Best option for a secondary spell damage type?

[Fenryn]

I understand that casters are not the meta for spell dps right now, and that playing a Dark focused Divine Disciple Dark Apostate build will have its challenges. I'm not aiming to push high reapers in raids, but I am looking to be useful to groups beyond secondary or tertiary heals, and to have significant options for dealing with negative-immune enemies.

I am not worried about Undead, as there are plenty of options as a Cleric to deal with most threats that can come from them between multiple turning options, and that almost no undead to my knowledge have immunity to elemental or Light effects outside of exceptions like Forgewraiths.

My question is thus: What would be my best option for a secondary spell damage type beyond Negative, ideally gained through a Domain?

I have done some research myself already, both from the years of playing this game in the past and running multiple lives of melee and imbue focused Dark Apostate, but mostly focusing on Heroic lives. I am now on Cormyr and am looking to break into playing in Epic and eventually raids. I know that DCs are the ideal for that, but being able to do SOMETHING to enemies that are negative immune would be ideal.

I looked at Fire initially, due to there being powerful high-level Fire spells in the Cleric spell list, and Fire Domain gives some nice SLAs. But, having just TRed to start getting the mandatory Wizard and Favored Soul past lives, I have noticed a significant number of enemies immune to both (Iron Golems, hellhounds/fire demons in old content that get Death Ward just because, ect).

What would be my best option to pursue for a secondary damage type to solve this sort of problem, in both Heroic and especially Epics?

 

[justin credible]

i did a tiefling fire domain dark apostate as a caster cleric
ended up putting more points into Divine Disciple than dark apostate, used holy smite sla and took the t5 prophetic zenith so that it worked on everything despite alignment. used the tiefling immunity stripping followed by firestorm sla and flamestrike spell to kill iron golems in sharn

it worked but after playing it as a caster, i think dark apostate is supposed to be a battlecleric

 

[Terpilar]

If DA, I would say Light as it already powers your imbue. Stacks of Divine Punishment while kiting and zapping on the go will eventually dispose of Iron Golems. Also, Light works on all undead that I know of, some even being vulnerable to it.

 

[Fenryn]

I'm going with Dark Apostate primarily for the benefits of the Shroud, both mechanically and aesthetically. In most of my plans I only invest the minimum required to obtain the shroud in the Dark Apostate enhancement tree, barring confirmation on whether or not the damage from Pray for Mercy activates the proc on Primal Avatar's Heart mantle, and possibly the Bullywug Priestess' Staff "applies the effects of Bane" mod. I've done plenty of builds as DA while being melee and using the imbue, I'm mainly looking for spellcasting with the build I'm trying to plan out.

 

[SpartanKiller13]

As far as your spec goes, Air Domain is my vote; Acid has less immunities, but Earth Domain isn't very impressive. Also with an elemental domain you can load up a Turn item, Cha augs, and 9 AP into RS to spam-instakill elementals

Shocking Grasp & Lightning Bolt get the job done for early heroics; Chain Lightning is amazing, and does passably even at cap - and you get Evocation DC bonuses which boost Implosion & BoGW (both of which help with immune enemies) for endgame scaling.

In epics on a caster, I've grown quite fond of Fatesinger's Strike a Chord for an epic strike (basically nothing is immune to Sonic), and Machro offers great support for both Sonic (if you go that route w/FS) and Electric (Tonquin's is AoE w/no-save and solid damage).

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Otherwise yeah, Light stuff is pretty much always good on Clerics (and there's a lot of synergy with EA) but that doesn't seem to be your target.

 

[Fenryn]

I was considering Air domain, for most of the same reasons you mentioned. I am unfamiliar with how easy it would be to gear, as I have never really done much in Epics, and I don't know how trying to gear both Negative and Lightning would interact with gear tetris. Might be easier with runearm proficiency?

 

[Jhml]

I'd still go with fire domain; Celestial Bombardment (and the Fire Storm SLA) is just too good not to use. Death warded fire immunes can eat some Divine Punishment, Cometfall and Divine Wrath, I guess... :unsure: