What would it take to get you to run a healing cleric in reaper?

[Kryori]

If you have a meatshield that doesn't get 1-shot, and can in fact survive a mob on Reaper 10 then it actually works quite well.

In framing my response I was talking about playing in a low-reaper heroic PUG, since that's where I expect most of the game's reaper play to take place. If you're at a point where you're considering taking on Reaper 10 then you have more gear, past lives, and expertise than I, and in the thousands of hours it took to accumulate all that you must have bumped into someone who would be willing to TR into a healer to get an optimal team together for R10 runs.

That being said, if you've got a meatshield that doesn't get 1-shot in Reaper 10 then you're probably dealing with someone who has the combination of equipment, past lives, and expertise that would enable them to play a ranged character who doesn't get hit in the first place and therefore doesn't need a healer. It's a chicken and egg problem - in order for healers to be viable, tanks who can survive (but only with healing) need to be commonplace, and in order for these more heavily defensive tanks and the build sacrifices they make to get there to be viable, healers need to be more commonplace.

Heck, maybe all it'd take is preventing hirelings from being summoned in Reaper. Then someone would have to do it and clerics would be welcomed despite all their flaws instead of patted on the head and left in the dust while the team zergs their way to the mission end without a scratch.

[Kryori]

You're forgetting other healing classes in your solutions. There is no radiant servant tree for bards and druids. But otherwise, I totally agree with you.

Oh, and druids have several proactive healing over time spells. They work great to mitigate damage as it happens. Just a thought.

The question was specific to clerics. It's right there in the title.

And sure, druids have HoTs. Doesn't help with one-shots.

Given how hard things hit in Reaper, I'd gladly take a class with powerful shields a la EQ2 Shaman or WoW Discipline priest over a traditional healer, but amusingly the best class for that at the moment seems to be a Warlock with Brilliance, Feigned Health, and False Life.

[Odysseus2011]

That being said, if you've got a meatshield that doesn't get 1-shot in Reaper 10 then you're probably dealing with someone who has the combination of equipment, past lives, and expertise that would enable them to play a ranged character who doesn't get hit in the first place and therefore doesn't need a healer. It's a chicken and egg problem - in order for healers to be viable, tanks who can survive (but only with healing) need to be commonplace, and in order for these more heavily defensive tanks and the build sacrifices they make to get there to be viable, healers need to be more commonplace.

I'll answer this under two categories.

First, while it may seem counter intuitive having a tank would actually amplify the damage output of a group. When you have ranged toons kiting a massive trash mob around it becomes very difficult to do a constant and steady amounts of damage. Tanks provide a stability to the group that allows other builds to output their maximum amount of DPS. When you compliment a tank with a DC caster not only do you have the control of loose mobs provided by a tank's intimidate, you also allow other builds to do even more damage with spells like hold monster. A ranger with IPS can do a helluva lot more damage if he's not worrying about getting hit by melee, archers, and casters every second and can simply stand in one spot and shoot through a line of held monsters. On top of that melee builds do ~30% more damage than rangers. With a hold monster's 1.5 boost a melee does ~45% more damage than a ranger.

Second, while kiting mobs can work a tank provides a much more steady and reliable source of defense for the rest of the group. On top of this some things simply cannot be kited, such as casters with dots.

In conclusion having a tank provides security and stability to a group in a difficulty where such traits are absolutely necessary to prevent a run from becoming a rez fest.

Here are a couple examples: Reaper 10 Grim and Barett


1. Note at the first set of mobs how the tank provides a source of stability for the group, allowing damage hitters to maximize their potential.
2. This endfight cannot be completed easily by simply kiting the boss. His divine wrath will hit shuricannons for about 6-7k. With a tank there is no frantic scurrying around to get out of the bosses sight and is relatively easy to complete without a single death.

Reaper 10 Black and Blue


This particular endfight is fairly difficult since the dragon has a massive range on his breath weapon and while it is possible to avoid him the amount of energy it takes to avoid the Breath/Dots/Melee/Archers for the duration it would take to drop the dragon is very extensive. With a tank however it is very easy to complete and we were unlucky to not finish the endfight with zero deaths.

-Edit- The damage of ranged vs melee in reaper: The reaper damage reduction that affects all damage applies more steeply to ranged toons. If both a melee and a ranged toon did a hit of 1,000 outside of reaper the melee would do about 30% more in reaper 10.

When you apply this to a held monster which gives a 1.5 bonus the melee would see his overall damage increases 1.5*1.3 = 1.95 verses that of a ranger who would only see the 1.5 increase. Thus the 45% difference.

[Memnir]

Just speaking personally, I'd log in and play the cleric I made to heal in Reaper.

/shrug

YMMV

[Livmo]

A 2nd Healing Cleric

TY

+1

~

As an arty I've been boosting my heal bombs for the group : )

I do have a cleric, but well, you know. Why did let me die? Because you ran around the corner before I could catch up...(back to my arty : ) )

[Kryori]

With a hold monster's 1.5 boost a melee does ~45% more damage than a ranger.

Pretty sure that 50% extra damage applies to all sources. That nitpick aside I do see the value in a tank, adding order to the chaos of battle and consolidating targets for AOE control/nukes and so forth.

I'm not arguing against the value of a tank, I'm arguing that in order to get people in general to run healing clerics in high skull reaper, reaper-viable tanks are going to have to become common enough that they're predictably available. So my first point is that in high skulls, healers need tanks in order to be more than rezbots.

Now let's consider that from the tank's point of view. In order to be able to survive the kind of mess 10 skulls throws at you, you have to make sacrifices which aren't conducive to having fun outside of that environment. You probably forgo trapping, self-healing, and dps in order to pick up hp, hamp, avoidance, etc. You probably pick Stalwart Defender and a shield over Kensei and a two-hander.

It makes sense to choose these options if you have a static group, but if you find groups through LFM this build is going to be miserable to play because you're relying upon the limited skills of incompetents who may not even speak your language. So the second point is that in order for there to be tanks capable of high-skull content generally available in the LFM rotation it has to be both fun and efficient to play that fully defense-specced tank.

I don't see that happening any time soon, so I expect 95% of the 1% of people who could potentially tank 10 skulls if they went full ****** to keep running R1 TRs for racial points. Without those tanks, healers are unnecessary in groups that actually occur through LFM; and if you've got one of those tanks you're in a static and you don't need anyone else to play a cleric because one of your own has already bitten that bullet.

[JOTMON]

I would run a healing cleric in reaper if...

1 The healing was an AoE byproduct as I laid waste to a dungeon or healed myself
2 Clerics had solid dps, self-healing, and tanking, all at the same time
3 Plague Reaper AoE healing negation on attack is removed

Until then, warlock on!

What would it take to get you run a healing cleric in reaper?

Fix Clerics..
Clerics are not just bandaid dispensers for party ouchies...

Clerics are supposed to be walking destroyers of undead.. fix this aspect of clerics..
Domains.. have them work like pacts.. the pacts are way better than the inferior domain perks.
Cleric spells.. meh... many spells are pretty sucky relative to todays game... add more spells and revisit the current spells...mass aid was useful when cap was level 10 and players had 80hp..
better buffs.. clerics deserve regen spells and temp HP spells able to be cast on others (same temp HP type as warlock so they don't stack)..
SLA's for things similar to consecrated..
revamp bears/bulls/owls/etc... so they are stacking buffs not outdated and trumped by level 7 gear.. increase the +bonus by caster level..

[Odysseus2011]

Thanks for the correction, my mistake with the HM.

However who says that everyone cannot stand to play a tank. Maybe some people like knowing that without their help the entire run would've been much harder if not impossible without them.

You also said in an earlier post that it's hard to take the role of healing seriously because everyone in the party gets 1-shot by anything dangerous. So I kindof assumed we were talking about higher skull reaper. If you're getting consistently 1-shot on 1-5ish then you've got a problem.

[DaggomaticDwarf]

I run an arti healer in Reaper. Why cleric specifically?

You only heal Artis?

[JOTMON]

Unfortunately, current game mechanics do not support the tank.
There are no parties going oohh get a tank...
a tank is deadweight, game has moved into the DPS wins the day.

moreso in higher level Reaper.. parties need every point of DPS to finish the fight faster not drag it out with a subpar class focus sucking party resources trying to go toe to toe with mobs..
We kite the mobs that one shot instead of trying to go with a toe-toe tank that dies with 2 shots..
a heavily invested tank with no DPS which then prolongs the battle which results in more failure....

A tank needs to be able to take a beating from more than 1 mob at a time w hile getting yo-yo spam healed..
Waste of party's mana and dedicated focus to spam heals on a player trying to play tank, too many other classes fill the position with better survivability and DPS by not tanking.

A tank need to hold aggro of more than 1 mob at a time and be sustained by a healer who is also able to spot cures on the party.
Tanks have no useful abilities to CC or abilities to mitigate sufficient damage to make them viable.

Personally I thing one of the biggest failings is the PRR as it is currently applied.
a robe user can hit 100 PRR and mitigate 50% damage..
the 400 PRR tank takes 20% damage has no DPS and is still likely getting killed by mobs smacking them for more end damage than HP they have.
Fix the scale.. 100 PRR should only mitigate 25%, Have 400 PRR be a cap and mitigate 95% damage.

[Kryori]

Thanks for the correction, my mistake with the HM.

However who says that everyone cannot stand to play a tank. Maybe some people like knowing that without their help the entire run would've been much harder if not impossible without them.

You also said in an earlier post that it's hard to take the role of healing seriously because everyone in the party gets 1-shot by anything dangerous. So I kindof assumed we were talking about higher skull reaper. If you're getting consistently 1-shot on 1-5ish then you've got a problem.

I'm not consistently getting 1-shot, but health does become a binary experience, and I abandoned my healing cleric as soon as I hit 20 for that reason. In my single-life, heroic-reaper-only experience as a Radiant Servant cleric people fall into just about three categories when examined from a healer's perspective.

First there are those who are literally invincible in low skulls through a combination of past lives, grandfathered pre-order bonus items, mountains of gear and perfect memory of every trap location. These guys don't care if you're a healer because they'll never take enough damage to need a heal, but for some reason they let me tag along anyway. Most of the time I was scrambling just to keep in sight of them, because they were constantly rushing to the end of the mission and almost incidentally killing necessary things along the way. They don't need a cleric for reaper because healing is an outdated mechanic for them.

Second you have the chaff from which that wheat was plucked - new players who discover every trap by braille and find themselves overwhelmed 30 seconds into any fight when their arsenal of cooldowns has run out and things are still fighting back. They need more than a cleric can offer for reaper, and do often die, if not in a single hit then at least so quickly that no amount of healing will suffice. By far the most common builds I've seen in actual play are glass cannons, and that means watching a whole lot of one-shots when the opening salvo doesn't end the fight entirely.

Finally you have the rest of us - people who have to kite and CC to survive, but have enough sense not to kite into a trap. People who've played a few lives in this environment and learned that there are builds that succeed without a healer and without sacrificing damage. People who largely aspire to run one of those builds so they can be successful no matter how much chaff fills their LFM party.

I -could- try to build a tank that can withstand Reaper with a healer, but then I have to find a healer, and we're back to that chicken and egg argument again, so I'm better off trying to build something that can carry a whole team rather than exclusively enable others to excel under ideal circumstances that rarely present themselves during play. Sure, I'll never get to reaper 10, but there's literally nothing available at reaper 10 that isn't also available at reaper 1 except challenge - and reaper 1-5 is quite challenging enough for me when playing with the company available through LFM.

[Qezuzu]

Don't know why you specify cleric, but... for Bards and Druids to not run circles around them, for one thing. Both have better CC and the healing is equally as good (Druids actually get Mass Regenerate which is hands down the best healing spell in the game.)

I've healed groups through r3 Slaver's pt3 end fight with no deaths on my SS Bard.

[Fallout47]

Unfortunately, current game mechanics do not support the tank.
There are no parties going oohh get a tank...
a tank is deadweight, game has moved into the DPS wins the day.

moreso in higher level Reaper.. parties need every point of DPS to finish the fight faster not drag it out with a subpar class focus sucking party resources trying to go toe to toe with mobs..
We kite the mobs that one shot instead of trying to go with a toe-toe tank that dies with 2 shots..
a heavily invested tank with no DPS which then prolongs the battle which results in more failure....

A tank needs to be able to take a beating from more than 1 mob at a time w hile getting yo-yo spam healed..
Waste of party's mana and dedicated focus to spam heals on a player trying to play tank, too many other classes fill the position with better survivability and DPS by not tanking.

A tank need to hold aggro of more than 1 mob at a time and be sustained by a healer who is also able to spot cures on the party.
Tanks have no useful abilities to CC or abilities to mitigate sufficient damage to make them viable.

Personally I thing one of the biggest failings is the PRR as it is currently applied.
a robe user can hit 100 PRR and mitigate 50% damage..
the 400 PRR tank takes 20% damage has no DPS and is still likely getting killed by mobs smacking them for more end damage than HP they have.
Fix the scale.. 100 PRR should only mitigate 25%, Have 400 PRR be a cap and mitigate 95% damage.

I have run high skull reaper both with and without a tank, and I would choose to have one over an additional dps all things being equal. Again optimal party make up would include dps that can actually break the dr of 10 skull mobs. You won't get that kind of dps with pugging and the group needs to know what they are doing in 10 skull.

The support roles of healer, tank and cc, while not absolutely necessary for high skull, make it a hell of a lot smoother. So blanket statements such as 'current game mechanics do not support a tank' are almost always gonna be false.

Healers can do 10 skull without the self healing nerf being watered down for healers, tanks can tank 10 skull with the current game mechanics available and cc will always be necessary at 10 skulls. I know this because I've witnessed this in 10 skull reaper runs. Neither is a replacement for the other and hopefully never will be in reaper.

I am amazed at the number of threads calling for nerfs to reaper, why reaper can not be run unless modified and how OP'd/necessary this class or that class is. Honest to god people if you don't like it, can't run it, just do us all a favor, choose not to run it. Leave the challenge for those of us who enjoy it.

-Hegenome/Feelgooddr

[Enoach]

Couldn't resist

[Skycaptain]

All it would take for me to run a healing cleric in reaper is no longer being passed up in favor of, say, warlocks. I love healing clerics but they are looked down upon by others and so I play different classes. I'd rather play a class I sort of enjoy than none at all.

[JOTMON]

I have run high skull reaper both with and without a tank, and I would choose to have one over an additional dps all things being equal. Again optimal party make up would include dps that can actually break the dr of 10 skull mobs. You won't get that kind of dps with pugging and the group needs to know what they are doing in 10 skull.

The support roles of healer, tank and cc, while not absolutely necessary for high skull, make it a hell of a lot smoother. So blanket statements such as 'current game mechanics do not support a tank' are almost always gonna be false.

Healers can do 10 skull without the self healing nerf being watered down for healers, tanks can tank 10 skull with the current game mechanics available and cc will always be necessary at 10 skulls. I know this because I've witnessed this in 10 skull reaper runs. Neither is a replacement for the other and hopefully never will be in reaper.

I am amazed at the number of threads calling for nerfs to reaper, why reaper can not be run unless modified and how OP'd/necessary this class or that class is. Honest to god people if you don't like it, can't run it, just do us all a favor, choose not to run it. Leave the challenge for those of us who enjoy it.

-Hegenome/Feelgooddr

I am sure good players may be playing tankish type toons and have the support of healers, but I am seeing a lot more players moving away from their tanks and healers and opting for more CC, DPS, UMD..
The self sufficient UMD toons healing each other.. not the diversified party that should be the ideal party..

Say what you will, I still stand by the game mechanics don't support tanking or toe-toe combat for melees.. the mechanics still favor ranged combat.


The only change I would like to see for Realer is the removal of reaper 1-4, so difficulties run 5-10, and the removal of heroic XP from Reaper..
Reaper should be run for Reaper XP and challenge, bot the double dip bonus of regular XP along with Reaper XP.
and while they are at it.. remove dungeon scaling.. that has no place in Reaper..

[the_one_dwarfforged]

i would play a healer more just to fill the role in groups if:

1) i was in a semi static group that ran content that a healer was actually useful in on a regular basis

2) healing in ddo wasnt an absolutely mind bogglingly one dimensional, binary, boring task

[AngryDude]

It's not hard to get a group as a healer. Add evasion and some dps and good to go. Grab scrolls wands in lower levels and no worries on spell cool downs or sp.

[FranOhmsford]

The only change I would like to see for Realer is the removal of reaper 1-4, so difficulties run 5-10, and the removal of heroic XP from Reaper..
Reaper should be run for Reaper XP and challenge, bot the double dip bonus of regular XP along with Reaper XP.
and while they are at it.. remove dungeon scaling.. that has no place in Reaper..

I'd go with having R1, R4, R7 and R10 stay but removing the rest as superfluous.

I don't like that R1 has made Elite much more difficult to get groups for but removing it now would seriously annoy way too many people while removing R2 and R3 but keeping R1 and R4 would be a much lesser issue.

[Seere]

I really enjoyed the 2 videos posted above.

Can we have videos of similar (or same) content being completed by 6 ranged characters on R10?

I think that would make this thread more interesting.