My Game Guide

I originally intended this as an addendum to my clanking guide, but as I spent more and more time on it, it got far too big to just be an addendum. Since you can’t change the thread title once set either, I’ve decided to put this all in a new thread. Go me and my lack of foresight.
For those who have not already read it, further information and tips for clerics can be found in the Famous Guide to Clanking, here: http://www.outspark.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28378

I would like to apologise for the drab formatting of the guide. There is a strict 10000 character posting limit, and I simply couldn’t fit any html code into the posts. If that changes any time, I’ll put some work into making a more attractive, shiny looking guide.

Introduction: Why be a cleric?

Unlike most games, clerics aren’t a backline, fragile healing chimps, they’re hard to kill, blunt weapon wielding fury gorillas with powerful buffs and awesome healing magic. Though they have the worst damage out of any class, they can stand up against far more powerful enemies armed with nothing but their Faith (Faith of course, being their pet name for their +9 spiked mace of death).

The good side? You’ll be be vital to parties, you’ll be able to solo more cheaply than anyone else, you get the best looking armour (unlike fighters, clerics do not feel the need to wear belly shirts), and you’ll have automatic access to all the best buffs in the game, because you’re the one who’ll be casting them. You can heal and revive the dead, something no other class can do. Poison and disease are no threat to you, and even the mightiest of foes can find themselves being outlasted by the clerics stoic nature in battle.

The bad side? Even though you’ll be able to solo, you’ll take a long time to kill anything with your terrible, terrible damage, you’ll have to put up with people constantly assuming you’re a slave because you’re a cleric, and demanding anything from healing to buffing without even a thank you in return. Your accuracy and evade are almost as bad as the mage, and even though you can survive the most punishment, you’ll frequently have to, because a cleric has no way of dealing with multiple monsters, neither a ranged skill to lure away stragglers, nor an AOE skill to handle multiple enemies.
You’ll even kill so slowly new enemies will spawn on you whilst you’re fighting one monster already, keeping you permanently locked in combats you want to escape.

Playing a cleric well is one of the hardest skills to master, it needs precise timing, attention to detail,
Stun is your greatest threat as a cleric, as you don’t have the endurance of a fighter, you’ll need to keep healing to survive. Your second greatest threat are magic users, who can strike you from afar, allowing you no retaliation. On the other hand, mages can be your greatest ally, giving you the damage you lack, whilst you in turn protect them from harm.

Choose a cleric if you are patient and if you like to help others.

1.0: General Cleric Builds

One of the most common questions: What build?

First off, what does each stat mean to a cleric?

Strength: Clerics have bad, bad damage. Lowest in the game in fact. Points invested in Strength won’t make you magically turn into a damage dealer, and it isn’t until you have a lot of points sunk into it that you’ll see much of an improvement at all, but it will make you faster at killing things, and that’s nice. Each point of strength adds 1.2 damage, and since it never caps, you can keep on adding to it and never have to worry about it peaking. Because it ignores defence, strength is an excellent stat to have in PvP, since it lets them punch through those points in Endurance, unlike monsters.

Dexterity: The importance of this stat depends entirely on which weapon you use. The mace has only the third best accuracy in the game (only mages have a worse accuracy primary weapon), and the worst dexterity progression, whilst the hammer has the third worst (only the axe and the wand have a lower accuracy score).
Since Dexterity is a stat usually flat out dismissed for clerics, I’ll go into it a little deeper, to hopefully demonstrate why.
What dexterity does is actually fairly complex, according to the wiki, each point of dexterity gives: +0.2 EVA% up to level 50, where it drops to 0.1 EVA%, +0.3% AIM (up to level 33, where it only gives +0.2% AIM per point, and again drops to +0.1% AIM after 67 points).

Now, clerics are maybe the only class other than mages that has effectively a 0% chance of evading a yellow enemy’s attack, so we’ll focus on the accuracy bonus instead. 0.3% is the biggest straight % increase per point of anything in the game.

Compared to the archer, even a level 60 mace has only 233 accuracy. Added to your base dexterity, you can easily have over 400 aim. If Dexterity really does boost accuracy by a percentage (which it may well do), then each point in it can at higher levels result in over 1.2 more points of aim. Sink 5 points into Dexterity, that’s 1.5%. Assuming you hit around 420 accuracy with the new mace+stats at level 60, that’s an extra 6.3 aim. Sink 10 points for 3%, it’s 12.6 - Not a huge number, is it? Mace users won’t be getting much from putting points in Dex.

What about hammer? Well, hammer users have a smaller number to play with, they’ll have about 380 aim total. Ten points of dexterity for them will give them only 11 points of aim. That’s not even the difference between Hammer and Mace. In fact, to make up just the difference between hammer and mace at that level, you’d need 33 points of dexterity for a 9.9% bonus (which would leave you just short at 417 aim), to actually hit the same accuracy, you’d have to put in a massive 37 points of dexterity, just to give you the same aim as a mace user with the same stats.
If that mace user spent those same 37 points in strength, they’d be dealing an extra 44 damage per hit, regardless of defence.
If they put it into endurance, they’d have a +3.7% chance to ignore all damage received, 185 hitpoints, and 18 points of defence.
If they put 25 of it into Spirit, there’s a 5% chance for a critical that the hammer user won’t be getting.
Hopefully this proves, even if you’re a hammer user, it’s just not worth adding dexterity.

Endurance: Unlike the fighter, a cleric has no two handed weapon (who wouldn’t like a giant, two handed bludgeon though?), so Endurance is always useful to a cleric, unless that cleric has Alzheimer’s and forgot his shield. Each point of endurance up to 50 adds 0.1% chance to block. Unlike dexterity, this isn’t based on other stats, it’s a flat addition to your shield and buffs, so with 50 endurance, stoneskin and a shield, you’re going to have a 10% chance to block every single hit that comes at you, from a raging slime to Godtree’s smite. This stat can and will save your life if you boost it.

Spirit: The only other stat apart from Strength to boost damage, and even then indirectly, spirit has a flat bonus of 0.2% chance of critical per point. Since this only needs to be upgraded to 25 points, and is a percentage chance rather than flat damage bonus, it can be maxed out early on, and still grant the same proportional bonus to damage at level 99 as it does at level 20, one of its bonuses over strength, though it doesn’t provide quite so much of a damage bonus in the short term.
Since it also boosts magic defence and SP, it helps the cleric against their second most deadly enemy: The magic user.

Intelligence: This stat does nothing for a cleric except allow them to say they’re smart. Clerics are not smart, they are angry, club wielding apes of fury. They deal no magic damage, so never, ever, ever upgrade it. Ever.

Alright, onto builds!

1.1: The general clanking build.
The 25 Spirit, 50 Endurance build mentioned earlier in the clanking guide is a pretty flexible build. Crits will help you in soloing, and what cleric doesn’t like having a larger hitpoint reserve to let them heal less often? Stoning less, healing less and bashing less makes this is a pretty self-sufficient build, and serves equally well in parties and solo.
You didn’t hear it from me, but I hear that Steam has a cleric, and that his cleric uses this build, it’s just that good.

1.2: Solo/Duo Builds
There are various proportions that make up the strength build clerics. The most popular is 2:1 Endurance/Strength, which is comparable to the clanking build in terms of defence against physical enemies, and is faster in solo, though not by as much as some might claim. The points in strength are sometimes wasted in a party, however, where a cleric cannot always safely wade in and start hitting the enemies. This build is good for duo with a fighter however, where you’ll be able to let the fighter take some hits before having to heal them, allowing the both of you to kill enemies quickly.

Another popular and strong solo build is 1:2 Endurance/Strength, which sacrifices defence for speed of kills. Though the cleric with this build will kill faster, without good equipment, they’ll take more damage than their better defended cleric buddies, which diminishes much of their partying ability, especially later in the game, where a good cleric can take aggro more often than even a mage can. A cleric who has to heal themselves, or worse, a cleric who’s dead, isn’t a useful member of the party. This cleric is better suited to a lonely solo career, but they’ll be good at it at least. Good for loners, and some early points in endurance can help with the young cleric’s survival issues.

1.3: The “Party Builds”

There are two builds that can be considered purely for partying, and both are very simple pure builds.

Pure Spirit: This build is severely lacking in defence against everything except magic mobs, and will spend a great deal of their extra SP on extra healing if they try to solo (where their crit% won’t be that much higher than a 25 Spirit build; only a 3.9% difference at level 59). But in parties, the logic runs that the more SP they have, the more time they can spend dishing out the healing.
The biggest flaw in this reasoning comes from heal aggro. A non-endurance cleric takes quite a bit more damage, and so can handle fewer monsters without needing to self-heal. This almost inevitably means juggling heal spells when you shouldn’t need to.

Pure Endurance: The true party build. This self-sacrificing soul has given up the offensive ability and ability to handle magic-attacks of the End:Spr build in exchange for being an excellent backline cleric. Even when they take aggro, a full endurance cleric can handle the most monsters at a time without needing to self-heal, making situations that much more survivable. Since the full endurance cleric has zero offensive capabilities of course, they are totally stuck being party clerics.

1.4: The PVP Builds.

Every cleric can solo, even the full-Int cleric can solo, these guys aren’t much for the party, but not only are they fast soloers, though their lower defence will make them heal slightly more often, these are the ones who take advantage of strength - “the PvP stat”, to try to keep the immortality of the cleric and the exceptional mortality of their victims.

Full Strength: The best, numerically speaking, a cleric can have. Full strength at level 59 is +76 damage every hit, and that’s going to jump to +90 at level 60, thanks to the +10 stat points you pick up for levelling. +76 on top of the 80-150 a cleric usually deals is a pretty hefty number, especially ignoring defence the way it does. It’s debatable if that will ever let the cleric outdamage someone’s stoning ability, but this is one cleric that you can’t ignore hitting you.

25 Spirit, Full Strength: Critical hits might not add as much for the cleric as raw stren0gth, but spike damage is the best way to catch someone off-guard and kill them in PvP. 5% critical at the expense of only dealing an extra 46 damage per hit (+60 come level 60) is a fair trade off if you want to be a PvP monster. You might not kill as fast or as easily as a mage, but who’s going to dare come close to a self-healing, ultra damaging war machine with an attack skill that’s on the same kind of level as fireball?

2.0 Skill Empowerment

Part of every build, in fact the most important part, is your skill empowerment. Without these, you’re wasting a good deal of your potential.
Cleric skills up to 59 are listed here, in detail.
http://www.fiestafan.com/wiki/Cleric_Skills

Of the cleric’s fourteen skills, there are six that are never worth empowerment; every single buff spell the cleric has except for invincible lasts for one hour, making their SP cost, duration and cooldown times irrelevant, and the basic bonus they give cannot be empowered either. Cure is the sixth one, where you will rarely, even in a PvP situation against an archer, need to worry too much about the cooldown, or the cost of the skill, and its potency is determined purely by level, nothing more.
This brings it down to eight that you might choose to empower or otherwise.

Heal empowerment.

5 points in Cooldown is basically increasing the amount your Heal restores by a third, and more importantly, reducing the amount of time you need to go without a heal. It is mandatory, utterly mandatory. Without fully empowered heal, you’ll be less durable, less useful in parties, less useful as a cleric. Solo or party, Heal is your best weapon, upgrade it as soon as possible.
5 points in SP consumption on the other hand, is technically optional, but very, very rewarding. You will be casting heal maybe a thousand times an hour if not more, and if you empowered SP consumption, you’ll be saving yourself 67000 SP’s worth of stones. Without this, clerics go from a very cheap, to a very expensive class indeed.

Restore empowerment.

If you want to be a dedicated heal-monkey, then Restore empowerment is a possible, but honestly, you’re better off waiting for Rejuvenate.
Why?
Because Restore is a buff-style healing spell, and its effects last 15 seconds, reducing cooldown is rather pointless. If two people are taking enough damage, then being able to cast Restore on the second 1.5 seconds earlier than you could otherwise is 90% likely to be unimportant. Being able to keep casting it on the same target 1.5 seconds earlier is equally pointless, since it’ll still be around for another 10 seconds anyway.
The only other thing improvable with Restore is its SP consumption. Again, since you only need to cast it once every 15 seconds, it’s pretty rare that this is going to be a problem for you.

Rejuvenate empowerment.

More important if you’re going to be clanking than if you’re just going to be healing, where you’ll want to cast this as often as possible,
the situation does come up where you’ll appreciate the additional recovery from rejuvenate, from boss monster to massive AOE mob, or just so you can juggle heals more easily.
5 points in Cooldown will drop the time from a long, long 10 seconds to a short, short 7 seconds. That’s the same increase in potency as Heal gets, and will let you cast Rejuvenate seven times, instead of five times, in a minute.
Since rejuvenate is fairly cheap for what it does, and you won’t be casting it too frequently, you might not find empowering it worthwhile, but again, 5 points in SP consumption halves the cost, making it a mere 72 SP a cast, almost as cheap as Heal.

Invincible empowerment.

Invincible. Some people swear by it, some people swear at it. Others yell “won’t someone please think of the children?” and tell everyone to stop swearing.
One thing to note about invincible beforehand is that it is not as good as stun is. Monsters can still curse you, stun you, or poison you through invincible. They can even deal enough damage to punch through invincible, so don’t expect it to be the ultimate godspell some people make it out to be.
Anyway, whether invincible is worth it to you or not depends entirely on what you fight. Against any boss monster, they’ll probably punch through your invincible spell in two to three hits. In an AOE party against a mob of five monsters, it might only last as long as four seconds before they break it, or it might last all ten seconds. Against single greens or yellows, the skill will probably last until the duration expires.
If you fully empower invincible, it will last 17.5 seconds. If it does, then that’s great. But every time it doesn’t, you’ve basically wasted precious empowerment points on doing nothing but making your skill icon look pretty. SP consumption and cooldown are basically worthless too, since 5 points in cooldown equates to 5 seconds, and you won’t be casting this skill very often at all.

Bash empowerment.

Like a college student’s 1953 Skoda, which they’ve covered in so many accessories they can almost hide the Skoda label, Bash is the clerics’ only toy for 35 levels, and you’re probably going to want some go-faster stripes on it, but Bash is no Skoda, at level 52, it has a higher bonus minimum and maximum damage than fireball does (don’t get too excited, thanks to their base stats and the comparative weakness against M.Def, mages will still deal more damage with Magic Missile[1] than you do with Bash[7], the skill might rock, but you’ll still suck). 5 points in damage will boost your damage by a straight 50%. 5 points into cooldown will boost it by only 25%, yet cost more. However, combine the two, and you will deal 187.5% the damage of an unempowered Bash, more than the sum of its parts.

Since you only have six skills to empower, and this will be the only other skill you will use nearly as frequently as Heal, it may be worth it for you lowering the SP consumption. Though this may become less worthwhile at a later time when more skills become available for a cleric, one would hope that skillpoint resets will be made available by the time any more worthy alternative to Bash consumption comes out.

Trip and Bleed empowerment.

Looking at these shiny light flashing, pretty skills of glowiness, I’d love to say that they were actually worthwhile, but these skills at the moment are barely worth buying, let alone empowering. Rumour has it that one day Trip will cause stun, and Bleed will deal DoT bleeding damage, but until that day, any empowerment of Trip or Bleed is a flat out waste. I’ll reevaluate this once they fix them.

Protect, Resist, Stoneskin and Endure.

Though I’ve already said these should never be empowered, these spells, most particularly Protect, are vitally important to a Cleric. Both Protect and Resist gain in power the more nearby characters in your party, up to a maximum of +60%, and in a full party, Protect at early levels gives a larger bonus to damage than weapons do, and simultaneously gives more defence than all of the cleric’s armour. At level 51, it makes a difference of dealing up to thirty damage more against Uruga monsters, and taking 50 damage less, every hit. Resist too, will make a huge difference in survival, and your mage-buddies will kill so much faster with the magic damage bonus, they’ll love you too.
Stoneskin functions like 10 points of endurance in terms of blocking per tier, whilst Endure gives you more SP and HP than two vitality and mentality scrolls tier 1 combined.

Where am I going with this?
Always have them cast.
If you die, your first action when you revive should be to recast your buffs. Stoning if necessary. A cleric is balanced with the idea that they will have their buffs active 24/7, so if you don’t, you might as well be naked. They’re literally that important.

3: Weapon Choice.

It has been demonstrated mathematically that, when compared side by side, the hammer and the mace deal effectively equal damage to each other over a minute.
However, there are some advantages to each weapon that I feel compelled to go into.
In the future, attack skills that are dependent on weapon choice are available for the cleric. The only ones currently known are trip and bleed, which I shall address with each weapon in turn. If and when new skills are brought into the game, and when trip and bleed are finally fixed, I’ll update this part of the guide accordingly.

Mace: The cleric is not only the class with the worst damage in the game, the mace has pretty low damage too, and is only third best in terms of accuracy.

Pros and cons: The high(ish) accuracy of the mace will mean that you will land many hits, compared to the hammer, whilst the damage difference is offset by the mace’s faster attack speed. If going for Bash as often as possible, a mace can strike four times between bash cooldowns, whilst a hammer can only hit three, making for a subtle advantage in damage for the mace user.
The primary downside of the mace is that it lacks the sheer power of the hammer, with a 2% lower critical hit rate, and half the damage bonus. Some, but not all of this failing is compensated by the earlier, and more numerous, masteries for the mace.

Skill: Bleed. Supposedly destined to cause bleed damage over time, much like the archer ability. Damage over time could potentially allow the cleric to kite, will assist in holding aggro, and will help offset low cleric damage with its additional, defence ignoring, damage.
Depending on how much damage bleed deals, this could push the mace ahead in terms of sheer damage output, making this look to be

Hammer: The hammer has good statistical damage, but, when coupled with the cleric’s natural talent for combat (none), the overall damage is still nowhere near what other classes can put out. Still nice though.
For a cleric.

Pros and cons: The hammer user will fumble a lot without an aim scroll, and won’t hit very fast, but when they hit, the damage will certainly make up for it. You’ll crit more often too, which will make your skills more powerful than if you wielded the mace, especially since the hammer user can take advantage on the zero downtime between attack skills to pull off an Attack-Bash-Trip-Attack combo, for some excellent immediate damage.
The main downside is, of course, the dreaded “miss” (and you’ll hate missing on Bash at least as much as you love critting with it), and the cumbrous nature of the hammer itself.

Skill: Trip. Destined to cause stun, like a single target devastate, this ability is like giving the cleric another mini-invincible, and is almost worth carrying a hammer just so you can use this skill. It might be lacking in damage, but chances are it will give the hammer user, and clever weapon switcher, a nice little boost in the defense department. Trip, when implemented, will make the hammer the weapon of choice against other clerics in PvP.
4: Tips and Tactics

4.1: The Heal Chain

I covered a little on the Heal Chain in my clanking guide; mainly about using to for self-healing to hold aggro, but I’ve seen too many clerics using Rejuvenate when they should have Healed, Restoring when they should have Rejuvenated, and generally failing to use the right spell in the right situation, and it has cost lives because of it.

Heal: This is the first, and best spell in the Heal Chain. If someone isn’t on full health, is taking hits from a monster, and Heal is not on cooldown, then use it!
Never use any other healing spell if heal is available.
Secondly, it pays to have a lower tier heal equipped on your hotbar, whenever your lower tier heal can fully heal the injuries your heal target has received, use it instead of your max tier heal. Lower tiers of heal are more efficient, allowing you to heal to full health just as fast, at a fraction of the cost.

Restore: The number one failing using this skill is using it on someone who is on low health.
That’s right, this is the one spell where it’s better to cast it on someone who’s currently on high health. This is because at low health, Restore does not recover enough health on the target early on to allow them to survive the next hit coming to them, whilst at high health you have plenty of time to get full benefit from the regeneration.
Restore’s ideal function is to supplement healing. If a monster deals 1200 damage every hit, then just healing will gradually lose them 100 HP every time the monster hits, or you must waste a heal to top them off. With Restore active, they’ll recover 160 by the time the monster hits again, letting you keep them on full HP with just one heal, saving you SP in the long run.

Rejuvenate: The main problem people seem to have with this skill is they assume it’s just a bigger, better heal, and use it as such.
This is simply wrong. You should never, ever use Rejuvenate when you could be using Heal, it’s just too slow for the job. In fact, if Heal is more than halfway through cooldown, it’s still better to wait for Heal than it is to cast Rejuvenate.
Best time to cast Rejuvenate is immediately as you cast Heal, skipping the animation, and then casting Heal immediately as Rejuvenate resolves, skipping the Rejuvenate animation as well.

Cure: Worth a mention, even though it doesn’t restore a single point of HP, using cure on somebody suffering from poison is like casting Restore on them, only frequently better. Always use it when someone needs it, and always interrupt the casting animation.

Recover: A terrible, terrible heal for emergencies. The only time you’ll need, or want, to slip Restore into your heal-chain is to interrupt the animation of Rejuvenate, if several members in your party are taking or have taken reasonably low damage.
Be warned that this spell generates more aggro than the mage’s level 60 AOE, and if you use it, there’s a good chance that you’ll have an excellent chance of taking aggro en masse, which can make your Sacrifice buff come into play rather earlier than you might like.
The range on the area of effect is also rather poor; you’ll only effect people within a strict radius around you, so you’ll need to be up there on the front lines, prepared to take hits, when you use this brute.

4.2: Juggling Heal
Cleric kryptonite. In ideal situations, you’ll be healing a single target, where your only need for the Heal Chain is if they’re taking more damage than you can normally heal. When the chips are down, and more than one person is taking damage, you’ll need to start splitting your healing abilities. For the most part, you’ll need to use your best judgement for the situation as to who needs what (being attacked by an army of green monsters is quite a bit different to being attacked by two red ones after all), but here’s some general tips to make the process as efficient as possible.

My top tip to juggling heal? Hotkeys. Learn them. F1-F5 will target a party-mate, including yourself. The number keys are right next to it, and if you can cast Heal, Rejuvenate and Invincible on three different targets, all without looking at the keyboard at all, you’re going to be a lot faster than if you move your mouse from one side of the screen to your party window, click on the person in trouble, move your mouse back to your hotbar and right click Heal, let alone trying to click your target in the throng of battling monsters and allies.

#1: New spawns.

Not so much part of juggling heal as a method of making it easier, whenever a new monster spawns, either hit it yourself, place yourself between it and its next nearest target, or if you can’t do either of these things in time, just unload as much healing power as necessary on the target as it approaches them. You’ll either take aggro yourself, or they’ll be on full health just in time to survive the new, unexpected hit. Recover can and will snatch any newly spawned enemy that just started attacking someone, so bear that in mind.

#2: Yourself.
If possible, and if their partymates need their attention more, the cleric should be using stones for themselves, whilst continuing to heal their party. Self-heal as little as possible, though Restore might help you survive, and Invincible will buy you time and make it easier for the tank to take enemies off you.
If the enemies are dealing a lot of damage to you, and there aren’t more mobs that you might aggro by doing so, use Heal Kiting (described later), to reduce the damage you take. This may allow you to survive on stones where you would swiftly die if you’d stood still.
Advice I often break myself (hence my notorious record of dying), is to remember that you are possibly the only cleric, and if you die, nobody will revive you. When you simply can’t help heal yourself or die, do so. Even if some people in your party die, the monsters that were attacking them will remain focussed on them for several seconds, giving you time to move away, and then come back to save them, and the situation, once the monsters have left.
Despite this advice, remember that you’re not made of paper, you don’t need to heal every single hit against you, or stone as soon as you take damage. So long as you have 1 HP, you’re alive. Do the absolute minimum to keep yourself alive, no more, no less.

Place in the Heal Chain: None. But if it’s heal or die, as a cleric you’ll usually have the most, or second to the most, HP, making yourself a good choice for Rejuvenate. Heal only in an emergency.

#3: The main tank.
Usually, the tank/clank will have the most HP to handle the situation the longest. If they have enough HP/Defence to survive without one Heal from you, that will allow you to devote time on healing other targets as needed. Do not mindlessly just heal the tank, as some people tell you, if they’re sitting at full health whilst their party dies all around them, you’re wasting your abilities.

Place in the Heal Chain: Depending on their HP and how quickly they’re taking damage, the tank is usually the first target for Restore, since they’ll make most use of it, and that will buy you time to help the rest of the party. Other than this, Rejuvenate is a good choice for the tank, since it’ll let you devote Heal as necessary to other characters, whilst they’ll have the HP to survive the wait for Rejuvenate (which will also have more effect, since it usually heals other characters by more than their max HP). Obviously, always Heal the tank when they need it, especially when Rejuvenate is on cooldown.

#4: Meatshield.
Any high HP character or other cleric who isn’t the main tank. Clerics will usually have the situation in hand with their stones, whilst spare fighters will typically have HP to spare when they’re only handling a small portion of the monsters (if around half, then give them more attention accordingly).

Place in the Heal Chain: For other clerics, Restore, and only if they haven’t already cast it themselves. In an emergency where they simply can’t handle what’s hitting them, dedicate Heal and Rejuvenate to them as necessary, since they’ve probably started holding the bulk of the enemies by that time. For fighters, treat them much the same as you would the main tank.

#5: Squishies.
“Archers need revive, not heal.”
Squishies are the low HP damage dealers who are the only way you’re going to finish this combat in time for dinner. If you let them die too much, they become cranky. Many monsters that you can just stone the damage away from yourself can kill a squishy in two hits or less. They also steal almost as much aggro as you do, which is pretty tragic for them.

Place in the Heal Chain: Heal. This is where emergency healing comes in. If a squishy needs healing, chances are they need it now, because in two seconds they’re dead. Invincible is a good spell for them, especially if they ignore the monster hitting them like they should, invincible will stop them panicking and running around grabbing more aggro, as they are wont.
Restore isn’t quite so useful, nor is Rejuvenate, unless the squishy is in desparate need of help mid-Heal cooldown. This is because their HP totals just aren’t able to make the most of the spells, nor to survive the wait for them to kick in.

4.2: Heal Kiting

Yes, clerics can kite, in fact, doing so can save lives.
Whilst in any party, an AOE party in particular, it’s pretty easy for the cleric to be attacked by something, perhaps many somethings.
By running around the party in a wide circle, each enemy can attack the cleric perhaps 1/3 as often as they could normally, thanks to monsters having a brief pause every time they hit someone. By moving in a circle, the cleric can continue to heal their party as normal (and survive much more easily through stones alone), whilst not attracting any further away mobs, buying much-needed time for their party to deal with any monsters they currently have on them, until they are free to kill the enemies attacking you.

4.3: Overcoming Stun

Yes, stun is indeed the worst state for a cleric to be in, after death and fear (which can’t be dealt with as below, but has a minor advantage in moving you away from the threat). But there are two ways you can cope with being stunned.

#1: Sleeping it off.
Yes, you can go into your mushroom whilst stunned. Since you can’t heal anyway, you might as well. For a five second stun, you can recover easily 6% of your SP and HP with the basic house alone. That’s going to help offset some of the HP you lose from the enemy whilst you’re stunned, and the SP you recover is going to let you heal when you get out of stun.
Leave your house with perhaps a second left of stun, and you’ll be refreshed and ready to continue the fight.

#2: Too busy to sleep.
The other thing that stun doesn’t stop is casting time. You can continue casting spells you were already casting as you become stunned. Useful? You bet. If you think you’re about to be stunned (with some enemies it is a predictable special attack), start casting Restore, Rejuvenate or Invincible (or even Revive, and this may be the one time where you might as well cast Recover after level 60). You’ll finish casting the spell during stun, and can then either wait it out, or sleep off the rest of your stun.

4.4: Cleric Cooperation

It’s awkward when you have another cleric in the party, isn’t it? Will they heal? Will you? Should you heal them?
The only way to sort this out for sure is to talk it over with them and split the responsibility.
If you’re in a situation where only one of you needs to heal, then the cleric with the highest level, the most points in Strength, and/or the better weapon, should be the one who walks up to the front line and saves everyone SP and time by adding to the DPS.
If you’re a front-line cleric and things get hairy, immediately stop pretending to be a damage dealer, and start unloading healing on whoever needs it. If you see someone with low health and the backline cleric hasn’t healed them, do so yourself, keep them alive, no matter what you’re doing, you’re still a cleric, first and foremost. Your responsibility is to protect the people who can’t protect themselves (if you’re not that kind of cleric, then kindly never join any party ever, nor any kingdom quest, seriously, better off without you).
If you’re the backline cleric, assume you’re going to be healing every single person there is, don’t assume that your other cleric buddy (or buddies), will handle it for you.

Yes, I’ve just told both front and backline clerics to heal whenever they think someone needs it. “Better safe than sorry” is the key motto for teamed up clerics, and it’s not you who’s going to be the sorriest if you let someone die because you thought someone else was going to heal them just like they did the other seventy times.

4.5 Sequential Healing

Another important skill for cleric cooperation is stepped healing. If two clerics heal, at exactly the same time, as quickly as they can (sometimes necessary when facing impossible odds), then their target will recover anything from 220 to 2200 HP, depending on the tier of heal used by each cleric. Not many people have 2200 HP. In fact, chances are pretty good that if your heal-target is losing health quickly enough to need two clerics spam healing, they’re losing enough health every two seconds that they may well die.
Observe your cleric-buddy. When they heal, you wait one second, then continue healing as fast as you can, whilst they do the same. The result? The longest your shared heal-target goes without receiving healing is barely over a second. In a situation where a two second delay between heals can be fatal, this is by far the most efficient method of both ensuring your heal spell isn’t wasted, and your heal-target doesn’t die. Done with lower tier heals for each of you, you can both save SP whilst keeping your tank in better health than if you each spammed your max-tier heal as quickly as possible.

4.6: Supporting a Clank

With clankers being so very awesome, how would you help a clanker in your own party?

Well, for starters be aware that in most cases that a clanker quite honestly doesn’t need help from supporting clerics in the same way as a tank would. If you use invincible on a Tank, then you’re saving yourself some SP and avoiding gaining more aggro that constant healing would net you. If you use invincible on the primary cleric, they are not only bound to continue healing themselves at exactly the same rate, but there’s no way unless you had a higher level Heal/Rejuvenate skill that you could steal aggro from them anyway. You’d be wasting your SP and invincible.

In the end, if the clanker is not losing health after healing, the best way to help is to just charge on in and smite the same monster they are. Don’t completely ignore the clanker, of course, you wouldn’t ignore a fighter would you?
When you’re fighting deep red mobs, even one mis-timed heal can kill, and if they lag, their chatbar is open, they got distracted…. They’ll die, and hell will break lose.
So, if their health gets within one hit of them dying, sling a Heal their way. Even if it’s not max-tier, the extra few seconds you just bought them will let you determine if they’re in need of more serious healing (game crashes and disconnects fall into this category, as they’ll just stand there taking hits without healing), or if they just mistimed a heal press by 0.1 of a second.

The other scenario to watch out for is when the primary cleric can’t survive the encounter.

As an example, you’re fighting five Blue Trumpies, they’ll attack twice each every second and a half for about 200 damage each. 2000 damage every three seconds. In this situation, unless healing constantly, the clanker dies, yet unless recover is active, after three or four heal/attack cycles, the resultant damage will kill them anyway. As a result, either the clanker must stone to make up the deficit, risk delaying a Heal by casting Restore themselves, or start heal kiting whilst they continue to try and hold aggro. This clanker is quite possibly having trouble.

So, when it’s obvious that the primary cleric is struggling, there are a number of things that the support cleric(s) can do:

1) Restore. Gaining 80 HP every 1.2 seconds is very important when that 80 HP can make the difference between life and death. A clank will sometimes be so occupied with self-healing that they won’t have time to cast it, so making sure that they have a Recover active on them can alleviate a lot of the pressure when taking on a mob, and perhaps let them start using other skills to help speed the battle along, or protect themselves better.

2) Invincible. The skill’s nerfed, but those few seconds can allow a damage dealer to kill one of their opponents (with a subsequent drop in damage received), let them cast recover, rejuvenate, or even cast invincible again themselves. Usuable on the clanker or anyone who managed to steal a monster from them, this is when you’ll be glad you didn’t use it on them a minute ago when they weren’t having any problems.

3) Heal. The method of healing is slightly different than with a non-cleric. Rather than using your max tier heal by default (unless they really are in such deep trouble that you need to), the easiest method on you is to time their self heals, and then cast a lower tier heal (As covered above, in Sequential Healing) just as their own heal resolves.
If timed correctly, then the additional heal should resolve just as the primary cleric’s heal ends, but before they take any further hits from enemies. This should bump their HP to full each time, so unless they’re in danger of being one-shotted, this will let them hold aggro, keep them alive, and you won’t grab any attention whatsoever, thanks to your lower-level heal.

4.7: Compensating for range

The cleric has zero ranged ability for dealing with enemies. As such, to survive as a cleric, you must learn very exactly the range at which monsters you fight will aggro you, and pay careful attention to whether they are facing you or not. If an enemy is facing you, it has roughly five times the aggro range of an enemy facing away from you, and this can be used to your advantage, whether to sneak past the enemy, or to only aggro one out of a large group.

4.8: Zoning

Sooner or later, you will accidentally aggro more enemies than you can handle. Too many people I’ve seen start running around in circles, hoping that the enemy will get bored of chasing them.
This will not work.
Instead, move, as quickly as possible, healing as little as possible, and gaining as little extra aggro as possible in a straight line, preferably towards a clear path leading out of the area (do not train people whilst zoning, be sure to give them plenty of warning to get out of the way). The important factor isn’t the time you spend fleeing from an enemy, but the actual distance from their spawn point you move.
It’s important to note that this same method, but healing constantly, can be used to lure enemies far from their original spawn points. This is why healing rarely is advised whilst trying to zone a mob.

5: Soloing

This topic seems to come up frequently, now I know that there’s already a thread dedicated to solo locations for other classes (http://www.outspark.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27454), but the cleric gets far less benefit than other classes for facing green or yellow mobs. This is because, whilst the other classes can kill quickly, the cleric takes a long time killing even green mobs, yet uses about as many stones (typically none).
So, whilst you should feel free to use the linked guide as a rough estimate, you can actually find yourself going to another area long before other classes.

5.1 How to figure out if you can solo somewhere

First off, monsters closer to town are usually weaker than monsters deeper into the map (exception being Sea of Greed, where there are two towns adjacent, where the areas closer to Roumen are substantially weaker than the monsters closer to Elderine). In Uruga, the monsters in the top left corner of the map are the easiest (closest to Collapsed Prison, and subsequently the next lowest level town: Elderine), and so on. If you are considering beginning to solo in an area, start on the weakest monster first, and see how much it hits you for. If it doesn’t one shot you, that’s awesome. Heal yourself as quickly as possible, and see how long it takes them to hit you again. As you gain in confidence try against more enemies in an area,
Once you have a rough idea of what an enemy can do, here’s how you can determine whether you can solo against it.

Easy: If you can recover to full health every single time your heal cools down, you can solo the enemy.
Medium: If you can recover to full health when using Restore in conjunction with your Heal spell.
Hard: The enemy has special attacks, causes stun, or just plain hits hard enough to make you need to use Heal, Restore, stones and Rejuvenate to survive against it.
Impossible: The enemy one-shots you, or has a special attack that is followed by a rapid normal attack that can also kill you before you can heal.

Bear in mind that until level 40, there are monsters that can also cause DoTs that you cannot Cure.
Also bear in mind that any monster type other than normal is not worth fighting. They have much more HP, hit harder, and frequently have special attacks or the ability to stun. Unless you have a quest, avoid them entirely. Even white monsters twenty levels below you can have as much HP as a yellow enemy, yet give only 1 Exp for your trouble.

5.2 Normal Monsters that cause Stun

A woefully incomplete list of stun causing normal monsters. If anyone wants to say more, I’ll put them here.
Whilst you can kill stunning monsters as a cleric, they pose a greater danger to you than they do any other class.

Wild Imp
Bone Imp
Archmage Book
Werebear
Goblin Captain
Lightning Vivi
Orc
Greenky

Thanks to Zilie for helping with this.

5.3 The Golden Rule

Avoid taking on more than one monster at a time. You’re a cleric. You will never get an AOE attack, because Isya hates your kind soloing. As a result, you have no reason to take on any more than one enemy at once, and absolutely no way of dealing with extras either.
This is hard, because you have no ranged ability either, to lure out lone monsters, so hang around at the edges of a spawn spot, learn to cautiously walk towards a group of monsters until one, and only one of their group aggros you, anything to help you avoid fighting multiple monsters, which is just a waste of resources for you. Sometimes you can’t avoid aggroing more than one monster, but 99% of the time, it’s faster and easier to fight one on one.

6: Other tips and advice.

A section for any ideas, or special techniques people care to submit. You will receive full credit for your entry.