[Ethelinde]

To assume that clerics will never need to fight is a major flaw in your thinking. What if you can't find a party to do the grinding for you, or if your guild is in a war and need additional firepower? Being a STR cleric I have more hp and defense compared to most other clerics at my level END build or not. I'm not saying all clerics should solo; I'm just stating the facts from my personal experience. I was a full END all the way till 55 doing nothing but healing, and that was the only thing I could do really, since having such low firepowers put me in serious disadvantage.

As I've also stated, unless you're simply too bad at collecting money or equipments that provide you with END, you are not going to have to ever invest in END. If your reason of investing in END is due to the supposed need to survive you're going the wrong direction, since if you rely on others to take the hits it's unlikely you will ever be in a situation where you few points of extra defense would be needed. Defense from added END is also wasteful as they only provide 0.5 defense per point as opposed to 1 full point of defense from simple greens.

From all my grinding/partying this is the result:

at around 55 my END cleric hit at most around 100 on red mobs, my STR cleric hit 240 (I'm using 55 since that's the highest my END cleric has gotten). With buff my END cleric had roughly 2.4k hp and 2.7k sp, my STR cleric had 2.3k hp & 2.6k hp (change in gears). My END cleric has about 540 defense without +9 equipments & my STR cleric had about 650.

As you can see gears are what's really making the difference for me, and I've spent less than 500s on all of them except for my hammer & shield.

I can't really say my block rate wins over the END cleric, but once again if you rely on healing others for exp, then you most likely won't be blocking much mobs anyway. Since others are the ones that take hits for you.

Going after the block rate is logical for fighters as they tank and make maximum use of the shield, but as a support cleric it's rather pointless. After all if you're at the point where those block rate meant life or death for you then you would really not have a purpose in pt (you're too busy healing yourself to mind others).

Imo if you're a careful cleric you would never draw aggro upon yourself via heal; from experience only crazy heal spamming (as crazy as spamming 1k+ heal on 200 damage) have even a chance to steal from mages.