Well finally done with the Dragonlord past lives, and have switched into a Dark Apostate on my main. I would have loved to stay Dragonlord to be honest, but I expect it will get nerfed into the ground soon. It is just too good as is.
Anyway Dark Apostate has been both fun and frustrating.
Good:
* Well this is mostly about Death domain, not Dark Apostate per say. Huge Necro dc boosts, great SLAs. Immunity to energy drain is redundant with Dark Apostate undead form, but if you don't run that it's good.
* The 200% scaling Harm spell in the T5 is a lot of fun, especially for self healing. 5% spellcrit for a few classes of spells is nice in the T5 too (plus more necro boosts)
* Overall damage is pretty good for leveling assuming you can hurt them (see ugly below)
* Good synergy with the Divine Disciple tree (probably better than the Dark Apostate tree overall, but you really want some of the DA T5s)
* Does surprisingly well fighting most undead with a bit of light power, plus autodestroy on turn undead (if you take it)
Bad:
* Several of your abilities are not consistent and/or bugged. The evil damage from Bane/Prayer/etc does not trigger some abilities like extra spellpower when casting alignment spells, but if you crit with them, it will trigger spellpoints on crits with alignment spells.
* Your evil damage doesn't work on a large number of champions and other enemies. Based on my testing, every enemy in this list is "immune" (you don't actually get an immune message).
https://ddowiki.com/page/Mind_Block
* Enemies that cast mass death ward instantly when you walk in a room suck for a long time. I feel like Magus of the Eclipse mantle is absolutely required for this build since it has the only functional dispel magic in the game.
Ugly:
* Oh boy do I hate Iron Golems (and other constructs) on this build. With the inability to curse them, you can't get your decent evil damage on them. You can't use necro power on them. You can't use fire on them. I ended up having to skip Epic Von4 this life because I couldn't deal with the iron golems. With the lack of groups on top of that, this is nearly a game breaker for playing this build. There are entirely too many things immune to negative and clerics don't really get spells that can deal with them effectively. It got so bad I was almost tempted to take Macrotechnic and get the rust damage upgrade on it's strike. *sigh*
* Another big issue is liches and things like the Wizking that are immune to 6th level and under spells. Clerics have so few spells that actually do anything past level 6 that you are on a huge cooldown while waiting to try to nuke these guys again. While not quite as bad as iron golems (since you can at least use fire) it does add a very aggrevatingly long time to boss kills.
Now I am only level 28 so far. I have't tried to run my Reapers yet at cap. I suspect I am going to have a very horrible time in Sharn, and Ravenloft at minimum due to the Iron Golems.
Overall while I want to try to make this work as my main, I gotta give it a 6 out of 10 just due to the bugs, and inability to really do any dungeon with constructs well.
One suggestion I would have for SSG is allow bestow curse to land on constructs, etc once you have the 4th core in Dark Apostate. This would let us do our evil damage and at least give us a small tool to help bring them down. Honestly I think the curse should do an immunity bypass to allow 50% of the necrotic damage to land (not 100% bypass). That would allow the DA to at least use their higher level spells to damage stuff.
