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.

Agonist is a very versatile spec and can be used in a variety of situations.

Strengths:

1. Links which can provide up to a 30% damage interception from any party/raid member.
2. Very good AoE Damage (30k+)
3. Beacon of Despair (Pet Summon) for easy soloing.
4. Lots of healing abilities. (HOT, cleanse, 3 stack heals)

Weaknesses:

1. Single target DPS leaves something to be desired (5-6K)
2. Only 1 Raid buff

Firstly, here’s a picture of the tree itself (click the image to bring up the full-size version).

The point spread is 58 into Defiler and 18 into Cabalist. Here is the build on Rifthead.

The only macro for this build is this one, which is used during the second part of your AoE rotation.  However, if you are fighting 6 or more mobs, you can just use this macro continuously for maximum DPS.

#show Pain Transmission
suppressmacrofailures
cast tyranny of death
cast pain transmission
cast bound fate

Buffs used:
Soloing-

• Rage Blight/Grief Blight– They do not stack. Use Rage Blight to do more damage, or Grief Blight to do more healing.  Normally I would only recommend using Grief Blight if you are in the spec to heal specifically, otherwise, use Rage Blight. At a full 5 stacks, this buffs your damage by 20%.  These stacks only accumulate when your beacon or links are taking damage.
• Feast of the Fallen– Heals yourself,  party members, and pets for a small amount every time an enemy mob dies.
• Dark Harbor– Adds +3% resistances to your character.

During every other situation, these additional buffs are used, which are called links. This is what makes this soul unique as you can intercept and take damage from another character in the party/raid. There are 4 links and each one scales a little differently. Generally, the higher intercept percentage the link, the less intercepted damage you take.

• Link of Agony– 30% intercept/Cleric takes 19% of the intercepted dmg.
• Link of Suffering– 20% intercept/Cleric takes 30% of the intercepted dmg.
• Link of Misery– 10% intercept/Cleric takes 59% of the intercepted dmg.
• Link of Distress– 5% intercept/Cleric takes 85% of the intercepted dmg.
• Blighted Greed– When cast upon another party member, allows the Cleric to gain stacks of Blight without intercepting any damage.

Use these links in order or importance in your party/raid.  Example: In a 5-man group, prioritize your links by Tank > Healer > Support > DPS.  Same goes for a bigger group, just prioritize your links in the same manner.  All the links are usable at the same time, but only one link per person.

Single Target Encounters:  

1. Cast your Beacon of Despair at your target’s location (if solo). This will automatically focus your target on your beacon and not on you, and all your attacks will channel your aggro to the beacon.
2. The main abilities you will use for your rotation are in this order: Marrow Harvest (1), Siphon Vitality (2), Dark Water (3), Curse of Solitude (4), Bond of Pain (5), and Somatic Desecration (6).
3. In order to maximize DPS, this is the rotation:  5 1 2 3 4 1 6 6 6 6 6 1 2 3 4 1 6 6 6 6 6.  This rotation will result in the highest DPS gain for a single target encounter and takes exactly 30 seconds to complete with no delay in cast times. After the last Somatic Desecration (6), you can re-apply Bond of Pain (5) and start all over again.
4. The DPS output of this rotation depends mostly on how often your beacon is getting hit. The more abuse it takes, the higher your DPS output will be.  On most single target pulls, you can expect between 5-6k DPS with an Expert-geared Cleric.

Important:  Siphon Vitality heals you, and this activates your Husk of Indifference, which absorbs all the intercepted damage you take from your links or beacon. By maintaining your rotation, you will never lose any health as the shield will never drop. It is also important to keep Bond of Pain up as this deals reactive damage back to the attacker each time one of your links or beacon does damage and ends up accounting for 10-15% of your total DPS for an encounter. If you have target of target enabled in your settings, you can also heal your beacon easily using your Ghastly or Loathsome Restoration. One use of this will make the beacon’s health go back up to 100%.

Multi-Target Encounters:

1. The multi-target rotation is not much different from the single target rotation, however there are a few key differences.
2. Cast Beacon of Despair at the target’s location (if solo).
3. If the enemy mob is 5 enemies or less, start with this rotation: Marrow Harvest, Siphon Vitality, Bond of Pain, Unholy Nexus (no Global Cooldown), and Curse of Solitude.
4. Start the AoE macro. You should be able to do about 4 Bound Fates and Tyranny will detonate around the time when you should go back to the first part of the rotation.
5. If the group of enemy mobs is larger than 5, you can just use the AoE macro as the first part of the rotation only affects 5 mobs.
6. Once again, your DPS output is dependent upon how hard your beacon is getting hit. This soul shines on AoE pulls. On an 8 dummy parse, this spec will pull in around 26-28k DPS with no Bond of Pain or links active so you can expect to see 30k+ with links or a beacon active.

Final Thoughts:

Your beacon can be used whenever you’re soloing no matter how many mobs you are fighting, however, the beacon becomes useless in a party or raid situation as you will likely have a tank and healer present.  When you use your links on your party members, they then act like your beacon, which will buff you as they receive damage. When Bond of Pain is active, they will be dealt reactive damage when the enemy attacks.

All your bonds have no cooldown and are instant cast, but their effectiveness lasts for 30 seconds.

Using Empowered Affliction will restore 7% of your max Mana, but reduce your max HP by 5% for 10 seconds up to 5 stacks. This is a great tool and can be used on the run, just be careful because big hits or waves could potentially kill you during this vulnerable state.

If your beacon takes too much damage, it will de-spawn and all aggro will redirect back to you.  It is very hard to pull the aggro away from yourself once this has happened and as such, there are a few heals you can use to keep your beacon’s health up.  Ghastly and Loathsome Restoration are big heals that consume the stacks of Foul Growth (up to 3) and can heal your beacon up to full health from around 25%.  You can also sneak in Hideous Restoration during your rotation and this HoT will help take some of the heat of your beacon.

Last Friday, Kervik announced a few changes that are currently being made for Mages and Shaman Clerics. Here they are, starting with the Shaman changes:

Originally posted by Kervik (Source)

---

Some additional updates on things in the work for Shaman.

• Cold Blooded now affects all damage (not just melee)
• Increase Lightning Hammer’s range to 30m.
• Increase Frozen Wrath’s range to 30m.

This are more changes that will make their way to PTS eventually for people to give feedback on. If they survive all that they will probably be part of the next full update.

And for Mages:

Originally posted by Kervik (Source)

---

Another small update on some changes in the works:

• Increase the base chance for Fireball to proc Combust to 40%.
• Improved Combustion now increases the chance for Fireball to proc Combust by 20/40/60%.
• Pyromancer’s Armor can proc an additional Fireball once every 4s instead of once every 5s.
• The debuff from Rending Slash increases damage by 3% per stack. Up from 2%.
• Damaging abilities granted by Possession are getting a buff so its not a DPS loss to use.

Fans of the various Cleric DPS specs have been hoping for improvements for a while now. Many players had hoped that Storm Legion would finally fix all of the scaling issues that tended to affect the pure DPS specs, but certain callings are already falling quite a bit behind the curve. The good news? Kervik, who seems to have taken over the reins of communicating on the forums with the Cleric community, has taken note of the issue and will be looking at Cleric DPS soon. Here is what he had to say:

Originally posted by Kervik (Source)

---

Hey all,

There are plans to take a look at cleric dps soon, particularly the Shaman’s. I’ll update you all when I have a better idea on what, if any, changes are in store. More feedback on what you all are seeing on live is always welcome though.

If you’d like to offer feedback in the way of posting raid logs and whatnot, this thread seems to be a decent place for providing Trion with Shaman feedback.

Over the weekend, Trion posted a few updates on the forums for Clerics, Warriors, and Rogues. Among the updates, there were notes of current bugs impacting Fiery Spike and Expose Weakness for Rogues, Reckless Strike for Warriors, and Light of Redemption for Clerics. Light of Redemption, the Sentinel ability, has actually been temporarily disabled as of late Saturday. Here are the three dev tracker posts, starting with the Cleric update:

Originally posted by Pithos (Source)

---

Hello everyone,

We’ve had to disable the 61 point Sentinel ability, Light of Redemption, due to a bug.

Thank you to everyone who reported it, and we hope to have it active again soon.

Keep reading to see the others.

And for Rogues:

Originally posted by Ailion (Source)

---

Some updates:

1) The damage bonus acquired by Flame Blitz (talents, heat retention etc.) is currently being transferred to Fiery Spike, resulting in more than expected damage added to Fiery Spike. This will be fixed later.

2) The additional damage from Expose Weakness is being “distributed” over the duration of DOT effects. For example, if Expose Weakness increases damage by 100, using Impale results in Impale getting an additional 100 damage over 20s, or 9 per tick, instead of 100 per tick. I may re-function Expose Weakness by removing the 20 Charges limitation.

Finally, an update for Warriors who might be using the RB/VK DPS spec:

Originally posted by Ailion (Source)

---

Hey guys,

Just to let you know, Reckless Strike is currently bugged because it is tagged both as a physical attack and a non-physical attack when it should only be a physical attack. As such, it is enjoying all the non-physical damage bonuses from the Riftblade talents.

I will be getting that fixed, but not a hotfix at the moment.

As the holidays come to a close, Trion’s team is getting back in action on the RIFT forums. Yesterday we saw a few updates to some Cleric fixes that are in progress, which were posted by Kervik:

Originally posted by Kervik (Source)

---

Couple updates for you on some fixes and such:

• Changing Liberty of Thought to be castable while Silenced. (meaning it will now allow you to break out of silence)
• Fixed an issue with Gesture of Goodwill. It should now correctly affect all instances of Burnout from your absorbs.
• Empowering Light wasn’t being affected by silences, this is being fixed (sorry!).

Kervik also mentioned that an issue regarding the Druid talent, Celerity, is currently a bit bugged and is being investigated further.

Yesterday both Atrius and Zinbik were hard at work on the official RIFT forums, communicating with the community about upcoming changes to Warrior and Justicar tank mitigation, as well as some changes being made to Riftblade. Here’s a roundup of their posts, starting with Zinbik’s thoughts on tank mitigation and the announcement of a change for Doctrine of Glory:

Originally posted by Zinbik (Source)

---

As of right now, internally, all tanks have nearly identical health and mitigation. This is already largely true on LIVE.

Nearly all of the changes currently being made to Warrior tanks involve allowing them to establish their mitigation more easily or passively against all monsters involved in the fight. Justicars already have the advantage there, because the only active mitigation factor we have to establish during the fight is Precept of Refuge. Everything else is passive or a lengthy buff, meaning we get the full benefits against all monsters right from the start of the fight.

The only real changes to the math behind Warrior mitigation are largely minor to help establish better internal Warrior equivalency. I’m not going to completely discount the possibility of some crazy new hybrid popping up that we haven’t considered that comes out ahead, because that happens sometimes in a system like this. However, that possibility has been at the forefront of our thoughts throughout the process.

As far as Soul Coalescence equivalents go, yes, Doctrine of Glory will soon reduce your damage taken by 2.86% per Conviction consumed for 4s. It will no longer heal at all, because it was unloved and no longer wishes to help anyone.

Continue reading to see the other dev tracker posts.

And here are some thoughts from Atrius, who has been diligently working with the Warrior community to try and eliminate the current Warrior tank and DPS issues. First, his thoughts on the 10% damage mitigation discrepancy that the developers have stated currently separates Warrior tanks from Cleric and Rogue tanks:

Originally posted by Atrius (Source)

---

Ok, let me address this 10% issue. We called it a 10% lower issue because as we ran tests we found a 10% reduction over the course of a test. The guys testing tanks sent me some things they found that we all believe were leading to this discrepancy. After implementing these changes I ran a test following their findings and as a Paladin, once Pacifying Strike, Light’s benediction and Aggressive Block are up I am hitting the same comparable numbers as the Justicar and there is no longer a 10% issue. Since these buffs are intended to be kept up, once the initial rotation is over the Paladin should be at comparable numbers for the rest of the fight.

So in essence the 10% mitigation issue should be fixed, provided you test with a Paladin who has those three abilities active. And if you are worried about getting through that first rotation, fire off Shield Defense to cover it (Since you now have Aegis of the Light you can burn your Shield Defense and not be worried about not having a CD).

Also, some news about Riftblade:

Originally posted by Atrius (Source)

---

A few days ago I said that it was not our intention to nerf the Riftblade in any way. Unfortunately we fixed a couple bugs that drastically increased Riftblade Burst damage (10K ticks on Fiery Burst have been mentioned a few times). After looking into the impact these bug fixes have had we are going to have to make one small nerf. So I wanted to come here and let you guys know what that was going to be. We are going to reduce Burst Capacitor from 5% per Talent Point to 4%. From a Maximum of 25% to a Maximum of 20%.

This change should come into PTS at the same time as the Paragon buffs so please test them against one another.

Many of you may be returning to RIFT, maybe many of you are starting up for the first time, or maybe you’re just leveling an alt. In any case, you’re probably trying to catch up with some friends and are eager to dive into the new Storm Legion content. This video and guide is probably the fastest and best way to hit level 50 in the fastest time possible. Keep reading and we’ll give you the low down on what you need to do.

The game has changed quite a bit since the game launched and questing is out as the preferred method for speed leveling. Instant Adventures have given the game a whole new angle on things; but that is not what helps you level the fastest! We’re going old school in this tutorial with some straight up mob grinding.

This whole theory hinges on that you can get your hands on some veteran experience vials. These vials give you a 100% boost to experience pre-50 from mob kills which means you earn double the experience when you kill something. Once you get your vials stocked, you need to head out to the undead farm in Freemarch (see maps to the right). Now you have to de-level yourself to level 14 or so. You’ll be fighting NPCs that are approximately level 12.

There are two ways to de-level yourself; right click on your portrait and mentor yourself down to level 14 or join a Freemarch Instant Adventure and you’ll be there. Load up your best AOE farming spec and go to town.

This guide was done with a cleric using a Defiler spec, but any class and spec that can handle 5-10 NPCs at once will work just fine.

For those who are doing this, you might have to take a break and do some dungeons or Instant Adventures for gear so once you are high enough, your de-leveled stats are good enough for this.

The farm is loaded with mostly melee mobs and a few casters and is mostly densely populated. If you can find a better location, please share in these comments. However the relatively low hitpoints of level 14 mobs makes this ideal. The higher level you get, the easier things become.

Once you have that all straightened away, you’ll be melting faces in no time. At level 48, you can expect to get about 850 experience per kill and you’ll be killing 5-10 mobs at once. For comparison sake, you are gaining 2500 experience completing stages in IAs and 4500 or so for finishing them.

The last hint is to do your Random Warfronts every day. At level 49, winning a random warfront netted you 76,000 xp and winning five got me level 49 to 50 in about an hour. However, I did manage to win 5 in a row so this is very faction dependent.

If you really want to game the system as you grind, join up the local IA and let other people complete stages. If you are without scruples you can leech of other folks for a few extra thousand experience every few minutes. Also, when you join up warfronts for the bonus experience, determine quickly if you will win or not (most of the time you can figure this out quickly). If you suspect you will lost, quit and go back to grinding and try again when your desertion debuff wears off.

If you have any way to improve this strategy, leave it in the comments section below.

Being new to the world of Telara is a daunting experience, looking at all those high level Clerics with their shiny armour wandering around on fantastic mounts bristling with weapons and virtually aglow with magic can be enough to cause the new Cleric  to think they can never be that good.

Fear not the challenge, for here is a way to beat the levelling woe’s and become one of those Clerics you first looked up to.

This guide is set out to make the transition from level 10 to level 60 as painless as possible if you have to do it Solo or with a friend. So the first thing you need to do is get out of the starting zone by following the quest line and get to today’s Telara, you should be around level 8 when you emerge, I’d suggest following the quest line till you get to level 10 then you can reset your souls to take advantage of this guide.

Single target Macro

Healing Macro

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.

Strategy: 
Fairly straight forward at this level. You use Vex to pull mobs (this is a DOT ~ Damage Over Time~ spell) and then spam your single target macro until the target is dead. You have no AoE abilities at this level so keep your pulls to single target. Use your Healing Macro as you see fit to keep alive.

Single target Macro

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.

Strategy: 
Exact same as level 10, new spell “Sanction Heretic” added to Single target Macro.

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s

Strategy:
Make sure you have the buff “Shroud of Agony” up when fighting multiple mobs and always pull with Vex where possible as this heals you for 6% of your max health over the duration, otherwise just as before. Just remember to Vex everything to keep your health topped up.

AoE Macro

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s

Strategy: 
Pretty much the same as before, Vex and then spam your new AoE macro if fighting multiple enemies or use your Single Target Macro when there is only one.

You can now use Harsh Disciplin as well as your Healing macro to heal yourself. Remember to make sure you have “Shroud of Agony” on if you are fighting multiple enemies.

Single Target Macro

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s

Strategy:
You now have Ride the Lightning to get you into the fight quicker,it also damages the targeted enemy and damages all others on the way past. Also useful for breaking out of any movement imparing effects.Otherwise, as before, tag with vex to heal yourself and mash single/aoe macro

Single Target Macro

Healing Macro

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s
• Righteous Mandate – put this on your friend/partner/random person to help heal them as you DPS.

Strategy:
Use Glacial Shield on a pull, otherwise it’s the same as before, this time your single target macro has a ranged attack in it so any mobs out of melee range, you cast ekkehard’s grasp doing 115+ damage to them.

AoE Macro

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s
• Righteous Mandate – put this on your friend/partner/random person to help heal them as you DPS.

Strategy:
Not much new here except your AoE macro can now be spammed. Remember to cast Vex on your targets to keep the healing flowing, Doctrine of Bliss when you need a quick boost. Don’t forget Harsh Disciplin when the last target is nearly dead to finish it off and heal yourself.

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s
• Righteous Mandate – put this on your friend/partner/random person to help heal them as you DPS.
• Glory of the Chosen - Weapon attack heals you for a small amount

Strategy:
No major changes….keep at it…

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s
• Righteous Mandate – put this on your friend/partner/random person to help heal them as you DPS.
• Glory of the Chosen - Weapon attack heals you for a small amount

Strategy: 
Tag as many targets as possible with vex. Use Ride the Lightning if possible when you get snared. Gather the mobs up and try to have them all face you. Mash your AoE macro until all dead; use your ST macro if there’s a straggler or two. If you get really low on health use doctrine of bliss a few times. When low on mana, hit purpose immediately after a soul drain for quick mana recharge.

Single target – OPTIONAL

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s
• Righteous Mandate – put this on your friend/partner/random person to help heal them as you DPS.
• Glory of the Chosen - Weapon attack heals you for a small amount

Strategy:
If you run into Mana problems, cast “Ageless Ice” to recover 7% of your mana. “Jolt ” is a big hit if you activate it when it procs off, The macro above is for those people that don’t want to have another button to press. If you want to do more damage though, keep it on a separate key to cast “Jolt” when it Procs for a 50% damage increase.

You also now have “Interdict” – An AoE Interupt, works well in PVP and PVE with a 10 second cooldown

Word to the wise, the mobs start hitting like a truck from now on, until you know you can handle them, pick your target with caution, nothing worse that attacking a higher level mob, nearly beating it down, then it’s friends jump in and paste you to the floor.

Buffs to Keep Active

• Armor of Devotion – Increase Crit Hit chance
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm – cause your attacks to deal addition damage.
• Shroud of Agony - 20% chance when hit to deal Death damage to up to 10 nearby enemies over 6s
• Righteous Mandate – put this on your friend/partner/random person to help heal them as you DPS.
• Glory of the Chosen - Weapon attack heals you for a small amount
• Heart of the Frozen Sea - Increases resistance

Strategy:
Apart from the new buff “Heart of the Frozen Sea” you get another interrupt, “Bitter Wind” , this is a Single Target interrupt, for those times when you just need to stop someone after you have already interrupted the crowd..

Oh, and welcome to level 60

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.

The Defiler, of course, deals in death-type magic. Their spells largely consist of reflective damage and burst healing. Defilers can take a portion of the brunt of an ally’s attack themselves with a special ability called a Link. Links allow the Defiler to intercept a portion of the damage from the ally at a reduced rate, making the soul ideally useful for raids. Links are off-GCD, and the damage reduction occurs after mitigation, but before absorption, meaning all types of damage reduction will still be important.

There are four different Links total, and one can only be placed on a player at a time, meaning a full Defiler will have a couple links on different players in a raid. The most powerful, a 25% intercept, can be placed on the tank, and the lesser Links, such as 20%, etc., will be on another player that’s likely to take damage at some point. Linked players also receive extra healing from certain Defiler healing abilities.

Defiler heals are delayed in nature and stack. Strategy is needed for throwing heals out, and the Cleric can keep the stacks rolling and save them for a huge spike heal, or activate them early for more of a HoT-style heal flow. The healing style ends up being reactionary and re-directive, and the burst healing that’s possible is very controlled.

Due to the redirection of damage from Links, Defiler healers will need to remember to keep themselves healed as well. There are ways to help the Cleric absorb some of this kickback damage. Again, this seems like quite a strategical way to heal that should prove enjoyable for players who are searching for a little more from their healing character than simple button spam.

The Defiler also gets Bonds that can be placed on the enemy, which have different effects. One of which heals the Cleric every time the enemy does damage. At 61 points in the soul, Defilers have an ability to temporarily transform into an abomination, which acts like a survivability cooldown.

The soul gets a special type of stationary pet (that isn’t a real pet– it can’t be named, but it can’t stack with another type of pet, either), known as a Beacon, which can be useful for soloing and tanking damage. Beacons aren’t offensive, and act more like targeting dummies that distract enemies than anything. They look like weird eyeball totems, pictured to the right. The Cleric’s aggro gets automatically transferred to the Beacon when used.

Defilers should be pretty interesting in PvP, but will definitely take some smart strategy. The good news is that the Defiler is a little more mobile than say, a Purifier, which will be a benefit.

Damage-wise, Defilers play fairly strategically as well. Certain abilities proc off the targets of the player’s Links, meaning that if the group is clumped up together in a pile of mobs, the Cleric will be able to do respectable AoE damage. That said, damage is definitely a second role for the Defiler, as it is primarily a healing soul. It still does decently solo as a standalone soul, but it also synergizes well with other souls.

And yes, that brings me to one of the hugest changes as far as Clerics go in Storm Legion– our group healing -icar specs are not as effective due to the changes to the Justicar tree. Zinbik stated that Doctrine of Loyalty will not be the go-to AoE healing spell this time around, and that wasn’t the original intention to begin with. Instead, Clerics are encouraged to use hybrid Defiler specs (or Warden) in order to fulfill a hybrid healer/DPS role or come up with a solid leveling spec. And yes, -icar specs still technically work, but they aren’t intended to allow players to become super-powerful raid healers as we saw in the past.

One of the specs showcased during the live stream was a Druid/Defiler hybrid. Druids are getting quite a few changes (yay!) in Storm Legion, including a new ranged DPS pet, a new tanking Satyr pet, and some better self-healing and utility options. Druid DPS will now be optimal when attacking from behind the enemy, and interestedly enough, some of the best Cleric DPS specs tested last beta were centered around Druid.

Early Defiler is probably where some of the best synergy talents lie. Links and Bonds come in extremely handy for leveling, and the 0-point Defiler buff is quite useful for soloing. Another strong contender should be Inquisitor with a bit of Defiler, which makes Inquisitor a little more survivable, and gives the Cleric some interesting group utility options through Links and AoE healing. Additionally, Justicar may get some decent damage with early Defiler, and this combination may work well for an off-tanking spec.

Shaman is a lot less centered around random burst damage. The new rotation is much more solid, and takes some practice to utilize well. The rotation revolves around alternating between magical damage attacks and physical damage attacks, which is an interesting change, and makes for a much more engaging rotation.

Warden has received some large changes as well, and is shifting into a more hybrid healing/ranged DPS class. Warden will also be the primary AoE healing soul. The basic idea for the new Warden– throw up HoTs, throw up AoE HoTs, and damage if you have time to do so. This may make Warden decent for soloing and group hybrid play. Warden and Defiler should also work decently together, providing a mixture of heal types.

During the live stream, some interesting raid progression questions were brought up. One player questioned how healing will progress in Storm Legion, since in vanilla (or chocolate– whichever is yummier) RIFT, healing scaled up extremely quickly, leaving a large portion of our content to be easily healed through. Zinbik said that yes, Storm Legion content will definitely scale better and has been planned better as far as DPS and HPS growth.

The next Storm Legion new soul reveal Live Stream headed our way will feature the Tactician, our new Rogue soul. A couple weeks ago, Elrar confirmed that we wouldn’t have to wait a whole month before getting to steal a glimpse of the Tactician in action. This came as a relief to many players who are anxious to find out about their favorite soul.

A couple days ago, a more specific timetable was announced on Trion’s Twitter feed, shown to the left. It seems Rogue fans will have to wait at least another week for their reveal. And yep, before anyone asks, the first part of that Tweet is indeed a “rouge” joke.

As we begin our final countdown toward the time remaining until Storm Legion’s launch, it definitely appears the folks at Trion have their hands full. October promises to be a busy month with the Rogue reveal, Cleric reveal, the announcement of Storm Legion’s open beta, and RIFT Patch 1.11 somewhere in there.