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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 3876102" data-attributes="member: 16726">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.</blockquote>

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