heavy armored priest

[KennethTopp]

Is that a viable idea? Or shooting yourself in the foot? Or should they wear robes? Or medium or light armor?

[Zarkhes]

Idea is having heavy front fighters, and ligh back casters.The more heavier armor you have, the more slower you action is.It could easily slow your heal spell so by the time you cast it, it would be already too late.

But it would be awesome.Mine NPC priest is magran folower, and she would look realy great with heavy armor!

[Ichthyic]

heavy armor slows priests down too much IMO.  they can boost their own defenses, but why?  when they can cast such nice buffs and damaging spells.

if you want to make them less squishy, give them a shield, but I rarely have the problem that my priest is getting hit.
 

Chanters, OTOH, are not affected by heavy armor at all (at least for their chants), so giving a chanter plate armor works just fine.  they will attack slower, but you're relying mostly on their chants and invokes anyway so....


 

[Wolken3156]

This isn't IWD, heavily armored Priests are far from optimal sadly. It probably won't harm you too much in Normal or Easy, but in Hard or POTD, its a really bad idea.

[Luckmann]

Viable? It depends on what you consider viable. First of all, forget about Heavy Armour, in game terms, because the Heavy Armour is Full Plate, but what you'll want is likely defined as Medium, meaning anything from Leather to Breastplate.

But is it viable? Well, you'll be able to finish the game, no doubt. But as far as optimization goes, anything above Cloth for a priest (even robes, because robes are NOT the same as Cloth; Cloth has no penalty, but robes have a 15% penalty for some nonsense reason) is strictly sub-optimal, and the higher you go, the more you're going to be gimping yourself, largely needlessly.

But if you want to do it anyway, for thematic reasons if nothing else, then yes, it can be done. But you should know that you could do better, and go into the game knowing that you won't be at your best. The penalty is just not worth the protection for anything short of a tank.

But if I ever play a priest of Magran, I'm going to do it with a Breastplate. I know that is a terrible choice, but I will do it anyway. So you should know that it is a terrible, terrible choice - and then decide whether that's a bullet you want to bite. If you do, I would recommend actually building it as a melee Priest (which is another terrible choice) to capitalize on the added protection, but you don't need to.

[Ichthyic]

I like the quest robes from the castle in act 1 (berathian priest robes)

they look nice, they are unique, and they have 2 damage reduction base with only 5% speed penalty... the way a robe should be.

they are also entirely enchantable, and you can have up to 6 of them.

perfect caster gear IMO.  they do have ONE problem though... they weren't properly designed to be worn with capes; you'll find capes will clip into your back if you wear one while wearing this robe.

edit:

I decided to take a closer look... and it turns out that I think the robes are set to the sex of your main character.  so the reason they clip with a cape when wearing them on a male character, is because likely, like me, your main character is a female, so actually the game puts a dress on your male character.... and it causes some clipping issues.

I'd call that a bug, but they have a lot more bugs than that to deal with first.

 

Edited April 3, 2015 by Ichthyic

[Itasko]

Heavy Armor = bad recovery time. Priests need the fastest recovery time of anyone really because sometimes they need to heal fast, fast, fast. I don't put anything on my piest that reduces recovery time. Not like anyone ever gets to him any way. If they did, I would just "Halt" them and move away.