Why Is the Cleric Unfun?

[Wepwawet]

I also love playing Clerics. Clerics and Druids. I like characters with strong religious flavor. It offers many role playing opportunities.

It's true that the Cleric usually is not much fun to play... But I think it is mostly because of the other players than the game itself. People just expect the cleric to be there healing every single scratch and usually don't remember/know that he has some cool spells or powers.
A well prepared party should have cure potions and not rely simply on the cleric.

A thing that I just hate about the clerics it's their supposed power over the undead! You want them destroyed, not running and hiding somewhere, so you can't destroy them properly!
Because of that I only play Clerics with the Sun domain. It's the only way this power is indeed useful.

 

[Ahnehnois]

A while back I had a cleric who served the deity of vengence, took damaging spells, and was basically a blaster who occasionally healed the party after the battle was over if he was in a good mood. Worked fine.

OTOH, in my most current game I had a different player take up a cleric of the local sun god, take the Healing domain, and totally devote himself to healing people and charity and such. He's fairly crappy in combat (except against undead, which there have been plenty of), but he doesn't mind being the medic at all.

I think spontaneous divine casting (UA) really helps clerics define their roles and makes them far more enjoyable to play. If you want to play one thing and the party is always asking you to heal them it's a pain, but that problem can be avoided if you basically declare how good of a healer you are during spell selection and decide to take other spells.

 

[Celebrim]

In 3.X, Cleric is my favorite class to play.

If the designers feel the 3.X Cleric class is 'unfun', then its just another example of how the 4e game is not designed with me in mind.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Protip 4: Killing your enemies more quickly so they can't hurt you more is almost always more efficient than just letting them get that extra damage on you and patching it up with cures later. If only more players understood this...

-Will

In theory, this is true. But to be a real force to be reckoned with (and make a difference), you need to buff up, which takes a few rounds. In several situations, the front-line won't hold long enough without some serious in-combat healing from your Cleric.
Once you get access to some serious combat spells (Flame Strike, Wall of Fire, Destruction), this tactic might work a bit better, but you still don't have as many spells of this as a Sorceror or even a Wizard (because you don't have lower-level "bread and butter" spells for this as them).

 

[jsaving]

It is a mystery, at least at first glance -- clerics are generally perceived as being amongst the strongest classes in the game and yet few people want to play them.

The problem, in my view, is that clerics are almost universally expected to pay for others' mistakes. Rogue triggered a trap through carelessness? Cleric, burn one of your spell slots to heal him. Fighter ran ahead of the party and got knocked out by a mob? Cleric, burn a few of your spell slots to heal him. Wizard got skewered by arrows because he didn't bother to memorize any defensive spells? That's OK, the cleric can burn some of his slots instead.

It is true that 3rd edition made clerics a bit more fun by adding spontaneous casting. While 2nd edition clerics had to fill their spell slots with cure spells and thereby enter each fight *knowing* they couldn't contribute any other way, 3rd edition clerics could memorize other spells and then hope against hope that they wouldn't need to convert most of them to cure spells over the course of the battle.

But the real problem isn't, and never was, the fact that clerics had to memorize cure spells. Rather, the problem was that clerics had to spend most of their *actions* sacrificing resources to fix other players' mistakes -- an ideal role for an NPC but simply not very entertaining for a PC. And because spontaneous casting didn't address that issue, clerics didn't become dramatically more fun to play in 3e.

The key for 4e is to ensure that clerics can heal other party members while simultaneously keeping cleric players in the thick of the action. One of the playtest reports contained an example in which a cleric's melee attack triggered healing energies that washed over his party, which is exactly the sort of thing that's needed to make clerics fun to play.

 

[Wormwood]

Rather, the problem was that clerics had to spend most of their *actions* sacrificing resources to fix other players' mistakes -- an ideal role for an NPC but simply not very entertaining for a PC.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. Well put!

edit: I've seen about half a dozen cohorts in the past 7 years. All but one were healers.

One of the playtest reports contained an example in which a cleric's melee attack triggered healing energies that washed over his party, which is exactly the sort of thing that's needed to make clerics fun to play.

One more data point for the 'looks like the 4e designers paying attention to actual play' column.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

How are they "unfun"? They're easily the most powerful class at mid to high levels in 3.5!

 

[Perun]

Cleric is one of those classes apparently considered 'unfun' to play. The most cited reason for this appears to be the fact that he often spends a lot of actions on healing his companions. Why, though, is healing considered unfun?

I love playing clerics and healing in combat involves similar complexity of decisions to attacking with spells (which ostensibly is not considered unfun) or weapons, ranging from how to get to the people who need it, through whom to prioritize when, to the type of spell used. I don't find it any more boring than hacking at an opponent, the prime occupation of classes such as the barbarian - why do other people find it so boring?

Well, IME, a typical combat in which my aasimar cleric of Amaunator takes part frequently looks like this:

• Round 1: I cast bless!
• Round 2: I cast cure light wounds on the soulknife!
• Round 3: I cast shield of faith on the soulknife!
• Round 4: I cast cure light wounds on the crusader!
• Round 5: Okay, guys, I'm going into melee! I cast bull's strength on me and ready my greatsword!
• Round 6: What do you mean the combat is over?!

Now, I fully expect to heal or buff once or twice in combat, but in the vast majority of cases I don't get even near the melee... I'm the guy in field-plate wielding a wand (of cure light wounds) standing just outside the combat

That's unfun.

 

[Celebrim]

The problem, in my view, is that clerics are almost universally expected to pay for others' mistakes...simply not very entertaining for a PC.

I reject this idea completely. It's not entertaining or enjoyable to help others? To work as a team? To be Mr. Fix-it? To be, most often, the single most important guy on the team? To be the one guy that the team can't afford to have go down, because everything else can be recovered from? To be the most flexible guy on the team in and out of combat? To be the one guy on the team who can always contribute in every situation because you are almost as good of a spell caster as the wizard(s), and/or almost as good of a combatant as the fighter(s). That's not fun? If that isn't fun, I'm not sure what is.

If anything, the 3.X Cleric is _too fun_, _too attractive_, _too good_ and almost makes it so that, "Why would anyone ever play anything else?" is a legitimate question. You can play 'a party of clerics' and cover every role in the party far better than you can with any other class. You can have a cleric fighter (defender), a cleric wizard (blaster), a cleric cleric (leader), and with a bit of help from a PrC and a little multiclassing, a cleric rogue. I only wish every class was as well designed, as versital in role playing situations, as versital in character creation, as useful over a wide range of levels, and as fun to play as the Cleric.

The Cleric is not an example of something in 3.X that needs fixing. It's an example of something that all the other classes should be aspiring to. I would have thought that the designers would be looking at the cleric and saying, "This is the class that we did just about right. Let's make all the classes more like this."

 

[3d6]

I find that clerics are more fun the more you have of them -- in a party of clerics, no one spends actions healing others, and you can focus on the more ass-kicking aspects of clericdom.