Dark Apostate issues

[Raynebowdragon]

You know what has me completely bamboozled is why you would create a Dark Energy Cleric then remove one of the only good reasons to take it... I run with a completely Neg Energy Team as a Cleric! Dark Apostate arrives and I'm excited here is a great way to run a Cleric with a full Neg Team I can put pos heals on a back burner for pugging and load up the Neg Heals like NEB uhhhhhh NEB errrrrrrr where is the only reason I was excited about the Dark Apostate ummmmmm it's not there!

A Dark Energy Cleric with no NEB *** were you thinking SSG? You just took away the ONLY reason I had for doing the Dark Cleric! I've completely lost interest in doing a Dark Cleric now, I was so excited and now I'm totally flat!

[fatherpirate]

If you want some decent DPS
go this way

Drow
Volkoor
Death Domain
Spend at least 3 AP to pick up Shadowblades in the Fey Ill tree.
Shadowblades count as drow Favored weapon and level up nicely together
with the curse ability of dark apostate

go to town
do not forget, Bane, prayer, bless and so on do damage
to the enemy with this class tree (assuming you pay for that)
making this build an armor piercing/debuff build

have fun

[Xezom]

If you want some decent DPS
go this way

Drow
Volkoor
Death Domain
Spend at least 3 AP to pick up Shadowblades in the Fey Ill tree.
Shadowblades count as drow Favored weapon and level up nicely together
with the curse ability of dark apostate

go to town
do not forget, Bane, prayer, bless and so on do damage
to the enemy with this class tree (assuming you pay for that)
making this build an armor piercing/debuff build

have fun

I should have specified in my OP. Dark Apostate Caster Issues. If you want to run as a gish, this tree does as well as a gish does. It's not on the level of EK by any means but it's not the worst. The sad part is that gish toons do as much with their melee attacks as the caster does with their fully ramped spells.

This tree has the design to support gish play style for sure, but if you are trying to run as a caster it is not the way to go at all. It is a decent splash tree for DD and Warpriest, but being that it is the namesake of the entire Archtype, being a splash tree is not what it should be. There is no arguing that this tree when taken by itself as your primary (t5 and capstone) lacks the power it needs to be a viable main set up for the caster fantasy that it's pitching. In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that if you went even the gish route it's still not great without needing to get extra power from somewhere else. Yes, I am aware that the game is designed to have you taking points in multiple trees to contribute to a build. That is not the issue here. The issue is that Dark Apostate pitches itself as a tree designed around "Dark healing, evil magic, negative damage, undead control and destruction."

Of those things, this tree only has 2 (3 if you count the shroud) points that have anything to do with dark healing (Return to Dusk and Benediction for more Harm scaling), negligible Evil casting potential (Ironically they changed the description from saying "Evil Damage" to "Evil magic", don't think I didn't catch that SSG), 2 points for negative damage, 0 of which are SLA's that do negative damage, and funny enough the best thing it does is deal with undead, though it mainly takes the form of Turning, which we all know is not exactly a great mechanic to rely on (Cursed Words actually does a really good job with Undead so definitely not complaining on that one). Back on lamannia, many of us argued that this tree shouldve just expanded on it's debuffing fantasy up in the T5's so solidify it as a true debuffer by giving it something meaningful to do against raid bosses/groups. Had that occured, it would have been acceptable to have subpar damage (such as where it is now) because it's main role would've still contributed something meaningful to groups. In it's current state it just doesn't do anything well enough on it's own to justify playing it as a focus. It lacks a true sharp identity because it tries to do too many things, and does not do any of them well as a caster. Arguably not even well enough to justify using it over alrady existing builds that do the same thing but better even as a gish.


I'm not arguing that the tree has NO useful builds that include it. If you play a DD and splash DA for defensive options or a Warpriest/Gish DA works great as a splash. What I'm saying is that as a caster, it meets very few to none of the criteria that it set itself up for in its described play style in a fashion that is meaningful enough to make it worth full speccing into. Again, simply giving it's PFM enough punch to make it's debuffing spells usable for, at the VERY minimum, clearing trash effectively would make this tree actually viable as a stand alone or main tree. As I said before, once you hit 14 you can become an Insta-death machine, but that isn't the play style it pitches and as we know with inst-kill builds (looking at you Illusion Deep gnome PK spammers) get pretty dang stagnant pretty fast (and the devs are not huge fans of them).

In reality, as I and others have said, some simple tweaks to PFM's damage to bring it up to non-laughable would totally change my opinion of the tree. If PFM had enough power to be viable at least up to 14 where you could get to your Inst-kill spam Set up, it would at least have a decent progressive feel to it. I don't think it's a great method for delivering on the Dark Priest fantasy but it would at least still check all the boxes for a viable tree/build.

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

I'm not sure if the negative energy inflict wounds and harm spell are functioning as intended but they all seem to be touch range only - which is extremely frustrating trying to heal a party of undead. Unlike normal heals they fail constantly due to positioning, spacing, distance, etc - extremely difficult to use - are they all meant to be touch range only? Seems like they should be like positive heal spells and have the same positioning, spacing, distancing as they do.

[misterski]

I'm not sure if the negative energy inflict wounds and harm spell are functioning as intended but they all seem to be touch range only - which is extremely frustrating trying to heal a party of undead. Unlike normal heals they fail constantly due to positioning, spacing, distance, etc - extremely difficult to use - are they all meant to be touch range only? Seems like they should be like positive heal spells and have the same positioning, spacing, distancing as they do.

Inflict wound spells have always been touch range. For the Harm spell it varies from edition to edition.

[fatherpirate]

What the tree (or the class) could use,
is a pet. similar to the skel warrior, iron defender, wolf
maybe a demon dog ... or a will-o-wisp or something.

that might nudge up the power enough to mimic
the EK playability ( give or take) or at the least make it
an interesting option.

[Xezom]

What the tree (or the class) could use,
is a pet. similar to the skel warrior, iron defender, wolf
maybe a demon dog ... or a will-o-wisp or something.

that might nudge up the power enough to mimic
the EK playability ( give or take) or at the least make it
an interesting option.

I would 100% agree with that. If it had something that took over the role of finishing off weakened target it would be pretty comparable to EK. It wouldn't have to be insanely high damage but just enough to finish things off after you throw your debuff damaging spells on things and pull some heat off of you while you wait for your single target inst-kills to come back up (post 14)

I guess that's what so frustrating about this tree. It is so close to being good and fun, it's just one thing off, and that one thing could be a plethora of different ideas that'd work. It's just missing that one last thing that pulls it's kit together. The easiest solution is upping the damage on PFM. Adding a tanking/kill securing pet, adding more meaningful boss/raid debuffs, adding negative healing for undead/living allies like the alchemist salve, etc. would all work out as well.

I don't think DDO truly needs DPS tree #4506, but at least it would have a role xD

[SocratesBastardSon]

I assume this is a bug and not WAI: Activating Rage shuts off both Apostate's Curse and Shadow Shrouding. I assume this is a bug given that Rage can be used with other Forms, and Apostate's Curse appears to work with other Forms as well (unless you activate Rage), e.g., Druid Bear. I tested three versions of Rage: Barbarian, Druid Wolf with NP, and Wildhunt Shifter and all three cancel AC and Shadow mantle. I discovered the bug because I was thinking of doing a DA LR for my Shifter Cleric Thief-Acrobat.

Good thing I tested before wasting a Heart.

UPDATE: I also tested it with Destruction Domain, which allows Raging with Cleric spells. Nope, doesn't work that way either, Rage still cancels DA toggles.

[yfernbottom]

I have played a round with it a bit. If you go for Aureon (staffs) and a two handed fighting build, you can make a decent melee caster hybrid. The evil damage also lands on some foes I was not expecting it to. It seems to hit more things than normal evil damage on lootgen weapons, but those are kind of actively gimpy so I don't use them much save for flavor.* I could easilly be mistaken about that.

My only real complaint with the tree is that 1d4 damage per level for the enhanced SLAs seems extremely low. I guess the idea is that the spells are only supposed to do good damage after you curse a mob, but it's a convoluted ability rotation compared to just straight up nuking them or beating them in the face.


*I had an evil damage, hp drain two hander with a festival cold burst gem on it that I really liked even though it really wasn't that great. That is literally the only time I've used one for long, and that was years ago. Now days I might get stuck using an evil damage weapon at super low levels (I like to play with lootgen stuff for funzies on new alts), but even a poison or chaos weapon will get swapped in as soon as I find one.

[Xezom]

I have played a round with it a bit. If you go for Aureon (staffs) and a two handed fighting build, you can make a decent melee caster hybrid. The evil damage also lands on some foes I was not expecting it to. It seems to hit more things than normal evil damage on lootgen weapons, but those are kind of actively gimpy so I don't use them much save for flavor.* I could easilly be mistaken about that.

My only real complaint with the tree is that 1d4 damage per level for the enhanced SLAs seems extremely low. I guess the idea is that the spells are only supposed to do good damage after you curse a mob, but it's a convoluted ability rotation compared to just straight up nuking them or beating them in the face.


*I had an evil damage, hp drain two hander with a festival cold burst gem on it that I really liked even though it really wasn't that great. That is literally the only time I've used one for long, and that was years ago. Now days I might get stuck using an evil damage weapon at super low levels (I like to play with lootgen stuff for funzies on new alts), but even a poison or chaos weapon will get swapped in as soon as I find one.

A lot of the older alignment weapons had clauses in them that were something like "Does 1d6 evil damage to good enemies," or "Deals 1d6 evil damage to non-evil enemies." I'm not sure if that's true on your particular weapon or not, but might be one reason. It's been forever since I played a melee toon outside lamannia testing.

And yes this tree has a few gish options/imbue potential. It's far from being on the same level as a EK/PM by any stretch of the imagination. I wish I could rename the Thread to Dark Apostate Caster Issues to clarify. I'm not saying that the DA is a GOOD Gish character, but it's not as bad at being a gish as it is as being a dedicated caster. If there had been a Bestow Curse, Mass SLA at T5 to make the idea of needing to curse things to do real damage feel like the intended style, I'd have been okay with that. 2d6/Cl still isn't great damage, but if you could mass curse and mass Bane to hit groups with enhanced damage it would've at least made for a cohesive rotation. As you pointed out it's a clunky and convoluted rotation to try to curse targets from afar one at a time and then use Bane on them, and that's the only option you really have to get decent-ish damage cause even maximized and empowered Bane without enemies being cursed does next to nothing.

So two things that need to be done to make DA at least viable as a Caster and worth playing (and two alternate suggestions):

- Pray For Mercy's Damage is far too low to be even remotely considered useful. Suggestion: Increase damage to 1d4+4/CL enhanced to 1d6+6 at T5.
- Prayer and Bless need bug-fixed as they are not getting the benefits of their damaging meta-magics. Compounded with the horrid damage PFM does, the DA Caster does even lower damage.
- Third optional that would help with being able to get some time for your moderately long SLA CD's to come back up: Make Cursedwords/Bestow Curse and Bane accept Enlarge as a metamagic as well. Currently they do not.
- Fourth optional would be to abandon the horrid damage this tree does and ramp it's debuffing in T5 as was suggested on Lamannia. Support characters don't need a lot of damage if they are useful enough to the party in other ways. It wouldn't fix the charaters solo caster power, but it would give it a useful niche as a support/debuffer in parties. (Long shot but still pushing for a full debuffer lol)


Until at least the first two of those are addressed, the DA Caster is not worth the time you spend in character selection to make it. At this point, I'm going to stick to my statement: DO NOT PLAY DA IF YOU WANT TO USE IT AS A CASTER! YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED!

Once it is buffed up some I will be happy to edit, delete, redact and even rave about the tree because it truly is awesome on paper. It just needs some more oomph to be awesome in-game

[ned_ellis]

You know what has me completely bamboozled is why you would create a Dark Energy Cleric then remove one of the only good reasons to take it... I run with a completely Neg Energy Team as a Cleric! Dark Apostate arrives and I'm excited here is a great way to run a Cleric with a full Neg Team I can put pos heals on a back burner for pugging and load up the Neg Heals like NEB uhhhhhh NEB errrrrrrr where is the only reason I was excited about the Dark Apostate ummmmmm it's not there!

A Dark Energy Cleric with no NEB *** were you thinking SSG? You just took away the ONLY reason I had for doing the Dark Cleric! I've completely lost interest in doing a Dark Cleric now, I was so excited and now I'm totally flat!

Wow! The removal of NEB in DD completely slipped me by
My neg-cleric without the new archetype is now worse off, and the excitement of having a way to make it even more flavoursome be stripped away with the lack of caster synergy is just sad
I'll try it, because I predelict flavour to efficiency but it will be then abandoned if it cant become functional via extreme tweaking at higher levels...what a shame.

ps : I'd love to run a full neg group - sounds a blast!

[Anihsod]

The 900 pound gorilla is the missing Neg Energy Burst, it should be fueled by turns and have all metas available. This is so blatantly wrong to exclude that it's very nearly objectively wrong. " But .. OP ... " to which the only correct reply is " have you met sorcs and alch's yet"?

[cmecu]

We've been pushing since preview one to get them to ramp this tree up, but so far its still pretty lackluster. It's better than it was in preview 1 (should tell you how bad it was to start), but it still needs work. I'm very hopeful that they give it a hotfix buff as, like you, I love the theme feel and look of the class and tree. Right now, it just doesn't live up to it's fantasy... or even usefulness. It's close just needs some number tweaks.

I also tested the curse SLA damage vs undead to make sure the metas are working, and it completely smokes Pray for Mercy. You could make pray for mercy the same as cursed words and it would still be way better than it is now if it worked on everything. The biggest issue of this tree is it's lack of doing anything useful. Penalties to hits and saves are nice especially since many of them stack, but those penalties mean nothing if you can't do enough damage to actually kill things before running dry on SP.

I havent messed with the tree casting wise, more just for adding evil or whatever to melee attacks.. what is the point of the Dark Apostate Tree? Like what is its main purpose , or best use for damage?

[Hedd]

The 4th teir curse enhancement says that you curse when you crit with a favored weapon. Has anyone actually seen this happen? I'm sporting a 14-20 crit range and haven't seen it curse anything.

[Zuldar]

Dark Apostate really only has two good enhancements in the entire tree. The undead form which is mostly for the immunities (horrid wilting and burning blood in particular) since clerics already have decent healing and Benediction which vastly increases harms ability to heal which pairs well with the undead form. Everything else is pretty much just filler.

Most of the abilities are just too weak to be much use outside of normal/hard content and the stacking concealment and incorporeality quickly become worthless if you dabble in even a moderate amount of reaper skulls. Just for fun I did one Dark Apostate life with a build that could achieve a permanent 95% concealment and while that may seem overpowered the big issue there is that any content where it would be OP is content where there really isn't any danger to begin with. Turns out concealment is kinda worthless outside of leveling, even if you have as much of it as is possible to get.

Dark Apostate just kind of lacks an identity so it doesn't really do anything particularly well leading to a kind of mediocre tree that is fine for leveling to get the past life but isn't something you'd want to play in end game when better options exist.

[ned_ellis]

The 900 pound gorilla is the missing Neg Energy Burst, it should be fueled by turns and have all metas available. This is so blatantly wrong to exclude that it's very nearly objectively wrong. " But .. OP ... " to which the only correct reply is " have you met sorcs and alch's yet"?

Bingo! (s)he gets it. and that's only to get it to be a functional splash tree...