D&D 5E How on earth is this balanced?! Twilight cleric, more in-play evidence

[Savage Wombat]

Don't use White Plume Mountain - I recently ran a group of completely inexperienced players with 8th level pregens through it, and they slaughtered everything present with ease. You'd want to test with something slightly dangerous, or use lower level pregens.

 

[Mort]

Don't use White Plume Mountain - I recently ran a group of completely inexperienced players with 8th level pregens through it, and they slaughtered everything present with ease. You'd want to test with something slightly dangerous, or use lower level pregens.

Not sure I'll actually do it, though I'll run the idea by my group (planning on our first in person session shortly).

Would need a stand alone adventure as opposed to a lengthy one.

What about Lore of Lurue from Candlekeep Mysteries? I have it, but have barely even skimmed it yet - anyone care to comment on difficulty?

Edit: I suppose if I get really motivated (and way too focused on procrastination) I could recruit a few more and do it on roll20 - worth a thought.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It's mostly a ribbon ability.

Medium armor is better for clerics anyway.

No it's not. You might think that the Dex/Wis cleric is the best - but Str/Wis is only viable with heavy armour - and heavy armour breaks pure Wis clerics into two pathways.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Honestly the Twilight cleric to me doesn't just look powerful - it looks boring.

In particular two of its early abilities are simple no-sells. The first is that "Darkvision for all" is a bit of an atmosphere destroyer. The second is that the ability that has everyone up in arms would be no fun to use at the table.

Essentially the optimal play for a Twilight Cleric in turn 1 is always the same. You stand roughly where you are and channel divinity which when you cast it does basically nothing. It's not big, it's not flashy, and it can be done on autopilot. At least the healbot gets to take actions and then burn their spells on healing at a time they will save peoples' lives.

And once the Twilight Cleric has made the least interesting first turn the tension drains out of the fight before it even had time to really get going. The whole thing routinely becomes a mopping up excercise where the PCs are never in danger and it's never tense.

Kinda like Warlock Eldritch Blast boring? If a player wants to spam an ability and the table and/or player find it boring, that’s at least partly (if not completely) on the player.

A possible cure for the Twilight Sanctuary draining the tension out of the fight is for the DM to have informed baddies (try to) run away temporarily.

I am with you on the one hour shared long range Darkvision thing, to an extent. Although, Darkvision isn’t “instawin” either. Darkness as dim light still comes with its disadvantages.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Yeah, the "this thing isn't broken, because the DM can fix it" is a terrible argument, and also contradictory. Why the heck would a DM need to fix a game mechanic if it isn't broken? I've never changed anything in my games that I thought was completely fine the way it was. I've never changed Paladins, I've never changed Barbarians, and I've never changed Warforged. However, I have changed Dragonborn, Monks, Rangers, and Yuan-Ti Purebloods before (to make Dragonborn stronger, Monks less boring, Rangers actually useful, and Yuan-Ti not absolutely broken). "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Why would we want to fix this thing if it wasn't broken? I know what I've seen, and in my campaign, the Twilight Cleric has been OP as %#$&. They've regularly out-damaged the TCoE Beast-Master Ranger with a Longbow, the Archery Fighting Style, and Sharpshooter, and have been able to solo kill/survive tons of monsters that should have been impossible for them to take on at that level. And not only is it OP, like the others have said, it's remarkably boring. It's spamming the same 3-4ish spells/abilities over and over all the freaking time, and I'm saying this as someone that has played a Warlock. It's just overflowing with super-useful abilities, and none of them encourage creative play, it's just "activate this, attack that, boom! They're dead and you're immortal".

I'm a powergamer. I like having powerful characters, and as a DM I like it when my players are powerful heroes that face huge challenges. I like my games being on hard-mode, and the Twilight Cleric just makes it easy mode way too often.

 

[Don Durito]

It really amazes me how many people like to say "it's not a problem because the DM can fix it."

Which, if true, essentially means EVERY game system is perfect.

What they're really saying is it's not a problem because I'm such a good DM.

An awful lot of forum posts are really just people finding ways to boast about their supposedly amazing DMing skills.

I found once I realised that it became a lot easier to skim right over them and focus on the signal rather than the noise.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

A DM “fixing” something and a DM coming up with novel ways to challenge powerful PCs may be two circles of a Venn Diagram, but they are far from synonymous.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

What they're really saying is it's not a problem because I'm such a good DM.

An awful lot of forum posts are really just people finding ways to boost about their supposedly amazing DMing skills.

I found once I realised that it became a lot easier to skim right over them and focus on the signal rather than the noise.

That’s quite an uncharitable reading of the dissenting opinion in this thread (and perhaps others… although no doubt your assessment is correct in at least a few cases).

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Yeah, that's to me the worst thing about it. Excessive healing with minimal damage is annoying and slow - renewing ablative armour is just tedious to deal with. I'd far rather see OP offence doing too much damage than something that just jams the game.

This I can get onboard with. Certain players already slow down the game with not being prepared for their turn and/or not bothering to learn their abilities between sessions. We don’t need to exacerbate that with abilities that eat up game time with tedious resolution.

 

[Mort]

That’s quite an uncharitable reading of the dissenting opinion in this thread (and perhaps others… although no doubt your assessment is correct in at least a few cases).

But is it really a dissenting opinion to say x ability is not overpowered because the DM can fix it?

You can argue an ability is not overpowered because it is of a similar power level to others, you can argue it's not overpowered because it's too niche, or any number of other reasons why it may appear to be overpowered but isn't.

But arguing the DM can control for it isn't really valid because:

1. It's taking a system argument and putting it on the shoulders of the DM;
2. In theory the DM can control for just about anything, so it's not really valid to use that as an excuse;
3. It completely avoids the actual issue of whether the ability is within the power level expected, etc.