D&D 5E Is Nature Cleric's Dampen Elements ability way overpowered?

[coolAlias]

Fair enough. The problem of the white room strikes again!

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah it's hard to evaluate. It's really good when it fired, completely useless otherwise.

YMMV of course.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I had Absorb Elements on my Eldritch Knight. You know how many times I got to use it? Zero.

Elemental damage isn't all that common. Elemental resistance is common and easy to come by. Half the party are probably resistant to something.

If you want to "White Room" it, try comparing it to a Rogue's Uncanny Dodge.

 

[Seramus]

As long as the story has a reasonable chance for elemental damage to happen, it should happen more often just because you are playing a Nature Cleric (the same way a Ranger should encounter her Favored Enemy more often than a party without Rangers). Unless you are in AL and/or running modules without modification for whatever reason.

 

[CapnZapp]

Is Nature Cleric's Dampen Elements ability way overpowered?

No.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

it should happen more often just because you are playing a Nature Cleric.

I would not, under any circumstances, rewrite an adventure just to squeeze in more elemental damage because someone happened to be playing a nature cleric.

 

[S'mon]

It's not that good, AoEs often hit multiple PCs, so you only help one. And Resistance items & magic are pretty plentiful already.

 

[Seramus]

I would not, under any circumstances, rewrite an adventure just to squeeze in more elemental damage because someone happened to be playing a nature cleric.

When players choose their characters, they are often asking you to feature certain things in the game. For example, when someone makes a trap focused rogue they are asking for some badass scenes where they disable traps. That doesn’t mean every place has to have traps, but it’s directly telling you, the DM, “Please sir, I would like to beat traps.”

You can always use session zero to set up expectations, like “I run low combat, high politic games” or whatever to encourage/discourage choices of course.

 

[mortwatcher]

white-rooming single domain ability versus other domain abilities at only one level is quite silly
some domains get better abilities at start, some at higher levels
also some domains get better spells than others
the nature cleric ability is very useful, if you need it, but their domain spells are kind of lacking compared to other domains

 

[TwoSix]

Unless your campaign centers on stopping Bernie the Burninator and his Pyromancer Posse, it's really not going to come up that much. And even if it did, it's half damage for one ally once a turn. It's just not that powerful.