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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Volund" data-source="post: 7078496" data-attributes="member: 6872597">As my tempest cleric advances in level and we face tougher enemies, I am failing Dex/Con saves so often that I can barely keep myself healed, let alone the party. Did I build my character poorly, am I playing him wrong, or is failing your saves at higher levels just a feature of 5e D&D? This is my first 5e character after a long hiatus from AD&D where all of your saves got better as you leveled up. I would appreciate any advice on how I might play/use spells differently with my cleric.My half elf tempest cleric just made level 9 at the end of our last session. Keeping him alive is becoming a challenge because I literally can't make a saving throw to save my life. In recent sessions I have been baned and restrained by kuo-toa whips, poisoned by gas, and hit by all manner of spells like fireball, cone of cold, flame strike, and disintegrate which required my party to spend all its treasure to have a high level cleric resurrect me (I guess they like having me around). I'm supposed to be the party support but I'm more like the party liability. It doesn't help that we don't have a bard or paladin.I used point-buy to start and my stats are 16/10/14/8/20/10 having used two ASI's to max out Wis. I'm starting to feel that a str build for heavy armor was a trap. Now that I've played this character for about 6 months, I think I overestimated the value of a high AC. My AC is 21 (plate, shield, cloak of protection) but I am rarely on the front lines unless using Spirit Guardians/Dodge so my AC is not targeted very often. I'm tough to hit when I dodge, but easy to damage with spells and the ratio of attacks against my saves to attacks against my AC is at least 3:1. With a low dex I often don't get a chance to get my support spells up before the first enemy spell or effect has gone off. I don't think I've used my warhammer since level 5. My AC could have been 10 and I would have taken almost the exact same damage our last two sessions. The str build was great at tier 1 - I was as good at melee as anyone else. At tier 2 I feel like I get more mileage out of hanging back and using concentration spells, taking the Dodge action, and then attacking with spiritual weapon which has a better chance to hit than my melee attack. After reaching 7th level my tactic has been to try to banish the enemy spellcaster but if they make their save I naturally become the target for all sorts of nasty spell attacks (that's how I got disintegrated). At level 12 I plan on taking the Resilient (Con) feat if I live that long. I suppose if I could start again I could dump strength to 8 and to start with a 16 Dex and 15 Con, or play a variant human that starts with the resilient (con) feat but that wasn't the character I wanted to play and even then I'd still be failing a fair amount of DC 13+ saves. How do players compensate for saves that are the same at level 14 as they were at level 1? Is a character without proficiency in either Dex or Con saves even viable at higher levels? Having the outlander background and a high Wis and all the Wis skills plus athletics has been incredibly useful outside of combat, but so far having a great Wis save hasn't been as helpful as I thought it would be.  Wis saves don't come up very often in our game. Will that change against higher CR monsters?</blockquote>

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