[PHB] Divine Favor and Righteous Might Official Spell Changes

[Celtavian]

Take a closer look at Magic Circle against Evil before you just write it off. Yes, the bonuses to saves et al are useless compared to the items the character is wearing. However, the ability to ignore mind-affecting spells is FAR from useless at high levels. In fact, it's really sort of imperative that you put one on each fighter in the party - they need all the help they can get against "save or stop" WILL save spells like Dominate Person.

We do still use spells such as Magic circle against X and Protection from X for just such occasions. Same reason we keep a few Lesser Restorations memorized. You never know when you will need such spells. Our clerics recently had their wisdom drained to th epoint where they couldn't even cast a level 4 spells. Only one of the clerics could cast Lesser Restoration and yet did not have the spell memorized. We won't make that mistake again.

This can work both ways. We've found that if there are more targets around for the monsters to beat on it reduces the damage in two ways. First, the extra targets mean that fewer PCs get singled out for massive damage. Second, with more bodies in melee you reduce the mobility of the monsters and cut down on flanking and isolation tactics.

In our group, only the melees (fighter, paladin and barbarian) have the armor class and hit points to stand up to what we fight for any length of time. Rogues get smashed faster than the fighter and require even more healing if they take on an enemy by themselves. We really don't want to risk the cleric going down. If the cleric goes down usually the whole party is going to end up dead. That is why we have three clerics: 1 multiclass fighter/cleric, a straight cleric, and a cohort cleric. We really needed the help.

Maybe it's our group that's different, but we've been running the same core characters since 3.0 came out and the clerics get to do lots of stuff besides healing. They throw offensive spells (Fire Storm is a favorite at our current level), fight in melee AND heal. While the offensive spells have gotten bigger, their basic role hasn't changed from the point where clerics GET offensive magic (Flame Strike is the first real one).
The thing that really makes this possible is having enough ranks in Concentration to be able to cast defensively. Once you get over that hurdle you can stand in front of the bad guy and fight, heal the fighter standing next to you without having to move, throw out a Hold Person, Bane or Bestow Curse and not take the AoO, and so on.

Mark.

Probably a difference in DMing styles. Our DM really pulls no punches and throws incredibly tough encounters at us. We do, or did, have a horde of characters, so I can't blame him.

 

[Perun]

This is why I vastly prefer the Cloistered Cleric (from UA) to the traditional D&D cleric. The class is physically weaker than the PH cleric, and thus much less likely to step on fighters' toes. There might be some overlapping with certain wizard abilities (cloistered cleric is much better at identifying magic items, for example, since he gets identify as a 1st-level spell on his spell list, without the arcane material component).

The thing that bothers me about standard clerics is that the class is designed to be two things -- a decent combatant and a primarily defencive caster. In any situation where you need to cast spells, you won't be able to be an effective combatant (because you can't fight and cast spells at the same time). If most fights require cleric to act as a healer, the player might feel that he's not using the character to his full potential: why have all the combat skills (decent hp and BAB, good armour, etc.) if you don't get the chance to use them?

Cloistered cleric takes care of this -- the character is a scholar and a primarily defencive spellcaster. You can boost yourself for combat (with the standard cleric boosting spells), but then you become an average combatant (about the equivalent of the un-boosted regular cleric). In battle you boost, heal and protect, out of combat you've got a tremendous amount of skill points and knowledge skills.

Incidentally, I've been toying with the idea of giving clerics a couple more special abilities while reducing their spellcasting (max. of 6th spell level) a bit for some time now. The theoretical end result would make them similar to psychic warriors. That way, they'd be primarily combat-focused, and (IMO) closer to the idea of a martial priest the claric was originally designed to reflect. I might even fold the paladin into this variant class, and make it the (un)holy warrior class thing.

Regards!

 

[Grognard]

Hey! I resemble that remark. But you only stay one until the breath weapon is used, then you have to rotate down the dragon chart.

Awww, poor baby...

 

[ForceUser]

I won't be making this change in my game. I like clerics being a bit more powerful because it gives players incentive to play them. Hardly anyone plays the cleric in my game as it stands, and this nerf, balanced or not, is not going to encourage anyone in my group to take the plunge. So thanks WotC, but no thanks.

 

[ForceUser]

This is why I vastly prefer the Cloistered Cleric (from UA) to the traditional D&D cleric.

Cloistered clerics are neat, but they are subpar in the standard Fab Four array of fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue. In such a setup, they are supposed to be the backup fighter, a role for which the cloistered cleric is exquisitely unsuited. All three cloistered clerics we've had in our campaigns have died at least once. Clerics, in my opinion, make poor backrank classes, because the cleric needs to be up front healing the guys who are upfront. And when the cloistered cleric steps up front, he gets tooled because he's little better than a wizard on the front ranks.

That's why I prefer the standard cleric. He needs the heavy armor and d8 HD just so he can be an effective in-combat healer.

 

[Black Knight Irios]

The reduced power of Divine Favor was good work.
But the reduced power of Righteous Might, was and is not so good. I have thought about making Righteous Might a 4th level spell with the changes applied.

Another spell that can break game balance is gate. But that problem has not occured in any group I played or DMed so far.

 

[Piratecat]

Another spell that can break game balance is gate. But that problem has not occured in any group I played or DMed so far.

Hijack: I didn't think Gate was broken, especially with the 1000 xp cost for calling -- until last game, when I worked out exactly how powerful a 37 HD horned devil is when gated in by a 19th lvl caster. Other than getting VERY lucky with a banishment, fleeing, or summoning in a solar of their own, I don't believe that there is any way my 19th lvl party of eight PCs could survive this encounter. In fact, it's possible that the fiend could tpk them in less than three rounds.

Okay, back to the topic at hand.

 

[Thanee]

(One casting of Gate allows to overcome pretty much every challenge a party faces at those levels, because of the 2x HD - with 1x HD and probably a reduced XP cost to compensate (i.e. 500) it's a much more reasonable spell.)

Bye
Thanee

 

[Perun]

All three cloistered clerics we've had in our campaigns have died at least once. Clerics, in my opinion, make poor backrank classes, because the cleric needs to be up front healing the guys who are upfront. And when the cloistered cleric steps up front, he gets tooled because he's little better than a wizard on the front ranks.

That's why I prefer the standard cleric. He needs the heavy armor and d8 HD just so he can be an effective in-combat healer.

While I haven't seen the cloistered cleric (CC) in actual game-play (we've been playing in a campaign before UA was released), he is one of the top choices for my next character.

A standard cleric easily gets stretched too thin. In order to be a decent combatant and spellcaster, he needs good scores in Str, Con and Wis. And even if he manages to get great scores in these, he's still playing a second violin to almost anyone -- he'll be decent in a fight, but to truly do something, he needs a couple of rounds to buff himself up, and by that time most fights are already over. To do a successful job as a front-line healer, he needs ranks (and lots of them) in Concentration, and he only gets 2 skill points per level, and Int isn't anywhere near the priority list for clerics. (If he doesn't max his ranks in Concentration, he's really not any better in front-line healing than the CC -- the CC will get hurt easier (lower AC, less hp), but the standard clerics won't get many spells off.)

Besides, to be a good healer, you don't need to be up front, you need to be in the "second row", behind the fighters.

Cloistered clerics are neat, but they are subpar in the standard Fab Four array of fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue. In such a setup, they are supposed to be the backup fighter, a role for which the cloistered cleric is exquisitely unsuited.

That's true, and the party will have to accomodate this in some way (just as they would accomodate any "non-standard" party mix -- our current party is cleric-less, we have a fighter, fighter/psychic warrior, wizard, rogue, and a druid, and we rely heavily on wands of cure light wounds for healing). Perhaps a rogue might be replaced by Rogue 1/Ranger X, who can then serve as a decent second-line combatant as well.

Regards!

 

[Plane Sailing]

Second mini-hijack

(One casting of Gate allows to overcome pretty much every challenge a party faces at those levels, because of the 2x HD - with 1x HD and probably a reduced XP cost to compensate (i.e. 500) it's a much more reasonable spell.)

Since there isn't a direct correlation between HD and CR, I think I might be tempted to make gate able to summon a creature with a CR of up to casters level, for an xp cost.

(just thinking about the idea that "you don't get xps for a summoned monster just like you don't get xps for surviving a cloudkill" which works fine for summoned monsters because they are normally so far below the casters 'CR' that they are only speedbumps or nuisances. Gate on the other hand allows you to summon something that greatly exceeds your own CR.

In Piratecats example, I wonder how the party would have felt if they had managed to defeat the 37HD devil, but got no extra experience above and beyond the CR19 wizard himself?

/end second hijack


FWIW I think the Divine Favour nerf is right - quickened divine favour was an insanely useful buff for clerics of 9th level+. I don't have an opinion on righteous might as it hasn't seen use in my games (apart from by the bad guys...)