So after toying around with a handful of classes during the stress test, I can sum up the zealot rather quick.
This class feels very similar to wow’s priest without dispel. That sentence will probably be interpreted as war = wow. That’s definitely not the case.
But here’s a simple rundown of playing one. You have an instant cast HoT. It’s always handy to have those on people right before a fight starts, especially on squishy sorcs and the like. You have a 3 second cast heal that is a BOMB. Since it’s 3 seconds, start casting before your target takes damage. However, it’s nearly impossible to cast with something beating on you. Luckily you have a 1 second cast heal that works just like renew in wow. It heals for a moderate amount and then drops a HoT. I find that dropping those 2 HoTs on a sorc/bw will be enough to heal backlash. At least at a lower level. But for the cases where you’re being hit and can’t drop your bomb heal, there’s an instant cast that heals a moderate amount too. It’s not the most ap-conservative move on Earth, but for those emergency cases, especially while running, it’s handy. But when things are looking bad, there’s also a shield. So there’s level 10 healing in a nutshell. The higher level spells will certainly give you more to do.
But just healing isn’t enough. There was a pretty large amount of time where I didn’t have to heal anything. This is mostly due to 2 HoTs and a shield, but this time is obviously used to either regain max ap or dps, depending on your situation. But you have a DoT that’s relatively weak compared to a sorc’s. Damage is damage. There’s also a 2 second cast single target nuke. “Nuke” is probably a misnomer since it’s mediocre at best. It hit for about 150-200 whereas my sorc at the same level was doing 600. But like I say, damage is damage. Sometimes it’ll make all the difference.
Moving on! Sorceress!
It’s not exactly the most challenging class in the world to play. DoT, nuke, AOE. It’s your straight forward caster, but your spec will probably vary on what you like to play the most.
So there are basically 3 types of pvp (I still hate saying rvr) fights. Battlegrounds, world pvp, and keeps.
For the battlegrounds, single target nuking worked best for me. Just find someone and blow them up. It’s easy to top the damage charts by tab-DoTing, but against an organized team that will get you killed.
The world pvp felt a lot like wow’s AV. Two rather large armies meeting with a no-man’s-land in between. Walk in, DoT, walk out. With a 3 second cast on your AOE (remember, level 12 here), you’ll quickly be targeted within 100 yards range. Plus the cast timer set back when you get hit. So DoT spec will probably be huge for this stalemate.
And lastly, keeps. I had the opportunity to defend a keep against roughly 20 or so players for the better part of 2 hours. The keeps are large buildings, but the battles inside are relatively small. So I’ll break this down into the two parts of keeps: fighting outside the keep and inside.
Outside: Hot oil and catapults aside, this is extremely position dependent. When there’s 15 people right in front of your door, it’s hard NOT to go AOE suicidal just to see the numbers. So while defending, try to find a spot up high on the keep without being too obvious. They have range too. While attacking out here, single target nuking the people up high will most likely be the most useful thing you can do.
Inside: These rooms are extremely small for the amount of people that were in it. On the defensive side of things, you don’t want your NPCs going down. Now, with a set of NPCs on both floors (the third is for vendors), you have two big chances to stop them. When they’re on the first floor you’ll find it difficult to find a safe place to drop bombs here. Your instant cast AOE will be fun, but it draws attention and you’ll die. Fast. Your best bet is just to use your team as a pick and drop bombs when you can. On the second floor, you have more options. There’s a ramp that goes up and down from this floor. This is your best bet for hiding and bombing. The third floor is the best since they have no business up there. You can spam your instant cast AOE while running by to start causing panic in the healing ranks on your way up. This is the most dangerous time, obviously. But once you’re on the third floor you can use an angle around the ramp to start your 3 second cast AOE. At end game you’ll probably have something more useful, we’ll see. But that worked extremely well for me at these levels. Your average character had 1600 or so HP and I was critting (100% dark magic pretty much all the time) for about 550. I was hitting probably 2/3 of the people in the room. That alone kept 20 or so people from capturing the keep for a few hours. There were some people in there with me, but we weren’t organized or even working together. So basically, sorcs + keeps = good fun. On the offensive side of things it’ll depend on the number of defenders. If you catch them off guard (like what happened to me), single target the NPCs down and get the keep. If an organized guild is defending, still single target AOE to focus fire people down. In the end the specs will ultimately depend on the abilities, like most MMOs. So perhaps this is where to use what spells instead of spec fun.
/rant