Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Volund" data-source="post: 7235199" data-attributes="member: 6872597">The Tempest cleric is near and dear to my heart since that was my first 5e character, now level 15. Some advice based on my experience:Short response: Don't focus much energy on building up your attack rolls. Your party has that covered. Get your Wis score up to at least 18, preferably 20, before worrying about your attacks and do what you can to succeed on as many concentration saves as possible.Dex is more useful overall to you than Str because of saves and initiative. Better init means you'll get your buffs and crowd control up sooner. Assuming using standard array or point buy, I would start with a 16 Dex and just leave it there and use your ASI's to get Wis to 20 ASAP in order to be the best Tempest Cleric you can be. Go sword and board and not ranged. You want your enemies close for Spirit Guardians, Destructive Wrath, Thunderwave, Destructive Wave, etc. Aside from your weapon attack with Booming Blade, every tactic you described keys off of Wis. After maybe taking War Caster or Resilient (Con) at level 4, focus on Wis exclusively because:Wrath of the Storm can be used a number of times equal to your Wis bonus per long rest, and the damage is halved on a successful Dex save vs your Wis DCSpiritual Weapon uses your Wis mod for attacks and damageSpirit Guardians damage is halved on a successful save vs your Wis DCYour only ranged cantrip, Sacred Flame, does no damage on a successful save vs your Wis DCTurning or destroying undead depends on your Wis DCYour big damage rounds will always be from using Destructive Wrath, and it's almost always better to use it to affect multiple enemies. BB is not a good candidate to use DW until Level 8 when you are adding 2d8 total thunder damage (BB + Divine Strike). Even then you really are just crit fishing so that you can use Destructive Wrath to do max damage of 32 plus the weapon damage, with no chance to save for half damage. For that, it really doesn't matter whether your attack stat is +5 or -5; you crit at the same rate. Since you can't control when you crit, you may find that you mostly use DW for Call Lightning or Shatter instead, in which case you'll be more concerned with your save DC than your attack stat. Later, at higher levels, a lot of monsters have magic resistance and Legendary Resistance which makes it much harder to nail them with your DW if you use spells, so simply hitting with a BB attack bypasses all of that. By level 14, BB + Divine Strike will add 4d8 so on a crit you can do an automatic 64 hp plus your weapon damage. My point is that BB is much better for the Tempest Cleric once the thunder d8's start to stack up, so you might want to boost your Wis save DC early, and get BB later on. My cleric rarely made melee attacks after level 5 - the fighters and barbarians were so much better at it. I always seemed to have better things to do with my action and getting close to an enemy attacker for melee wasn't worth the risk of losing concentration. My half elf Tempest Cleric 15 boosted Wis at levels 4 and 8, took Resilient(Con) at 12, and will take Magic Initiate for BB (and a familiar) at level 16. I started my Str at 16 and never raised it. With a magic weapon I'm now +10 to hit and that seems good enough.Do you have to be a High Elf? You would get so much more from Wood Elf and a starting Wis of 16 - an extra spell, an extra Wrath of the Storm, a higher DC, better Spiritual Weapon attack and damage, better heals, and be able to max out your Wis with 2 ASI's instead of 3. You'd have to give up the High Elf cantrip and BB, but you get a lot in return. Alternatively, if you can use the Half Elf variants from SCAG you could select to be Half High Elf and trade the two extra skills for the BB cantrip and have a +1 for Wis and +1 for either Str or Dex, whichever you decide (in addition to +2 Cha which helps a proficient cleric save).</blockquote>

Verification