You’re right, it is considered a hybrid support/dps build, but I feel like the support chaplain alone provides isn’t good enough at endgame pvm.
The reason for that is because every dungeon / saalus will have pardoners outside offering blessing and sacra. You can only expect your blessing to be useful after halfway through dungeon when their pardoner shop blessing wears off. Depending on their build, they can also do the whole dungeon without losing their blessing (i.e. my Sadhu 3 PD 2 never runs out of blessing even not being a chaplain).
Chaplain buffs benefit only very specific classes. When playing my Murmillo, blessing / last rites / sacra are completely useless seeing i’ll never auto-atk and my skills are single hits with very high % skill factor. What’s +2k damage when my skill hits for 100k?
At the same time, chaplain buffs are very useful for certain classes like Quarrel Shooter 3 and SR 3. These classes will have their blessing wear off super fast. In the case those builds are in your party, they’ll love you for being a chaplain.
Overall, I feel like chaplain is not good enough support since it’s limited to being helpful only to a very limited amount of builds. Having your buffs rendered to useless when players pick Pardoner’s blessing makes most of chaplain’s supportiveness crumble.
And at the same time, at ET higher floors, blessing buff will make very little difference since players will have high end transcended weapons and blessing is a +flat damage addition. Thauma 3 as a support, on the other hand, is useful everywhere and a big supportive boost to ET parties.
Ressurection in paper sounds like an important skill. But I can count on my fingers the amount of times I used it successfully in a party. Players rarely die, and even if they do, they can be carrying Soul Crystals. You’re a chaplain yourself, tell me how many times you’ve used Ressurection and tell me if it’s worth the skill points or not.
Yes, it’s a trade-off, but I don’t feel like it’s one good enough. In my opinion chaplains perform much better at Inqui 1 build because of the synergy of auto-atk and Breaking Wheel / Malleus. PD 2 has zero contribution and synergy with your auto-atks.
I have both Chaplin -> PD2 and Sadhu 3 -> PD2 and I feel like the second build deals more than double the amount of dps of the first one. I take ~10 minutes to solo lv 290 dg with the second build while the first one easily takes 20+ mins. Both with similar transcended gears. Of course chaplain has less dps, but I feel like it’s too much dps loss for the little supportiveness it gives.
If you want a true damage support that makes a huge difference at endgame, make CryoChrono or ThaumaLinker.