The Agonist is a serious death dealer which can maim your enemies and protect your allies.  Trion listed the Defiler soul as a healing soul, however, this soul has much more potential than just being a healing soul.  By combining the Defiler and Cabalist souls, this spec reeks of death, and your tank will thank you after that huge pull.

Agonist Spec purpose:  Solo, AoE Damage, and tank/group damage reduction.

Some of us have already seen a bit of the Defiler– the expansion’s new Cleric soul– in action on Storm Legion’s beta server, but for those who haven’t, here is all the information and highlights from Friday’s Cleric reveal live stream, which will most likely be viewable on Trion’s TwitchTV page shortly. For now, if you’d like to watch it, it can be found on Youtube.

The Defiler soul’s slightly different from the other new Storm Legion souls thematically. The team referred to the soul as “tragically misunderstood.” It is a ranged healing soul, capable of both AoE healing and tank healing, as well as putting out decent damage. Defilers are unique in that they balance both life and death within their fingertips. The soul does require some fairly in-depth strategy to play to its full potential, which may be why it’s somewhat misunderstood thus far.

Like Rogue and Warrior players, Cleric players have been anxiously awaiting our Storm Legion soul unveil. Some Cleric players are more excited about the announcement of the incoming fixes and changes to our current souls than the unveiling of the shiny, new soul (Defiler!). That alone should tell the community that something is amiss about the current state of Clerics. And there certainly is– when it comes to Cleric DPS.

For quite a few major patches now, we’ve seen Band-Aid fixes of sorts, where numbers are tacked on to Mien of Aggression, certain abilities, and well, that’s about it. Mien of Aggression itself is half the problem, since we’re dependent on it for DPS. And even with it, our DPS scaling constantly falls behind. Clerics need a true overhaul to really be competitive on the DPS playing field. Yesterday, Zinbik, RIFT’s Cleric Lead, admitted just that.

Speculating about the possible new Cleric Storm Legion soul is an interesting experience in creativity. Clerics are the class that can do everything, the Swiss army knife of classes, in a way. But that, of course, doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. There’s always room for improvement, especially when it comes to the Cleric DPS souls. So hopefully we’ll see some of that as Trion re-balances the souls for synergy. But what about the new soul?

Zinbik, Trion’s Cleric lead, has gone on record saying we won’t be receiving a pure support soul (although that could change, I suppose). It seems unlikely that we’ll receive a fourth healing soul, since our healing spectrum is fairly wide already. We have a wide array of DPS souls, too, and Justicar is currently in a pretty good place mitigation and threat-wise, which makes it strange to imagine another Cleric tanking soul. Still, we could see one. We could also see another DPS soul, one that synergizes better with the current setup.

Some crafty, sneaky cleric recently figured out a way to utilize using Downranked (rank 1) Healing Communion. He simply didn’t train it as he leveled to 50. Whether that was intentional or accidental, that still remains to be seen.

Apparently at level 50, a downranked lvl 1 Healing Communion only costs 121 mana. Since the spell scales extremely well with spellpower, spamming HC heals for a crapton at a minimal mana cost. With serendipity procs galore and proper use of healer’s haste, HC spam can toss out 10k healing per GCD. The forums are ablaze with streams of tears from every perspective. Some claim that a warden/sentinel build will still outperform this exploit by a large margin. The majority of players who use this exploit still hold the position that spamming HC downranked is clearly the highest means of HPS and healing done. Where do you stand?

Should using a downranked spell in Rift even exist? Is this clever use of game mechanics or an exploit? Many Rifters feel that it CLEARLY is exploiting the game and brings a huge inbalance to warfronts and world PVP. I personally feel that it is a slipup on Trion’s part and it will be hotfixed soon. Downranking spells is a thing of the past. It existed in WoW for a long time and was used intentionally for utility, pvp focused purposes mainly. By allowing this to even exist in-game currently is a flawed mechanic that needs to be addressed. So all of you clerics healing for 400k in a Black Garden by using this bug, kudos to you for your insight-but let’s be honest, you’re exploiting a Rift mechanic, period! So enjoy topping charts for the meantime, and enjoy spending your plat on training.

Where does the community stand on this issue? Is it a clear exploit or an acceptable use of Rift mechanics? I’m curious to see how the players are feeling towards this hot topic. Give me your impressions on the topic and join the RJ discussion and the official Rift forums.

Originally thought to be one of the slower leveling classes in Trion Worlds: RIFT, Clerics have shown themselves to be not only exceptional in parties, but masters of soloing much of games leveling content. The reason for this is extremely simple: the ability to AoE(Area of Effect) grind every  quest in the game, with the exception of elite or group based content, with a proper soul build.