D&D 5E Clerics of Life: Broken, Bad Design, or Working as Intended?

[FormerlyHemlock]

But a Fey Knight Paladin is the most Soloable class in the game (although battle master fighter is close).

Beg to differ. If I were going to solo, I'd take either a Necromancer or a Shadow Monk w/ Mobile feat, and I think the Shadow Monk would be more fun.

 

[derickmoore25]

I get the feeling the multiplier wasn't used for figuring encounter difficulty

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Another question I'd be interested to discuss is this: if the Cleric of Life is working as intended, and we agree that it provides the whole group with a CR multiplier, what is that multiplier?

I have yet to run a group with a Cleric of Life in it, but I've run groups with Lore Bards, who are actually much better healers than Life Clerics.

My informal observation is that healing magic is never indispensable (since HP is only a second line of defense; it's almost always better to spend movement than HP) but it is useful, especially for groups with high AC. The value of healing is essentially tied to how many rounds of enemy actions it negates, which is high for someone like an AC 23 Paladorc (with Shield for AC 28) or an AC 21 Bladesinger with Blur up, and lower for someone like a Recklessly attacking AC 16 Wolf Barbarian or other DPR-focused character. (Yes, damage resistance helps, but generally IME it just offsets the Reckless bit, and damage taken per round is still high.)

For a truly optimized healer like a Life Cleric 1/Sorcerer 3/Lore Bard 6/Warlock 5 (healing about 2500 HP per long rest plus 480 more per short rest) in a group with lots of at-will DPR (Sharpshooter fighters/rangers) and good defenses (say, a Mounted Combatant tank in plate armor and a shield), the effectiveness multiplier is about tenfold: instead of having 400 HP in the party, you have about 4000. For a life cleric the effect is much smaller, probably not more than double, and it doesn't affect an individual fight as much as it does the party's endurance over the course of an adventuring day. Your story about an eight-PC group taking down fifty enemies is about what you'd expect from any group, life cleric or not. Eight PCs are hugely powerful.

Edit: oh, wow, this thread is necro'ed and I've already responded to it last year. To explain the superhealer: the essence of the build is that a Lore Bard 6 can steal Aura of Vitality (3rd level Paladin spell) which heals 70 points over the course of a minute. Then Life Cleric 1 adds 5 points of healing per round, for 120 total, and then you use Extend Spell and a sorcery point to double it to 240 points of healing. Voila, 240 points of healing with a single 3rd level spell. Most efficient healer in the game, and none of the targeting restrictions which always make Preserve Life worth less than its theoretical maximum.

 

[derickmoore25]

Agreed!

You have to be careful when you build encounters with that many enimes the encounter xp system isn't designed to figure more then 20 enemies. So you can't accurately calculate difficulty the encounter multiplier increases evwry 3-4 monsters. If I had to guess I'd say that encounters multiplier fore figuring difficulty should of been between 10-15

 

[Tanarii]

Little bit of thread necromancy here, but it turns out this discussion is not over in my head.

It turns out that everything I've described up until this point in the thread has been wrong, at least insofar as I didn't realize the quantity multipliers were a thing. I just noticed them last night.

If you include the multipliers, the numbers are even more off, and encounters get even easier. What are other dungeon masters' experiences with this system? Do you find that the combination of XP budget and quantity multipliers is giving you accurately challenging encounters?

Even accounting for the size of my party (eight PCs) according to the guidelines in the RAW, a x3 multiplier for 11-14 enemies seems egregious.

You probably should have started a new thread linked back to this one. Folks aren't likely to notice this post, with a new question, many pages into to the post and made a year later. Unless they do what I just did, and read the entire thread through in one sitting.

IMo the force multipliers are critical to understanding the rated difficulty of the fight. For example, you claimed originally 1100 xp per PC, for 8 PCs. That's Deadly, and your PCs blowing all their resources on the one fight would be shocking. They should have been able to survive that and handle another 2+ a bit encounters of that difficulty. To a totally adventuring day of 3500 xp per PC.

But when you multiply it x3, now you're looking at 3300 xp per PC for difficulty purposes, or 3xDeadly. And just shy of how much they should be able to handle in a day. So yes, blowing all their resources, including healing, is appropriate. Surviving, especially with everyone on their feet, is somewhat amazing, and having a Life Cleric undoubtably helped make that possible.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You probably should have started a new thread linked back to this one. Folks aren't likely to notice this post, with a new question, many pages into to the post and made a year later. Unless they do what I just did, and read the entire thread through in one sitting.

Ironically, you are chastising someone for necro'ing a thread 12 months ago, last January. Little bit of a late warning. ;-)

 

[DMZ2112]

You have to be careful when you build encounters with that many enimes the encounter xp system isn't designed to figure more then 20 enemies. So you can't accurately calculate difficulty the encounter multiplier increases evwry 3-4 monsters. If I had to guess I'd say that encounters multiplier fore figuring difficulty should of been between 10-15

IMo the force multipliers are critical to understanding the rated difficulty of the fight. For example, you claimed originally 1100 xp per PC, for 8 PCs. That's Deadly, and your PCs blowing all their resources on the one fight would be shocking.

Welcome to ENWorld, both of you, and thank you for the responses.

After a full 17 months of running my weekly campaign (in the interest of dispelling confusion, my last post to the thread was in January 2015), I have stopped seeing the negative issues related to the DMG EXP calculations that I was a year ago. The system seems to be performing much more reliably for me. It is probably down to my having more experience with the system.

I still find it almost impossible to burn down our life cleric's pool of healing abilities without resorting to feats of basest contrivance (I actually finally tapped him out for the first time this past Wednesday), but it also hasn't become the issue I thought it would -- focused burst damage is still potentially lethal (or at least incapacitating) at 7th level.

 

[Tanarii]

Ironically, you are chastising someone for necro'ing a thread 12 months ago, last January. Little bit of a late warning. ;-)

I'm on a roll today. /smh

 

[derickmoore25]

Ironically, you are chastising someone for necro'ing a thread 12 months ago, last January. Little bit of a late warning. ;-)

Take a look at the cultist in the MM it has lvl 3 spells treat it as a caster 1 lvl higher then the party. Throw a small group of them together using the highest lvl slots they have for aoes and do a couple small encounters then 1 big one. In my experience that uses up heals quickly.

 

[derickmoore25]

Trap them in a 60ft hallway 1 tank 1 caster on each side. The caster covers his side of the hallway with wall of fire and then hides behind the tank. Suddenly the party has to find a way out right now or they are going to die. Another cool thematic change I love is anything that has natual resistance to an element and it makes since for is healed by it. Fire elementals 2 charge forward and fight the party one hangs back blasting. One of them gets low he nukes the area with fireball healing the other 2 elementals.