Justicar crystal changed on PTS

Justicar Synergy Crystal on PTS

It seems Zinbik has done his job and made changes to the synergy crystals for all souls. Here is a picture from the new Justicar synergy crystal on the PTS. As you can see this one is clearly better then the current version available.

With my current gear (still no HK drops for me) I am already reaching nearly 1000 SP raid buffed this means that the 4 piece bonus will gives you at least a 1000 damage shield every 15sec (if you use it on cd). This will be a really welcome change. And the 2 piece bonus boosts our survivability by a bit as well.

Looking for Hammerknell gear

With Hammerknell being out for nearly a week it's time to start adding item to my spreadsheet.

I would like it if everyone that found a cleric tank item could post a picture of the item in the comments or on my spreadsheet thread on the official forums found here: http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?205793-Justicar-Speadsheet.

Screenshots of the items are preferred to prevent possible typo's and also please report which boss (or trash) dropped the item.

Mien of leadership change

Well it seems our cleric dev Zinbik does read the forum afterall and we as a result we have a new change incomming with patch 1.4 and maybe our synergy crystal will change aswell.

Originally Posted by Zinbik 

Hey guys, one more last minute Cleric note for 1.4 that will go up to PTS sometime in the near future:

Mien of Leadership - Increased the bonus to threat to 450%.

Also, I just wanted to add that we are still looking at the Cleric Synergy Crystals. We'll be hotfixing any changes we need to make to the LIVE servers as necessary.

Some of you might think this is a 50% threat increase however this isn't the case. As it's a threat bonus we go from 400% threat generation to 550% threat generation which is "only" a 37.5% threat increase. However this is still a really big buff to our threat and I suspect that those that already played well might have to look out to not pull threat of the other tank (especially on AoE heavy bosses where you use a lot of DoA and DoL).

Diminishing Return

There are currently 3 stats that have a build in diminishing return these are armor, blocked amount and resistance. The reason they have a build in diminishing return is because otherwise the stats become better the more you have of it making you want more resulting in it become even better etc.

The formula for these 3 stats are as followed

Armor: 

Damage % reduction = Armor / ( Armor + 6500 ) * 100%

Block:

Blocked % = Block / ( Block + 721 ) * 100%

Resistance:

Damage % reduction = Resistance / ( Resistance + 600 ) * 100%

Murdantix down

Well it seems my guild was one of the first to kill this boss.
It's a fearly easy boss aslong as you have the raid dps and healing.

Fatality - Blightweald (EU)

Justicar crystal unchanged

Well it looks like the Justicar synergy crystal didn't get a change like Zinbik suggested. As a result it's currently not worth getting and you might want to look into using one from another soul.
However there is still a lot of time before anyone will be able to use a Synergy Crystal as it requires 2 pieces of T2 raid vendor gear. And that will take some time to get so we might get lucky and they will fix it in time.

Magic damage

First of mitigation talents stack additive and resistance stacks multiplicative with that reduction so currently cleric tanks can get 28% magic damage mitigation (15% from Shield of Faith, 3% from Thick Skinned and 10% from Thorvin's Law) and as a result our magic tanking capability's are lower then that of other tanks.
For comparison a warrior tank can have up to 52% magic damage reduction (57% if the target has mana) and as a result takes 50% less magic damage.

For those wondering why having 52% vs 28% is 50% less damage taken
Lets look at a magic attack that would deal 10000 damage.
A warrior will take 10000 * ( 1 - 0.52 ) = 4800 damage.
A cleric will take 10000 * ( 1 - 0.28 ) = 7200 damage.
( 7200 - 4800 ) / 4800 * 100%= 50.0% more damage taken

Now I didn't take resistance from raid buffs into consideration so lets add that.
That's 30 from planar protection and 40 from bard/archon buff for 70 resistance to all schools.
70 resistance = 10.45% less damage taken.
So a warrior now takes 1-(1-0.52)*(1-0.1045)=57.02% less magic damage.
And a cleric now takes 1-(1-0.28)*(1-0.1045)=35.52% less magic damage.

That same attack now hits for the following
A warrior will take 10000 * ( 1 - 0.5702 ) = 4298 damage.
A cleric will take 10000 * ( 1 - 0.3552 ) = 6448 damage.
( 6448 - 4298 ) / 4298 * 100%= 50.0% more damage taken

So as you can see the raid resistance buffs have no effect on the effective difference between a warrior and a cleric. (and even if we fully take Favored of the Valnir into the calculation as full mitigation (this means no overhealing at all which is not the case) we still take 35% more damage)

The counter
To partly counter the effect that we take more magic damage it is possible to stack resistance of the type you are encountering. Currently that is mostly life is Greenscale's Blight and Death in River of Souls and with Hammerknell you can expect water damage.
There are a couple of places where you can pick up resistance.

1. Dark harbor from the cabalist tree provides 40 earth, water, air and fire resistance.
2. Bard/Archon buff provides 40/39 resistance to everything.
3. Planar protection guild perk that can be used to grant up to 30 resistance.
4. Resistance runes for chest and shoulders they come in a 21 and 27 resistance version for a total of 42-54 resistance.
5. The river of souls world-event gave the option to get a trinket with stats that included 20 death resistance.
6. The Hammerknell world-event gives you the option to obtain a trinket with 20 Water Resistance.
7. The Hammerknell world-event gives you the option to obtain a sigil of the five with 20 Water Resistance which is perfect for making a water resistance sigil.
8. Lesser essences up to 6 in total (if you make a resistance sigil/foci don't use greaters)
   Ordered from best to worst.
   1. Inscribed Sourcestone Resist essence provides 24 resistance + 17 endurance
   2. Crystal Sourcestone Resist essence provides 26 resistance
   3. Inscribed sourcestone essence provides 16 resistance + other stats
   4. Raid rift essence provides 15 resistance + other stats
   5. Crystal Sourcestone essences provides 12 resistance + other stats
   6. Expert rift essences provides 11 resistance + other stats
   7. Green essences with 1 other stat can provides up to 12 resistance (strength or endurance are the best)
   8. Green essences with more then 1 other stat can provides up to 6 resistance
   9. The collector's edition weapon rune provides 10 resistance of one kind

Then one last note about resistance, it does not scale linearly but like armor and blocked amount it got a build in diminishing return.