After getting Priest to level 30 I've now manage to get a Mystic to level 25. This wasn't really my intent, but as my other friends have been playing now I decided to create another healer to run through Bastion of Lok, and leveling Mystic to 20 was pretty easy. While I'm no means a master of the class, I do have a few things to say about it at this point, though keep in mind my impressions are limited to the level 1-25 range.
And unfortunately my impressions of the class up to this point is that it is a poor man's priest, and no where near as interesting.
Offensively Mystic works very much like a Priest (except with fewer spells). Mystics have a standard ranged attack (just like Priest, and Sorcerer), a short ranged cone-based AOE (like Priest), and a short ranged high damage strike (just like Priest). This combination is very effective at low level, just like priest, and I have to admit I was MUCH faster soloing this time around. But this isn't because Mystic is faster or harder hitting (quite the opposite I think), it's because my soloing tactics have changed due to experience.
While I leveled this range as Priest I stayed at long range, plinking and jumping to stay at range. This is a mistake, in fact. At low levels (up to 25), it's much more effective to pull packs of mobs, stay at close range, and chain your AOEs at close range while circling your opponent to avoid most hits. While before I was taking on 1 mob at a time, I'm doing 4+ as a mystic. And with packs of small mobs I'm pulling 3-4 packs at a time, and AOEing them. Priest could do the same thing, but I just didn't even think about it at the time.
Mystics do get an effective lock-on poison effect that is very effective and has the advantage of being castable in motion. This is a cool spell, which can stack up to 3 times on a target, but is hampered by a 10 second duration, which means that you will be casting this a LOT. Too bad, because with this spell, and other DPS spells, the Mystic would be much more effective, but as it is it can actually be somewhat annoying to keep 100% of the time this up while healing.
As a healer Mystics just don't have the options that a Priest does. Mystics can drop healing orbs, which are very nice. And they have an effective lock-on heal. They also have a lock-on cleanse...and a very expensive healing fairy that stays up only for a few seconds. That's it. Priest definitely feels more versatile.
Of course Mystics DO get summons, but in practice I've not been enthused with them. Besides the tanking summon, most of the summons don't last very long (10-20 seconds), have a high MP cost, and aren't that affective anyway. The tanking pet, for example, holds aggro 'ok', but on average is hitting for about 28 damage and gets knocked down a LOT. The Thrall of Vengeance, a ranged attacker, lasts for less than 20 seconds, and does just about 180 damage a hit (about the same as the primary nuke at this stage), and uses a lot of mana so you can't just leave it up even if you wanted to.
In fact even with using my main nuke, with the DPS pet, and the poison debuff at 3 stacks I feel like I'm doing...less damage than any other class than perhaps priest (at range anyway). And this is simply not sustainable for very long even under the best of circumstances.
And unlike Priests, Mystics seem to have a mana issue. While Priests can easily get mana back pretty easily Mystics only have Circle of Corruption at this level and this is a low damage AOE that's short range and returns a relatively small amount of damage (though on the plus side it provides mana to everyone in range). From experience the spell is not that useful solo, and is harder to use in a party where there is a lot of movement and AOE. That's not to say it's worthless, but the spell would be much better with a slightly larger radius, or a reduced channeling time.
As for evasion the Mystic class gets Teleport (just like the sorcerer), which is a pretty cool spell by itself. But priests get two evasion skills, one with a damage component, so even in that regard Priest seems more versatile. Fighting BAMs solo, I definitely preferred the two jumping skills that Priests get over Mystics single (if cooler) teleport.
At 25 I think I have enough information to say that while the class is not broken, it may not be the one for me. It's features mimic those of other classes too closely and it's distinctive abilities (such as its summons) are just not that cool. They need to last longer, and be more effective than they are right now (it would also be useful if you could heal them). Party Auras are much more useful (at this point I've only got the party speed buff), but burn mana which is already a scarce resource.
The two Bastion of Lok runs I did with the Mystic showed me that unlike Priest, who can still DPS in a fight, as a Mystic mana was too much of a precious resource to burn. Every time I tried to heal and DPS, I ended up having to stop for fear of running out of mana. And Circle of Corruption was completely worthless in a boss fight--it wasn't worth the risk of getting that close and staying in one place long enough for it to be effective. At least 50% of the time I tried, I'd get knocked down, and loose the channel anyway.
So at this point I'm not likely to take my Mystic much farther. I might do a few more BOL runs, or possibly SM?, but I'm much happier with Priest at this point and am looking forward with the rest of my group catching up to 30.
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