 15 turn undeads, and for the aura and aura blast, that is more than enough I find. Having more than that could be less useful than having more hitpoints or spell points.

Toughness is very important to give you more hitpoints so you don't die. Enemies can and will hit you for large amounts so having more than 300 hit points is essential. More than 400 is much better.

On my cleric, I took extra turns, empower healing, quicken, extend, maximize, mental toughness, improved mental toughness, and toughness (in no particular order). I would recommend against spell penetration since it's all or nothing. My wizard took 1 spell penetration feat and 3 levels of enhancements and even with a scepter that gives another +2 to spell penetration, he's at the bare minimum to get through enemy spell resistance at level 18-20. If you add it all up, I've got +7 to my spell penetration, you would have to sacrifice a lot to get that high with a cleric. Even then, you would be at the bare minimum for spell penetration and still have many enemies having too high a resistance. In addition, also know that once you have gotten through an enemies spell resistance with your spell penetration, you then have to roll against their save with your Spell's DC (difficulty check). If your wisdom is not maxed out, starting 18, and taking every level-up, enemies will save against your spells. So spell penetration is useless unless you have a wisdom of 34 or higher at level 20, my cleric has a 38 wisdom. 30 wisdom at level 14 should be a good goal if you're going to do offensive spells.

As for this powergamer thing, if you go this route you should be taking metamagics and toughness and mental toughness. You don't need to leave any of them out. If you think scrolls will be how you get by with less sp, realize that scrolls have a long cooldown, and heal scrolls will hit a warforged tank for about 90 hit points...compared to 300-400 for your empowered heal spell with life magic and whatnot. most often in tough situations, your party members will be taking damage faster than the scrolls will heal. Yeah, they are great to use to supplement your spell point healing, but they are not going to do the trick in high level content.

As for lower level content, I still think more sp is better for level 10-16. Doing demon sands and gianthold with extra sp is only going to make things run smoother. Make sure you have life magic enhancements maxed out, superior (potency/ardor/devotion) VI.