Legendary Games Presents: Legendary Cleric (Open Playtest)

[Thealtruistorc]

I know that whispers about this project have been circulating for quite a while, and I'm happy to announce that Legendary Clerics is finally ready for open playtest.

This will be a rather brief playtest, likely closing after a week or two. Nonetheless, a wide variety of options for the revised cleric class are here for any who want to check them out.

Legendary Cleric (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QQtOuk1HTpVD6fLk-Cgo_J3uYvRY0qvNXb3sP-Z9jfU/edit?usp=sharing)

Input is, as always, appreciated

[Mister Rex]

I left comments in two places.

Granting Divine Paragon's advanced boon progression to every cleric seems like a mistake to me. It's a massive amount of power creep to not need to trade anything for it, when its on top of massively buffed domains granting entire, scaling class features in some places.

The Prophet archetype, and just generally granting a class with unlimited access to their spell list the ability to take Quick Study, is some of the most egregious power creep I've ever seen. I'd normally be very polite about this, but how is this a good idea. At the "very least" an exploiter wizard needs to actually buy and know the spell.

The domain changes, ignoring that a lot of them need number and balance tweaks, seems good and the basic changes like Wisdom + ranks for knowledge religion seem ok.

I hope this playtest gets a lot of TLC, but those two were the big things that stood up as just, "and then we duct taped it onto the class".

[Kris Moonhand]

Things I like upon sight:

4 skill ranks per level.
Non-deity Clerics baked into the class.
Channel Energy now has Selective Channel built in.
Channel Energy no longer locked to alignment.
Channel Energy now completely Wisdom-based.
Clerics being actually good at Knowledge: Religion.
Spontaneous casting of domain spells.
The Faith Pool thing being the fuel for domain stuff instead of having a bunch of 3/day abilities or whatever.
Domains now feel like actual class features instead of tacked-on garbage that you forget about half the time (I scanned through them a bit, but I liked what I saw, especially the elemental ones).
The Faithless and Primordial Disciple archetypes (what can I say, I like Kineticists).

Things I don't like upon sight:

Spontaneous Casting no longer allows casting of cure spells (You can take Expanded Domain Magic to make up for it, but still).
Less overall spell slots because domain spell slots are no longer a thing.
Deific Obedience boons 6 levels early. That's faster than literally any of the Prestige Classes that get boons. And that's terrible.

What happens with the Obedience stuff if you don't worship a deity or other powerful entity? Are you just supposed to trade it out with one of the ACFs?

Maybe I'm just blanking, but it looks like the Prophet only talks about preparing spells, not casting them? Do they cast differently than a regular cleric? Are they supposed to work like an Arcanist?

[Skaia]

Normally I don't comment on these things and just kind of watch its development but there's a few things that are pretty concerning about this to me as a whole. I really like the direction and think that beefier domains are neat and making more spells spontaneous would probably get rid of some of the issues of playing an early level cleric but there are few things that just jump out at me as a sort of...why? Also a small issue with the domains.

Firstly, Freedom is a subdomain belonging to Liberation. Also I get why Erosion, Vermin and Ruins as domains are missing, because nobody has probably heard of them, but Madness and all of the alignment ones are as well. It doesn't seem random that the four alignment ones are missing, though Madness doesn't make much sense to me to be, and also starts to kind of pigeonhole a cleric's choices on domains since a god only has Five Domains to begin with. Probably not a huge issue, it's just something I'm curious about. On to the why part, that will probably not contain anything others have mentioned so far, so as not to just rehash their points.

The Embodiment Archetype, the Champion Cleric Archetype here. So, there are some pretty clear conventions I feel when it comes to how DDS balances their archetypes and gishes but even considering the Lost Sphere gish classes, which I'm pretty sure are accepted as generally stronger than DDS ones, this ones Chassis makes no sense. It's a full High-Caster, with a martial tradition, and full blended training, on top of also getting 10 extra talents from their domains, and then a bit more if you want to trade out some of your blessing of faith. That's a lot of talents, that can be used at near full power since you're also still 3/4s BAB (and even then there's a handful of skills that scale on skill ranks), which I don't think there is anything across any of the sphere classes/archetypes (at least on the spheres wiki) that even comes close to that kind of power.

Evangelist. Not really sure how I feel about giving bardic performance on a class that kind of seems way stronger than it, but archetypes that turn one class into another is a thing that has happened with other legendary classes so I won't get into it that much. That this stacks with Embodiment throws it into some weird stuff. You lose your first domain, and in its place get a different list of spontaneous spells or in place of that 10 extra talents. Now, you still get a second domain and thus you still get associated domain spheres, so by RAW I think you just end up getting another extra 10 talents on top of that, (with like 5 or so of them coming at level 10.)

Generalist Discipline. I have a problem with this conceptually because it's super overloaded. Going back to the Embodiment Archetype this now just gives you full unrestricted talent selection for your magic talents, which just makes it even stronger. But beyond that, your domain is the main choice of your class and the main power of it, and also the main thematic of how you represent your god. You're basically taking that choice and just throwing it out the window, allowing you to flex full on class features as well as pseudo flex your spell list (and less important class skills,) at the cost of a feat and a different capstone. It just feels really strong and also just takes away the choices involved in playing this class to begin with.

Also small note that more amuses me then anything else, is that you can take Cloistered Cleric and Embodiment archetype or Scholar of the Canon feat to be an 6+int Skill Point INT Cleric.

Anyway, I haven't read all of the archetypes nor have I read all of the domains, but this from just a bit of reading is what jumped out at me as immediately noticeably problematic.