Is turning Important?

[Merlion]

The actual turn undead ability itself probably isnt going to be a biggy unless your in an undead heavy campaign.


However, the positive energy channeling its based on can be used to power various overpowered Divine feats, like Divine Metamagic and Domain Spontaneity.

I guess they decided every facet of the Cleric needded to be able to add to its silly level of power.


Now for Paladins some of the sane Divine feats can be a nice way to get some good out of your turn ability, wether or not undead are common in the campaign...Divine Might is nice for a paladin, but not overpowered.

 

[axp_dave]

The actual turn undead ability itself probably isnt going to be a biggy unless your in an undead heavy campaign.


However, the positive energy channeling its based on can be used to power various overpowered Divine feats, like Divine Metamagic and Domain Spontaneity.

Merlion's comment is probably the best mechanics point mentioned. I don't think much of the abilty, but if can feed a lot of great feats. Check our the cleric feat thread, it has a lot of good thoughts from people.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=151869

 

[Merlion]

Merlion's comment is probably the best mechanics point mentioned. I don't think much of the abilty, but if can feed a lot of great feats

A lot of that was sarcasm, just for the record


I feel the feats I mentioned...mainly Divine Metamagic and Domain Spontaneity, should never have been published.

But, they do make turn undead useful, if in an unbalanced fashion...


some of the others are somewhat useful and not broken tho..

 

[General Barron]

Perhaps a little off topic, but does anyone else feel that "turn undead" should be a spell (or a few spells) instead of an ability? As this discussion clearly points out, turning is only as useful as the DM makes it, so why not just make it a spell that the cleric can memorize when needed?

Just my opinion. If I were making v4.0, that is how I would do it.

 

[Zimbel]

Turning -> Spell

I agree; turning should be a spell (or group of spells). It should also be simplified.

 

[nittanytbone]

Clerics don't get many feats or skill points; if you're running core books RAW the best way to buff turning is to use Improved Turning, Extra Turning, have 5 ranks in Knowledge: Religion, and follow the Sun domain. That's a significant investment for your average cleric, especially for an ability which will probably only come up 1/4 of the time at most, even in an undead heavy campaign.

What might be wiser is to invest in a cohort or ally with such specialization. A cohort makes sense as its always nice to have a cleric around for buffing and healing and when undead do show up you'll be glad to have them.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Turning is quite probably the stupidest mechanic in the game.

From a cleric player point of view it sucks - most of the time it does nothing, and sometimes it will make an easy fight (ie - low hit dice undead) even easier. Often it will make a moderately difficult fight extremely hard (as turned undead flee through the dungeon awakening everything).

From a DM point of view, it sucks. It screws up the CRs assigned to most undead, because they assume you have it. It turns minor encounters into total non-events (don't even THINK about putting skeletons up against 2nd level characters).

From the point of view of other players, it sucks too - the cleric will use it, and either the undead will run away (a useless or worse than useless result), or he will destroy them all (a very boring end to a fight).

I'd really suggest using the UA turning damage variant.

 

[silyolpooh]

Or don't turn

Playing a cleric, I always hated the randomness and bulkiness of the TU ability. So we use the one from Unearthed Arcana, in which clerics do (ClericLevel)d6 damage to all undead in 20ft. That said, I still took extra turning to boost some sacred feats.