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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6870128" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Most of the really interesting cleric spells from AD&D are gone, unless you re-invent them. Things like Mental Domination and Spacewarp are now the sole province of wizards. Physical Mirror and Reverse Time don't exist. Wide-area clerical healing or crop blessing spells like Breath of Life and Abundance are now scaled down and belong to druids, not clerics, unless they're on the Nature domain list (I don't remember).Draw Upon Holy Might wasn't that interesting but it was definitely strong, and it's gone, regrettably. Clerics do have a number of interesting buffs and abilities in 5E, but they're completely different from AD&D-era clerics. If you want to be impressed by clerics, you need to check out Sanctuary, Warding Bond, Shield of Faith, Spiritual Guardians, Death Ward, and possibly Command. Also look at Planar Ally and consider hiring by the minute instead of the day--if you can manage to borrow a Solar just long enough to help kill the Ancient Red Shadow Dragon, he will deserve every gold piece of his share of the treasure. (The biggest problem actually with Planar Ally isn't effectiveness, it's flavor--why do all of these planar creatures suddenly turn mercenary just because you summoned them through a spell instead of through a planar rift or something? The guidelines feel incomplete--work with your DM on this, or if you're a DM, work with your players to give them a version of the spell that offers more predictability/agency.) Regenerate is now an interesting combat buff too because the auto-healing occurs at the beginning of the recipient's turn, so auto-stabilizes and gets to act. When you're going to fight a shadow dragon, stack Death Ward and Regenerate on whomever you think is most likely to eat punishment from the dragon.Clerics also have reasonably good opportunity attacks, and they can do a fair amount with melee cantrips, although not so much that I'd build a PC cleric around melee cantrips specifically.So, mechanically, 5E clerics are interesting. I just can't intellectually respect them for their standards of worship... but the powergamer in me kind of wants to find a way to play one anyway, maybe by making a cynical one who only pays lip service.</blockquote>

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