CLERIC: Life Domain - Disciple of Life update

It's been a long time coming - finally it's here. The Disciple of Life feature of the Life Domain Cleric is now supported automatically on D&D Beyond.

What does this mean for me?

If you're playing a character that selected Life Domain as their Divine Domain, then you gain the feature Disciple of Life.

This feature makes your healing spells more powerful and, up until now, it's been your responsibility to remember that and add the bonus to your healing spells.

With this update, the bonus is now added automatically and, even better, it's fully included when you roll Digital Dice on D&D Beyond.

The go to spell for most clerics who want to heal someone is Cure Wounds, which heals a creature for 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier. At 2nd level, that's probably going to be 1d8 + 3 for most clerics with a Wisdom score of 16 or 17.

The Disciple of Life feature adds 2 + the spell’s level. For Cure Wounds cast with a 1st level spell slot, that's an extra 3 healing, taking the amount healed up to 1d8 + 6.

Screenshot of the D&D Beyond character sheet, showing the Archmage's Favor digital dice used to roll for the healing of a 2nd level Cure Wounds spell. The result is a 6 and 8 on the dice, with a bonus of 7, giving a total amount healed of 21.

Disciple of Life in Detail

Let's take a look at that feature, as written in both the Basic Rules and the Player's Handbook:

Disciple of Life

Also starting at 1st level, your healing spells are more effective. Whenever you use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore hit points to a creature, the creature regains additional hit points equal to 2 + the spell’s level.

The following spells all qualify for this bonus, as they include the wording that they cause a creature to restore/regain hit points:

Image of a Dwarven Cleric, wielding a warhammer

Two further spells also qualify due to wording, that we need to talk about:

  • Mass Heal - heals 700 hit points spread as you like. The way this interacts with the Disciple of Life feature is pretty unique, as the feature doesn't just bump the amount healed up to 711. Instead, the bonus is applied to each creature. In a hypothetical situation where a Life Domain cleric were to cast this spell and choose to allocate 1 hit point of healing to each of 700 creatures - each of those creatures would also receive a bonus 11 healing (for a total of 12 each). That would mean the spell healed a total of 8,400 hit points!
  • Power Word Heal - restores the target to maximum hit points, so adding the Disciple of Life bonus isn't something that can be done meaningfully.

Screenshot of the D&D Beyond character sheet, showing the spells section of the sheet for a 3rd level Life Domain cleric. The spells visible include Cure Wounds and Healing Word, which are automatically increased by the Disciple of Life feature.

Homebrew Spells

We want to make sure that this works well and to review community feedback before we tell you all how to use this system for your homebrew subclasses, spells etc.

The last thing we want is for you all to make a bunch of homebrew content and then we make some changes to this system, due to feedback.

We absolutely will make sure to write up information on how to use this for homebrew, with appropriate screenshots and we expect that to be fairly soon. 😊

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