Trait the fire mitigation debuff for curse of sticky feet. Use this on whatever reavers are trying to blow up. When you get the vitality debuff, stack this with sticky feet on whatever reavers are trying to blow up. Almost all sig rank reavers do fire damage. If you've ever heard someone bragging about a 1200 damage dev strike crit the part they don't mention is that they were war leader buffed and their target was defiler debuffed.

Trait improved plague gourde. Use it between heals to debuff the block/parry/evade on the focus target. If you can get it to land, you will crit and apply the debuff (-5% to b/p/e) about 37% of the time. This stacks with the rank 5 spider debuff and other plague gourdes (even your own).

Try not to use any other of your attack skills in a big fight. Fire gourde does not stack with the BA fire dot (which is crap Turbine...), staff strike is a joke for power efficiency.

What is this 'job' and 'real life' that you speak of :)

hahaha.. np, it's likely everything will end up changing in Bk14 anyways

Or a HoT, if you're feeling nice. :wink:

Also, let WLs do all the tanking, it's what they are good at.

*cough* Rainyman and NoPain get working on that tactics section :)

http://baos.alanlouie.com/node/53

But from a very much non-defiler... mine is R0 still, my viewpoint from leading them and what i've learned

a) Freeps are chasing you around and trying to kill you. Good. They're not trying to kill anyone else and you have some defense mechanisms (slight self heal and the fear).

b) When running, find or request a Web the Earth and run through it... if they get to melee range, blow fear

c) When we're not engaged with NPCs and people are dropping, strongly consider staying out of combat and doing rezzing to let the WL's fire their big rezzes when needed, not just on one or two creeps.

d) IMO work on keeping people moderately up and let the WL's work on the burst healing/defense. Yes fire that big one when needed, but those heal over times help maintain people at a reasonable level so we aren't wittled down (WL's are great at single target mass healing. The AoE one is really expensive to fire off)

e) When defending a keep, stay alive and be ready to go upstairs and rez dead people from outside the entrance into the keep

f) Slot health to stay alive longer against both NPCs and Freeps... see NoPain's guide in the link above to traits

g) If you aren't using your fear on anything else at the moment and the raid leader isn't having you hold it for a particular call, go find the closest chunk of freeps and fear them a bit. Preferably the ones chasing someone else around (champs/burgs/guards)

h) See target assist? If you have the power, debuff it (and call it on vent if you can so that another defiler doesn't additionally debuff it).

i) When engaged with many melee NPCs (particularily FM's), if we're not aoe'ing them down, fear a couple off so we can take a few at a time

That's a couple of my thoughts from my utilization of them. To me, the most important use of the defiler is the rezing ability if they can drop out of combat. They help the sustainability of creeps and prevents us from dropping below the critical threshold of viable combat numbers.