I am wondering if one of the ways to balance as a DM is to send more undead and chew channel divinity a different way. CD is a limited resource and sending undead isn't that hard to add into encounters/dungeons. It would be slightly campaign altering, but if you get the twilight cleric having to ponder how and when its best to use their CD it might bring things better in line. At the very least I think it would be important to break up the monotony and alter play styles.
I am wondering if one of the ways to balance as a DM is to send more undead and chew channel divinity a different way. CD is a limited resource and sending undead isn't that hard to add into encounters/dungeons. It would be slightly campaign altering, but if you get the twilight cleric having to ponder how and when its best to use their CD it might bring things better in line. At the very least I think it would be important to break up the monotony and alter play styles.
Yeah typically the way I would handle it is minions as they will do low amounts of damage to offset the addition but not a crazy amount if they choose NOT to use it.
Thats the real difficult part is structuring encounters that will challenge them if they use it but not completely destroy them if they don't....
As I had stated before it drops the offensive CR of the creature by at least 2 points....so dropping in a CR 10 creature on a party of level 7s will be about right if they use Twilight Sanctuary but could cause some deaths if they do not.
Vs.
You send out a bunch of zombies to tick away at health and provide incentive to use the alternative feature of the CD....Brilliant move @Elfdope
I am wondering if one of the ways to balance as a DM is to send more undead and chew channel divinity a different way. CD is a limited resource and sending undead isn't that hard to add into encounters/dungeons. It would be slightly campaign altering, but if you get the twilight cleric having to ponder how and when its best to use their CD it might bring things better in line. At the very least I think it would be important to break up the monotony and alter play styles.
Yeah typically the way I would handle it is minions as they will do low amounts of damage to offset the addition but not a crazy amount if they choose NOT to use it.
Thats the real difficult part is structuring encounters that will challenge them if they use it but not completely destroy them if they don't....
As I had stated before it drops the offensive CR of the creature by at least 2 points....so dropping in a CR 10 creature on a party of level 7s will be about right if they use Twilight Sanctuary but could cause some deaths if they do not.
Vs.
You send out a bunch of zombies to tick away at health and provide incentive to use the alternative feature of the CD....Brilliant move @Elfdope
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying. If the cleric can just reflexively throw around tHP with impunity, and without thinking, then clearly you as a DM are not putting much creativity into the encounter. You can’t just get stuck incorrigibly in your perfect little combat encounter and refuse to change it because it’s yours and it’s perfect and so wonderful and you think it’s so great. You might have to compromise a little. Make the players think, and punish them a little for taking the easy way out. Present them with tough decisions, make them ration their abilities. Plus you could get them to trigger their Twilight Sanctuary, wait like literally a minute and throw them back into initiative, now with no channel divinity. Or incapacitate the cleric. Make sure to throw in spells and effects that could potentially incapacitate the cleric and the aura drops. You have every tool at your disposal, use em.
I am wondering if one of the ways to balance as a DM is to send more undead and chew channel divinity a different way. CD is a limited resource and sending undead isn't that hard to add into encounters/dungeons. It would be slightly campaign altering, but if you get the twilight cleric having to ponder how and when its best to use their CD it might bring things better in line. At the very least I think it would be important to break up the monotony and alter play styles.
Yeah typically the way I would handle it is minions as they will do low amounts of damage to offset the addition but not a crazy amount if they choose NOT to use it.
Thats the real difficult part is structuring encounters that will challenge them if they use it but not completely destroy them if they don't....
As I had stated before it drops the offensive CR of the creature by at least 2 points....so dropping in a CR 10 creature on a party of level 7s will be about right if they use Twilight Sanctuary but could cause some deaths if they do not.
Vs.
You send out a bunch of zombies to tick away at health and provide incentive to use the alternative feature of the CD....Brilliant move @Elfdope
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying. If the cleric can just reflexively throw around tHP with impunity, and without thinking, then clearly you as a DM are not putting much creativity into the encounter. You can’t just get stuck incorrigibly in your perfect little combat encounter and refuse to change it because it’s yours and it’s perfect and so wonderful and you think it’s so great. You might have to compromise a little. Make the players think, and punish them a little for taking the easy way out. Present them with tough decisions, make them ration their abilities. Plus you could get them to trigger their Twilight Sanctuary, wait like literally a minute and throw them back into initiative, now with no channel divinity. Or incapacitate the cleric. Make sure to throw in spells and effects that could potentially incapacitate the cleric and the aura drops. You have every tool at your disposal, use em.
The counter to that is....not everyone is good at that sort of thing?
Maybe its a new DM...maybe its a DM that doesn't run combat a lot...maybe they don't have a lot of time to prep and rely on encounter builders?
Its also just so easy to use with no real cost to the cleric to use it...even in the undead example if you offset damage from the minons you are still having a substantial effect as now you have to minion manage which will slow down game time...it has an effect on the overall game regardless and its proportional impact compared to other CD is much much higher.
To say its never a problem is just not a good answer...it will be a problem for enough people that it should have likely got another pass in playtesting. I expect an errata in the future on this one to be honest....
Here is one munchkin tactic I can see. I would never allow it, but I KNOW there would be players trying to rules lawyer it.
Say Mr 5th Warlock has cast AoA on himself, for 15 Temp HP.
First turn, he gets whacked twice, and is down to say 2 THP, but also does 30 HP Cold damage, as per the RAW of the spell. He zips into the aura, says "filler up", the 5th level Cleric rolls a 4, for a total of 9 THP, which now replaces the 2 THP Mr Warlock had left. Mr Warlock goes back into battle, gets hit once for 8 THP, again doing 15 HP Cold damage when hit, but down to 1 THP, comes back at the end of his turn and gets a recharge this time to 8 THP.
That scenario is wildly OP, and I doubt even close to RAW, but any DM willing to allow the Twilight Cleric may actually entertain this kind of use.
I don't think this works as THP doesnt stack. While he had AoA active he could not get the THP from the Divinity.
Here is one munchkin tactic I can see. I would never allow it, but I KNOW there would be players trying to rules lawyer it.
Say Mr 5th Warlock has cast AoA on himself, for 15 Temp HP.
First turn, he gets whacked twice, and is down to say 2 THP, but also does 30 HP Cold damage, as per the RAW of the spell. He zips into the aura, says "filler up", the 5th level Cleric rolls a 4, for a total of 9 THP, which now replaces the 2 THP Mr Warlock had left. Mr Warlock goes back into battle, gets hit once for 8 THP, again doing 15 HP Cold damage when hit, but down to 1 THP, comes back at the end of his turn and gets a recharge this time to 8 THP.
That scenario is wildly OP, and I doubt even close to RAW, but any DM willing to allow the Twilight Cleric may actually entertain this kind of use.
I don't think this works as THP doesnt stack. While he had AoA active he could not get the THP from the Divinity.
Have a read again. I did not stack the THP. I replaced it with a higher number. And while I agree that the scenario I just posted is something I would never allow at my table, I am sure some player would most certainly say "who says the Warlock can't get a recharge of their THP?"
Or conversely, and this is RAW, as I see it, the Twilight Cleric can ruin the AoA spell of a friendly Warlock, or an NPC BBEG. AoA says this: "If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage. " I bolded "these" for a reason.
Because the Twilight Cleric's CD says this:
Whenever a creature (including you) ends its turn in the sphere, you can grant that creature one of these benefits: You grant it temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level.
So now the TC tells the DM, "Yeah, I just chose to replace the THP from the AoA spell with my own THP, and because those THP do not stack, but are a strict replacement, the AoA THP are gone, so the spell is useless. The creature that is "granted this benefit" has no choice in the matter, per the wording in the spell.
This is a terribly written, incredibly poorly thought out subclass, with ridiculously OP features. But that is the expected level of quality being churned out by WOTC these days.
Then you replace it with the Twilight THP and lose the benefits of the AoA.
"A protective magical force surrounds you, manifesting as a spectral frost that covers you and your gear. You gain 5 temporary hit points for the duration. If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage."
To me this would indicate if you replace them then you forgo the benefits of AoA.
Here is one munchkin tactic I can see. I would never allow it, but I KNOW there would be players trying to rules lawyer it.
Say Mr 5th Warlock has cast AoA on himself, for 15 Temp HP.
First turn, he gets whacked twice, and is down to say 2 THP, but also does 30 HP Cold damage, as per the RAW of the spell. He zips into the aura, says "filler up", the 5th level Cleric rolls a 4, for a total of 9 THP, which now replaces the 2 THP Mr Warlock had left. Mr Warlock goes back into battle, gets hit once for 8 THP, again doing 15 HP Cold damage when hit, but down to 1 THP, comes back at the end of his turn and gets a recharge this time to 8 THP.
That scenario is wildly OP, and I doubt even close to RAW, but any DM willing to allow the Twilight Cleric may actually entertain this kind of use.
I don't think this works as THP doesnt stack. While he had AoA active he could not get the THP from the Divinity.
Have a read again. I did not stack the THP. I replaced it with a higher number. And while I agree that the scenario I just posted is something I would never allow at my table, I am sure some player would most certainly say "who says the Warlock can't get a recharge of their THP?"
Or conversely, and this is RAW, as I see it, the Twilight Cleric can ruin the AoA spell of a friendly Warlock, or an NPC BBEG. AoA says this: "If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage. " I bolded "these" for a reason.
Because the Twilight Cleric's CD says this:
Whenever a creature (including you) ends its turn in the sphere, you can grant that creature one of these benefits: You grant it temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level.
So now the TC tells the DM, "Yeah, I just chose to replace the THP from the AoA spell with my own THP, and because those THP do not stack, but are a strict replacement, the AoA THP are gone, so the spell is useless. The creature that is "granted this benefit" has no choice in the matter, per the wording in the spell.
This is a terribly written, incredibly poorly thought out subclass, with ridiculously OP features. But that is the expected level of quality being churned out by WOTC these days.
Then you replace it with the Twilight THP and lose the benefits of the AoA.
"A protective magical force surrounds you, manifesting as a spectral frost that covers you and your gear. You gain 5 temporary hit points for the duration. If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage."
To me this would indicate if you replace them then you forgo the benefits of AoA.
Which is precisely what I detailed in the 2nd half on my post.
Then don't take them?
"you can grant that creature one of these benefits:"
You're ignoring action economy and the cost to the druid.
The fact that you have to burn an action or bonus action AND a spell slot makes the druid a one note character if they want to use unicorn.... You have to devote your turn to casting a healing spell and thus limiting what you can do every turn off you want to give the benefit out every turn
The twilight Cleric does not need to do this and can activity cast damaging spells while still giving out the benefit.
This makes them more versatile as well as they can cast buff/debuff spells or whatever other action they want.
The druid actually has to give something up to use the feature.... The twilight Cleric doesn't.
I'm not forgetting about the action economy. Your overplaying the action economy.
That Druid. He can afford to cast those Healing Spells if he's already got summons on the field unless you take out the summons. And if you do he can call out more and repeat the process. Letting his beasts chew through you... and even the temp HP of twilight Sanctuary is actually very easy.
The Twilight Cleric is also forced into a particular position. The Druid is not. The Druid can sit safely back out of the way where he is hard to target. People complain "oh that just makes the druid more targettable and more susceptable to concerted efforts." The Twilight Sanctuary and the Twilight Cleric fall to the Same Exact Thing. And have to be much closer to danger to make theirs function.
There are lots of ways to deal with it. There have been lots of ways to deal with it for a long time. This isn't some kind of new situation and everybody keeps acting like it didn't exist before Tasha's when it did. It's something that has basically always existed in some form and each iteration has always had it's own strengths and it's own weaknesses. These Scenerio's are nothing new to people who haven't only been using Healing as a last resort when somebody falls all this time.
The Cost of More Resources for the Shepard Druid is the Balance to the fact that they don't have to be in danger when they do it. having it affect only Fey and Beasts is not the downside people try to paint it as. Because Druids summon mostly fey and Beasts. I've played a level 10+ Shepard Druid with these kinds of abilities already in place. Part of what makes them effective is that there are all kinds of ways to disconnect the Druid from a lot of them if you wish to.
You really want to talk about low level characters with this build by complaining that the 10+ is mostly irrelevant.
I can do that too. Your talking an average of 6Temp HP at level 3 with twilight sanctuary. CR 3 has plenty of multiattack monsters. many of them doing between 5-8 damage per hit. The single target monsters are usually doing more than that per hit.
Your Temp HP is protecting from maybe a single blow. Even if you roll maximum and get 9hp. Your protecting from maybe a blow and a half.
Even if your generous and you say the average hp of a character is based off a d10 (though I'm fairly certain it's in the d8 range) At level 3 your looking at a total of 20 hp before con and 23-29 so your looking at an average of just 26 hp. just about Every level 3 character is just praying they don't get too often and that their AC is Protecting them because they die in about 4-5 hits on average without healing. Two Enemies piling up on any average non-tank character can potentially kill it in a single round, Though it's likely to take 2 rounds. So even if you factor in 6temphp. You've extended that one characters life by only a single round. You've given it just enough that it won't die in one round. And it's going to take two of them 3 rounds but they will basically kill the character in those three rounds still because you've only extended their life by at most 3 attacks total.
And I can hear the counter argument. "Well I can just heal them in that second round and that's not a problem." Guess what? it was the exact same scenario and solution without Twilight Sanctuary to keep them alive. it didn't change with Twilight Sanctuary at all. Twilight Sanctuary didn't accomplish anything dramatic. Turn Order would actually dictate more about the danger of it than Twilight Sanctuary would. if the two of them split up there was always likely to take them more turns to kill your party than it would take to kill them if you just heal them. You'd still have a chance to do your attack spells as well. You might finish the fight a couple rounds quicker but that's it.
Even when you scale up twilight sanctuary. Which it does ridiculously slowly. So slowly that it's never really blocking more than one hit at any given appropriate level cr/challenge (and actually comes closer to being more at the lowest levels). Even At level 5 when Fireball comes into play. Fireball is going to average 24 damage a hit per person that it hits. Twilight Sactuary at it's strongest Is going to protect a person for 11. This means that on any particular fireball, each member that gets hit by it in a best case Temp HP scenerio from Twilight Sanctuary is still going to take 13 damage if they fail the save to their Actual health. Even though the Average Temp HP at that level is 8, Either of Which Twilight Sanctuary can't replace.
Temp Hp is not some magical mystical god power. It's limited. And it's not like Aid at all. The truth of the Matter when it comes to temp Hp is that it's just a 1 time use Damage reduction pool that you have to use on any and all incoming damage without picking and choosing what to apply it to. Even if you keep reapplying it ever turn. All your doing is reducing the damage by a bit. And your hoping it's going to be enough to cover at least one blow fully. That's it. it doesn't refill, it doesn't stack, it doesn't even allow you to mix sources, it can't be applied in any way to anybody that is unconscious and dying, and there is nothing I can think of at all that modifies it.
You all are billing it and pushing it as this great ability. and it's like a massive Aid buff to your party, You complain I'm attacking you and not your arguments when I point out your hyping it up to much and your not recognizing this issue isn't new and already existed and call out your ignoring it. But that's the actual problem. The mechanics aren't the issue here, it's the bad faith arguments to push one side of the argument that certain people are supporting. The white room math can be argued all day. I can and have pointed out how it's wrong and your answers have basically been "No. It's this this and this and it's totally new and it's totally more and totally OP" that is just a repeat of what you already said that I pointed out isn't necessarily what it appears already.
It's not better than the Shepard Druid for costing less. Or being gotten at a lower level. It's just a different way of doing the same thing with it's own pro's and cons versus somebody else. Being Lower Level and Costing Less are just some of the Pro's to Twilight Sanctuary. Being far more interruptible and centered on the cleric forcing the cleric into certain positions or team-mates into certain positions to try and make optimal use of it are it's Con's. But In the End, It's all just in a matter of which pro's and con's are acceptable to a particular player, How the DM decides to challenge them, and the party that your playing with. Your Party may be willing to work to help mitigate those con's, They may not. That's between you and your party. But the Reality is that in Actual Play. Most of the things that people are pushing as so OP in this thread are not going to work out that way. They are not going to usually be playing the perfect white room scenario's crafted to highlight these specific points in these ways, just like Healing Spirit did not usually perform in play to the OP'ness people white roomed it into supposedly being.
You're ignoring action economy and the cost to the druid.
The fact that you have to burn an action or bonus action AND a spell slot makes the druid a one note character if they want to use unicorn.... You have to devote your turn to casting a healing spell and thus limiting what you can do every turn off you want to give the benefit out every turn
The twilight Cleric does not need to do this and can activity cast damaging spells while still giving out the benefit.
This makes them more versatile as well as they can cast buff/debuff spells or whatever other action they want.
The druid actually has to give something up to use the feature.... The twilight Cleric doesn't.
I'm not forgetting about the action economy. Your overplaying the action economy.
That Druid. He can afford to cast those Healing Spells if he's already got summons on the field unless you take out the summons. And if you do he can call out more and repeat the process. Letting his beasts chew through you... and even the temp HP of twilight Sanctuary is actually very easy.
The Twilight Cleric is also forced into a particular position. The Druid is not. The Druid can sit safely back out of the way where he is hard to target. People complain "oh that just makes the druid more targettable and more susceptable to concerted efforts." The Twilight Sanctuary and the Twilight Cleric fall to the Same Exact Thing. And have to be much closer to danger to make theirs function.
There are lots of ways to deal with it. There have been lots of ways to deal with it for a long time. This isn't some kind of new situation and everybody keeps acting like it didn't exist before Tasha's when it did. It's something that has basically always existed in some form and each iteration has always had it's own strengths and it's own weaknesses. These Scenerio's are nothing new to people who haven't only been using Healing as a last resort when somebody falls all this time.
The Cost of More Resources for the Shepard Druid is the Balance to the fact that they don't have to be in danger when they do it. having it affect only Fey and Beasts is not the downside people try to paint it as. Because Druids summon mostly fey and Beasts. I've played a level 10+ Shepard Druid with these kinds of abilities already in place. Part of what makes them effective is that there are all kinds of ways to disconnect the Druid from a lot of them if you wish to.
You really want to talk about low level characters with this build by complaining that the 10+ is mostly irrelevant.
I can do that too. Your talking an average of 6Temp HP at level 3 with twilight sanctuary. CR 3 has plenty of multiattack monsters. many of them doing between 5-8 damage per hit. The single target monsters are usually doing more than that per hit.
Your Temp HP is protecting from maybe a single blow. Even if you roll maximum and get 9hp. Your protecting from maybe a blow and a half.
Even if your generous and you say the average hp of a character is based off a d10 (though I'm fairly certain it's in the d8 range) At level 3 your looking at a total of 20 hp before con and 23-29 so your looking at an average of just 26 hp. just about Every level 3 character is just praying they don't get too often and that their AC is Protecting them because they die in about 4-5 hits on average without healing. Two Enemies piling up on any average non-tank character can potentially kill it in a single round, Though it's likely to take 2 rounds. So even if you factor in 6temphp. You've extended that one characters life by only a single round. You've given it just enough that it won't die in one round. And it's going to take two of them 3 rounds but they will basically kill the character in those three rounds still because you've only extended their life by at most 3 attacks total.
And I can hear the counter argument. "Well I can just heal them in that second round and that's not a problem." Guess what? it was the exact same scenario and solution without Twilight Sanctuary to keep them alive. it didn't change with Twilight Sanctuary at all. Twilight Sanctuary didn't accomplish anything dramatic. Turn Order would actually dictate more about the danger of it than Twilight Sanctuary would. if the two of them split up there was always likely to take them more turns to kill your party than it would take to kill them if you just heal them. You'd still have a chance to do your attack spells as well. You might finish the fight a couple rounds quicker but that's it.
Even when you scale up twilight sanctuary. Which it does ridiculously slowly. So slowly that it's never really blocking more than one hit at any given appropriate level cr/challenge (and actually comes closer to being more at the lowest levels). Even At level 5 when Fireball comes into play. Fireball is going to average 24 damage a hit per person that it hits. Twilight Sactuary at it's strongest Is going to protect a person for 11. This means that on any particular fireball, each member that gets hit by it in a best case Temp HP scenerio from Twilight Sanctuary is still going to take 13 damage if they fail the save to their Actual health. Even though the Average Temp HP at that level is 8, Either of Which Twilight Sanctuary can't replace.
Temp Hp is not some magical mystical god power. It's limited. And it's not like Aid at all. The truth of the Matter when it comes to temp Hp is that it's just a 1 time use Damage reduction pool that you have to use on any and all incoming damage without picking and choosing what to apply it to. Even if you keep reapplying it ever turn. All your doing is reducing the damage by a bit. And your hoping it's going to be enough to cover at least one blow fully. That's it. it doesn't refill, it doesn't stack, it doesn't even allow you to mix sources, it can't be applied in any way to anybody that is unconscious and dying, and there is nothing I can think of at all that modifies it.
You all are billing it and pushing it as this great ability. and it's like a massive Aid buff to your party, You complain I'm attacking you and not your arguments when I point out your hyping it up to much and your not recognizing this issue isn't new and already existed and call out your ignoring it. But that's the actual problem. The mechanics aren't the issue here, it's the bad faith arguments to push one side of the argument that certain people are supporting. The white room math can be argued all day. I can and have pointed out how it's wrong and your answers have basically been "No. It's this this and this and it's totally new and it's totally more and totally OP" that is just a repeat of what you already said that I pointed out isn't necessarily what it appears already.
It's not better than the Shepard Druid for costing less. Or being gotten at a lower level. It's just a different way of doing the same thing with it's own pro's and cons versus somebody else. Being Lower Level and Costing Less are just some of the Pro's to Twilight Sanctuary. Being far more interruptible and centered on the cleric forcing the cleric into certain positions or team-mates into certain positions to try and make optimal use of it are it's Con's. But In the End, It's all just in a matter of which pro's and con's are acceptable to a particular player, How the DM decides to challenge them, and the party that your playing with. Your Party may be willing to work to help mitigate those con's, They may not. That's between you and your party. But the Reality is that in Actual Play. Most of the things that people are pushing as so OP in this thread are not going to work out that way. They are not going to usually be playing the perfect white room scenario's crafted to highlight these specific points in these ways, just like Healing Spirit did not usually perform in play to the OP'ness people white roomed it into supposedly being.
Man I appreciate your input but these exceedingly long replies are hard to digest....could you maybe condense into a few bullet points to make discussion a little easier?
This is not a white room scenario...its just always on all the time when you activate it and you do not have to waste your action, bonus action, reaction to use it.
30 ft is a huge amount of space and it can move with you so you do not need to spend any action, bonus action, or reaction to move it to where it needs to be...you just move and its available to them.
The shepard druid has to spend a BA to move their totem and if the party gets moved out of the space forcibly or the battlemap changes you are stuck with having to burn a BA to move the totem.
That also means you cannot cast a BA healing word to proc it....and since mass healing word doesn't come online until 3rd level spells do your low level druid is going to suffer while the cleric just keeps pumping out THP with no interruption.
Overall the numbers for Shepard and twilight are close to the same but the utility is far and away better on the twilight cleric.
I am wondering if one of the ways to balance as a DM is to send more undead and chew channel divinity a different way. CD is a limited resource and sending undead isn't that hard to add into encounters/dungeons. It would be slightly campaign altering, but if you get the twilight cleric having to ponder how and when its best to use their CD it might bring things better in line. At the very least I think it would be important to break up the monotony and alter play styles.
Yeah typically the way I would handle it is minions as they will do low amounts of damage to offset the addition but not a crazy amount if they choose NOT to use it.
Thats the real difficult part is structuring encounters that will challenge them if they use it but not completely destroy them if they don't....
As I had stated before it drops the offensive CR of the creature by at least 2 points....so dropping in a CR 10 creature on a party of level 7s will be about right if they use Twilight Sanctuary but could cause some deaths if they do not.
Vs.
You send out a bunch of zombies to tick away at health and provide incentive to use the alternative feature of the CD....Brilliant move @Elfdope
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying. If the cleric can just reflexively throw around tHP with impunity, and without thinking, then clearly you as a DM are not putting much creativity into the encounter. You can’t just get stuck incorrigibly in your perfect little combat encounter and refuse to change it because it’s yours and it’s perfect and so wonderful and you think it’s so great. You might have to compromise a little. Make the players think, and punish them a little for taking the easy way out. Present them with tough decisions, make them ration their abilities. Plus you could get them to trigger their Twilight Sanctuary, wait like literally a minute and throw them back into initiative, now with no channel divinity. Or incapacitate the cleric. Make sure to throw in spells and effects that could potentially incapacitate the cleric and the aura drops. You have every tool at your disposal, use em.
The counter to that is....not everyone is good at that sort of thing?
Maybe its a new DM...maybe its a DM that doesn't run combat a lot...maybe they don't have a lot of time to prep and rely on encounter builders?
Its also just so easy to use with no real cost to the cleric to use it...even in the undead example if you offset damage from the minons you are still having a substantial effect as now you have to minion manage which will slow down game time...it has an effect on the overall game regardless and its proportional impact compared to other CD is much much higher.
To say its never a problem is just not a good answer...it will be a problem for enough people that it should have likely got another pass in playtesting. I expect an errata in the future on this one to be honest....
I mean, maybe I’ve been playing devil’s advocate here, like I said, the class sounds super boring to me. I like buff abilities and all that, but I prefer the offensive capabilities of of the Tempest and Light domains. Nothing here speaks to me. I will try to make a powerful character, but if it isn’t fun, I just won’t play it. Not a minmaxer per se. I wouldn’t disallow a player to take this domain personally.
Man I appreciate your input but these exceedingly long replies are hard to digest....could you maybe condense into a few bullet points to make discussion a little easier?
This is not a white room scenario...its just always on all the time when you activate it and you do not have to waste your action, bonus action, reaction to use it.
30 ft is a huge amount of space and it can move with you so you do not need to spend any action, bonus action, or reaction to move it to where it needs to be...you just move and its available to them.
The shepard druid has to spend a BA to move their totem and if the party gets moved out of the space forcibly or the battlemap changes you are stuck with having to burn a BA to move the totem.
That also means you cannot cast a BA healing word to proc it....and since mass healing word doesn't come online until 3rd level spells do your low level druid is going to suffer while the cleric just keeps pumping out THP with no interruption.
Overall the numbers for Shepard and twilight are close to the same but the utility is far and away better on the twilight cleric.
The arguments against me are always from a position particularly suitable to the Twilight Cleric with them perfectly positioned to cover all of their perfectly positioned allies with the perfect situation of them all taking damage each turn so that they all get the Temp HP each turn. And if I made shorter less detailed remarks about them people would inevitably claim about not having details, or I'd get even more of these biased comparisons than your putting out now. And Yes. They are Biased.
This is White Room and it's in Favor of the Twilight Cleric. This same thing can be done for the Shepard Druid and it can produce numbers just as big if not bigger if it really wants to and there are all kinds of ways to call Shepard Superior if you really wanted to. And I'd point out how they aren't superior on the Shepard Druid either, just Different to other things. Shepard just happens to be one of the closest to the claims that almost everybody makes about Twilight Sanctuary to show it's not new or somehow greatly over powered in some way.
yes the Totem Can be Moved with a BA action. But this is not necessarily a burned action. There is not necessarily the need to Heal on every turn for every member just like there is not necessarily going to be Temp HP on ever party member on every turn. Sure the Twilight Clerics Ability moves with them. But that also means it moves when they are moved. if they are shoved around or can't get to a position. Their ability can't get to it either. Just A 4 elements monk (often mislabeled as the worst class and subclass in the game) could play havoc on a Twilight Cleric with Water whip if you insist on a clear cut example of how this is not the total boon your painting it as in your white room scenario. Because they'd be able to likely reliably relocate the Twilight Cleric up to 25' out of position for as long as they have the ki to use it. They could Unbroken air to shove the Twilight Cleric out of position away as an alternative if they go with that instead. Or an Open Palm could shove the Twilight Cleric around in all kinds of ways as long as they have ki for their Flurry of Blows. And that's ignoring that all Monks have Stunning Strike and a well built 4e Monk likely has a better save for it than the most popular way other monks are built. Having it move with you is not all good. It's not all bad. But it's not all good. If you think you can find all kinds of other ways to do similar things. There is just as much boon to having these kinds of abilities being free standing and require movement by another means.
That radius your hung up on? That everybody is calling so massive. Not that special either. The Totem matches it. Many spells fill at least most of it. High Level paladin's match it with Aura's. Paladin Aura's are in fact another way this is not new. They have abilities that can potentially be stacked that are just on. At the cost of not having as large of range until High Level. Oath will affect which ones they have but some of these are things like actual immunity to charm and halving all magic damage taken. A Paladin with the Ancients Oath even when only affecting magic damage is potentially blocking just as more damage as Twilight Cleric is doing. And it's not even costing them a Channel Divinity to do it but their radius is much smaller. On top of that considering it's paired with as much as a +5 on Saves. it's possible the Paladin is blocking even more damage. All for just existing close by and being conscious and being an ally.
And Druids don't get Mass Healing Word. But in an interesting twist. That's what even low level Shepard druids can basically throw out every time their totem proc's healing just at low level. Average healing for a level 1 healing word tends to be 5. When you get to the point of casting healing word on a level 5 cleric even if you've taken the ASI in Wisdom to increase it is only 6 spread out over a variable number of targets in a certain range. once You get up to level 8-10 however. The Druid is effectively casting cure wounds on everybody in the area of the totem, Whether they need it or not, for potentially the cost of just a single level 1 spell.
The Totem is going to heal for less at level 3 for example than healing word on each individual person but it's potentially doing a lot more healing depending on how many are within range. And it's movable, without moving the druid, but it costs you a bonus action. Druids don't have a lot of bonus actions anyway. And it's non-concentration so it can't simply be interrupted. But once you get to level 5. Your just 1hp short on most of your targets for that single level 1 spell to duplicating a level 3 spell for the cleric. And when you go up 1 more level to level 6. Your now going to be effectively doing the same as that level 3 spell on all targets, Plus a bit more from a level one spell.
But no. Your cleric is not necessarily going to just be pumping out Temp HP without Interruption. If the party moves. They are going to have to move and hope that somebody doesn't move outside of it on their turn before the effect kicks in. And hope that they don't get stunned or something else that inflicts a similar condition to incapacitate them. The Argument that they are going to be able to keep using this ability For it's full minute without some kind of threat to losing it is entirely white room. It's making a ton of base assumptions in favor of the Twilight Cleric that can just as easily be made in Favor of the Shepard with their own ability. Like it's easy to white room say that the Shepard is always going to be able to heal because the party is just going to assumedly stay within the range of their totem with it's benefits.
The utility is slightly better on the Twilight Cleric. But the healing... The healing gets way above the Twilight Cleric as the levels pile up and the various synergies come online. Not only that but the Healing is not the only effect of that Particular Totem. Your forgetting about the fact that There is advantage to noticing anything hidden or invisible in range of the totem. Which means that all within it are harder to sneak up on and more likely to be able to find and hit invisible targets. Something that Twilight Sanctuary is not doing. Twilight Sanctuary's trade off in this regard is the ability to cleanse charm or fear at the cost of not being able to apply temp hp for that turn.
If I had to Boil it down in Terms that you and I have talked about Before. Twilight Sanctuary on the Twilight Cleric is Essentially The Hold Person of this conversation. Your hoping for the benefit of multiple rounds out of it while there is a lot more chance that your not going to. On the Other hand The Totem is the STunning Strike of this conversation. it's guaranteed in what it does but it's probably going to cost me more to do much of the time. And no. Twilight Sanctuary is in no way guaranteed. There is a lot working against it. From all the ways to shut it off. To the way it can be pushed around To all kinds of other variables and potential weaknesses if we really want to objectively consider them.
All your arguing for. isn't something that's better. it's just something that's different. Not new... Just a remix so that it's different. It's got it's own pro's and con's. Literally for every way that you can make it sound better there are usually 3 or 4 ways to use as examples to use it against the twilight cleric or get around it, or show it's not special. I'm usually not naming most of them in this thread. Or even trying to. Just pointing out that they are there for people to come up with.
I am merely highlighting what I believe to be the logic gaps in your comparison. You are doing the same thing. When I point out the differences between twilight sanctuary and guardian spirit, and you dismiss that as if I'm saying "anything above level 10 is irrelevant" (which I didn't write, by the way), you're just ignoring the arguments I'm making. And yes, I think it's extremely relevant whether an ability is available at level 2 or level 10.The thread here is literally actually about whether TS is OP for tier 1 (levels 1 to 4) or not. Then you showed up here drawing wild comparisons to another class that does entirely different things (circumstancial buffing of healing spells, and later healing summoned pets of far weaker level then your other partymembers) at a significantly later point in the campaign. But to be fair: The thread has gotten a bit out of hand before.
I'm trying to get to the point. Let's stick with the level 3 example you brought up, just so we have some semblance of the same basis for discussion.
I can do that too. Your talking an average of 6Temp HP at level 3 with twilight sanctuary. CR 3 has plenty of multiattack monsters. many of them doing between 5-8 damage per hit. The single target monsters are usually doing more than that per hit.
Let's assume 6 tHP per round and a CR 3 monster that has 3 attacks, hits 60% of the time and does 6 damage. So per round, on average, 10.8 damage. In this context 6 tHP is damage reduction of almost 60% (sounds pretty stupid). So let's assume the party hits 5 of these monsters and consists of 4 characters. Then 13.5 damage per round hits each member. Hmmm, still a 45% damage reduction. Yeah well, then the monsters just have to concentrate their attacks. But this is now a problem, because 5 CR 3 monsters for a party of 4 level 3 characters exceeds the deadly limit several times.So I reduce to 2 CR 3 monsters and throw in 3 weak minions and let the CR 3 monsters attack concentrated and send the minions on the rest of the party. The minions do about 5 damage to each member of the party, except on the char I'm already attacking with the CR 3 monsters. Whereas, that depends on how the battle develops. So the player who gets the concentrated damage gets 16.6 (21.6 -6; 27.7% damage reduction) and the others 0 (5-6; 100% damage reduction). I think that's game-changing and really hasn't been in the game in that form before. You don't.
Even At level 5 when Fireball comes into play. Fireball is going to average 24 damage a hit per person that it hits. Twilight Sactuary at it's strongest Is going to protect a person for 11. This means that on any particular fireball, each member that gets hit by it in a best case Temp HP scenerio from Twilight Sanctuary is still going to take 13 damage if they fail the save to their Actual health. Even though the Average Temp HP at that level is 8.
With 8 tHP that is a damage Reduction of 33% and you say it, like it's nothing.... DnD isn't a game of really big numbers. That means that small numbers like 6 or 8 per Round matter a lot.
Now of course this is whitebox math, but it's also pretty real in the game. Because you can not prevent this effekt from happening all the time. In fact i believe that the effekt will take place in over 80% of the time. So in my opinion your statement is whiteboxing, that preventing player-effects is an easy task. I say it‘s not. Especially if you try to do it without frustrating the player. He wants ts to be online and enjoy his character and not get targeted for using his abilities. There are other broken abilities in the game, so it's not entirely new, but TS is nothing to be sneezed at. I never said there weren't other things in the game that annoy me balance-wise. But that's not what this thread is about. It's explicitly about the Twilight Domain in Tier 1.
Suggested solutions so far: Focus the cleric to prevent the effect. Run away and lure the enemies back into the fight after a minute. Try to use up Channel divinity differently increase the damage while TS is active, if necessary with minions Be a better dungeon master and bring more creative ideas to the table to prevent the ability from being used effectively
Do you notice anything?
EDIT: Reminder: TS doesn‘t need concentration. Some of your post seem like you‘re thinking that it does. The only way to prevent ts is by incapacitating or killing the cleric. Just like the totem of the shepherd druid.
I am merely highlighting what I believe to be the logic gaps in your comparison. You are doing the same thing. When I point out the differences between twilight sanctuary and guardian spirit, and you dismiss that as if I'm saying "anything above level 10 is irrelevant" (which I didn't write, by the way), you're just ignoring the arguments I'm making. And yes, I think it's extremely relevant whether an ability is available at level 2 or level 10.The thread here is literally actually about whether TS is OP for tier 1 (levels 1 to 4) or not. Then you showed up here drawing wild comparisons to another class that does entirely different things (circumstancial buffing of healing spells, and later healing summoned pets of far weaker level then your other partymembers) at a significantly later point in the campaign. But to be fair: The thread has gotten a bit out of hand before.
I'm trying to get to the point. Let's stick with the level 3 example you brought up, just so we have some semblance of the same basis for discussion.
I can do that too. Your talking an average of 6Temp HP at level 3 with twilight sanctuary. CR 3 has plenty of multiattack monsters. many of them doing between 5-8 damage per hit. The single target monsters are usually doing more than that per hit.
Let's assume 6 tHP per round and a CR 3 monster that has 3 attacks, hits 60% of the time and does 6 damage. So per round, on average, 10.8 damage. In this context 6 tHP is damage reduction of almost 60% (sounds pretty stupid). So let's assume the party hits 5 of these monsters and consists of 4 characters. Then 13.5 damage per round hits each member. Hmmm, still a 45% damage reduction. Yeah well, then the monsters just have to concentrate their attacks. But this is now a problem, because 5 CR 3 monsters for a party of 4 level 3 characters exceeds the deadly limit several times.So I reduce to 2 CR 3 monsters and throw in 3 weak minions and let the CR 3 monsters attack concentrated and send the minions on the rest of the party. The minions do about 5 damage to each member of the party, except on the char I'm already attacking with the CR 3 monsters. Whereas, that depends on how the battle develops. So the player who gets the concentrated damage gets 16.6 (21.6 -6; 27.7% damage reduction) and the others 0 (5-6; 100% damage reduction). I think that's game-changing and really hasn't been in the game in that form before. You don't.
Even At level 5 when Fireball comes into play. Fireball is going to average 24 damage a hit per person that it hits. Twilight Sactuary at it's strongest Is going to protect a person for 11. This means that on any particular fireball, each member that gets hit by it in a best case Temp HP scenerio from Twilight Sanctuary is still going to take 13 damage if they fail the save to their Actual health. Even though the Average Temp HP at that level is 8.
With 8 tHP that is a damage Reduction of 33% and you say it, like it's nothing.... DnD isn't a game of really big numbers. That means that small numbers like 6 or 8 per Round matter a lot.
Now of course this is whitebox math, but it's also pretty real in the game. Because you can not prevent this effekt from happening all the time. In fact i believe that the effekt will take place in over 80% of the time. So in my opinion your statement is whiteboxing, that preventing player-effects is an easy task. I say it‘s not. Especially if you try to do it without frustrating the player. He wants ts to be online and enjoy his character and not get targeted for using his abilities. There are other broken abilities in the game, so it's not entirely new, but TS is nothing to be sneezed at. I never said there weren't other things in the game that annoy me balance-wise. But that's not what this thread is about. It's explicitly about the Twilight Domain in Tier 1.
Suggested solutions so far: Focus the cleric to prevent the effect. Run away and lure the enemies back into the fight after a minute. Try to use up Channel divinity differently increase the damage while TS is active, if necessary with minions Be a better dungeon master and bring more creative ideas to the table to prevent the ability from being used effectively
Do you notice anything?
EDIT: Reminder: TS doesn‘t need concentration. Some of your post seem like you‘re thinking that it does. The only way to prevent ts is by incapacitating or killing the cleric. Just like the totem of the shepherd druid.
Some of my post does not seem to think that it does. i in no way said that it is concentration. That's an assumption of my words that you made. Incapacitation is not that rare. All kinds of things that temporarily disable a character for a turn tend to inflict disabled. Paralyzation, Some Poisons, STuns, Unconcious, Petrification, straight up Incapacitated. They all shut down Twilight Sanctuary. Roughly 1/3 of the conditions in the game actually incapacitate targets. You act like this is a hard thing to inflict. It's actually not that hard.
You also act like Shoving the Cleric around is a hard thing to inflict. It's not. And many of them do so for 10' to 20' of space. There are creatures that even do some of these things just because an attack hits.
Also. The numbers are lower yes, So they are more significant yes, But that's not new in any way. your pointing this out to make Twilight Sanctuary seem more powerful but it applies to everything that came before it as well. That 1/3rd of a single attack is not special. It's normal.
Your Claims about deadliness of an encounter. Sure. It's deadly to An Actual group made to fit the intended power curve. it's not necessarily so deadly to the Min-maxed Groups that many people play with based upon absurd standards about how characters at like 5th level should be able to wipe out 1 or more CR 9 creatures or it's weak that is pushed in some circles of the D&D realm.
Also. your Numbers about how well the creature can hit. We can turn that around on the party. We can give the enemies some kind of healer to counteract damage to them just as easily and thus make A CR three and a few minions much tougher automatically. you work on the premise that only the party has these things and not the enemy in your white room argument in favor of Twilight Sanctuary.
Then there is the fact that 60% on 3 hits is pretty much likely that 2 of the 3 will hit every round. Missing one extra hit every 3 to 4 rounds. This means that the DPR is higher than 10.6 It's closer to 11.6 So you Block 6 Damage. it's still hit you for basically double that. When your hitpoints are only in the range of 4 to 5 times what a single hit can do. And this is health damage that Twilight Sanctuary can't replace. unless your absolutely going to employ a healer and/or have most of your party targetting just that one creature. Your looking at the likelyhood of at least one party member going down if your only applying base damage factors on the part of both sides based upon their attacks. Because that CR 3 creature likely has 2 to 3 times the Health that the party has.
Your own Weapons. If your playing at proper power level are only doing on average 7-9 damage a hit on base(depending on a few factors). Barely over that of the monster your fighting and your hit rate is not that much better. Missing at least 1 attack out of every 4 at best but your actually likely to be closer to the same 2 hits out of 3 attacks that the enemy is using with the same extra miss somewhere in the space of every 10 rounds. As a CR3 monster tends to have a similar +6 to +7 attack modifier as the party does. This means to take the monster down. Without any extra protections at proper power level, Even if your protected by Twilight Sanctuary. your looking at seeing who can do 10 hits a piece first as to say who goes down. But any turn that for some reason Twilight Sanctuary is missed. That is actually the equivalent of one extra attack in the monsters favor in your War of Attrition of just who's hitpoints matter first. This is why a CR 3 is a challenge to 4 appropriately powered adventurers but not an OP group. The CR 3 is going to do enough damage to kill a one on one target at a higher rate than that target can kill the CR 3 monster so it's going to take the effort of 2 or more PC's doing damage and/or the use of Damaging abilities to increase damage to balance that out and potentially turn it into the parties favor. Because that's something that you have to take into account. At Character level 3 Against a CR 3. it's doing damage at pretty much double the rate of any one party member that you have going at appropriate power level. it will kill at least one member of your party without a concentrated effort from the party and/or other mitigating factors. And those other mitigating factors just make the fight a bit easier on the party. They do not guarantee a win of any kind. Not even with Twilight Sanctuary. Even with Twilight Sanctuary your party has to have at least 2 of your party members get in their average of 10 hits in 5 turns before the CR 3 monster does the same thing. That fireball that you blocked 1/3rd of the Damage for. The Reality is that For each member of your party that fireball hit that's still effectively 1 to 2 extra hits that CR 3 monster has dealt to your party that pushes them closer to death depending on whether they make the save or not.
That 80% uptime that you presume to have. Purely because that's what you imagine the likelyhood to be means that The 1 turn it doesn't provide Temp Hp to apply their damage reduction For some reason or if the monster rolls a high enough to Initiative to attack first then the 1 on 1 fight is in the monsters favor. that CR3 creature if it's only doing 12 damage a turn and your blocking 6 of it. Just means that your party is going to last just 2 to 3 turns longer without losing a member against it without other intervening factors. That may seem like a lot to some people, And mind you it is not an insignificant amount. But there are other things that can have this same exact effect. And Many of them Stack Together. And Several of them don't cost any more resources. Tanks often rely on some of these factors innately as a matter of the nature of the game and rely on party members supplying others in various ways.
And For that matter. There's another truth that most people overlook. There is in some ways actually more challenge at playing extremely low level characters than playing high level characters. The Dangers and the Balance is actually a lot tighter and little changes are actually a lot more extreme than at high levels. And it just happens to be at the levels people tend to ignore or skip most at 1-3 because they have deemed them boring for various reasons. Twilight Sanctuary kicks in at level 2 and we're talking about CR 3. But not only is a CR 5 or a CR10 monster not quite the threat But the boost in capability of characters at those kinds of levels also means that the average threat is not quite as deadly and changing a combat by just one or two monsters not as likely to change an encounter from a minor challenge into a deadly one (with certain exceptions). At level 1 even just one or two more CR 1/4 or 1/2 monsters can potentially turn an ok encounter into a TPK. specially against something that isn't min-maxed purely for combat. Twilight Sanctuary shines at this level and I picked CR3 to show it at it's best to show that it's not some kind over overwhelming thing. Twilight Sanctuary at level 10 is not nearly so impressive. Because this is a point where legendary actions tend to show up more and more. So the Temp HP of Twilight Sanctuary can end up being stripped away without it even being the enemies turn so that their actual turns are fully effective, all kinds of various conditions and effects from enemies are almost common place that can end up taking effect, and the general increase in number of low level threats that die easily but potentially do a lot of damage rather quickly as well because of their numbers. Half of the Threat of the Crystal Golem for example is not just because of the damage. Which it's rather decently set up to be dealing 40 a turn. But also the fact that it's resistant to magic and it has a rather good chance of blinding melee characters and/or forcing them to take disadvantage on all attacks. And it can slow anything in melee range on top of that potentially severely dropping DPS against it. The 13average Temp Hp Looks Nice on the surface but when your talking about a creature that can knock 1/3 to 1/2 of a characters hp out of it in a single turn and make it hard to retaliate. it can either feel like it's just saved you or it can just as easily feel like it might be slowing down the inevitable even though you can say the same kind of thing "Well 1/4 of the damage is not an insignificant amount." It's not an insignificant amount but it's against a Monster that expects various things to be done to do things like take off 1/4 or 1/2 of the damage it does or for characters to mitigate or reverse that damage in some way. It's literally part of the balance of the Game and Twilight Sanctuary just matches that balance. From Low Level Where it's potentially blocking full hits to High level where creatures can practically sneeze for that kind of damage and balance is all but out the window. Twilight Sanctuary is accounted for in the balance and structure of the game. It's strong where 1 hit can make all the difference in the world but 1 hit is also potentially really easy to find. it's weak at the point where things go off the rails and the point it co-ordination and synergy of abilities and tactics and many things are weak, While being balanced right in the middle where it needs to be balanced.
I am merely highlighting what I believe to be the logic gaps in your comparison. You are doing the same thing. When I point out the differences between twilight sanctuary and guardian spirit, and you dismiss that as if I'm saying "anything above level 10 is irrelevant" (which I didn't write, by the way), you're just ignoring the arguments I'm making. And yes, I think it's extremely relevant whether an ability is available at level 2 or level 10.The thread here is literally actually about whether TS is OP for tier 1 (levels 1 to 4) or not. Then you showed up here drawing wild comparisons to another class that does entirely different things (circumstancial buffing of healing spells, and later healing summoned pets of far weaker level then your other partymembers) at a significantly later point in the campaign. But to be fair: The thread has gotten a bit out of hand before.
I'm trying to get to the point. Let's stick with the level 3 example you brought up, just so we have some semblance of the same basis for discussion.
I can do that too. Your talking an average of 6Temp HP at level 3 with twilight sanctuary. CR 3 has plenty of multiattack monsters. many of them doing between 5-8 damage per hit. The single target monsters are usually doing more than that per hit.
Let's assume 6 tHP per round and a CR 3 monster that has 3 attacks, hits 60% of the time and does 6 damage. So per round, on average, 10.8 damage. In this context 6 tHP is damage reduction of almost 60% (sounds pretty stupid). So let's assume the party hits 5 of these monsters and consists of 4 characters. Then 13.5 damage per round hits each member. Hmmm, still a 45% damage reduction. Yeah well, then the monsters just have to concentrate their attacks. But this is now a problem, because 5 CR 3 monsters for a party of 4 level 3 characters exceeds the deadly limit several times.So I reduce to 2 CR 3 monsters and throw in 3 weak minions and let the CR 3 monsters attack concentrated and send the minions on the rest of the party. The minions do about 5 damage to each member of the party, except on the char I'm already attacking with the CR 3 monsters. Whereas, that depends on how the battle develops. So the player who gets the concentrated damage gets 16.6 (21.6 -6; 27.7% damage reduction) and the others 0 (5-6; 100% damage reduction). I think that's game-changing and really hasn't been in the game in that form before. You don't.
Even At level 5 when Fireball comes into play. Fireball is going to average 24 damage a hit per person that it hits. Twilight Sactuary at it's strongest Is going to protect a person for 11. This means that on any particular fireball, each member that gets hit by it in a best case Temp HP scenerio from Twilight Sanctuary is still going to take 13 damage if they fail the save to their Actual health. Even though the Average Temp HP at that level is 8.
With 8 tHP that is a damage Reduction of 33% and you say it, like it's nothing.... DnD isn't a game of really big numbers. That means that small numbers like 6 or 8 per Round matter a lot.
Now of course this is whitebox math, but it's also pretty real in the game. Because you can not prevent this effekt from happening all the time. In fact i believe that the effekt will take place in over 80% of the time. So in my opinion your statement is whiteboxing, that preventing player-effects is an easy task. I say it‘s not. Especially if you try to do it without frustrating the player. He wants ts to be online and enjoy his character and not get targeted for using his abilities. There are other broken abilities in the game, so it's not entirely new, but TS is nothing to be sneezed at. I never said there weren't other things in the game that annoy me balance-wise. But that's not what this thread is about. It's explicitly about the Twilight Domain in Tier 1.
Suggested solutions so far: Focus the cleric to prevent the effect. Run away and lure the enemies back into the fight after a minute. Try to use up Channel divinity differently increase the damage while TS is active, if necessary with minions Be a better dungeon master and bring more creative ideas to the table to prevent the ability from being used effectively
Do you notice anything?
EDIT: Reminder: TS doesn‘t need concentration. Some of your post seem like you‘re thinking that it does. The only way to prevent ts is by incapacitating or killing the cleric. Just like the totem of the shepherd druid.
Some of my post does not seem to think that it does. i in no way said that it is concentration. That's an assumption of my words that you made. Incapacitation is not that rare. All kinds of things that temporarily disable a character for a turn tend to inflict disabled. Paralyzation, Some Poisons, STuns, Unconcious, Petrification, straight up Incapacitated. They all shut down Twilight Sanctuary. Roughly 1/3 of the conditions in the game actually incapacitate targets. You act like this is a hard thing to inflict. It's actually not that hard.
You also act like Shoving the Cleric around is a hard thing to inflict. It's not. And many of them do so for 10' to 20' of space. There are creatures that even do some of these things just because an attack hits.
Also. The numbers are lower yes, So they are more significant yes, But that's not new in any way. your pointing this out to make Twilight Sanctuary seem more powerful but it applies to everything that came before it as well. That 1/3rd of a single attack is not special. It's normal.
Your Claims about deadliness of an encounter. Sure. It's deadly to An Actual group made to fit the intended power curve. it's not necessarily so deadly to the Min-maxed Groups that many people play with based upon absurd standards about how characters at like 5th level should be able to wipe out 1 or more CR 9 creatures or it's weak that is pushed in some circles of the D&D realm.
Also. your Numbers about how well the creature can hit. We can turn that around on the party. We can give the enemies some kind of healer to counteract damage to them just as easily and thus make A CR three and a few minions much tougher automatically. you work on the premise that only the party has these things and not the enemy in your white room argument in favor of Twilight Sanctuary.
Then there is the fact that 60% on 3 hits is pretty much likely that 2 of the 3 will hit every round. Missing one extra hit every 3 to 4 rounds. This means that the DPR is higher than 10.6 It's closer to 11.6 So you Block 6 Damage. it's still hit you for basically double that. When your hitpoints are only in the range of 4 to 5 times what a single hit can do. And this is health damage that Twilight Sanctuary can't replace. unless your absolutely going to employ a healer and/or have most of your party targetting just that one creature. Your looking at the likelyhood of at least one party member going down if your only applying base damage factors on the part of both sides based upon their attacks. Because that CR 3 creature likely has 2 to 3 times the Health that the party has.
Your own Weapons. If your playing at proper power level are only doing on average 7-9 damage a hit on base(depending on a few factors). Barely over that of the monster your fighting and your hit rate is not that much better. Missing at least 1 attack out of every 4 at best but your actually likely to be closer to the same 2 hits out of 3 attacks that the enemy is using with the same extra miss somewhere in the space of every 10 rounds. As a CR3 monster tends to have a similar +6 to +7 attack modifier as the party does. This means to take the monster down. Without any extra protections at proper power level, Even if your protected by Twilight Sanctuary. your looking at seeing who can do 10 hits a piece first as to say who goes down. But any turn that for some reason Twilight Sanctuary is missed. That is actually the equivalent of one extra attack in the monsters favor in your War of Attrition of just who's hitpoints matter first. This is why a CR 3 is a challenge to 4 appropriately powered adventurers but not an OP group. The CR 3 is going to do enough damage to kill a one on one target at a higher rate than that target can kill the CR 3 monster so it's going to take the effort of 2 or more PC's doing damage and/or the use of Damaging abilities to increase damage to balance that out and potentially turn it into the parties favor. Because that's something that you have to take into account. At Character level 3 Against a CR 3. it's doing damage at pretty much double the rate of any one party member that you have going at appropriate power level. it will kill at least one member of your party without a concentrated effort from the party and/or other mitigating factors. And those other mitigating factors just make the fight a bit easier on the party. They do not guarantee a win of any kind. Not even with Twilight Sanctuary. Even with Twilight Sanctuary your party has to have at least 2 of your party members get in their average of 10 hits in 5 turns before the CR 3 monster does the same thing. That fireball that you blocked 1/3rd of the Damage for. The Reality is that For each member of your party that fireball hit that's still effectively 1 to 2 extra hits that CR 3 monster has dealt to your party that pushes them closer to death depending on whether they make the save or not.
That 80% uptime that you presume to have. Purely because that's what you imagine the likelyhood to be means that The 1 turn it doesn't provide Temp Hp to apply their damage reduction For some reason or if the monster rolls a high enough to Initiative to attack first then the 1 on 1 fight is in the monsters favor. that CR3 creature if it's only doing 12 damage a turn and your blocking 6 of it. Just means that your party is going to last just 2 to 3 turns longer without losing a member against it without other intervening factors. That may seem like a lot to some people, And mind you it is not an insignificant amount. But there are other things that can have this same exact effect. And Many of them Stack Together. And Several of them don't cost any more resources. Tanks often rely on some of these factors innately as a matter of the nature of the game and rely on party members supplying others in various ways.
And For that matter. There's another truth that most people overlook. There is in some ways actually more challenge at playing extremely low level characters than playing high level characters. The Dangers and the Balance is actually a lot tighter and little changes are actually a lot more extreme than at high levels. And it just happens to be at the levels people tend to ignore or skip most at 1-3 because they have deemed them boring for various reasons. Twilight Sanctuary kicks in at level 2 and we're talking about CR 3. But not only is a CR 5 or a CR10 monster not quite the threat But the boost in capability of characters at those kinds of levels also means that the average threat is not quite as deadly and changing a combat by just one or two monsters not as likely to change an encounter from a minor challenge into a deadly one (with certain exceptions). At level 1 even just one or two more CR 1/4 or 1/2 monsters can potentially turn an ok encounter into a TPK. specially against something that isn't min-maxed purely for combat. Twilight Sanctuary shines at this level and I picked CR3 to show it at it's best to show that it's not some kind over overwhelming thing. Twilight Sanctuary at level 10 is not nearly so impressive. Because this is a point where legendary actions tend to show up more and more. So the Temp HP of Twilight Sanctuary can end up being stripped away without it even being the enemies turn so that their actual turns are fully effective, all kinds of various conditions and effects from enemies are almost common place that can end up taking effect, and the general increase in number of low level threats that die easily but potentially do a lot of damage rather quickly as well because of their numbers. Half of the Threat of the Crystal Golem for example is not just because of the damage. Which it's rather decently set up to be dealing 40 a turn. But also the fact that it's resistant to magic and it has a rather good chance of blinding melee characters and/or forcing them to take disadvantage on all attacks. And it can slow anything in melee range on top of that potentially severely dropping DPS against it. The 13average Temp Hp Looks Nice on the surface but when your talking about a creature that can knock 1/3 to 1/2 of a characters hp out of it in a single turn and make it hard to retaliate. it can either feel like it's just saved you or it can just as easily feel like it might be slowing down the inevitable even though you can say the same kind of thing "Well 1/4 of the damage is not an insignificant amount." It's not an insignificant amount but it's against a Monster that expects various things to be done to do things like take off 1/4 or 1/2 of the damage it does or for characters to mitigate or reverse that damage in some way. It's literally part of the balance of the Game and Twilight Sanctuary just matches that balance. From Low Level Where it's potentially blocking full hits to High level where creatures can practically sneeze for that kind of damage and balance is all but out the window. Twilight Sanctuary is accounted for in the balance and structure of the game. It's strong where 1 hit can make all the difference in the world but 1 hit is also potentially really easy to find. it's weak at the point where things go off the rails and the point it co-ordination and synergy of abilities and tactics and many things are weak, While being balanced right in the middle where it needs to be balanced.
I have never seen so much text to talk about how a free 13 points of THP per turn is somehow a bad thing.
Edit: Look, at this point i don't know how to answer your Post without repeating huge chunks of things, that i have said. Your arguments and examples become a little wild right now. We will not come to an agreement here.
Lost so much time reading this old thread because I'm preparing an adventure and there's a Twilight Cleric.
The point that is most important to be made is that I the DM red this long thread because the TC is OP. I have to spend more time preparing to conteract this one likely never really tested feature so that I the DM can also have fun.
So here's my solution all of my monsters will be level 2 twighlight clerics or at least 3 of them will have 2 levels of TD. :)
That will cause antagonism and I would expect it not to be a fun game. You can put the party against a group of enemies including a twilight cleric once or twice in a campaign but every battle will get boring VERY quickly.
The best solution is to talk to the player who wants to play a TC and explain the situation to them. The rest of the party might feel under powered. You want to create combat that is challenging but to do that you would have to use monsters that are intended for far higher levels of play and can result in things going badly if things go wrong (for example a critical hit on the first turn before the cleric has put TS up could result in character death), and telling them they wil have to play another character or (possibly) agree to some nerfs). The alternative of not raising the difficult of the combats so they just walk though everything will get boring very quickly
An alternative is to have multiple combats with no chance of a rest between them, the combats with TS up might be a cakewalk but the ones where they don't will be a challenge.
I think they only really messed up with cleric.I must admit I don't really follow cannon of the settings, most of my games are in homebrew worlds what I look for in a subclass is balance and being fun to play.
Eloquence Bard and the two sorcerer subclasses are powerful probably the most powerful bard and sorcerer subclasses in the game but not to the extent of being a problem, more powerful creatures in other classes could be made before Tasha's Genie warlock is powerful but not as powerful as hexblade and while mercy might be the most powerful monk subclass that should probably described as the least anemic, at least 75% of subclasses are more powerful than mercy monk.
I love playing my stars druid and I nearly picked wild fire both are well balanced and fun to play, I have seen quite a lot of soul knives and bladesingers and they too are balanced and fun. They absolutely nailed ranger while fey wanderer and swarmkeeper are not particularly attractive to me they are well balanced and the changes to beastmaster make me want to play one when I get a chance.
They could have tweaked the eloquence bard, and clockwork and aberant mind sorcers down a tad and nooone would have complained but the astral self monk and wild magic barbarian are on the weak side. Only Twilight and Peace clerics are the real problem.
I personally never see the need for giving monsters these sorts of abilities, unless I see flagrant abuse (an entire party MC into level 2 Twilight clerics for instance) Really this is to help the cleric be less of a heal bot and actually be able to make meaningful use of their spells and features to be more player friendly. That being said the THP can feel overwhelming through the first 4 levels since most things don't hit super hard. But I am a GM that tends to like to speed through to level 5 anyway, since by then classes start cpoming into their own. After the hill giant and othercr 6-8 monsters come in to play the Twilight domain channel loses it's OP status and just becomes a good ability allowing a character to basically nerf a single incomoing attack. Do also remember that characters are supposed to be out numbered in encounters, not the players out number the monsters, like it was in older editions, so each PC should be facing about 1.5-2 attacks on the average. a party of 4 should be fighting 6-8 monsters not 4 or less. so with that taken into account, Twilight functions more as damage spike protection when all 6 goblins actually hit your fighter with 12 HP that might lay him on his face with out it, he is still standing thanks to 4-10 temps a round with out everyone needing to spring into damage control stance.
Any argument that twilight sanctuary isn't overpowered has aged very poorly. It's so good that I've gotten to the point of not wanting to play with twilight clerics on one of the westmarches I'm on because they run it raw and it makes combat crazy boring. It's just so hard for the dm to put the party in any real danger when the twilight Cleric is doing their thing.
The other westmarch I am a part of did nerf it and I like what they did with it quite a lot. Instead of working at the end of everyone's turn, it only works at the end of the cleric's turn but they get to pick any ally within the aura for that trigger. It ends up being better to "precast" it so that you have a free action turn 1 and everyone rolls in with thp.
I mean if you want to threaten the party twilight sanctuary can be made a non issue easily enough hordes are a good way to handle it as are just using bigger baddies like swapping goblins for orcs at early play. It all depends on what you want personally I hate spending a lot of time in teir 1 and have no problem ratcheting encounters up to meet the pcs capabilities. That said I never really start encounter design until I know what people are going to be playing usually at minimum class and sub class, and I tailor the encounters to what should challenge them. I have had level 2-3 parties who can handle a pack of ogres and ettins (veng paladin, enchanter, life cleric though twilight would be just as good, and soul knife) when they are going full out I've also seen parties that struggle with kobolds and goblins until they are out of teir 1. It just depends, remember as the DM you aren't supposed to be adversarial to your pcs you are supposed to be running a game all can enjoy. So I would challenge you to try tailoring the encounters to the party as opposed to just looking at the CR and going yep seems to fit.
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I am wondering if one of the ways to balance as a DM is to send more undead and chew channel divinity a different way. CD is a limited resource and sending undead isn't that hard to add into encounters/dungeons. It would be slightly campaign altering, but if you get the twilight cleric having to ponder how and when its best to use their CD it might bring things better in line. At the very least I think it would be important to break up the monotony and alter play styles.
Yeah typically the way I would handle it is minions as they will do low amounts of damage to offset the addition but not a crazy amount if they choose NOT to use it.
Thats the real difficult part is structuring encounters that will challenge them if they use it but not completely destroy them if they don't....
As I had stated before it drops the offensive CR of the creature by at least 2 points....so dropping in a CR 10 creature on a party of level 7s will be about right if they use Twilight Sanctuary but could cause some deaths if they do not.
Vs.
You send out a bunch of zombies to tick away at health and provide incentive to use the alternative feature of the CD....Brilliant move @Elfdope
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying. If the cleric can just reflexively throw around tHP with impunity, and without thinking, then clearly you as a DM are not putting much creativity into the encounter. You can’t just get stuck incorrigibly in your perfect little combat encounter and refuse to change it because it’s yours and it’s perfect and so wonderful and you think it’s so great. You might have to compromise a little. Make the players think, and punish them a little for taking the easy way out. Present them with tough decisions, make them ration their abilities. Plus you could get them to trigger their Twilight Sanctuary, wait like literally a minute and throw them back into initiative, now with no channel divinity. Or incapacitate the cleric. Make sure to throw in spells and effects that could potentially incapacitate the cleric and the aura drops. You have every tool at your disposal, use em.
The counter to that is....not everyone is good at that sort of thing?
Maybe its a new DM...maybe its a DM that doesn't run combat a lot...maybe they don't have a lot of time to prep and rely on encounter builders?
Its also just so easy to use with no real cost to the cleric to use it...even in the undead example if you offset damage from the minons you are still having a substantial effect as now you have to minion manage which will slow down game time...it has an effect on the overall game regardless and its proportional impact compared to other CD is much much higher.
To say its never a problem is just not a good answer...it will be a problem for enough people that it should have likely got another pass in playtesting. I expect an errata in the future on this one to be honest....
I don't think this works as THP doesnt stack. While he had AoA active he could not get the THP from the Divinity.
Then you replace it with the Twilight THP and lose the benefits of the AoA.
"A protective magical force surrounds you, manifesting as a spectral frost that covers you and your gear. You gain 5 temporary hit points for the duration. If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage."
To me this would indicate if you replace them then you forgo the benefits of AoA.
Then don't take them?
"you can grant that creature one of these benefits:"
You do not have to....
I'm not forgetting about the action economy. Your overplaying the action economy.
That Druid. He can afford to cast those Healing Spells if he's already got summons on the field unless you take out the summons. And if you do he can call out more and repeat the process. Letting his beasts chew through you... and even the temp HP of twilight Sanctuary is actually very easy.
The Twilight Cleric is also forced into a particular position. The Druid is not. The Druid can sit safely back out of the way where he is hard to target. People complain "oh that just makes the druid more targettable and more susceptable to concerted efforts." The Twilight Sanctuary and the Twilight Cleric fall to the Same Exact Thing. And have to be much closer to danger to make theirs function.
There are lots of ways to deal with it. There have been lots of ways to deal with it for a long time. This isn't some kind of new situation and everybody keeps acting like it didn't exist before Tasha's when it did. It's something that has basically always existed in some form and each iteration has always had it's own strengths and it's own weaknesses. These Scenerio's are nothing new to people who haven't only been using Healing as a last resort when somebody falls all this time.
The Cost of More Resources for the Shepard Druid is the Balance to the fact that they don't have to be in danger when they do it. having it affect only Fey and Beasts is not the downside people try to paint it as. Because Druids summon mostly fey and Beasts. I've played a level 10+ Shepard Druid with these kinds of abilities already in place. Part of what makes them effective is that there are all kinds of ways to disconnect the Druid from a lot of them if you wish to.
You really want to talk about low level characters with this build by complaining that the 10+ is mostly irrelevant.
I can do that too. Your talking an average of 6Temp HP at level 3 with twilight sanctuary. CR 3 has plenty of multiattack monsters. many of them doing between 5-8 damage per hit. The single target monsters are usually doing more than that per hit.
Your Temp HP is protecting from maybe a single blow. Even if you roll maximum and get 9hp. Your protecting from maybe a blow and a half.
Even if your generous and you say the average hp of a character is based off a d10 (though I'm fairly certain it's in the d8 range) At level 3 your looking at a total of 20 hp before con and 23-29 so your looking at an average of just 26 hp. just about Every level 3 character is just praying they don't get too often and that their AC is Protecting them because they die in about 4-5 hits on average without healing. Two Enemies piling up on any average non-tank character can potentially kill it in a single round, Though it's likely to take 2 rounds. So even if you factor in 6temphp. You've extended that one characters life by only a single round. You've given it just enough that it won't die in one round. And it's going to take two of them 3 rounds but they will basically kill the character in those three rounds still because you've only extended their life by at most 3 attacks total.
And I can hear the counter argument. "Well I can just heal them in that second round and that's not a problem." Guess what? it was the exact same scenario and solution without Twilight Sanctuary to keep them alive. it didn't change with Twilight Sanctuary at all. Twilight Sanctuary didn't accomplish anything dramatic. Turn Order would actually dictate more about the danger of it than Twilight Sanctuary would. if the two of them split up there was always likely to take them more turns to kill your party than it would take to kill them if you just heal them. You'd still have a chance to do your attack spells as well. You might finish the fight a couple rounds quicker but that's it.
Even when you scale up twilight sanctuary. Which it does ridiculously slowly. So slowly that it's never really blocking more than one hit at any given appropriate level cr/challenge (and actually comes closer to being more at the lowest levels). Even At level 5 when Fireball comes into play. Fireball is going to average 24 damage a hit per person that it hits. Twilight Sactuary at it's strongest Is going to protect a person for 11. This means that on any particular fireball, each member that gets hit by it in a best case Temp HP scenerio from Twilight Sanctuary is still going to take 13 damage if they fail the save to their Actual health. Even though the Average Temp HP at that level is 8, Either of Which Twilight Sanctuary can't replace.
Temp Hp is not some magical mystical god power. It's limited. And it's not like Aid at all. The truth of the Matter when it comes to temp Hp is that it's just a 1 time use Damage reduction pool that you have to use on any and all incoming damage without picking and choosing what to apply it to. Even if you keep reapplying it ever turn. All your doing is reducing the damage by a bit. And your hoping it's going to be enough to cover at least one blow fully. That's it. it doesn't refill, it doesn't stack, it doesn't even allow you to mix sources, it can't be applied in any way to anybody that is unconscious and dying, and there is nothing I can think of at all that modifies it.
You all are billing it and pushing it as this great ability. and it's like a massive Aid buff to your party, You complain I'm attacking you and not your arguments when I point out your hyping it up to much and your not recognizing this issue isn't new and already existed and call out your ignoring it. But that's the actual problem. The mechanics aren't the issue here, it's the bad faith arguments to push one side of the argument that certain people are supporting. The white room math can be argued all day. I can and have pointed out how it's wrong and your answers have basically been "No. It's this this and this and it's totally new and it's totally more and totally OP" that is just a repeat of what you already said that I pointed out isn't necessarily what it appears already.
It's not better than the Shepard Druid for costing less. Or being gotten at a lower level. It's just a different way of doing the same thing with it's own pro's and cons versus somebody else. Being Lower Level and Costing Less are just some of the Pro's to Twilight Sanctuary. Being far more interruptible and centered on the cleric forcing the cleric into certain positions or team-mates into certain positions to try and make optimal use of it are it's Con's. But In the End, It's all just in a matter of which pro's and con's are acceptable to a particular player, How the DM decides to challenge them, and the party that your playing with. Your Party may be willing to work to help mitigate those con's, They may not. That's between you and your party. But the Reality is that in Actual Play. Most of the things that people are pushing as so OP in this thread are not going to work out that way. They are not going to usually be playing the perfect white room scenario's crafted to highlight these specific points in these ways, just like Healing Spirit did not usually perform in play to the OP'ness people white roomed it into supposedly being.
Man I appreciate your input but these exceedingly long replies are hard to digest....could you maybe condense into a few bullet points to make discussion a little easier?
This is not a white room scenario...its just always on all the time when you activate it and you do not have to waste your action, bonus action, reaction to use it.
30 ft is a huge amount of space and it can move with you so you do not need to spend any action, bonus action, or reaction to move it to where it needs to be...you just move and its available to them.
The shepard druid has to spend a BA to move their totem and if the party gets moved out of the space forcibly or the battlemap changes you are stuck with having to burn a BA to move the totem.
That also means you cannot cast a BA healing word to proc it....and since mass healing word doesn't come online until 3rd level spells do your low level druid is going to suffer while the cleric just keeps pumping out THP with no interruption.
Overall the numbers for Shepard and twilight are close to the same but the utility is far and away better on the twilight cleric.
I mean, maybe I’ve been playing devil’s advocate here, like I said, the class sounds super boring to me. I like buff abilities and all that, but I prefer the offensive capabilities of of the Tempest and Light domains. Nothing here speaks to me. I will try to make a powerful character, but if it isn’t fun, I just won’t play it. Not a minmaxer per se. I wouldn’t disallow a player to take this domain personally.
The arguments against me are always from a position particularly suitable to the Twilight Cleric with them perfectly positioned to cover all of their perfectly positioned allies with the perfect situation of them all taking damage each turn so that they all get the Temp HP each turn. And if I made shorter less detailed remarks about them people would inevitably claim about not having details, or I'd get even more of these biased comparisons than your putting out now. And Yes. They are Biased.
This is White Room and it's in Favor of the Twilight Cleric. This same thing can be done for the Shepard Druid and it can produce numbers just as big if not bigger if it really wants to and there are all kinds of ways to call Shepard Superior if you really wanted to. And I'd point out how they aren't superior on the Shepard Druid either, just Different to other things. Shepard just happens to be one of the closest to the claims that almost everybody makes about Twilight Sanctuary to show it's not new or somehow greatly over powered in some way.
yes the Totem Can be Moved with a BA action. But this is not necessarily a burned action. There is not necessarily the need to Heal on every turn for every member just like there is not necessarily going to be Temp HP on ever party member on every turn. Sure the Twilight Clerics Ability moves with them. But that also means it moves when they are moved. if they are shoved around or can't get to a position. Their ability can't get to it either. Just A 4 elements monk (often mislabeled as the worst class and subclass in the game) could play havoc on a Twilight Cleric with Water whip if you insist on a clear cut example of how this is not the total boon your painting it as in your white room scenario. Because they'd be able to likely reliably relocate the Twilight Cleric up to 25' out of position for as long as they have the ki to use it. They could Unbroken air to shove the Twilight Cleric out of position away as an alternative if they go with that instead. Or an Open Palm could shove the Twilight Cleric around in all kinds of ways as long as they have ki for their Flurry of Blows. And that's ignoring that all Monks have Stunning Strike and a well built 4e Monk likely has a better save for it than the most popular way other monks are built. Having it move with you is not all good. It's not all bad. But it's not all good. If you think you can find all kinds of other ways to do similar things. There is just as much boon to having these kinds of abilities being free standing and require movement by another means.
That radius your hung up on? That everybody is calling so massive. Not that special either. The Totem matches it. Many spells fill at least most of it. High Level paladin's match it with Aura's. Paladin Aura's are in fact another way this is not new. They have abilities that can potentially be stacked that are just on. At the cost of not having as large of range until High Level. Oath will affect which ones they have but some of these are things like actual immunity to charm and halving all magic damage taken. A Paladin with the Ancients Oath even when only affecting magic damage is potentially blocking just as more damage as Twilight Cleric is doing. And it's not even costing them a Channel Divinity to do it but their radius is much smaller. On top of that considering it's paired with as much as a +5 on Saves. it's possible the Paladin is blocking even more damage. All for just existing close by and being conscious and being an ally.
And Druids don't get Mass Healing Word. But in an interesting twist. That's what even low level Shepard druids can basically throw out every time their totem proc's healing just at low level. Average healing for a level 1 healing word tends to be 5. When you get to the point of casting healing word on a level 5 cleric even if you've taken the ASI in Wisdom to increase it is only 6 spread out over a variable number of targets in a certain range. once You get up to level 8-10 however. The Druid is effectively casting cure wounds on everybody in the area of the totem, Whether they need it or not, for potentially the cost of just a single level 1 spell.
The Totem is going to heal for less at level 3 for example than healing word on each individual person but it's potentially doing a lot more healing depending on how many are within range. And it's movable, without moving the druid, but it costs you a bonus action. Druids don't have a lot of bonus actions anyway. And it's non-concentration so it can't simply be interrupted. But once you get to level 5. Your just 1hp short on most of your targets for that single level 1 spell to duplicating a level 3 spell for the cleric. And when you go up 1 more level to level 6. Your now going to be effectively doing the same as that level 3 spell on all targets, Plus a bit more from a level one spell.
But no. Your cleric is not necessarily going to just be pumping out Temp HP without Interruption. If the party moves. They are going to have to move and hope that somebody doesn't move outside of it on their turn before the effect kicks in. And hope that they don't get stunned or something else that inflicts a similar condition to incapacitate them. The Argument that they are going to be able to keep using this ability For it's full minute without some kind of threat to losing it is entirely white room. It's making a ton of base assumptions in favor of the Twilight Cleric that can just as easily be made in Favor of the Shepard with their own ability. Like it's easy to white room say that the Shepard is always going to be able to heal because the party is just going to assumedly stay within the range of their totem with it's benefits.
The utility is slightly better on the Twilight Cleric. But the healing... The healing gets way above the Twilight Cleric as the levels pile up and the various synergies come online. Not only that but the Healing is not the only effect of that Particular Totem. Your forgetting about the fact that There is advantage to noticing anything hidden or invisible in range of the totem. Which means that all within it are harder to sneak up on and more likely to be able to find and hit invisible targets. Something that Twilight Sanctuary is not doing. Twilight Sanctuary's trade off in this regard is the ability to cleanse charm or fear at the cost of not being able to apply temp hp for that turn.
If I had to Boil it down in Terms that you and I have talked about Before. Twilight Sanctuary on the Twilight Cleric is Essentially The Hold Person of this conversation. Your hoping for the benefit of multiple rounds out of it while there is a lot more chance that your not going to. On the Other hand The Totem is the STunning Strike of this conversation. it's guaranteed in what it does but it's probably going to cost me more to do much of the time. And no. Twilight Sanctuary is in no way guaranteed. There is a lot working against it. From all the ways to shut it off. To the way it can be pushed around To all kinds of other variables and potential weaknesses if we really want to objectively consider them.
All your arguing for. isn't something that's better. it's just something that's different. Not new... Just a remix so that it's different. It's got it's own pro's and con's. Literally for every way that you can make it sound better there are usually 3 or 4 ways to use as examples to use it against the twilight cleric or get around it, or show it's not special. I'm usually not naming most of them in this thread. Or even trying to. Just pointing out that they are there for people to come up with.
I am merely highlighting what I believe to be the logic gaps in your comparison. You are doing the same thing. When I point out the differences between twilight sanctuary and guardian spirit, and you dismiss that as if I'm saying "anything above level 10 is irrelevant" (which I didn't write, by the way), you're just ignoring the arguments I'm making.
And yes, I think it's extremely relevant whether an ability is available at level 2 or level 10.The thread here is literally actually about whether TS is OP for tier 1 (levels 1 to 4) or not. Then you showed up here drawing wild comparisons to another class that does entirely different things (circumstancial buffing of healing spells, and later healing summoned pets of far weaker level then your other partymembers) at a significantly later point in the campaign. But to be fair: The thread has gotten a bit out of hand before.
I'm trying to get to the point.
Let's stick with the level 3 example you brought up, just so we have some semblance of the same basis for discussion.
Let's assume 6 tHP per round and a CR 3 monster that has 3 attacks, hits 60% of the time and does 6 damage. So per round, on average, 10.8 damage. In this context 6 tHP is damage reduction of almost 60% (sounds pretty stupid).
So let's assume the party hits 5 of these monsters and consists of 4 characters. Then 13.5 damage per round hits each member. Hmmm, still a 45% damage reduction. Yeah well, then the monsters just have to concentrate their attacks. But this is now a problem, because 5 CR 3 monsters for a party of 4 level 3 characters exceeds the deadly limit several times.So I reduce to 2 CR 3 monsters and throw in 3 weak minions and let the CR 3 monsters attack concentrated and send the minions on the rest of the party. The minions do about 5 damage to each member of the party, except on the char I'm already attacking with the CR 3 monsters. Whereas, that depends on how the battle develops. So the player who gets the concentrated damage gets 16.6 (21.6 -6; 27.7% damage reduction) and the others 0 (5-6; 100% damage reduction).
I think that's game-changing and really hasn't been in the game in that form before. You don't.
With 8 tHP that is a damage Reduction of 33% and you say it, like it's nothing....
DnD isn't a game of really big numbers. That means that small numbers like 6 or 8 per Round matter a lot.
Now of course this is whitebox math, but it's also pretty real in the game. Because you can not prevent this effekt from happening all the time. In fact i believe that the effekt will take place in over 80% of the time. So in my opinion your statement is whiteboxing, that preventing player-effects is an easy task. I say it‘s not. Especially if you try to do it without frustrating the player. He wants ts to be online and enjoy his character and not get targeted for using his abilities.
There are other broken abilities in the game, so it's not entirely new, but TS is nothing to be sneezed at. I never said there weren't other things in the game that annoy me balance-wise. But that's not what this thread is about. It's explicitly about the Twilight Domain in Tier 1.
Suggested solutions so far:
Focus the cleric to prevent the effect.
Run away and lure the enemies back into the fight after a minute.
Try to use up Channel divinity differently
increase the damage while TS is active, if necessary with minions
Be a better dungeon master and bring more creative ideas to the table to prevent the ability from being used effectively
Do you notice anything?
EDIT: Reminder: TS doesn‘t need concentration. Some of your post seem like you‘re thinking that it does. The only way to prevent ts is by incapacitating or killing the cleric. Just like the totem of the shepherd druid.
Some of my post does not seem to think that it does. i in no way said that it is concentration. That's an assumption of my words that you made. Incapacitation is not that rare. All kinds of things that temporarily disable a character for a turn tend to inflict disabled. Paralyzation, Some Poisons, STuns, Unconcious, Petrification, straight up Incapacitated. They all shut down Twilight Sanctuary. Roughly 1/3 of the conditions in the game actually incapacitate targets. You act like this is a hard thing to inflict. It's actually not that hard.
You also act like Shoving the Cleric around is a hard thing to inflict. It's not. And many of them do so for 10' to 20' of space. There are creatures that even do some of these things just because an attack hits.
Also. The numbers are lower yes, So they are more significant yes, But that's not new in any way. your pointing this out to make Twilight Sanctuary seem more powerful but it applies to everything that came before it as well. That 1/3rd of a single attack is not special. It's normal.
Your Claims about deadliness of an encounter. Sure. It's deadly to An Actual group made to fit the intended power curve. it's not necessarily so deadly to the Min-maxed Groups that many people play with based upon absurd standards about how characters at like 5th level should be able to wipe out 1 or more CR 9 creatures or it's weak that is pushed in some circles of the D&D realm.
Also. your Numbers about how well the creature can hit. We can turn that around on the party. We can give the enemies some kind of healer to counteract damage to them just as easily and thus make A CR three and a few minions much tougher automatically. you work on the premise that only the party has these things and not the enemy in your white room argument in favor of Twilight Sanctuary.
Then there is the fact that 60% on 3 hits is pretty much likely that 2 of the 3 will hit every round. Missing one extra hit every 3 to 4 rounds. This means that the DPR is higher than 10.6 It's closer to 11.6 So you Block 6 Damage. it's still hit you for basically double that. When your hitpoints are only in the range of 4 to 5 times what a single hit can do. And this is health damage that Twilight Sanctuary can't replace. unless your absolutely going to employ a healer and/or have most of your party targetting just that one creature. Your looking at the likelyhood of at least one party member going down if your only applying base damage factors on the part of both sides based upon their attacks. Because that CR 3 creature likely has 2 to 3 times the Health that the party has.
Your own Weapons. If your playing at proper power level are only doing on average 7-9 damage a hit on base(depending on a few factors). Barely over that of the monster your fighting and your hit rate is not that much better. Missing at least 1 attack out of every 4 at best but your actually likely to be closer to the same 2 hits out of 3 attacks that the enemy is using with the same extra miss somewhere in the space of every 10 rounds. As a CR3 monster tends to have a similar +6 to +7 attack modifier as the party does. This means to take the monster down. Without any extra protections at proper power level, Even if your protected by Twilight Sanctuary. your looking at seeing who can do 10 hits a piece first as to say who goes down. But any turn that for some reason Twilight Sanctuary is missed. That is actually the equivalent of one extra attack in the monsters favor in your War of Attrition of just who's hitpoints matter first. This is why a CR 3 is a challenge to 4 appropriately powered adventurers but not an OP group. The CR 3 is going to do enough damage to kill a one on one target at a higher rate than that target can kill the CR 3 monster so it's going to take the effort of 2 or more PC's doing damage and/or the use of Damaging abilities to increase damage to balance that out and potentially turn it into the parties favor. Because that's something that you have to take into account. At Character level 3 Against a CR 3. it's doing damage at pretty much double the rate of any one party member that you have going at appropriate power level. it will kill at least one member of your party without a concentrated effort from the party and/or other mitigating factors. And those other mitigating factors just make the fight a bit easier on the party. They do not guarantee a win of any kind. Not even with Twilight Sanctuary. Even with Twilight Sanctuary your party has to have at least 2 of your party members get in their average of 10 hits in 5 turns before the CR 3 monster does the same thing. That fireball that you blocked 1/3rd of the Damage for. The Reality is that For each member of your party that fireball hit that's still effectively 1 to 2 extra hits that CR 3 monster has dealt to your party that pushes them closer to death depending on whether they make the save or not.
That 80% uptime that you presume to have. Purely because that's what you imagine the likelyhood to be means that The 1 turn it doesn't provide Temp Hp to apply their damage reduction For some reason or if the monster rolls a high enough to Initiative to attack first then the 1 on 1 fight is in the monsters favor. that CR3 creature if it's only doing 12 damage a turn and your blocking 6 of it. Just means that your party is going to last just 2 to 3 turns longer without losing a member against it without other intervening factors. That may seem like a lot to some people, And mind you it is not an insignificant amount. But there are other things that can have this same exact effect. And Many of them Stack Together. And Several of them don't cost any more resources. Tanks often rely on some of these factors innately as a matter of the nature of the game and rely on party members supplying others in various ways.
And For that matter. There's another truth that most people overlook. There is in some ways actually more challenge at playing extremely low level characters than playing high level characters. The Dangers and the Balance is actually a lot tighter and little changes are actually a lot more extreme than at high levels. And it just happens to be at the levels people tend to ignore or skip most at 1-3 because they have deemed them boring for various reasons. Twilight Sanctuary kicks in at level 2 and we're talking about CR 3. But not only is a CR 5 or a CR10 monster not quite the threat But the boost in capability of characters at those kinds of levels also means that the average threat is not quite as deadly and changing a combat by just one or two monsters not as likely to change an encounter from a minor challenge into a deadly one (with certain exceptions). At level 1 even just one or two more CR 1/4 or 1/2 monsters can potentially turn an ok encounter into a TPK. specially against something that isn't min-maxed purely for combat. Twilight Sanctuary shines at this level and I picked CR3 to show it at it's best to show that it's not some kind over overwhelming thing. Twilight Sanctuary at level 10 is not nearly so impressive. Because this is a point where legendary actions tend to show up more and more. So the Temp HP of Twilight Sanctuary can end up being stripped away without it even being the enemies turn so that their actual turns are fully effective, all kinds of various conditions and effects from enemies are almost common place that can end up taking effect, and the general increase in number of low level threats that die easily but potentially do a lot of damage rather quickly as well because of their numbers. Half of the Threat of the Crystal Golem for example is not just because of the damage. Which it's rather decently set up to be dealing 40 a turn. But also the fact that it's resistant to magic and it has a rather good chance of blinding melee characters and/or forcing them to take disadvantage on all attacks. And it can slow anything in melee range on top of that potentially severely dropping DPS against it. The 13average Temp Hp Looks Nice on the surface but when your talking about a creature that can knock 1/3 to 1/2 of a characters hp out of it in a single turn and make it hard to retaliate. it can either feel like it's just saved you or it can just as easily feel like it might be slowing down the inevitable even though you can say the same kind of thing "Well 1/4 of the damage is not an insignificant amount." It's not an insignificant amount but it's against a Monster that expects various things to be done to do things like take off 1/4 or 1/2 of the damage it does or for characters to mitigate or reverse that damage in some way. It's literally part of the balance of the Game and Twilight Sanctuary just matches that balance. From Low Level Where it's potentially blocking full hits to High level where creatures can practically sneeze for that kind of damage and balance is all but out the window. Twilight Sanctuary is accounted for in the balance and structure of the game. It's strong where 1 hit can make all the difference in the world but 1 hit is also potentially really easy to find. it's weak at the point where things go off the rails and the point it co-ordination and synergy of abilities and tactics and many things are weak, While being balanced right in the middle where it needs to be balanced.
I have never seen so much text to talk about how a free 13 points of THP per turn is somehow a bad thing.
Edit: Look, at this point i don't know how to answer your Post without repeating huge chunks of things, that i have said. Your arguments and examples become a little wild right now. We will not come to an agreement here.
That will cause antagonism and I would expect it not to be a fun game. You can put the party against a group of enemies including a twilight cleric once or twice in a campaign but every battle will get boring VERY quickly.
The best solution is to talk to the player who wants to play a TC and explain the situation to them. The rest of the party might feel under powered. You want to create combat that is challenging but to do that you would have to use monsters that are intended for far higher levels of play and can result in things going badly if things go wrong (for example a critical hit on the first turn before the cleric has put TS up could result in character death), and telling them they wil have to play another character or (possibly) agree to some nerfs). The alternative of not raising the difficult of the combats so they just walk though everything will get boring very quickly
An alternative is to have multiple combats with no chance of a rest between them, the combats with TS up might be a cakewalk but the ones where they don't will be a challenge.
I think they only really messed up with cleric.I must admit I don't really follow cannon of the settings, most of my games are in homebrew worlds what I look for in a subclass is balance and being fun to play.
Eloquence Bard and the two sorcerer subclasses are powerful probably the most powerful bard and sorcerer subclasses in the game but not to the extent of being a problem, more powerful creatures in other classes could be made before Tasha's Genie warlock is powerful but not as powerful as hexblade and while mercy might be the most powerful monk subclass that should probably described as the least anemic, at least 75% of subclasses are more powerful than mercy monk.
I love playing my stars druid and I nearly picked wild fire both are well balanced and fun to play, I have seen quite a lot of soul knives and bladesingers and they too are balanced and fun. They absolutely nailed ranger while fey wanderer and swarmkeeper are not particularly attractive to me they are well balanced and the changes to beastmaster make me want to play one when I get a chance.
They could have tweaked the eloquence bard, and clockwork and aberant mind sorcers down a tad and nooone would have complained but the astral self monk and wild magic barbarian are on the weak side. Only Twilight and Peace clerics are the real problem.
I personally never see the need for giving monsters these sorts of abilities, unless I see flagrant abuse (an entire party MC into level 2 Twilight clerics for instance) Really this is to help the cleric be less of a heal bot and actually be able to make meaningful use of their spells and features to be more player friendly. That being said the THP can feel overwhelming through the first 4 levels since most things don't hit super hard. But I am a GM that tends to like to speed through to level 5 anyway, since by then classes start cpoming into their own. After the hill giant and othercr 6-8 monsters come in to play the Twilight domain channel loses it's OP status and just becomes a good ability allowing a character to basically nerf a single incomoing attack. Do also remember that characters are supposed to be out numbered in encounters, not the players out number the monsters, like it was in older editions, so each PC should be facing about 1.5-2 attacks on the average. a party of 4 should be fighting 6-8 monsters not 4 or less. so with that taken into account, Twilight functions more as damage spike protection when all 6 goblins actually hit your fighter with 12 HP that might lay him on his face with out it, he is still standing thanks to 4-10 temps a round with out everyone needing to spring into damage control stance.
Any argument that twilight sanctuary isn't overpowered has aged very poorly. It's so good that I've gotten to the point of not wanting to play with twilight clerics on one of the westmarches I'm on because they run it raw and it makes combat crazy boring. It's just so hard for the dm to put the party in any real danger when the twilight Cleric is doing their thing.
The other westmarch I am a part of did nerf it and I like what they did with it quite a lot. Instead of working at the end of everyone's turn, it only works at the end of the cleric's turn but they get to pick any ally within the aura for that trigger. It ends up being better to "precast" it so that you have a free action turn 1 and everyone rolls in with thp.
I mean if you want to threaten the party twilight sanctuary can be made a non issue easily enough hordes are a good way to handle it as are just using bigger baddies like swapping goblins for orcs at early play. It all depends on what you want personally I hate spending a lot of time in teir 1 and have no problem ratcheting encounters up to meet the pcs capabilities. That said I never really start encounter design until I know what people are going to be playing usually at minimum class and sub class, and I tailor the encounters to what should challenge them. I have had level 2-3 parties who can handle a pack of ogres and ettins (veng paladin, enchanter, life cleric though twilight would be just as good, and soul knife) when they are going full out I've also seen parties that struggle with kobolds and goblins until they are out of teir 1. It just depends, remember as the DM you aren't supposed to be adversarial to your pcs you are supposed to be running a game all can enjoy. So I would challenge you to try tailoring the encounters to the party as opposed to just looking at the CR and going yep seems to fit.