Advice on a cleric feat please.

[two]

Ok Two, our group played last night and here are my observations when I kept initiative in mind.

We only had one battle last night, and as luck would have it, it was against a ghost. Everyone was entering a narrow staircase in a trap door on the floor. Before our trailing wizard could enter the shaft, the ghost showed up and started to toss him around with telekinesis. Being the only cleric in the party, and since I wasn't far down the staircase, I rushed back up the stairs to help out. Well, my initiative turned out to be lower than the ghosts and let me tell you it was not fun to have to wait for the ghost to take his turn, and slam the wizard, before I could make my turn roll. To be honest I kept failing my turn roll anyway, but it was painful to have to keep waiting until AFTER the ghost took his turn before I could even try.

So I guess by your reckoning, initiative didn't matter much in this battle because I kept missing my roll. But by my reckoning, I still would have liked to go before that ghost did. It would have been nice to reroll every round in this case. As it was, I was stuck with my low roll. Which led me to think of something else:

You implied that since the Imp. Init. bonus only applies once to a battle that it may not be so great. But when you think about it, the fact that you roll initiative only once makes it that much MORE important to make sure you get a good roll! In fact, I would go so far as to say if initiative was rerolled every round, Imp Init would be LESS important...but not by much. Remember, randomness favors the underdog.

Interesting, looks like worst case scenario for my little claim. Questions -- did the cleric lose initiative by 4 or less? Meaning, even if the cleric had IInit, would he have beat the ghost? And if so, could he have gotten into range in time to do anything?

That's another general IInit issue, the fact that a d20+4 is pretty random, you can lose even to something with an 8 dex pretty easily. In the long run, you do better, but the long run (30 battles+) is possibly a year of real-world time (because it's just once a battle). Unlike Dodge, which only matters 1 in 20, but you might use it 10 times every session.

Don't get too crazed about what winning/losing initiative means. At the end of round 3 you both have had 3 chances to do stuff. It's not like the ghost gets an extra move in.

So, what do you think? Include the fact that you had to push your party members out of the way on the stair to get to the wizard... what WOULD have happened if the cleric had won initiative? Could you have done the "win initiative, run up, turn ghost, battle over" thing? If so... perhaps your should take IInit. Seems like you get into a lot of situation at close range where it REALLY matters.

 

[mooby]

It's hard to argue the II is a useless feat.


My cleric took II and Dodge at first level, and I've never regreted it since (he's 9th level now).

Both feats have proven useful, each and every session.

 

[two]

It's hard to argue the II is a useless feat.


My cleric took II and Dodge at first level, and I've never regreted it since (he's 9th level now).

Both feats have proven useful, each and every session.

I'm not arguing II is not good... I'm just of the opinion that other feats would be "more good" than II.

But, it looks like other people's experiences jibe with II being very very useful, more than my own experiences.

So maybe it's better than I think for a Dex=12 cleric.