2024 Cleric (Tempest Domain) and Divine Order: Do I keep Martial Weapon and Heavy Armor proficiency?

2024 Cleric (Tempest Domain) and Divine Order: Do I keep Martial Weapon and Heavy Armor proficiency?

I have a question regarding the interaction between the 2024 Cleric and the Tempest Domain from 2014.

Under the 2024 Cleric rules, Martial Weapon and Heavy Armor proficiency appear to come from the Protector Divine Order, while Thaumaturge provides different benefits.

However, when I create a 2024 Tempest Cleric in D&D Beyond and choose Thaumaturge, the character sheet still shows proficiency with Martial Weapons and Heavy Armor.

Is this correct under the 2024 rules and the backward compatibility guidelines for older subclasses, or is it simply a D&D Beyond implementation quirk/bug?

More specifically, do older Cleric subclasses that previously granted these proficiencies (such as Tempest Domain) retain them in addition to the Divine Order choice, or are those proficiencies supposed to be replaced entirely by the Divine Order feature?

Has there been any official clarification, Sage Advice, or rules guidance on this interaction?

Thanks!

As far as I know, there has been no official ruling on this. Personally, I think it is pretty clear that you are meant to ignore those features of the subclass when using it in a 2024 game and only use the Divine Order and Blessed Strikes class features (which do the same things, but with choice instead of being locked in by the subclass).

As far as the character builder goes, that is just an implementation problem. The old subclasses also still give you the 2014 version of spells like Sleep, which the rules clearly state you should use the new version instead. If you check the homebrew section, you should be able to easily find a 2024 version of the subclass which removes the armor and weapon proficiencies from the subclass and gives you the updated versions of the domain spells.

Thanks for your reply. I was also leaning toward the idea that the proficiency change was intentional, so that the choice is made before even gaining the subclass. What surprised me, though, was that it hadn’t been implemented correctly here on D&D Beyond.

There are a lot of things with the new rules that have not been implemented properly. The infrastructure of the current character builder apparently makes implementation of new rules a problem, which is why we are supposed to be getting a whole new character builder sometime in the near future. Until then, we have to settle for work-arounds and homebrew solutions.

Quote from Sequilonis >>

As far as I know, there has been no official ruling on this. Personally, I think it is pretty clear that you are meant to ignore those features of the subclass when using it in a 2024 game and only use the Divine Order and Blessed Strikes class features (which do the same things, but with choice instead of being locked in by the subclass).

Weirdly, Blessed Strikes actually does explicitly say that it overrides similar features from older subclasses, which I think makes it very clear the whole idea was to decouple all of those choices from the subclass selection and that Divine Order should work the same way.