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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1149253" data-attributes="member: 151">When you consider that Flame Strike and Slay Living are the only truly offensive 5th level clerical spells, that's something of a no-brainer.  A quickened Divine Favor is a 5th level spell.  How many of those are you truly going to have memorized?  Break Enchantment often becomes a must at the levels being discussed.  Plane Shift, True Seeing, Raise Dead and Scrying are all important stand-bys.    So essentially, you're advocating taking one of the two most group oriented classes and having him act as a loner?  I can see that working, but it seems to work at cross-purposes.  Essentially, you're burning a good deal of your spell power to become...a fighter who loses his powers with a targeted dispel or beholder ray.  The sacrifice, of course, is that you have that many fewer spells to help the group when they need it, such as the aforementioned Break Enchantment, Plane Shift, Removal spells, Death Ward, Restorations, Dimensional Anchor, Dismissal and so forth.  Can the cleric be better than the fighter?  In some situations, yes, but only at the cost of actually being a useful member of a group.  And being a bit of a jerk, potentially.    IME, Dispel Magic is pretty powerful, particularly it's Greater variety.  That illustrates how differences in levels and campaign styles can change things.  The fighter isn't just dealing damage, he's taking it, too.  If you're a cleric and you've spent all your feats to be an effective melee or ranged combatant, then you're still not as good in different situations as a pure fighter, who'll be dealing 150+ points of damage with his arrows at the same time as you do, possibly while you're still buffing.  It sounds like you play in a game where you don't have many combats in succession very often, if at all.  That skews the numbers more than a little.  If you only reasonably have two or three combats a day, and you're prepared for them, you'll easily outmode the melee characters, as you've got more tricks, and are able to use them without fear of being caught with your pants down, spell-wise. This ultimately highlights what I've been trying to point out to UK for some time.  I think UK's efforts are admirable, but will ultimately prove of little utility, without some inclusion of proximate factors to balance his numbers.  The cleric's utility varies based on campaign-style much more than the fighter, for example.  If you regularly have 8-10 combats before resting, then you can rightfully expect the spellcasters to be much more conservative and harder pressed, than if you only have one or two combats.  If your party has no cleric (or has a cleric like Numion, who is carrying a big stick), and you enter a dungeon such as "Heart of Nightfang Spire" which is rife with undead...then the whole difficulty factor of encounters is dramatically changed.  A Bodak's potential threat, for example, widely varies, depending on the cleric's presence and his spell selection.  I seriously think that UK should look for a sub-system to plug into his other systems to factor in such conditions. Failure to do so can skew any results he produces.  The cleric is supposedly the most powerful class, and yet is widely seen as unpopular.  As I mentioned before, the cleric puts you in one of two positions: the team supporter or the One-Man-Army-Corps.  The team supporter is an unexciting role to play and the OMAC is a poor team player.  Further, unless the cleric exists in a vacuum, he's one of the few classes that comes with baggage: he's a de-facto member of an organization that he has to answer to and certain rules that govern his behavior that could cost him his abilities that is generally more restrictive than 'don't stop being lawful/chaotic'.  If the DM doesn't enforce such aspects, that's a factor, as well.</blockquote>

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