AbdulAlhazred
Legend
That's cool. It just sounded like a continuation of the 'clerics aren't efficient because...'.Ah, I understand the disconnect. You think I'm one of those people who cares about winning arguments, so when I say something you view it in terms of whatever previous disagreements have come up instead of as an independent item. I on the other hand saw someone who said their druid hadn't been able to do much damage mitigation, but he's a new guy and still struggling to get the hang of things, so I chipped in with a word of advice on his behalf for two of the things that druids can do to mitigate damage. Yes, Spike Growth is situational--it won't work when you're fighting missile mobs, and I believe I said that originally; and it won't work against flying creatures; but it might very well have worked against the Fire Elemental mentioned in your post, depending on terrain and what its motivation was for attacking you. In my experience anyone who sees the spikes is going to be quite reluctant to spend a full turn of movement dashing across them, taking 30 or 40 points of damage in the process (depends on geometry), in order to kill the PCs. I agree that the tactic is situational and not something for every combat, but it's a non-obvious tactic when you first read through the PHB so I thought it worth mentioning.
I'm not saying any of them replaces each other. I was just saying that the most important functionality is healing/restoration that the cleric is uniquely positioned to provide. Being a loremaster or a nature guy is situationally useful, healing is ALWAYS useful.Precisely. Neither does the cleric displace the druid, or the lore bard, or anyone else. The cleric is non-mandatory precisely because of opportunity cost. If you could always add a cleric without losing anyone else, obviously you'd take him and be glad. Either of us can name lots of useful things that a cleric can bring to the party.
Sounds to me like some devs didn't quite do their homework. I mean if you are going to have a cleric then surely its shtick should be healing, and neither archetypes nor past edition experience points to bards as healics. So my conclusion would be that this is RAW differing from RAI.Ah, so you just didn't know about Aura of Vitality? I will explain.
At 6th level, the Lore Bard gets Magical Secrets: two spells off any class's list. He can steal the 3rd level Paladin spell Aura of Healing. It heals 2d6 hit points with a bonus action every round for a minute, or 70 points of damage on average. This is two and a half times more efficient than Cure Wounds with 20 Wisdom. That's why I say clerical healing is inefficient.
There are other combos that are similarly attractive when done proactively as damage mitigation (e.g. druid's Wildshape into a meat shield, or Polymorph) but Aura of Vitality bards are as good as it gets when it comes to healing damage after the fact. I would not trade my healing bardlock for a cleric, especially since he'll eventually get all the best parts of being a cleric (Bless, Death Ward) through Magical Secrets without giving up the best parts of being a bardlock (crazy good Stealth, Repelling Blast combos to blast enemies off cliffs/into walls of fire/etc., Conjured Animals, improved Counterspelling, lots of bardic inspiration dice, eventual Wish spell) and without the icky RP downsides (to me) of being a PC whom I-the-player can't intellectually respect. (That's a flaw in me BTW, not in other people, but it's one I haven't overcome yet. I am unable to relate to anyone who would worship a D&D godling any more than I can relate to people worshipping Egyptian pharaohs in real life. It just makes no sense to me why you would do that, and yet they did.)
Well, if they really did accidentally make bards vastly better healers than clerics, IMHO its a mistake, but then again nobody can be blamed for playing by the rules. There were certainly some pretty silly things you could do in past editions as well.
I'm not particularly fond of clerics either, but for a different reason. They just don't have a lot of thematic correspondence to anything in fiction or myth. Not that there's NOTHING, each bit of the cleric comes from somewhere, but its a kind of weird synthesis. I don't mind them in terms of just playing out classic 'D&D as a fantasy genre' play, but I like the option to be able to play less stereotyped games. I like D&D but I see classic D&D tropes and genre as kind of a straightjacket. This is one of my beefs with 5e, it rather slavishly sticks to those tropes. You can probably escape them more than in AD&D or 3e, but not nearly to the degree you could in 4e, where a game could borrow lots of the D&D classic material and heavily rework it.