The Inquisitor, a non Inquisitors guide. (draft and drawing board)

[Stoic]

I been busy lately but here is the write up I was asked to do.

AA's : The Pros and Cons

This is to explain why an Inquisitor goes the STA AGI line and to explain how it is effective. First the Inquisitor class is a dps based class, a majority of our buffs and skills are dps based and we have a strong affiliation toward helping melee users. To illustrate this at the end of this post I will show what a Self-Buffed Inquisitor is capable of reaching in melee ability with AA's specced down this line and their effectiveness on raids, groups, and solo ventures.

First I will cover the basic AA setup that as of today seems to be the "most bang for your buck" setup in generally any situation.


Yaulp - 1
20% Double Attack. 20% Haste. 20% DPS Mod. Lowers Focus and Ministration by 32.

STA: 4-4-8-8

+20 Stamina - A means to an end, nothing more.

Hammer Smite - A nice Combat Art that does decent damage and stuns non-epic mobs. 45 second recast.

Severe Judgement - 100% melee crit. The single most powerful melee AA in the game. If you need clarification as to why then you have no buisness playing this game.

Inspired Renewel - 15.6% Heal Crit. Heal crit is the only AA we have that "can" increase our healing potential and should be maxed due to that fact. Anything to increase our primary role as healers should be maximized providing the cost is worth the gain.

AGI: 4-4-8-7-1

+28 Agility - A means to an end.

Wondrous Buckling - Single target Mez ability. Does not work on epics. 45 second recast. 13.2 second duration. Mostly a means to an end, however works well on heroic mobs and on players in pvp or duels.

Battle Fervor - 32% Melee Double Attack, 32% Increase in Shield Effectiveness. This ability coupled with Yaulp gives 52% double attack and increases the effectiveness of the next ability in this line.

Shield Ally - 52% chance target avoids attack using casters avoidance. Single target buff that is helpful on high agro classes. Requires no concentration.

Holy Shield - AOE Immunity except when direct. Recast 90 seconds. Duration 30 seconds. Single target only (not group).



Those are the values of the spec I listed using all 50 points for the Cleric tree. Now to show you what a fully self buffed Inquisitor can achieve with buffs and AA's combined. (Items and adornments have been removed from this study despite how common haste and dps increases are. Also all values are with M1 spells.)

Melee Crit: 100%
Double Atk: 52%
Haste: 81%
DPS Mod: 51%

With this setup to obtain the AE immunity and heal crit we in effect make our melee prowess extrodinarily high. The only thing keeping us from being the highest parsing class in game is the priest's lowered modifier to damage compared to Fighters and Scouts. In effect by increasing our ability to heal and keep others alive we inadvertantly turn ourselves into damage dealing melees. Even if we only use Auto Attack we do excellent damage depending on the weapon we have equipped.

Now some people would argue that INT line is the way to go to be the best healer there is. I disagree, the amount of useless points you spend to achieve a means to an end for sub par abilities is high. Take for example "Pact of the Faithful" our Spell Crit increase AA. It provides very little to us because our spells are so weak as it is and most are dots meaning only the first tick actually can crit.

The next in the line "Facile Grace" gives us 15% casting speed. When added it takes away only .1 to .3 of a second from any spell at the very most. The only use for this ability is to combat spell lag. You might be able to spam 1 or 2 more spells but over the course of a long fight even with chilling inquest you can't spam the whole time. Power conservation is also part of being a good healer. 15% is just too low a value to make it worth the 20 points you would need to invest to achieve it.

Now the end line ability Divine Recovery. Many raid leaders and uninformed people swear by this ability. I however find it horribly lacking in its effectivness. I do not discount its strong appeal and the fact if tweaked it would be a viable option worth persueing. In its current form however it is inadequate. As of today it "Increases Recovery speed of group by 33% and increases casting speed by 50%." Now for the reason why it is too costly. It only lasts for 24 seconds with a 300 second recast (5 mins). So even on the longest of fights you could cast it maybe 2 times. 24 seconds of quicker casting and recovery isn't bad for an "oh shit" situation but to spend 24 AA's for an emergency "oh shit" spell seems like an awful waste of AA. IF thisability had a quicker reuse time like 2 minutes, a longer duration of 30 seconds then and only then would it even be remotely worth having. At present though if you need to rely on "oh shit" abilities then I suggest you start over from scratch and learn how to heal again, your group mates will respect you more. I know some people think the world of DR, I just can't fathom why.


I would go into detail about the wisdom line but if anyone, including a templar went down that line and are in your guild I suggest you slap them with a 30lb dildo and tell them to respec or suffer expulsion from the guild for being too retarded.


Now the Strength line, has some "ok" abilities, but nothing worth notice for the most part. The endline ability is too costly and there isn't enough gain from the rest of the abilities to justify spending 24 points to obtain it. The endline ability "Steadfast" makes the inquisitor immune to interupts as long as they stand still and sometimes stifles. However you gain stronger abilities in other lines with more overall general usage and not just 1 strong ability for 24 points. I don't discount that the ability itself has its merits, but the point cost associated with obtaining it for the sub par abilities you have to get is just too mediocre.




In summary, with our AA spec in the cleric tree set this way we also open up avenues of options with the class that most other classes can't compete with. Strong melee dps skills, Strong healing skills in groups and raid and most importantly soloing, and our buffs combined with wearing plate allow us to have a strong mitigation and decent avoidance considering our shortcomings in that department. I didn't cover our Inquisitor AA's in this analysis either because this setup is strong even without the battle-cleric abilities. However this setup helps us take full advantage of the battle-cleric line and further enhance our DPS healing philosophy "If the mob is dead you don't need to heal its damage." The quicker things die, the quicker you move to the next mob, the quicker you obtain Exp, AA, Items, and saves you time in the long run allowing you to complete more tasks in a day than a defensive class.

I must emphasize however that I in no way endorse a foolish Inquisitor to "only" dps and forget that they are first and foremost a healer. Allowing people to die defeats the purpose of being able to watch them suffer from damage. If your dead afterall, you can't experiance pain. We are evil healers for a reason. If someone dies due to negligence on the Inquisitors part then they are not doing their job effectively. Keep that in mind every time you run in to dps on a mob. Play smart. Learn encounters and understand when you should dps and when you should be at max range healing. Never confuse the fact that just because you can do something, that it means you should do it at every concievable time.

[Mephiston]

excellent post stoic thank you very much for breaking that all down.

and to think id thought youd forgotten to do it :p

also slightly OT

I would go into detail about the wisdom line but if anyone, including a templar went down that line and are in your guild I suggest you slap them with a 30lb dildo and tell them to respec or suffer expulsion from the guild for being too retarded.

but but you can tank tarinax!

[Stoic]

LOL yeah I been busy lately with all sorts of crap and didn't want to do a half assed job. Thanks for the review, hopefully helps. If ya got any suggestions or comments let me know and will see about making revisions to the original post.

p.s. Tanking tarinax with wisdom line is uber, but thats about the only situation where you would want that AA line hehe. Otherwise breakout the 30 lb dildo!

[Chanah]

Originally Posted by Yorr

I guess this isn't very significant to the debuff section, but since I assume you want all info to be correct, I'd like to add that the spell version, Absolving Flames, does not do divine damage. Yes, it still debuffs divine, but the damage it does is heat.

Yup your right, I remember reading heat damage and still wrote down divine :\ shame i cant edit.

Originally Posted by Yorr

As a side note, there's a big difference between convict and dispatch that explains why people say they love dispatch. I love convict as well and always keep it on, but with dispatch, people can save their highest damage attacks, especially those with long recast (like decapitate), and use them when they know dispatch is on. Convict is good for higher maintained dps throughout a fight, while dispatch is good for high burst damage.

I like the idea of a guide like this. Nice work by everyone involved.

Dispatch is indeed better for those high attacks, just trying to show how important convict really is.

[Yorr]

No one has asked me specifically to do this, but I thought I could add my contribution. Feel free to post suggestions to this and to correct me if I get something wrong.

Getting high damage as an inquisitor.

Here, I will not talk anything about healing. I know how important it is to heal at the right time and keep people from dieing, but I will ignore that in this section for those times when you know you don't need to heal anything. There are times like that, for example when you're in a dps group on a raid against an encounter that don't have any aoe abilities and low enough damage output on the tank.

First of all, what you need to have to be able to do high damage is the right achievement spec. Stoic made a good post about the KoS achievements, so I won't go any further into that. Since no one has made a post about the eof achievements yet, I'll just quickly add that you should fill all the points in the battle line for most damage.

Secondly, you need the right kind of equipment. The most important part of this is your weapon. I've seen a lot of inquisitors running around with a one-handed weapon and a shield, and while there are times for that as well, it's not optimal for doing high dps. What you need is a good two-handed weapon. When you look for a weapon, don't look at its damage rating. Look at the top damage the weapon can do compared to the delay of the weapon. Why? It has to do with how crits work. I don't know the exact math for it, but all crits are based on the top damage of the weapon and ignores the lowest possible damage, and when you have a permanent 100% crit chance, that applies to every single autoattack hit you land. If you have two weapons with the same delay, one that hits for 60-70 and one that hits for 1-75, the one that hits for 1-75 is better no matter how much higher the damage rating of the other weapon is. One decent weapon that is quite easy to acquire with only one group is the Blackscale Maul that drops in the Blackscale Sepulcher. That can be a good start, but it's obviously not very good compared to some weapons you can get while raiding. Hammer of the Dragonborn from HoS is ok (attuneable, so might be on broker), but the Vraksakin Claw Club from Vraksakin in the Temple of Scale is much, much better. Other than avatar loot, I've never seen a weapon that even comes close to that one.

Other important aspects of equipment:

• Strength: This affects your autoattack damage as well as the up-front damage of your combat arts. The more strength you have, the harder you hit, so try to get as much strength as possible. It might be hard to do, since we don't have a strength buff to help us, but a good start could be to get a set of mastercrafted items, like devout xegonite armor (good for intelligence as well as strength) if your gear isn't already way past that. Acrylia jewelery and strength hex dolls will help as well.
• Intelligence: This affects the damage over time portion of your combat arts, as well as procs and all spell damage you do. I'd say that this is your secondary damage modifier. Strength is much more important, but if you can get intelligence up without loosing too much strength in the process, that's a good idea. Also keep in mind that if you get a very high amount of strength, you're greatly affected by how diminishing return works. In that case, loosing 50 strength to gain 50 intelligence can be well worth it.
• Wisdom and power: This does not in any way affect your damage, unless the lack of it brings you out of power. Make sure to plan ahead and don't get too little of this, or you'll be in trouble (especially if you end up in desperate need to do some of that healing I wasn't going to talk about).
• DPS mod and Haste mod: These two are very important for getting a high autoattack damage, and not so very hard to obtain. With Yaulp, Consecrated Aura (Master I) and Fanaticism (Master I), together with the Ivy-Shrouded Earring of Tunare, the Amulet of the Forsworn (DT access reward), two proced acrylia rings with strength and agility imbues, the War Mantle of Rallos and a +10 dps mod adornment (Scintillating Judicious Clasp) for whatever neck piece you're using, you get 111 dps mod and 128 haste mod solo. Of course, you can't always expect all those procs to go off at the same time, but even when those proc buffs aren't active, you still have 69 dps mod and 104 haste mod with those items and buffs. That means your autoattacks hit 69% harder and 93% faster than you would with 0 of those two modifiers. That said, if you're in a group and can afford to put Consecrated Aura on yourself without risk of someone dieing and if you don't have to take it from someone who can use it better, do it.

When you've got all that down, you need to be in a good group that buff you up even more, but since most people have little control of what kind of group they'll end up in, I'll skip that part. Now, how to do in combat? Well, I bet there are a million ways, but I usually start out with Convict after pull, and sometimes Fanatical Vengeance depending on how long I think the mob will live. No point to spend two seconds casting it if you'll end up with just one proc of it doing any damage. If it's a multimob encounter, I also put Heretic's Destiny on the mob that should die first. Forced Obedience and Debase are applied when needed, but I usually skip those on trash fights. I then put my achievement enhanced version of Fanaticism on, make sure to be close enough to the mob to actually hit it with my autoattack and begin spamming my combat arts, starting with my dots and maintaining them throughout the fight. I've heard that a lot of people don't like E: Fanaticism, but I wouldn't want to be without it when I'm trying to do as much damage as possible, since I'd have to choose between Fanaticism or combat arts if I didn't have the enhance. Also, Fanaticism speeds up your recasts, putting for example Strike of Flames down to an 18.2 second recast instead of the normal 20 second recast. When I need to reapply my spells, I toggle fanaticism off to not have to spend an eternity casting those spells, but then turn it on again when I'm ready to only use combat arts for a while.

For now, I can't think of anything more to add. Good luck with outparsing the scouts and mages. ;)

[Mephiston]

on that issue

the 2 types of acrylia rings are absolute gold. both of them have good stats and godly procs. get them use them, live them (wen dpsing )

id not bother with vengence, one auto attack swing and youve made up for all of the ticks practically.

other than that a nice start to, im sure a large section

[Yorr]

Well, it's true that fanatical vengeance don't do a lot of damage compared to a double attack with the vraksakin claw club, but if you have that weapon and not too much haste, you could turn autoattack on to do the first swing before you start casting fanatical vengeance and then by most only delay the second swing by very little. Without the enhance achievement and with only 243 int, my vengeance does 5*305=1525 damage if all triggers gets through. If you get 3 ranks to the enhance on that, you'd get 397*8=3176 (assuming that 3 ranks give 30% more damage and not the 10% you get on rank 1, I must admit I don't know this as a fact :P). 1525 or 3176 damage for a 2 sec cast spell does sound good enough for me, and you might be able to add a bit more int and a lot of mob debuffing to that equation.

[Chanah]

Originally Posted by Mephiston

on that issue

the 2 types of acrylia rings are absolute gold. both of them have good stats and godly procs. get them use them, live them (wen dpsing )

id not bother with vengence, one auto attack swing and youve made up for all of the ticks practically.

other than that a nice start to, im sure a large section

Funny thing is alot of scouts/tanks don't even know how uber they are, some don't use em or just 1 of em, well ofcourse some are easely maxed with haste or dps, for those 1 ring will do ofcourse, but its amazing if you inspect them and see that so many dont use em at all :\, i cant wait myself for the T8 version

[Avirodar]

Originally Posted by Yorr

If you have two weapons with the same delay, one that hits for 60-70 and one that hits for 1-75, the one that hits for 1-75 is better no matter how much higher the damage rating of the other weapon is.

Not entirely accurate, if my understanding is correct.

A crit hit does a normal damage roll, and adds 30% damage. If the total happens to be less than the normal max dam roll of the weapon, it does the weapons max dam + 1.

With 100% crits, a weapon with a damage range of 60 to 70, will do crit hits for between 78 to 91.

With 100% crits, a weapon with a damage rating of 1-75, has to do a "random roll" of over 58 to exceed its base top end 75 damage (59*1.3=76.7). Any random roll below 58 will result in the automatic boost to be max damage + 1 (which is 76).

So basically, 58 swings out of 75 will be hitting for max damage + 1 (76), and only 17 swings out of 70 will hit harder (77-97).


I think a better (and more realistic) way of saying what you tried to say, would be:

If two weapons have a 2.5s delay, one hits for 80-120 (ave100), and the other hits for 50-150(ave100), the 50-150 will be a better weapon.

[Yorr]

Ah, ok. As I said, I didn't know the exact math for it, so thank you for clearing that up for me.