It's been a long time coming - finally it's here. The Disciple of Life feature of the Life Domain Cleric is now supported automatically on D&D Beyond.
What does this mean for me?
If you're playing a character that selected Life Domain as their Divine Domain, then you gain the feature Disciple of Life.
This feature makes your healing spells more powerful and, up until now, it's been your responsibility to remember that and add the bonus to your healing spells.
With this update, the bonus is now added automatically and, even better, it's fully included when you roll Digital Dice on D&D Beyond.
The go to spell for most clerics who want to heal someone is Cure Wounds, which heals a creature for 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier. At 2nd level, that's probably going to be 1d8 + 3 for most clerics with a Wisdom score of 16 or 17.
The Disciple of Life feature adds 2 + the spell’s level. For Cure Wounds cast with a 1st level spell slot, that's an extra 3 healing, taking the amount healed up to 1d8 + 6.
Screenshot of the D&D Beyond character sheet, showing the Archmage's Favor digital dice used to roll for the healing of a 2nd level Cure Wounds spell. The result is a 6 and 8 on the dice, with a bonus of 7, giving a total amount healed of 21.
Disciple of Life in Detail
Let's take a look at that feature, as written in both the Basic Rules and the Player's Handbook:
Disciple of Life
Also starting at 1st level, your healing spells are more effective. Whenever you use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore hit points to a creature, the creature regains additional hit points equal to 2 + the spell’s level.
The following spells all qualify for this bonus, as they include the wording that they cause a creature to restore/regain hit points:
- Aura of Life
- Aura of Vitality
- Cure Wounds
- Enervation
- Goodberry (see the Sage Advice guidance on this)
- Heal
- Healing Spirit
- Healing Word
- Life Transference
- Mass Cure Wounds
- Mass Healing Word
- Prayer of Healing
- Regenerate
- Soul Cage
- Vampiric Touch.
Image of a Dwarven Cleric, wielding a warhammer
Two further spells also qualify due to wording, that we need to talk about:
- Mass Heal - heals 700 hit points spread as you like. The way this interacts with the Disciple of Life feature is pretty unique, as the feature doesn't just bump the amount healed up to 711. Instead, the bonus is applied to each creature. In a hypothetical situation where a Life Domain cleric were to cast this spell and choose to allocate 1 hit point of healing to each of 700 creatures - each of those creatures would also receive a bonus 11 healing (for a total of 12 each). That would mean the spell healed a total of 8,400 hit points!
- Power Word Heal - restores the target to maximum hit points, so adding the Disciple of Life bonus isn't something that can be done meaningfully.
Screenshot of the D&D Beyond character sheet, showing the spells section of the sheet for a 3rd level Life Domain cleric. The spells visible include Cure Wounds and Healing Word, which are automatically increased by the Disciple of Life feature.
Homebrew Spells
We want to make sure that this works well and to review community feedback before we tell you all how to use this system for your homebrew subclasses, spells etc.
The last thing we want is for you all to make a bunch of homebrew content and then we make some changes to this system, due to feedback.
We absolutely will make sure to write up information on how to use this for homebrew, with appropriate screenshots and we expect that to be fairly soon. 😊
Bless you!
Thank you very, very much!
No clerics in my campaign, so I'm just happy for the people that needed this, and excited for the possibilities this will eventually open to homebrew! :D
Thanks for this update!
Homebrew use is exactly what I'd like to know about! A lot of us have already had to make homebrew content to try and get DoL to work over the past several years. I've got a PC that started off as a Life Domain cleric, but we ended up tweaking the flavor and made homebrew Domain, but functionally the only difference is the prepared spells, the homebrew subdomain has all the same subdomain features as the Life Domain. I would figure that having a feature on the homebrew domain called Disciple of Life, similar to how you need a Spellcasting Feature or whatever it is you need for that one Warlock pact feature to work, would be a simple way to go about it that should already account for a large number of people who've already created homebrew workarounds. It would also be simpler than adding another checkbox to the spells.
Good work. Would love confirmation, but I'm assuming the work done behind the scenes to support this is generic enough to be applied to other classes or homebrew content with feature specific modifiers in future?
That’s why they gave all this love to the clerics, got to get that d4 somehow!
Looking at the Life Domain subclass, it's a new modifier subtype they have made. I'm assuming that this specific one, and variants of it, will be made available to homebrewers soon.
Pretty much! We need to make sure this works as well as we hope and gather community feedback first, but yes, this is built to be expandable.
This is awesome! I've heard a lot of people requesting this
Hey there!
One "issue" we found in our group:
I have a modified Life Domain for my Cleric as this is currently the only/easiest way to give my players additional features.
However, a) the new modifier isn't available as a homebrew modifier and b) even when I make a new copy of the Life Domain (which then includes the new modifier), the bonus isn't applied.
We're guessing it's not just triggered by the modifier but also by the original Life Domain ID?
Seems the revivify spell line should also be included; they restore at least 1 hit point. Also tagged healing in DDB.
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth (and to be clear, I love the horse/DoL feature, thank you!) what are the chances this makes Blessed Healer a possibility? I know it is different (right now there is nothing that will modify a sheet's hit points automagically), but it would be similarly loved (at least by me). It is a feature I constantly forget to apply.
Revivify doesn't qualify - it states, "That creature returns to life with 1 hit point."
Can anyone here confirm that Aid does not benefit from disciple of life.
Jeremy Tweeted about it
https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/717055256572506113
But even this I am willing to argue my case against.
THANK YOU!!!
This is awesome, thanks for incorporating! My party is going to be impressed with the increased amount of healing I'm going to do next session ;)
Does the update add the Blessed Healer Feature? Does the Cleric have to adjust their own hp when the spell is cast?
Would love to see this for the Alchemist Artificer's Restorative Reagents at some point!
interesting but increasing the max hp has different wording than regain hp, also applies to temporary hit points since those cannot be 'healed'