Rift Exhaustive Chloromancer and Warlock Class

The point of this build is to do mediocre burst damage, with high sustained damage over time, high healing, as well as survivability. While it is well known that Necromancer / Warlock is the best PVE build atm, I'd say this build is perhaps one of the best well rounded; in other words, you can carry this spec from PVE to PVP and vice versa.

If you've been keeping up with things so far, you'll know that the first video seemed a little rough, and perhaps didn't 100% effectively show what this build can do. I hope this next video can do that. However, I want to cover a few things first:

A note on roles, I chose Necromancer as my third role for the pet and extra dot. However, you can choose whatever you want. Obviously, if you don't go with Necromancer, you'll need to adjust number 3 on the rotation to a Dot, or instant cast / spell of your liking


Video Guide:

• General Gameplay - 00:00 - 03:20 
• General Spell Explanations - 03:20 - 05:00 
• Build / Spell rotation in action - 05:00 - 07:57 

Spec:

Spell Rotation:
The basic spell rotation is simple, and not hard to learn. I cover it in the video, however, I'll type it out here too.
Follow this rotation until Opportunity procs. If Opportunity procs, cast Vile Spores within 5 seconds. Vile spores does damage, and then damage over time

1. Ruin - Instant cast. Does instant damage, as well as damage over time.
2. Dark Touch - Instant Cast. Does damage over time.
3. Necrosis - Instant Cast. Does damage over time.
4. Radiant Spores - Each damage tick (this includes each tick from a dot) has a 15%(30%) chance to heal for 100% of the damage given.
5. Life Leech - Takes life from monster, gives to caster.
6. Withering Vines - Does damage over time, and heals caster over time.

If you get ~75% life: Use Bloom, an instant cast heal. If Bloom is on cooldown, use Flourish, an AOE instant cast heal.
For single target mobs: Follow the same rotation.
For multiple mobs at once: For 2 - 3 mobs I follow 1-4 on the rotation, and switch between the monsters. For 3+, I follow 1-6 on the rotation and leave out the vile spores until the dots have been applied. May apply radiant spores early.

Itemization:

• With this build, I stack these stats in order: Intel, Spell Crit, Wisdom, Endurance.
• I also have the Trinket that you get at decorated with Freemarch, which, when hit, has a chance to heal you for 120.
• There is a Greater Essence you can purchase that has a chance to heal an additional 436 health over 8 seconds. A radiant spores proc does proc this. If I can manage to get an epic sourcestone, This build will literally become Godlike.

For PVP:
I give a pretty decent rundown at this video here:



Tips:

• Play defensive. You're a mage, yes, but you're also a clothy.
• Use mostly instant casts. You don't want to be caught in the middle of a 2s cast spell.
• Use Radiant Spores on a cluster of people
• Apply dots and switch targets.
• For focus targeting, apply dots and use Stream of Reclamation

For Rift Boss Encounters:

With this rotation, I stay at the top of the contribution meter.

Tips:

• When Opportunity procs, keep using Vile Spores.
• Use Radiant Spores each time it's off cooldown. This is because if there is another chloromancer there, and he casts this spell, it will override yours.
• Use Flourish (The AOE Group heal) Every time it's off cooldown. This will increase your points.
• Use a battle rez if you easily can. It will give you 1000 points every time.
• Use Entropy when your charge bar is full.

Read rest of entry

Rift Basic Chloro Healing Guide

Basic Tips on Easy Chloro

Soul Choices
I reckon that for a beginner or somebody uncertain about the ins and outs of the Chloro, the Warlock is the best secondary soul. Most of the benefits are passive or long term buffs... so you are getting used to focussing on the Chloro tool-set and the Chloro strengths and weaknesses. Archon and Necro are the other most common secondary souls, but both have more active tool-sets for contributing to the Chloro and so require more choices to be made and perhaps a more in-depth knowledge, so that you can be making the right choices of the right times to use which abilities.

For beginners, by using Warlock, you're able to focus on the Chloro abilities. So you just have to deal with less and are less likely to get into trouble.

Note: Chloro healing at levels below level 15 is very different to what's described in this guide. Personally, I would only start using Chloro as your Main soul from level 15 onwards. You only need to really need to main heal from level 16 in the first instances. You can go for more at lower levels and there's some nice builds for that... but there's really little need at lower levels and there are more efficient builds.

Warlock Point Investment
Once you have Chloro/Lock as your main souls, then the Warlock tree for Chloro support is pretty straight-forward. As of Beta 6 you're aiming for it to look like this. I've included Neddra's Influence - which is a DoT enhancement. It is believed that this affects Stream of Reclamation (SoR) damage and Withering Vines (WV) damage (but not the heal element of Withering Vines and not the DoTs from Nature's Corrosion).

There are other options and things you could extend this with... but for the basic tree, that's basically what it will look like.

Apart from the first 6 points in the Warlock tree for the mana regain tool, you'll be pouring all your available points into the Chloro tree. By the time you reached a level with your Chloromancer, that you were able to get as high in the Warlock tree as linked above, you'll be making all your own decisions about what things to take and where, primarily based on your own experiences.

It's important to let your own experiences guide you most strongly. Test what other people say in your own play and decide for yourself what is better.

Chloro Point Investment
As of Beta 7, Call of Spring isn't working on the core heals of the Chloro: Radiant Spores (RS) and Lifegiving Veil (LV) heals. Since these represent 90% of the healing that you'll do as a Chloro, that makes it a lot weaker. The Chloro Shield ability, also got a big rebuild in Beta 6 and is much stronger now, with the mana regain built in. Also, the present state of the Nature's Corrosion improvement, is that it will enable your Ruin and Vile Spores to do ~30%+ more healing (based on logs). That may be bugged like Call of Spring - and both may be fixed - but as things stand, Nature's Corrosion is a strong contender for points and Call of Spring a weak one.

As a result, most Chloro/Locks will probably aim toward a build that looks something like this, which leaves 4 points over... about which endless discussions could be had... but none of them will affect you much right now, since you'd need to be level 47 to get to those decisions pretty much.

It's important to let your own experiences guide you most strongly. Test what other people say in your own play and decide for yourself what is better.

Important Equipment
If at all possible, you should get a sigil that will take a Greater Essence and put into that slot one of the Essences that gives you a chance of proccing extra healing whenever you cast a healing spell. Lifegiving Veil heals will proc these Essences. This can add a huge amount of healing to your Chloro, as it can proc separately on every single target that your Lifegiving Veil heals hit.

Your basic priorities in casting should 90% of the time be:

1) Radiant Spores must be kept up.
Explain to your group, that if they're taking damage, more dps = more healing from Radiant Spores. Faster consistent hits are probably better than slow big ones in that situation (because you may or may not get that 30% roll on a slow big hit... but if you do 5 other hits in the same time, you'll probably get healed by a couple of them).

2) Nature's Touch is your first active healing priority.
If there's ever a choice of which active heal to cast, Nature's Touch should be your first choice. It's the best nuke for both tank and group heal.

3) Ruin is your second active healing priority.

4) Vile Spores when there's nothing else you need to be doing

Keep Entropic Veil up when you can. I personally tend to hit it when charge is up to ~50%.

Your Nukes are your Heals
When everyone/several people in the group/raid takes damage at the same time, trust in Lifegiving Veil and Radiant Spores to bring everybody back to full health. Your nukes and Radiant spores will usually do the job just fine. Most situations like this don't need a direct heal.

Direct Heals are for Emergencies
Direct Heals (Bloom/Flourish/Wild Growth) should be used when the above is all failing. They are to be viewed as your emergency heals.

Your first instinct when people in your group start taking damage, should be to hit another nuke not a direct heal. Direct heals are for when you're sure that nuking and radiant spores isn't going to work any more.

Rotations
There is no real 'rotation' for Chloros, because to a certain extent you're reacting to a situation. But the basic healing rotation should probably be something like:

Ruin, RS, NT, VS, VS, NT, VS, VS, Ruin, RS....
I put Ruin in before Radiant Spores because when Ruin recycles, I use it and know that I have to use Radiant Spores straight after it to keep RS maintained (Ruin cooldown = Radiant Spores duration - 1s). You'll have slightly different ways to lead into this rotation at the beginning and will always be making adjustments because of using your mana regen tools, Bloom/Flourish/Wild Growth etc... as well as other bits and bobs in the Chloro tool-set. But at heart, the above is the basic Chloro rotation.

Entropic Veil is a decision thing. Some Chloros prefer to save it for when they need a bit of a burst of healing. My approach is to maintain a consistently high level of healing, so that you're less likely to get into a situation when you need that burst in the first place. Also, with Warlock you get such good charge regeneration, that you will find that you swiftly get 50% charge back again - so if you do need a burst at some point, you're likely to have enough charge to give you that.

Your Chloro mantra is:
"My nukes are my heals... My nukes are my heals.... My nukes are my heals...."
Repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until you can think nothing else, young grasshopper - and you shall truly be a masterful Chloro.

Withering Vines
Withering Vines creates an AoE heal for more than Vile Spores - but only heals targets within 7 metres of the mob you cast it on. You get the Withering Vines HoT and also a Lifegiving Veil heal from the first tick of the DoT.

Vile Spores creates a much wider radius AoE heal, for less than Withering Vines... and also heals the Synthesised Tank for far more than Withering Vines.

All in all...
* If you need to maintain high level of healing on the synthesised tank, then you should always use Vile Spores in preference to Withering Vines.

* If you need to AoE heal group/raid members further away from the mob, then you should always use Vile Spores in preference to Withering Vines.

* If there are several melee group/raid members taking damage from a mob - and you don't need to worry about the synthesised tank. Then Withering Vines will be a better heal.

Balancing toward DPS for Group Contribution
If you are healing extremely comfortably, you may want to improve your contribution to the group, by increasing your DPS. You can do this by choosing to use Stream of Reclamation more. Stream of Reclamation is a channeled spell but doesn't use up charge. It delivers a great deal of damage and the first tick will give a 90% Lifegiving Veil heal. At the same time, each tick increases the proc chance of Radiant Spores on that target. Nevertheless, you could cast 3 other healing spells in the time it takes to channel Stream of Reclamation... so you will lose some healing overall when using it.

So you gain a lot of extra damage but lose some of your healing. Use Stream of Reclamation only when you're healing the group very easily and can be confident that the healing you lose by using it, won't cause problems for keeping the team alive.

Also, if you're healing very comfortably, then you may want to stagger your usage of Nature's Corrosion enhanced Vile Spores a little more. Nature's Corrosion adds a 6 second DoT to the end of Vile Spores (and Ruin) which does 100% of the damage done by the nuke. The Vile Spores DoT will be over-written if you cast Vile Spores again. You'll always get the extra heal from the first tick... but you may not get the 2nd and 3rd ticks of the DoT. So some people like to try to leave the next Vile Spores as long as possible, so that you get more ticks of the Vile Spores DoT. This is quite advanced though... and you should make sure that you don't let your healing drop too much, just because you're waiting for a bit of DPS. Your prime goal is to heal - not to DPS.

Read rest of entry

Warlock Review

The Warlock deals in the dark arts and walks a fine line between controlling the aspects of death and being controlled by them. Using curses and leeching their opponent's life force to feed their own, the Warlock is a fearsome force to be reckoned with.

Pros

• Master at soloing
• Lots of survivability tricks
• Little to no down time
• One of the highest DPS souls

Cons

• Damage needs time to ramp up
• Can be overwhelmed by burst DPS

Overview
The Warlock is among the most powerful and feared souls in all of Rift, with high damage and survivability making them a daunting opponent to face. Warlocks have a high success rate as a close companion soul to the Necromancer, with either soul doing well as the focal point. Which soul to focus on will be more about personal preference of playstyle than anything, with many players doing 33/33 splits between the two.
Solo Play

Soloing as a Warlock is a very easy road to hoe, with tons of tools and tricks to help you along the way. Players who can manage the rotation of life drains and mana regen will rarely need to stop to rest or drink. Multiple mob pulls are not a problem either with multiple AoE damage spells at their disposal as well as a very potent single target fear.

Group Play
What Warlocks lack in utility and crowd control, they more than make up in raw damage. High output groups will love to bring you along as they burn through content. Even though the Warlock may not have that initial high burst of damage, they make the last 40% of the enemies health bar drop quickly. Warlocks also possess a stun and a silence that increase their worth to a group.

Pairs Best With

Necromancer
Cut from eerily similar cloths, the Warlock and Necromancer are truly a match made in..well, somewhere south of the heavens. In builds that feature heavy point investment into both, it’s often hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Adding extra healing, a strong pet and the ability to drop all aggro make this pairing a no brainier.

Chloromancer
As similar as the Necromancer is to the Warlock, the Chloromancer is equally dissimilar – but they are still an excellent pairing. Needing very few points to be effective, the Warlocks DPS rotation is enhanced quickly. By leading with Radiant Spores not only will all group members have a chance to heal themselves for 100% of the damage they deal, the Warlock will increase his Intelligence for several seconds – making other spells more potent and effective. Rounding out a build with group healing utility will make you a fast favorite in groups.

Read rest of entry