D&D 3E/3.5 Creating 4e-like Cleric in 3.5e

[Shin Okada]

One of the biggest improvement in 4e is that Clerics (and other healers) can heal comrades and fight in the same round. This is achieved by 2 factors. 1) The main healing prayer is minor action, thus a cleric can use his standard action for using attack prayer or making a melee attack. 2) There are standard action attacks which has either healing or buffing as additional effect.

Usually, when a pre-4e cleric heals, he must use his entire round for healing (plus movement, maybe).

Now, I want to make a 4e-like cleric in 3.5e, who can heal/buff and attack in a single turn.

I can think of only few ways to do this, say,

Quicken Spell (plus Divine Metamagic: Quicken Spell)
Sudden Quicken
Summon Spells (once summoned, a cleric can let a summoned creature attack while using healing/buffing spells)

Are there some other good ways?

 

[Rampant]

Would playing a Crusader count?
Paladins have a feat called battle blessing which allows them to cast their pally spells as a free action.

 

[airwalkrr]

One way which I have often considered is making all spells with "cure" in their title a swift action, but only for clerics. This replaces the spontaneous healer class ability of the cleric. Other classes can gain use of the same ability at the cost of a feat. This might not be a good thing to allow for monsters though, as it will generally lengthen certain types of battles considerably.

Yet, while I sympathize with the notion of a cleric being forced to choose between the "fun" option of fighting and the "unfun" option of healing, I have played clerics enough to realize that having the power to choose to heal is not at all unfun to me. It is a great element of strategy to the game which I enjoy. It is a calculated risk. Do I choose to use my action to revive the wounded fighter or is the enemy weakened enough that one more attack might be enough to fell it? I enjoy having to make such strategic decisions and believe the game is balanced with this in mind.

 

[Shin Okada]

Would playing a Crusader count?

Hmm ... No, I don't think so. Paladin's spellcasting ability is quite limited.

Yet, while I sympathize with the notion of a cleric being forced to choose between the "fun" option of fighting and the "unfun" option of healing, I have played clerics enough to realize that having the power to choose to heal is not at all unfun to me. It is a great element of strategy to the game which I enjoy. It is a calculated risk. Do I choose to use my action to revive the wounded fighter or is the enemy weakened enough that one more attack might be enough to fell it? I enjoy having to make such strategic decisions and believe the game is balanced with this in mind.

Yes, healing itself includes a lot of tactical decisions and could be fun. In addition to that, cleric is the best buffer and also can do really a lot of things out-of-combat. Actually, I played a lot of cleric PCs in 3.Xe.

Still, after playing 4e for some years, I found that 4e-style Cleric (and mechanic of other leader classes) is indeed an improvement, especially in combat.

 

[Ahnehnois]

There is the Close Wounds spell from SC (immediate action, short range, level 2). There's also Healing Spirit (PHBII, level 4), which takes an action to cast but hangs around a few rounds (and is ripe for extend spell).

You could look to the CC feat (blanking on the name) that lets Paladins auto-quicken all their spells. Perhaps a feat that auto-quickened a very limited set of cleric spells would be comparable.

A broader solution might be to look at the classes that can cast and fight in the same round. The best example from 3.5 is the Duskblade, PF has introduced the Magus. These are both arcane, but a divine conversion would be viable.

 

[Rampant]

The crusader is a class from the tome of 9 swords, I'm away from most of my collection right now but i recall them being sort of like 4e clerics.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Crusader is the closest to what the OP wants, it just lacks enough healing maneuvers to really be focused on that concept. Close Wounds spell is also great. And with Healing Lorecall spell active, it can remove some nasty effects along with the small hp heal.

Instead of reactively healing damage after it happens, perhaps consider porting over a (pretty darn powerful, IMO...) feat from pathfinder for the cleric to use to just plain prevent damage from occuring? (It's basically negating critical threats with 1st level spells! Yay, pearls of power!)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Memorize & cast the Fast Healing spells...that way, the targets heal on their own while you can go playing Whack-A-Gnoll.

 

[Rampant]

Whack-a-Gnoll

I like that.