Hexen/Cleric



At first Parias the Cleric might look like the least useful character: his AC and weapon damage are less than Warrior’s, and he can’t shoot with his basic weapon unlike Mage. Don’t be hasty with conclusion. Cleric is the most well-balanced among the three characters. He’s also the only one who can drain life energy from his foes, transferring it to his HP.

Weapons

 * Mace of Contrition is a common melee weapon with no special abilities, but useful nonetheless.


 * Serpent Staff is your second weapon. Being a ranged weapon, it fires two green sparkles, each of them moving in a sinusoidal wave, which makes it very hard to use at long distances and in narrow corridors. Still, it’s a good medium-range tool, and firing it point blank allows you to drain HP from your foes. Don’t expect it to be a “super vampiric weapon which allows you to be invincible”, because melee strike with Serpent Staff never causes pain shock (except to Stalkers). Perfect targets for your life restorations are Ettins since they are slow and have no special abilities. Other enemies are harder to suck HP from: Afrits can fly, strafe and shoot at you at the same time; Chaos Serpents can shoot, but are too slow (always strafe when hitting them in close combat); Wendigos constantly shoot at you, making it harder to approach them; Centaurs block attacks with their shields; Stalkers hide underwater (but aren’t so bad anyway since they receive pain shock from melee attacks of Serpent Staff); Dark Bishops fly, shoot and explode on death.


 * Firestorm is another medium- and close-range weapon. It fires a very fast fire bolt which explodes on impact. Firestorm deals additional damage to all targets close to the first one by spawning 8 fire sparkles for a few seconds. It can happen so the main fire bolt will hit a target, then the target will move into sparkles, receiving additional damage from them.


 * Wraithverge is your last and the most powerful weapon. It fires a ghostly bolt which deals some damage to the target. Even if it misses, there’s nothing bad in this, because it spawns 4 self-guided ripper ghosts which chase your enemies and deal damage each time they happen to be “inside” the target. Good against Centaurs because these foes can’t protect themselves with shields from “inside” attacks. Another good usage is to shoot the wall in front of you, so ghosts will fly around the corner and slay monsters that are hard to reach. Ironically, ghosts pass through walls, but never attack enemies through walls (they need to fly through some space to reach the target).

Usage of Artifacts

 * Mystic Ambit Incant: Restores a lot of HP.
 * Flechette: The effect is very similar to Bomb of Ancients in Heretic. Cleric puts the bottle down, and after about a second it detonates, creating a big cloud of poison and dealing constant damage to all targets in this cloud (including you, so be careful). Good against Centaurs since they aren’t able to block attacks with their shields in the cloud of gas and become stunned, other foes don’t seem to have problems passing through the gas, but they receive damage anyway. However, you need to place this item carefully not to be hit by poisonous cloud and make sure monsters will pass through this cloud to you at the same time.
 * Icon of the Defender: Invincibility (doesn’t protect against instant death), you’ll be transparent from time to time. If you’re transparent, monsters’ attacks will pass through you.