Create a Priest
Fiesta: A Beginner's Guide to Priests/Clerics
The role of a healer has always been an important part of the traditional RPG party. Whether you are venturing off into the wilderness or delving into depths unknown, having a party member who can quickly cure ailments, heal wounds, and even strengthen your skills and reflexes is an important factor that every adventurer should think about. In Fiesta, this well accepted trope is also present in the form of the Priest.
Clerics or priests are a magic based class that has plenty of skills for healing and curing status ailments. Whether you have a full party or just playing with a single partner, having a cleric in the group immediately allows you to tackle enemies that you would normally run away from.
Armored Healers
Unlike the typical cleric of other fantasy genres, Fiesta allows you to create a priest that is pretty tough. Most RPG fans are used to the stereotypical clerics clothed in robes and armed with small maces. Fiesta provides a whole new take on the class by decking them out in full armor and upgrading their little hand maces into giant hammers of destruction (at least, that is what the weapons look like in-game).
Clerics in this game benefit highly from having a shield since the same character attribute that raises health and defense also provides a bonus to the shield block rate -and for anyone who has played or played with a cleric before will know how important it is for the healers to be able to absorb damage on their own.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Not everyone is fit to play a cleric. If this is your first time to play an MMORPG, we highly suggest trying out any of the other three classes before you delve into this role. The place of a cleric in the game is very limited: you only work as a support character. Sure, you can play Fiesta with this class and still get pretty far on your own -but that will take plenty of time and effort.
A cleric is more efficient when working with a party and by playing the support role. By support, we mean providing healing for any party member that is taking damage, and removing poison and other status ailments from the tanks.
Those of you who are really inclined to play supportively will be happy to know that the cleric is not entirely worthless on their own. The class benefits from having several attack-based skills allowing it to deal plenty of melee damage on its own. In fact, some players could even capitalize on this build to create a semi-solo style cleric for adventuring -the only weakness to this build is that the support abilities are less emphasized making it less desirable to have in a party as compared to a full healing-focused cleric.
Learning to Build
Regardless of your ideal cleric build, one stat should be your main focus: endurance. This will provide your cleric with plenty of HP, good defense, and that much needed block rate bonus that allows you to use shields to ward off enemy attacks. The reason for this is very simple: the higher your health and defense is, the less healing you will need for yourself. This enables you to conserve your magic power for your party members.
The big question next is whether you would prefer to play by attacking enemies, or if you would want to stay behind the front lines. Each of these options has its own perks and problems, so it really pays to study up a bit before making your choice.
The most typical and recommended build is that of the full healer. In this case, you increase your endurance to the maximum and use everything left to boost your SPR. This build is useful when you want to play support.
Now, the biggest bane of any healing based player is that the game gets repetitive and old fast -sure, like the other classes, any MMORPG plays with a giant rinse and repeat pattern. But the situation with clerics is that the yawn-factor is increased tenfold. This is because of the fact that playing support means you never get to experience the thrill of tackling the enemy head-on, and none of the kills actually feel like yours at all. While any party member will attest that they would never have been able to pull it off without a healer in the group, all you ever get to do is spam the heal spell.
When fighting against high level enemy spawns, the action does get a little hot and exciting -and having to keep up with all the critically injured teammates is not an easy thing. But when you are dealing with enemies of the same level, you can expect to get bored fast.
On the other hand, you could play as an attack-style cleric. The bonus here is that you get to play like a really tough fighter -able to absorb damage and you even get to have a few skills that let you deal plenty of damage. The bad part is that parties will not want to have you around as much. This is because you will be sacrificing some of that SPR or END stat in exchange for a bit of STR. Strength is crucial to melee attacks, and your weapon based skills will need to have that extra power to be of any use.
Skills to Ponder
The most commonly discussed skill for clerics is heal -but really, what else is there to it? You point at yourself or an ally, cast the spell, and health is restored. Naturally, maxing out this skill gives you an excellent HP per mana cost ratio. Also, you will need this skill to support yourself when playing alone.
Cure is a "might be" useful spell -depending on the situation. When dealing with opponents that dish out plenty of poison damage or when fighting against other players in PVP, having this skill counts -though some players may prefer to just resort to using consumables instead; so try to foresee how much usage this skill will have before investing in it.
Revive is a must-have skill for any cleric that plans to play support for adventuring parties. The on-the-spot revival nature of this skill makes it an important tool in ensuring that all your key players are able to fight at full efficiency (and when you have to walk a long distance from the town to your target enemy, it also saves you plenty of time).
Stoneskin is a self-buff ability that increases your defense. Contrary to what the skill name is, the ability raises your shield block (as opposed to increasing your physical defense). Since clerics are natural shield users with END as their primary stat, this spell can prove really useful when you need to play as a tank against some really tough foes.
Invincible provides players with a brief moment of invincibility -about 10 seconds worth. This is a great way to support your tanks if they are facing massive boss enemies. Keep this spell on standby and unleash it right before your enemy fires off a massive move. The 10 second damage nullification will help get you out of tight spots if you know how to time it right.
Resist and Protect are your typical "increase magical and physical defense" spells. You can cast it on yourself or on the entire party. These spells help a lot in giving your party members increased resistance -which means less heal spells for you to cast. Naturally, it is important for you to know what kinds of attacks your enemies will be unleashing -if they exclusively use magic or physical attacks, then stick with the spell that applies.
Working on Your Own
If you ever decide that you would want to try out the cleric as your starting class, and you want to adventure on your own, you will need to remember a few things. First off, equipment will matter a lot. Trade as much as you can with other players, chances are you might be able to chance upon other clerics selling off their old shields as they buy new ones. The same goes for other equipment and weapons.
You can still team up with other players, but your role as a support healer is only second to your position as a tank. A fighting cleric's defense is a whole lot tougher than that of a fighter's and that is because you can hold off an enemy on your own. Depending on the map, you maximize the number of enemies your party can pull by acquiring an aggro aside from the one that the rest of the team is pulling. Of course, expect to supplement your HP with your own heal spells so that their healer can conserve mana for the other players.
Or find out more on Clerics in Fiesta at Outspark.