Raid EQ2 Kunark Ascending Inquisitor Class Helper - Soteria

What are Inquisitors even good for, anyway?
Buffing hit points, and casting verdict are the main things unique to the class. Aside from that, they offer the standard priestly package of heals and cures, a bit of group utility, and lousy dps. I will go into more detail on how an inquisitor might best accomplish these things in the drivel to follow.

But first, if you're a total noob and don't know where inquisitors fall in the game's priest taxonomy:

Spoiler: Introduction to Heal Mechanics 101

Everquest 2 has 4 basic approaches to healing. Here they are, in descending order by which they are applied:

Intercepts - Shaper (Channeler)

Intercepts are unique to the Channeler class. The Channeler has a pet that intercepts a certain percentage of incoming damage on either a target player or group, so that the pet takes the damage instead.
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Wards - Shaman (Mystic & Defiler)

Wards act like a barrier that absorbs incoming damage up to the ward amount, minus a percentage of bleedthrough, determined by the encounter script. Every priest class has some capacity to ward damage, but wards are the primary heal mechanic for Shamans.
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Reactives - Cleric (Templar & Inquisitor) <---YOU ARE HERE

Reactive heals place a spell on a target or group that triggers a heal on that target each time they are damaged. Most reactives have a limited number of triggers. Clerics' primary class heals are reactives.
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Heal over Time - Druid (Fury & Warden)

Heal over Time spells heal their target(s) at frequent intervals for the duration of the spell. Every class has some capacity to heal a target or targets over time, but Druids' primary class heals are HoTs.​

First things first, lets build an AA spec.
You can take a look at what I'm doing with my AA spec here.

A lot of the stuff in your AA trees is up to personal preference, but I'll explain why I've chosen certain things, and why some endlines aren't as good as they sound.

Spoiler: Cleric Tree

Strength line

Skull Crack has an interrupt, which is useful for stopping bad things from happening. Watch for annoying stuff on the mob's cast bar, and interrupt it so you don't have to deal with it!

Bolt of Power gives basically all your spells/combat arts/auto attacks a chance to interrupt. Helps you avoid a lot of BS, and the free damage is cool too.

Unwavering Resolve gives you focus (increases hit rate for ranged auto I think?) and hit points, which are nice to have.

Steadfast makes you immune to interrupts and stifles. Fun fact: Epic 1.0 buff Absolution gives you a chance to proc daze and stifle immunity for the group, and it's up a lot. I still spec for steadfast but... ehh? Something to consider.
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Agility line

I've tested Shield Ally a bit this year. It seems to add about 1% uncontested avoidance to the target, best case scenario. Not nearly as good as it used to be.

Holy shield (single target AoE blocker) has obvious situational uses... I haven't found any encounters this year where I can't live without it.
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Stamina line

Severe Judgement used to be amazing, but as long as auto attack damage is irrelevant it isn't worth putting points in. (Update: Epic 2.0 makes auto attack matter)
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Wisdom line

Divine Demonstration is a pretty good encounter damage spell.

Blessed Armament adds a damage proc which parses as Cleanse. It's nice free dps.

Exorcise is pretty stinking good AoE damage. When you read it, you will see that it reduces the potency of heals by 95%, and you will panic... but all it does is subtract 95 potency from your heals. Considering you probably have potency in the tens of thousands right now, it's negligible. Fun fact: if you can't figure out why your auto attack sometimes gets toggled on without you doing anything, Exorcise is why.
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Intelligence line

Divine Recovery gets a relevance boost from the add-on right underneath it, Divine Healing, which turns it into a nice little group potency buff. At present potency levels, you can expect to give 250-400 potency to your group members, depending on how much they already have.
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Divine Guidance

...is obviously good.
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Spoiler: Inquisitor Tree

Last time I tested, all of the stuff that says "improves reuse speed by xx" doesn't actually change anything as long as you've capped reuse speed(for pete's sake, cap reuse speed).

Enhance:Condemn gives you a combat mitigation debuff at 5 ranks. Combat mitigation is a separate stat from Mitigation, and debuffing it will make the mob take more damage from all sources. It's good to have.

Many of the AAs in this tree are melee versions of your damage spells. Put points in them, use them instead of the spells. They proc Absolution, spells do not.

Reach of Faith is really really good. If you don't value having massive heal range, go play a mystic for awhile until you do.

Punishment adds a heal to your punishment spells. The heal is raidwide, which is cool, but it is also currently insultingly small. I haven't tested it beyond T2 raid mobs, but on those it was healing for a maximum of 200,000 per trigger. Fun Fact: if you use ACT, you will need to look at the target mob's Healed (Out) to find the heal from Punishment.

Combative Healing is a must-have. You need it.

Chilling Invigoration is pretty nice!

Shadows Tree
Vile Recovery apparently does reduce the cooldown of Divine Recovery.

Fanatical Devotion is good free damage for your group.

Despotic Healing and Attonement of Sins are a waste of points. Those spells are overkill compared to HP pools even without any points in them.

By the same token, Redemption of Faith doesn't really gain you anything. Every heal you have is already more than big enough to fully heal anyone from 1hp to max, and the casting time/reuse components aren't relevant as long as casting/reuse speeds are capped. May as well take Persecution for the marginal benefits to dps.

Spoiler: Heroic Tree

Enhance: Divine Guidance gives DG more duration, which is good. Der.

Divine Armor automatically heals (up to) 10% of whatever damage hits its target. That can be slightly handy on a tank.

Equilibrium is a death save for all non-fighters in your group with UNLIMITED TRIGGERS for 8 seconds. So good. People will expect you to have this.

Immaculate Revival is an instant cast rez for your group with full health and power, which you can cast even if you're dead. Every cleric should have it, because it's godly.

Spoiler: Dragon Tree

Wuoshi's Essence line

Not a tree I'd recommend for much of anything​

Nature Dragon Scales line

Taking this tree to get Undaunted (death save) is a really legit way to turtle up for a tough fight, if you're struggling to keep yourself alive. Everything here is pretty good, if survival is a problem.​

Draconic Regeneration line

Majestic Casting is really good, but it's the only thing worth taking in the whole tree.​

Wild Smiting line

This tree is where the good dps stuff is at. Uncontrollable Wrath and Quickening are good, and Litany of Destruction is good if you aren't capped on doublecast.​

Spoiler: Prestige Tree

Prestige, Page 1
You need Fanatic's Protection and Final Verdict. If you can't cap crit bonus with a full left-side spec, then go double conversion so that you can. The leftside stuff beyond Fanatic's Protection isn't that good outside of situational use for power regen. But crit bonus is a big deal. Big big big. Update: Go double conversion either way. Crit bonus is good to reforge out of, and will help you get your dps mod up to capitalize on auto attack damage from the epic 2.0 buff.

Prestige, Page 2
8 points in Undeniable Power and 1 in Power from the Soul is a clear choice. If you're way overcap on crit bonus either from double conversion or godly gear, you might put only 5 points in Imbued Sight... the remaining 3 points in Enhanced Vigor isn't a bad idea if you go that route. Update: If you have epic 2.0 I suggest skipping the crit bonus line (as long as you can cap cb without it) and getting the wdb endline instead.

Divine Waters and Cloak of Divinity are obviously both good.

Spoiler: Focus Effects

Focus:Fanatical Healing and Focus:Alleviation are a waste of points since those spells are overkill whether you put points in them or not. May as well throw stuff in Stalwart, Unrestricted and Speed instead.

Stats, Gear, Reforging!

Spoiler: Equipment Choices

Pretty much you want to equip the same stuff as everybody else: whatever has the most potency. If you run heroic zones, you can shoot for 1k+ potency items in every jewelry slot, including belt.

The best cloak currently available comes from the Kunark Ascending crafting questline.

The best secondary is the shield you get from finishing the Thalumbra Signature questline, the Kunark Ascending Signature questline and 30 Obulous Frontier quests.

You can pick up some other goodies from the currency merchant in Nye Caelona once you finish the quests in Obulous Frontier, so go take a look there.

Hit PQs in Jarsath Wastes and Fens of Nathsar for a good charm and primary weapon (at least until Epic 2.0)

Wantia adornments are the best for most of your white adornment slots.

For purple runes, you will need at a minimum the set of 3 Aspect of Paixao, and set of 2 from Aspect of Antiquilacion. Bolstered Attributes and Relentless Conviction are a good idea, and an Exceptional Bloodjewel cloak rune if you can get one.

The best green adorns are the Spirit Stone of Et'Kalysh, which drop from heroic zone quest crates and are tradeable so you can find them on the broker.

Spoiler: Reforging

Top priority, it should go without saying, is to cap casting speed and reuse speed(100% is cap for both, overcap casting speed converts to a small amount of doublecast). 50%+ recovery speed isn't a bad investment either.

If possible, shoot for 100% strikethrough and 20-30% accuracy, so you can hit mobs and proc things like Absolution, Battle Dressing, and interrupts(not to mention do some dps).

After that, reforge as much as possible into Ability Mod.

There's really not much point in worrying about dps mod/haste/multi anymore, but 100% ae auto is still useful.
Update: Post epic 2.0, you'll want to swing melee auto attack and reforge for auto attack. Reforge overcap crit bonus into dps mod(hard cap is 2300 but make sure you have at least 600), and make sure you're capping flurry in combat.

Alright, how do we keep people alive?
There isn't exactly a cast order for heals, since you've got to adapt to what's happening with incoming damage as you go. That being said, there are some things you'll pretty much always do.

First of all, let's talk about Fanatic's Protection. It is a 30 second duration buff that can be cast on anyone in your group/raid. It applies with 12 increments, and it will lose an increment every time the target takes damage. Each increment gives the target's group +45%MaxHP... meaning 12 increments gives each group member 540%MaxHP.

The smart way to use this spell is to macro it to yourself. Do that by right clicking it, and clicking "Create macro" then type your name in the "Target" box. That will make it easy to maintain as many increments as possible on the group, since you (hopefully) won't be taking hits(and therefore losing increments) very often.

If you're in a raid, you might need to make macros for people in other groups too, so you can maintain it on several groups at once.

Now, let's talk about your temp rotation. I'm talking about Divine Waters, Divine Guidance, and Inquisition, as well as Chilling Invigoration and Equilibrium. If you keep an eye on your spell timer (we'll come back to this), you can chain these end to end one at a time, so that you always have something up getting heals out to your group.

If incoming damage is significant, you can throw Malevolent Diatribe in between temp rotation spells and refreshing Fanatic's Protection as often as necessary.

For cures, you've got your class cure, Resolute Flagellant, as well as epic 1.0 cure spell, Cleansing of the Soul.

If incoming damage is being satisfactorily handled by your temp rotation (as will be the case 99% of the time), then...

Those heretics aren't going to smite themselves!
Start by debuffing combat mitigation with Condemn and Writhing Strike. Update: Post epic 2.0 lead with Divine Righteousness
If you can get them to trigger, punishment spells ( Heresy/Smite Heretic, Repentance, and Vengeance) are pretty nice dps, especially if you can cast them during Time Warp for extra triggers. However, you'll have to get the hang of which mobs proc them well and which ones don't.

No matter what you press, your biggest damage sources will be Ascension abilities and passive sources such as weapon procs, other class's damage proc buffs, and exorcism. (And auto attack, with epic 2.0) But you should still mash spells and combat arts, because they proc stuff!

Push Verdict when Heroic mobs are at 12% hp and Epic mobs are at 3% hp!

You need some macros, man.
You should add /cancel_spellcast commands before your cures, Equilibrium, and Verdict, because you need to make sure you cast those right away, not queue them so that they cast once you're dead, or whenever.


Also, don't forget that macro on Fanatic's Protection, like this:


Is your UI terrible?
One thing I could not live without is a spell timer UI window. You can sort of get by with the maintained spell window in the default UI, but don't do that to yourself!

I use DrumsUI, I've been told DarqUI also has a customizable spell timer UI window of some kind.

I don't think DrumsUI has been updated for Kunark Ascending... but you can work around that by going into your UI folder and deleting the mainhub_persona.xml file, so that it uses the default Character window instead of the outdated DrumsUI one.

 

The DrumsUI updater is no longer maintained. However, patches are available on the eq2ui forums in the form of ZIP files that you can simply extract over your current installation.
However, I recommend you backup your UI folder beforehand.

 

Soteria,

Thank you for this write up. Very useful and informative.

I have a few questions.

1. Given the crap AA's that you have to go through to get other abilities, are there any that you would change? and what would you like to change about them? I am mostly thinking of the reuse change AA's, which are great on TLE until 1/12/2017 when TSO comes out and most toons can be reuse capped.

2. Previous advice about healing included casting the group heal spells over and over to proc effects on heal for the groups. Is that advice still valid? or have most of those interesting heal procs gone away?

Thanks!

 

You know, even though there is some stuff that isn't useful anymore because of capped stats and stuff, I think Inquisitors have it better than many (most?) other classes in that regard.

If I could change one thing in the AA trees, I would make punishment's heal calculated on the inquisitor's stats and give parse credit to the inquisitor, the way Involuntary Gift does for Templars, or Bane of Warding does for Defilers. Punishment spells have the potential to be a really fun class feature, but currently they tragically under-perform relative to the similar abilities other classes have.

Hmm, I'm trying to think of which effects you're referring to. Absolution, the Epic 1.0 spell, has a 50% chance to proc extra heals after you cast heals, and Dogma is a profession spell that heals the target of any beneficial spell you cast (seems to include cures, buffs, death saves...). If you take the full leftside prestige spec, it makes Fanatical Devotion proc off of heal spells as well as attacks, which is useful if you're spamming heals. Off the top of my head, that's everything I can think of that you proc by casting heals.

So you can cast heals to proc more heals... which is fine I guess, but you don't really gain anything by spamming heals for that if your group isn't dying... The only thing worth pointing out in connection to the procs I mentioned above is that because of Dogma, you can use the myth cure like it's a quicker-casting, uninterruptible Alleviation, if you don't anticipate needing to use it to cure for the next few seconds.

 

it used to be that there were procs like the ring of emptiness

EQ2U - Item Details - Ring of Emptiness

that you would proc off heals, so you wanted as many heals pumping at once as possible. probably not a valid strategy anymore, as there really don't seem to be any interesting procs on items like this one anymore.

 

Oh, I see what you mean. Nope, nothing like that I'm aware of now. The only item procs I can think of are damage procs on weapons, and those only trigger off of attacks.

 

I just quickly skimmed over your guide and you seem to not mention that once we get our Mythic 2.0, speccing for melee Auto Attack stats matter. You want to get Severe Judgment and you want to cap DPS, FLURRY and Multi-Attack and not just go for max potency where its possible to do so.

You pretty much want to use your ascension skills and do as much damage by auto attacking while casting your heals. Remove everything else from your bars.

With 2.0 stats priority is: DPS > FLURRY > POT/MA > AMOD > DOUBLECAST >>>

 

Thank you for this Soteria, just saw it as a late returnee and have seen a marked imrpovement in my dps.

 

Change to INQs in PoP: Most stuff is the same, but our prestige build has changed.



We do more DPS now because we can afford to get Interrogation without wasting too many AAs.

If you want you can remove the point in Final Verdict and Brainstorm and put 3 in Perfect Timing for even more RNG damage.