[r00t61]

IMO:

1. Both Prestige paths for Clerics are somewhat bugged. Heal 18 (the first Heal that only Guardians can use) still heals the same amount of HP as Heal 17, 2000 HP. Which is stupid. In addition, the HP upgrades for Rejuvenate 11 and 12 (the Rejuvenates that only Guardians can use) are only 150 HP, which is less than any HP upgrades for the entire Rejuvenate skill tree. A lvl-89 cleric with Levan Set (lvl 75 blues) using Rejuvenate 9 can heal more HP than a Guardian using Rejuvenate 12.

Which is also stupid.

2. The Protect bonus for HKs is also terribly lame. The best Protect increase is received at lvl 91, when damage/defense increase goes from 127/117 to 300/270. The next level of Protect (the first one that only HKs can use) increases only to 315/365, and the last one, at level 104, only increases to 330/400. Which is stupid.

The Endure bonus for HKs is also lame. At level 95, the last level of Endure available before it becomes an HK-only skill, Endure provides a 920/860 HP/SP bonus. Using a Safe Set (level 85 blues), a Guardian can increase this by 25% to 1,150/1,075, which is awfully close to the bonus provided by the level 104 HK-only version of Endure of 1,180/1,100. Which is, again, stupid.

3. The notion of an HK being better at "soloing" is a red herring. At the 9x/10x, clerics are SO ridiculously slow at killing a mob, relative to the other classes, that soloing essentially becomes pointless. Clerics HAVE to pt in order to gain xp at anything even resembling a reasonable rate. So there's no need to become concerned with "how well will I solo?" as a cleric. As a corollary, there's no need to become concerned with "mace or hammer?" Both cleric prestige paths will suck at soloing so it doesn't matter.

4. Since clerics will have to party thus, here's my take: Deadly Blessing (the HK crit buff) is just awesome for AOE mage grinding parties. There's nothing like Quicken-DB-DB on two 9x/10x mages that have +10 wands. It makes black bears, phouches, mutant snakes, and big mud men disappear in a puff of mage smoke. Deadly Blessing, even unempowered, has a reasonable 1-minute cooldown time, which makes it very useful.

Guardian's Rebirth, however, is awesome for Helga raids. As a cleric on a Helga raid, you will typically have many bodies to revive, so much so that it will overwhelm your Revive cool down. You can theoretically make up for this by simply bringing as many clerics as humanly possible, but there may not be that many clerics available. But this is a very specific function.

You may look at the HK's pvp skills and say cool, I'll do PVP, but clerics and archers in general SUCK at pvp, so unless you have lots of SC to spend, or you like getting killed, there's little point in being a PVP cleric. It's a waste of time.

So the question, "HK or Guardian" is really asking, "Which is the better of 2 flawed choices?"

My answer would be HK, by a small margin.