D&D 5E Life Cleric vs Light vs War in Practice

[apathyward]

I feel I should chime in from a War Cleric perspective. While mine is only level 6, his functionality (and other domains' as well) must be looked at as "Effective Healing". I've built my War as a martial character in a party of a Moon Druid, Warlock, Paladin/Fighter, Monk, and Ranger. The ability to add 10 to any of their d20 rolls is almost unbeatable at my level. It's not a rolled 1d10, its a flat 10. This almost always results in a hit for them instead of a miss, which causes the encounter to end with less blood shed. Also, since the War Cleric can be built in this martial manner, that leaves more spell slots open for more Healing Word, which also allows me to melee attack in the same turn. Channel Divinity and my War Priest Wisdom modifier bonus action melee attack are the only limits, being 2 a day and 3 a day currently.

This thread in general seems to be agreeing that there are enough spell slots for the healing you want to do in 90% of encounters.

 

[exile]

Given the existence of hit dice? Yes. And given I've been playing for about 18 months now, I feel pretty confident saying any flavor of Cleric will do just fine n 5e. In fact one complaint about the game by some is it has too much healing, which resulted in options in the DMG to reduce healing. I've yet to hear anyone complain there is not enough healing in the game.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. My post was actually meant more as a jab at PF and PFS (both of which I really like) and the need for every character to acquire-- as early as possible in their career-- a wand of CLW.

 

[gyor]

I think the meat of the Trickster Domain is 75% Channel Divinity Duplicity, 15% spells like Dominate person and Polynorph, and 5% Blessings of the Trickster.

Example Use CD, then cast Ethrealness on yourself and you can blast enemies from the Ethreal Plane using any spell via your duplicate without reprisal most of the time.

I think there are other useful tricks for using Duplicity, but many of them require multiclassing, into say Chainlock, or Fighter, or Rogue for example.

 

[Unwise]

Oh, that original comment in the OP was mine. I had wanted to know at the time if other people felt the same, but the conversation moved on in another direction, as the OP mentioned.

In theory, my players were concerned by the low healing amounts on the spells by default. The expectation is that after a fight the cleric will heal everybody up to full if possible. Doing this just once really takes a huge amount of the clerics resources. This leaves them with only a few spell slots left. If you only have a few spell slots, you better keep them for healing, as you feel like a douche if somebody dies on your watch. This is partly about players expectations, but is a valid concern.

In practice, the life cleric is doing a great deal of healing and feels that if they were not a life cleric, they would seldom get to cast anything else. Other players in that group agree, the efficiency of healing means that the life cleric at least gets to throw out some Commands or Holds, which another cleric might not.

The war cleric in another group is definitely different, but not when it comes to spells. The fact he wears heavy armor and wades into combat makes a big difference in play style. The thing is, he uses almost all of his abilities for healing, since they don't rely on a large wisdom, like the offensive spells. He uses some buffs, but only after weighing up if they will prevent more damage than his healing could restore. So spells like Shield of Faith (+2 AC) get a run now and then.

Another players runs a Trickery cleric and I have to say the advantage on stealth ability is incredible, enough to make them a great subclass all by itself. There is always somebody in the party who is terrible at stealth, giving them advantage is just great. Having your scout be very unlikely to fail is also amazing. This player is great at using illusions, so I think he almost forgets he can heal. He is a not a great litmus test, as he is in a group with another healer and has avoided the 'healer label', so is no more pressured into healing than a bard would be.

I normally DM, but I have played a Light Cleric and he at least has access to Fireball and an incredible channel divinity. At level 2 he was doing something like 2d10+2 to everybody within 30feet. That just wipes out entire encounters. At higher level he has Fireball in a party with no wizard. As such he is the go-to-guy for blasting stuff, which is great. So, in regards to the question in the OP, the Light cleric at least has unique spells that set him apart as a blaster, something that the Life cleric cannot do, even if he does have more spell slots left over for blasting.

 

[green_destiny]

In theory, my players were concerned by the low healing amounts on the spells by default. The expectation is that after a fight the cleric will heal everybody up to full if possible. Doing this just once really takes a huge amount of the clerics resources. This leaves them with only a few spell slots left. If you only have a few spell slots, you better keep them for healing, as you feel like a douche if somebody dies on your watch. This is partly about players expectations, but is a valid concern.

Well in my table...

If the party needs healing after a long combat sure, I'll heal them.

If a scout comes back wounded from a scouting mission, perhaps I'll heal them too. Yet as much as possible I want to maximize my healing to multiple targets in a single spell.

But if a character/s does something stupid, disregarding the advice of the rest of the party not to do it, or explored something just out of curiosity (and not the benefit of the party) and got them hurt - I don't. Period.

Clerics don't get to be the party's healing b!tc#, in the contrary they're his b!tc#es. Lol. (Cleric is not my only character)

 

[Blue]

If the party needs healing after a long combat sure, I'll heal them.
...
But if a character/s does something stupid, disregarding the advice of the rest of the party not to do it, or explored something just out of curiosity (and not the benefit of the party) and got them hurt - I don't. Period.

Heh, in 3.5 and earlier editions when healing was only the cleric's problem, in my experience everyone want to be healed to as close to full as wasn't wasteful. In 4e, where you spend healing surges from your own character and many times it's up to you to "overspend" a surge or not, I see a lot more PCs willing to walk around with some damage because it's their own surges they are using. Who wants to spend a surge that could heal 20 (or more with a leader's healing) when only down 12.

5e has an interesting balance there.

 

[Staffan]

In theory, my players were concerned by the low healing amounts on the spells by default. The expectation is that after a fight the cleric will heal everybody up to full if possible. Doing this just once really takes a huge amount of the clerics resources. This leaves them with only a few spell slots left. If you only have a few spell slots, you better keep them for healing, as you feel like a douche if somebody dies on your watch. This is partly about players expectations, but is a valid concern.

See, I think that's really the issue, and it comes back to one of the emergent properties back in 3e that I don't think the designers accounted for.

3e had a lot of words and pages in the DMG spent on the expected design of adventures around encounters - an Nth level party facing a level N encounter were expected to spend about 20-25% of their nebulously defined "resources" on that encounter - resources defined mostly as spells and hit points. They were also expected to have about four such encounters (give or take a few ELs) in a day, so at the end of the day they were actually in danger. Some of those encounters would be traps, zapping the party for so and so much damage (which is why 3e traps had challenge ratings just like monsters)

Thing is, that whole concept got wrecked right out the gate by the combination of two things: the assumption that magic items are fairly easily available for the right price, and that one of those items was the wand of cure light wounds. All of a sudden, as long as time isn't an issue you can heal back to full for less than 3 gp per hit point. That meant that the whole attrition model just didn't work anymore, because while spells remained spent, hit points didn't. So what if you fell into a pit trap and took 15 points of damage, that's just three wand charges. To compensate, many DMs ratcheted up the difficulty of encounters in order to provide more of a challenge, leading to spellcasters being more likely to nova with all their spells instead of holding things back in reserve.

That's something they tried to avoid with both 4e and 5e. 4e had the concept of healing surges that you needed to spend to get healing during the day, and 5e instead removes the easy access to magic items. But anyway, the point is that I think the designers wanted the typical adventuring day to feature attrition. In what little 5e I've been playing, I've been happy to hear players actually discuss how hurt their characters are and rationing available healing.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

In theory, my players were concerned by the low healing amounts on the spells by default. The expectation is that after a fight the cleric will heal everybody up to full if possible. Doing this just once really takes a huge amount of the clerics resources. This leaves them with only a few spell slots left. If you only have a few spell slots, you better keep them for healing, as you feel like a douche if somebody dies on your watch. This is partly about players expectations, but is a valid concern.

Are you taking short rests and using HD first?

Here's what you do after a battle.

1) If you are playing a Life cleric and you have character with less than half hp, you use Preserve Life to bring people back up to half of their hp.
2) You take a short rest and everyone spends HD to heal themselves.
3) Then and only then does a cleric use spells to heal.

5e isn't designed around a string of multiple difficult encounters. It is expected that you have a good number of encounters where you will need little if any healing afterwards. If your party is losing most of their hp in a fight multiple times between short rests you are playing in a nonstandard way.