*Release* Rift Catch-All - if it isnt for any of the other threads - it goes here

karmajay wrote:

If you could get all the skills for all 3 souls there would be no reason to mix and match. :)

There could be a reason (with a more significant focus on the branches rather than the roots), there just isn't. That's the answer I was looking for, unfortunately. Thanks for the quick reply.

Blind_Evil wrote:
karmajay wrote:

If you could get all the skills for all 3 souls there would be no reason to mix and match. :)

There could be a reason (with a more significant focus on the branches rather than the roots), there just isn't. That's the answer I was looking for, unfortunately. Thanks for the quick reply.

I think once you work with it and experiment you will appreciate it more. For ex, I have a solo build that is awesome. It is Bladedancer/riftstalker/assassin. I had 32 points in BD. An offensive soul, also a lot of the skills increase your damage when you doge and parry, ect. New attacks open up. I had enough points in assassin to increase my offensive damage. In the riftstalker tree, I put enough points to get a skill that gives me health back when i have combo points left over. This was great for soloing. Even if a group hit me, I would spam my aoe attack that built up combo points, when that mob died, i would get a chunk of health back and i could usually live through the battle. Now if someone was using this same build for pvp, they would adjust those points to take advantage of all the stealth stuff assassin has instead.

Now, I was also using this same build for the expert dungeons. i wasn't doing as much damage BECAUSE I was not getting hit and having those dodge offensive attacks available. Also, since we had healer in the group and all the mobs were elite, I did not need the riftstalker healing skill. I moved my build around to eliminate all that, and now I'm doing much more expert dungeon damage. I took that same build last night into a death rift event, and while i was melting elite mob faces, my survivaability was not as good as my solo leveling b uild because I didnt have that self healing!

So, the class/soul/role system is incredibly flexible. Also, the fact that the group in a dungeon can switch roles for any situation is really helpful and fun!

April 9 I was sitting at home at my PC.

April 16 I will be on the road all day to get my son.

I'm kind of in the same boat, I had time on the 9th kind of...and the 16th i'm working all morning then have qualifications and then friends in town visiting...luckily they are gamers so i *might* be able to postpone a little. lol Is that sad? I feel a little sad about that, but mostly i feel excited about getting to possibly get sweet rare loots.

Buncha addicts...

MoonDragon wrote:

Buncha addicts... :D

You do not want to look at my time played on Steam hehe

karmajay wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

Buncha addicts... :D

You do not want to look at my time played on Steam hehe

God, mine either.

I will be driving 12 hours to my inlaws on the 16th.

I forget who didn't believe me in vent while we were pvping earlier tonight, but this (http://rift.zam.com/en/item/B3BEB55C...) is what i was talking about why the guardians always turn into undead

its an essence that procs when they take damage (and also the dumbest thing ever why is this in the game)

but no it is not the world event thing and was in the game before it (guardians only though again why is this in the game it is the dumbest thing)

Lots of Dev activity on the forums last night. There was a major dev post on each of the forums about coming updates in 1.2.

Crafting

Hello Crafters!

It’s been a few weeks since our last update and we have a number of new things coming along that we thought everyone would be interested in hearing about. Many of the below changes will be coming out with the next major update and should be going live in the next few weeks. As always there are a lot of things in progress and this is only a preview of some of them!

• Weekly Crafting Quests – We’re looking at different ways of awarding plaques for crafters. We’re currently working on new, endgame crafting quest content that will give you ways to earn plaques more reliably. In addition these quests are going to be tied into special Rifts that have been tailored for crafters with crafting specific rewards!

• Runecrafting Materials – We’ve mentioned previously that we wanted to take a look at Runecrafting recipes and their ingredient costs. Some ingredients have been used more frequently than others, so we have gone in and updated many of the recipes to better balance out the need for kinetics, perpetual and sentience ingredients.

• Daily Quest Objectives – We’ve reviewed through all the crafting dailies and have fixed a number of issues related to them. Previously there were some daily quests that required very rare and hard to get materials in their recipes, and we’ve gone ahead and updated those to be more reasonable. We’ve also fixed a variety of other issues related to daily quests in the process including: dailies where the recipe is above the quest’s skill requirement, dailies not awarding exp, and we’ve improved the variety in crafted items (particularly for Armorsmiths). You can find details about these changes in the patch notes once they’re released!

• Crafting UI – We’re working on new features to improve the usability of our Crafting UI, specifically sorting and filters for the Recipe Window.

• Rare Material Quest Items – We’ve slightly increased the chances of getting crafting quest starter items from harvesting and mobs! We have added more locations in which the quest starter can drop. For example you can now get a Discarded Pickaxe Head from both Iron and Chromite, instead of just Chromite. In addition, we’ve slightly increased the drop rates for these items.

•Bug Fixes – We’re working diligently to fix bugs as they keep rolling in. The patch notes will call out all the issues that have been addressed recently. Fixes you can expect to see soon include fixes for recipes sorting incorrectly in the recipe list, necklaces salvaging for incorrect materials now drop silver, gold, and platinum respectively, and fixes to items sorting incorrectly on the Auction House.

Expert Dungeons

Upcoming Expert Dungeon changes for 1.2

Hello my fellow Rifties. I want to give small preview to some of the planned changes to our Expert dungeons. Note: This is not a complete list there are plenty of other things that should be updated (such as various achievement bug fixes).

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, we're generally happy with the overall difficulty but will be making a few adjustments for 1.2.
- Reduced Health on non-boss encounters
- Caelia the Stormtouched will be modified to be more understandable
- Gronik's power gain will be nerfed
- Rictus ground target ability will be nerfed a bit
- Gatekeeper Kaleida will have the range of some of the crystal abilities reduced and will ignore line of sight
- Scarn's smouldering bones will stay on fire longer
- Ice Talon and the Falconer will have their health pools slightly reduced
- King's Breach Manticores will not instantly use their special abilities
- Shadehorror Phantasm will no longer spawn minions on pets

We will also be making some particular changes to make some encounters more melee balanced
- Ragnoth's whips have reduced range, duration, and effectiveness
- Fae Lord Twyl will no longer have any 'safe' locations
- Sparkwing's PBAE will have a reduced range. His chained bolt will now work properly on ranged targets.
- Konstantin's cleave will no longer be 360 degrees. Players that are in melee range will get a damage bonus.
- Glubmuk's poison bolt will no longer hit melee.
- Chillblains' elementals will no longer prefer to spawn on the closest targets
- Queen Valnara's ground effect she drops on her location will hurt less.
- Ouldare's special abilities will share a cooldown.
- Luggodhan's goo will no longer target the tank

PvP

PVP Balance Update 15th April 2011

Evening!

We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback for PvP since we’ve gone live, so much that we’ve had quite a challenge weeding out which things we wanted to tackle first. Today I want to give everyone a preview of changes in our upcoming patch, as well as some hints as to where we are headed next.

Improving Reward Quality

There’s been a lot of concern about the quality of the Rank Sets, and the effectiveness that Valor has in PvP compared to the rewards from Tier 1 and 2 dungeons. With 1.2, you’ll find that Valor has received a significant boost, granting reduction in damage taken from Players. In addition we’ve also updated many of the PvP rewards. Here’s a few highlights:

• Retuning PvP items to have more offensive punch.
• Updated & added a number of items to Rank 1 & 2 that will be on par with T1 dungeons.
• Updated & added a number of items in Rank 3 & 4 so that this set is on par with T2 dungeons.
• Reduced the current Rank requirement for Rank 5 weapons to Rank 4, and introduced all new Rank 6 weapons that are on par with Epics from Raid dungeons.
• All Rank Set pieces can now be tinted.

Crowd Control

Crowd control continues to be an item we’re watching carefully. There is a fine line to walk between too much CC and CC being considered useless. With that in mind we’ll be making a few changes in the next patch:

• Increasing the window of time that Diminishing returns is effective, which should reduce the chances of being chain CC’d through an extended encounter.
• Adding a small immunity buff to Break Free in the PvP souls that way players are not immediately CC’d after using their abilities.

Warfront Notoriety

Another area of improvement slated for the next patch is improving the flow of Notoriety advancement so it’s more fun.

• Increased the notoriety rewards from warfronts and warfront related daily quests
• Updated the Notoriety rewards for Port Scion, with the goal of moving some of the better rewards to an earlier notoriety level so they are more in line with the new rank set progression

The above is the bulk of the changes we plan to release with our next patch. However there is no rest for the weary and we’re hard at work on adding some new PVP gameplay into RIFT. We’ll talk about this in more detail once we have things hammered out. That being said people should expect to hear more about things like PvP open world zone events, weekend events with alternate game mode warfronts, and PvP leaderboards & statistics soon!

Cleric

Cleric Balance Update 15th April 2011

Greetings, Clerics of Telara. I'm Zinbik, the guy in charge of Clerics. I am here to discuss... THE FUTURE! Before I begin, I just wanted to thank everyone for their feedback so far. Whether in-game or here on the forums, we really appreciate any insight we can get as to how you're perceiving the game. Now, on to the changes!

We’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback on the ranged DPS souls. For this next patch we’ll be focusing on the Inquisitor, working to make their DPS more reliable and comparable to other DPS souls.

Inquisitor

* Life and Death Concord is just too random. When it procs a lot, you're having a blast! When it hardly procs at all, you want to strangle me. We really want to make this more reliable so their DPS isn't so variable.
* The Armor spells don't offer much of a choice. You've got "the damage and defense one", "the different damage and defense one", and "the mostly useless one". We're going to change that into "the defensive one", "the offensive one", and "the big stick".

The Healing souls have gotten a fair amount of feedback as well. Right now we'd like to focus on the Sentinel with a little Purifier love on the side, examining how we can make certain abilities more useful and interesting. Below are a few examples of these changes.

Sentinel

* Healing Breath, while fantastic for a 0-point ability, just isn't where we'd like it to be for those heavily specced into Sentinel. As long as its HPS is inferior to Healing Invocation, it just ends up being a liability when you try to use it on the tank in response to a minor damage spike or stun. We'd like to fix this, but only for those with a heavy investment into Sentinel.

Purifier

* Ward of the Ancestors is nice and all, but with its current setup ends up being something you only ever cast on the tank. We plan on lowering the cooldown, but adding a blocker to prevent you from casting it on the same person for the next 30 seconds. This allows you to use it on more targets without allowing one target to be shielded 100% of the time. Once we've had time to observe this change within the LIVE environment, we can evaluate the addition of scaling to absorption for a following patch.

Remember, just because I didn't mention an issue here that you're concerned with doesn't mean we don't share that concern. This is not an exhaustive list of changes that will be happening to Clerics this patch. We’ll be releasing more information when the ALPHA patch notes go live.

Mage

Hey everyone,

I have some information for you on some of the upcoming changes with the next patch. Most of the changes and fixes coming with this update have come from forum posts and feedback sent to us. While we're always looking into issues and concerns of all sizes, those below are the ones with the largest impact that will be part of the 1.2 update.

First off, there will be a good number of fixes and updates. Among these are ones such as fixing the Pyromancer’s Combust so the effects now stack correctly, fixing the Elementalist's Charged which wasn't affecting the top ranks of Lighting Strike and several issues with weaker buffs overwriting stronger ones have also been resolved. We are also taking a look at pets and hope to resolve a number of the most reported pet bugs, such as pets no longer attacking after being stunned.

As many of you have been posting the Pyromancer ability, Ground of Strength, is an amazingly powerful ability. In many cases it is more powerful than it was intended to be, and as a result, is effectively the required choice as the mage PVP soul. It does need to be desirable, but also does need to have its power brought in line with its intended balance.

Another issue, that in many cases is connected with the Pyromancer, is the Dominator's Controlled Opportunity. As many people have experienced, if you get Transmogrified by someone the next hit you take is really going to hurt. The main issue we found with this ability was critical hits on the target were receiving double bonuses, one from critically hitting and another from Controlled Opportunity, which generated much more damage than intended.

We looked into several possible changes that would help mitigate this while leaving Controlled Opportunity both useful and desirable. The change we have arrived at is having the damage bonus remain, and while an enemy is affected by the debuff the next ability used on them is guaranteed to hit and cannot be resisted but cannot critically hit. If when you attack an enemy with this debuff you are affected by an ability such as Nenvin’s Lament, which gives you a 100% chance to critically hit, your attack will hit the enemy and the Nenvin’s Lament buff will not be consumed until you attack again, preserving the special crit from Nenvin's for the later attack.

Once we get closer to the patch day, a full list of the fixes and changes included with the patch will be available. We look forward to your feedback on all of the changes when the next update comes to the Test Server.

Rogue

To my fellow Rogues,

Thank you for posting your feedback and suggestions in the forums. I really appreciate your time and effort trying out various builds and sharing them with the both the community and us. Many of the changes we will be introducing in the next patch are a result of the community’s hard work and dedication to the calling.

Assassin
As we all know, the Assassin is the cold-blooded killer who selectively picks his target and vanquishes his victim with ruthless efficiency. Unfortunately, they lack the punch we want them to have. As such we are looking to improve both their initial burst and their overall DPS over time. In addition we have been working on many of the Stealth bugs people have been reporting and we hope to get them fixed for the next patch.

Bladedancer
While the Bladedancer is an excellent soul for soloing and brings some fantastic utility to the table, they are still not hitting the DPS goal we expect them to. As such, we are looking to tweak a number of their core abilities upwards to make sure the Bladedancer’s DPS is more in line with what we’d expect from a whirling dervish of destruction.

Marksman
Finally for the Marksman, there are two areas of concern we are looking to address. Firstly, the Marksman’s overall DPS is not at a level we are happy with. Secondly, the Marksman is too reliant on the use of cooldowns to get the most out of its soul. With these in mind, we are reviewing their situational long cooldown abilities and DPS abilities with the intent of improving their overall performance and reducing the number of buttons players need to worry about.

Once again, thank you for all your feedback. The preview above is an outline of our intention for the upcoming patch and does not include a complete list of changes and fixes. More details will be added as we move closer to patch day.

Warrior

Hello all, we have been following the forums and feedback over the last few weeks and I wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you all about some changes we are looking to make to the Warrior souls with the upcoming patch. We picked through the feedback and looked over the souls and we decided to make some changes to a couple souls that are not quite fitting in like we want them to. The Void Knight and the Warlord.

The Void Knight has always been intended as the premier choice in tanking magical mobs but we don’t feel like it does that as well as we would like it to, so we are looking at several changes to help it fill that role. Just a couple examples, though not by any means everything we are looking at.

1) Giving them a new self buff that reduces the damage they take from non-physical melee attacks.
2) A revision of the Pacts system in which we are ending the practice of using a full Pact dump for each ability. The goal is to make them easier to use, easier to understand, and more balanced.
3) Fixing Fusion of Flesh to be more useful. This change will be independent to the bug currently affecting Rank 5.

We always wanted the Warlord to be a solid tank that could be useful in more situations. He currently fits a dual role of being a tank while bringing useful buffs to the table. Right now we are happy with their ability to buff their party, but we feel their ability to tank is below where we want it to be. Here a couple things we are working on to help change him into the tank we want him to be.

1) Giving him a new high level ability that acts as Sergeant’s Order but as an AOE, allowing him to pull in multiple enemies.
2) Taking a look at his tanking ability and seeing where we can make tweaks to help his mitigation out.

We also have a whole bunch of bugs we are fixing across all the souls and we look forward to being able to give you more detailed patch notes on these changes and bug fixes in the near future.

So, I am at work and cannot verify this at the moment. I just read on the forums that the Chloromancer and Justicar group heal abilities have been disabled for todays event to cut down on server lag.

I'm not sure what to think of this. I understand their thinking that everyone will be doing the event while its going on today. What if someone is just trying to run a dungeon and their build depends on it?

When we set out to get this unveil event in front of you, it was all about some serious ambitions.

Great new types of content to unveil a brand new raid zone. Events that really push the edge of what's possible not just in Rift, but in any MMO of its kind. All within an incredibly rapid amount of time following launch.

In this case, while we did get to "what's possible" we didn't get to "solid gameplay for the entire game universe." The later phases of the event were too concentrated and time-compressed, which caused issues on a number of worlds.

Ambition is important -- It's what keeps us improving day to day, week to week, month to month. But, it's equally important to know when you walked too close to the edge and got cut.

Between our previous experience with zone events and now with world events, we have a much better idea of the range we can create "fun" for at a mass scale in the future, and the steps we need to take to continue progressing the more solid gameplay experiences that only happen in RIFT.

As I had posted earlier, our next world events will already be taking everything we learned, as well as all of your comments about the event, into account. Please do keep them coming -- I guarantee we're here reading them all, weekend or not.

As developers, none of us are happy when anyone who chooses to spend their valuable time in our game feels like they got the short end of our aspirations.

To that end, even if something goes great for some, when it doesn't go great for all, we're going to go out of our way to make it up in some way wherever we can.

We're going to assume that if you are an active subscriber you were intending to participate in the final stages.

1) Operating on that assumption, later this week everyone will be receiving an in-game mail with the River of Souls Event Reward Pack containing:

Symbol of Purity – This item starts a quest you can complete to obtain

* 250 Otherworldly Sourcestone
* 1x - Purified Treasure Cache – Contains a random chance of obtaining one of the special world drop event rewards from the day of the event
o Common – Grave Goods Bag -Unique 20 Slot Bag (NEW ITEM)
o Uncommon - Shroud of Anti-Life – Lorn non combat Polymorph
o Rare – Nimble Spectral Horse – 90% Speed Mount
o Ultra Rare – Swift Spectral Warhorse – 110% Speed Mount
* Shadetouched Weapon Cache – The starter item for the Rare Death weapon quests. You can choose whichever level appropriate one you'd like.
* The following two Achievements, since not everyone who was (or wanted to be) present was able to obtain them.
o Grim Hero
o Grim Protector

2) The achievement for kneeling to Alsbeth will remain available in her incarnation inside the River of Souls.

3) Additionally, we're also going to continue the Otherworldly Sourcestone drops for the next few days, for those who haven't yet finished off their collections and would care to.

4) And since the question has come up quite a few times -- the ability to complete the quests from the Shadetouched Weapon Cache will continue, such that you're always able to finish them.

We do thank you for your patience with us during this first ever World Event. We know that patience isn't infinite. We do respect that fact greatly, and you have our word that we're listening and reacting smartly for the next round.

- Scott

RIFT™ TO OFFER FREE CHARACTER TRANSFERS

Gather your friends in RIFT and play anywhere, any time

When the next major RIFT™ update hits early this summer, subscribers will be treated to a surprise – free character transfers. Trion Worlds announced today that with RIFT 1.3, players will have the ability to move to select servers in their territory once each week, taking all items, achievements, and titles with them. Additionally, guild leaders will be able to move their guild’s level and experience.

“MMOs are all about playing with your friends no matter which server they’re on, and that’s why we’re offering this as a free service to our subscribers,” said Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer. “RIFT is both a game and a service, and adding free server transfers is just one more way we can make this the best possible MMO experience available.”

Whether you want to play with friends, check out a new server, or avoid queue times on highly populated servers, you’ll be free to move about Telara. As a part of this grand experiment, there will initially be no limits on the number of times you can transfer your characters or guild.

Character transfers will remain a free service for the foreseeable future, and could become a permanent addition to the RIFT experience. Subscribers will be able to perform the transfers inside of the game itself once the patch is live.

Awesome, I just rolled a toon to be on shatterbone to be with you guys. My 50 warrior on Bryiel is in a RL friend guild that has pretty much gone belly up. Be great to move him over

So the first 3 months - the most critical phase for all MuMORPuGgers - have gone by. What's the state of the game with regards to bugs, balance, player base (both behavior as well as numbers) and lastly the GWJer community on Shatterbone? How big was the inevitable population drop between days 30 and 60 after release? And is there any sub-class combination that would play like a Gobo Shaman in Warhammer Online (HoTs'n'DoTs)?

Luggage wrote:

So the first 3 months - the most critical phase for all MuMORPuGgers - have gone by. What's the state of the game with regards to bugs, balance, player base (both behavior as well as numbers) and lastly the GWJer community on Shatterbone? How big was the inevitable population drop between days 30 and 60 after release? And is there any sub-class combination that would play like a Gobo Shaman in Warhammer Online (HoTs'n'DoTs)?

The game was fairly well debugged prior to release. I don't know of any major ones myself, but I am sure a few people can point some out (if I can't remember any, it can't be a big deal). Player base looks relatively stable. The leveling can be quick if you want, but there's just as much end game content, if not more, to keep you busy (if you're into gear, raiding, or crafting). GWJ is going strong, IMO, but we've merged with another non-GWJ guild to facilitate raiding (we never had good numbers). As far as HOTs and DOTs, I do know the mage class has a DOT oriented class with a pet (necro) and I think the cleric side has a class (warden?) which is primarily heals. I don't know the DOT power of clerics, but a cleric can answer. Either way, the cleric is the only option for HOTs, mages heal through doing single target damage.

It's similar to WAR, but different, because the classes don't suck. The public quest concept is very much a part of the game, and quite active (but optional). If you decide to give it a try, use my free trial link that I provided in the other thread about free trials.

According to Google, this is as close as it gets to the Warhammer Shaman play style. Since Rift has not had significant amounts of bad press, I'll check it out once my cable is set up, I have a new PC and I am done business traveling, meaning end of this month.

Rift being the Steam DOD for five bucks, I have a quick question: Is Rift dead? Or can you still squeeze out a bit of fun if you jump in?

Anyone have a spare refer a friend code I could stack onto if I buy it from Steam today?

K1 wrote:

Rift being the Steam DOD for five bucks, I have a quick question: Is Rift dead? Or can you still squeeze out a bit of fun if you jump in?

Rift is far from dead, Its actually doing very well. They had a huge update yesterday with all sorts of pretty interesting concepts like duo dungeons.

El-Producto wrote:

Anyone have a spare refer a friend code I could stack onto if I buy it from Steam today?

Here you go, use this

http://www.riftgame.com/en/products/...

Thanks!

Cobble wrote:
El-Producto wrote:

Anyone have a spare refer a friend code I could stack onto if I buy it from Steam today?

Here you go, use this

http://www.riftgame.com/en/products/...

Can I use it to? I'll be tho jumping between CoH and Rift. CoH is now F2P, and Rift was always a game intriguing me.

Which server must I go, and what "race"? and.. what would you guys suggest for someone who like Healing. I used to be a tank in other MMO, but always go for the healer route for casual play.

Yes, please do.

Cobble wrote:

Yes, please do. :)

I have added you as well on Steam.

Which server must I go, and what "race"? and.. what would you guys suggest for someone who like Healing. I used to be a tank in other MMO, but always go for the healer route for casual play.

I got those questions to ask

I play on Bryriel. The GWJ guild was on shatterbone and long since folded into some other guild. I have both defiant and guardian toons but currently i spend most of my time playing as guardian (i find the community to be older and a shade more mature than on the defiant side)

Race doesn't matter in your choice. Pick whichever one you like the look of the best. I am currently playing a dwarf mage named Bob

For healing roll a cleric. A shaman/druid build is nice solo and there are lots of options for group healing using Purifier.

I'm a total whore for cheap collector's editions so I pulled the trigger on the $10 Steam sale before it ran out this morning. I'll probably activate the account this weekend, but before I get that far I'd be grateful if anyone can suggest a website with good character builds to look at. I dislike melee (don't like running around after mobs) and usually play healers, so a healer that had the option for decent ranged DPS (for solo questing) is usually my first choice.

I played a trial for a week or two on the Defiant side of the Shatterbone shard, but I really don't like the whole "magic-steampunk" aesthetic of the Defiant so I imagine this time I'll roll Guardian. I'm leaning towards choosing one of the PVE-RP servers in hope of finding a more mature community unless someone has strong recommendations about a non-RP server that's not filled with leet-speaking dickheads.

I have transferred my 50 war over to Shatter in the hopes there are GWJers left. Don't forget to check the GWJ channel to see if anyones around. My 50's name is Akareth and i just rolled a baby defiant Assassin named Cobs

Manach wrote:

Which server must I go, and what "race"? and.. what would you guys suggest for someone who like Healing. I used to be a tank in other MMO, but always go for the healer route for casual play.

No recommendation on server - I played on Shatterbone, Guardian though. Race is pretty irrelevant, so choose based on looks, etc. If you really care about min/maxing, the run speed increase on Defiant is good while the run speed increase on Guardian is pretty crap (it's a group buff, but the range is extremely short and it's on a longer cooldown). The jump is actually a better overall travel speed increase, it's just annoying to use very much. Probably the most useful of the racial skills that I recall is the dwarf falling damage reduction.

If you want to play a healer, you should go cleric. They have pure single-target healer specs, decent aoe healing specs, a decent tanking spec that's slow to build aggro, and some interesting dps/heal hybrids as well as a couple decent dps specs for casual play. You can also heal as a mage with chloromancer, but it's harder to do at lower levels and with lesser equipment, while cleric has many options and many viable specs even at the raiding level.

Urgh, just downloaded like 7.9 gigs on steam, and now it's doing a 3.24gigs patch.. why isn't there download optimization? :S