D&D 5E 5e grave cleric advice

[Bill Capstick]

Hello everyone, unfortunately my kenku rogue recently got crushed by an ettin in out of the abyss, so this weekend I'm looking to start playing a cleric. I was leaning towards grave cleric as the healing abilities and crit-cancelling seem great, whilst still being a bit tanky.

I rolled stats, and got 15, 15, 14, 13, 10, 8.

I'll be starting at LVL 4, so picked variant human with war caster, then an asi at LVL 4 to give me str8 dex 16 con 14 int 10 wis18 and cha 13.

Am I gimping myself not having any mellee options? Should i use a crossbow over sacred flame? How would you build this character? The rest of the party is a land druid, brawler fighter, div wizard and gloomstalker ranger.

I could be tempted to go with another subclass for martial weapons or attack cantrips, or maybe a level in fighter would be worth it?

Thanks

 

[Blue]

I understand that your group is short on front-liners (depending on if the ranger is ranged or melee), but I think you'd really be spreading yourself too thin to try to go for it.

You mentioned this is a replacement character - are you coming in at 1st or a higher level? Especially if the group is 5th or higher the weapon damage of a cleric has too low of a return (as a percentage of damage needed to kill).

Mind you, that doesn't mean you can't be off-tanking to take a few attacks. If you have spells like Spirit Guardians up you want to be near or at the front anyhow. Assuming half-plate & shield, with +2 max dex, and that's at AC 19 before anything else.

One "action for big damage" is your Channel Divinity - it effectively lets you do the damage of your hardest hitter once per short rest (or twice at higher levels). Between that and your spells there won't be a lot of times where "a bit of damage" is the right choice on how to use your Action. And when it is, you do have cantrips available without diluting yourself. Plus your cantrips improve at 8th, even further pushing them over a weapon.

Are you locked into the choices in your original post? If not I have some suggestions.

If you're not worried about melee you can easily ditch a weapon altogether and go shield+free hand for casting, so all Warcaster brings you is advantage on Concentration, but Resilient (Con) would give you another trained save that helps all including Concentration and give you +1 CON.

In that case all three of your odd scores can be increased as long as one is in CON. Personally I'd go for CON 16 and DEX 14 - more HPs, better concentration saves, same AC in medium armor due to max dex. The loss of a point to Init doesn't hurt a cleric as much - in many cases if healing you want to go later in the round anyway. And since you heal, the effects of a missed CON save are more dangerous then the extra damage that's the most likely effect of a missed DEX save.

The one place a loss of a single point of init hurts is the corner case where you want to ready to use your channel divinity right before a high-damage ally goes. But it's rare that +1 to init will swap your initiative order.

 

[Bill Capstick]

Thanks for the advice, I'm not locked in with any of my class or race decisions yet. I'll swap my sex and con scores, that makes a lot of sense.

I'll be starting at level 4 to match the rest of the party