I like the new focus on S tier, no longer being just "really good", instead being "potentially broken or problematic at tables". That feels much more helpful for players and the right focus in general for analysis of how the classes and subclasses are balanced.
@@valerius88 agreed. It's a really good reason I like the revision to Paladins. If you didn't use your spell slots to smite you were "playing wrong" and if you did it's possible you ended encounters without allowing the other players from being able to do anything, which decreases party fun. Edit:I played 1-16 Paladin in Against the Giants.
100% agree. I’ve had a few players at my table play subclasses that were S-Tier which definitely made the game less fun for me as the GM because of how overpowered they were. Looking at you Echo Knight!
I think we're overlooking the changes to healing spells for high level life domain clerics that just max out dice. A 3rd level spell slot can easily mean 18 healing per person as a bonus action.
@@shaneconnolly4747 A 5th level Mass Cure Wounds does 5d8+Wisdom. By this level, that means you do 40 + 5 + 7 (52) healing to 6 people, and then an additional 7 healing to yourself. And you can do this with greater potency by upcasting. Even at high levels, this is *massive* healing that can undo several rounds of damage. This is different from 2014, when it was 3d8+Wisdom (24+5+7 = 36) which is fine, but is not nearly as good. And upcasting normal healing word is so insanely potent too now, when it was just completely negligible in 2014.
My favorite life domain memory is when the Monk was getting eaten by a T-Rex and kept going onconscious while the life domain Cleric constantly got them back up.
Hard to imagine a more horrific experience... Monk: Oh, God! He's chewing me! Cleric: Don't worry! I can keep you alive! Monk: No! Stop! It hurts! Oh, just please let me die!!!!
As others have pointed out, you seem to have missed this part of Preserve Life for Life Domain: "This feature can restore a creature to no more than half its Hit Point maximum."
Yeah, i hate that line of text to be honest. It was about to be a great channel divinity, and then they have to throw in the "sike uhm actually you can only heal them up to half, limiting your healing ability, when healing is already not great in 5e/5.5e"
Also if you have a DM that refuses to have his enemies attack you duplicate and they just somehow know witch one is witch and they only swarm you, just switch place with your duplicate as a bonus action.
reminds me of this really common but bad faith reading of the feature on the 2014 version where they just assumed that it could be insight checked like any illusion spell when that wasn't provided by the text. idk why "this unique ability that only this subclass gets that doesn't provide a clause that people can tell it's fake based on a check should be directly compared to a spell most classes can get earlier than this" obviously im not saying that enemies should be stupid and always think it's real but there are ways to counter play it without immediately shutting it down
It's not spelled out in the rules, but a reasonable approach might be to make a quick judgment based on enemy/NPC intelligence, familiarity with illusions, and whether something has made it very obvious that the duplicate is non-corporeal. Maybe the first bandit runs the duplicate through, then shouts to the others that it's a fake...with maybe an Investigation or Perception check to recognize if the cleric has swapped places with the duplicate (because I'd really want to reward cleverly-timed use of that ability). A seasoned adventurer or a caster with a penchant for illusions might make the check to notice the duplicate's an illusion in the first place, with advantage if they can also see the PC (or just not require a roll if they've done something to make it very obvious) Making it make sense does require more careful GMing than a system where all the mechanical consequences are detailed; D&D really is at times a compromise between the super-flexible (which also means more non-dice non-mechanics work for GM and players) rules-light storytelling-first systems and the more mechanically fleshed-out tactical systems
I really wish the Life domain cleric had a class feature that let them grant temporary HP (besides a Spell) or to Overheal, giving Temp HP (or increasing Max HP) by the amount of excess healing.
Yeah- I agree. Especially because Light Domain- Basically the Blaster Clerics- Get to grant temp HP when using one of their features. But Life Domain doesn’t, for whatever reason.
IMO Life needed to get a lot of the toys of the Twilight cleric. We probably wont see peace or twilight without some serious revision in 5.24 so letting Life run a divinity with temp HP would give more weight to hardcasting healing spells with the life domain feature.
@@bobnewkirk7003 With great dread and sorrow, I am waiting for when they will release Twilight Cleric 2024.. Oh, its in desperate need of a nerf, yes- but i will miss my overpowered emo clerics :(
A party member, potentially the cleric themselves, can increase the healing threshold with the AID spell. “Tough” origin feat also does this and can stack. Inspiring leader works along with as a source of Temp HP with charisma or wisdom based characters.
6:32 Preserve life can't restore hit points past half a characters hitpoint max correct? Makes this ability much more niche, you would use it when a few party members are really low.
With the possible exception of if you cast it first with a spell slot, then with War God's Blessing (with only the first one requiring concentration, and only the second ending if you cast it again)...though a table-ruling that this is also not allowed probably wouldn't shock anyone
For comparison, this is what Monty & Kelly gave 4 years ago for the Cleric Subclass Tier Ranking : - Life Domain : S - Light Domain : A -Trickery Domain : B -War Domain : C
Which is what I find wild. Overall, I think the cleric has improved and the life domain only got better. Other than not being able to use the good berry strategy I can’t see why it’s rating would drop so much
@@abcrasshadow9341 not disagreeing but it does make me laugh, how if you watch their old cleric rankings, they talk this domain up massively. Now it’s regarded as situational.
Thank you. I think it is really interesting to see Life's fall, but overall I'm not surprised. The Life domain abilities always sounded really good, but when you actually get into play... You heal an additional +4 hp and heal yourself for 4 hp on the same turn. For the VAST majority of the subclass, that's it. Now that the Heavy armor was moved out, and we are just looking at the unique life abilities, they lose a lot of that old luster.
My understanding is 2024 Disciple of Life only applies the turn you cast the spell. Therefore, it will have little effect on Aura of vitality (round 1 only) and none on goodberry.
If a bunch of creatures hold their actions to eat a berry the moment you create them, I would argue that disciple of life would still apply (although this is only 4 hp restored rather than 1). If you could use a held action to feed another creature than you could heal more with more berries, but there isn't precedent in the spell description for that and you would need either a party of 10 or have some minions/hirelings to make use of all berries in one turn, which is pretty unlikely.
Im so angry they included TRICKERY instead of Tempest in the new PHB… I like Trickery, but I wish they had put the POWER OF ZEUS in the new phb instead…
I've played a 1-20 War cleric using the 2014 rules, and the 2024 updates are amazing and remove the bumpiness. Personally I'd rate it an A. If I had the 2024 rules, Id never run out of War Priest Bonus Action attacks as my Wis modifier was 3+ and that's how long fights last, and I generally prepped with Spiritual weapon and either shield of faith or spirit guardians before combat starts.
@@jeffdybdal656 Spiritual Weapon doesn't require concentration though for War Domain clerics, that's what's cool about the 2024 revisions. Add Shield of Faith without concentration as well and you're golden.
I'm part of a 4-person party playing Curse of Strahd. Originally, we had a paladin, fighter, druid, and rogue. Healing was being provided primarily by the druid. After having the druid go down, and the paladin out of position, we realized we needed a cleric. By chance, my ability scores as a fighter were high because of good rolls, and I took a 13 in wisdom for a perception boost. When we leveled up from first to second level, I took a level in Life domain (2014 rules). With a wisdom of 13, my spell save DC and spell attack bonus were going to be minimal. I picked Life domain because the spells I picked were buffs, so DC and attack bonus don't matter. My pick of Protection from Evil and Good were clutch because we had two members who were in two different solo fights with ghouls. The fact that the ghouls were fighting with disadvantage meant our party members survived. Not the typical reasons for choosing Life domain, but it's working for us.
Invoke Duplicity mimics your movements. Therefore, if you Invoke Duplicity and give yourself invisibility, you would not be able to "snatch the McGuffin" without detection because your Duplicate would "act out" every step you make. Outside observers would not know exactly where you are, but they would be able to watch you climb a latter, walk across a ledge and jumping down to a lower area (with a good investigation roll).
Trickery Domain Cleric who has a day job as a Mime. So they put out the duplicate and steal something, and everyone outside just sees a mime preforming on the street
I mean, to be fair, this is assuming you're in a space where the motions required to move through it would be automatically obvious. If you NEED to climb a ladder to get to the McGuffin then yeah, sure, that would be a giveaway... but I'd argue that the large majority of combat environments most DMs run don't include very many features like that, so that's probably more of a niche exception than a general rule.
@@evanabney3659 My understanding of Invoke Duplicity is that the duplicate the cleric's movement, but doesn't actually move to a corresponding space. So if you climb a ladder, the duplicate would climb in place. If you pick someone's pocket, so would your duplicate - you would be revealing your technique.
So the player has an excuse to mime whatever their character is doing without looking too much like they're doing it? Sounds like a win for the table, at least...
I'll say that my plan for playing a War Domain Cleric is to pair both Shillelagh and True Strike together. You can do this specifically with either Human or High Elf, I personally favor the Elf-style. Then you get through both Magic Initiate and Species access to 2 very important spells. Mixing these together means we can Action: True Strike, Bonus Action: Shillelagh Turn 1. After that we rely on War Priest for BA attacks with our new Shillelagh and cast True strike every turn. At level 6 it get's a little more interesting as now, not only do we have War Priest, but our main attack can instead be a non-concentration spiritual weapon. That means after turn 1 we always have damaging BA ability and with a combination of both we won't run out. The best part is that we can do all this and still Spiritual Guardians if we're need AOE. Probably not as strong as a Fireballing Light cleric but we've got attacks on par with our Fighters, and we could theoretically multiclass or take Weapon Mastery to add topple/slow to our Shillelagh attacks.
@@fortunatus1 True you can just Shillelagh and thats a fine build. However, if you never plan to get Extra Attack from multiclassing and you want to be attacking with a weapon you might as well stack True Strike on that. Or use your action to cast leveled spells, which at that point why be a war cleric?
I play a Life cleric in a party with a druid and a bard and I'm afraid you're correct, I feel so useless and redundant a lot of the time 🥲 I love my character though so I don't want to change my build but. yeah. people say roles don't matter in 5e but the overlap in niches can leave people feeling excluded.
How is your Cleric’s Con/Strength score? You could try taking Spirit Guardians and going with a melee cleric build- That way, you can heal yourself up when you take damage on the frontlines, while your other party members can focus on healing your other frontliners… I mean, at least your healing would go somewhere. I dunno, just a thought, I’ve never played a Cleric for a full campaign, so idk what its like
@@Jekrane A melee build wouldn't work for my character unfortunately. I do have decent CON (15, planning to take Resilient and bump it to 16 at lvl 8) but STR is my dump stat since it doesn't make sense for the character to have high strength for many reasons, so I took the thaumaturge order when we recently updated to the 2024 rules. I already maxed out my WIS so I can do a little bit of blasting even if I'm not the most optimal blaster I can at least give people advantage with guiding bolt and prevent undead creatures from bouncing back with radiant damage. Genuinely I'm okay not being super OP or perfectly built. It just sucks to feel cornered in an suboptimal niche (healing) when other players can do the same and there's an expectation that's standby and do nothing but be a healbot. To be fair most of the other players are very nice and encourage me to do more blasting, it's just one player that complained about me not healing them once (we were separated and in different maps), called me a bad healer and it's been trying to one up me bc they're a druid and can cast the same healing spells so it's been weighing on me since then.
If I was that druid or bard, I'd heal less and damage more knowing I had a life cleric backing me up. I'd take 1 healing spell just in case you went down, and the rest of my spells would be freedom to have more fun with my class. They aren't purposely building healers, are they?
@@nobodynamedmatlock I don't think they are, bard definitely isn't but druid has the animal totem feature so they can heal quite a bit with it. Having a backup is good, I'm not saying I have ownership over healing spells obviously. But this player has called me a bad healer and one up-ed me whenever I heal someone so I have been feeling very redundant and like I have no place in the party. I deal with it because it's mostly just this one person but yeah.
I tend to think the war domain's problem isn't really any different from the Paladin's, Valor Bard's, or Monk's problem, where you have two stats you need to buff. That's generally true for all gishes. I suspect that the solution is something similar.
I think what would really help the War Domain would be getting access to the new True Strike. Cause that would eliminate their need to keep up with strength (except for their 5 bonus action attacks per day, woopdidoo) and add even more extra damage on top. I still don't think it's quite enough to make up for their lack of extra attack, but it would be a big boost.
That's one approach. Either make it single stat with a spell or class feature, or boost both stats. You can boost two stats all the way to 20 while taking one feat (plus an epic boon feat), or boost one to 20 and the other to 18 while keeping more feats open. Neither is exactly unviable. (In fact, getting two stats to 20 is probably optimal for Monks, and maybe Barbarians, given their capstones.)
The one thing War domain would need to be great weapon using cleric is having Searing Smite as one of it's domain spells. That spell is such a massive damage boost to a weapon using cleric that you pretty much have to take 1 level in paladin just to get that spell.
I think there's a really good, straightforward, War Domain built that isn't even super hard. Str 16, Dex 10, Con 14, Int 8, Wis 17, Cha 8 is perfectly straightforward. At that point, you use War God's Blessing for Shield of Faith, not Spiritual Weapon. This also allows Full Plate, which is pretty good. That gets you basically all of the abilities pretty easily most of the time. I think you guys got over-focused on Spiritual Weapon and didn't consider just...not relying on that particular option much at all. Honestly, as a Bonus Action attack you can make pretty regularly, War Priest combined with wanting to use Bonus Actions for other stuff like Healing Word makes Spiritual Weapon a little obsolete in melee if you either go Strength heavy or grab Shillelagh. Now, if you're engaging in ranged combat, that's when the Spiritual Weapon comes out and is quite good.
I think single class cleric just goes shillelagh and melee attacks with booming blade and BA attack while spirit guardians is up. Use all your CD for shield of faith.
For War Domains, start as a Human Fighter. Take a background that gets Wizard or Druid Initiate, take the other with your human feat. You now get a Fighting Style, you have Weapon Masteries, a way to use Shillelagh and/or True Strike, Con saves, and Second Wind. Multiclass into Cleric. Take your next 8-10 levels in Cleric. Level 7 gets you a buff to all attacks, level 8 will let you max out Wisdom. 9-10 get you 5th level spells and Divine Intervention. Take 2nd level of Fighter for Action Surge. If you actually play past Level 12, I'd take 3 more levels of Fighter, get a subclass, Feat (GWM), and extra Attack. If you go to Level 20. 6 Levels of Fighter and 14 Levels of Cleric gets you 2 more Feats and Improved Divine Strike. I personally don't like Clerics, but I would 100% play this
I also think Spiritual Weapon is a trap. +2 Defense and Bonus Action attacks Wisdom x per rest. Then keeping the +10 Attack in your back pocket is better.
As a *Trickery Cleric,* you can cast spells with a *range of self* through your *illusion.* E.g. take the *Magic action* to let your *illusion* make an attack with *True Strike* or have *Spirit Guardians* emanate from it for the duration of the spell, since *Invoke Duplicity* states that _"You can cast spells _*_as though you were in the illusion's space,"_* which is far more liberal than the wording of e.g. *Find Familiar* _"when you cast a spell with a _*_range of touch,_*_ your familiar can deliver the touch."_
Nope. Just because you can cast as though you were in the space doesn’t mean the rules for self range spells changes. The emanation is not a thing which can be targeted with a self spell. It is not the caster. It is not even an object or creature to target. Self range spells target the caster only. The emanation is not the caster.
Hello, thanks for the video. It has always been hard for me moving from one edition to another. With all the changes I just gotta embrace it and see what happens. Cleric is my favorite and I've played 8 of them so far. Only 3 of them were in year+ campaigns. For my first Cleric, ill be playing a Hermit Dhampir life Cleric. I think it will be a lot of fun.
Life is one of my favourites. They are particularly potent with someone else in the party dropping aura of vitality. I was in a 7th level all cleric party fighting an adult black dragon. After the 3rd round of keeping the party alive, (having narrowly survived 2 breathe weapon attacks) the dragon targeted me with all their attacks. Still standing with 1hp next round, I healed back to full between a potion and a spell, looked at the dragon and asked "is that all you got?". Epic.
I believe that the Life Domain Cleric is something of a throwback to earlier days when healing felt more like a requirement. Now, we have so many choices to avoid damage, even within the Cleric class. A Twilight Cleric, with a party of 5, can generate more Temp HP than a Life Cleric can heal at the same level. Then there's increasing AC so damage just isn't taken.
I have tremendous respect for the new 'S' tier being 'This may well be problematic. It may make the game less fun at the table for being too overpowered.' Props to you guys for voicing that so clearly, and indicating that 'A' is the best-written class! Agreed on the Life Domain Cleric being B-tier, though I'd call it a very high B+. Like you always say, it's useful in 'the right campaign'. In this case, I'd say the right campaign is if a GM has been playing D&D since at least the 90's. Rests weren't guaranteed then. If you were in, say, a drow fortress, or an enemy stronghold, the GM wouldn't let you get in a rest. There are times where you might have a few minutes here and there, but not an hour, and definitely not 8. So, this is to me, where the life domain cleric shines: Between-combat healing, if resting isn't guaranteed. Also agreed that WotC kind of trapped themselves with the Life Domain spell list. The subclass logically focuses on healing. And the best healing spells, are cleric spells. There's really no practical way for the Life domain cleric to have spells that weren't on the cleric spell list, because it wouldn't make sense to create a very good healing spell, and then not put it on the cleric class list. Ah well. I'm surprised the War Domain cleric didn't wind up in the 'C' tier rating. All their abilities are really cool, agreed. However, there's two separate, but surprisingly not mutually exclusive, problems, as you said: Their best abilities can't be used together. But also, their best abilities rely on the same pools. Thus, the War Domain Cleric is in danger of running itself out of its cool subclass powers, at which point you'll be left with the base class. That actually makes me think of the Eldritch Knight vs. the Champion. (Putting it here instead of the Fighter video, simply because it's the same train of thought). I was surprised the Champion didn't do a smidge higher, and the Eldritch Knight a smidge lower, for similar reasons. The Eldritch Knight has great powers. But you have to know what you're doing--there's some forgiveness in spell picks, but not total forgiveness. Taking pure blaster spells fits the concept perfectly, but isn't an optimal pick. It's possible to goof yourself up with spell picks, though not necessarily hugely probable. Likewise, they have very limited resources. The Eldritch Knight is one unexpected fight away from just being a baseline fighter. On the flipside, I'm surprised the Champion didn't get a bit more love. I sometimes think their problem is just that it's a kind of boring class. However, I do think its abilities are under-rated. An Eldritch Knight isn't going to be casting spells all the time. A Champion, however, is probably going to be attacking all the time. Every single attack has an increased crit chance. Every round, you have the opportunity to just decide not to fail with a re-roll. The Champion's abilities, augment the base class even more, and you get to bring it to bear every round. I'd argue champion would therefore be a smidge higher, when we take the "Yeah, but the flavor is really dull" factor out. That's interesting, there's a couple different possible ways something can be dragged down the ratings -Competing resources -Adds too little to the class. -Conflicts with base class -Too easy to be reduced to just the base class until a long rest. Keep the videos up! I love watching you guys' takes ever since I discovered your channel in Spring of 2022. Proud owner of both Drakenheim books and soon to be the third as well!
Preserve life is no bueno, thanks to this line: This feature can restore a creature to no more than half its Hit Point maximum So, wait until your group is bloodied, invoke this ability, and everyone is still bloodied
Guided Strike is still great for support with being able to add +10 to another character's attack, pretty much just turning anyone else's attacks into a hit.
My chief reasoning for playing a 2014 War Cleric was access to all martial weapons and heavy armor whereas most cleric subclasses would give you only one or the other. Now that proficiencies aren't tied to subclasses, there seems to be less reason to play a War Cleric when something like Light would give your warrior-priest Warding Flare and Fireball.
The 2014 War Cleric was really bad, and Tempest and Twilight also had martial weapons and heavy armor. I think they should have given the War Cleric extra attack, or a free/bonus action weapon attack when you cast a leveled spell.
The base Cleric on 2024 gets a choice of more spell focus and keeping your base medium armour and simple weapons proficiency or being a more martial focused cleric with martial weapons and heavy weapon proficiency.
It's important to known that Life domain's Disciple of Life feature has been changed to only apply on the TURN you cast the spell, so goodberry and aura of vitality aren't really useful for that, but Mass healing powers REALLY get the benefit now, as it applies to everyone you're healing.
While the War Domain does have some of those issues, I feel there are two different ways to look at subclass abilities. Some subclasses work towards enhancing a particular playstyle and each new feature builds on that single direction, while others add more and more diversity that you may not be able to use all at once but allow for many different directions and solutions to problems. There are merits to both styles, it's just a matter if you want depth or breadth. I think of it like comparing a hammer to a swiss-army knife. One has a single job it's good at doing, while the other can do many jobs but not simultaneously.
Pages 75 and 76 in PHB24 describe the Trickery Domain Cleric. Invoke duplicity is described as mimicking your expressions and gestures. It does not say the duplicate does every motion or movement your character does. Think of Loki's duplicates - they all could be expressing and moving their bodies in different ways, but Loki's personality is shown in each clone. You could therefore hide and have the enemy think you are the duplicate as you command your duplicate to run around and you cast spells through the duplicate. Regarding casting spells through the duplicate - the PHB24 says you can cast spells as if you were in the duplicate's space but you use your own senses to cast them. With that wording, I feel spirit guardians would work with the duplicate. Spirit Guardians has a range of self with a 15ft emanation. So casting SG as if YOU were in the duplicate's space seems possible with rules as written. This would make the Trickery Domain S Tier IMO.
Also if the duplicate is intangible - then touch spells would not work. Touch is a sense - casting spells as though you were in the duplicate's space requires you to use your own senses. The only spells that would work would be ranged spells or self ranged spells.
My favorite subclass currently is the Death Cleric. The changes to Chill Touch were a significant buff to it. No longer does it have to rely on Inflict Wounds to use its features! And by the way; if you want Extra Attack on a War Cleric, best take 5 levels in Ranger as soon as possible. It lets you pick up a a few nice attack spells that run on Wisdom along the way. With Paladin, you would need bump up Charisma, and Fighter would add nothing to your spellcasting unless you pick Eldritch Knight, which is Intelligence-based. Only the Ranger has both martial and casting synergy with the Cleric.
I played a war domain cleric/gloomstalker ranger with a longbow back with the 2014 rules. It fuckin shredded. I can concede that war domain is a bit lackluster but there's absolutely some really fun things you can do with it.
I feel like a "B" for life cleric, as a generalist, is appropriate. As you said, your party comp REALLY dictates the power of a life cleric. I find their best results are warding bond to a fighter/monk/paladin in the front line and your heals keeping up with resist, and the self heal you get keeps you in the fight for a lot longer as well.
Regarding Disciple of Life: if you upcast a spell, it counts as a spell of that level for all purposes including this feature. Eg. If you cast a 3rd level “cure wounds” it won’t heal +3Hp, it will heal +5. Regarding War Priest: I think a balanced way of keeping the spirit of the 2014 feature intact would be to grant an additional attack as part of the attack action wis uses per rest. And to avoid broken combos, add a conditional: “This stacks with additional attacks from the extra attack feature, but does not stack with additional attacks from spells or other features such as by attacking with a nick weapon”
Personally, I am going to houserule some changes to war cleric to make it feel more like intended: Warpriest: You gain weapon mastery with a single simple or martial weapon of your choice. In addition, when you take the attack action, you can add your wisdom modifier to the attack roll of one attack per turn (no action), in addition to your Strength, or Dexterity modifier. You can use this feature a number of times equal to your wisdom modifier, and regain all uses on a short or long rest. Eyeballing it, this doesn’t feel broken but I would want to test it. It certainly isn’t as powerful as the class feature that lets you covert a failed d20 test into a success once per turn without limits (I forget which class/subclass or level). As to 6th level, I want to resolve the decision paralysis around the channel divinity. So I will give them extra attack and the following secondary benefit (a greatly nerfed version of the printed feature to make it more of a ribbon). 6th: Spiritual weapon no longer requires concentration, and you can cast it once per day without expending a spell slot.
One subtle buff for the light domain is that daylight now creates sunlight, so if you're a light cleric and you are attacked by a horde of vampires, you just instantly win
War Domain goes extremely hard if you go Human and pick up both MI: Wizard and MI: Druid. Getting Shillaleigh, Thorn Whip, Shield, and True Strike makes a War Cleric immediately viable from level 1, you can do your ability scores exactly the same as you would for a spellcasting cleric (14 dex). IMO it's an easy A+ with that setup. You could even start Fighter 1 for weapon masteries and Dueling on your club/quarterstaff.
My first character was a War domain cleric. I remember playing the class as thinking, “If this class got extra attack, I think it'd perfectly balance the bonus action problem” Still think that. Even with 2024 rules.
Admittedly it could be because of my partner’s campaigns being a Homebrew one, and various scenarios just work but my Grave Domain cleric always feels invaluable as a healer or as a regular caster. Plus it’s just fun to play a gothic Nun, with mine being Raven Queen aligned and profoundly devout to her goddess, since this Raven Queen is the goddess of peaceful death, healing and destroying undead. The Shadowfell is entirely hers. As are the Shadar Kai.
So I have a theory. Several of the subclasses in the 2024 phb have a focus on the “bloodied” condition. I think that Wizards whats to make this an important part of that game. I have a feeling that when the MM comes out, we are going to see a lot of monsters that have abilities that will trigger when PCs are Bloodied. So it may actually be helpful to have a healer keeping everyone above half through the fight.
In a War, The Life Cleric is indispensable. Nice to have a doctor reliable in combat. Again, Life Domain Clerics can know and prepare more, having all healing spells on lock. Flame Strike is ready to be prepared instead of having to choose between the two. Free Healing Spells are Awesome!
For War Domain, a good way to go is to grab Great Weapon Master. It will give you additional opportunities to get BA attacks. That should be enough to let you get BA attacks on most turns.
Potential (easy-ish) Homebrew fix for the War Domain: Swap War God's Blessing and War Priest. Guided Strike now lets you use WIS for attack/damage rolls. War Priest now gives two attacks a la Bladesinger.
The thing for me with the Life Domain is that their spell list has a lot of things I would want to have prepared anyway, which makes their soell list a bit better than it's given credit for.
I'm playing a Life Domain Cleric in a Vecna: Eve of Ruin campaign with a VERY melee focused party and I'm glad to say that he's done his job of keeping the party on their feet- and saved their lives- on multiple occasions 😄
I like that Trickery offers many options for creative play, but all I can think about is whether I want to follow the Sacred Flame or the Fallen Fire with the Light Domain (throwing a fireball on a bunch of paladins would be a funny reference).
Love how these Tier Rankings are showing just how balanced things have become with the subclasses. Love it or hate it, 5.24e has seemingly made play more fair and balanced no matter what you want to play. ~_~
I think the buff to the cure wounds really improve life domain. If life domain was decent in 2014, he is really good in 2024 now when his iconic spell almost doubled its healing.
I think War Domain can avoid a traffic jam with shillelagh though magic initiate. Combat 1, you can cast your spirit guardians and shillelagh on the same turn so you don’t feel like your wasting a turn setting up. On subsequent rounds, blow through all your war priest uses. You won’t need them again Combat 2: you can burn a use of channel divinity for spiritual weapon and since you’re not using a spell slot, cast spirit guardians again. After that, take a short rest. If your dm punishes you for taking short rests after every 2 or 3 combats, they’re a dick. With this, you still are making a bonus action attack every round of combat, save the first round of your first combat, in which you still are casting your spirit guardians so it’s not even going to feel like like you’re wasting your turn. I understand the desire to do everything at once but I’ve played as war priests in 5e which was even more restrictive due to bonus action casting and I still rarely ran into any problems. A +10 to one attack isn’t that great anyways with the removal of the -5/+10 feats. I don’t necessarily disagree with your ranking. The spells are pretty solid though there’s not much on there to get me super excited until 9th level. It might still land in B territory but it’s a cut above life domain. I might even slot it into A-.
If you can't spiritual guardians with trickster, then you can't thunderwave, you can't do touch either, as you would have it originate from your real self. The same with guiding bolt and so on and so on. It either lets you have spells 'shootout'/emenate/originate or whatever from the duplicate or you cannot.
Playing a Light Domain Cleric now. I took it for fireball, which I finally got to cast last session, and I promptly rolled 5 ones. I've done more damage with basically every other spell I've ever cast (except spiritual weapon. that always misses for me).
awesome video! it enlightened me to a possible fix to the war domain. If i would DM a trable with a war domain cleric, i think i would swap the lv 3 and 6 features and then give it a second attak at lv 6 instead of the bomus action. Actually, i think i would strip his gided strike and give one weapon mastery to the poor dude.... i don`t know if this woud be balanced tho.
war domain multiclassed with oath of vengeance would be fun. Would be fun to be able to cast shield of faith and haste on yourself and all in one turn. That is a +4 for AC then you could probably grab defensive dueler for an even further buff on AC. Would take a while in levels to get both online, but would be pretty crazy.
I'd also like to point out that all those healing spells (cure wounds and healing word) got an extra die. Healing overall got buffed. Personally, I find that a little strange much how this video explains that prevention often does alot more than pure healing can. I'm not complaining though.
Personally I can't wait to get to play the new trickery cleric, the amount of shenannigans you can get to with invove duplicity and all those domain spells is on the next level. Only thing I wish is that you would be able to use the duplicates senses and speak through it, but I guess those are both solvable issues. Minor Illusion lets you speak through it, and you can just stay nearby invisible to cover the senses.
for war domain cleric I'd be interested to see how balanced it'd be to give a slightly weakened version of level 6 feature at level 3 as a non-channel divinity feature (maybe total casting of them limited to wis mod per long rest? it could be workshopped) then the bladesinger style extra attack at level 6
Looking at War Domain, I'm getting the feeling it's built to accomodate either melee or spell casting. Not expecting the player to use all of the spells and abilities, but just the ones that work for their build.
It seems like with the War Domain, you're better off choosing another sub-class if you want to play a Cleric, and choosing a Paladin or another martial class if you want to be a melee combatant. The War Domain just doesn't seem to live up to the promise of frontline Cleric that it proffers.
I wonder what you guys think of the interaction of grave cleric giving spare the dying a range of 30 feet, would that range double at level 5 or only would the base 15 feet double? For me my second class I played was light cleric and loved it.
I think as written the 5.5 Spare the Dying causes the 5e Grave Cleric version to essentially always be one doubling ahead (who knows how the feature will be written if the subclass ever gets updated to 5.5). Since it specifically says the range doubles at each cantrip scaling level with the new range of the base spell written parenthetically rather than just saying the new ranges with no reference to the fact that it happens to double I'd read the parenthetical as helpful descriptive listing rather than prescriptive. Also the change from 5e's "Bonus Action spellcasting rule" to 5.5's "Only one spell slot expended per turn on a spell" it opens them up to potentially casting an impactful spell with their Action while still stabilizing someone
I love the new war domain for the level 6 feature alone. I think it's potentially incredibly powerful and carries this subclass. It's just a shame that war priest wasnt improved
I know this isn't phb 2024., however this is the perfect excuse to talk about my favorite one. Order cleric, it's first level feature to give allies reaction attacks and it's 6th level feature to give BA casting of enchantments is incredible. Only thing I don't like is the channel divinity involving the charmed condition, and the 17th level feature to basically just ......deal a extra 2d8 psychic damage. Now Multiclassing it goes hard, did it with Eldritch knight 13 and cleric 7 and the economy feels efficient. Order cleric is by far my favorite and I argue one of the best
Yes. The Level 1 Ability alone is great. It is also phenomenally worded, as it allows the attack AFTER the casting of the spell, so when the fighter goes down, you can pick him up with healing word and retaliate immediately. I haven't played it yet, but I'm hyped to play the Order-Cleric 1/ Clockwork-Sorcerer X I made. He's gonna chill in melee with heavy armor + shield + shield spell + Armor of Agathys + Bastion of Law at Level 7 and hit with booming blade to soft-lock his target into melee with the AoA-Retaliation, while having full spellcasting and 1st-level cleric spells like bless, command, healing word, shield of faith, etc. and the later ones even being twinnable. Level 1 Spellslot + 1 Sorcery-point to buff his, and a mates AC by 2 and also leting this mate attack as a reaction instantly. I think he's gonna be fire
I have an order cleric / clockwork sorc in a party I'm DMing and he's super strong. It's been fun for me too as I can bump up the encounter difficulty and complexity
You’ve completely glossed over how versatile the Life Domain Cleric is. It doesn’t matter if I cast very few sub-class healing spells per long rest. They’re like an insurance policy. If I need them I have them. If not, the party had a combat good day. Which I, no doubt, contributed to with my prepared daily spells from the excellent, extensive, non-healing choices from the Cleric spell list. And I get to change it up every day with builds that preclude the necessity to cast healing spells. We need gonna need damage? I can do damage. We gonna need battlefield control? Got you covered. Tank? Happy to front-line with the Barbarian and Paladin and buff all of us. Anyone who thinks Life Cleric should be rated at anything less than high A tier has never played a Life Cleric, at least not competently. This was true for 2014 and the 2024 rule changes haven’t made this less true. Despite what you’ve been told, Life Clerics are flashy, dangerous battle beasts who are a ton of fun to play.
So the base cleric features are excellent and the life domain features are valuable when they are needed? So B tier. You just argued that when you are not using your subclass features you still have all the great cleric options available to you. So does every other cleric subclass. Healing doesn’t come up all the time and relies heavily on the party composition and campaign. As we’ve always said. B is an excellent rating and can be S tier in the right campaign. Healing is not always useful.
For the level 6 War Domain subclass feature "War God's Blessing", I think they should have change : _You can expend a use of your Channel Divinity to cast Shield of Faith or Spiritual Weapon rather than expending a spell slot. Without requiring Concentration, for up to 1 minute._ ↓ _You can cast Shield of Faith or Spiritual Weapon without requiring Concentration._ That I would allow on my table if someone really wants to play a pure War Domain Cleric.
In the process of setting up a new campaign using 2024 PHB as base rules for character creation and spells. Really honestly not sure which way to go with my character. Thought initially crit fishing Half Orc Beastmaster with Piercer… but the removal of the ignoring of difficult Terrain and the orc not getting the extra crit die… Probably going with something different. Looking at Arcane Trickster Rogue, Trickery Cleric, Draconic Sorcerer or Illusionist Wizard
Love the video. I do think y’all are sleeping a tad on the life cleric now that healing spells have been buffed. Plus, in a party with a Druid and a Paladin and a Bard, the cleric frees up the role of healer so the others can really focus and excel on their role. I’ve played a life domain before and the other players never having to stop doing their thing to heal themselves or others meant the Paladin never stopped smiting! The bard never stopped slinging spells! And the Druid never stopped controlling the battlefield
I’m going to be starting a new campaign with a War Domain Cleric, and at the very least it seems like a great class. Origin Feat Magic Initiate for True Strike The Blessing of the War Domain doesn’t seem as clunky remembering that you do have plenty of different uses for your bonus action. The only issue is the reliance on Spiritual Weapon without concentration, which is a great ability, but honestly unless an encounter has a lot of low hp, or a few high hp creatures, are you really using it every battle? Another fun fact for High End play, you can take the Epic Boon of Combat Prowess and just never miss again… or at least very rarely when paired with True Strikes single attack, and only the occasional Blessing of the War God strike
My dm always allows thaumaturgy to let me throw my voice because of the wording of creating a sound at a location which makes trickery cleric a lot more interesting
I am really hoping that the Forge and Grave domains are in the next Xanathars equivalent book and get some nice QOL upgrades like Light and Trickery got. Twilight and Peace domains probably don't even need any upgrades tbh.
In light of the trickster domain comments, it will be interesting to see how the dudes rank barbarian subclasses. The wild heart barb literally does give all allies advantage against targets within melee range of him/her starting level 3. This did not seem to impress treemonk who gave the subclass a middling rating.
issue with wording flair is also in online play. you don't know when an attack comes most of the time. or if a DM holding back, or who his aiming at. that's why i never liked before the roll reaction stuff. most of those should stay at after it's declared imo.
My take on War Domain is that you need to be okay with blowing through your additional strikes in one combat encounter. Get that extra burst of damage out the way, and when you're done mauling, that's when you rely on spiritual weapon to pick up the slack a little if combat's still going or if you have another encounter before a rest. It's not elegant or intuitive - I think it could've been designed better - but it's not too bad in the end, I don't think. Real question for me is this: does War Domain bring anything to the holy warrior fantasy that the paladin doesn't? I'm not so sure about that aspect. The big thing I can think of is that it's fully compatible with the longbow, but besides that, it's just a more spellcastery paladin. Which is silly because you can't cast spells in combat much when you're using your action and bonus action on attacks. The spells end up feeling like an afterthought when they're the biggest distinguishing factor between Clerics and Paladins. I've played War Domain, and I don't think it's a redundant subclass or anything, but it's pretty niche. I'd probably give it a C overall.
I politely disagree with B on both the War and Life domain, especially on War. If War Domain could use ALL their special abilities in one go, they'd be dishing a lot of damage left and right. If they had fewer options, there would be situations where none of their war domain abilities would be useless. Their abilities stop each other to make sure you don't burn all of them in one go, like they did with monk's stunning strike. You have options, and you have some limits to avoid burning everything in one go and be OP in combat. You can focus more on one or another according to your build, which means you don't have a perfect build out of the bag.
Life Domain Clerics should get Plant Growth and Aura of Life. Giving life to the land and improving the life of people through better crops, and AURA OF LIFE, feels obvious to me
Trickery Domain is just Zed. Obviously no one gets to level 17 anymore, so who cares, but those early swaps, using abilities and Clerics basically becoming bards for spell lists is fun af.
Did anyone else notice Kelly said "Let us know your favourite Cleric sub-class in the DESCRIPTION below"? I think the dudes need to re-record this entire video 😂🤣😂
I’ve always loved your content. So glad the impact you two have had on DnD and it’s something to be extremely proud of, as I hope you both are. However… Couldn’t disagree more with the war priest assessment. What the cleric subclasses to me are really how experienced are you at the game? Not at all? Life. Somewhat? Light. Creative, trickery. War cleric… is the expert level subclass. It’s not a B at all in the hands of a ‘good’ player. Get true strike, use shield of faith over spiritual weapon (that spell has always been overrated). I actually like the scaling of the channel divinities. The 3rd level doesn’t need to be used by say 10th. That’s ok. It’s not like you don’t have options of channel divinity uses. The spell list is just fine. And I guarantee you an experienced player could have a lot of fun with steel wind strike. Further, what is every cleric really going to do? Spirit guardians and running around. Which subclass is best for that? Could it be the one that can add +2 to its AC concentration free? Hmmmm let me think.
I like the new focus on S tier, no longer being just "really good", instead being "potentially broken or problematic at tables". That feels much more helpful for players and the right focus in general for analysis of how the classes and subclasses are balanced.
It's always been there, but it feels more direct now.
@@valerius88 agreed. It's a really good reason I like the revision to Paladins. If you didn't use your spell slots to smite you were "playing wrong" and if you did it's possible you ended encounters without allowing the other players from being able to do anything, which decreases party fun. Edit:I played 1-16 Paladin in Against the Giants.
Agreed, its great!
It explains why Light Domain isn't S Tier. It's extremely good, an all-around improvement to Cleric, but doesn't risk breaking the game.
100% agree. I’ve had a few players at my table play subclasses that were S-Tier which definitely made the game less fun for me as the GM because of how overpowered they were. Looking at you Echo Knight!
I think we're overlooking the changes to healing spells for high level life domain clerics that just max out dice. A 3rd level spell slot can easily mean 18 healing per person as a bonus action.
That was already in the 2014 Life Cleric
@@shaneconnolly4747 healing spells now do twice as many dice worth of healing, which scales massively with maximizing dice.
@@shaneconnolly4747 A 5th level Mass Cure Wounds does 5d8+Wisdom. By this level, that means you do 40 + 5 + 7 (52) healing to 6 people, and then an additional 7 healing to yourself. And you can do this with greater potency by upcasting. Even at high levels, this is *massive* healing that can undo several rounds of damage.
This is different from 2014, when it was 3d8+Wisdom (24+5+7 = 36) which is fine, but is not nearly as good. And upcasting normal healing word is so insanely potent too now, when it was just completely negligible in 2014.
@@AnimatingClass101My partner homebrewed this into our games for a while so it’s great to see it implemented properly.
@@AnimatingClass101 I meant the maxxing dice was already in the 2014 class.
My favorite life domain memory is when the Monk was getting eaten by a T-Rex and kept going onconscious while the life domain Cleric constantly got them back up.
Hard to imagine a more horrific experience...
Monk: Oh, God! He's chewing me!
Cleric: Don't worry! I can keep you alive!
Monk: No! Stop! It hurts! Oh, just please let me die!!!!
Common cleric W.
As others have pointed out, you seem to have missed this part of Preserve Life for Life Domain: "This feature can restore a creature to no more than half its Hit Point maximum."
This was the case in 2014, did it stay the same with the new edition?
Yeah, i hate that line of text to be honest. It was about to be a great channel divinity, and then they have to throw in the "sike uhm actually you can only heal them up to half, limiting your healing ability, when healing is already not great in 5e/5.5e"
@@Itsumich It does say that in PHB2024; just checked
Also if you have a DM that refuses to have his enemies attack you duplicate and they just somehow know witch one is witch and they only swarm you, just switch place with your duplicate as a bonus action.
reminds me of this really common but bad faith reading of the feature on the 2014 version where they just assumed that it could be insight checked like any illusion spell when that wasn't provided by the text. idk why "this unique ability that only this subclass gets that doesn't provide a clause that people can tell it's fake based on a check should be directly compared to a spell most classes can get earlier than this"
obviously im not saying that enemies should be stupid and always think it's real but there are ways to counter play it without immediately shutting it down
It's not spelled out in the rules, but a reasonable approach might be to make a quick judgment based on enemy/NPC intelligence, familiarity with illusions, and whether something has made it very obvious that the duplicate is non-corporeal. Maybe the first bandit runs the duplicate through, then shouts to the others that it's a fake...with maybe an Investigation or Perception check to recognize if the cleric has swapped places with the duplicate (because I'd really want to reward cleverly-timed use of that ability). A seasoned adventurer or a caster with a penchant for illusions might make the check to notice the duplicate's an illusion in the first place, with advantage if they can also see the PC (or just not require a roll if they've done something to make it very obvious)
Making it make sense does require more careful GMing than a system where all the mechanical consequences are detailed; D&D really is at times a compromise between the super-flexible (which also means more non-dice non-mechanics work for GM and players) rules-light storytelling-first systems and the more mechanically fleshed-out tactical systems
@@ltcaphidedoesn't matter. The mob will have to sacrifice an entire round to decern the illusion. That's a big advantage to the party.
@@M_M_ODonnellit takes a full action to disbelieve an illusion so just causing the mobs to lose an action is still a big advantage
@@jaysw9585 It's "the mechanics are there to help the story" vs "the story is icing on the mechanics" play
I really wish the Life domain cleric had a class feature that let them grant temporary HP (besides a Spell) or to Overheal, giving Temp HP (or increasing Max HP) by the amount of excess healing.
Yeah- I agree. Especially because Light Domain- Basically the Blaster Clerics- Get to grant temp HP when using one of their features. But Life Domain doesn’t, for whatever reason.
That could be a really cool homebrew magic item idea?
IMO Life needed to get a lot of the toys of the Twilight cleric. We probably wont see peace or twilight without some serious revision in 5.24 so letting Life run a divinity with temp HP would give more weight to hardcasting healing spells with the life domain feature.
@@bobnewkirk7003 With great dread and sorrow, I am waiting for when they will release Twilight Cleric 2024.. Oh, its in desperate need of a nerf, yes- but i will miss my overpowered emo clerics :(
A party member, potentially the cleric themselves, can increase the healing threshold with the AID spell. “Tough” origin feat also does this and can stack. Inspiring leader works along with as a source of Temp HP with charisma or wisdom based characters.
6:32 Preserve life can't restore hit points past half a characters hitpoint max correct?
Makes this ability much more niche, you would use it when a few party members are really low.
I think that was changed for the 2024 rules
@@aidandunne5978 It was not. PHB 2024 still says Preserve Life cannot restore HP beyond half. The guys messed up
37:21 the feature says the spell ends if you cast it again, so no putting Shield of Faith on multiple party members with this.
With the possible exception of if you cast it first with a spell slot, then with War God's Blessing (with only the first one requiring concentration, and only the second ending if you cast it again)...though a table-ruling that this is also not allowed probably wouldn't shock anyone
For comparison, this is what Monty & Kelly gave 4 years ago for the Cleric Subclass Tier Ranking :
- Life Domain : S
- Light Domain : A
-Trickery Domain : B
-War Domain : C
Which is what I find wild. Overall, I think the cleric has improved and the life domain only got better. Other than not being able to use the good berry strategy I can’t see why it’s rating would drop so much
Honestly it was too high before. @@wudchop
Heavy Armor proficiency for Life was very strong. Also, healing has been muted some over the years.
@@abcrasshadow9341 not disagreeing but it does make me laugh, how if you watch their old cleric rankings, they talk this domain up massively. Now it’s regarded as situational.
Thank you. I think it is really interesting to see Life's fall, but overall I'm not surprised. The Life domain abilities always sounded really good, but when you actually get into play... You heal an additional +4 hp and heal yourself for 4 hp on the same turn. For the VAST majority of the subclass, that's it. Now that the Heavy armor was moved out, and we are just looking at the unique life abilities, they lose a lot of that old luster.
My understanding is 2024 Disciple of Life only applies the turn you cast the spell. Therefore, it will have little effect on Aura of vitality (round 1 only) and none on goodberry.
If a bunch of creatures hold their actions to eat a berry the moment you create them, I would argue that disciple of life would still apply (although this is only 4 hp restored rather than 1). If you could use a held action to feed another creature than you could heal more with more berries, but there isn't precedent in the spell description for that and you would need either a party of 10 or have some minions/hirelings to make use of all berries in one turn, which is pretty unlikely.
So my "make the Barbarian heal like Wolverine with Regenerate" trick probably won't work either 😥
They added "regains additional Hit Points on the turn you cast the spell." so Aura of Vitality only gets one extra bonus to healing
Which is sad, I think. Let the Life Domain do Life.
Tempest for me aall the way! Thunder and lightning for the wicked there will be smiting!
galileo!
Very, very frightening
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
I see a little silhouetto of a man 😮
Im so angry they included TRICKERY instead of Tempest in the new PHB… I like Trickery, but I wish they had put the POWER OF ZEUS in the new phb instead…
47:43 Thanks for the little poem Kelly!
"But if I had to rank them, one through 4,
It goes; Trickery, Light, Life, War."
I've played a 1-20 War cleric using the 2014 rules, and the 2024 updates are amazing and remove the bumpiness. Personally I'd rate it an A. If I had the 2024 rules, Id never run out of War Priest Bonus Action attacks as my Wis modifier was 3+ and that's how long fights last, and I generally prepped with Spiritual weapon and either shield of faith or spirit guardians before combat starts.
How are you swallowing the spiritual weapon is a concentration spell pill?
@@jeffdybdal656 Spiritual Weapon doesn't require concentration though for War Domain clerics, that's what's cool about the 2024 revisions. Add Shield of Faith without concentration as well and you're golden.
I'm part of a 4-person party playing Curse of Strahd. Originally, we had a paladin, fighter, druid, and rogue. Healing was being provided primarily by the druid. After having the druid go down, and the paladin out of position, we realized we needed a cleric. By chance, my ability scores as a fighter were high because of good rolls, and I took a 13 in wisdom for a perception boost. When we leveled up from first to second level, I took a level in Life domain (2014 rules). With a wisdom of 13, my spell save DC and spell attack bonus were going to be minimal. I picked Life domain because the spells I picked were buffs, so DC and attack bonus don't matter. My pick of Protection from Evil and Good were clutch because we had two members who were in two different solo fights with ghouls. The fact that the ghouls were fighting with disadvantage meant our party members survived. Not the typical reasons for choosing Life domain, but it's working for us.
Invoke Duplicity mimics your movements. Therefore, if you Invoke Duplicity and give yourself invisibility, you would not be able to "snatch the McGuffin" without detection because your Duplicate would "act out" every step you make. Outside observers would not know exactly where you are, but they would be able to watch you climb a latter, walk across a ledge and jumping down to a lower area (with a good investigation roll).
Trickery Domain Cleric who has a day job as a Mime. So they put out the duplicate and steal something, and everyone outside just sees a mime preforming on the street
I mean, to be fair, this is assuming you're in a space where the motions required to move through it would be automatically obvious. If you NEED to climb a ladder to get to the McGuffin then yeah, sure, that would be a giveaway... but I'd argue that the large majority of combat environments most DMs run don't include very many features like that, so that's probably more of a niche exception than a general rule.
@@evanabney3659 My understanding of Invoke Duplicity is that the duplicate the cleric's movement, but doesn't actually move to a corresponding space. So if you climb a ladder, the duplicate would climb in place. If you pick someone's pocket, so would your duplicate - you would be revealing your technique.
@@jennyoutrageous Everyone would see your pick pocketing technique. The Duplicate copies whatever you do.
So the player has an excuse to mime whatever their character is doing without looking too much like they're doing it? Sounds like a win for the table, at least...
Got the book today. I'm Jared, I'm a DM and I'm currently running the Curse of Strahd. The Social Interaction Example on pg 17 absolutely floored me
I'll say that my plan for playing a War Domain Cleric is to pair both Shillelagh and True Strike together. You can do this specifically with either Human or High Elf, I personally favor the Elf-style. Then you get through both Magic Initiate and Species access to 2 very important spells. Mixing these together means we can Action: True Strike, Bonus Action: Shillelagh Turn 1. After that we rely on War Priest for BA attacks with our new Shillelagh and cast True strike every turn.
At level 6 it get's a little more interesting as now, not only do we have War Priest, but our main attack can instead be a non-concentration spiritual weapon. That means after turn 1 we always have damaging BA ability and with a combination of both we won't run out. The best part is that we can do all this and still Spiritual Guardians if we're need AOE.
Probably not as strong as a Fireballing Light cleric but we've got attacks on par with our Fighters, and we could theoretically multiclass or take Weapon Mastery to add topple/slow to our Shillelagh attacks.
Do you really need both of those cantrips? Shillellagh already allows you to use Wisdom.
@@fortunatus1 True you can just Shillelagh and thats a fine build. However, if you never plan to get Extra Attack from multiclassing and you want to be attacking with a weapon you might as well stack True Strike on that. Or use your action to cast leveled spells, which at that point why be a war cleric?
@@Red13aron Don't forget Booming Blade
I play a Life cleric in a party with a druid and a bard and I'm afraid you're correct, I feel so useless and redundant a lot of the time 🥲 I love my character though so I don't want to change my build but. yeah. people say roles don't matter in 5e but the overlap in niches can leave people feeling excluded.
How is your Cleric’s Con/Strength score? You could try taking Spirit Guardians and going with a melee cleric build- That way, you can heal yourself up when you take damage on the frontlines, while your other party members can focus on healing your other frontliners… I mean, at least your healing would go somewhere. I dunno, just a thought, I’ve never played a Cleric for a full campaign, so idk what its like
@@Jekrane A melee build wouldn't work for my character unfortunately. I do have decent CON (15, planning to take Resilient and bump it to 16 at lvl 8) but STR is my dump stat since it doesn't make sense for the character to have high strength for many reasons, so I took the thaumaturge order when we recently updated to the 2024 rules. I already maxed out my WIS so I can do a little bit of blasting even if I'm not the most optimal blaster I can at least give people advantage with guiding bolt and prevent undead creatures from bouncing back with radiant damage. Genuinely I'm okay not being super OP or perfectly built. It just sucks to feel cornered in an suboptimal niche (healing) when other players can do the same and there's an expectation that's standby and do nothing but be a healbot. To be fair most of the other players are very nice and encourage me to do more blasting, it's just one player that complained about me not healing them once (we were separated and in different maps), called me a bad healer and it's been trying to one up me bc they're a druid and can cast the same healing spells so it's been weighing on me since then.
@@Jekrane Thank you for the suggestion though! I recently gained access to spirit guardians and I'm planning to use it as much as I can.
If I was that druid or bard, I'd heal less and damage more knowing I had a life cleric backing me up. I'd take 1 healing spell just in case you went down, and the rest of my spells would be freedom to have more fun with my class. They aren't purposely building healers, are they?
@@nobodynamedmatlock I don't think they are, bard definitely isn't but druid has the animal totem feature so they can heal quite a bit with it. Having a backup is good, I'm not saying I have ownership over healing spells obviously. But this player has called me a bad healer and one up-ed me whenever I heal someone so I have been feeling very redundant and like I have no place in the party. I deal with it because it's mostly just this one person but yeah.
I tend to think the war domain's problem isn't really any different from the Paladin's, Valor Bard's, or Monk's problem, where you have two stats you need to buff. That's generally true for all gishes. I suspect that the solution is something similar.
I think what would really help the War Domain would be getting access to the new True Strike. Cause that would eliminate their need to keep up with strength (except for their 5 bonus action attacks per day, woopdidoo) and add even more extra damage on top. I still don't think it's quite enough to make up for their lack of extra attack, but it would be a big boost.
You could grab either True Strike or Shillelagh to use Wisdom for your attacks.
That's one approach. Either make it single stat with a spell or class feature, or boost both stats. You can boost two stats all the way to 20 while taking one feat (plus an epic boon feat), or boost one to 20 and the other to 18 while keeping more feats open. Neither is exactly unviable. (In fact, getting two stats to 20 is probably optimal for Monks, and maybe Barbarians, given their capstones.)
@@jordanholt9170 or both!
Humans or Elves can grab the ability to cast both of those Cantrips from level 1.
The one thing War domain would need to be great weapon using cleric is having Searing Smite as one of it's domain spells. That spell is such a massive damage boost to a weapon using cleric that you pretty much have to take 1 level in paladin just to get that spell.
Kelly: its just fun to cast fireball...
Me: at the barbarian and fighter!
I think there's a really good, straightforward, War Domain built that isn't even super hard. Str 16, Dex 10, Con 14, Int 8, Wis 17, Cha 8 is perfectly straightforward. At that point, you use War God's Blessing for Shield of Faith, not Spiritual Weapon. This also allows Full Plate, which is pretty good.
That gets you basically all of the abilities pretty easily most of the time. I think you guys got over-focused on Spiritual Weapon and didn't consider just...not relying on that particular option much at all. Honestly, as a Bonus Action attack you can make pretty regularly, War Priest combined with wanting to use Bonus Actions for other stuff like Healing Word makes Spiritual Weapon a little obsolete in melee if you either go Strength heavy or grab Shillelagh. Now, if you're engaging in ranged combat, that's when the Spiritual Weapon comes out and is quite good.
Exactly!
And then grab Great Weapon Master later for supplemental BA attacks opportunities and extra damage.
I think single class cleric just goes shillelagh and melee attacks with booming blade and BA attack while spirit guardians is up. Use all your CD for shield of faith.
For War Domains, start as a Human Fighter. Take a background that gets Wizard or Druid Initiate, take the other with your human feat. You now get a Fighting Style, you have Weapon Masteries, a way to use Shillelagh and/or True Strike, Con saves, and Second Wind. Multiclass into Cleric. Take your next 8-10 levels in Cleric. Level 7 gets you a buff to all attacks, level 8 will let you max out Wisdom. 9-10 get you 5th level spells and Divine Intervention. Take 2nd level of Fighter for Action Surge. If you actually play past Level 12, I'd take 3 more levels of Fighter, get a subclass, Feat (GWM), and extra Attack. If you go to Level 20. 6 Levels of Fighter and 14 Levels of Cleric gets you 2 more Feats and Improved Divine Strike. I personally don't like Clerics, but I would 100% play this
I also think Spiritual Weapon is a trap. +2 Defense and Bonus Action attacks Wisdom x per rest. Then keeping the +10 Attack in your back pocket is better.
Me likee
As a *Trickery Cleric,* you can cast spells with a *range of self* through your *illusion.* E.g. take the *Magic action* to let your *illusion* make an attack with *True Strike* or have *Spirit Guardians* emanate from it for the duration of the spell, since *Invoke Duplicity* states that _"You can cast spells _*_as though you were in the illusion's space,"_* which is far more liberal than the wording of e.g. *Find Familiar* _"when you cast a spell with a _*_range of touch,_*_ your familiar can deliver the touch."_
Nope. Just because you can cast as though you were in the space doesn’t mean the rules for self range spells changes. The emanation is not a thing which can be targeted with a self spell. It is not the caster. It is not even an object or creature to target.
Self range spells target the caster only. The emanation is not the caster.
Hello, thanks for the video. It has always been hard for me moving from one edition to another. With all the changes I just gotta embrace it and see what happens.
Cleric is my favorite and I've played 8 of them so far. Only 3 of them were in year+ campaigns. For my first Cleric, ill be playing a Hermit Dhampir life Cleric. I think it will be a lot of fun.
"Cooking with gas" never gets old from Monty!
Life is one of my favourites. They are particularly potent with someone else in the party dropping aura of vitality. I was in a 7th level all cleric party fighting an adult black dragon. After the 3rd round of keeping the party alive, (having narrowly survived 2 breathe weapon attacks) the dragon targeted me with all their attacks. Still standing with 1hp next round, I healed back to full between a potion and a spell, looked at the dragon and asked "is that all you got?". Epic.
I believe that the Life Domain Cleric is something of a throwback to earlier days when healing felt more like a requirement. Now, we have so many choices to avoid damage, even within the Cleric class. A Twilight Cleric, with a party of 5, can generate more Temp HP than a Life Cleric can heal at the same level. Then there's increasing AC so damage just isn't taken.
I have tremendous respect for the new 'S' tier being 'This may well be problematic. It may make the game less fun at the table for being too overpowered.' Props to you guys for voicing that so clearly, and indicating that 'A' is the best-written class!
Agreed on the Life Domain Cleric being B-tier, though I'd call it a very high B+. Like you always say, it's useful in 'the right campaign'. In this case, I'd say the right campaign is if a GM has been playing D&D since at least the 90's. Rests weren't guaranteed then. If you were in, say, a drow fortress, or an enemy stronghold, the GM wouldn't let you get in a rest. There are times where you might have a few minutes here and there, but not an hour, and definitely not 8. So, this is to me, where the life domain cleric shines: Between-combat healing, if resting isn't guaranteed.
Also agreed that WotC kind of trapped themselves with the Life Domain spell list. The subclass logically focuses on healing. And the best healing spells, are cleric spells. There's really no practical way for the Life domain cleric to have spells that weren't on the cleric spell list, because it wouldn't make sense to create a very good healing spell, and then not put it on the cleric class list. Ah well.
I'm surprised the War Domain cleric didn't wind up in the 'C' tier rating. All their abilities are really cool, agreed. However, there's two separate, but surprisingly not mutually exclusive, problems, as you said: Their best abilities can't be used together. But also, their best abilities rely on the same pools. Thus, the War Domain Cleric is in danger of running itself out of its cool subclass powers, at which point you'll be left with the base class.
That actually makes me think of the Eldritch Knight vs. the Champion. (Putting it here instead of the Fighter video, simply because it's the same train of thought).
I was surprised the Champion didn't do a smidge higher, and the Eldritch Knight a smidge lower, for similar reasons.
The Eldritch Knight has great powers. But you have to know what you're doing--there's some forgiveness in spell picks, but not total forgiveness. Taking pure blaster spells fits the concept perfectly, but isn't an optimal pick. It's possible to goof yourself up with spell picks, though not necessarily hugely probable. Likewise, they have very limited resources. The Eldritch Knight is one unexpected fight away from just being a baseline fighter.
On the flipside, I'm surprised the Champion didn't get a bit more love. I sometimes think their problem is just that it's a kind of boring class. However, I do think its abilities are under-rated. An Eldritch Knight isn't going to be casting spells all the time. A Champion, however, is probably going to be attacking all the time. Every single attack has an increased crit chance. Every round, you have the opportunity to just decide not to fail with a re-roll. The Champion's abilities, augment the base class even more, and you get to bring it to bear every round. I'd argue champion would therefore be a smidge higher, when we take the "Yeah, but the flavor is really dull" factor out.
That's interesting, there's a couple different possible ways something can be dragged down the ratings
-Competing resources
-Adds too little to the class.
-Conflicts with base class
-Too easy to be reduced to just the base class until a long rest.
Keep the videos up! I love watching you guys' takes ever since I discovered your channel in Spring of 2022. Proud owner of both Drakenheim books and soon to be the third as well!
Preserve life is no bueno, thanks to this line: This feature can restore a creature to no more than half its Hit Point maximum
So, wait until your group is bloodied, invoke this ability, and everyone is still bloodied
Guided Strike is still great for support with being able to add +10 to another character's attack, pretty much just turning anyone else's attacks into a hit.
My chief reasoning for playing a 2014 War Cleric was access to all martial weapons and heavy armor whereas most cleric subclasses would give you only one or the other. Now that proficiencies aren't tied to subclasses, there seems to be less reason to play a War Cleric when something like Light would give your warrior-priest Warding Flare and Fireball.
The 2014 War Cleric was really bad, and Tempest and Twilight also had martial weapons and heavy armor. I think they should have given the War Cleric extra attack, or a free/bonus action weapon attack when you cast a leveled spell.
The base Cleric on 2024 gets a choice of more spell focus and keeping your base medium armour and simple weapons proficiency or being a more martial focused cleric with martial weapons and heavy weapon proficiency.
I keep feeling like Joe should stick his head in the frame when you were talking about the trickery cleric to say, “You talking ‘bout me?”
It's important to known that Life domain's Disciple of Life feature has been changed to only apply on the TURN you cast the spell, so goodberry and aura of vitality aren't really useful for that, but Mass healing powers REALLY get the benefit now, as it applies to everyone you're healing.
While the War Domain does have some of those issues, I feel there are two different ways to look at subclass abilities. Some subclasses work towards enhancing a particular playstyle and each new feature builds on that single direction, while others add more and more diversity that you may not be able to use all at once but allow for many different directions and solutions to problems. There are merits to both styles, it's just a matter if you want depth or breadth. I think of it like comparing a hammer to a swiss-army knife. One has a single job it's good at doing, while the other can do many jobs but not simultaneously.
Pages 75 and 76 in PHB24 describe the Trickery Domain Cleric. Invoke duplicity is described as mimicking your expressions and gestures. It does not say the duplicate does every motion or movement your character does. Think of Loki's duplicates - they all could be expressing and moving their bodies in different ways, but Loki's personality is shown in each clone. You could therefore hide and have the enemy think you are the duplicate as you command your duplicate to run around and you cast spells through the duplicate.
Regarding casting spells through the duplicate - the PHB24 says you can cast spells as if you were in the duplicate's space but you use your own senses to cast them. With that wording, I feel spirit guardians would work with the duplicate. Spirit Guardians has a range of self with a 15ft emanation. So casting SG as if YOU were in the duplicate's space seems possible with rules as written.
This would make the Trickery Domain S Tier IMO.
Also if the duplicate is intangible - then touch spells would not work. Touch is a sense - casting spells as though you were in the duplicate's space requires you to use your own senses. The only spells that would work would be ranged spells or self ranged spells.
My favorite subclass currently is the Death Cleric. The changes to Chill Touch were a significant buff to it. No longer does it have to rely on Inflict Wounds to use its features!
And by the way; if you want Extra Attack on a War Cleric, best take 5 levels in Ranger as soon as possible. It lets you pick up a a few nice attack spells that run on Wisdom along the way. With Paladin, you would need bump up Charisma, and Fighter would add nothing to your spellcasting unless you pick Eldritch Knight, which is Intelligence-based. Only the Ranger has both martial and casting synergy with the Cleric.
I played a war domain cleric/gloomstalker ranger with a longbow back with the 2014 rules. It fuckin shredded.
I can concede that war domain is a bit lackluster but there's absolutely some really fun things you can do with it.
I feel like a "B" for life cleric, as a generalist, is appropriate. As you said, your party comp REALLY dictates the power of a life cleric. I find their best results are warding bond to a fighter/monk/paladin in the front line and your heals keeping up with resist, and the self heal you get keeps you in the fight for a lot longer as well.
Regarding Disciple of Life: if you upcast a spell, it counts as a spell of that level for all purposes including this feature. Eg. If you cast a 3rd level “cure wounds” it won’t heal +3Hp, it will heal +5.
Regarding War Priest: I think a balanced way of keeping the spirit of the 2014 feature intact would be to grant an additional attack as part of the attack action wis uses per rest. And to avoid broken combos, add a conditional:
“This stacks with additional attacks from the extra attack feature, but does not stack with additional attacks from spells or other features such as by attacking with a nick weapon”
Personally, I am going to houserule some changes to war cleric to make it feel more like intended:
Warpriest: You gain weapon mastery with a single simple or martial weapon of your choice. In addition, when you take the attack action, you can add your wisdom modifier to the attack roll of one attack per turn (no action), in addition to your Strength, or Dexterity modifier. You can use this feature a number of times equal to your wisdom modifier, and regain all uses on a short or long rest.
Eyeballing it, this doesn’t feel broken but I would want to test it. It certainly isn’t as powerful as the class feature that lets you covert a failed d20 test into a success once per turn without limits (I forget which class/subclass or level).
As to 6th level, I want to resolve the decision paralysis around the channel divinity. So I will give them extra attack and the following secondary benefit (a greatly nerfed version of the printed feature to make it more of a ribbon).
6th: Spiritual weapon no longer requires concentration, and you can cast it once per day without expending a spell slot.
One subtle buff for the light domain is that daylight now creates sunlight, so if you're a light cleric and you are attacked by a horde of vampires, you just instantly win
War Domain goes extremely hard if you go Human and pick up both MI: Wizard and MI: Druid. Getting Shillaleigh, Thorn Whip, Shield, and True Strike makes a War Cleric immediately viable from level 1, you can do your ability scores exactly the same as you would for a spellcasting cleric (14 dex). IMO it's an easy A+ with that setup. You could even start Fighter 1 for weapon masteries and Dueling on your club/quarterstaff.
Cure Wounds (etc.) can be cast at higher levels for greater effect; thereby increasing the amount of the bonus heal.
My first character was a War domain cleric.
I remember playing the class as thinking,
“If this class got extra attack, I think it'd perfectly balance the bonus action problem”
Still think that. Even with 2024 rules.
Admittedly it could be because of my partner’s campaigns being a Homebrew one, and various scenarios just work but my Grave Domain cleric always feels invaluable as a healer or as a regular caster.
Plus it’s just fun to play a gothic Nun, with mine being Raven Queen aligned and profoundly devout to her goddess, since this Raven Queen is the goddess of peaceful death, healing and destroying undead. The Shadowfell is entirely hers. As are the Shadar Kai.
So I have a theory. Several of the subclasses in the 2024 phb have a focus on the “bloodied” condition. I think that Wizards whats to make this an important part of that game. I have a feeling that when the MM comes out, we are going to see a lot of monsters that have abilities that will trigger when PCs are Bloodied. So it may actually be helpful to have a healer keeping everyone above half through the fight.
In a War, The Life Cleric is indispensable.
Nice to have a doctor reliable in combat.
Again, Life Domain Clerics can know and prepare more, having all healing spells on lock.
Flame Strike is ready to be prepared instead of having to choose between the two.
Free Healing Spells are Awesome!
For War Domain, a good way to go is to grab Great Weapon Master.
It will give you additional opportunities to get BA attacks. That should be enough to let you get BA attacks on most turns.
One of the things you missed that you need a 15 strength to even take advantage of the heavy armor proficiency. That splits your stats.
Potential (easy-ish) Homebrew fix for the War Domain: Swap War God's Blessing and War Priest. Guided Strike now lets you use WIS for attack/damage rolls. War Priest now gives two attacks a la Bladesinger.
The thing for me with the Life Domain is that their spell list has a lot of things I would want to have prepared anyway, which makes their soell list a bit better than it's given credit for.
I'm playing a Life Domain Cleric in a Vecna: Eve of Ruin campaign with a VERY melee focused party and I'm glad to say that he's done his job of keeping the party on their feet- and saved their lives- on multiple occasions 😄
I like that Trickery offers many options for creative play, but all I can think about is whether I want to follow the Sacred Flame or the Fallen Fire with the Light Domain (throwing a fireball on a bunch of paladins would be a funny reference).
Love how these Tier Rankings are showing just how balanced things have become with the subclasses.
Love it or hate it, 5.24e has seemingly made play more fair and balanced no matter what you want to play.
~_~
Damn, I didn't realize how limited war domain was because I didn't notice the overlapping action/resource requirements.
I think the buff to the cure wounds really improve life domain. If life domain was decent in 2014, he is really good in 2024 now when his iconic spell almost doubled its healing.
I think War Domain can avoid a traffic jam with shillelagh though magic initiate.
Combat 1, you can cast your spirit guardians and shillelagh on the same turn so you don’t feel like your wasting a turn setting up.
On subsequent rounds, blow through all your war priest uses. You won’t need them again
Combat 2: you can burn a use of channel divinity for spiritual weapon and since you’re not using a spell slot, cast spirit guardians again.
After that, take a short rest.
If your dm punishes you for taking short rests after every 2 or 3 combats, they’re a dick.
With this, you still are making a bonus action attack every round of combat, save the first round of your first combat, in which you still are casting your spirit guardians so it’s not even going to feel like like you’re wasting your turn.
I understand the desire to do everything at once but I’ve played as war priests in 5e which was even more restrictive due to bonus action casting and I still rarely ran into any problems.
A +10 to one attack isn’t that great anyways with the removal of the -5/+10 feats.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your ranking. The spells are pretty solid though there’s not much on there to get me super excited until 9th level. It might still land in B territory but it’s a cut above life domain. I might even slot it into A-.
If you can't spiritual guardians with trickster, then you can't thunderwave, you can't do touch either, as you would have it originate from your real self. The same with guiding bolt and so on and so on. It either lets you have spells 'shootout'/emenate/originate or whatever from the duplicate or you cannot.
Playing a Light Domain Cleric now. I took it for fireball, which I finally got to cast last session, and I promptly rolled 5 ones. I've done more damage with basically every other spell I've ever cast (except spiritual weapon. that always misses for me).
The biggest war cleric buff is that at level 6 you can now cast spirit gaurdians and spiritual weapon on the same turn with no set up round
On the Trickery cleric and casting spells using the illusion as your point of origin, contagion got a buff. I really want to use this...
awesome video! it enlightened me to a possible fix to the war domain. If i would DM a trable with a war domain cleric, i think i would swap the lv 3 and 6 features and then give it a second attak at lv 6 instead of the bomus action. Actually, i think i would strip his gided strike and give one weapon mastery to the poor dude....
i don`t know if this woud be balanced tho.
war domain multiclassed with oath of vengeance would be fun. Would be fun to be able to cast shield of faith and haste on yourself and all in one turn. That is a +4 for AC then you could probably grab defensive dueler for an even further buff on AC. Would take a while in levels to get both online, but would be pretty crazy.
I'd also like to point out that all those healing spells (cure wounds and healing word) got an extra die. Healing overall got buffed.
Personally, I find that a little strange much how this video explains that prevention often does alot more than pure healing can. I'm not complaining though.
Don’t worry Kelly, use Thaumaturgy while Invoke Duplicity to fill the whole space with your Trickery taunts!
Personally I can't wait to get to play the new trickery cleric, the amount of shenannigans you can get to with invove duplicity and all those domain spells is on the next level. Only thing I wish is that you would be able to use the duplicates senses and speak through it, but I guess those are both solvable issues. Minor Illusion lets you speak through it, and you can just stay nearby invisible to cover the senses.
for war domain cleric I'd be interested to see how balanced it'd be to give a slightly weakened version of level 6 feature at level 3 as a non-channel divinity feature (maybe total casting of them limited to wis mod per long rest? it could be workshopped) then the bladesinger style extra attack at level 6
Looking at War Domain, I'm getting the feeling it's built to accomodate either melee or spell casting. Not expecting the player to use all of the spells and abilities, but just the ones that work for their build.
It seems like with the War Domain, you're better off choosing another sub-class if you want to play a Cleric, and choosing a Paladin or another martial class if you want to be a melee combatant. The War Domain just doesn't seem to live up to the promise of frontline Cleric that it proffers.
To talk through your duplicate you could pick up Minor Illusion and cast it through it, then use the sound option.
Light and Tempest have always been my favorites, but I think the one I'm most excited to see updated for 2024 is the Knowledge Domain!
I wonder what you guys think of the interaction of grave cleric giving spare the dying a range of 30 feet, would that range double at level 5 or only would the base 15 feet double? For me my second class I played was light cleric and loved it.
I think as written the 5.5 Spare the Dying causes the 5e Grave Cleric version to essentially always be one doubling ahead (who knows how the feature will be written if the subclass ever gets updated to 5.5). Since it specifically says the range doubles at each cantrip scaling level with the new range of the base spell written parenthetically rather than just saying the new ranges with no reference to the fact that it happens to double I'd read the parenthetical as helpful descriptive listing rather than prescriptive. Also the change from 5e's "Bonus Action spellcasting rule" to 5.5's "Only one spell slot expended per turn on a spell" it opens them up to potentially casting an impactful spell with their Action while still stabilizing someone
I love the new war domain for the level 6 feature alone. I think it's potentially incredibly powerful and carries this subclass. It's just a shame that war priest wasnt improved
Kelly rocking the Yaniir shirt! ❤️ Great vid!
Life cleric is critical in my current campaign. Every fight we’ve had since level 4 has been near TPK
I know this isn't phb 2024., however this is the perfect excuse to talk about my favorite one. Order cleric, it's first level feature to give allies reaction attacks and it's 6th level feature to give BA casting of enchantments is incredible. Only thing I don't like is the channel divinity involving the charmed condition, and the 17th level feature to basically just ......deal a extra 2d8 psychic damage.
Now Multiclassing it goes hard, did it with Eldritch knight 13 and cleric 7 and the economy feels efficient. Order cleric is by far my favorite and I argue one of the best
Yes. The Level 1 Ability alone is great. It is also phenomenally worded, as it allows the attack AFTER the casting of the spell, so when the fighter goes down, you can pick him up with healing word and retaliate immediately. I haven't played it yet, but I'm hyped to play the Order-Cleric 1/ Clockwork-Sorcerer X I made. He's gonna chill in melee with heavy armor + shield + shield spell + Armor of Agathys + Bastion of Law at Level 7 and hit with booming blade to soft-lock his target into melee with the AoA-Retaliation, while having full spellcasting and 1st-level cleric spells like bless, command, healing word, shield of faith, etc. and the later ones even being twinnable. Level 1 Spellslot + 1 Sorcery-point to buff his, and a mates AC by 2 and also leting this mate attack as a reaction instantly. I think he's gonna be fire
I have an order cleric / clockwork sorc in a party I'm DMing and he's super strong. It's been fun for me too as I can bump up the encounter difficulty and complexity
A gnome trickery cleric is on my list to try in the 2024 rules. Just because it just feels right.
You’ve completely glossed over how versatile the Life Domain Cleric is.
It doesn’t matter if I cast very few sub-class healing spells per long rest. They’re like an insurance policy. If I need them I have them. If not, the party had a combat good day.
Which I, no doubt, contributed to with my prepared daily spells from the excellent, extensive, non-healing choices from the Cleric spell list. And I get to change it up every day with builds that preclude the necessity to cast healing spells. We need gonna need damage? I can do damage. We gonna need battlefield control? Got you covered. Tank? Happy to front-line with the Barbarian and Paladin and buff all of us.
Anyone who thinks Life Cleric should be rated at anything less than high A tier has never played a Life Cleric, at least not competently. This was true for 2014 and the 2024 rule changes haven’t made this less true.
Despite what you’ve been told, Life Clerics are flashy, dangerous battle beasts who are a ton of fun to play.
So the base cleric features are excellent and the life domain features are valuable when they are needed? So B tier. You just argued that when you are not using your subclass features you still have all the great cleric options available to you. So does every other cleric subclass. Healing doesn’t come up all the time and relies heavily on the party composition and campaign. As we’ve always said. B is an excellent rating and can be S tier in the right campaign. Healing is not always useful.
For the level 6 War Domain subclass feature "War God's Blessing", I think they should have change :
_You can expend a use of your Channel Divinity to cast Shield of Faith or Spiritual Weapon rather than expending a spell slot. Without requiring Concentration, for up to 1 minute._
↓
_You can cast Shield of Faith or Spiritual Weapon without requiring Concentration._
That I would allow on my table if someone really wants to play a pure War Domain Cleric.
In the process of setting up a new campaign using 2024 PHB as base rules for character creation and spells. Really honestly not sure which way to go with my character. Thought initially crit fishing Half Orc Beastmaster with Piercer… but the removal of the ignoring of difficult Terrain and the orc not getting the extra crit die… Probably going with something different.
Looking at Arcane Trickster Rogue, Trickery Cleric, Draconic Sorcerer or Illusionist Wizard
Light domain cleric might be my favourite class to play and love to see is just as good
Love the video. I do think y’all are sleeping a tad on the life cleric now that healing spells have been buffed. Plus, in a party with a Druid and a Paladin and a Bard, the cleric frees up the role of healer so the others can really focus and excel on their role. I’ve played a life domain before and the other players never having to stop doing their thing to heal themselves or others meant the Paladin never stopped smiting! The bard never stopped slinging spells! And the Druid never stopped controlling the battlefield
The fact that healing word and cure wounds (and their mass versions) got buffed, makes life cleric less special than before IMO
I think if you have a lot of summon spells prepared with your Life cleric, the player can hold itself pretty good if he keep healing the creature.
I’m going to be starting a new campaign with a War Domain Cleric, and at the very least it seems like a great class.
Origin Feat Magic Initiate for True Strike
The Blessing of the War Domain doesn’t seem as clunky remembering that you do have plenty of different uses for your bonus action.
The only issue is the reliance on Spiritual Weapon without concentration, which is a great ability, but honestly unless an encounter has a lot of low hp, or a few high hp creatures, are you really using it every battle?
Another fun fact for High End play, you can take the Epic Boon of Combat Prowess and just never miss again… or at least very rarely when paired with True Strikes single attack, and only the occasional Blessing of the War God strike
My dm always allows thaumaturgy to let me throw my voice because of the wording of creating a sound at a location which makes trickery cleric a lot more interesting
I am really hoping that the Forge and Grave domains are in the next Xanathars equivalent book and get some nice QOL upgrades like Light and Trickery got. Twilight and Peace domains probably don't even need any upgrades tbh.
In light of the trickster domain comments, it will be interesting to see how the dudes rank barbarian subclasses. The wild heart barb literally does give all allies advantage against targets within melee range of him/her starting level 3. This did not seem to impress treemonk who gave the subclass a middling rating.
issue with wording flair is also in online play.
you don't know when an attack comes most of the time.
or if a DM holding back, or who his aiming at.
that's why i never liked before the roll reaction stuff.
most of those should stay at after it's declared imo.
My take on War Domain is that you need to be okay with blowing through your additional strikes in one combat encounter. Get that extra burst of damage out the way, and when you're done mauling, that's when you rely on spiritual weapon to pick up the slack a little if combat's still going or if you have another encounter before a rest.
It's not elegant or intuitive - I think it could've been designed better - but it's not too bad in the end, I don't think.
Real question for me is this: does War Domain bring anything to the holy warrior fantasy that the paladin doesn't? I'm not so sure about that aspect. The big thing I can think of is that it's fully compatible with the longbow, but besides that, it's just a more spellcastery paladin. Which is silly because you can't cast spells in combat much when you're using your action and bonus action on attacks. The spells end up feeling like an afterthought when they're the biggest distinguishing factor between Clerics and Paladins.
I've played War Domain, and I don't think it's a redundant subclass or anything, but it's pretty niche. I'd probably give it a C overall.
I haven’t played a cleric in a minute but thanks to the 2024 rules I remember why I love them
As a life cleric’s DM I have to wholeheartedly agree that their presence makes my encounter “balance” very fun
I politely disagree with B on both the War and Life domain, especially on War.
If War Domain could use ALL their special abilities in one go, they'd be dishing a lot of damage left and right.
If they had fewer options, there would be situations where none of their war domain abilities would be useless.
Their abilities stop each other to make sure you don't burn all of them in one go, like they did with monk's stunning strike.
You have options, and you have some limits to avoid burning everything in one go and be OP in combat.
You can focus more on one or another according to your build, which means you don't have a perfect build out of the bag.
Life Domain Clerics should get Plant Growth and Aura of Life. Giving life to the land and improving the life of people through better crops, and AURA OF LIFE, feels obvious to me
Seeing Trickery Cleric at A is definitely a pleasant surprise
I would like to see a video showing some B tier subclass with the party compositions becoming S tier.
Ranger with war domain lines up a little better since both classes like higher wisdom.
Trickery Domain is just Zed. Obviously no one gets to level 17 anymore, so who cares, but those early swaps, using abilities and Clerics basically becoming bards for spell lists is fun af.
Did anyone else notice Kelly said "Let us know your favourite Cleric sub-class in the DESCRIPTION below"? I think the dudes need to re-record this entire video 😂🤣😂
I think it is Really nice to see Trickery Domain finally see some smoothing out for a Useful Build.
I’ve always loved your content. So glad the impact you two have had on DnD and it’s something to be extremely proud of, as I hope you both are.
However… Couldn’t disagree more with the war priest assessment. What the cleric subclasses to me are really how experienced are you at the game? Not at all? Life. Somewhat? Light. Creative, trickery. War cleric… is the expert level subclass. It’s not a B at all in the hands of a ‘good’ player.
Get true strike, use shield of faith over spiritual weapon (that spell has always been overrated). I actually like the scaling of the channel divinities. The 3rd level doesn’t need to be used by say 10th. That’s ok. It’s not like you don’t have options of channel divinity uses.
The spell list is just fine. And I guarantee you an experienced player could have a lot of fun with steel wind strike.
Further, what is every cleric really going to do? Spirit guardians and running around. Which subclass is best for that? Could it be the one that can add +2 to its AC concentration free? Hmmmm let me think.