Inquiring Clerics Want to Know: God Crunch

[Lackhand]

Hopefully the list of Cleric powers will be diverse and large enough to allow different Clerics of different gods to feel completely different from one another. Same for Paladins, too.

Heh. Your hopefully is actually my very-not-hopefully.

It's neat when they get their own little tricks, but if they feel like different classes, I'd really rather that they were different classes, and that Ioun was worshipped nigh wholly by wizards and multiclass wizards, for example.

 

[Stalker0]

This would make me very sad, indeed. I really liked the way that deities were integrated into the game under the 3.x rules. If the only things that make one cleric different from another are a couple of feats and a paragraph of background fluff, I don't see the need for deities to exist at all.

Maybe that was the intent.

The only thing that made clerics different from each other in 3.5 was their choice of domains, and since many gods shared domains that wasn't that big a difference. While some domain abilities were very cool, mostly it was just a list of extra spells, often ones the cleric had already.

If the "power of Amunetor" ability from the pregen is any indication, clerics could each get a distinctive encounter ability. That's something that can be used in every fight, which is pretty significant.

 

[Fiendish Dire Weasel]

If the "power of Amunetor" ability from the pregen is any indication, clerics could each get a distinctive encounter ability. That's something that can be used in every fight, which is pretty significant.

Check the other side of the sheet and the Cleric's Feats. He had to use a feat to get the "Power of Amunetor" ability.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Check the other side of the sheet and the Cleric's Feats. He had to use a feat to get the "Power of Amunetor" ability.

Yes. But is this bad? Presumably I'll have to take feats to specialize in my weapon as a Fighter, too.

 

[Aenghus]

While there is limited information, it does look like clerics will be about as customisable as the other classes now, i.e. a fair bit, but nothing like 2e speciality priests, and without even spell domains. I can understand why, combat roles and balance were very important in 4e and customisable clerics were one of the biggest nightmares in previous editions from a role and balance perspective.

Given the widespread cleric-hate I am sure they bent over backwards to make the cleric class balanced and playable, probably at the cost of flexibility.

I would prefer different priest character concepts to the melee cleric to be modelled by different classes, (which seems to be the 4e philosophy, as classes do seem to be more specialised). IMO overloading the 4e core cleric with vast flexibility would be a mistake.

 

[Akhena]

I like very much the idea of different classes to model different character concepts. I hope this will be covered in future books.

 

[D.Shaffer]

Considering what we just found out about Paragon paths, it looks like it could be VERY easy to make a paragon path for each god if you really wanted to. Not sure if you WOULD really want to, though.