Clerics

(credit: from the old general newbie guide made by Rhynst on proboards, changed and updated somewhat.

Cleric (3w, n, e, n, e)

Learning Curve: Low

Damage Dealing: C

Damage Absorption: A+

Soloing ability: A

Bashing ability: B

Tanking prowess: A

Famous clerics: Bazhi, Cogline

Class Abilities

Clerics’ unique powers are their prayers: they get increasingly powerful prayers as they raise their wisdom. Here’s a table of their prayers:

Wis	Prayer	Cost(sps)	Effect
2	Light	10	Holy symbol becomes a light source for about 10 minutes
3	Cure	20	Heals 15-30, more on others
4	Wound	25	Deals about 10 damage
5	Detect	20	Detects if something’s cursed, pretty useless
5	Purge	20	Reduces potion tolerance in another player, you’ll use this one a lot
5	Tolerance	20	To find out how bad the tolerance in another player is
6	State	20	Find out about a monster’s alignment and weak points and other information
6	Transform	Varies	Transforms water into various types of alcohol. Not 100% sure it’s at 6 wisdom.
7	Slow	25	Cures poison slightly
8	Uncurse	75	Uncurses items, not that many items are cursed, and most of those come from Zhammar.
9	Fix	50	Heals 30-85 or so, you’ll be using this one a lot.
10	Cold	20	Adds 15-35 to cold resistance for about 15 minutes.
10	Fire	20	Adds 15-35 to fire resistance for about 15 minutes.
11	Turn	50	Something useless
12	Dispel	25	Similar to cold and fire, for magic resistance
12	Waterwalk	40	Not too sure it’s 12 wisdom. Allows players to walk across water.
12	Purify	50	Better version of purge, but damages the recipient
13	Hammer	40	A damage spell that does about 30 damage
14	Curse	100	Curses an item – a cursed item can’t be unwielded or removed. Mostly used in player-killing
15	Bless	50	Gives equipment a nice boost in quality
15	Disinfect	85	Fixes up diseases, plagues, etc
16	Neutralize	100	A better version of slow
17	Cleanse	120	A better version of purify
18	Destruct	100	Deals some damage to every undead in the room, better clerics do this better. This is only really useful for some treasure hunts with multiple undeads in the same room.
19	Heal	180	Fixes all things wrong with a player, including pinkies.

Defensive abilities

Clerics are most well known for their healing prayers, which on average all heal more than 1 hit point per spell point. They also get a range of prayers that increase their resistances by about 30 each (random), and bless, which increases the quality of their armour. This makes clerics perfectly suited to tanking.

The line of prayers related to purge are essential for other characters to remove their tolerance. Tolerance is the effect of potions becoming less and less potent as you use more and more of them. You can’t purge yourself, so seek out another cleric via ‘who class’ to offer to ‘swap purges’.

Offensive abilities

Clerics also have offensive prayers – but these are generally quite inefficient compared to equivalent mage and necromancer offensive spells. However, wrath is still very useful to grab some equipment with after reboot. Once you’re geared up, vast majority of the time, your spell points are better spent on healing spells.

Skills

Clerics are very good with clubs, flails and staves. They also get longsword and polearm skills acceptably quickly. All of these are fairly high damage weapon classes. This makes them also good bashers, as any tank appreciates extra healing, higher resistances and solid damage. These same qualities make them very good at soloing as well – as long as you fight monsters within your abilities, you’ll simply outlast them.

One special note for clerics is the mace of crushing – this 30-70 skill club is excellent for all clerics as it comes with a bonus to-hit for clerics, highly recommended when raising club.

Races

These qualities, along with a reliance on wisdom, makes dwarves the long-time favourite class for clerics. Their high wisdom and constitution makes them very effective punching bags, the high strength letting them wear all the armour they need and wield very heavy weapons, making them one of the most solid characters in the game. The Destructor also offsets one of the deficiencies of the dwarf, by providing dwarves +1 dexterity, and in the hands of a dwarf does fairly nice damage. The cons of dwarf are the low dexterity and intelligence – my level 26 dwarf cleric still has below 90 blocking, and these 2 low stats make him gain weapon skills very slowly. However, Bazhi is a dwarf. This is the tried and true path for clerics.

Half elves have a higher wisdom than dwarves, but much less strength and constitution. This makes them a fair bit less solid, and a worse tank. I feel that the cleric should be a damage-soaker, and the half elves just sacrifice too much to fit that role. The 15 strength also cuts the half elf off top end weapons like Krakadoom and outstanding sword. The advantages of half elves are that they have high intelligence, and skill very fast compared to dwarves. They also have a fairly powerful wrath, if you want to play a cleric like a mage.

Elves are, unfortunately, even worse than half elves in the front line role. They have less wisdom, constitution, and strength, for 2 more dexterity. There’s little reason to play an elf cleric.

Humans are a happy medium between dwarves and half elves. They have decent amounts of each stat. They’re a little bit worse than dwarves at doing everything cleric-related, but their skills raise much faster, so in that sense they’re for people who like to see skills flash up. The little sacrifice in quality they make isn’t too large, and they can still tank about as well as a dwarf. The post-level 19 increase in weight capacity also offsets the sacrifice of strength somewhat. If I were to make a cleric tomorrow, it’d be human.

Orcs are the dark horse in this field. They are actually better than dwarves at the front line role – 2 more dexterity and 1 more constitution for 2 wisdom and 1 strength. The strength matters little now – the weight capacity issue is offset by the post-level 19 increases, and the damage decrease is offset by hitting more with the 2 dexterity. The orc still has enough wisdom to get access to all the useful prayers. The downsides are that skills come slowly and prayers fail a little bit more.

Levelling your first Cleric

Clerics are one of the easiest classes to level up. It’s a simple process of grabbing a weapon (recommended club for new players), sticking to it, armouring yourself up, and whacking things around your level until you hit level 19.

Levels 1-10: get yourself a few thousand coins first, through CX, picking up rusty chainmails in the forest, taking free items like fire gems and helmets and ladders from various areas, begging, etc. Then buy a fishing pole from Salty John (2e, n), check your real life time, go to Zhou (26n, e), train with him, go to your favourite low level area and whack things with your pole for the next 12 minutes. Heal when hurt with either the free sleeping room in the manor, or if you’re rich (5000+ coins), just heal with medicinals while you’re killing. Get stats and levels as you can, until you have exactly 15 club (probably around level 3). When you get the 15, stop killing things immediately, get 1 or 2 packages of medicinals, and re-train with zhou (wait for the previous session to run out if necessary). Then spend as much time in combat as possible in the next 12 minutes – it shouldn’t be hard with medicinals and the cure prayer. This should get your club skill to somewhere between 18 and 25.

Now it’s time to get a gnarled club – either find one in the shops, or kill for one yourself with your pole – find an orc in a dalair hovel (16w, 4n, w, n, if dead, try 2s, if that’s dead, try n, 2w, n, etc etc) smack it down. Spend your time up to level 10 just whacking things with your club, building your bank account through selling things that your kills drop (spirits in the ghost ship are good for this), and raising the club skill. Don’t neglect intelligence as a stat – just max out dexterity while levelling, and then get the cheapest stat available after that (unless there’s something you really need, like the next prayer). By level 11, as long as you’ve been raising your int and wis well, as well as hitting things around your level, you should have at least 25 club, hopefully 30 or more.

Levels 10-15: These are the levels where you start getting your most important prayers. Notice that when you first get some of the prayers, they often fail and aren’t very good – this is because your wisdom is still quite low – as a consequence, even though you do have fix, it’s probably better to use cure since it’s much more reliable.

The most important thing for you at these levels is to get your hands on the mace of crushing – suitable for 30 skill onwards. A cleric with a mace of crushing deals about twice as much damage as one without at these levels. If you’re lucky, there’ll be one in the shops or your guild’s storage, and if not, it’s time to beg, steal, bully your way to one. Then get some light affordable armour (cuirboilli leathers and radiant armour are good choices), a light shield (a green or black shield, a fine hoplon shield), smokes, medicinals, and take kills that are easy and have some equipment to sell – messengers and soldiers in the Burnham woods, brigands, packrats and dalair soldiers initially. As you level up and get more skills, Andeli knights, Zhammar and Drakhyra guards, zombies in the underground forest, and kills of that quality should be good. As you are able to carry more and more, get more armour – amulets and rings are a priority, then helmets and robes and the like.

When you get the bless prayer, keep your body armour and jewellery blessed. Keep your hit points above 30, don’t take unnecessary risks, and you should in due time hit level 15. You should have at least 45 club by the end of level 15, hopefully closer to 60.

Level 16+: unlike most other classes, at around level 16, your character is pretty much ‘fully functional’. It’s a case of starting off at level 16 on the easier ‘real kills’ – fairy dragon and queen, wyvern and general, etc, getting better stats and ability to carry more heals and equipment, moving up to the bread and butter kills – bulette and hermit, riognach, evil cleric and bonebreaker, etc. Eventually reaching the peak of your powers, you can solo all but the most difficult mobs, by simply outlasting them.

Playing a Cleric

Killing things with a cleric is pretty simple. Grab the best armour and shield you can find and carry, wield the biggest weapon you can find, and grab the best pack you can find. Get a load of standard heals, find something to kill, and simply fix yourself whenever you’re less than 70 hit points from maximum. Refill on heals as you run low, pray for the appropriate resistances as the situation demands, and don’t go too low on hit points. This is one of the simplest classes to kill stuff with easily.

When bashing, your job is to be quick with your ‘pray fix tank’ alias while providing modest damage. The tank will either tell you to monitor his hit points yourself, and heal him once he goes below x hit points – in which case it’s time to turn on party awareness ‘help paware’. Alternatively, he’ll ask you to fix on his command, which is time to pay attention and quickly hit your alias every time he yells out for a lifesaver. Some tanks are inattentive about how many spell points you have – notify them every time you’re down below 100 spell points. You’ll probably be also required to ‘do the heals’. Always be smoking and bound, and bind your tank as well. Don’t be afraid to drink alcohol every so often, as long as you don’t get too drunk to bind your wounds. Purge your tank if they’re using potions every so often, and also pray the appropriate resistances. Do this well and most tanks will love you.

Is a Cleric for you?

Clerics are good for those learning the game, those wanting to learn to tank or bash, and people who appreciate good solid grunt characters. If you feel your mage lacks some toe-to-toe ability, give this class a try.