Doug McCrae said:
The problem with clerics is they're too good at too many different things. They can melee as well or better than fighters and barbarians. They can heal, buff, scry and turn undead. Domains give them domain powers and magic-user spells such as fly.
1. The only way they can melee as well or better than fighters and barbarians is through the use of buff spells. This was problematic in 3.0 when they could keep the buffs up all day and still have plenty of spells left over, but with the shortened buff duration in 3.5 they need to burn through all their spells to keep up with the Joneses.
Where this becomes problematic again is if the DM allows the party to always have control over their encounters-per-day. (In other words, the encounters never come to them and they can always decide when "enough is enough" and retreat for a rest.) It's not that DMs should always be interrupting the PCs when they attempt to rest, but the threat should be there so that the PCs don't have carte blanche to blow all their daily resources in a single battle and then rest up for the next battle.
Once you've allowed that style of play, clerics are hardly the only overpowered class: This is also the reason why so many people have problems when they compare mid-level arcane spellcasters to mid-level melee fighters.
2. Healing is irrelevant unless you're playing some kind of deathmatch-style where the PCs are fighting each other. The cleric's ability to heal is there to service the party as a whole -- it doesn't enhance the cleric personally in any way.
3. Buffs either chew up their spells to make them look just like fighters, they feed into their core competencies, or -- like healing -- they service the party as a whole and make everybody more powerful.
4. Turn undead is broken. It's broken in favor of the cleric at low levels and it's broken against the cleric at higher levels. At low levels it can regularly wipe out entire encounters with a single action. At higher levels, undead gain HD so fast compared to their CR (due to their lack of Con scores) that the ability becomes completely useless -- the cleric can never succeed in turning anything but undead mooks.
WotC has tried to fix the latter problem by giving clerics nifty feats that transform their turn checks into something meaningful and useful at higher levels. They've generally tried to work around the former problem by throwing in
unhallow or some fluff-text justified turn resistance whenever they want to do an undead-centric adventure. But these just feed into the other problem turning has:
It's never actually any fun.
Turning basically has two results: (1) You roll the dice and nothing hapens. You've wasted your entire turn and accomplished nothing. (2) You roll the dice and end the encounter.
Like any other save-or-die effect, it reduces the gameplay to a game of craps.
In my experience, every group I've played with for any length of time generally develops one of two dynamics:
(1) The cleric pulls off a couple of encounter-ending turns early in his career. Everyone is really excited by how easy that encounter was. Turn continues to be used, for its use becomes increasingly blaise until the group no longer takes undead encounters seriously. Eventually turning becomes useless and the cleric stops using it.
(2) The first several times the cleric uses his turning ability it doesn't work (the dice don't like him or whatever). He become frustrated with wasting his time while other characters are doing cool stuff. He stops using turns.
And the final problem with turning is that its the only major ability in the game which survived the update to 3rd Edition while retaining an odd and wonky mechanic with no other precedent in the game and an essentially mandatory table look-up.
I've scrapped the whole system and replaced it with a single d20-based turn check creating an area effect opposed by a Will saving throw. Variability of effect depends on the margin of success.
Hmm... This ended up turning into a rant against turning.
Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net
