Cleric PVP Manastones

[Haniya-DN]

Hey all! o/ 

Recently I've been a little lost on what the defensive builds are for support clerics in PVP, and figured it'd be good to ask for advice now that fragments are more plentiful and I'm actually making some serious gear progress. At the very beginning of 6.0 people were saying to go HP/HB, then after some time there were a lot of recommendations for Physical Defense/MDef. This is what I currently have socketed, although I was never quite certain if I should go full one or the other, or do a hybrid build, or even what numbers to aim for. Since 7.0, some people are saying to go for MR and/or Evasion but I have to admit I'm preeeeetty skeptical about MR- I can't imagine how much you'd have to stack to hit the 50% cap these days. 

But I'm always open to advice and different perspectives, so please share your tips for manastone builds in 7.0!  

[Hinotori-DN]

First of all, two resources you should be using before dumping all your kinah in any defensive build:

RU Gear Calculator (you can switch it to English): https://aiondb.ru/tools/equipment/

•     Remember to add your cubics.
•     You can't add collections on that calculator but make sure to account for them too.
•     Magic Resist is labeled "Magic Defense" there, so when you're entering your retune stats, for pieces that can have both Magic Defense and Magic Resist (armor, plume/bracelet), Magic Resist is always the one with the highest max values.

Livo's video about 6.0/7.0 formulas:  

•     9:15 explains the values for MR and Evasion vs MA/Accuracy
•     9:45 explains the values for Block vs Accuracy

 

If you go for either MR, Evasion or Block, you have to commit your full set to it, aka every piece that can be retuned for that stat needs to be retuned, and all your manastones should be of that stat (and given the scarcity of manastones compared to previous patches, I'd save any purple/red manastone for ultimate gear only, and use ancients on lesser gear as a placeholder, unless you're sure you gonna be using that gear for a long time if you're slow about upgrading your stuff).

About what values to aim for, I'll quote myself from another thread:

On 26/9/2019 at 3:16 PM, Hinotori-DN said:

A dps class in full T2 gear with everything tuned for Acc/MA + collections/cubics/etc (but without Acc/MA manastones) will be somewhere between 15k ~ 16k base Acc/MA.

A cleric in full T2 gear max tuned and socketed for MR (+ cubics/collections/etc) can reach just below 22k MR (or evasion, since they scale at the same rate). 15k ~ 16k MA vs 22k MR = 27% ~ 24% resist rate. 

Now, you won’t see 22K MR clerics for a while due to the low availability of stones (which ties back to your original topic) and ridiculous selective retune prices compared to other regions, so the few MR clers in NA are somewhere between 18k ~ 20k MR which is only 13% ~ 17% resist rate vs 15k ~ 16k MA (less when you also factor MA buffs), tho you may hear complains about MR more often since most players don't have full T2 gear yet, so their base MA is way lower (10k ~ 13k range, so 30% ~ 21% resist rate vs 18k MR which is nowhere max MR).

Consider that most people are not in full red gear, and even those people often retune their armor for HP/double defense/Crit rather than Accuracy or MA, so it's not like your set will be useless unless you're rocking 20k MR/Evasion. People in legendary accs will most likely go HP/M.Atk/Crit so you don't need that much MR against those compared to someone in ultimate accs tuned for MA, so as long as you don't have an unrealistic goal of resisting someone that outgears you by a whole tier (or someone who is already working on a MA/Accuracy set), you can work your way towards a defensive set.

 

MR will also stop stuns from templars/sins/chanters etc (Rangers can get 1K MA from Focused Shots but you can stop some of their stuff too), you could argue that you could go Evasion to stop their damage as well, which you can and it's a viable build too (also good vs Painters), in fact if you browse korean profiles you'll see a ton of clerics running +19k evasion, since most people can't afford two good pvp sets just decide what will benefit you in most situations considering that magic classes are often focused first in group pvp so it's usually the melee doing the most dps (so point in favor for Evasion), but if you don't have cross dispel the MR will stop a lot of fears (except Nightmare Shriek which ignores MR and Modor)/silences etc, and for solo/1v1 it's useful too.

Also worth noting that next patch, Saving Grace only activates on Resists or Blocks, so another incentive to have one of those sets (if there's mobs around you can aggro one to proc an easy block as they tend to have low accuracy, and you can also easily resist their magic stuff with relatively low MR), and super long term, we'll also get S grade minions that can boost your MR or Evasion (Modor) or Accuracy (Sheba) depending on what version you get, but there's so much RNG involved to get those that you'll only see a handful of players with them unless we get a super generous event.

 

On 11/10/2019 at 9:30 PM, Haniya-DN said:

then after some time there were a lot of recommendations for Physical Defense/MDef. This is what I currently have socketed, although I was never quite certain if I should go full one or the other, or do a hybrid build, or even what numbers to aim for.

You can still run a defense build (either full phy def or hybrid phy/magic), especially if you don't have the resources to commit to an MR or Evasion set, it's not as op as resisting or evading stuff but it's also not RNG based, so it will always shave off some damage. For reference, a full phy def set with garbage (but cheap!) +16 stones is an extra +800 defense, which is like having Hyperion Buff + Hyperion toggle at the same time (relying on the fact that most groups run mostly physical dps, with a few exceptions).