Cleric Overview – Inquisitor
The king of cleric ranged DPS and my personal favorite. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Inquisitor. If you need a boss dead fast, and you need it to be done from a safe distance, call an Inquisitor. If you need a swarm of skeletons, imps, goblins, or zubats dead, and you need it done yesterday, get an Inquisitor. Folks, I promise that, unless you love being up close and personal to the enemy and their amazingly fun cleave attacks, you will love being an inquisitor. Excellent single-target and AOE damage, a sustainable CC, an AOE fear, two debuffs that cause the enemy to take 7% extra damage that stack, a cooldown that can protect your tank or healer from a fear effect and save the day – sorry – I have to stop here because if I don’t, I’ll go out of control listing all the great things about the Inquisitor soul.
Gameplay Style
The Insquisitor soul is basically a traditional offensive caster. It has a quick bolt spell, a big fireball-like spell (damage, then a small DoT,) a channeled AOE, and several other caster staples. If you like the classic wizard archetype, you should feel at home playing an Inquisitor in terms of its play style. Perhaps straying a bit from that basic archetype, an Inquisitor’s DPS relies heavily on two DoT spells. Another major mechanic of the soul is a slight reliance on critical hits; when an Inquisitor crits, it gets a buff that increases damage done by 15% for 5 seconds. With a high enough crit chance, the buff can be maintained indefinitely, which is something you definitely want.
Utility
The Inquisitor is a very powerful DPS soul. If you want to be a ranged DPS, and performance is among your priorities, this is the soul to play. It’s not all about damage though, Inquisitor has many important tools like a purge/dispel ability and a CC that can be maintained indefinitely. The purge spell can be obtained by putting a mere 10 points in the Inquisitor soul tree, so it’s fairly easy to access even if Inquisitor isn’t your main soul. At 12 points, you get Perseverance; this spell will grant immunity from a single fear effect to you or an ally and has a cooldown of two minutes. Immunity from one fear effect on a 2 minute cooldown may not seem like much but, used on a tank or healer, it can make quite a difference for some encounters like Michael Bringhurst (more like Bringshurt) in Expert Darkening Deeps. Deeper into the tree are Trepidation and Bewilder. Trepidation is an AOE fear effect; I have saved my tank’s life a couple times with this. Bewilder is a CC that can be maintained indefinitely. There’s a bit of a catch though, it only lasts for 8 seconds. This gives you little time to do anything else. It also costs a fairly large amount of mana to maintain for extended periods of time.
Simple PvE Build
[10 Cabalist | 51 Inquisitor | 5 Sentinel]
For Inquisitor, I have two builds to share. The one above is a build that I think best represents the way the developers intended 51-point Inquisitors to play. The 5 points in Sentinel let you cash in on a cool 5% bonus to spell power, one of the best instant cast heals in the game for when things get hairy, and an endurance buff for when you are rolling solo or in one of those extremely rare (more like imaginary) cases where no one else in the group has an endurance buff. 10 points in Cabalist is just enough to get both a second %5 bonus to spell power and a 5% bonus to spell damage, in addition to Sigil of Power and two ways to use it (Tyranny and Obliterate) to regain mana. The 51 points in Inquisitor allow you to enjoy the full potential of Ritual of Judgement; this increases the damage added by spell power to Vex and Sanction, which are an important part of your damage. In addition to this, you get all the utility spells in the Inquisitor tree, like Purge and Bewilder.
How It Works
Buffs:
- [Self Buff] Armor of Devotion if your crit chance is relatively low (for example, under 15%) and Corporal Punishment isn’t active very often.
- [Self Buff] Amor of Treachery if your crit chance is good and you see that Corporal Punishment is often active.
- [Group Buff] Spiritual Protection
Rotation/Priorities:
Single Target
- 1. Keep Spiritual Deficiency active on your target.
- a. Unless you are saving them for a particular phase in a boss fight, the best time to use your trinket/consumable cooldowns is right after casting Spiritual Deficiency; you do not want to waste time from your cooldown’s duration refreshing Spiritual Deficiency.
- 2. Use Fanaticism, but only before casting Bolt of Depravity or Sanction Heretic.
- 3. Keep Sanction Heretic up.
- 4. Keep Vex up.
- 5. Cast Bolt of Depravity when Life and Death Concord activates.
- 6. Cast Bolt of Judgment.
AOE Groups
- 1. Use Fanaticism, but only before casting Soul Drain.
- 2. Cast Soul Drain; make sure you do not stand in front of targets that cleave (oh, that’s just about 98% of enemies) since you will be up close to cast Soul Drain.
- 3. Channel Circle of Oblivion.
- a. Just a little tip here. Soul Drain will not be off cooldown by the time you finish channeling Circle of Oblivion. You will have time to cast one instant cast spell before Soul Drain is ready again, so throw a Sanction Heretic, Vex, or even a Spiritual Deficiency on something – don’t just sit there doing nothing!
Advanced PvE Build
[13 Cabalist | 51 Inquisitor | 2 Purifier]
I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably saying it out load, actually. “But wait, that looks almost identical to the other one! What makes this build so advanced?” Well, my young cleric padawan, it’s true that only 5 points have been shifted. There’s a lot more going on though; this build plays a bit differently. Alright, so what exactly is happening here? Well, we removed Sentinel (good bye Healing Breath, we still love you) and replaced it with Purifier. We only want one thing from Purifier, and that’s Spirit Rupture. We put 2 points in there and added put the remaining 3 in Cabalist. We don’t care about Purifier’s Wisdom buff, it’s fairly weak; the 3 points we put in Cabalist will increase damage from DoTs and channeled spells by 3%, which is better than a meager buff to Wisdom. According to my tests, this build yielded about 12.222% (repeating, of course) more DPS than the one I showed you above.
How It Works
Buffs:
- [Self Buff] Armor of Devotion if your crit chance is relatively low (for example, under 15%) and Corporal Punishment isn’t active very often.
- [Self Buff] Amor of Treachery if your crit chance is good and you see that Corporal Punishment is often active.
- [Group Buff] Spiritual Protection
Rotation/Priorities:
Single Target
- 1. Keep Spiritual Deficiency active on your target.
- a. Unless you are saving them for a particular phase in a boss fight, the best time to use your trinket/consumable cooldowns is right after casting Spiritual Deficiency; you do not want to waste time from your cooldown’s duration refreshing Spiritual Deficiency.
- 2. Use Fanaticism, but only before casting Bolt of Depravity or Sanction Heretic.
- 3. Keep Sanction Heretic up.
- 4. Keep Vex up.
- 5. Cast Bolt of Depravity when Life and Death Concord activates.
- 6. Alternate casting Spirit Rupture and Bolt of Depravity; your goal is to try keeping Spirit Rupture’s DoT up as much as possible.
AOE Groups
- 1. Use Fanaticism, but only before casting Soul Drain.
- 2. Cast Soul Drain; make sure you do not stand in front of targets that cleave (oh, that’s just about 98% of enemies) since you will be up close to cast Soul Drain.
- 3. Channel Circle of Oblivion.
- a. Just a little tip here. Soul Drain will not be off cooldown by the time you finish channeling Circle of Oblivion. You will have time to cast one instant cast spell before Soul Drain is ready again, so throw a Sanction Heretic, Vex, or even a Spiritual Deficiency on something – don’t just sit there doing nothing!
Smooth Moves
Once in a while, someone will do something that will make you go “Whoa…that was so cool. I want to be like him/her when I grow up!” Well, if you want people to think you’re awesome, try your hand at these maneuvers.
- The tank is about to die! He’s keeping threat on those 20 zubats like a boss, but the healer can’t keep him up for long without a moment to catch up. What can we do? Well run in there like a champion, cast Trepidation, and give the healer time to get the tank back into fighting shape.
- Oh noes! The tank took a big hit early on and your healer had to use a bomb heal to save him. Catastrophe averted? Of course not. The tank’s taunt is on cooldown and one of the mobs in the pack is headed straight for the healer! Don’t worry guys, it’s kay. Our Inquisitor, Speedy McLightningReflexes, locked the mob down with Nysyr’s Rebuke long enough for the tank to pick it up!
- That caster is really nailing the tank, but no one in the group has an interrupt spell…or do we? CC isn’t an option; the mob is in melee range and taking AOE damage. Spam Bewilder on it for maximum profit, it doesn’t matter if it’s taking damage!
- Everyone is dead…except you! And…one mob. You can’t possibly kill a dungeon elite on your own. Can you? You create distance between you and the mob with Excommunicate and Impede, then proceed to alternating Bolt of Judgment and Bewilder. It took a while, but you just solo’d yourself a dungeon elite and can get your team back up. You’ve earned a cookie.
