Return of Reckoning

Hey all I'm new here but I'm immensely enjoying the PvP goodness that is Warhammer Online. I've figured what I want to do with my DoK, I want to focus on abilities that do damage to heal, primarily path of sacrifice abilities like Transfer essence and Rend Soul. Yes, I know this makes me vulnerable and a bad candidate for max healing numbers since I HAVE to melee to heal, but it's about finding my own style, not Min/Max - been there, done that. Questions for you more experienced DoK users:

- Divine Fury: When using damage-based heals, this should be a 25% net damage increase with no downside, since the increased damage offsets reduced healing on an ability like Rend Soul, right? Seems like a no-brainer for this playstyle.

- Transfer essence seem incredibly powerful in a melee-healing DoK. Transfer essence + empowered transfer heals AND builds soul essence for Rend Soul. Should be used as a group heal when the focused healing of Rend Soul isn't needed.

- Pillage essence both drains AP and should give a big chunk essence in a single strike, making it ideal for a quick refill.

- Keeping with the damage theme, Transferred focus again seems a no-brainer. Melee crits increase healing taken, essentially offsetting the entire downside of divine fury while still letting you enjoy the damage boost.

- Finally, climbing up the path of torture to grab curse of Khaine seems good. 50% less healing seems strong.

Statwise, the build would focus on melee damage (str+crit+skill) and melee survivability (wounds+though) since all heals scale off dealing damage.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice?

- The reduced healing portion of Divine Fury (and Murderous Inent for that matter) only affects casted heals (those that scale off willpower) and has not effect on lifetaps (Rend Soul, Transfer Essence).
- Transfer Essence is indeed incredibly powerful for lifetap healing, so much so that it will probably get severely nerfed once the DoK/WP rework goes live again (possibly replaced with the old version of a single target heal instead of an AoE one).
- Post the rework DoKs/WPs who are focusing on melee healing probably won't need weapon skill since their melee healing abilities will heal for the full amount of damage (damage done + damage mitigated).

The rework I mentioned above was in effect a month or so back and made DoKs/WPs into very powerful melee lifetap-based healers. It was removed with the intent of being reimplemented once the patcher is out and the dev team has more control over the client in order to change and reimplement some abilities to be able to fine-tune those two careers.

I suggest you read through the WP/DoK section of this thread and simply wait for the rework to come back since melee healing will become much more powerful. viewtopic.php?f=52&t=18310

Thanks for the info! Something that struck me later is the wording on Transferred Focus: "your defensive target will become 20% more receptive to DIRECT heals."

As I understand it lifetap isn't a direct heal, so does that mean that Transferred Focus won't improve your rend soul and transfer essence heals?

I too would be interested in the possibilities of melee healing with the DoK, however I see most DoKs using off-hand chalice which makes me think the class is still mostly used as a ranged healer.

Any (preferably melee healer) DoK with experience in lvl 40 rvr/pvp care to comment on that?

Melee healing is currently possible but it kind of sucks atm. Aza had implemented an experimental mode for DoK/WP a few months back to make melee healing great again but there were some issues with it that made it pretty OP in certain situations so it got rolled back for now. To my knowledge, the plan is to re-introduce the melee healing changes once the new launcher comes out, as the devs will have client control at that time and they can better adjust things. In short, yes you can melee heal but right now backline healing is stronger. My main is a DoK and I am patiently awaiting the day when the melee healing changes come back.

Thanks. I'll casually level my DoK up then until it gets some more tweaking.