Life cleric tips?

[Rfkannen]

Jim playing a life cleric for the first time. Domain and class fit for a priest of ilmater which I wanted to play.

Any tips on playing one effectively? I know healing isnt always the best in 5e, so any tips on doing it efficiently or what spells are worth it would be great! (Like mass cure wounds vs mass healing word).

Race wise I went for a variant human with warcaster.

Any tips welcome!

[Yunru]

Find something else to do.
If you try to just heal, you'll end up twiddling your thumbs.
Also look at someone ongoing spells like Spiritual Weapon, so even when you need to heal you can eek out something else as well.

Early levels are quite limited in spell slots, so look at nonmagical ways to heal too. Herbalism kit springs to mind to allow you to make Potions of Healing.

[Dork_Forge]

What level will you be starting at? I'd suggest the Healer feat over Warcaster to be honest, you get a great deal of slotless healing from it and can pick people up to 1hp as long as you have healing kit uses left.

In terms of healing in combat it works just fine as long as you plan your economy, bonus action healing is key. Whilst you're using Healing Word you can double down on healing with the Healer feat or channel divinity using your action or use a cantrip or weapon attack to maintain damage output.

[clash]

The best thing a about a life cleric is it really enables you to play however you want. Life cleric has most of the cleric spells that you want to prepare anyways freeing up room in your prepared spells for what you decide to focus on. Their healing spells are more effective meaning you use less spells on healing between combats than other clerics freeing up more spellslots during combat for what you want to focus on. Furthermore if healing is what you want to do during combat, life cleric is actually fairly effective at it.

Comparing an inflict wounds for example to a cure wounds on a life cleric shows that healing can actually be more effective.
Inflict wounds 3d10 ~ 16.5 * .65 hit % = 10.75
Cure Wounds 1d8 + 5 + 3 ~ 12.5

[MikeRoxTheBoat]

Wade into battle with spirit guardians, spiritual weapon, and your mace. At level 3, you're essentially a small walking fireball with some crowd control built in. You'll have more fun if you're not sitting on your haunches waiting to heal.

Healing is best done after someone goes down, or out of combat. In combat, focus on support, positioning, crowd control, and essentially mitigating damage in the first place. You've got a lot of utility outside of your healing. Your heals just happen to be good enough as well that you don't have to worry about putting effort into them.

[airless_wing]

Life Clerics are incredibly tanky, especially at lvl 6 with the Blessed Healer ability. Don't fear walking into the melee to support your teammates; you can afford to have a few hits target you.

Mass Cure Wounds is an odd spell: on paper, it looks really fantastic with the sheer amount it can heal. But how often does the entire team need that much healing? And, if that keeps happening, might there be better tactics you all can use. Don't get me wrong; it can easily bring the team back from the brink for a handful of turns, where Mass Healing Word maybe earns your team only one more hit a piece. So keep it prepared, but 5th level spells are valuable.

Don't feel like you need to play passive either: you're still a Cleric with Divine strike and a ton of offensive versatility, getting to use cantrips and simple weapons.

[barakas]

Tank hard. Bless lots. Your party will love you. Focus on heals only when party members go down. I loved playing a Life Cleric. I got a few magic items (healing gloves - 1x/short rest 2d4+2 heals, staff of life - produced lemons that could be consumed to heal 2d4+2 hp and the effect of a lesser restoration. If a creature ate more than one lemon in a 24 hour period, they would take 2d8 poison damage and vomit for the next 30 minutes.) that really enhanced my play, but that isn't necessary to play a great character.

Spirit Guardians is such fun, especially when you flavor it well. Guardian of Faith is incredibly useful when placed in the middle of a big swarm of baddies.

[Nhorianscum]

Jim playing a life cleric for the first time. Domain and class fit for a priest of ilmater which I wanted to play.

Any tips on playing one effectively? I know healing isnt always the best in 5e, so any tips on doing it efficiently or what spells are worth it would be great! (Like mass cure wounds vs mass healing word).

Race wise I went for a variant human with warcaster.

Any tips welcome!

You get a lot of healing (in fact you get almost all the healing) from your domain list.

Upcast aid + domain + eventual hero's feast handles all our healing hands free.

Similarly GoF and SW are on the domain list and are non-concentration.

The main benefit of life is heavy armor and just hard diving your cleric list.

Remember. You're a prepared caster. You can shift spells known every long rest and dear lawd is it useful. Read and know all your spells.

[Nidgit]

Spiritual Weapon and Spirit Guardians are Cleric staples and you're in good shape opening with one or both of those in every combat. In fact, both are great candidates for upcasting. Guiding Bolt and Bless are also extremely helpful first level spells that are great for most situations.

If you're open to multiclassing, taking a level in Druid for Goodberry makes you a phenomenal healer since your Life Cleric bonus gets applied to each berry. Using Shillelagh frequently is a way of becoming more SAD and increasing the value of Wisdom.

Another solid technique, since you already have Warcaster, is picking up Booming Blade from a feat or multiclassing as a way of boosting your opportunity attacks to vicious heights. Give your enemies the choice of staying in staying in Spirit Guardians range or taking massive damage from an augmented Booming Blade attack.

[col_impact]

Life Cleric 1/ Shepherd Druid X and Shepherd Druid 2/ Life Cleric X are extremely potent healing builds. The bear spirit and unicorn spirit totems are unbounded, affecting any number of creatures within 30 feet radius for 1 min. This means, for example, that your healing words becomes repeatable mass cure wounds for 10 rounds under a unicorn spirit.

[SirGraystone]

Any cleric are good at healing, Life domain make it almost too easy. I wouldn't bother with druid multiclassing. If you really want to multiclass I would suggest more fighter for a fighting style and action surge.

For spells:
Cantrips: Guidance is too good not to take, Toll of the Dead is good damage and fit with Ilmater suffering.
1st level: Bless is a very good buff that should be use often, Healing wound is great in combat, out of combat you can use cure wounds but remember that everyones can use HD to heal on short rest.
2nd level: Spiritual weapon will add to your damage, prayer of healing is good for AoE heal.
3th level: mass healing words and spirit guardians
4th level: banishment (good to take out a dangerous opponent out of a fight will you wipe the smaller mobs), death ward (no concentration good to keep your tank up)

[Petrocorus]

Instead of multiclassing, you can take Magic Initiate, and then maybe Warcaster at level 4. You can live with Wis 16 until higher level.

Shillelagh can make you SAD, though you already need Str 15 for the heavy armor.

But Goodberries combines with Disciple of Life, by RAW. Which means 40 HP of healing out of a level 1 spell, if the DM doesn't cringe.

[KorvinStarmast]

Here is a tip or two:
1. At 5th level, when the max spell level you can cast is spell level 3, you can use Gentle Repose + Revivify to bring back an ally from the dead (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/q/87306/22566). As you ponder doing this, make sure you discuss it ahead of time ... but one of the reasons that I play life cleric a lot (and always keep a level 2 slot in reserve) is to prevent PC death among my allies using this tool. If you had already burned your 3rd level spell, you can keep the body "on ice" until you can prepare again and Revivify them. Then, since it is first thing of the day, you can expend Channel Divinity OPreserve Life) and get them up to half HP, whereas Revivify had only get them back to life with 1 HP.
You touch a creature that has died within the last minute.That creature returns to life with 1 hit point.

Something to keep in mind.

2. Magic Initiate Druid:
Your disciple of life class feature means that Goodberry berries are each worth 4 HP. (Confirmed by devs a few years ago). It is even listed in the Sage Advice Compendium.
The pick I have used is:
1st Level Spell = Goodberry.
Cantrip 1 - Shillelagh
Cantrip 2 - Guidance

This leaves you free to pick 3 other cantrips:
Sacred Flame
Chill Touch/Toll the Dead
Anything else on the Cleric cantrip list.

Or, you can pick "produce flame" from Druid and pick Guidance from Cleric.

3. Keep gems on your person for casting those critical spells: Revivify, Raise dead, etc. That's where your money goes as a Life Cleric. (Or, you can insist that your party mates keep those gems on themselves if they want you to cast that spell ... in AL that seems to be a reasonable request given how gold has gotten a bit more scarce in that venue ...)

4. Don't forget to fight. I have found Spiritual Weapon to be a very handy spell that is prepared for free, and it uses a bonus action. Caution: find out what enemies are immuned to force damage (Flame Skull, IIRC).

5. Until your wisdom is 20, make your ASI choice Wisdom. The higher your spell DC the better your chances are that Command, Hold Person, etc works better. Also, it makes your Shillelagh to hit and to damage more effective. It also makes your Spiritual Weapon More effective.

6. Your shield needs your Holy Symbol on it. Nuff Said.

7. On your second and subsequent round with Spirit Guardian, go ahead and "dodge" action and let SG do the damage. You don't want a hit to take down your concentration. (Had to correct this with an edit)

Teach your party mates about Long and Short Rests

8. Between combats, do not heal them with spell slots unless a strange situation arises. Make them burn those HD to heal. The spell slots saved may get them back up on their feet during combat. I still struggle with this in our current group.

[Slipperychicken]

I've been doing life clerics for years, and this is what I like best:

Build choices

Vhuman -> Healer feat
Get a bunch of healer's kits, use Healer liberally.
At character creation, see if your GM will let you trade some of the background starting gold for healer's kits
Consider grabbing war caster or resilient(con) at some point
Magic Initiate(Druid) is a great, if cheesy, choice because goodberries are basically auto stabilize+revive to 1hp. Allies can give you those if you get downed. Not strictly required


Spells

Bless all the time! It's not winning any style contests, but it's an extremely strong buff for its level and scales with your allies' damage. On average it increases expected DPR by a ridiculous amount (~10-150% depending on how hard a time they have hitting normally), so if you have three damage-dealers it's an autopick and by far the best use of your concentration.
Use healing word in-combat, and cure wounds outside combat.
Focus your spells on condition-removal. Lesser restoration, remove curse, protection from evil and good, dispel evil and good, etc etc. If a PC gets sick, you cure it. When a PC gets screwed-over by possession or curses, you un-screw them. It takes a lot of your spells-prepared to be ready for everything, but that is your job.
Spiritual Weapon. Doesn't take concentration, bonus action, decent attack. Good use for a 2nd level slot when something absolutely needs to die.
Spirit Guardians when you need to take down way more minions than your allies can handle
Enhance Ability + Guidance. When you absolutely need someone to pass a skill check, they'll get advantage and a d4.
Prayer of Healing is a trap. It looks super efficient, but the 10-minute casting time puts it in a super awkward place right before short-rests where it's never really worth it. Any time you could cast it, the party could also just short-rest and heal that way.


Gameplay

Your life mission is to keep the party alive forever, no matter how many combats happen between long rests.
Conserve spell slots. Use 'Healer' and 'Preserve Life' liberally because they are short-rest abilities. If allies can short-rest/hit-dice their damage off, let them do that. Learn when you need to cast spells to win a fight, and when your allies got this. Every spell wasted on an enemy is a spell you won't have to keep your party alive.
Pop "preserve life" when people are low enough that you can use all (or almost all) of the points in it. Fantastic when multiple PCs are downed.
Do not handle unidentified magical phenomena or potentially-trapped stuff. Let someone else do it first, and cure them if they get screwed over. Only interact with them when you are reasonably confident you can do it safely (i.e. "this can only be handled by the pure of heart"). You are the fire extinguisher. Do not let the extinguisher catch fire.
Do not second-guess yourself if a PC acts strange when interacting with a magical phenomenon. Use remove curse on them.
NEVER be arrogant or dismissive about diseases or curses. Yes, your spells can cure leprosy and cancer, but they will not cure your GM's frustration when you laugh off his big plot point. It doesn't take much to provoke a GM into making his stuff immune to your attempts at curing it.
Remember that your stuff can help NPCs too! A good life cleric has most of the iconic powers of *scrubbed*, so go around helping people to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside. Heal the wounded, cure the sick and blind, feed the hungry and thirsty, raise the dead, etc etc. The love of the GM is the greatest defense any PC can have.

[sophontteks]

Think of yourself more as a tank then a healer. You want to take damage to get the most out of your healing, since all healing will target you as well. And if the enemy ignores you, you can pretty much return your entire team to the fight with your divine power thing.

It's actually fantastic. The enemy has to focus you, because, duh, your the healer, but at the same time you are probably one of the tankiest members of the party, if not the tankiest.

This solves the age old question of "How does a tank hold agro?"

If you want a dedicated healer role, druids do it better. Shepherd druids actually spank life clerics silly in this department.

[Slipperychicken]

If you want a dedicated healer role, druids do it better. Shepherd druids actually spank life clerics silly in this department.

The unicorn-totem trick is certainly great for hitpoints once per short rest, but I don't see remove curse, revivify, or 'dispel good and evil' on the druid list. Removing those cursed/possessed status effects and giving cheap resurrection are important for the medium-to-long term success of a party. Unless druids are getting them from a summon somehow, in which case it's still coming online a lot later.

[stoutstien]

The unicorn-totem trick is certainly great for hitpoints once per short rest, but I don't see remove curse, revivify, or 'dispel good and evil' on the druid list. Removing those cursed/possessed status effects and giving cheap resurrection are important for the medium-to-long term success of a party. Unless druids are getting them from a summon somehow, in which case it's still coming online a lot later.

The bear totem is the true winner here. That's a crap ton of thp you can hand out before every short rest and the. Have the unicorn for emergency. Pre healing is the best healing.

[BoringInfoGuy]

Mechanically, Life Clerics favor Str over Dex builds. Heavy Armor needs a decent Str score to use. Magic weapons for clerics have a tendency to use Str as well. Lightbringer, for example.

I say this as a Dex based Life Cleric player.

A good Con Score is also important. Aside from maintaining Concentration on your spells, when the party wide AOE hits the party, you need to be one of the characters still standing even after a failed save. You can turn a near wipe to fighting fit in a single turn by using Preserve Life and Mass Healing Word. Bonus points if you can keep up Spirit Guardians at the same time.

The favorite ASI picks for any Cleric are using two to cap Wisdom, Resilent Con for Constitution Save proficiency, and Warcaster.

Many more details can be found in this forum on the Devout and the Dead thread.