Subclass Guide: War Domain Cleric

A while back, I wrote some guides for some of the less popular or widely panned subclass options in D&D 5e. These are often considered "trap" options, but in my experience, it's not that the option itself is bad, it's that people either don't consider the whole package or don't really understand how to use it. Usually, people imagine something from the class name that isn't quite the same as its design.


These guides are to explain how to play the class right, not to serve as a charop guide or prove this option is better than that one. If a subclass fits what you want to do, by all means, choose it. So without further ado, here is my guide for the War Domain Cleric.

It's a trap! The War Domain Cleric gets a lot of grief because between 2 and 5 extra melee attacks per day isn't all that great compared to a Fighter. At higher levels, these extra attacks really aren't that cool, not compared to true melee classes like Barbarian, Fighter, and Paladin. Clearly, this is a trap option, as you can't just go around swinging your warhammer at every monster you see.

Why people get it wrong: The key thing to understand about this or any other subclass is that it does not replace the base class. The War Domain Cleric is still a full divine caster, with all the tremendous versatility and power that implies. If what you want is battle-hardened front-line warrior who also heals his pals, the class you're actually looking for is Paladin. A War Domain cleric is not a replacement for a Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, or Paladin. If he was, he would be broken. The War Domain Cleric's primary job is still casting spells, not smacking things with a warhammer.

That said, a melee weapon attack is much more than its damage die. This is largely due to the fact that is coupled with heavy armor proficiency, benefits from magic weapons, can land critical hits, and is generally easier to get Advantage with. If, for example, the Fighter knocks a bugbear prone, there's not much benefit a Light Domain Cleric gets from that. The War Domain Cleric, by contrast, can go attack the creature twice with advantage.

What it's for:
War Domain clerics are for supporting the front line, not being the front line. All of the domain's specialties work together for that end. In particular, your role changes as you level up. Early on, somewhat like the Moon Druid, you add a fairly high level of impact to the party that helps them survive those lethal first few levels. But later on, melee should take a back seat to casting, just as with any other cleric.

Levels 1-4: At low levels, having 2 or 3 extra attacks per day is a little behind the Fighter's Action Surge in offensive power. You've also got a full caster's worth of magic in the tank, and you start life with up to 18 AC. Low levels are pretty lethal, so full healing + extra offense increases the likelihood that everyone will make it to Level 5 with their character alive. The meaner your DM is, the more attractive War Domain becomes.

Levels 5-7: At this point, you become more of a support character and take a step back from the front lines. You should largely reserve your War Priest attacks for when you have Advantage. At this point, a War Domain is a fantastic option if you have two companions that multi-attack, thanks to the Crusader's Mantle domain spell. The fact that you get War God's Blessing, which lets you use your Channel Divinity to grant an ally +10 to hit, at 6th level should drive this home---your next tier of power is more support, not more offense. You're much more useful making sure the Rogue hits his sneak attack, not trying to act like a Fighter. Crusader's Mantle alone is one of my favorite War Domain features, and makes this subclass a perfect option for high-offense parties.

Levels 8-20: You know what's an exciting thing about high levels? More ways to paralyze enemies. At high levels, your War Priest attack is a card you keep in your back pocket until it's time to lay down a critical hit, or you have at least guaranteed advantage. The rest of the time, just be your normal badass cleric self. If you've got Crusader's Mantle up when the wizard lands Hold Monster, you've got a shot at an easy 6d8+4d4+2STR damage. For a cleric, that isn't shabby. Even if it's your own Hold Monster (very nice domain spell), it's 6d8+2STR damage without burning a slot.

This option shines: When the party has a couple martials for you to support and characters with stunning/paralyzing powers. Valor Bards and Monks are your best friends.
This option thuds: When the party desperately needs a warrior or goes heavy with the blaster casters.

So How's Pathfinder 2 Doing?

In 2016, I predicted that Pathfinder would not survive 5e. In 2018, I predicted PF2 would briefly seem to sell very well, but not ever capture the heights of PF1.

Well, it seems my predictions are being born out. The original Pathfinder eventually went on to sell competitively with 4e, some even saying it outsold 4e in the last couple years of its life. Pathfinder 2, well...outside of its launch month, when it briefly cracked the top 200 on Amazon, it's fallen to a distant 2nd place on Amazon. Let's compare to this snapshot from August 2018:

November 2019 Fantasy Gaming Snapshot (non-RPGs represented with ellipses):

1. ...
2. D&D Player's Handbook
3. ...
4. D&D Xanathar's Guide to Everything
5. D&D Monster Manual
6. D&D Dungeon Master's Guide
7. D&D Eberron Preorder
8. D&D Core Rulebooks Gift Set
9. D&D Starter Set
10. ...
11. ...
12. D&D Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes
13. ...
14. D&D Descent Into Avernus
15. D&D Volo's Guide to Monsters
16. ...
17. ...
18. ...
19. D&D Curse of Strahd
20. D&D Dungeon Master's Screen Reincarnated
21. D&D Ghosts of Saltmarsh
22. ...
23. ...
24. ...
25. ...
26. ...
27. D&D Waterdeep Dragon Heist
28. ...
29. ... (lmao, the Elder Scrolls cookbook)
30. ...
31. ...
32. D&D Arcane Spellbook cards
33. D&D Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica
34. D&D Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide
35. D&D Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage
36. ...
37. ...
38. D&D Baldur's Gate: DIA Dice & Miscellany
39. Pathfinder Core Rulebook (P2)

Yikes. #39 is not where I expect a new product to be, certainly not one that is supposed to be competitive with D&D.  As we continue looking down the list, all things RPG-related are D&D, including 3rd-party products, with only two Paizo books in the top 100, the P2 Bestiary and a P2 character guide. Starfinder's now at #107.

The RPG industry has returned to D&D + outliers. Sure, we'll see P2 as the #2 RPG for the quarter, and Starfinder at #3, but these numbers show just how distant those are behind #1. It doesn't look like P2 is going to renew sagging interest in Paizo's take on D&D.

Guns are Loud, Not Low

I've played a fair amount of video games, and by far, Battlefield 3 and 4 have the best gun sounds of any game I've played. Distant second is COD: Black Ops, which is roughly on par with World at War. Everything else is trash.

Why?

Guns are really, really, really loud, typically well over 150 dB. But they also have nearly all of their power at the high frequency range, about 1-1.5 kHz. Listen to this to get an idea of how high that is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o_fZX_voFo

The problem entertainment has is that really loud, high pitches are extremely unpleasant to the listener. This because sound intensity, which which is how much power is delivered by an acoustic wave to a unit of area, is proportional to the square of the frequency. Movies tend to peak around 90 dB, but if all that were in the 1-1.5 kHz range, it could really damage your eardrums. Consequently, that kind of loudness is reserved for low-frequency bass tones.

In order to make guns sound loud, movies and video games tend to rely on a few tricks. Some are quite clever, like reducing the volume of other sounds to make the guns sound louder by comparison. But nearly all of them just lower the sound of the gun so they can amplify its loudness. If you watch enough action movies or play enough video games, you probably think handguns and rifles make loud, booming noises. But even the biggest machine guns don't boom, they bang.

The funny thing is World at War and Black Ops used a lot of authentic gun sounds...and were widely panned by game critics and gamers alike for their "thin, unrealistic" gun sounds. By contrast, the Modern Warfare series, which sounds like it uses a lot of synthetic audio, was praised for its sound, and every game in the series won awards from the game industry for its sound design. Because people think guns have bass-heavy booming sounds, this is what an AK-47 sounds like in MW3, as compared to real life:


But if you ask me, the first of these sounds a lot more like the real thing:

Diminishing Returns

They remade a couple Black Ops 1&2 maps for Black Ops IV. The machine on the left has 512 MB of RAM and came out in 2005. The machine on the right has 8 GB of RAM and came out in 2014.




This is why graphics do not matter any more.

5e's HP Inflation

5e is pretty well-known to have an HP inflation problem. It's not as bad as 4e (which gave high-level dragons over a thousand hp), but it's worse than 3.5(!!!). An AD&D ogre has 19 hp, a 3.5 ogre has 29 hp, and a 5e ogre is a bloated monstrosity with 59 hp. There's a lot of initial bloat, but it does sort of calm down by high levels, at least compared to 3.5. An AD&D 2e Ancient Red Wyrm had about 104 hp. 3.5's Very Old Red Dragon has 487 hp, and 5e's Ancient Red Dragon has 546 hp.

So what the heck happened? If you look at the raw damage of a fighter, it doesn't look that far off. A 5e fighter is attacking twice for 1d8+6 when an AD&D fighter is probably doing 3/2 attacks for 1d8+4.  Eventually, AD&D fighters have a much higher chance to hit as well, so damage stats are surprisingly close.

One of Mike Mearls' guiding philosophies in 5e design is that not hitting anything for several rounds in a row is boring. At early levels in AD&D, your chance to hit was often around 25%. In 5e, your base chance to hit is typically no lower than 40%, and often much higher. In the case of the ogre, everybody's got about a 60% chance to hit.

So at low levels, the biggest difference is that the other classes do a lot more damage than they used to. An AD&D Magic-User often twiddled his thumbs until combat was over, and a Thief's big effort was to try and not die. But in 5e, every caster has cantrips that do about 1/3 to half the damage of a Fighter's attack. The Thief (now the Rogue) gets his Sneak Attack any time he attacks the Fighter's target. So when you add everything together, the party as a whole is easily doing triple or more an AD&D party's damage. So when in addition to your fighter's 1d8+5 damage, the rogue hits for 2d6+3, the cleric hits for 1d8+2, and the wizard hits for 1d10, with a 60% chance to hit for each, that 59 hp gets whittled down pretty quick.

At the high end, there is a different dynamic in play. The fact is that both AD&D and 3.5 were notoriously broken at high levels. Your wizards & clerics would pile on a few effects to turn the party into an unstoppable killing machine, your warriors looked like Christmas trees of powerful magical gear, and they would tear through the most dangerous monsters and even gods as though they were made of tissue paper. So at high levels, 5e characters have actually been nerfed quite a bit, while the monsters have been significantly beefed up. An ancient dragon is no cakewalk, even for 19th-level characters. 5e's Ancient Red Dragon has 546 hp, but he's a reasonable threat for that 19th-level party, while AD&D had virtually nothing that would challenge players of that level.

What I don't like about this system is there's a tremendous amount of bookkeeping to do in a battle. If you look at my notebook after a fight, you'll often see a dozen or more hits recorded on a monster before it goes down. It can be mentally exhausting, especially since I don't like to use digital tools in a social setting. The characters in my party are only around 6th level, and virtually every fight they have now has over 200 hp to whittle down. The warriors have two or more attacks, mage spells have a lot of dice, and the druid might summon eight animals to help him, each with its own attack. The math works out, but sometimes it all seems to get out of hand.

5e failure: NPCs

I've mostly been a 5e fan, but one place I feel the system has fallen short is NPCs. The combat has been heavily tested and balanced around ensuring players have about a 50% chance to hit (according to Mike Mearls, this is due to observing that players don't have much fun when they go 6 rounds in a row without a hit), so monsters are huge HP sacks in order to keep them alive for a couple rounds. An AD&D ogre typically has around 19 hp, while the 5e ogre has 59(!!!), but the 5e ogre is so much easier to hit, and players output so much more damage relative to their own HP, that the in-game experience of fighting an ogre really isn't too different from one game to the other. If an AD&D module says 4 ogres attack the party, you can reasonably replace them with 4 ogres in 5e and get approximately the same difficulty.

The unfortunate consequence of players hitting more often and doing more damage per level is that NPCs are really just not viable foes at all. A common scenario in AD&D is an NPC of approximately the same level as the players with a few minions. In 5e, the players focus-fire on the NPC, killing him in the first round, then mop up the minions. Let's look at why, focusing on 5th-level characters.

The party opens the door on a 20'x20' room to confront an evil cleric standing behind a row of orcs armed with spears. Our wizard decides to save his Fireball for later, as this isn't a very hard fight. We're going to focus-fire on the evil cleric. The fighter throws handaxes, the rogue shoots his shortbow, the wizard casts Magic Missile, and the cleric casts Spiritual Hammer. How's this work out?

In AD&D, the evil cleric has +1 chain and a shield for AC 3. The DM gives him 6 hp per hit die for 30 hp.

• The fighter's exceptional strength gives him THAC3 of 10, and his axe does d6+3 damage.
• The thief's high DEX gives him a THAC3 of 13, and his arrow does d6 damage.
• The cleric's THAC3 is 14, and his Spiritual Hammer does d4+2 damage.
• The wizard does 3d4+3 damage. He cast Protection From Normal Missiles earlier to ensure his spells succeed while the party clears rooms.

If everybody hits, the evil cleric takes 2d6+4d4+8 damage.   But the thief has a 40% chance to hit, and the cleric has a 35% chance to hit, so when we factor all this in, the party has (using my supersecret calculator) about a 0.5% chance of taking out the evil cleric in the first round. Of course, players don't do all this math, but experienced AD&D players have an intuitive feel for this, and consequently know it is much more worthwhile to attack the orcs immediately (who have AC 6 and an average 4.5 hp apiece) than to concentrate on the cleric.

In 5e, the cleric has chain and shield for AC 18. The DM gives him 7 hp per hit die for 35 hp. In addition, he gets an effective +2 to AC for being behind the row of orcs.

• The fighter gets to throw two handaxes at +7 to hit, and each axe does 1d6+6 thanks to his Duelist fighting style,
• The thief, who is hidden around the corner, gets advantage to attack, +7 to hit, 4d6+4 damage.
• The cleric's Spiritual Weapon attacks at +6, ignores the protection from cover, and does 1d8+3 damage. In addition, our cleric also throws a light hammer at +6 to hit, 1d4+3 damage.
• The wizard uses a 2nd-level slot for 4d4+4 damage. 

There is, when accounting for 5e's critical hits, a 66% chance the evil cleric is dead in the first round. Furthermore, if the cleric isn't taken out immediately, he can cast devastating spells like Spirit Guardians, which could quickly turn this situation into a TPK. By contrast, the most exciting thing an AD&D cleric typically does is boost the attacks of his minions. So not only is eliminating him in round 1 hardly even possible, taking him out isn't nearly so urgent.

My experience with 5e is that NPC + minions tends to be that the party focus-fires on the NPC and eliminates him in one round, or maybe the top of the second. This makes these kinds of scenarios wholly unsatisfying in a way they aren't in AD&D.

Pathfinder Sales Collapse

According to ICV2, Pathfinder has now fallen so far in sales that Starfinder is now the #2 best-selling RPG. And no, Starfinder sales haven't exploded. It's currently ranked #41 in Amazon's fantasy gaming list, and #3009 in all books. The 5e Player's Handbook is, of course, #1 in fantasy gaming and #15 in all books. If you want another proxy, Pathfinder's fallen to under 10% of online games on the platforms Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.

At this point, there is no longer a Pathfinder product in the top 50 on Amazon. The CRB now sits at #77 on the gaming list and #8,114 overall. That's not to say Paizo has stopped publishing books. They just released a new world splat on Christmas (a book of minor deities nobody asked for), a new set of pawns, more flip-mats, a rules expansion for martial arts, and more stuff like that. But the rankings are abysmally low. This stuff isn't selling, and the proliferation of it makes Paizo look more like late-era TSR than a healthy company.

Oh, and they've got more coming! Pocket editions of everything, more splats, more accessories, a new AP, and essentially more and more junk to suck the last few whales dry of their cash for a game nobody is buying anymore.

Buzz for Pathfinder 2 seems to be bordering on nonexistent. I've scaled my forum usage back to zero in the last few months, but a quick perusal shows the obsessive nerd-world of RPG forums is just not really interested in talking about Pathfinder 2. This bodes ill for its sales, because unlike D&D, Pathfinder has zero brand recognition outside of the dedicated nerds. There is no chance that the game will bring in huge numbers of new players the way 5e did.

It doesn't take a genius to predict PF2 is going to sell poorly. It's a product without an audience. But what we can add to that is that continuing with PF1 is no longer an option. If PF2 is a sales catastrophe of significant magnitude, Pathfinder is over.

And really, that might be a good thing. Unlike Pathfinder, Starfinder isn't a me-too product with a generic setting shamelessly cribbed from the most popular bits of somebody else's product. Paizo will have to lay some people off, of course, but there's more sustainability in a unique product than the Fruity Frosted O's version of D&D.