I don't know that it is IDEAL either, my point was only that a 20 STR cleric, with the right pick of race, is perfectly viable, and in fact they ARE perfectly viable, and rather scary. You really only want to do it with a STR/WIS race. I don't really know where people got the idea that CHA is really all that valuable for a STR cleric, it isn't.
There are several good powers with a Cha rider (the level 3 encounter powers come to mind). I agree it's not crucial, and given Wisdom is more useful 95% of the time, I think the Cha build might even be something of a trap. But at some levels, your power choices are really not that great without a decent Cha mod. Admittedly, after some research, I believe the problem is less great than it sounds... I'd recommend a Str 18, Con 13, Wis 14-16 approach on most Str Clerics.
No, my point is that the STR cleric's powers are just a lot simpler and more direct and aren't really circumstantial at all for the most part.
Have you ever played a well-built Warlord, or played next to one? I really don't get why you seem to believe their powers are all circumstancial and/or difficult to use. The best Warlord powers are mostly "Hit, let an ally shift/move, make them hit too", which is really as simple and universal as it gets, and with the right ally, can be very powerful.
This is a common misconception about CG. The POINT of CG is to provide any healing at all. 1 point brings your fallen comrade back up, so that 1 point is worth FAR more than the additional 3-5 points the CHA cleric is adding. Same with the damage, ANY amount of automatic radiant damage is bad news for your enemies, it is way easy to boost it up and all the nice happy fun undead will love you for it. Sure, with a CHA bonus of +4 it is a better power, but it is already a REALLY good power even without that. Combine with Battle Standard of Healing and the effects are even more awesome.
First of all, if you need CG to keep helping your party members up from below 0 HP, it sounds like you're not doing too hot in the first place.
Second, using a tactic which 1. invites the enemy to either stop skipping over unonscious party members and just knocking them to negative bloodied (cause they'll get back up, otherwise) or take you down if you're outside the zone and 2. keeps everyone constrained to a small area, sounds like a bad idea to me.
Third, there's action economy: it costs a minor action to sustain a zone, but minor actions are important to clerics, and you're very vulnerable to action denial effects; if the enemy is at all mobile, you're giving up your move action as well to move the zone around with them, which will eat up MORE actions.
No, the damage you are doing with SW is not super duper amazing, but it will work out to be quite adequate for a daily. If you go 4-5 swings with it per use on average you're doing better damage than most daily powers even with around a -2 to-hit effectively. Remember, the CA extends even to your own attacks, including SW itself. CA is a very nice debuff. It is going to apply to EVERY other attack made against that enemy and a lot of characters don't have an easy time getting CA. The fact that you can shift the effect to a new opponent is really gold too. I think this is a rather underrated and underappreciated power.
Hrm. All right. I haven't seen Spritiual Weapon in actual play, so I'm willing to give this one to you. It always sounded like an alright, if not great, power to me too.
Do note that it requires a good Wis score, though, or your -2 to hit estimation (which is only very roughly correct, anyway, but I realize it's hard to make a better one) will not hold true. If your wisdom mod is more than 1 lower than your strength mod, I'd recommend taking Augment of War instead. In fact, I would take that anyway (no sustain).
Edit: one final thing I forgot: unless you're taking either as your level 9 daily (which means you miss out on the awesomeness that is Divine Power), you can't take Spiritual Weapon and Consecrated Ground as dailies together.
Yeah, they are just not 'only mediocre'. I think you might want to put one up against a Warlord in actual play and watch. Both are great leaders, but I still say the STR cleric delivers the goods. Righteous Brand was ABSURD pre-errata. Now it is only the best at-will buff in the game. There are still a couple easy ways to get some surgeless healing love, so it really isn't totally nerfed, more like again it was absurd OOTB with AV1 and DP factored in. Surgeless healing though really isn't the big draw for the STR cleric. The big draw is you can apply top-notch buffing, do heavy damage, AND heal all in the same round. When required you can drop one of a whole number of highly effective dailies on top of that. The character will stand up to a pretty good beating and has really excellent defenses. The STR cleric in our group has all around the best defenses of any character in the group, high fort, high will, stratospheric AC, and with a shield in one hand and a crusader's weapon in the other even has a pretty decent REF. It isn't a class with one amazing standout feature, it just has goodness through and through.
Mediocre might be a tad harsh, yeah. In my experience, leaders are some of the best inter-balanced classes, where even the weakest leader (most believe this to be the Ardent) is not terrible compared to the best one. I never meant to paint them as weak or otherwise terrible, because that's simply not true. Strength/Wis clerics are good healers, have some decent buffs (and one of the best at-will buffs in the game), and can be fun to play.
The main reason I responded is because you called them the
best leader, something I can simply not agree with.
. I was playing a 'super high healing cleric' for a few levels before hybrid came out, and I immediately switched to a hybrid invoker|cleric for more damage, blasting, and control.
