The Basics - Choosing a Race - Choosing a Weapon -Raising Skills - Partying - Soloing

Clerics are the pure people of this world. They are in contact with the gods. By praying to their gods, they can heal people and do other kinds of wonders. 

The Basics

Choosing a Race

As with all classes, selecting a race is very important in determining how you will play your character.  In the cleric class, the two most commonly used races are half-elf and dwarf.  Wisdom is the key stat when it comes to clerics, as it determines which prayers the character has access to, and how strong those prayers are.  Half-elves have the highest wisdom in the class and therefore can be powerful clerics.  In addition, their fairly high intelligence helps them raise skills faster in a class that is notorious for raising skills slowly.   The main drawback to half-elf clerics is their relatively low strength and constitution. 

Dwarves are an extremely popular choice for the cleric class, particularly for those who wish to use them as tanks.  They are very balanced in the stats that are important for clerics and for tanking.  They combine high strength and constitution with a reasonably high wisdom level.  The main drawback to them is that their low intelligence makes skills more difficult to come by.  

Other races can be acceptable as clerics, though they will likely not be as powerful as half-elves or dwarves.

Choosing a Weapon

For most clerics, there are two primary weapon classes to be concerned with.  In most cases, those who are just starting out will want to concentrate almost exclusively on club skill.  It raises the quickest of all the skills for clerics and does the most damage.  If you concentrate on club skill alone from the start, you can be well into the 30's or 40's by level 10 just by soloing and raising your level when you get the chance.

The other class that is useful to most clerics is flail.  Flail will not do as much damage as club and flails are usually harder to come by if you rely on the shops for your equipment.  However, it will raise at about the same rate as club and it can be a nice alternative to club if you get bored wielding the same weapon all of the time.  I wouldn't recommend messing with flail skill until you get past level 15 or so and have a healthy club skill.  It can be useful, but it's really not worth taking time away from your club skill at lower levels.

High level clerics may also consider raising their staff skill as well.  It raises reasonably fast for clerics (if the term "fast" can be used in the same sentence as "skill" when referring to a cleric).  This can provide a bit more diversity to your skills.

Other skills can be worked on by clerics, just as any other class may attempt to work on skills that may not traditionally be associated with that class.  Just be warned that trying to raise two-handed axe with a cleric, while not impossible, will take a lot of patience and work.  Other weapon classes should be avoided until you get to level 19. 

Raising Skills

As mentioned before, raising skills with a cleric is not a quick process.  It is fairly easy to have club in the high 80's by the time you reach level 19 if you focus entirely on club while you are raising your levels.  As with any other class, partying is the best way to raise skills.  However, if you are tanking and skill raising is your primary purpose, consider recruiting bashers who have lower skills than if you were partying strictly for experience.  By having bashers with lower skills, you will do a higher percentage of the damage and probably stay in the battle longer.  Obviously, it will be harder to raise as much experience as you would in a party with bashers having 100 skill in two-handed axe.  It all depends on what you want from your party.

Partying

Clerics are very popular for parties.  They are often used as "tanks," meaning the person in the party who takes the damage while the other members (the bashers) hit the monster from behind the tank.  Clerics work well as tanks because of their ability to heal themselves through prayer to their gods and their high constitution.

They can also be good bashers as well.  By using their healing prayers to heal the tank, they can be quite useful while doing good damage with a club.

Tanking with a cleric is fairly easy in my opinion.  I'm told by many people that necromancers are much easier to earn vast amounts of experience with, but I've had better success as a cleric.  I'm not certain if that makes me a good cleric or a crappy necro (I suspect the latter strongly), but that is my experience.  

Success as a tank relies on two keys.  First, get a set of aliases that you are comfortable with.  This is very important.  When you are fighting a high-level monster, you must be comfortable with your aliases and commands for healing and rescuing your bashers.  Typos are potentially lethal, so make sure you come up with a system that works.  I'm a very poor typist, so I alias almost everything.  The following are the main aliases I use when tanking:

These aliases work for me with the heals I prefer to use.  I generally keep a wineskin filled with booze (Crutch or firebreather typically), as many kniggets as I can buy and a couple of mental potions as a backup in case I get stuck in a fight with a major NPC.  I also will use meat from the racks on occasion if a ranger has supplied the guild with vast amounts as some are apt to do (*bow Emylia, Caryn, Suze, etc.*).  I also try to keep a pipe lit with parkraz or Hobbitat Gold.  Having a basher who will keep your wounds bound with medicinals is very handy.  Nearly every tank I have seen has a slightly different method and, of course, everyone has their own way of aliasing things so that it makes sense to them.  The most important thing is that you are comfortable with what you use.  Experiment with some things on fairly easy monsters and see what you like.

After you have a good system of aliases, the other aspect you must learn is where to go and what to fight.  This is what separates a good tank from an average tank in most cases.  A tank who knows his limits and knows what he can do with the bashers he has will get more skills for his party and will get better experience in a shorter amount of time than those who don't.  It takes time to learn the MUD well enough to tank.  You need to know a multitude of areas and monsters and know their relative difficulty so that you can be adequately prepared for the fight when you get there.  For those who are inexperienced with these things, party with a good tank as a basher and watch where he goes and what he does.  This will be a good learning experience for you.  Additionally, it is important to explore a lot.  Obviously, most of the MUD is based on killing things, but exploration is perhaps more important to overall success.  Without exploration, you will doom yourself to fighting the same handful of monsters over and over and over.  This will get boring quickly for you and your bashers.

Soloing