Clerics are one of two classes in the PHB that get a very large selection of subclasses (on top of also having an option in the Dungeon Master's Guide.) Cleric domains can help to flesh out the divine pantheons of a world, and while existing deities might fit with new cleric subclasses, it's also an inspiration to create new gods.
As a note, I'm going to rush past any Potent Spellcasting or Divine Strike feature, as one or the other is common across all subclasses, with Blessed Strikes, the optional replacement in Tasha's, giving you slightly less damage on average but applying to both melee attacks and cantrips. Potent Spellcasting (which seems slightly less common) allows you to apply your Wisdom modifier to the damage of your Cleric cantrips, while Divine Strikes adds 1d8 damage, or 2d8 after level 14, to one melee weapon attack on your turn, the damage type being tied thematically to the class. Blessed Strikes adds 1d8 radiant damage to either one melee attack on your turn or your cantrips (unlike Divine Strike, it doesn't upgrade. You could argue this is generally better than Potent Spellcasting, given that its average damage is 4.5, which is close to 5 from Wisdom, and can crit if you have an attack-roll cantrip, and of course also empowers your weapons if you use them.)
Arcana Domain:
Arcana Domain, found in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, is for worship of gods of magic. Divine and arcane magic don't have any mechanical distinction, but I do find it interesting how subclasses like this and the Divine Soul sorcerer kind of blur the lines. If you want the healing capabilities of a cleric but also kind of want to play a Wizard, this might be the right choice for you.
Your domain spells are Detect Magic, Magic Missile, Magic Weapon, Nystul's Magic Aura, Dispel Magic, Magic Circle, Arcane Eye, Lemonund's Secret Chest, Planar Binding, and Teleportation Circle. Some of these are great, though Nystul's Magic Aura is generally one of those spells I imagine is mainly useful for NPCs, like having a Lich use it to appear as a humanoid along with some illusion magic (which I'm totally not having a lich NPC use in a campaign I run...)
At 1st level, you get Arcane Initiate: You gain proficiency in Arcana and you learn two cantrips from the Wizard spell list, which count as Cleric cantrips for you. (They don't specifically note these don't count against your cantrips known, but I think that's just because SCAG isn't formatted as precisely as later books.)
At level 2, you get Channel Divinity: Arcane Abjuration. As an action, you present your holy symbol and one celestial, elemental, fey, or fiend of your choice within 30 feet of you has to make a Wisdom saving throw if they can see or hear you. If it fails, it's turned for 1 minute or until it takes damage. While not an official condition (though it probably should be?) this works just like Turn Undead. And like Turn Undead, this gets upgraded. After you reach 5th level, if a creature fails, it gets banished for 1 minute if it isn't on its plane of origin, with no concentration required, if it's of a low enough CR. (Eventually getting to CR 4 or lower at level 17.) While this doesn't have the Banishment spell's permanent banish effect if you let it last the full minute, this is still a pretty great bit of crowd control - again, with no concentration required!
At level 6, you get Spell Breaker. If you restore hit points with a spell of 1st level or higher to an ally, you can also end one spell of your choice on that creature, if the spell's level is equal or lower to the level of the spell slot you expended to heal them. This is actually really fantastic - you do a 2nd level Healing Word on someone who's under Hold Person and they're popped out of it. Being able to dispel magic and heal at the same time is actually really solid.
At level 8, you get Potent Spellcasting.
At level 17, you get Arcane Mastery. You choose one spell each of 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th levels from the Wizard spell list. These get added to your domain spells, and are always prepared for you. That's right. Divine Intervention and Wish on the same character. Dear lord. I mean, if there's any downside to the Cleric spell list it's that it isn't the Wizard spell list. But now it kind of is. Jeez.
Honestly, there's a lot to like about this subclass. I'm kind of surprised I don't see it more often. I also think this is the perfect subclass to take if the party is pressuring you to be a cleric for the heals when what you really want to be is a Wizard (granted, that Arcane Mastery thing won't come online until 17, so even though you get 6th level spells at 11, you won't get Disintegrate until later.)
Forge Domain:
In a weird way, I feel like Forge clerics are kind of proto-Artificers. Still, gods of the forge have been mainstays of real-world pantheons, and you get a lot of really useful features here, especially when magic weapons are few and far between (the longest-running campaign I've been in as a player has a Forge cleric, and when we got all our equipment taken away when we arrived in the Nine Hells, it's been very useful to be able to empower the Gunslinger/Ranger's salvaged musket with magical damage.)
Your domain spells are Idenfity, Searing Smite, Heat Metal, Magic Weapon, Elemental Weapon, Protection from Energy, Fabricate, Wall of Fire, Animate Objects, and Creation. Naturally a bit of a fire theme here, but also plenty of stuff to enhance weapons.
You also gain proficiency in heavy armor and smith's tools (oddly not martial weapons.)
At 1st level, you get Blessing of the Forge. At the end of a long rest, you can touch one nonmagical object that is a suit of armor or a simple or martial weapon (no natural weapons.) Until the end of your next long rest or until you die, the object becomes a +1 magic item (so a +1 weapon or a +1 armor.) You can use this once per long rest (which, given that it only happens at the end of a long rest, is kind of implied.) This can be huge in any situation where you need magic weapons to fight resistant or immune foes. And if the party's full up on magic weapons, magic armor is rarer, so putting that on a party member's armor can be very useful.
At 2nd level, you get Channel Divinity: Artisan's Blessing. You can conduct an hour-long ritual to create a nonmagical metal object worth 100 gold or less. All you need is metal equal in value to the object you want to create, which you lay out in front of you for the ritual. This will even create the nonmetallic parts of the object (such as the leather of a sword's hilt) even if you don't have that material. This is one of those things that really lets the players use their imagination - all sorts of useful objects can be created, and there's no limit on size - only value - so we've been able to make things like carts or a complex rig to allow the friendly unicorns pulling our wagon to detach themselves if needed in combat.
At level 6, you get Soul of the Forge. You gain resistance to Fire damage and while you're wearing heavy armor, you get a +1 bonus to your AC. Both of these are very welcome - fire resistance is great, as it's one of the most common forms of magical damage (you'll also avoid exhaustion in hot jungles or deserts.)
At level 8, you get Divine Strike, dealing fire damage.
At level 17, you get Saint of Forge and Fire. You gain full immunity to fire damage, and while wearing heavy armor, you gain resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks. As I've often pointed out, player characters only rarely get full immunity to any kind of damage, and fire is a great one to have - you can stare down an ancient red dragon and take their breath full in the face and be fine. Indeed, dragons tend not to have magical attacks, as do a few other high level creatures. In fact, the RP possibilities of this are really cool - maybe your god commands you to create something in a forge inside a volcano, and you have to wade through a lake of lava to get to the sacred forge - which you're totally fine to do.
So, this is a subclass that doesn't focus so much on enhancing healing, but gives you a lot of other ways to support your party, and is really thematically consistent, which I love.
Grave Domain:
Another very popular choice, the Grave Domain is a more benevolent (potentially) take on death as a divine domain - being less about the promotion of death and destruction, but more about being a caretaker for the dead and ensuring the natural cycle is not profaned. (I had an NPC describe it as "keeping the living alive and keeping the dead dead.") The way I think of this subclass is that while Life domain lets you keep your party at the peak of health, this one is better for dealing with emergencies, with a kind of "don't you die on me!" vibe. Life domain is your general practitioner, while Grave is your ER doctor.
Your domain spells are Bane, False Life, Gentle Repose, Ray of Enfeeblement, Revivify, Vampiric Touch, Blight, Death Ward, Antilife Shell, and Raise Dead. Some strong offensive spells here, actually. There's a grave cleric in the campaign I run, and I'm honestly shocked I don't see Blight or Antilife Shell used more often.
At 1st level, you get Circle of Mortality. If you'd normally roll dice to restore hit points with a spell to a creature at 0 hit points, you instead heal them for the maximum amount the spell can do. This is actually great, giving them a big heal just when they need the biggest heal you can give them.
In addition, you learn Spare the Dying, which does not count against your known Cleric cantrips. Additionally, you can cast it as a bonus action and at a range of 30 feet. This is actually fantastic - usually you're better off just casting a healing spell with your action than using Spare the Dying if you're in the middle of a fight, but this lets you handle things while still leaving your action open, and also lets you save people you can't quite get to. There was a moment in Critical Role's second campaign in which Grave cleric Caduceus managed to stabilize one character and dispel the mind control on another (the mind-controlled one had been the one to knock out the unconscious one) on the same turn, proving how clutch this can be.
Also at level 1, you get Eyes of the Grave. As an action, you can learn the location of any undead within 60 feet of you that isn't behind total cover and isn't protected from divination magic. You can do this a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier per long rest. This is not quite as good as a Paladin's Divine Sense, but being able to alternate with the party's paladin (or if you, you know, don't have one - though seriously, paladins are awesome) makes this pretty good - mostly just a cherry on top of some other really good features.
At 2nd level, you get Channel Divinity: Path to the Grave. As an action, you choose a creature within 30 feet of you that you can see, cursing it. The next time you or an ally hits the cursed creature with an attack, they have vulnerability to all of that attack's damage (and then the curse ends.) Doubling an attack is really amazing. Also consider that you can hold this action (and unlike a spell, you don't need to concentrate and it's not wasted if you don't use it.) In our Curse of Strahd campaign, the Grave cleric often holds this for when my Vengeance Paladin is about to hit a target, and then I'll use a divine smite to do enormous amounts of damage (I think I did something like 100 damage when I also happened to crit against an Amber Golem).
At 6th level, you get Sentinel at Death's Door. As a reaction, if you or a creature you can see within 30 feet is hit with a critical strike, you can turn that hit into a normal hit (and any effects triggered by the critical hit are canceled.) You can use this feature a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier. 30 feet is a bit of a short range, but being able to cancel out any big spikes of damage can be very helpful. It might make the DM sad they don't get to roll so many dice, but it's a great way to keep things reasonable.
At level 8, you get Potent Spellcasting.
At level 17, you get Keeper of Souls. When an enemy you can see within 60 feet of you dies, you or one creature of your choice you can see within 60 feet of you regains HP equal to the enemy's number of hit dice. You can use this feature only if you aren't incapacitated, and once you use it, you can't until the start of your next turn. This rider on the end actually makes it clear that this doesn't take your reaction, which is pretty great - you can just redistribute that life energy. This isn't going to be a huge amount of healing - an Ancient Red Dragon only has 28 hit dice, which is a sizable heal, though if an ancient red dragon has died, I feel like your campaign might have just concluded. That said, this is actually free healing that's limited only by how many things you can kill, and while you have to be conscious to use it, there's nothing saying you can't use it on an unconscious ally to pop them up, so the party can actually focus on taking down the monster while you just spare the dying on the unconscious person and let the monster's death pop them back.
I think the Grave Cleric is another great option if you want to focus on being a healer, but while the Life Cleric is about healing and little else, Grave Clerics also have some powerful offensive capabilities as well. It's a top-tier subclass.
Next post, we'll look at the options out of Tasha's, including the Order domain originally published in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica.
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