Oh cleric what are thou? When most classes can heal...

[TheSword]

I always thought the phrase came from [Cleric Or Druid]-zilla.

I think the most important healing a cleric does is the few hp to bring someone back to consciousness and acting again. This has become easier than ever which frees the cleric up to do more interesting things.

I like the fact that magical healing has taken a back seat, it always stretched credulity to have so much magical healing in the game to my mind.

We have a cleric (or Druid) in about 75% of games. But I like the fact that no class is essential.

 

[Li Shenron]

... but is it enough? I think it's great that no single class is "needed". The last thing I want is a game where one player has to "play class X" because no one else wants it and she's stuck with it. 3e's answer was to make the cleric extremely powerful. 5e's answer was to make the cleric not mandatory. But did 5e overshoot?

You already answered yourself. It's just great as it is now. There is no good reason for a single class to be mandatory in a party. The current range of healing options in 5e is the result of decades of players asking for more healing sources, exactly because people don't like being forced to play something to fill the gaps, and also generally prefer a game where you can variate the party, instead of always having to build more or less the same tactical group.

In retrospective, I think the 3e approach was a mistake. Not only it used unfairness to fix another unfairness, which didn't cancel out because they were different types of unfairness. But it also failed at noticing how the CODzilla option encouraged a lot of players to play "a solo game within a group", which in my personal opinion goes against the absolute best thing of RPGs which is cooperative play.

 

[Leatherhead]

Oh man, you want to talk about the identity of Clerics? Lets talk about Clerics.

But first, a clarification:

Of the 4 classes that still can't heal others (I think, I may have missed something), two can heal themselves (fighter, monk) and the last two have damage reduction (barbarian, rogue).

Fighters can heal other people. The Purple Dragon Knight isn't popular, but it does boast short rest healing power.

Anyway:

So where does this leave the cleric? Does he still have a role, an identity? Role Playing wise, absolutely (worshiper of a deity is a pretty strong "identity") but "rule-wise", "party role wise" - what does the cleric do?

This is a multi-layered question which goes even farther that it think's it does.

It's first important to mention, the Cleric (A.K.A Priest), was originally a rules patch. They were not the healers, per say. But rather explicitly anti-undead at first. Of course, that's way too narrow of a niche, even back in the day. So they slap-dashed some healing, a bit of spells, and some of the fighting-man (with an arbitrary restriction on weapons for reasons) on for good measure.

It's also worth mentioning that Paladins were introduced shortly after the Cleric was, so the overlap between them has been a thing for nearly the entire run of D&D. So if you wanted to get your smiting, shiny armor, and god-worshiping on, you had multiple ways to do so from basically the beginning.

This means that Clerics became tied to the idea of being a healer. And that's only because healing was a problem that needed to be solved. Nobody really liked having their character in bed for weeks, if not months, at a time after every fight. And people loathed the idea of characters just getting back up after being stabbed in the stomach. It was such a problem, that to this day, there are still message-board skirmishes fought over just how much "meat" an HP consists of. So, Clerics became the defacto method of healing for the game, and there was much quieting of gnashing teeth.

For a time anyway. Because the fate of all patch-fixes is eventual catastrophic failure when the higher-ups inevitably decide "It's working, just leave it be" instead of properly replacing the system. And boy were there problems with this particular patch fix.

Firstly, not everyone likes the idea of being a Cleric. Clerics are characters who pray to the gods in order to get spells, and some people just can't handle that core. Maybe because of IRL religious beliefs, or maybe they can't stomach being second fiddle to anyone or anything.
Secondly, the social contract regarding being the designated healer can be downright toxic. I can vividly remember the time someone exploded at me because I had the audacity to cover the entire party with a Wall of Stone, preventing the enemy archers from delivering a TPK via the business ends of their arrows, which allowed one of the party members to bleed out due to dice rolls.

So at this point in history, the Cleric has an Identity. But it's a crappy one. They are the Healers who also worship gods to get spells. Who are different from the other guys who worship gods so they can stab the badguys better.

These problems festered for a few editions, right up until 3e, where they decided to make Clerics more popular by shaking up a few things. Naturally, the fixes made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Mostly because they didn't fix the mechanical problems and even went as far as to introduce new ones. The Mechanical fix: Clerics became "Full Casters" which meant they had the spellcasing potency, if not breadth, of a Wizard who walked around in full plate all day. This change eventually lead to the monster known as CoDzilla, who frequented CharOp circles and terrorized many tables, or something like that. On the other hand: The fluff change, despite being largely overlooked, was considered relatively benign, if not positive, and easy to ignore for those who demanded it due to tradition. Clerics were no longer explicitly required to worship gods. In retrospect, this idea may not have been all it was cracked up to be, as it effectively eroded the RP side of things and left the Cleric more or less a necessary evil type of mechanical monstrosity, though you could still do the prayer thing if you wanted too.

So at this point, I'm going to dredge up:

I think that to an extent, the lack of cleric-dependence has helped with the popularity of 5e. In my experience, clerics are not a popular class, perhaps because of their religious connotations.

In 4e, the Cleric class as we knew it was more or less outmoded. The Leader Role (and some downtime streamlining) broke up their monopoly on healing. The Divine Power source expanded the "person who prays for power" idea into two more classes (both of which were arguably cooler than the Cleric ever was), which in turn meant that they could gut the New Cleric of it's seemingly endless array of powers. With this there was much rejoicing, for CoDzilla was dead, with a vengeance. A monster grown out of trying to fix a problem by treating the symptoms instead of the disease.

This path more or less continued into 5e. Healing is again covered by multiple classes, and multiple classes get their powers from the gods. However, now that the specter of Codzilla is no longer at the forefront of the players minds, it begs the question: What exactly is a Cleric for? It's not that religious connotations aren't popular. Not only do the Paladin, Warlock, Druid, and Monk classes cover that out of the gate to various degrees, but there is an ever-growing collection of subclasses that are aping that angle. It's not that healing isn't useful, as evidenced by the also large number of characters and classes who can pull that off.

No, the problem now, is that the Cleric can't latch itself onto an external rules problem anymore, forcing the Cleric to stand on it's own merits, while people slowly realize it had none to begin with.


TL;DR: the Cleric is a hot mess, because the Cleric has always been a hot mess. Only now, it isn't a "necessary evil"

 

[bleezy]

Cleric is still the only class with Revivify before level 9. Now instead of lack of healing, my players bemoan the lack of revivification when no one wants to play a cleric.

 

[CapnZapp]

Sometimes you just can't win

 

[Sacrosanct]

My highest level 5e PC is a tempest cleric. I like how in 5e, you play the class thet appeals to your current desire, and no class is any more important than another.

I do disagree about clerics not having an identiy. Thats what role playing is. You give your character an identity. For my tempest cleric, his identity was blowing the crap out of anything and everything with thunder and lightning lol. And also being a front line defensive juggernaut, causing damage to any creature foolish enough to come near him, which was exceptional battlefield contol.

 

[Rossbert]

Thematically I like the interpretation as a given church's mix of pioneer/scout/special ops guy. Yo u send in the cleric when an area is too dangerous for normal clergy, an area needs flat-out miraculous help, or the church has a critical mission that needs more 'practical' skills over extensive ecclesiastical knowledge, but you need some you trust more than a lay person or a mercenary.

Mechanically I always think of it as the divine wizard, the baseline divine caster.
Where the sorcerer, warlock, and bard can be described as 'like a wizard but...(metamagic, short rest spell lots, mixed with cleric, etc.)" the cleric serves the role for the paladin, and to an extent the bard, druid and ranger (way more smashy, mixed with enchanter, nature themed, natured themed mixed with rogue, etc.).
But realistically you play a cleric when you either really like a domain or you just want to play a tough full caster with solid staying power and some emergency face smashing and anti-undead ability.

So yes it has less of a unique niche but serves almost as the repository of divine spells , deity granted abilities and what the height of divine caster could be with the most direct link to the divine source.

In 5e this 'base form' idea is more apparent than ever with class features being far more likely to be shared across various classes (channel divinity comes to mind immediately as does the battle master's maneuver mechanic if you have Xanathar).

 

[Warpiglet]

My favorite character (or one of them) i 1e AD&D was a cleric. I somehow found a +2 mace and some other goodies and still was no match for a specialized fighter! at. all.

But it was so fun. The role was very cool. We also had a lot of undead in different scenariors and being able to turn was great.

I did some healing but whenever possible dropped a flamestrike or some such. I think if you role play a prophet, a missionary, a crusader or a vampire hunter of a combination of these things, you are playing a cleric. For me, healing was the most boring aspect of a once favorite class.

Then again, my group really only tries to have some match with alignment and goals. We could all end up clerics, all thieves (old nomenclature) or whatever since we usually played what sounded fun.

I have railed against "who is playing cleric?" from the early days. Try to acquire some potions of healing and be damn careful is what we used to do if a cleric did not show up!

That they are not forced to do less exciting stuff now makes them MORE appealing to me, not less.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

5e isn't the edition to make big changes to the cleric (they spend all "big change budget" on the bard), although I could see divine intervention expanding in 6e to be something like the wild magic sorcerer [you ask for divine intervention more often and the DM pulls from a table of interventions--hmm, could even totally replace spellcasting if the table changed by level].

I think it is best to think of the cleric less from a mechanical role (although "get out of jail free card" guy is a good description of mid-to-high level clerics), but more from the role playing "most divine of the divine casters" (like the druid is the "naturest of the nature casters").

 

[Schmoe]

I think there is plenty of room for an "Agent of a good" archetype in the game, aside from the "Warrior of a god" that the paladin represents. I'd be happy to see 2e's spell spheres return along those lines.