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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grydan" data-source="post: 6043479" data-attributes="member: 79401">It was entirely possible for the original Cleric to reach Patriarch (the final named level) without ever gaining a single healing or disease curing spell. It was never possible for them get around the edged weaponry restriction. All Clerics automatically had the ability to turn undead. Which then is more essential to being a member of the Cleric game class?While yes, they were the only one of the original three (and if you add the later Thief, the "core four") classes that had access to healing magic, there was nothing that required an individual Cleric to ever have any of the healing magic on their spell list. Alright, but I also don't see "Cleric" as representing "magical healer", because that has even less thematic overlap. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Interesting then that both non-healing clerics and urban rangers have been supported over the years. Even as recently as 4E, the Ranger class could choose to take Dungeoneering rather than Nature as their skill, leaving them no particular automatic advantages in surface wilderness over anyone else. Even as one of the Leader classes, the role to which the vast majority of healing abilities was granted, it was entirely possible to build a 4E Cleric that never gained more healing abilities than Healing Word.To be honest, I think the Fighter class is both too broad (in terms of what archetypes they want it to cover) and too narrow (in terms of the support given to it in order to represent those archetypes). This seems to be the meat of our disagreement. To me, all divine spell-casters are Clerics, to you, it's the smaller category of divine healers. A well put-together Swashbuckler class would be a wonderful thing to see, but I'm not holding my breath waiting on it. It needs the combat prowess of a Fighter, while doing so in light armour or no armour at all, and needs the cunning wit usually restricted to dashing rogues and charming bards (verbal fencing being often just as important, or even more so, than the physical).Does it make any sense at all for such a character to wade into battle alongside a medieval style knight in plate armour? Not really, but hey, that's D&D for you.He was not, as you say, a magical healer. However, he is from a non-magical setting. I also never said that magical healing needs to be available to all. I love 4E's combat roles (and think the system suffers somewhat due to there being no roles outside of combat). However, their presence apparently deeply offends some people, so away they go. I do think that subsuming the role of "healer" into "leader" was a smart move, though. One can fill the same approximate combat role with defensive buffing of allies: preventing damage often produces results indistinguishable from repairing it. The fact that healing surges are limited is virtually the entire point of them, as far as I'm concerned. I view their role of allowing healing to be roughly proportionate amongst characters with differing HP totals as being entirely secondary to their role of presenting a limit to daily healing. That role didn't even require a name, they could have just used "25% of your max HP, rounded down" in every healing ability to gain the same effect. It's the fact that they're a resource that you need to manage is what requires them to have a name. Whether or not they're playing the same role depends on how a Cleric of Death is put together. A OD&D Anti-Cleric is the same, mechanically, as the Cleric, with the Cure spells having reversed effects, and the Raise Dead spell becoming Finger of Death: in all other mechanical respects, the two are identical (and as repeatedly noted, it's entirely possible for either a Cleric or Anti-Cleric to have none of those spells in the first place, which would make the two indistinguishable). Certainly a 4E Cleric of the Raven Queen who chooses to embrace no more than the bare minimum of healing effects plays the same role (in the 4E sense) as a Cleric of Pelor who chooses to be a pacifist healer and choose every single available healing option. They're just approaching it in different ways.In terms of weapon proficiencies and armour proficiencies... that's one of the very things I'm arguing (and judging from the playtest documents, WotC already agrees with me to an extent) doesn't need to be decided at a class level. It can be decided within a class. Followers of the Warbringer already gain additional weapon proficiencies, as do followers of the Trickster. In the last package, though we only had one subtype of Sorcerer available, that subtype modified the proficiencies from those listed as the base proficiencies of the class.</blockquote>

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