Will the Cleric still be an absolute requirement for a party?

[Irda Ranger]

One of the things that has always bothered me about D&D is how the Cleric is far more important than any other class - to the point of being a requirement for any party that wished to succeed without extreme difficulty.

Agreed. I think that's a pretty "obvious" problem though, which suggests it will be on the "To do list" of the 4e designers.

Iron Heroes has some good uses of the Heal skill, which becomes more effective with level, and has different rules for healing naturally which allows you to recover without a Cleric. I don't expect it to translate over directly to 4e, but it's a good example of what's possible to write into the rules without resorting to the divine spellcasting trope.

I think a good balance, which I expect the designers to be aiming for, is that having a Cleric will be "a nice healing boost, but not necessary."

I'd also appreciate fewer monsters that inflict the types of damage which makes Restoration and other spells necessary.

 

[Irda Ranger]

For healing hitpoints out of combat, you can always just have the rogue UMD a wand of cure light wounds. That part isn't what clerics are uniquely competent at.

No charged items in 4e.

 

[Christian]

No charged items in 4e.

A) He was talking about the 3rd Edition paradigm.

B) Cite? I've seen hints, but nothing definitive about that.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

A) He was talking about the 3rd Edition paradigm.

On the one hand, the thread is dealing with the 4E paradigm. On the other hand, I'm getting the impression that there will be a lot less need for a dedicated healer in 4E. So the whole exercise is kind of ridiculous until we find out some more about class structure and hit point recovery systems.

 

[Merlion]

I've never understood why some people see Clerics as necessary, or a healer for that matter. Its rarely been an issue in my experience.

Since they wont get rid of the Cleric, I just hope its halfway balanced in 4e.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I've never understood why some people see Clerics as necessary, or a healer for that matter. Its rarely been an issue in my experience.

I guess it's just that in my games and in my Living Greyhawk games that I've run there are enemies at Average Party Level 10 or so who are power attacking with a two handed weapon for 10 and getting 3d6+32 points of damage with more than enough bonus to hit 2 attacks per round on the fighter. When a 10th level fighter gets hit for over 80 damage a round, there is no way for him to survive 2 rounds of it(rolling max hitpoints with a con of 18 gives him 140, and he'd still be dead after 2 rounds, on average. Using the Living Greyhawk method of average plus one on all die rolls, he'd have 104 hitpoints).

Basically, either the fighter gets a heal of at least Cure Critical strength each round or he dies. Generally, the only way to do that is to have a cleric around.

Either that or the party finds a way to kill the enemy on the first round each time to avoid it getting a second round of attacks. I've seen at least one party who was built for massive damage who played without a cleric, and they all had Improved Initiative so that they could get enough damage on the enemy before they died. They still had a lot more random deaths than other groups whenever they found an enemy immune to the element they used on their first round of attacks or when they rolled low on initiative.