Buff Cleric - The most fun cleric you didn't know you could play (subjective of course)

[pirotessa]

Are you tired of sitting around on a cleric waiting for a group or LFM to be able to do anything? Bored out of your mind when the group is over-tuned and heals aren't required?

Then this may be the build idea for you if you like to solo, short-man, raid, group, and have some variety on your cleric or cleric-lives. Who knew cleric could be so much fun!

Before we get to the basics this can really be built two foundational ways depending if you prefer soloing more or like to sit back and buff/heal more.

15 Cleric (protection domain) / 5 Bard

Primary Stats
Con / Cha with level ups into either depending if you want more HP or higher Hit/Damage
Why not wisdom? Because DC casting won't kill bosses unfortunately in the times you want to solo (can change if you group more).

Now I know that may seem like an odd split at first but lets look at the benefits -

15 Cleric with Protection Domain
All the essential spells and death pact for the games oops moments which are a plenty.
Radiant Forcefield
30 sacred prr/mrr (yes not the max but 30/30 is still pretty solid for everything else we'll pick up)

5 Bard
Warchanter buffs + swashbuckling
Alternatively - Warchanter + Spellsinger buffs because why not?

Race
Not sure if there is one master race to choose but they give different benefits depending on what you want and the amount of racial points you have. Here are a couple quick ideas:
Aasimar - healing amp / positive spell power / sacred hp if not going high in warpriest / or vulnerability/melee dmg/double strike if meleeing
SDK - Chains for more aoes while swashbuckling (frees up Fury destiny for needing quickcutter)
Dwarf - More bubbles
Your choice - Have fun with it

Enhancements
This is subjective to what you want to do. For a more melee focused you can build
Warchanter - 38 all the buffs (and more importantly you get run speed which clerics are terrible at!)
Swashbuckler - 14 points - To use a buckler, cha to damage, and sonic imbue (for solo)
Vistani - 8 points (haste) - Rapid Slash to hit as close to 100 doublestrike as possible
Radiant Servant - 11 points - Cure Moderate SLA and Positive Energy Burst (This is a must since will heal, debuff with exalted mantle, and give 20 second prr/mrr boost)
Feydark - 3 - cha to hit
Warpriest - 4-8 - At least 4 points for cha trance and then more for PRR or can put elsewhere

Alternatively if you didnt plan on meleeing, can drop swash/vistani/feydark/warpriest and put points in spell singer to get up to healing song/fom song/spell cost reduction. Spell Singer cores also give a bonus to positive crit chance which can be nice.

For me, why swashbuckling pays off is because of the new bucklers from chill of ravenloft:
Non-crafted buckler comes with Guardbreaking (OP for trash with kukri), Insightful PRR and then you can craft 10% spell cost reduction and insightful positive (or meltfang if you prefer for damage)
The raid crafted buckler gives further options as you can then add affirmation/ash/dust/ooze/salt, whatever you want to it.


Destinies
Again you get lots of wide open options here but here is what I picked with the reasoning of why
Fatesinger T5 - 34points
More buffs to bard ballads, lots of positive spell power, free enlarge, spellpoint reduction, turn the tide, and you can get the greatest shout for another healing sla for 6sp with a 6second cooldown.

Exalted T4 - 23 points
Wrathful Form Mantle for bonus healing and then while healing or using positive energy burst will buff prr/mrr and debuff prr/mrr.
Cure moderate SLA
Leaps - needs to go fast and with the T4 core your leaps heal you and others. So you can heal yourself while zooming around.

Fury T4 - 25 points (this would be the most flexible to me depending on what you wanted to do and what race you picked, would probably do Unyielding. DC, or Shadowdancer for more debuffs, evasion, dimension door if was a SDK instead of Aasimar or something entirely else if more casting focused)
Quick cutter - essential for melee aoe - rest is doublestrike and filler as needed


Gear
Really the primary gear I would recommend is Breath of Vitality from threats. This would be the only raid item I would say is non-replaceable as currently you cant make up the quality healing lore anywhere else.
Kukri as a primary weapon so you can get as close to 100% doublestrike with rapid slash.

Lots of guides on how to gear but effectively this is where I ended up self-buffed in reaper -

~5k hp / ~4k sp
300% fortification / ~400 PRR
Positive SP - 900 (not counting metas), 56% crit chance, 87% crit damage chance
96% doublestrike with rapid slash (no insightful doublestrike or would be capped)
201 to hit and 144 to damage with a 15-20x4 crit profile

Again not going to be top dps by any stretch but lets you solo and play the game as a cleric oustide of sitting around waiting for groups.

Lots of things can be changed depending on what you want to but wanted to drop a framework of something different I have been having fun with and I believe will stand up for playing the majority of content, either solo or with groups.

 

[Sehenry033]

I was trying to figure out a cleric/bard for a HC character I want to make to group with guildies. I was hoping you could answer a few questions on if this would work.

If doing a 32 pt first life, how would you split stats? I won't have a wisdom tome and I won't have easy access to wisdom items, will charisma help with casting? If not I need to rethink. I was thinking dwarf for more bubbles. Keep in mind, simply staying alive is the biggest thing. Most people in my guild take Barb for blood tribute, but for me that is a road I don't want to get hooked on. Would this toon have enough survivability?

How would you do the level ups?

I doubt I would bother with the melee aspect, so I would be focusing on cleric buff/heals and bard buffs for the most part.

 

[pirotessa]

Absolutely happy to help.

If just focusing on healing/buffing and survival I would go all Con/Wis for stats and then do level ups into Con.

You could do Wis as well for more spell points and higher DCs if you planned on casting DC related spells.

Unfortunately CHA doesn't really help with spellcasting on a cleric. You could do FVS instead where it would but then you lose out on the cleric domains, which is primarily why I did this split. CHA will impact the spellpoints you get from the bard levels though so it does have some impact.

This character has incredible survivability as youre a cleric so you get all of the healing spells, necessary buffs, and then death pact ar lvl 15, which is pretty much a free life if something bad happens. Also with protection domain you can get a decent enough prr/mrr to take a couple hits as well.

For leveling would do Bard for the first level to take advantage of the skill point bonus.

1 Bard
2-16 Cleric
17-20 Bard

Most of the Bard buffs will play a more significant role as you get into epics where getting all the cleric spells first helps.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

 

[SpartanKiller13]

Fun build!

Would suggest Shifter as a race for any local buff build, Beasthide Howl is another 14 PRR/MRR AoE (and -Attack of enemies if you're close enough). Nice to use alongside Protection's turn bonus.

 

[Sehenry033]

Fun build!

Would suggest Shifter as a race for any local buff build, Beasthide Howl is another 14 PRR/MRR AoE (and -Attack of enemies if you're close enough). Nice to use alongside Protection's turn bonus.

Why shifter? it seems to have a lot of focus on rages and I can't rage and cast buff or heal spells on my cleric can I?

 

[SpartanKiller13]

Why shifter? it seems to have a lot of focus on rages and I can't rage and cast buff or heal spells on my cleric can I?

1) You can absolutely rage and cast buffs (via Draconic Incarnation, Wildhunt Shifter, or technically Destruction Domain) if you want (mostly useful for Blood Feast +1400 temp HP/rage, which is a pretty decent survivability option especially given the 10-minute duration).
2) The reason I recommended Shifter is in the comment that you responded to:

Beasthide Howl is another 14 PRR/MRR AoE (and -Attack of enemies if you're close enough).

Here is a wiki link for your perusal: link. This is a local AoE buff, which lines up well with the style of this build.

 

[pirotessa]

Fun build!

Would suggest Shifter as a race for any local buff build, Beasthide Howl is another 14 PRR/MRR AoE (and -Attack of enemies if you're close enough). Nice to use alongside Protection's turn bonus.

Definitely a solid option as well.

Personally, I just don't like how they look and like to wear shoes .

 

[Sehenry033]

1) You can absolutely rage and cast buffs (via Draconic Incarnation, Wildhunt Shifter, or technically Destruction Domain) if you want (mostly useful for Blood Feast +1400 temp HP/rage, which is a pretty decent survivability option especially given the 10-minute duration).
2) The reason I recommended Shifter is in the comment that you responded to:

Here is a wiki link for your perusal: link. This is a local AoE buff, which lines up well with the style of this build.

I will be going Protection Domain so basically I wouldn't be able to take advantage of rages until I hit destinies correct?

 

[YTSESoldier]

I will be going Protection Domain so basically I wouldn't be able to take advantage of rages until I hit destinies correct?

You can as a wild hunt shifter as they get cast while raging in tier 3....requires an ap investment if you don't have the PLs

 

[SpartanKiller13]

I will be going Protection Domain so basically I wouldn't be able to take advantage of rages until I hit destinies correct?

As YTSESoldier said, you could by going Wildhunt Shifter; but the main reason to rage as a caster is Blood Feast temp HP which scales by epic/legendary level; so it's largely pointless before epics anyway. Also the PRR/MRR buff comes from Beasthide Shifter.

If you're doing a leveling build I would not recommend Shifter. It's a lot more useful for an endgame raid/questing character, where having +1400 tHP most of the time is a significant gain, and by that point the Shifter's Howl has also scaled (at level 5 it's +4 PRR/MRR, which is a lot less impactful especially if you're only applying it to 2-3 party members instead of 5+ in a raid group).

Beasthide Shifter also offers some defensive benefits (5% Quality HP, 30 HAmp, 22 PRR while raging) but I don't think those put it ahead of Pirotessa's recommendations in the original post.