Clerics PVE DPS - Chanter Staff or Mace?

[PetitFour-KT]

So clerics don't have any magic staves with pve stats, is it better to have a chanter staff and socket knowledge or just stick with a mace?

Chanter Staff - Higher PVE attack (~12% if you fuse two harvester staves) but no crit spell, loss of extra MB from magic weapons

Mace: Casting speed but much lower PVE attack (7%)

[Raerbear-DN]

double Harvester staff vs Harvester mace & shield is something like a 130-150 Magic Boost and 100 Crit Spell difference + the 5% or so PvE attack.

assuming the rest of your gear is decent you will still have plenty of Magic Boost for any endgame content and the Crit Spell loss isn't game-changing considering how much you get from accessories & Knowledge manastones.

even if the stat difference was bigger i would take an attack speed Chanter/physical staff over a casting speed Cleric/magic mace for DPSing pretty much any day since DPS Clerics mostly use instant or chain skills, the only skill that really benefits from more casting speed is Call Lightning (i don't include Punishing Earth because chain skills) but the attack speed pays off a lot more (and is just much, much smoother especially at higher ping).

tl;dr Harvester staff > mace.

[Neleth-KT]

I say mace.

Have u try an attack speed scroll on mace ? the speed just as fast as staff.

There's no reason u should use chanter staff as glad shouldn't use magic mace on dual wield setup despite mace have higher attack than sword.
If developers want clerics to use staff they would make new magic staff lone time ago.

[Raerbear-DN]

yeah you can achieve similar speed as a casting speed scroll with a staff by using an attack speed scroll with mace but you can also use an attack speed scroll with a staff for even faster chains/instant skills and that's not taking into consideration the 5% PvE atk (vs 130-150 Magic Boost and 100 Crit Spell) 

"if the developers didn't include it, they don't want your class to use it" isn't really relevant given Aion's long history of not including specific gear pieces for certain classes with every important patch (Cleric MB PvPvE staves*, Songweaver PvPvE attack speed gloves, Aethertech gear in general, etc. most if not all of which get added inevitably)

on top of all that if you do a quick search on the Korean website 99% of the Cleric profiles that you go to use double Harvester staff, very very few who have a Harvester mace with Magic Boost/Knowledge socketed

[PetitFour-KT]

I agree, classes NEVER get the gear with the right stats. We all know game developers are always drunk when they design gear/skills for classes. Like once everything went mythic concentration has been all gone, and all healing boost had been gone on chain sets in early 5.0. I don't think ncsoft even remembers what some of these do. They don't even remember what the whole chanter class does in general. Also the "mace DW" case is not even close to the 5% pve attack difference.

 

Anyway my concern is that I'm not going full tryhard with k+9/k+10, the MB (or even crit spell) loss can actually be an impact if I don't want to turn sacrificial power on. I'll test it out on gear calculators and see if the stats are good enough.

[Raerbear-DN]

+1 about Concentration gear, anytime i do PvE on my alt Clerics that don't have lowbie Rentus shield & the old eternal Crucible cloth hat it's very frustrating ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

anyway, even if you're socketing Knowledge 6-7s (really for PvE just spamming 6s in a few pieces is perfectly fine and super affordable) assuming your accessories are at least full Apollon or better (Harvester) your Crit Spell will be fine for any current content, the 5% PvE attack will make up for the lack of MB + outside of solo PvE there's always buffs and debuffs from other classes to boost your Magic Boost & Crit spell, but nothing/no one can boost your PvE attack %. 

an AP/AP staff would give you around 130 less MB than the Harvester/Harvester and obviously 0% PvE attack, Harvester/Mythic BM you would gain like 40 MB over Harvester/Harvester but no bonus PvE attack. Harvester/Harvester is the best PvE option for Cleric until they release a Magic Boost PvE attack staff.

i'm curious what you mean by if you don't want to turn Sacrifical Power on, assuming you're DPS spec there's no reason to keep it off/not run it and if you need to toggle it to heal, you aren't gonna be DPSing anyway. regardless of what weapon you're using, that -200 MB from not having Sacrifical Power is going to be the same but maybe i'm just not understanding what you are saying

edit: another (temporary) combine for Harvester staff would be Apollon since those are extremely cheap but Harvester/Harvester is still the best because of the bonus PvE attack from Conditioning. 

[PetitFour-KT]

Even with k+7 socketing one can reach way above 5k MB which is cap for most instances (actually only except BOS I guess?) so sacrificial power basically does nothing in most situations. Being able to do some support heal while being in DPS spec is very handy. I can of course macro to healing set for healing and back for DPS but if you have tried doing that with a potato PC + bad ping you would know it's highly inefficient. I would always prefer NOT switching sets a lot unless the group needs emergency major heals because every time I use gear macro the whole game lags ~1s freeze which is not cool for either healing or dps.

[Raerbear-DN]

yea i understand that, but originally you said your concern was that since you aren't planning to use higher level stones so the stat loss might actually affect your DPS without Sacrificial Power which implied maybe the rest of your gear wasn't good enough to be past stat cap w/o Sacrificial Power, but yeah it's pretty easy to be MB capped or almost capped without high level Knowledge stones even without Sacrifical Power 

[PetitFour-KT]

Yes I'm going mainly for k+7 stones only.

After working on some gear calculators it looks like it's good enough to hit cap with a chanter staff, so I guess that makes the choice. Little bit less crit spell though <1k. (even with full harvester accessories)

Let's hope NC is not giving us a magic staff a few months later saying "sorry, we forgot about it".

[Raerbear-DN]

even with Know 6s you should be well above the cap with COE/BOS accessories and decent armor anyway, that aside Harvester/Harvester is the best option even if you somehow aren't MB capped just because of the PvE attack %

as far as i remember there's nothing new in the near future (5.8 etc) as far as PvE MB staves go but i don't wanna say that's 200% true in case i'm wrong, pretty sure i'm not though