This is a short video showing two clips that I thought were very interesting.
I can’t narrate videos at the moment due to technical stuff, at least I got the quality right. Though you can expect narrations from me in the very-near future.
The first clip is me getting jumped by a Rogue (Assassin, MM I think).
I was killed riding to my quest hub by a large group of Guardians, they were everywhere looking for the Death Rifts and had the same quests etc. It was a lot of fun, never the less and was my second bit of major World PvP. The first bit of World PvP I had will be no-doubt covered by Taugrim, you’ll see that soon.
When this Assassin jumped me I had put up my Dex buff and my 50% snare buff (on every melee ability), but didn’t get the chance to summon my Pet nor buff my weapon damage.
So, taken from the Official Rift Druid Soul Description, the weakness reads as follows:
“A Druid’s bond with their Fae Spirit is both the key to their power and their greatest weakness. Enemies who destroy a Druid’s companion greatly reduce the Druid’s prowess and endurance.”
Is this true? Without my Greater Fairy I had a good deal less survivability but managed to win the fight and come out on top, still.
What did I do?
Assassin / Marksman
You’ll see I try not to panic as I was expecting a Rogue to camp me, I get my bearings and pop my win macro (pet rage, 5% plus damage & trinket). I fail to put him to sleep (slumber) as I made a mistake and put a small DoT on him before hand.
After, I try and kite him as long as possible to keep the healing up and let my HoTs do their job, unfortunately he was Marksman too so that was no issue for him. His crits gave me heals through Gift of the Chosen (which I touched on in my Cleric overview). When I was at a similiar health pool to him, I let rip and revolved my rotation whilst trying to keep my health always above 1k.
Eventually, he uses the ‘Slip Away’ ability just before he dies, (essentially the Assassin version of Vanish from WoW) and I get killed by two other Guardians near-by. I was pretty happy!
Necromancer / Warlock
The Second clip is my getting jumped by a Necromancer / Warlock not long before the previous clip. His pet is a Rogue-like one, so he gets a Stun off before I even notice him. An important thing to note is that my mana battery spell was down because I was grinding and that plays a huge part in this fight.
I come out of it and heal up, the Greater Fairy really impressed me during this ambush, she was constantly spamming her heals and HoT, never letting it drop. She was really brilliant, and unless I have a dedicated healer in any PvP group I’m in (be it Warfront or World), then I will definitely trade the Satyr (which I’ll touch on in a later video, only just got it) for the Greater Fairy.
I immediately go mental at him and let him know I could rip his face off if he didn’t try. I knew straight away Soul Purge was coming any time soon (channelled, deals damage and heals for tons) and wanted to use my silence then. Only when he started to actually use the spell did I realise I subconsciously used the Silence at the start whilst I was pressuring him! Big mistake there.
My mana always seems to dry out in bad situations, (Taugrim always makes fun of it) and this was one of them. You can see my spamming my Shift-V when its about to come off CD, desperately willing it to hurry! What that does is ensures every melee hit restores about 10% mana on contact, though what good is it if you have no mana to hit with? That was my issue, whilst trying to balance self-healing I only got 1 strike off whilst the mana battery ability was up, giving me about 150 mana…
Luckily, my pet was being Pro and helped keep me up, I tried using LoS and finished the guy off with two Ranged attacks.
The Arguement
Do we (Druids) NEED the Pets that badly?
I don’t know, time will tell! On one hand, the Assassin was fine to solo without my Pet, on the other hand – I couldn’t see myself winning that fight with the Mage with my Pet helping me so, so much.
Taugrim's MMO Blog 
My biggest question for you is how you will counter a Void Knight or a Dominator (especially after he poly squirrels you and sucks your mana dry).
ty in advance
I still haven’t to this day seen a VK main so I can’t answer that, I’m not sure what I’d do.
Dom I play LoS games with, and the Satyr helps with that.
Though as people have previously mentioned, the Dom CC is a tad over the top and needs to be addressed.
I can’t figure out why your comments show up as shawshank22 but your posts as Cas.
Really good video, was fun to see the ganker get smoked. Interesting to watch as you take more of a aerial camera view in combat.
I have separate usernames apparently.
Interesting you mention the aerial combat view, you can see it proper gimps me at around 00:35 where (I think) the Rogue breaks my root by Blinking forward and I didn’t even realise.
Nice video Cas. It’s got me wondering about the viability of melee clerics in general as I’m unhappy with my mage right now and am thinking of rerolling a support class.
In short, does a melee based cleric build also cater for group healing in PvP as well? I had a lot of fun playing a Grace/Salv Warrior Priest in WAR because allowed me to wade in on the font line but heal my team at the same time. From what little I’ve seen of RIFT clerics though it seems melee builds are far more about self healing than group healing.
Any thoughts you have would be most welcome.
You’re right about front-line Clerics seemingly being more about self-healing than the healing of others.
In this spec, If playing with friends or I simply have the breathing space, I’ll always chuck a HoT on any Ally nearby for mitigation etc.
But for front-line group healing you might be more interested in Shaman / Justicar or something similiar.
I’ll get a video up soon of Shaman / Justicar and you can see what you make of that.
Its basically as close as you can get to Warrior Priest as a Cleric in my opinion. You’ll see.
Fun video, Cas. I hit level 42 this morning and I’ve been leveling/PvPing almost exclusively using some type of Shaman-heavy build. Your video inspired me to mix things up a bit and try a Druid-heavy spec. Here’s some general thoughts based on my (limited) experience with Druid so far:
1). Druid seems to have better/more consistent sustained damage compared to Shaman. In contrast, Shaman seems to have better burst potential (primarily due to Rage of the North and it’s synergy with Jolt).
Mixing the two souls in creative ways can yield really good results that strike a balance between the strengths of the Druid soul and the strengths of the Shaman soul (i.e. my Druid spec picks up Jolt and Stormborn from Shaman to fill in some of the missing burst potential).
2). What Druid may lack in baseline burst potential it seems to make up for in CC options. It’s interesting that Druid has nearly the entire arsenal of CC in the game at it’s disposal (a ranged snare on short cooldown, a single target mez, single target silence, unbreakable AoE root, and a single target heal debuff with a short enough cooldown you could -almost- maintain it on two targets at once).
3). Overall I’ve been fairly pleased with both the Satyr and Greater Faerie pets. I tend to run with the Satyr and treat it like an additional (fairly hard-hitting) DoT but your video clearly shows the Greater Faerie has its uses.
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the pet AI. Coming from WAR and dealing with White Lions, it was refreshing to have the pets path intelligently to targets and use abilities appropriately.
Trion should also be commended for some of their more common sense quality-of-life improvements to pet AI. Namely, having them regularly attempt to move to the back of their targets. It seems like such a “Duh!” thing in retrospect but it’s something many developers have overlooked.
So that’s my “generic-I-need-my-own-blog-to-post-this-wall-of-text-on” thoughts thus far. Looking forward to seeing more videos from both you and Taugrim.
Hey there,
1: Yeah you’re dead on about that, spot on mate.
I was also thinking about getting Jolt and Stormborn later on.
2: Again, you nailed it on the head there, I do tend to find the Mez a bit useless though, I don’t rely on it much.
3: Definitely, the Pet AI is brilliant and much better than anything I expected, you can literally leave your GFaerie to do its thing and you’re fine.
I do like the Satyr, like you said he is a hard hitter sometimes, though he does require a tiny bit of micro-management (just to attack my target).
Thanks for watching, I hope to keep bringing some more videos to the blog ( and start narrations ) in the future.
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Very nice video. I tried out your build and it was much more fun and effective than I thought it would be. Looking forward to more videos :)