5e Throwdowns #2: Judgement Day, aka the terminator!

[LudicSavant]

How tough to kill are you really if your team crumbles around you? In my ethos, a tank does not meekly stand by, confident in their personal turtle shell, waiting for the other 3/4s of their party’s action economy to die off. Thus, I have aimed not only to become very durable, but also to become the character who must die first in order to make anything stick to any of my allies. The unselfish terminator who shares their terminator-ness.

To that end, I give you the everhealing juggernaut and high priest of Cyttorak, the Regenerator! Nobody in the party dies until you do, and you... just… won’t... die!

The Regenerator

How it feels to eat a 400 damage optimized burst combo,
then stand up on your turn with full hit points.

Opening Rant:
Why just have hundreds of hp when you can generate thousands?

For that matter, why just be a Terminator when you can make your allies unkillable too, get the whole Skynet crew going? And hey, if you get knocked to 0 hit points, why not just stand back up at the start of your turn and heal the whole party to full? And just walk at people using Dodge+Spirit Guardians while negating whatever Team Monster wants to do to the party? And why multiclass when you can twink out with just one? (What, I like learning spells as soon as I can, fight me)

How tough to kill is your party really? It's not just a matter of healing hit points, but also all those niggling status effects like "possessed by a ghost" or "cursed" or "paralyzed" or "dead." Add onto that the fact that you're a heavily armored character that can afford to spend their actions on Dodge and still get most of their damage output, or the fact that you can heal literally thousands of hit points more than other Cleric subclasses (yes, that's "than other Clerics" not "than non-Clerics"), or the fact that you have fantastic damage mitigation spells, and more. Oh sure, you can get by without a healer in 5e, but a well-played Life Cleric is basically just a force multiplier on the survivability of your whole party. And if you didn't need all that healing, you spent fewer spell slots on the healing you did need and have more space for caving in faces. Wanna be tough? A great Life Cleric makes everyone tough. Nobody dies until you do, and you aren't gonna die easily.

We're also going to be combining stuff from GGtR and Eberron to get a suite of useful Reactions and get some good damage out, smashing into your enemies and punishing them for trying to hit you, or for trying to flee, or for trying to hit allies, or even for just trying to stay put. You get the idea.

Please note that Clerics have so many options that I can't actually cover all of the strategies for all of them, this is not a 100% complete listing of the potent tactics available to you.

What this build will do:

• Be exceptionally strong at level 1, and remain strong all the way to 20. No breakpoints here, we optimize for all levels.
• Make it so that nobody in the party will go down until you do.
• Make it very difficult for you to go down.
• Have good damage, control, and utility while walking inevitably towards your victims.
• Not dip Druid, because then your DM might not let you wear your metal Juggernaut helmet, which is thematically unacceptable! Also it’d reduce your AC, delays feature progression, and we’ll have thousands of healing anyways. But mostly because everyone already knows the Goodberry trick and I want to showcase what a twinked-out single-class Life Cleric can do.

Level 20 Life Cleric
Race: Variant Human
Stats: Str 15 / Dex 8 / Con 16 (18 after Aberrant and Res:Con) / Int 8 / Wis 16 (20 @8) / Cha 8
Background: Rakdos Cultist (Azorius is very good too, see Variants at bottom)
ASIs: Aberrant Mark (+1 Con) @1, Wis @4, Wis @8, Res(Con) @12, Magic Initiate @16, Lucky @19
Cantrips: Booming Blade, Guidance, Toll the Dead, Word of Radiance, Light, Thaumaturgy, Shillelagh, Thorn Whip

At 1st Level: Kicking Off With a Bang

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We're gonna break out the cheese right out the starting gate by taking a Ravnica background.

We're going to pick Rakdos, because it gives something that Life Clerics usually don't have: A reaction spell! Enemies basically have to kill you first, and this punishes them for actually managing to hit you sometimes with a good-scaling burst of damage.

You also automatically know all these spells as Cleric spells that you didn't before.

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• Burning Hands
• Dissonant Whispers
• Hellish Rebuke
• Crown of Madness
• Enthrall
• Flaming Sphere
• Fear
• Haste
• Confusion
• Wall of Fire
• Dominate Person

Hey, is that Dissonant Whispers, arguably the best level 1 direct damage spell that stays relevant throughout the whole game? It sure is. This lovely spell will not only do a respectable 3d6/save for half damage of a great type (Psychic) but, more importantly, will make an enemy flee and provoke opportunity attacks from everyone.

While we're at it, why don't we just go ahead and grab Aberrant Dragonmark for +1 Con, Booming Blade, and the Shield spell once per short rest (plus an optional bonus effect, best used if no allies are within 30 feet of you). So we now have more good reactions. And we also have set up a situation where the enemy is punished for trying to hit us (because we're tough as nails to hit, and can respond with Shield or Hellish Rebuke), and punished if they try to run away from us (because Booming Blade), and punished for just staying put and letting the party cluster around them because you can just drop a Dissonant Whispers on them and give the whole team OAs. Basically, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

And of course you'll have a bonus action Healing Word that not only can save people from the swinginess of level 1 life, but heal enough to pop an ally up to full thanks to your Life Cleric boost!

To summarize,

• Can full (or nearly full) heal an ally as a bonus action.
• At this level, Guidance is a bigger bonus than Expertise that you can hand anyone.
• Booming Blade, Toll the Dead, and Word of Radiance
• Dissonant Whispers straight up ends enemies if enough party members are around them.
• Burning Hands is a better AoE than Clerics get in a level 1 or 2 slot.
• Shield 3 times per DMG standard day; optionally can give +1d8 temp HP or +1d8 damage to something in 30 feet of you (better to use if allies aren’t next to you)
• Hellish Rebuke for reaction damage (upcasts decently well later, too).
• Bless, Shield of Faith, and Sanctuary for versatile defensive options that will never stop being relevant. Remember you can just cast Sanctuary at the end of your turn, after hitting someone.

And we're still just level one. We're just getting started.

At 5th level: And Then There Were Spirit Guardians

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Your bread and butter is SG+SW+Dodge, or Toll the Dead or Booming Blade (depending on the enemy’s defenses), or a spell slot like Dissonant Whispers+OAs. And if they hit you, you can react with Hellish Rebuke or Shield (optionally with the temp hp or force damage rider).

Dodge+Spirit Guardians+ the occasional Shield is sufficient to safely wade into a horde of mooks until they are all dead; a type of foe that many other tanks struggle with is a cakewalk for you. Spirit Guardians also lasts a generous ten minutes, so you can often get multiple encounters out of it in a dungeoneering scenario with your excellent defense and Con-saves.

Your Channel Divinity is fantastic, and doesn’t count as a spell so it can be cast alongside a Spiritual Weapon or Healing Word. It’s a considerable chunk of health, especially since healing can’t miss (whereas all your damage mitigation will slow down the damage of Team Monster).

You also have a wide selection of good spells prepared thanks to your lovely domain list. Sure, they’re spells that a Cleric already knows, but things like Lesser Restoration, Bless, Revivify, and Spiritual Weapon might as well just read “+1 spell prepared” because those are things you always want on standby anyways.

Spoiler: Optional: On the care of Animated Dead

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If you're feeling Evil, you also have the option to start using Animate Dead from here on out, using them to swarm your foes, provide cover for allies, block movement, grapple, dish out damage, hand out potions (for even more healing utility), whatever you like. You don't have to use a bonus action every turn; you can give them a lasting general order and only need to use bonus actions to change it. The most resource-efficient way to use Animate Dead is to spend any leftover spell slots (usually from non-adventuring days) right before you sleep on it, then you'll have your minions and your slots the next day. If at the end of the day you don't have any spell slots left to maintain them, no problem, you can just order them to dispose of themselves before the 24-hour timer runs out. In this way, you can essentially convert downtime into minions.

Healing Snapshot at L6 (w/Blessed Healer):

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At level 6, a character with a d8 HD and 14 Con has 45 HP. Even a d12 HD / 16 Con Barbarian has just 65.

• Your Channel Divinity heals 30 hp a pop (180 over a ‘standard adventuring day’), fantastic all on its own.
• Even a Healing Word is worth 12.5 hp (3 to you, 9.5 to ally), for 42.5 when used with a CD. That’s a pretty significant amount of burst healing.
• Life Transference is an average 41 HP burst heal (basically a full burst heal for an ally), but deals an average of 13 damage to you (counting Blessed Healer).
• An L2 Prayer of Healing is worth 76 hp to 4 allies, out of combat.
• Revivify and Lesser Restoration are always prepared if you need them, per your Domain list. If anyone besides you dies, you can just pick them up as an Action.
• Warding Bond is an amazing spell. Imagine if you could extend Shield of Faith’s duration to an hour, make it non-Concentration, and switch out 1 point of its AC bonus for +1 to all saves. That alone is well worth a 2nd level slot later on, and that’s before we even count its fantastic damage-splitting ability, or its synergy with your level 6 Blessed Healer ability or your multi-target heals.

And remember, healing can’t miss. The slower enemies do damage, the more effective it is. For perspective, a CR 6 Vrock only has ~9 DPR against AC20, or ~3 DPR if you’re using Dodge+Spirit Guardians.

You might have heard people say that Clerics shouldn’t be healing that much, but that’s for non-Life Clerics. It’s a much better deal for Life Clerics.

At Level 11: Being a Full Caster in Tier 3+

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You’ve got a whole lot of slots to play with now. Your low level slots remain very useful due to choices like Bless, Warding Bond, Hellish Rebuke (which upcasts well), Spiritual Weapon, Dissonant Whispers, etc.

You now have a complete set of tools to fix basically any status, whether it’s “dead” or things that are even harder to remove without a Cleric in your party. This can really help increase everyone’s survivability in a way that is often overlooked by people who only care about AC and HP.

You have your choice of buffs like Holy Sword or Haste (from Rakdos), as well as lockdown effects like Banishment. Holy Sword is a fantastic choice if you have someone like a Fighter who makes a lot of attacks.

• Your healing has been scaling apace.
• PCs tend to have about 80hp at this point.
• Death Ward is a non-Concentration buff that gives an extra “0 hp” gate, which means tha to kill someone they not only need to get them to 0, but hit them
• 330 hp in your Channel Divinity pool (per “standard adventuring day”), 55hp a pop
• L6 Heal is worth 86hp + status effect heals, essentially a 0-full.
• L3 Mass Healing Word is worth 55hp if it hits 4 people. Combos with Channel Divinity just like regular Healing Word does.
• Previous heal spells remain relevant, they’re just in spell slots you can use more freely.
• If anyone dies, you always have Revivify prepared.

At 13th level: Regenerate Synergy

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Right here, you get Regenerate, a non-Concentration buff which has an especially noteworthy synergy with Life Cleric: It heals 10 hp per tick rather than 1, so it heals over 6000 hp.

While much of this will be lost to overhealing, it’s basically “don’t worry about taking hit point damage for an entire hour.” Also importantly, the timing of the regeneration is at the best possible time: Right at the start of the creature’s turn. What’s that, got reduced to zero? You just stand up at the start of your turn, action economy fully intact.

Level 17: Supreme Healing

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We’ve picked up Magic Initiate (Druid) which gives us Shillelagh (to bring out our fully scaled Booming Blade / Divine Strike), Thorn Whip (for comboing people into SG, teammate hazards, etc) and Goodbe just kidding, we’re taking Absorb Elements because at this level it can cut some 40 damage off a Meteor Swarm or Ancient Dragon’s breath mid-combat (which can save your Concentration), and because we have more non-combat healing than we know what to do with anyways.

With Shillelagh + Divine Strike + Booming Blade, you have a 6d8+5 damage resourceless melee attack (10d8+5 if they move away from you)… on top of whatever you’re dishing out with Concentration and your bonus action (such as upcast SG+SW). And of course as always you can throw in a Dodge or a full offensive/control spell or the like while you’re at it. Dissonant Whispers is even still relevant in a first level slot because the OAs of your allies have probably scaled.

You also have Supreme Healer, which supercharges your lower-level healing spells to a point that makes your between-combat healing feel bottomless and lets you dish out a surprising amount of healing with Healing Word, Mass Healing Word, or even Cure Wounds or Mass Cure Wounds.

And if enemies somehow actually wear your party down, you can just use Mass Heal and instantly pop everyone right back up to full.

Level 20: Even More Regenerate, Channel Divinity, and Improved Divine Intervention

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By now, you’re getting 900 hp over a ‘standard adventuring day’ just from your Channel Divinity alone. Then over 700 from Mass Heal. Then potentially thousands from up to 3 slots of Regenerate (tip: You can use it on multiple party members at a time). And then you’re getting Supreme Healing + Blessed Healer + Disciple of life from everything lower than that, with plenty of slots, which adds up to an enormous amount in its own right.

Basically, unless an enemy can straight up blow through all your HP at once, they can’t kill your or your allies. And even if they did disable any of your allies, you could put them right back into the fight.

So they need to go for you, the Regenerating, bonus action Supreme/Blessed healing, Shielding, Element Absorbing, Hellish Rebuking, Dodging (or Divine Strike Booming Blading), status removing, death warding, damage splitting, buffing/debuffing/controlling/supporting machine while dealing with your entire unflappable Terminator party. And even if they burst you all the way down to 0 (easier said than done), they need to get through all your Death Saves before your initiative comes up, or you’ll just stand right back up, and heal all the way back to full, and they have to go through it all over again.

You also have high saves against pretty much everything that matters to you: Con, Wis, and Cha, with rerolls from Lucky and various spells that can help you further. Dexterity saves are mostly just damage and you just shrug that off. That just leaves the rare Int saves, which honestly seem like an appropriate thematic weakness for the juggernaut anyways.

Oh, and if there's something that still seems bothersome, you can just ask God to sort it out with Improved Divine Intervention, your lovely reward for not multiclassing.

Final thoughts:

Spoiler: Variants for this build

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• My top two choices for Ravnica background were Rakdos (for a handful of nifty tools Clerics don’t usually have like Reaction spell slots, low level AoEs, Dissonant Whispers, Haste, etc) and Azorius (pretty much solely for Counterspell). I picked Rakdos for the default build because it’s flashier, but in terms of being able to have a counter for every kind of offense Azorius may well be the better choice. I recommend it if you feel your party composition doesn't have enough Counterspellers.
  
  
• A level 1 Druid dip can work great depending on how your DM handles the whole “metal armor” thing (I discuss the various ways of approaching this in my Land Druid post here). Obviously, there’s the ol’ Goodberry combo, plus you get Shillelagh and Absorb Elements a lot earlier and thus can have the Booming Blade side schtick going at all levels. This’ll let you fit in another ASI like Warcaster. I avoided this for the default build just because everyone already knows about the Goodberry combo and because no two people on the forums seem to be able to agree with each other on the Druid armor question and anywho, it would be thematically unacceptable to take off your metal juggernaut helmet.
  
  
• Other races I considered were Rakdos Mark of Sentinel Human (Shield 1/day, switch in to take an ally's damage 1/day, pseudo-Expertise in Insight and Perception, puts Compelled Duel, Bigby’s Hand, and most importantly Counterspell on your spell list), Warforged (for +1 passive AC), Loxodon (Advantage on charms and fear makes Wisdom saves truly ironclad, and you can hold people with your trunk until they melt in your SW/SG), and Hill Dwarf (+1 hp/level is worse than +1 AC, and you get -5 speed, but you have the option to dump Str and get more Dex)
  
  Ultimately, I went with Variant Human because of the sheer value of the Aberrant Mark + Res:Con combo.
  
• You can take Res:Con before maxing Wis depending on your playstyle preference.
  
• I thought about changing up the ASI order to make it more of a melee weapon attack machine at mid-levels, but Toll the Dead is plenty serviceable at the levels that Booming Blade falls behind a bit (and BB still has relevance against low AC foes, or if you get Advantage), and I just couldn’t justify delaying maxing Wisdom on a Cleric, especially when you’d often want to use your Action for things like spellcasting or Dodging anyways.
  
• You can swap out Thorn Whip for one of the Shape Element spells or Create Bonfire, depending on what would fit best with your party.

Spoiler: tl;dr Summary

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Aberrant Mark and Rakdos makes you start off exceptionally strong and versatile at level 1, and you stay strong throughout the entire undiluted full spellcaster progression.

You have a full suite of potent Reactions, something that Clerics usually just don't have. You max Wis ASAP. You have high (and not infrequently buffed) saves where it counts (Wis, Con, Cha), with your only real weakness being the rare Int save (Dex saves are mostly just damage, so you mostly just shrug them off).

Works well against any kind of enemy, including huge mook swarms (something a lot of other tanks struggle with).

You also provide the extra survivability that comes from having a Cleric. Simply put, some status effects are a lot more problematic if you don't have one ("Oh, my ally's possessed by a low CR ghost from a mook swarm, guess I have to reduce them to zero hit points to get the ghost out.")

But perhaps most of all, you have literally thousands of hit points worth of healing before we even talk about the fantastic Regenerate synergy (heck, the Channel Divinity alone scales up to being worth 900hp per standard day at 20), and this scales pretty smoothly throughout the game, giving you the ability to actually outheal damage while still getting a lot of your punches in at the same time (especially since so much of your DPR contribution is going to come from your Concentration and bonus actions as a Cleric). You also have plenty of mitigation tools to slow down the damage you and your allies take, making it even harder to overcome your healing. Bear-barians wish they could eat half this many hit points of damage.

And you can actually "draw aggro" to your tank since enemies pretty much have to deal with you in order for anyone else to go down and stay down.

Shouting "LIVE, INSECT" when healing allies is optional.