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Message: <blockquote data-quote="marelion" data-source="post: 5817414" data-attributes="member: 6679828">Honestly, I don`t think Strengh-builds are too useful.They pack a surprising punch at early heroic and righteous brand is about as good as it gets for an at-will-buff, your strikers will love you for picking it. The strenght build only has one disadvvantage: It is MAD as hell and you need a lot of feats to be able to stand your ground in melee. You only get simple weapon proficiency, no shields and you get only chainmail. Battle Clerics Armament or some racial weapon feat can fix that up, as a melee cleric you definetely want a +3 proficiency weapon other than a dagger. The real pain starts when you take a closeer look at the powers and class features available for clerics and you start to realize that Healer`s Lore lets you add your Wismod to he healing you grant. So a strong emphasis on your secondary attribute is somewhat preferable to make your healing powers more effective. With all the nerfs to surgefree healing you are sooner or later going to burn your teammates surges at an enormous rate, since you have access to a lot more more healing powers, but heal noticably less HP per surge you trigger in comparison to the Wis-cleric. Quite a number of powers available to Strenght cleric have an additional charisma rider and lots of nice feats and PPs such as Holy Emissary make use of Charisma. And there are only two cleric PPs that trigger of Strenght. As a strenght cleric you can easily multiclass to fighter to grab some of their PPs (I like Dreadnougt for the toughness ), however, so this might not be an issue for you. You are hard pressed for powers that grant saving throws that become more and more important as you level up, since you might not have the charisma to use the utilities for all they are worth. And Priest`s Shield is my personal nominèe for 4E`s worst at-will power. A +1 power bonus to AC? Seriously? Why would I ever waste a standard actionfor that when I could use Righteous Brand instead? The deeceision between Wis and Cha for riders makes for tricky builds. And your at-will powers don`t deal radiant damage, so you won`t be good against undead unless you pick up a radiant weapon. And without a radiant weapon you cannot qualify for Radiant Vessel which is pretty much the boost to healing the cleric gets.And your HP are a little low for a frontliner, so Toughness is almost a must have imho. Depending on your DM`s opinion regarding the lenght of an adventuring day, Durable might be neccessary as well, since your constitution won`t likely be good.Oh and be sure to pick a deity of the skill domain so you can turn Righteous Brand into a MBA via the Power of Skill feat, so that you have an option for charging opponents and for more effective OAs. Again , pretty much a feat tax if you want to join the club of the true melees.If you want to go the melee route with 4E, I would strongly recommend picking Sollinor`s Hammer, which is a MBA straight out of the box and look at some of the blast attacks the Wis cleric has access to. You will be a better healer, you can use Sacred Flame and actually hit something with it to grant saving throws or THPs and you will have an easier time qualifying for feats. Pick the Holy Emissary PP and go to town. +2 to  saving throws for adjactent allies is plain awesome, your Defender will love you for it. For fun`s sake, convince your defender to pick the Justiciar PP, which lets allies reroll saves against charm and fear effects and watch your GM go mad <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />The way I feel about it, the designers pretty much tried to copy paste the WoW priest into the game and then deceided to offer the strenght build as an attempt to consolve nostalgic oldschool gamers who want their clerics to enter the fray. Only they totally failed to balance the two builds out against each other, offering much better options and much more support to one build, while neglecting the other almost entirely.<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" /> I mean, it took them until September 09 to finally realize the strenght cleric only had  one PP available with attacks that trigger off strenght(1 1/2 if you generously ignore the fact the Encounter Power of the Angelic Avenger used Wis for attack rolls and you get 2 1/2 if you count Stone Keeper which s only available to dwarves). While there are 12 PPs for Wis-based clerics of any race. Oops.Enough of the rant about the design of the cleric class and let`s hope somebody might be able to give you a quick tour of the laser and pacifist builds for i have no experience with these and thus cannot really comment on them.</blockquote>

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