So I am interested with the flavor of twilight cleric, and I decided to build one just for fun. I've seen several times on online forums and optimization websites that twilight clerics are broken or at least one of the stronger cleric domains. But I've never really understood that. Twilight Sanctuary channel divinity seems to be just ok, it can stop charmed and frightened effects and can provide up to 10d6 Temp HP. That's an average of 30, and by the time a battle would take an entire minute to complete, The monsters you'll be fighting would be able take out all of them in one mediocre strike. The only apparent benefit of this ability is that you can target multiple people, but even then, they're temp HP so they simply disappear when it's all over. Just casting aid I think would be far better in almost every situation. Their other abilities are also just ok at best in my eyes. Is there something I'm missing?
So tl;dr, Why is everyone going crazy over the "broken-ness" of Twilight Cleric?
Twilight sanctuary is better than you’re reading it. For one, temp hp last until the next long rest, not just the end of the fight. For two, you give them out, with no action, to any creature that ends its turn in the area — not once on your turn, once on each creature’s turn. If five allies end their turn within 30 feet, all five get the temp hp. If one of them gets hit and loses theirs, they get them refreshed at the end of their next turn. Again, the cleric doesn’t have to do anything after the first time they use it. So d6+level isn’t a whole lot, buts a passive boost that requires no action from anyone. I don’t think it’s op, mostly because it doesn’t scale very well, but it is quite strong. Giving out darkvision can be pretty powerful, but that will be party and campaign dependent. If everyone has darkvision, or you DM doesn’t worry much about seeing in the dark, it’s not so great, but otherwise it can be huge.
And they get heavy armor and martial weapons, which only a couple other domains get.
I’m not in the camp that thinks they’re op, but they are pretty strong.
Here's a comparison of aid and twilight sanctuary, since that's the alternative you suggest.
With aid, three allies get their current and max hp boosted by 5, plus 5 per upcast. Let's say an enemy burns through those extra hit points in one hit and deals 3 damage beyond that. You're down 3 hp from your original maximum, but you can heal back up to the adjusted maximum if you spend extra resources.
With twilight sanctuary, anyone you want who ends their turn within 30 ft. of you (which can potentially be far more than three allies) gain 1d6+cleric level temporary hp every round. Let's say an enemy does the same thing as before: it burns through your temporary hp and deals 3 damage beyond that. You're down 3 hp from your original maximum, but at the end of your next turn you gain 1d6+cleric level temporary hp once again, and the enemy now has to burn through those again before it can actually hurt you again. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the minute, for probably every member of the party (including familiars, pets, npcs, and summons). Plus, if you still have those temporary hp after the fight, you get to keep them until you finish a long rest.
On top of that, let's give basically the whole party 300 ft. of darkvision, enough to dispatch threats from much further away than they can actually be seen. And let's give someone advantage on initiative with no resource cost whatsoever. And let's give the subclass a top-tier domain spell list. This is all with only two levels.
It's not necessarily broken, but it's extremely strong (especially at lower levels) and can be a lot for the DM to adjust to, and strong party composition can exacerbate the issue even more. Where it really gets broken is when you have a twilight cleric and a peace cleric in the same party at level 6+. Twilight cleric pumps out temporary hp every round, while peace cleric buffs the party with pseudo-bless that stacks with real bless and allows them to decide who's best suited to take the damage from a given source at any given time during the combat.
So I am interested with the flavor of twilight cleric, and I decided to build one just for fun. I've seen several times on online forums and optimization websites that twilight clerics are broken or at least one of the stronger cleric domains. But I've never really understood that. Twilight Sanctuary channel divinity seems to be just ok, it can stop charmed and frightened effects and can provide up to 10d6 Temp HP. That's an average of 30, and by the time a battle would take an entire minute to complete, The monsters you'll be fighting would be able take out all of them in one mediocre strike. The only apparent benefit of this ability is that you can target multiple people, but even then, they're temp HP so they simply disappear when it's all over. Just casting aid I think would be far better in almost every situation. Their other abilities are also just ok at best in my eyes. Is there something I'm missing?
So tl;dr, Why is everyone going crazy over the "broken-ness" of Twilight Cleric?
Your math is way off. Twilight Sanctuary doesn't provide up to 10d6 THP, no idea where you got that from. It provides a maximum amount of THP (assuming your THP is depleted every round) of 10*(1d6+level)*party members, as a general rule. So supposing a level 2 cleric with 6 party members (cleric, paladin, rogue, wizard, wizard's familiar, paladin's horse), by way of an example, that's 10*(1d6+2)*6 = 60d6+12. In reality, because fights do end before a minute is over, you can leave the ability on to keep re-rolling your THP amounts until you roll a 6, so everyone is topped off for the next fight. You know THP doesn't wear off when Sanctuary ends, right? It behaves like all THP - it'll stay on you all day until it's depleted.
The Peace Domain is even more powerful, to be honest, but Twilight Domain is no joke. Between the above, 300 foot darkvision on the entire party, and at least one party member having advantage on initiative rolls, the Twilight Domain will just relentlessly solve problems better than other options can.
I give you circle of power. An incredibly powerful spell that works as a 17th level capstone ability for paladins. The fact that twilight domain clerics get it twice as early can tip the scales.
You don’t have to choose between Aid and Twilight Sanctuary. You can have both.
A Twilight Cleric has utility buffs (Darkvision, Initiative), Twilight Sanctuary and flight that don’t require concentration. Consider the following possibilities:
The weirdest thing about Twilight Cleric is that they got 1d6+Cleric level THP for free every turn with a Channel Divinity use.
Armorer Artificer originally had a 1d6 THP per turn as a BA....but they felt that was too good and made it limited to PB per day which a huge nerf.
Some say "Armorer has better AC"....which it doesn't. Twilight gets heavy armor and shield so they have the same AC to start and the artificer has to use an infusion to get better AC. Meanwhile they are pretty much required to be in melee as their gauntlets are melee weapons while Clerics have ranged cantrips.
"But Twilight Cleric has to use a CD to get this!" So? They get this back on a short rest and get multiple uses of it per short rest eventually. It not only outpaces what an artificer will get for the entire day with ONE use of the CD but they get to do this likely 5 more times in a day if you are doing at least 2 short rests a day.
To me this was the biggest problem with the feature...it just blows armorer away like crazy.
It blows not only Armorers, but also Crown Paladins and College of Glamour Bards away, and not by a bit - they are made completely obsolete. The twilight cleric makes the spells Darkvision, Levitate, False Life, Heroism look like a total waste. At level 6 it gives the defensive equivalent of troll regeneration to everyone in the group, and all their pets, mounts, and allies.
These class abilities are so poorly designed, it is a shame. This subclass must have been designed by someone with power fantasies (the hovering, almost invulnerable superman with the X-ray sight), total ignorance of existing mechanics, or no grasp of balance.
Eyes of the Night (I still think 300ft is a typo, since 30ft seems totally reasonable) allows ranged fighters to kite enemies at night at will. Other darkvisions are capped at 120 feet for a reason.
Steps of Night allows the cleric to hover over things without needing concentration or having to land. Other flight mechanics introduce the risk of falling when concentration is broken, or require to land at the end of the turn, or are given out at much later levels.
Twilight Sanctuary is
mechanically annoying, as it forces a roll per round until a 6 is reached; this is because you can override temporary hit points when you would get a higher score; many other temp hp abilities give you a set mount, probably for this reason;
lacking concentration, making it not a choice between, say, bless, and this feature; but having choices is good, and a way of balancing things;
scaling with everything in range; there are very few mechanisms in place that allow this (crusader's mantle, the pre-nerf healing spirit), and for good reason - it can be exploited easily;
not restricted in duration; many other mechanisms let the temporary hit points vanish at the end of the duration;
allowing 10 refills; there are very few mechanisms that allow this (heroism, regenerate) - and those only give you a tiny amount of hit points, again for good reason.
I just want to say that I appreciate the amount of thought you have put into this and the game design insight you are applying to your critique of Twilight Cleric. I had some similar concerns, but lacked the language to articulate them.
Twilight Sanctuary: reduce temporary hit point amount to proficiency bonus plus spellcasting ability modifier, require concentration (makes it a more difficult choice), require a reaction after the activation (avoid the free refill for everybody all the time), limit the amount of creatures to 6. Actually, that might still be too strong, but at least there are some caveats now.
This is, of course, my personal opinion. As a player, I prefer not to play on easy mode, it takes the challenge away. As a DM, I want to challenge my players at least a little bit, so I ban the RAW Twilight cleric subclass on my table. Or I could provide every goblin with an automatic rifle, but these idiots would probably use them as a club.
This is why I dislike house rule nerfs so much; DMs will be annoyed by something that might be slightly overtuned and bring the hammer down way, way too hard. If you're going to utterly destroy the best feature the class gets, you should probably just avoid letting people play it.
Twilight Sanctuary: reduce temporary hit point amount to proficiency bonus plus spellcasting ability modifier, require concentration (makes it a more difficult choice), require a reaction after the activation (avoid the free refill for everybody all the time), limit the amount of creatures to 6. Actually, that might still be too strong, but at least there are some caveats now.
This is, of course, my personal opinion. As a player, I prefer not to play on easy mode, it takes the challenge away. As a DM, I want to challenge my players at least a little bit, so I ban the RAW Twilight cleric subclass on my table. Or I could provide every goblin with an automatic rifle, but these idiots would probably use them as a club.
This is why I dislike house rule nerfs so much; DMs will be annoyed by something that might be slightly overtuned and bring the hammer down way, way too hard. If you're going to utterly destroy the best feature the class gets, you should probably just avoid letting people play it.
Ludi makes a great point on why the Twilight domain cleric is kind of just too broken. Mechanically, it is possibly a power gamer's dream come true.
To possibly solve this, one of the suggestions given to me was why not increase the number of creatures that can cause charm or frightened states. It might make the cleric choose to forego the temp hit point feature in favor of breaking the status condition.
Another could be to isolate the members of the party with some battle field control spells to limit the utility of the feature.
Though these suggestions I gave are not exactly something that would "stop the sheer brokenness" of the Twilight domain cleric. It might help a bit, though the DM will need to work a bit more to plan this ahead. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks.
Ludi makes a great point on why the Twilight domain cleric is kind of just too broken. Mechanically, it is possibly a power gamer's dream come true.
To possibly solve this, one of the suggestions given to me was why not increase the number of creatures that can cause charm or frightened states. It might make the cleric choose to forego the temp hit point feature in favor of breaking the status condition.
Another could be to isolate the members of the party with some battle field control spells to limit the utility of the feature.
Though these suggestions I gave are not exactly something that would "stop the sheer brokenness" of the Twilight domain cleric. It might help a bit, though the DM will need to work a bit more to plan this ahead. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks.
Or at least limit how many creatures it can do per turn.
It scales exponentially due to the fact that everything in the party can get the THP with no action cost.
Another suggestion was to find a way to incapacitate the Twilight cleric. Soon as he is down, the Sanctuary goes down too. Again, just a suggestion. Hope it helps.
Another suggestion was to find a way to incapacitate the Twilight cleric. Soon as he is down, the Sanctuary goes down too. Again, just a suggestion. Hope it helps.
Yeah if I did DM for one I would likely have enemies with stun/incapacitation effects.
Twilight Sanctuary: reduce temporary hit point amount to proficiency bonus plus spellcasting ability modifier, require concentration (makes it a more difficult choice), require a reaction after the activation (avoid the free refill for everybody all the time), limit the amount of creatures to 6. Actually, that might still be too strong, but at least there are some caveats now.
This is, of course, my personal opinion. As a player, I prefer not to play on easy mode, it takes the challenge away. As a DM, I want to challenge my players at least a little bit, so I ban the RAW Twilight cleric subclass on my table. Or I could provide every goblin with an automatic rifle, but these idiots would probably use them as a club.
This is why I dislike house rule nerfs so much; DMs will be annoyed by something that might be slightly overtuned and bring the hammer down way, way too hard. If you're going to utterly destroy the best feature the class gets, you should probably just avoid letting people play it.
How would you approach balance for this?
For starters, CDs should never require concentration. That's already one of the reasons the Trickery domain is so incredibly bad.
Every other AOE THP-granting or healing (since they behave very similarly) subclass in the game consumes action economy - generally the caster's. One of the mechanical flaws with the ability is simply that at the end of every allied creature's turn, the cleric will generally roll a die, which is simply time-consuming - introducing action economy costs helps address that. That's easily where I'd start, here, and then I'd playtest it, to see if it needed tweaking.
Here's an example, which is deliberately not a pure nerf - that is, it's not strictly worse in all respects than the original, and that's deliberate.
As an action, you present your holy symbol, and a sphere of twilight emanates from you. The sphere is centered on you, has a 30-foot radius, and is filled with dim light. The sphere moves with you, and it lasts for 1 minute or until you are incapacitated or die. When you take this action, and then again on each of your turns as an action or bonus action, you can choose one of these affects and apply it to all creatures of your choice in the sphere: • You grant each of them temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level. • You end one effect on each of them causing them to be charmed or frightened (if there are multiple, the DM chooses which one, or determines it randomly).
Twilight Sanctuary: reduce temporary hit point amount to proficiency bonus plus spellcasting ability modifier, require concentration (makes it a more difficult choice), require a reaction after the activation (avoid the free refill for everybody all the time), limit the amount of creatures to 6. Actually, that might still be too strong, but at least there are some caveats now.
This is, of course, my personal opinion. As a player, I prefer not to play on easy mode, it takes the challenge away. As a DM, I want to challenge my players at least a little bit, so I ban the RAW Twilight cleric subclass on my table. Or I could provide every goblin with an automatic rifle, but these idiots would probably use them as a club.
This is why I dislike house rule nerfs so much; DMs will be annoyed by something that might be slightly overtuned and bring the hammer down way, way too hard. If you're going to utterly destroy the best feature the class gets, you should probably just avoid letting people play it.
How would you approach balance for this?
For starters, CDs should never require concentration. That's already one of the reasons the Trickery domain is so incredibly bad.
Every other AOE THP-granting or healing (since they behave very similarly) subclass in the game consumes action economy - generally the caster's. One of the mechanical flaws with the ability is simply that at the end of every allied creature's turn, the cleric will generally roll a die, which is simply time-consuming - introducing action economy costs helps address that. That's easily where I'd start, here, and then I'd playtest it, to see if it needed tweaking.
Here's an example, which is deliberately not a pure nerf - that is, it's not strictly worse in all respects than the original, and that's deliberate.
As an action, you present your holy symbol, and a sphere of twilight emanates from you. The sphere is centered on you, has a 30-foot radius, and is filled with dim light. The sphere moves with you, and it lasts for 1 minute or until you are incapacitated or die. When you take this action, and then again on each of your turns as an action or bonus action, you can choose one of these affects and apply it to all creatures of your choice in the sphere: • You grant each of them temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level. • You end one effect on each of them causing them to be charmed or frightened (if there are multiple, the DM chooses which one, or determines it randomly).
I think making it a BA makes a lot of sense...at least limits the action economy of it.
I think making it a BA makes a lot of sense...at least limits the action economy of it.
Yeah I think making it a bonus action would go a long way towards fixing it, though I'd maybe still limit the number of creatures it can affect to WIS or something, rather than any number you can cram within range.
It's strange that this one channel divinity is so powerful, while Forge Clerics can make a thing, War Clerics can make one roll not suck, tempest can max certain damage types and so-on. I've built a Twilight Cleric character for possible future use, but I probably won't use this channel divinity at all except in emergencies (mass charm/frighten), and think it'll still be a perfectly good character, as Twilight Cleric's spell list and other abilities are good enough that you could literally remove the channel divinity from the sub-class and it'd still be one of the best.
So I am interested with the flavor of twilight cleric, and I decided to build one just for fun. I've seen several times on online forums and optimization websites that twilight clerics are broken or at least one of the stronger cleric domains. But I've never really understood that. Twilight Sanctuary channel divinity seems to be just ok, it can stop charmed and frightened effects and can provide up to 10d6 Temp HP. That's an average of 30, and by the time a battle would take an entire minute to complete, The monsters you'll be fighting would be able take out all of them in one mediocre strike. The only apparent benefit of this ability is that you can target multiple people, but even then, they're temp HP so they simply disappear when it's all over. Just casting aid I think would be far better in almost every situation. Their other abilities are also just ok at best in my eyes. Is there something I'm missing?
So tl;dr, Why is everyone going crazy over the "broken-ness" of Twilight Cleric?
Twilight sanctuary is better than you’re reading it. For one, temp hp last until the next long rest, not just the end of the fight.
For two, you give them out, with no action, to any creature that ends its turn in the area — not once on your turn, once on each creature’s turn. If five allies end their turn within 30 feet, all five get the temp hp. If one of them gets hit and loses theirs, they get them refreshed at the end of their next turn. Again, the cleric doesn’t have to do anything after the first time they use it. So d6+level isn’t a whole lot, buts a passive boost that requires no action from anyone. I don’t think it’s op, mostly because it doesn’t scale very well, but it is quite strong.
Giving out darkvision can be pretty powerful, but that will be party and campaign dependent. If everyone has darkvision, or you DM doesn’t worry much about seeing in the dark, it’s not so great, but otherwise it can be huge.
And they get heavy armor and martial weapons, which only a couple other domains get.
I’m not in the camp that thinks they’re op, but they are pretty strong.
Here's a comparison of aid and twilight sanctuary, since that's the alternative you suggest.
On top of that, let's give basically the whole party 300 ft. of darkvision, enough to dispatch threats from much further away than they can actually be seen. And let's give someone advantage on initiative with no resource cost whatsoever. And let's give the subclass a top-tier domain spell list. This is all with only two levels.
It's not necessarily broken, but it's extremely strong (especially at lower levels) and can be a lot for the DM to adjust to, and strong party composition can exacerbate the issue even more. Where it really gets broken is when you have a twilight cleric and a peace cleric in the same party at level 6+. Twilight cleric pumps out temporary hp every round, while peace cleric buffs the party with pseudo-bless that stacks with real bless and allows them to decide who's best suited to take the damage from a given source at any given time during the combat.
Your math is way off. Twilight Sanctuary doesn't provide up to 10d6 THP, no idea where you got that from. It provides a maximum amount of THP (assuming your THP is depleted every round) of 10*(1d6+level)*party members, as a general rule. So supposing a level 2 cleric with 6 party members (cleric, paladin, rogue, wizard, wizard's familiar, paladin's horse), by way of an example, that's 10*(1d6+2)*6 = 60d6+12. In reality, because fights do end before a minute is over, you can leave the ability on to keep re-rolling your THP amounts until you roll a 6, so everyone is topped off for the next fight. You know THP doesn't wear off when Sanctuary ends, right? It behaves like all THP - it'll stay on you all day until it's depleted.
The Peace Domain is even more powerful, to be honest, but Twilight Domain is no joke. Between the above, 300 foot darkvision on the entire party, and at least one party member having advantage on initiative rolls, the Twilight Domain will just relentlessly solve problems better than other options can.
I give you circle of power. An incredibly powerful spell that works as a 17th level capstone ability for paladins. The fact that twilight domain clerics get it twice as early can tip the scales.
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You don’t have to choose between Aid and Twilight Sanctuary. You can have both.
A Twilight Cleric has utility buffs (Darkvision, Initiative), Twilight Sanctuary and flight that don’t require concentration. Consider the following possibilities:
Turn 1: Spiritual Weapon, Twilight Sanctuary
Turn 2 +: Spiritual Weapon attack, Moonbeam (cast and subsequently move)
Or cast Sprit Guardians instead of Moonbeam.
Or:
Turn 1: Sanctuary (self), Twilight Sanctuary
Turn 2: Aura of Vitality, Bonus AoV heal (2d6)
Turn 3: Bonus AoV heal, Help Action.
The weirdest thing about Twilight Cleric is that they got 1d6+Cleric level THP for free every turn with a Channel Divinity use.
Armorer Artificer originally had a 1d6 THP per turn as a BA....but they felt that was too good and made it limited to PB per day which a huge nerf.
Some say "Armorer has better AC"....which it doesn't. Twilight gets heavy armor and shield so they have the same AC to start and the artificer has to use an infusion to get better AC. Meanwhile they are pretty much required to be in melee as their gauntlets are melee weapons while Clerics have ranged cantrips.
"But Twilight Cleric has to use a CD to get this!" So? They get this back on a short rest and get multiple uses of it per short rest eventually. It not only outpaces what an artificer will get for the entire day with ONE use of the CD but they get to do this likely 5 more times in a day if you are doing at least 2 short rests a day.
To me this was the biggest problem with the feature...it just blows armorer away like crazy.
I just want to say that I appreciate the amount of thought you have put into this and the game design insight you are applying to your critique of Twilight Cleric. I had some similar concerns, but lacked the language to articulate them.
This is why I dislike house rule nerfs so much; DMs will be annoyed by something that might be slightly overtuned and bring the hammer down way, way too hard. If you're going to utterly destroy the best feature the class gets, you should probably just avoid letting people play it.
How would you approach balance for this?
Ludi makes a great point on why the Twilight domain cleric is kind of just too broken. Mechanically, it is possibly a power gamer's dream come true.
To possibly solve this, one of the suggestions given to me was why not increase the number of creatures that can cause charm or frightened states. It might make the cleric choose to forego the temp hit point feature in favor of breaking the status condition.
Another could be to isolate the members of the party with some battle field control spells to limit the utility of the feature.
Though these suggestions I gave are not exactly something that would "stop the sheer brokenness" of the Twilight domain cleric. It might help a bit, though the DM will need to work a bit more to plan this ahead. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks.
Or at least limit how many creatures it can do per turn.
It scales exponentially due to the fact that everything in the party can get the THP with no action cost.
Another suggestion was to find a way to incapacitate the Twilight cleric. Soon as he is down, the Sanctuary goes down too. Again, just a suggestion. Hope it helps.
Yeah if I did DM for one I would likely have enemies with stun/incapacitation effects.
For starters, CDs should never require concentration. That's already one of the reasons the Trickery domain is so incredibly bad.
Every other AOE THP-granting or healing (since they behave very similarly) subclass in the game consumes action economy - generally the caster's. One of the mechanical flaws with the ability is simply that at the end of every allied creature's turn, the cleric will generally roll a die, which is simply time-consuming - introducing action economy costs helps address that. That's easily where I'd start, here, and then I'd playtest it, to see if it needed tweaking.
Here's an example, which is deliberately not a pure nerf - that is, it's not strictly worse in all respects than the original, and that's deliberate.
As an action, you present your holy symbol, and a sphere of twilight emanates from you. The sphere is centered on you, has a 30-foot radius, and is filled with dim light. The sphere moves with you, and it lasts for 1 minute or until you are incapacitated or die. When you take this action, and then again on each of your turns as an action or bonus action, you can choose one of these affects and apply it to all creatures of your choice in the sphere:
• You grant each of them temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level.
• You end one effect on each of them causing them to be charmed or frightened (if there are multiple, the DM chooses which one, or determines it randomly).
I think making it a BA makes a lot of sense...at least limits the action economy of it.
In two words: Twilight Sanctuary.
Yeah I think making it a bonus action would go a long way towards fixing it, though I'd maybe still limit the number of creatures it can affect to WIS or something, rather than any number you can cram within range.
It's strange that this one channel divinity is so powerful, while Forge Clerics can make a thing, War Clerics can make one roll not suck, tempest can max certain damage types and so-on. I've built a Twilight Cleric character for possible future use, but I probably won't use this channel divinity at all except in emergencies (mass charm/frighten), and think it'll still be a perfectly good character, as Twilight Cleric's spell list and other abilities are good enough that you could literally remove the channel divinity from the sub-class and it'd still be one of the best.
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