Part of it depends on how you want to play. Personally, I love playing a CC/buffer/debuffer version of cleric. Outside of the spells mentioned by others, here are some of my favourites:
Sanctuary — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve saved an ally/myself from death because of this spell.
Shield of Faith— cast this on your melee meat shield and let them do what they do best.
Faerie Fire — IMO one of the most underrated spells in the game.
Guidance — One of the best cantrips for people who like to role-play in towns and villages. Cast it on yourself or your bard and make haggling with townsfolk a whole lot easier.
Those are all pretty low level spells. And FWIW If you’re a fan of buffing/debuffing/CC than Twilight Cleric is fucking incredible. It’s basically broken if you know what you’re doing.
Sanctuary is a super interesting spell. There’s a trick with it on the artillerist artificer where you can keep it up on yourself while attacking with your turret/gun
For sure. Just bear with me, this is gonna get a little long-winded. Like, too-long-to-fit-into-one-post-on-Kbin long ;p
A lot of it depends on party make-up and playstyle. I'm gonna assume your party is rocking with the usual set-up: two melees, a ranged character, and a healer/spellcaster (you).
First thing to remember is that, as cleric, you kinda sorta have more responsibility than anyone else in your party. For instance, all the barbarian has to do is rush the bandit and swing his axe. As cleric, you're gonna be expected to attack, heal, buff and debuff. To be a great cleric, you’re going to have to pay attention every round—see who needs healing or a spell to cure frightened/confused/what have you. Some people don’t like this responsibility but I absolutely love it.
Your position on the battlefield depends on playstyle and party. If your party is configured anything like the one I mentioned, then I think your best bet is to be between your melee and ranged allies. Basically, you want to be close enough so that your spirit guardians can really mess with your enemies but not so close they can fuck with your concentration.
SPELLS TO CONSIDER:
Other than the ones mentioned before, here's a few more…
Healing word: use it sparingly, mostly to bring your allies back to life. There's no point in wasting the slot if your ally just got nicked for 5hp. Save it for when they lose consciousness and are on the brink of making death saves.
Aid: Great for a majority of the game. Personally, I like using a third level slot to give my allies +10hp. Because the health from Aid ISN'T considered temporary, the extra temp. hp from Twilight Sanctuary stacks with the hp from Aid. So, with aid and TS, at low levels you can almost double your party's HP.
Spells gained through twilight domain: You gain access to some of the best spells IMO. Faerie Fire, Moonbeam, See Invisibility, Leomunds Tiny Hut, and Greater Invisibility are all great spells. Pair moonbeam with an ally who has booming blade and bosses (aka your DM) won't know where to go.
Put greater invisibility on your rogue (or druid) out of combat to steal anything you want.
Use LTH whenever your party needs a rest, and even as choke points to mess with your enemies (they can't go through the hut, neither can magic).
Eyes of Night: So much for having to worry about dark vision. Having this pretty much allows you, and everyone in your party, to pick a race that doesn't have access to dark vision. The game hasn't even started and you're already helping out your buddies.
Vigilant Blessing: Advantage on every initiative roll you–or anyone of your choosing–makes. This is huge. Just make sure you use it.
Twilight Sanctuary: This is what makes you god-like. In my opinion, it's the strongest skill in the game. Time it right and you'll mow through bosses. Pair it with spirit guardians and good luck getting the smell of dookie out of their pants.
Steps of Night: Useful at night and in dungeons. Aesthetically badass (imagine being a bandit and seeing a heavily armoured dude with wings slowly floating towards you with two kickass spheres ((TS and SG)) surrounding their party). Also great if you need to flee a battle.
– As cleric, you can swap out spells during a long rest. This comes in handy if you're about to fight elementals and need the right kinda magic to beat them.
– With Vigilant Blessing, you might find yourself at the top of the initiative order often. Use this to buff your allies if you can (Shield of Faith) activate TS immediately (So everyone gets temp. hp) or cast something like Faerie Fire on a mob before your allies get in range of the spell.
– Where other characters measure success by damage/round, you measure it in damage, healing, buffing. If it annoys you that you're not doing the most damage then cleric won't be for you. So just remember: your success isn't based on the damage you do but the damage everyone else can do.
– The hardest part about being a cleric is that you have access to a lot of bonus action spells, and figuring out when to use what can be tricky. Pay attention to your allies, enemies, surroundings to figure out which one to use. Same rules apply for spells requiring concentration.
That's all I can think of for now. If anything else hits me I'll reply with another comment. One final thing though…
I've played almost every class in DND, and multiclassed into anything and everything. By far, I never felt as god-like as I did when I played twilight cleric.
True story: I was playing with a DM who had a hard time scaling the difficulty for our four-person party. We had around 6 player death's in our first three sessions. When my bard died, that's when I decided to try twilight cleric. We went from 6 death's to none. I don't know if anyone even made a death save after that. Morale of the story: twilight clerics are an absolute game changer when played properly.
Enjoy the game and if you have any more questions ask. Twilight cleric is awesome. Seriously. The worst part about it is that every class will seem weak after you've played it lol.
However, in −790 DR, drow from the Underdark began raiding the emirates of Tethyr and Iltkazar in earnest, looking to acquire human slaves. These raids, known as the Night Wars, occupied Calimshan’s garrisons, allowing those dissatisfied with the government to begin organized resistance against it
The cleric immediately getting offed is literally how I run my games. I always go hard and try to put the fear of God in the players asap so that they look forward to finding treasure and levels, giving them a push to find interesting solutions to simple problems.
Overconfident can be a lot of fun to play, especially when paired with a flaw, like mispronouncing, using words wrong or making words up. Like Dr. Teeth from the Muppets, for example.
My suggestion is to avoid any cringey back story. Seems like all characters have some edgy drama they center on. Instead, have a really boring backstory like you’re a retiree who is just looking to pass the time. Something you can kinda chuckle at to break the tension with having to roleplay.
Or, if you have to have an elaborate backstory here is one I’ve used: your character’s mind broke after whatever happened (like old age) and they believe they have made a pact granting them warlock powers. They don’t have those powers and are just going batty, so just work it out with the dm where you “cast” hexblade but just do a normal attack. So you’re just a fighter really but you’ll be pretending you aren’t with the other players.
I have a guy in my group who is unashamedly a power gamer (which is fine by me, he still will participate in all pillars of play; he just always prioritizes mechanical power). His PCs consistently have some edgy loner backstory. I honestly think it’s because he doesn’t prioritize backstory when creating characters, instead trying to come up with a backstory which justifies all of the mechanical things he wants his character to have. The thing is, I’ve seen him RP fun or interesting character ideas for like one-shots, but for longer campaigns he always reverts to the safety blanket of an edgelord.
Recently he was rolling up a new character, and after he gave me the character sheet, it inevitably had some edgy loner backstory where the only details were things that explained his class, background, and proficiencies. So I politely suggested we workshop the backstory under the guise of working in some details relevant to the campaign. What I then did was talk him through his character’s whole backstory from childhood through to adulthood giving him an opportunity to think through the backstory one step at a time, occasionally prompting what might be choices his character would’ve had to make at different points in his life.
The result of this was that he actually had to think about his character’s backstory and it ended up being a way more interesting character concept.
dnd
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.