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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ellington" data-source="post: 6009959" data-attributes="member: 6692166">Does anybody else find this ability to be needlessly clunky?It adds another resource pool for the cleric to manage apart from his spells, which would be fine, except the abilities this grants is so similar to his spells I can't help but feel the two could either be melded together somehow or distinguished further. A first level cleric gains the ability to once per day cast cure light wounds from a separate pool, but it isn't really cure/inflict light wounds but something slightly different. Different domains also grant different powers, which also feel very much like spells of their own. It all feels very confusing, especially for newer players.Let's examine what they're trying to accomplish with Channel Divinity:1) They're giving the cleric its own gimmick.This is good, and in line with the design of the other D&D next classes. Apart from the unique spell list the cleric has its own unique ability that no other class has, much like the fighter's combat superiority. The cleric can further customize this unique ability by choosing different domains, allowing for a wide variety of different clerics.2) They're giving the cleric a separate pool of resources for healing.Understandable. People often complained that they had to sacrifice their cool powers to become party 'healbots', and if they weren't healing the party they weren't doing their jobs. By giving clerics the ability to separate their cool powers from the "boring healing stuff", the class seems a lot more exciting. But is this the right way to do it? It seems like overly clunky design to me, and I think there might be simpler ways to go about it.Here are a couple of ideas I have on how to allow the cleric to perform his job as a healer without cutting the fun stuff out. Intertwined healing4E had some fun spells that allowed the cleric to both hit stuff and heal their allies at the same time. What if (no seriously), all the healing a cleric did worked this way? Whenever a cleric cast a spell, he could heal a nearby ally for like, 1d6 HP at first level. With two spells per day, the cleric would always heal at least 2d6 points per day. The amount of intertwined healing would increase, not with character level, but with the level of the spell slot used to cast the spell. So a first level spell slot would grant 1d6 HP as a free action while a third level spell slot would grant 3d6 HP. Evil clerics could use this power to deal the same amount of damage to nearby enemies.You can envision this as some sort of "divinity leak" in the cleric. Whenever he casts spells as a conduit for his god, some of the god's divinity leaks out to either heal or harm nearby creatures.But what about stuff like War domain clerics? They like to hit people and heal them at the same time. Where does that factor in? Simple, just give them spells that involve hitting people and the healing will follow. War domain clerics already have the spell Crusader's Strike which has them make a melee attack against a creature. Giving them some minor healing to go along with it sounds pretty cool to me.This isn't to say that spells like Cure Light wounds should be removed from the spell list. They'd still be there, and even get some bonus healing on top from the intertwined healing! Everyone wins, even the players that like to play healbots.Ritual healingSimple and effective. The cleric could cast mass healing spells after combat to patch the party up without having to prepare spell slots in advance. The cost would simply be money, much like with other rituals. This gives the cleric (and the party as a whole) another resource to manage when healing the group, but it's a lot more intuitive than some arbitrary X amounts of healing per day that's totally not cure light wounds. The cleric would turn into a portable healing potion vending machine, but with better fluff.Anyways, those are just a couple of ideas and I'd love to hear some more. I like the ideas they have for the cleric, but not so much the implementation.  If any of you agree and have some ideas of your own, please share them <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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