I like Nature Domain as well, thematically, but I don't think it's Channel Divinity is all that great. I like the spell list and the Divine Strike they get can't be beat. I feel like they would mesh well with a Ranger multiclass build (I am playing in a not very consistent gestalt Tyranny of Dragons game and my character is a Nature Cleric/Drake Warden Ranger, and it has been fun, but the character rules are far outside the norm for acceptability so I'm not sure how fun Nature Clerics would be on their own).
I also like the Order Domain, but it doesn't seem to have much love. I have an idea for a bounty hunter that is an Order Domain Cleric. If guns are allowed in the game he will definitely use them, otherwise it'll be a heavy crossbow. And when he uses his Channel Divinity he'll shout, "Reach for the sky!" I have a bit of a love for westerns, and Order Domain seems the most Clint Eastwood of all of them, to me, lol.
Nature is my personal pick, though it does depend on the context of the campaign. Cleric's Spirit Guardians spell synergizes amazingly well with the Thorn Whip cantrip to forcibly pull them in to trigger the damage. Plant Growth can make it so basically nothing can move in your area (It doesn't count as difficult terrain, so suddenly it's an 8 to 1 ratio for movement, or one tile a turn for basically anything on the ground, or possibly none depending on how your dm decides to handle partial tile movement), rendering an area impassible and VERY damaging turn to turn.
Lower level options that don't require two 3rd level slots would be stuff like Spike Growth with a party that has knockback options, since every 5ft of knockback translates to 2d4 damage with no saves.. Imagine, a single Eldritch Blast from that warlock who got the 10ft knockback invocation suddenly also gets 4d4 every time they hit a creature. People with the Telekinetic feat to shove 5ft means an extra 2d4. Open Hand monk can push two enemies back 15 ft for 6d4 damage each. I've seen some encounters that could have been nasty trivialized with a well placed spike growth.
The level 6 feature is also what I would consider quite good. Being able to halve the damage from the big damage spell from an enemy on the spellcasters means that you can make what would have been a fairly hard concentration save into around or barely above a DC 10. That alone puts it above a lot of the other domains defensively IMO. I can think of a few times where this feature really saved an encounter, when a wizard was able to maintain the polymorph, etc.
There is an argument to be made of "why would you pick nature instead of just being a druid" which is fair, but I think there are some important bits from cleric that makes it more worthwhile depending on what you were after. If your party was never going to bother with stealth, Pass without Trace is no longer the gold star that it might have been. Warding Wind depends heavily on the composition of your party and the enemies you face. Conjure Animals is one of the best 3rd level spells for combat in the entire edition, but plenty of tables have a very reasonable desire to not allow it because minionmancy can slow the game and be finnicky (I allow it personally if I know the player knows what they are down and won't be too slow, but it IS a fair argument that it's poorly designed for gameplay). Tidal Wave is an uncommon spell to see used anyway even though it can be good, but you have better things to do with your turns as a Nature Domain Cleric. Getting into 4th and later level spells I think it might shift in the Druid's favour, access to things like Polymorph, Conjure Chwinga, Anti Life Shell, Maelstrom, etc. Still, this isn't to discount the fact that cleric just has some very strong spells that actually scale decently into the mid/late game.
When you compare What the Nature Cleric can set up and do in combat, you have one of the highest AC full casters (Fullplate + Shield), who is able to render massive areas impassible for creatures that want to close into melee without any saves, who can give out elemental resistance against the big enemy attacks to maintain key concentration spells, who can make greater use of Spirit Guardians than any other cleric by a huge margin, and has the best potential average DPR with team work compared to any other cleric.
TLDR: Nature Domain isn't just discount Druid, it has a lot going for it and can have amazing synergy with a good party composition, and can hard counter many encounters in tier 1 play, and has access to some of the best area denial tools and party support for tiers 2-4. All this praise is contingent on you actually having a campaign to leverage these tools though, campaigns that don't feature beast enemies, melee enemies, doesn't have any team mates that have ways to move enemies around, ground based enemies, or doesn't have a lot of elemental damage will mean you aren't bringing quite as much to the table as some of the other cleric options. Honestly just the Thorn Whip Spirit Guardians combo makes this a decent domain choice though.
One thing that does get me, is that as a healer I can't out do the damage coming in, but if there is an undead person in the party, a level one necrotic damage spell can pretty much heal them for quite a few levels. Just seems a little silly (as necrotic damage heals them.)
Life can heal through massive bouts of damage. The CD alone can practically keep a party going 1/2/3 times a SR and they. An double dip with mass healing word or AoV.
as far as I know there isn't a PC option to allow healing from necrotic damage.
Necrotic damage is just damage. It doesn't prevent healing, and there are even necrotic spells (like vampiric touch) which explicitly heal. There are some monster actions that deal necrotic damage and reduce the target's maximum hit points, but that's a function of the action. The damage type is irrelevant.
One thing that does get me, is that as a healer I can't out do the damage coming in, but if there is an undead person in the party, a level one necrotic damage spell can pretty much heal them for quite a few levels. Just seems a little silly (as necrotic damage heals them.)
"Healers" aren't supposed to be able to out do the damage coming in. This isn't an MMO. There are no dedicated healers or tanks. That mentality will only cause frustration. You must unlearn what you have learned.
And necrotic damage doesn't automatically heal undead. That's not a rule in 5th edition.
as far as I know there isn't a PC option to allow healing from necrotic damage.
I think you're confusing with previous editions where necrotic had special properties; as Jounichi1983 says, in 5th edition there is nothing special about any damage type anymore, none of them have any in-built properties. The only difference now is the rider effects that come with their use, and how commonly resisted they are (which is why force is generally best, necrotic/radiant is generally better than cold/fire/lightning/poison/thunder and so-on).
There are still a handful of necrotic damage effects that also reduce a target's maximum hit-points, or prevent them from healing; chill touch for example.
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Lol. Don't know why y'all are quoting me on the necrotic= healing thing. I said I didn't think it's in 5e but for all I know it could be squirreled away in one the CR or MTG books which I don't use.
And you were objectively wrong. The spell vampiric touch both deals necrotic damage and provides healing based on the amount of necrotic damage dealt.
You also made, as far as I can see, no reference to previous editions or other setting books. And none of those setting books amend or contradict the core rules from the PHB.
I think a lot of folks overlook Nature, but maybe they’ve not played above 6th-8th level. Their ability to halve incoming elemental damage of their choice as a reaction, and do it every round, prevents a lot of damage. Also having the ability to tack on elemental damage of your choice to your (likely wisdom-based via shillelagh) melee gives you some offensive flexibility. You get a free skill, and the spell list is better than it seems. Between animal friendship and speak with animals (which is an always memorized ritual), you have that friend to nature flavor, especially with your channel divinity ability, which is limited albeit powerful when it comes in to play. Spike Growth is a great spell!
One thing I would change about it is Barkskin. Barkskin is rarely a good spell to use. It’s one thing to imagine a moon druid casting it before wild shape, but otherwise who is casting this? The Nature Cleric already has heavy armor and so began the game with chain mail. Maybe on a prison break?
I think Animal Messenger would be a great replacement choice that is not overpowered, not combat-focused, and has great flavor. Other choices could be Beast Sense, Locate Plant/Animal, Protection from Poison, Warding Wind.
Definitely hard to say since Cleric in general is great and most just bring nice flavor and mix to an already great class.
Death - my personal favourite. I'm a sucker for that dark broody type who kinda goes against the nice healy Cleric archetype. I typically pair it with Aasimar or Shadar-Kai for necrotic resistance to play into the necrotic build of the character.
Trickery - its all about the spells on this one. another good flavour choice as well, but the spell list is the best in my opinion of all Clerics.
Light - blasty blasty, fireball, wall of fire, burning hands, just another fun way to build a Cleric.
honorable mentions - Tempest for flavour, Arcana 17th lvl is pretty great, Grave since it can play similar to a Death Cleric, and Nature.
Not a fan of Twilight, Peace or other too overpowered subclasses, its a Cleric, you're already great, no need to show up everyone else :)
I came back to the game after 30 years to keep my friends' characters alive, so Life Domain was the obvious choice. Besides the obvious healing abilities, Spiritual Weapon is a great default damage spell to have packed.
Tempest is my favorite, but only because it was the first one I played. Other that that, I have to go with grave domain for the Spare the Dying Bonus Action and range of 30 feet.
I have to say Tempest domain is the best, because I generally enjoy not being a healer, but sometimes it's necessary, in which case Cleric of the tempest domain is a great choice because they have great offensive capabilities, but can still learn spells like cure wounds and lesser restoration.
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I like Nature Domain as well, thematically, but I don't think it's Channel Divinity is all that great. I like the spell list and the Divine Strike they get can't be beat. I feel like they would mesh well with a Ranger multiclass build (I am playing in a not very consistent gestalt Tyranny of Dragons game and my character is a Nature Cleric/Drake Warden Ranger, and it has been fun, but the character rules are far outside the norm for acceptability so I'm not sure how fun Nature Clerics would be on their own).
I also like the Order Domain, but it doesn't seem to have much love. I have an idea for a bounty hunter that is an Order Domain Cleric. If guns are allowed in the game he will definitely use them, otherwise it'll be a heavy crossbow. And when he uses his Channel Divinity he'll shout, "Reach for the sky!" I have a bit of a love for westerns, and Order Domain seems the most Clint Eastwood of all of them, to me, lol.
Nature is my personal pick, though it does depend on the context of the campaign. Cleric's Spirit Guardians spell synergizes amazingly well with the Thorn Whip cantrip to forcibly pull them in to trigger the damage. Plant Growth can make it so basically nothing can move in your area (It doesn't count as difficult terrain, so suddenly it's an 8 to 1 ratio for movement, or one tile a turn for basically anything on the ground, or possibly none depending on how your dm decides to handle partial tile movement), rendering an area impassible and VERY damaging turn to turn.
Lower level options that don't require two 3rd level slots would be stuff like Spike Growth with a party that has knockback options, since every 5ft of knockback translates to 2d4 damage with no saves.. Imagine, a single Eldritch Blast from that warlock who got the 10ft knockback invocation suddenly also gets 4d4 every time they hit a creature. People with the Telekinetic feat to shove 5ft means an extra 2d4. Open Hand monk can push two enemies back 15 ft for 6d4 damage each. I've seen some encounters that could have been nasty trivialized with a well placed spike growth.
The level 6 feature is also what I would consider quite good. Being able to halve the damage from the big damage spell from an enemy on the spellcasters means that you can make what would have been a fairly hard concentration save into around or barely above a DC 10. That alone puts it above a lot of the other domains defensively IMO. I can think of a few times where this feature really saved an encounter, when a wizard was able to maintain the polymorph, etc.
There is an argument to be made of "why would you pick nature instead of just being a druid" which is fair, but I think there are some important bits from cleric that makes it more worthwhile depending on what you were after. If your party was never going to bother with stealth, Pass without Trace is no longer the gold star that it might have been. Warding Wind depends heavily on the composition of your party and the enemies you face. Conjure Animals is one of the best 3rd level spells for combat in the entire edition, but plenty of tables have a very reasonable desire to not allow it because minionmancy can slow the game and be finnicky (I allow it personally if I know the player knows what they are down and won't be too slow, but it IS a fair argument that it's poorly designed for gameplay). Tidal Wave is an uncommon spell to see used anyway even though it can be good, but you have better things to do with your turns as a Nature Domain Cleric. Getting into 4th and later level spells I think it might shift in the Druid's favour, access to things like Polymorph, Conjure Chwinga, Anti Life Shell, Maelstrom, etc. Still, this isn't to discount the fact that cleric just has some very strong spells that actually scale decently into the mid/late game.
When you compare What the Nature Cleric can set up and do in combat, you have one of the highest AC full casters (Fullplate + Shield), who is able to render massive areas impassible for creatures that want to close into melee without any saves, who can give out elemental resistance against the big enemy attacks to maintain key concentration spells, who can make greater use of Spirit Guardians than any other cleric by a huge margin, and has the best potential average DPR with team work compared to any other cleric.
TLDR: Nature Domain isn't just discount Druid, it has a lot going for it and can have amazing synergy with a good party composition, and can hard counter many encounters in tier 1 play, and has access to some of the best area denial tools and party support for tiers 2-4. All this praise is contingent on you actually having a campaign to leverage these tools though, campaigns that don't feature beast enemies, melee enemies, doesn't have any team mates that have ways to move enemies around, ground based enemies, or doesn't have a lot of elemental damage will mean you aren't bringing quite as much to the table as some of the other cleric options. Honestly just the Thorn Whip Spirit Guardians combo makes this a decent domain choice though.
Life is life, life is love
One thing that does get me, is that as a healer I can't out do the damage coming in, but if there is an undead person in the party, a level one necrotic damage spell can pretty much heal them for quite a few levels. Just seems a little silly (as necrotic damage heals them.)
Necrotic damage is just damage. It doesn't prevent healing, and there are even necrotic spells (like vampiric touch) which explicitly heal. There are some monster actions that deal necrotic damage and reduce the target's maximum hit points, but that's a function of the action. The damage type is irrelevant.
"Healers" aren't supposed to be able to out do the damage coming in. This isn't an MMO. There are no dedicated healers or tanks. That mentality will only cause frustration. You must unlearn what you have learned.
And necrotic damage doesn't automatically heal undead. That's not a rule in 5th edition.
I think you're confusing with previous editions where necrotic had special properties; as Jounichi1983 says, in 5th edition there is nothing special about any damage type anymore, none of them have any in-built properties. The only difference now is the rider effects that come with their use, and how commonly resisted they are (which is why force is generally best, necrotic/radiant is generally better than cold/fire/lightning/poison/thunder and so-on).
There are still a handful of necrotic damage effects that also reduce a target's maximum hit-points, or prevent them from healing; chill touch for example.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
And you were objectively wrong. The spell vampiric touch both deals necrotic damage and provides healing based on the amount of necrotic damage dealt.
You also made, as far as I can see, no reference to previous editions or other setting books. And none of those setting books amend or contradict the core rules from the PHB.
I think a lot of folks overlook Nature, but maybe they’ve not played above 6th-8th level. Their ability to halve incoming elemental damage of their choice as a reaction, and do it every round, prevents a lot of damage. Also having the ability to tack on elemental damage of your choice to your (likely wisdom-based via shillelagh) melee gives you some offensive flexibility. You get a free skill, and the spell list is better than it seems. Between animal friendship and speak with animals (which is an always memorized ritual), you have that friend to nature flavor, especially with your channel divinity ability, which is limited albeit powerful when it comes in to play. Spike Growth is a great spell!
One thing I would change about it is Barkskin. Barkskin is rarely a good spell to use. It’s one thing to imagine a moon druid casting it before wild shape, but otherwise who is casting this? The Nature Cleric already has heavy armor and so began the game with chain mail. Maybe on a prison break?
I think Animal Messenger would be a great replacement choice that is not overpowered, not combat-focused, and has great flavor. Other choices could be Beast Sense, Locate Plant/Animal, Protection from Poison, Warding Wind.
Definitely hard to say since Cleric in general is great and most just bring nice flavor and mix to an already great class.
Death - my personal favourite. I'm a sucker for that dark broody type who kinda goes against the nice healy Cleric archetype. I typically pair it with Aasimar or Shadar-Kai for necrotic resistance to play into the necrotic build of the character.
Trickery - its all about the spells on this one. another good flavour choice as well, but the spell list is the best in my opinion of all Clerics.
Light - blasty blasty, fireball, wall of fire, burning hands, just another fun way to build a Cleric.
honorable mentions - Tempest for flavour, Arcana 17th lvl is pretty great, Grave since it can play similar to a Death Cleric, and Nature.
Not a fan of Twilight, Peace or other too overpowered subclasses, its a Cleric, you're already great, no need to show up everyone else :)
I came back to the game after 30 years to keep my friends' characters alive, so Life Domain was the obvious choice. Besides the obvious healing abilities, Spiritual Weapon is a great default damage spell to have packed.
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Tempest is my favorite, but only because it was the first one I played. Other that that, I have to go with grave domain for the Spare the Dying Bonus Action and range of 30 feet.
My second character ever was a Tempest cleric, and I really enjoyed it. But I also want to try Twilight.
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Twilight for dungeon crawl especially depending on racial traits. doubling dark vision plus all other perks is nice.
yeah I like how you can share darkvision with others in case you need to
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I have to say Tempest domain is the best, because I generally enjoy not being a healer, but sometimes it's necessary, in which case Cleric of the tempest domain is a great choice because they have great offensive capabilities, but can still learn spells like cure wounds and lesser restoration.
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