Hi all, me again.

I’ve been planning on making an update to the clanking guide for weeks now, ever since the Famous Maiya picked up her new spells, and when Lord Alden came and asked to use the old guide in his, I figured I really ought to get my finger out, since I’ve almost reached the level cap already. Whoever wants to read it, the old cleric tanking guide can be found at http://www.outspark.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18001, and covers the basic principles, and how to clank from level 25-49. In an effort to keep all information in one place, there will be a certain amount of the basic concepts repeated here, which veteran clankers can skip over to get to the new stuff.
This thread will not only explain how to clank and hold aggro at higher levels, it will also go into luring, stealing monsters from lures, and other advanced techniques for clerics, such as kiting.

Clanking 101

First off, what is clanking?
Clanking is cleric-tanking, using the aggro from the cleric’s healing ability to retain aggro. It can be used against bosses, single monsters, or massive groups of enemies to take all the hits and damage on yourself.
If done right, not only can a cleric serve as a party tank in groups without a fighter, they can serve as the main tanker in kingdom quests, against those pesky dungeon boss monsters, and if you get good enough, go for gold(en exp) in a two man AOE party with just you and a damage dealer. It’s expensive, it’s tough, and it needs you to have a very good grasp of cooldown and monster attacks, or you are going to die. A lot.

Why would anyone be crazy enough to want to clank then?
In the early stages of the game, archers and mages are made of paper. In the later stages of the game, they are still made of paper. Clanking keeps the hits off of them, and on you; which is nice, since you’ll be taking aggro and casting heal anyway. Typically a cleric will take less damage than either squishy class too, so in the later stages of the game, where the best exp comes from AOE parties (AOE parties depend on the mages and archers to use their area attacks to kill multiple enemies at the same time, which is more efficient than just killing one monster at a time), not only will the cleric be able to hold more enemies than a mage or archer can, there will actually be less risk of the cleric losing aggro than the squishy.
This is nice, because it’s when you have to start switching heals to various targets that people start dying.
Once you’ve learned how to stay alive against five monsters at once without hitting any of them, you’ll find surviving solo to be a lot easier too, thanks to the skills you’ve picked up from clanking.

How does clanking work?
The monsters in Fiesta have an unnatural attraction to flashing lights. Like moths, they will quickly home in on the cleric, who generates the shiniest lights, and begin trying to break him like a piñata to let all the lights out.
Seriously though, each Healing spell generates a fixed level of aggro, more if it’s cast on the target that a monster is hitting, less, but still some, if it’s cast near any monster. With every new level, this amount of aggro increases, and at high levels, the cleric rivals even the archer for the amount of aggro they can generate in a short time.

Building a Clanker

Stats
The most important stats if you want to be a dedicated aggro holder?
Spirit and Endurance.
Spirit boosts critical hit, and a critical hit, even from a cleric, will generate more aggro against a monster than a non-critical, even of higher damage. So you’ll want to perform crits as often as possible. Extra magic defence against monster special attacks, and extra SP to use slightly fewer stones each combat is just gravy, 5% crit is the meat.
Endurance boosts block percentage, you might not think that a +5% block percentage is much, but when there are five enemies attacking you, and with your shield and stone skin you block 10% of all incoming hits, you’ll be stopping on average a hit every second time they attack you, and when that hit makes the difference between staying alive and dying, you’ll be appreciating your Endurance points more than ever. Points in endurance will also be decreasing the damage you take from every hit. The more endurance, the more monsters you’ll be able to take.

I don’t have a 2:1 build, I’m currently only 38 Endurance, 25 Spirit, and I can still clank five blue clover trumpies without a backup cleric, so don’t worry too much about your stats, the majority of your survival will come from healing. Once you reach 60, you should be able to get 50 Endurance, 25 Spirit with points to spare.

Skills
It’s actually surprisingly easy to set yourself up for early clanking, you probably did it yourself without realising it: Max cooldown on Heal.
Most of the cleric’s aggro will be coming from Heal, so being able to cast it as often as possible will not only help you stay alive, it will help keep you as the main target. No other empowerment does as much good for the cleric.
Since you’ll be casting Heal more often than the mage is casting magic missile, lowering the SP consumption of Heal will also be vital, even fully empowered, clanking is an expensive technique, so lowering your SP use as much as possible is going to save you gems in SP pots and stones in the long run.
Since single target clanking will allow you to keep dealing damage, upgrading Bash cooldown and damage will cut down heal costs, because you’ll be able to heal yourself less frequently and still hold aggro. Later, with heal getting more and more expensive, and rejuvenate becoming necessary, holding aggro with bash and normal hits together with heals can actually save you SP.

Later on, you have 4 points left at level 59, after max empowering both Bash and Heal. If you didn’t, or only partially empowered Bash, you may have anywhere from 9-19 points, which you can add to any other skill, which I’ll go into below.
Restore does not generate any appreciable amount of aggro, and is frankly good enough on its own. Invincible is not a clanking tool, in fact, invincible is only useful to a clanker when they’ve pulled too much aggro, or they’ve lost it to a squishy, something I’ll go into later. None of the cleric’s buff spells, lasting for an hour as they do, needs any upgrading, and trip and bleed are currently broken.
So this leaves you with Rejuvenate. Rejuvenate is to Heal, what Mock is to Sneering Kick, it generates much more aggro, and is required to hold aggro off archers and higher level mages, but costs an absolutely horrific amount of SP, and has a long, ten second cooldown.

Putting points into cooldown will drop the time from 10 seconds to as low as 7 seconds, or, in clanking terms, three casts of heal compared to five. This will make it possible to generate a lot more aggro, which makes it good for clanking. However, only four points will reduce it to 8 seconds, which, though it sounds good, the 0.8 second casting time will delay your heal, which you cannot afford to do, making it just as good to put three points as it is four points into cooldown, since both come out to four Heal spells in effect. If you’re going to leave it at three points however, be sure to upgrade it to five as soon as possible, your total damage healable will improve dramatically, which again makes for larger mobs.
The other choice is to upgrade SP consumption. Five points will halve your SP costs, cutting easily 100 SP off every combat, and so much more from regular combat. However you choose to spend your points now, remember you can always add more points later.

What is not worth the trouble at this point is saving your points for the next level of heal-type spells. Even if Recover was a useful spell (debatable in its present state), 1.5 second cast time and a long cooldown, coupled with the sheer inefficiency of healing an entire party when you’re the only one taking aggro, prevent it from being a useful clanking skill, unless the aggro it generates proves to be large enough to take monsters off people with just one cast. Even then, the benefit you could get from 10 points of empowerment simply wouldn’t be sufficient to make this a worthwhile point investment.

Weapon

For clanking against a single target, the mace, rather than the hammer, will be your weapon of choice. The hammer hits hard, yet infrequently, and if you’ve ever watched an archer in action next to a mage, you’ll know that it’s not the size of your damage, it’s how often you deal it that matters to monsters, since they’ll attack the archer nine times out of ten.
Once trip and bleed are fixed, then the ability to stun might make carrying a hammer with you worthwhile for boss clanking, whilst the DoT from Bleed is looking to make the mace look even better for holding aggro. If and when this occurs, I’ll update this guide after checking out both skills and their impact, but for now, the mace is hands down the best tool for the job.

Now you’ve build your clanker (or even if you haven’t), it’s time to go into the basics.

Step 1: Know your tools.

The cleric has several key tools at their disposal for clanking.

#1: Heal.
Use it.
See how much health it restores?
Until you pick up Restore and Rejuvenate, that’s how much damage you can take every 2.1 seconds without dying, using a stone, or using a potion. A good time to start clanking is level 27, where you’ve just picked up your 500 HP heal spell, which generates a nice amount of aggro and is a big jump up in power from your earlier heals. Every time you pick up a new level of Heal, take some time to familiarise yourself with how much it restores. Get a feel of it, because it’s your number one weapon.

When you fight any monster, you should have a rough idea of how long you can survive without healing against it, so that you know when you can heal other people even whilst taking damage yourself. The only way to do this, of course, is practice.

Heal at low levels will be the signal to attack for your party mates, and even at higher levels, it will make up the bulk of your healing ability.

#2: Restore.
When I first got this skill, I really wasn’t too impressed with it. When I started clanking enemies which could out-damage my heal though, my opinion changed dramatically. Whilst you’re healing yourself, you can easily slip a recover in between heal cooldowns, and by the time it expires, you’ll have recovered 525 hitpoints. That’s more than an extra Heal already, and you got it two levels earlier than you got Heal[5].
Since Restore doesn’t need any more maintenance from you than the occasional recasting, it’s always worth having it active when you’re clanking, it’ll buy you time for rejuvenate to resolve, it will keep you alive when heal alone isn’t enough and stones are cooling, and you can sling it onto a party-mate who’s taking hits, and save their lives without breaking your own self-healing. It’s also cheap, costing only 86 SP for a max level Restore, which recovers more HP for the target than Rejuvenate[1], and has half the cooldown, which will allow you to recast it on several targets in quick succession.

#3: Rejuvenate.
Along with Heal, this leviathan healing spell will be your #1 aggro holding tool, and backup plan both. With a 0.8 second casting time, it should only be used while heal is in cooldown, but when combined with Heal, a cleric can recover 4000 HP in under 4.5 seconds.
At low levels, until around 40 or so, you won’t really need Rejuvenate; it’s expensive, it’s slow, and nothing much that you should be fighting out-damages your Heal. However, if you want to hold aggro, even when an archer is spamming their DoTs, and the mage is critting one hit out of five with Fireball, you’re going to need to use Rejuvenate, and liberally so.
As you gather more and more monsters at once, you’ll eventually end up needing and appreciating the massive dose of healing that Rejuvenate provides; once you’re holding five trumpies, each dealing 250 damage each, every second and a half, you’ll find that Heal really doesn’t do the job on its own, and you’ll be losing 150-450 HP after healing, and it’s with rejuvenate that you’ll be making up for the deficit.

#4: Buffs.
There is only one piece of advice for your buffs; keep them active. Recast them regularly, get into the habit of recasting your buffs every half hour or so. It might cost more, but the easiest way to die is for Endure or Protect to run out mid-combat, and you suddenly take 360 damage per hit instead of 250.

#5: Stones and Potions.
I appreciate, as a cleric, your relationship with stones may be shaky at best. You don’t normally ever need to use a health stone at all, but if you’re clanking a large mob, knowing when to use an HP stone or potion can save your life when all of your spells are on cooldown, or you need to help someone else in the party. SP stones will be your best friends in all the world, because if you ever run out of SP, you will die. Always be aware of how many stones you have, always keep a potion or two handy, in case of the unexpected.

#6: Invincible.
Invincible is, most of the time, useless to the clanker. You’ll be healing yourself anyway, so what would be the point?
However, there are times when invincible is worth using, whenever another monster spawns onto a party-mate, when it’s time to cut and run, or you need time to do something, invincible is the thing that’s going to give you the time you won’t have when you’re clanking normally.

#7: Recover.
I hate this spell, as a heal spell, it’s pretty worthless. It restores only 800 HP, it’s expensive, it’s slow, and its only time for healing the entire party is as a preventative measure, it can and will never be an emergency heal.
But, now I have it, it has a permanent place on my hotbar.

Why?

It’s a clanker’s dream.
Recover generates Mock levels of aggro, whilst at the same time healing everyone in your party. It can take enemies that have just started attacking (or even enemies a partymate has been hitting for awhile) off a partymate, and onto you with just one cast, it can cure all the damage on the person that grabbed aggro from one of the monsters you were AOEing, and reclaim aggro, all without you having to retarget.

For level 60+, Recover will replace Rejuvenate as the "go" signal for the rest of your party, but it generates so much aggro, even if some of them jump the gun, you’ll still probably hold the monster.
In fact, after a lengthy heal chain + Recover, you’ll have generated so much aggro that even if you stop healing for twenty seconds or more, the monster will still be hitting you, even if a mage has been shooting it the whole time.

When you get Quicken at level 67, with 0 cooldown time for one cast, this spell will be the one you use with it.

Note: Recover is such a bad healing spell, it breaks your heal chain, loses you HP and kicks your pet poodle.
Unlike all other cleric’s heal spells, if you are having trouble surviving, do not use the following chain: Heal, Rejuvenate, Heal, Recover, Heal.
Rejuvenate will restore your health slightly after casting time is finished (meaning the second Heal in that chain actually resolves before Rejuvenate does), but then Recover will delay and mess up your Heal Chain, resulting in quite possible death.
However, by casting Rejuvenate then chaining onto Recover, you will allow Rejuvenate to resolve mid-cast time for Recover. This will bump your health back to near full, then one second later Recover will resolve, bumping your health to full again. Do not try to chain multiple Recovers when you have Quicken.

Note: Now I actually have Quicken I can stress this fact: Chaining Multiple Recovers with Quicken does not work as well as waiting for aggro to start wavering off you, then pulling off the second Quicken again. The sheer size of a level 60+ AOE mob (potentially as many as thirty to forty monsters) combined with the excessive damage of a level 60+ AOEing mage will more than likely have at least one or two monsters eventually start hitting the mage instead of you, sometimes more, even after Recover is cast. This is more or less inevitable, thanks to the forces involved, but easily remedied by the second Recover once the mages start taking damage. This stops them going into a panic and stoning unnecessarily. Using the Heal Chain to sling a Heal at the mage(s) whilst you rejuvenate yourself will keep them, and you, alive.

Step 2: Preparing your party.

Some people, unbelievable though it may sound, don’t realise that clerics are awesome tanks. They are used to partying with fighters, which is fine, but a clanker works in a different way to a tanker. Whilst the tanker can immediately generate large amounts of aggro then faces periods of cooldown where that aggro dwindles, the clanker starts out slow, but just keeps accelerating, until their level of aggro is so high that no monster will be able to take their eyes off your sparkly lights.

Because of this slow build-up, if someone attacks a monster before you have built up sufficient aggro to keep their attention, the monster will lose aggro on the clanker and will start attacking the one who attacked them. Whilst Healing can build up aggro faster than someone attacking, and eventually take aggro back onto the clanker, this is expensive, painful, and risks the target being one-shotted.

Instead, make your party aware of the limits of clanking. Below level 41, a cleric will have a tough time holding aggro from an archer who uses DoTs, and will have to spend a few seconds building up aggro to hold a monster against the mage.
So, for the under 41 clanker, your party-mates will have to wait for you to heal yourself, and this is a sign that they can start attacking. This allows you the opportunity to get a few attacks in before you heal which will cement your hold on the monsters.
For the level 41 and over clanker, your party-mates must wait for your first cast of Rejuvenate, which is much flashier, and will allow even archers to start using all those DoT spells without having to spam nature’s protection at the same time. So long as your party-mates are patient enough to let you cast Rejuvenate before attacking, your chances of losing aggro from now on are slim indeed.

In case anyone doesn’t know what the two skills look like, Heal on the top, Rejuvenate on the bottom.

Note the markings on the ground with Rejuvenate, in case your feet are obscured, when the skill resolves there’s also a red light from above that doesn’t show up when you cast Heal.

So, now you know what to use, your party knows what to do, it’s time to start clanking!

Step 3: How to clank.

Basic Clanking up to level 40:

Move up to a single monster, and attack it. Whenever you can, cast your highest level heal on yourself. If at any point you lose aggro, immediately bash the monster, which is sometimes enough to regain aggro. Failing that, begin casting heal on the monster’s new target.

Since you have no extra healing skills, the strongest enemies you can face aren’t that much more damaging than your highest level healing spell, nor can you really hold multiple monsters for AOE yet. As such, stick to one monster at a time.

If you have a ranged attacker for luring enemies, have them attack only enough to draw the monster’s attention. As soon as they do, cast your highest level heal on them as the lure retreats back towards you, and once the monster gets close enough to you, use Bash. Most of the time this is sufficient to make you the monsters new target, if not, the lure must loop around the monster, and run back towards you, whilst you continue to heal them with your maximum level heal, and bash when the monster gets close enough, after two passes you should become the monsters target, even if you miss entirely with bash.

Because this technique wastes a lot of time and SP where the monster isn’t taking damage, the simpler, and cheaper method is for the cleric to walk close to the monster, aggro it just by standing near it, then pull it back to where the rest of the group is waiting, healing as you go. Once you get close, start attacking and self-healing normally, you should have gained enough aggro from self-healing on your way back that your allies can start attacking straight away.

There are more tricks you can pick up to make clanking easier, such as keeping recover cast on yourself and your allies, but it’s not until level 41 and upwards that you can start to make use of the heal chain.

Level 40+: The Heal Chain.

Not only is it at this level that Uruga trips start to become popular, it’s also when the cleric picks up their next step in both survivability and aggro control, the Heal Chain.

The basic heal chain comes into play when the cleric needs to heal any target that’s taking more damage than your heal can deal with alone. Since this is a Clanking guide, chances are that target is you.

As such, with an unempowered rejuvenate, the most efficient way to keep a target alive despite massive damage goes:

Heal: Restore: Heal x2: Rejuvenate: Heal x5: Rejuvenate: Heal: Restore.

Rejuvenate, when targeting a tank, can be delayed or accelerated according to how quickly the tank loses health between Heal spells, giving the cleric much finer control over how much they heal.
For clanking purposes, the idea is to generate as much aggro as possible, as quickly as possible, and so should go:

Heal: Restore: Heal: Rejuvenate.

From here, heal until rejuvenate has cooled, and repeat the cycle, using health stones if you have problems staying alive against the mob. By using this chain of heals, not only will you generate enough aggro to keep monsters off your squishies, you’ll also be able to survive taking the hits of all those monsters.

The Aggro Chain:

Extending the Heal Chain for clanking purposes, against a single enemy, it becomes worth throwing in as many attacks as you can muster, since the aggro of the mage against that one target will be higher than if they were AOEing against a large group.

This goes something like:
Heal: Restore: Heal: Rejuvenate: Heal: Bash: Heal: Bleed: Heal: Attack: Heal: Bash: Heal: Rejuvenate….

Note the use of Bleed in the aggro chain. Even though the skill itself is currently terrible, every attack carries with it a certain level of aggro. Bash and Bleed allow you to interrupt your spell animations, unlike auto attack, and lets you build up as much aggro as possible against a single target. It’s even more expensive than the normal heal chain however.

Step 4: Advanced Skills

1: Luring.
If you need to lure enemies, heal can be used to draw an enemy just out of aggro range, even if it’s facing away from you. This can be used to limit the number of enemies you draw at once.

2: Skip all animations.
Whilst the cleric has a lot of pretty animations, the fact is, if you waited for restore and rejuvenate to finish their animations, they’d actually take longer than Heal cooldown. Equally, interrupting Heal with Bash not only allows you to squeeze in some damage, if you press auto attack after either skill, you’ll attack faster than if you’d waited for your character to attack by themselves as well.

3: Skip attacking.
Sure, damage can help you keep aggro, but your attack animation can slow down Heal by a fraction of a second. If you’re facing an enemy and have it targetted, you’ll automatically attack it after you heal, even if you cancel target with escape. Against a large group of enemies, that time could kill you. Press F1 to target yourself, and you’ll no longer auto-attack, potentially saving your life.

4: Preemptive Healing.
Heal resolves slightly after you cast it, and continues to be active for a certain time after it’s cast. If you time the spell carefully just before an enemy strikes, you’ll be able to resolve the heal to recover the health you lost from the strike as well; perfect when you’re not on low health at the moment.

5: The Kensington Effect.
The aggro from Heal cast on a target can cause a recently spawned, or nearby non-aggro’d monster to switch target from a nearer character to the cleric, ignoring everyone in between. Use this to your advantage to take the hits a squishy can’t.

More tips, input and content as I remember it, or as people provide it. Also, Maiya’s ordered me to write a comprehensive cleric guide, so watch out for that in the near future. I’ll update this post with FAQs as and when they arrive, so keep watching this space!

Credits go to Kholai.

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