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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eclair~" data-source="post: 9816416" data-attributes="member: 7054492">The ClericHello God, are you listening? It's me, I need more spellcastingForewordThe Cleric is a class that's often type-cast into the role of healer. Many games have moved away from the necessity of a heal-bot party member, and 2014 5e provided many options for Clerics that varied between healing, damage, and support.2024 5e made a point of buffing various healing spells, often doubling the dice rolled for these spells. This seems like a considerable upgrade, but this is weighed against the increase in monster damage output. So at higher levels, these buffed spells effectively balance out against the heightened damage.Where this becomes a problem is that almost everything else that heals in the game did not receive any buffs at all, remaining at the same values. This means those sources of healing are now much less effective compared to enemy damage output, and healing magic is all the more vital.It's not a great design choice, and is one of those 2024 Caster Things where spellcasting is made the most important part of the game in many ways—and something that will likely force more Clerics into the party role of heal-bot.Level 1Spellcasting uses a fixed number of spells rather than being based on Level + Wisdom. With subclasses moved to Level 3, this does mean you get fewer to start with, then suddenly get your spell list doubles going from Level 2 to Level 3.Not getting subclasses at Level 1 is a significant shift, meaning that Clerics get quite a bit less at lower levels than they used to, not having features aside from spellcasting and generic Channel Divinity options until Level 3. Some of these features were very strong for a one- or two-level dip, while others weren't as powerful.New (or perhaps, "new") to 1st level is Divine Order, which lets you pick between two sets of starting boons—and whereas leaving subclasses to 3rd level might have deterred dips, this encourages dips. Your choices are between martial weapon/heavy armour proficiency, or an extra cantrip and adding your Wisdom modifier to Arcana and Religion checks.This retains a one-level Cleric dip as a easy entry to heavy armour and shield access—something not even a Fighter or Paladin dip will provide—or a unique boost to two skill checks that stacks with other features like Expertise.Level 22nd level gives you your Channel Divinity, which now gives you two uses to start and recovers one use on a short rest. This gives more uses early on (or for tables that don't bother with short rests), and fewer in the late-game. Nine a day with two short rests is an awful lot, especially for the more overpowered Channel Divinity(s?), but it's an awkward handling.Turn Undead no longer lets the affected creature take actions (i.e. Dashing away or Dodging if there's nowhere to move). Bizarrely, you becoming incapacitated or dying ends the effect, which doesn't really make sense.You also get Divine Spark, which lets you use your Channel Divinity to heal or harm a creature. As mentioned above, the buff to healing spells doesn't extend to other sources of healing, and thus Divine Spark is a weak source of healing, even with its effect increasing at higher levels. By the time you're 18th-level, Divine Spark heals as much as a 2nd-level Cure Wounds.Level 5Destroy Undead is replaced with Sear Undead, which causes undead that fail the save against Turn Undead to take damage rather than be instantly destroyed if its CR is low enough. This is based on Wisdom modifier, so it caps out very early. On one hand it doesn't trivialize low-CR undead, but on the other hand it won't be particularly impressive at high levels.Level 7The subclass-specific damage-boost features (and the Tasha's substitute) at 8th-level is moved to 7th-level. You get either 1d8 extra damage when you hit with a weapon once on your turns, or add your Wisdom modifier to Cleric cantrip damage. (Oddly, the former is limited to once and only on your turn, the latter can apply multiple times on any turn.)Your choice for this is likely going to boil down to preference, which will likely be influenced by your choice of feats. True Strike builds will inevitably want the weapon choice, War Casters will want the cantrip option.In fact, with how often 2024 5e removes permanent choices from character options, it's weird that Blessed Strikes is made into an immutable choice that locks in a later option when the Tasha's alternate feature could apply to both weapons and cantrips.Level 10Level 10 brings us Divine Intervention, a feature that begs for intervention from the divine gods of D&D (a.k.a. the designers) to elaborate on how it's actually supposed to work. And to explain the balance behind this.In 2014 5e, a successful attempt at Divine Intervention allowed the DM to provide benediction as they saw fit. 2024 5e generally runs off of an attitude of DM-antagonism, the idea of "the DM won't let you do fun things", and so walls off the DM from you and your features. Instead, what Divine Intervention does is let you cast any 5th-level or lower Cleric spell of your choice, without any spell slot or material component cost, once a day.Even if you set aside how strong this feature is—a free 5th-level cast, without any component cost—this has resulted in much confusion over the wording "As a Magic action" and "As part of the same action". This isn't limited to spells that only require a single action to cast, so this has caused confusion as to whether a spell with a longer casting time can be cast instantly with this feature.If that is the case, there's one already-notorious example that breaks the game. The Hollow spell can immediately and irresistibly impose severe hindrances on enemies, if Divine Intervention lets you drop it willy-nilly. Other spells also are very abusable, like Raise Dead for zero-cost revival.Ironically, the change of language to "As a Magic action" was supposedly meant to create greater clarity, but this is an instance where it has only caused confusion.Level 14Improved Blessed Strikes upgrades the earlier option you chose. Getting a bit of extra damage once on your turn just isn't as good as getting double your Wisdom mod in temp HP to yourself or an ally.I also question as to why this choice is fixed upon your prior choice, why these options can't be permitted with either Blessed Strike option. Why can't I get extra oomph on a cantrip, or why can't I dole out some temp HP on a weapon attack?Level 20That's right, we're already at level 20. And here we get Greater Divine Intervention. The previous capstone guaranteed your Divine Intervention would succeed. Here? You get exactly what you wanted when you picked a divine caster.You get Wish. You get a free cast of Wish. On top of your regular spell slots.Now, it gets restricted for 2d4 long rests, but even then just having a free casting of Wish is already stupidly powerful. Furthermore, it's kind of lazy to give a divine caster a strong arcane spell as their capstone.It should be noted as well that the drawback only makes an impact on repeated adventuring days, and if you have downtime after using it, it's liable to be ready for the next time you need Wish.ConclusionIt's tricky to analyze most full-caster classes on their own since a great deal of their distinguishing aspects comes from their spellcasting and subclass features. Nonetheless, base features still provide a way of defining each caster apart from each other, which makes it disappointing when other features are de-emphasized and Divine Intervention is reduced to nothing but an extension on spellcasting.At least you can tell a Cleric's features apart from other classes' features, which will be a different story for our next class.Building a Better Cleric?<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Putting it bluntly: patch the one-level heavy armour dip. Move Divine Order to Level 3. Clerics can live without the benefits until then.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">With subclass features moved to 3rd level, perhaps Channel Divinity could be a 1st-level thing. Divine Spark, as mentioned, is a pretty underwhelming addition—but it does give a little extra at low levels when spell slots are few.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Let Blessed Strikes be a more flexible feature.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If you're going to go for the DM-hands-off approach to feature design, give features like Divine Intervention more options than just "cast a spell". And better-written rules, to boot.</li> </ul></blockquote>

Verification