Devoted Cleric: Not Just A Healer

Neverwinter: Day Four

One of the more thankless jobs in most MMOs is healing, tanking being the other.  Everyone needs one, and yet if something goes wrong, their fault or not, it falls to blame the tank and/or healer for it. It couldn't possibly be the fault of the unaware dps standing in the fire or whatever too busy getting off on their recount numbers.  Or worse yet, the fact that your dps couldn't kill Hogger before the enrage timer at level 90.  Sorry for the WoW references, but despite their recent loss of a million plus subs, it's safe to say most people are at least somewhat aware of the WoW references.  With that in mind, and my predilection to playing the aforementioned DPS classes, I saved the two focal character types for last in my list.  

So, the Cleric.  It was once described to me by a very good friend as "the Lazy Man's Class" in 4E. You don't have to heal anyone until they are bloodied.  While this isn't the case quite in Neverwinter, it's still less intensive at low levels than other MMOs where I have healed.  Disclaimer: I have only played the Cleric through the first dungeon, so hard to say how much harder the healing gets later on.

However, that being said, I have run him through two skirmishes and the Cloak Tower twice now, and at level 17 he has been tremendously enjoyable. For starters, he doesn't only heal. One of his primary abilities at low level is Sun Burst, which is an explosion of holy power that heals allies and damages enemies at the same time.  It's a powerful AoE spell against the lowbie mobs in the first two zones and in the Cloak Tower.  In both skirmishes, my cleric was #2 on damage done while also being #1 on healing done.  The other feature that is fun is the Channel divinity feature you get at around level 15.  When you build up enough holy power, you can channel it, which takes your standard at-wills and changes them to two new channeled spells. One is a channeled attack that damages the target, and heals all the nearby allies.  The other is a channeled heal that heals the targeted ally with a stream of healing.  Both are relatively potent at this level, and I suspect they scale relatively well until you get your paragon abilities at level 31. 

The other two abilities are nice as well, Lance of Faith is a decent at will attack and Astral Seal is a pretty sweet stock buff/heal.  Apply Astral Seal on a foe, and any friendly target that attacks that foe gets healed. This is nice, as it even heals you which many of your abilities don't.  One of the encounters will heal you and your target both, but other than that, you are only caught in the AoE heals, I have yet to find a self heal.

The primary thing I didn't like about the cleric and healing mechanics is the reticule that Neverwinter uses to target. It is harder to target your allies to heal them.  Which is likely why you rely on several of the healing mechanics already mentioned. It's far easier to target the boss than to target all the moving parts of your allies, especially in random groups where everyone races about willy nilly.  However that aside, the cleric has been fun.

The devoted cleric and his Control Wizard ally, Likka.

The cleric uses chain main, and a holy symbol. They do not carry a weapon like in other MMOs, rather the holy symbol is their weapon of choice. Implement casters, clerics and wizards both, only use their implements rather than weapons.The cleric's is located on his belt on the right hand side of the image above.