Are Clerics Dead?

[calm cipher]

I am not sure I have seen a cleric all season. I do like the war maul stagger change but this was the quintessential trios cleric weapon. Shields now cannot stack. Resultantly, they are weaker both offensively and defensively, as well as outshined by bard. They were considered the worst class and have now fallen even further.

This is all exacerbated by Demon Fang, which is very powerful and has few alternatives, especially after the large culling of legendary soulstones. Playing a healer can work to an extent for a few weeks at most.

Protection was an amazing support skill and now it is not. Your teammates may have Golem Core and can still use protection potions.

Clerics have no realistic answer to rangers, fighters, etc. Round shield is not great. One handed maces are very risky in trios with all the two handers being used. I could go on but I think you get the idea.

Clerics need some serious attention. Offensively, defensively, and as a support, they are not in a good place. They should be viable as a tank and as a strong support.

[vast shale]

Seems like they tried to buff their offensive/support capabilities and heavily nerf their tankiness as much as possible.

My theory is they want them as a support/hybrid(caster?) only role. But they don't have the dps as hybrid for the "hybrid" part to make any sense the the scaling of ray is awful, you hit for ~30 per tick at 100 mp, may as well just crank physical power and only rootslam people atp

As far as why you aren't seeing them:

1: shiny new character

2: bunch of shiny new stuff on the 2 fan favorites

The only time I've seen a class other than ranger rogue, Bard, since season start has been the sweaty fighters dueling in the village

[spare carbon]

I agree completely with the OP.
There was a very good reason for clerics being nerfed. There are basically two different games going on here. There's the casual play which accounts for the majority of the players and then there's the end game elite play which accounts for a small minority of the players. In early game, cleric was RIDICULOUSLY broken, like seriously mind blowing broken, especially before the LoH nerf, they were literally unkillable. This didn't require any skills at all, just hold attack, and cast self protection when your shield ran out. That was the entire extent of the "skill" needed. If you could do that, you were literally unkillable. I mean I fought 4 rogues plus a cleric (different build) and a barb, all at once, and I was never even in danger. And many other lopsided fights where I was never in danger.

Even after the LoH nerf, if you choose the right build, you were entirely untouchable by any mob, or any player that was not in the to 5% even with multiple mobs and players working together against you.

This early game, accounts for the majority of the player base. This desperately needed correcting, in oder to keep the game balanced for the majority of players.

At the same time that early game cleric was literally unkillable, end game cleric was already struggling. So they fixed the early game balance which was desperately needed, but as a product of that they destroyed end game cleric, and they introduced a far superior support class, the bard. So now cleric is all but useless end game.

I don't know the solution here besides a full rework.

I get players aren't happy, I'm not happy, I mained cleric last season, and my cleric just finished his cool down for deletion, I won't be playing cleric this season. Cleric needs buffed, and needs to be way stronger for end game, but I cannot stress enough, or overstate, just how RIDICULOUSLY OP early game cleric was if you just chose the right skills. It didn't require gear, or talent

[lyric shale]

Yes

[spare carbon]

Just one specific build, and at least 90% of the player base could be demolished by a toddler

[lyric shale]

As top cleric from previous seasons I would say that cleric dead

[keen scroll]

awww
a harmless cleric killed you?

[ancient rampart]

Honestly,the only clerics I see are bots,maybe bevause Im low level but I dunno,I saw even bros with hamer but no clerics yet.

[calm cipher]

I still have yet to see a cleric and played a lot.

[jolly grove]

Cleric is dead, this is the first time I've seen developers nerf a class like this in a game. Of course, I've seen other games where a class was nerfed too much and had a hard time against other classes, but this is the first time I've seen it done like this, completely ruined.

[vast shale]

Funny enough the source material did this to rogues, they were unplayable for a year, no damage and no ability to take hits

Only build was to buy consumable Throwing knives and run poison and bleed , like a crappy version of a ranger

[keen scroll]

This 100%
I am actually quite close to quitting the game I think because i have been considering it 5 times a day
What is wrong with being tanky, they already made us slow, back then, we were already sitting stones to rangers and fighters
Now, we are just sitting ducks
Devs should just name cleric into ducks or delete the class entirely

[keen scroll]

That seemed right to me
They can already perma invis so to speak, rogues could always run, that's the assasin trope no? Looking for chances in the dark and keep harassing till there is a chance to strike. But no, now anyone can play rogues, just keep stabbing

[vast shale]

Except there was no "chance to strike" as rogues were also rocking 80 base hp, making them a 2 shot for literally every other class, and a one shot for most. So " slowly and gently harass to death" was the only option.

They could never perma invis in DaD, unless youre talking about in AoD, you can't even move in stealth in DaD without a perk(and even then you get 10 steps in any direction, then it ends stealth)and it doesn't last very long unless you slot ANOTHER perk(and yet another perk if you want your footsteps to be quieter)