If last month’s Swordsman patch theme is about screwing Swordsmen diversity, this month’s Cleric patch theme is clearly about Cleric DPS classes. I’m honestly surprised IMC remembered about DPS Clerics, let alone Physical Cleric DPS, and managed to actually buff the Physical DPS Cleric classes properly beyond mere SFR bumps. I seriously can’t believe last month’s and this month’s class balancing team are the same people unless they really have a grudge against Swordsmen.
IMC finally changed Monk out of its Energy Blast spamming playstyle into a hugely burst-DPS playstyle, thus giving it more leeway for other class skills and exhibit its expected DPS out better in practice. Golden Bell Shield’s Liberation mechanic was recycled as Monk’s Class Art (LOL), but the 5s buff only appears when Golden Bell Shield is on cooldown, the 5s buff resets its cooldown and the skill effect now increases Monk’s Final Damage instead. To make up for the loss of Energy Blast Nirvana, IMC massively buffed other skills and God Finger Flick damage buff duration got a QoL change increase to 30s (IMC, current buff is 15s not 10s lol). While the wording of the buffs implies that it only buffs Monk damage and the loss of Energy Blast Nirvana implies that one can’t proc Thunder Kick as consistently, fiddling with the numbers assure me to some extent that one just needs to play more cleverly and it’ll be all good.
Inquisitor finally have the cooldowns of its burst rotation synchronized, with Breaking Wheel on 25s and Ripper on 50s (25s if using Inquisitor Vaivora Lvl 4, Inquisitor Vaivora finally gets to shine again). Some changes were also made to make Inquisitor’s toolkit suit itself more like changing the Wheel to only trigger the user’s attacks and locking Judgement Art’s benefits only for self. Judgement Art’s change also essentially increases its effect’s uptime way up from 10s every 60s to 100% uptime of converting enemies into Devil-types. Simple changes, but IMO effective. Personally at this point, I feel like IMC should switch Inquisitor’s Lvl 4 effect with Inquisitor’s Lvl 1 God Smash perks, but that’s just me
Zealots … I think IMC’s game plan is to finally make Zealot stand on its own as an actual DPS class and not just a Blind Faith debuff bot. The biggest change would probably be Blind Faith changing from 20 hits debuff into an actual decent damage skill so players don’t take Zealots into full support builds to prolong the debuff indefinitely. Immolation getting minimum critical chance while on fire is fun, though I wonder if the fire refers to the 5s damage debuff or the 20s fire property buff (and whether the function extends to Zealot’s Vaivora effect), and Beady Eyed’s buff being 30s is a huge QoL change. Most of its skills have reduced cast times too, so its a nice change for Physical Cleric DPS.
Even in its rather limited class sub-category, Physical Cleric at the moment looks to be one of the most free class categories with each class being able to pull its own weight and not step on each other’s class design along with having their own Vaivoras so players are quite free to mix and match however they like, and I’m quite happy for that. Its rather amusing how IMC can use the same logic of removing synergies and making each class free, and get totally different outcomes on the Swordsman and Cleric tree.
I can’t really say for sure about new Sadhu until more details come out (I can definitely tell that Sadhu Master art got nerfed, her make-up’s way too thick), and I’m not the most knowledgeable about Magic Cleric DPS since I hear a little bit of displeasure about it, though with all these changes revealed, I’m rather shocked that IMC didn’t touch Druid at all. That aside, my lost faith that this class balancing team has their brains in the gutters is somewhat restored, next month’s class patch is going to be a riot to witness I bet.
PS: IMC remembered to change Crusader’s class symbol color to red, but forgot to change the class symbol frame from the circle frame to the octagram class frame. 
