You'll notice that a lot of my builds have been for martial character, usually half casters, third casters, or not casters at all. Pure spellcasters aside from the Warlock will often present so many possibilities for what we can do that it's really more likely you'll be playing sort of reactively, figuring out what makes the most sense in the moment. Now, sure, my Wizard can do his Conjure Minor Elementals/Scorching Ray combo to do insane damage (though not very sustainably) but I certainly don't do that every combat.
Still, even if you don't have that particular combo of spells, I wanted to get a sense of what other casters might consider using.
Clerics are most classically the healers of D&D. But there are two ways in which that doesn't really do them justice - first of all, basically no character should or even can just spend every turn in combat healing (ok, maybe when you get to higher levels you might find yourself doing that). Second, there's plenty that a Cleric can do as an offensive combatant.
I'd considered looking at the Grave Cleric, updated in Horrors Within (and one that has generally gotten disappointed reviews - my take was that if we didn't already have the Xanathar's version, it would be well-received. Part of the reason you sometimes need to just break and do a new edition is that people won't play a nerfed version of an older option if that older option is still available). But I decided to set that aside because I think the War Cleric might give us some more interesting decisions.
More than any other Cleric, War Clerics really favor going the Protector route, which gives you heavy armor training and martial weapon proficiency. To be honest, I think that the former is probably not worth it - sticking to medium armor will get you just one AC shy of the highest type of heavy armor, and with less of an ability score investment (you get slowed if you have less than 15 Strength in Splint or Plate, whereas 14 Dexterity will ensure you're getting the maximum AC out of medium armor).
On basically any other cleric, I'd prefer the extra cantrip and the ability to add Wisdom to Arcana and Religion checks (more or less making them Wisdom skills if you take a 10 in Int). But because this is a class that gives us (limited) additional attacks, I'm tempted to push for more of a martial vibe.
Now: we probably need to be wary of just treating this like it's a Martial class. Without Extra Attack, we get less value out of a feat like Great Weapon Master. We also don't get Weapon Masteries, which make something like Dual Wielder useful. Polearm Master can work great for us, but the bonus action Pole Strike attack we get is slightly redundant with our War Priest feature.
The big question, I think, is whether we want to pour everything into Strength or Wisdom.
Naturally, Wisdom is usually the top stat for a Cleric, as it affects our spells. It also gives us more uses of our War Priest feature.
But we also want to have decent Strength if we are choosing to fight with a big martial weapon.
Now, we can solve this issue, to an extent at least: if we take Magic Initiate: Wizard, we can pick up True Strike as a cantrip. This would let us make our regular attack with Wisdom, and even do an extra d6 of damage at level 10.
Alternatively, if we grabbed Magic Initiate: Druid, we could take Shillelagh, which would transform a Club or Quarterstaff into, at this level, a d10 weapon. The benefit here is that we could use this with both the Attack action and a War Priest bonus action - however, we need to spend our first bonus action on casting Shillelagh, as it only lasts a minute.
Here's what I think we're going to do:
We'll aim to start off at level 1 with a 17 in Wisdom and a 15 in Strength. At level 4, we take Great Weapon Master, making our Strength 16, and then at level 8, we take War Caster, giving us an 18 in Wisdom. By starting off with 15 in Strength, if we're willing to dump Dex, Int, and Cha, we could manage to get Con up to 16 (assuming we have a background that can boost both Wis and Con).
The Sage background gives us these as well as Magic Initiate Wizard, so we can grab True Strike and then pick up probably Shield as our 1st level spell (or Find Familiar, though I never actually wind up using my Familiar in combat, so I'd err toward Shield).
Now, how often will we actually use True Strike? Maybe not all the time, but it's nice to have.
Now, for a weapon, I would go with a Maul - without Weapon Masteries, it's sort of arbitrary whether you grab a Maul or Greatsword, and I actually prefer Mauls on an aesthetic level (especially if they're unrealistic massive sledgehammers with a head as big as your torso). It's pretty flexible - as long as it's a heavy melee weapon, you'll get the benefit of your feat from it - though note that heavy ranged weapons will suffer from our low dex).
Ok, next, let's talk spells.
For our big concentration spell, Spirit Guardians are usually a great call, especially if there are a lot of melee monsters. In single-target situations, you're still going to be getting a fair amount of damage each turn (if upcast to 5th level, you're looking at 5d8 damage, which is 22.5 damage on average for a failed save, or 11.25 damage on a success. Hit more than one target and it's for sure paying for itself.
But there are other possibilities. Crusader's Mantle won't give us a ton of damage, but if we have a lot of allies who make lots of attacks, it could add up. The spell doesn't upcast, though, so in order to hit the 22.5 damage mark, we'd need our party within the emanation to hit 9 times per round (against a single target). That seems tough to do unless we're specifically fighting alongside a Monk and a Fighter.
Summon Celestial is another option here, hitting for 12 damage on average twice per turn. Indeed, in a pure single-target situation, it likely would out-damage Spirit Guardians. But if there's anyone else you might hit, good old reliable SG will do it for you.
Now, thanks to War God's Blessing, we can cast Spiritual Weapon without concentration. That being said, that will cast it at its base level, which means only hitting for 1d8+4 once a turn. Our War Priest bonus action attack will be hitting for 2d6+3, which means 8.5 versus 10. Now, sure, the Spiritual Weapon will hit a bit more often, but I suspect that it won't make up for it.
In other words, we might hold off on Spiritual Weapon until we're out of War Priest attacks.
We might also want to cast Fire Shield before combat if we can, as it will dole out punish damage to melee attackers, but I won't be making this part of our calculation (Fire Shield is non-concentration).
But after turn 1, getting Spirit Guardians running, what do we do with our action on subsequent turns? The truth is that, as a Cleric, it's good to not have a necessary action here, as we'll be able to respond to the battlefield situation. But we'll calculate this as if we're just casting True Strike each turn (after the 1st).
We can sustain our War Priest attacks for four rounds, which will hopefully be long enough for combat to be over.
Finally, how often are we using Guided Strike? While we can get some good hits in with it ourselves, I'd assume someone else in the party, like a Rogue, Barbarian, or Paladin, is actually hitting harder with their attacks, and so we'd rather use this to help them land their strikes. That being said, when we use it on ourselves, we don't need to use a reaction. At this level, we have 3 Channel Divinity uses. Actually, I say that others are hitting harder than we are, but...
Oh, I just realized something:
GWM only buffs our damage if we are taking the Attack Action. So, no True Strike.
I will say, the True Strike damage bonus will outpace GWM, I think. At level 10, it's just 3.5 more on average compared with GWM's 4, but next level it goes up to 7, which is already outpacing GWM at its best. (This wouldn't be true if we had extra attack, but going pure Cleric means we won't.)
So let's rejigger this:
We start off with a 15 in Con and 17 Wis. Now, Sage doesn't boost Strength, which is a bit of an issue, but if our DM lets us use a custom background, we can get the same bonuses and feat. We'll just start off with a 16 Strength if we can this way. Then, we'll take War Caster at level 4 and Resilient: Con at level 8, getting us back to our same stats as before.
Ok, now we're just getting that True Strike damage.
So, gameplan:
Turn one, we cast Spirit Guardians at 5th level and close in with our target. As a bonus action, we make an attack with our Maul using the War Priest feature. We're going to save Guided Strike for our allies or for when we make a True Strike attack.
Turn two, we cast True Strike, and then again do a bonus action War Priest attack. And so on.
Let's figure out our damage:
First off, Spirit Guardians. This damage happens on the enemy's turn. They do have an 80-foot fly speed, so even in the spell's difficult terrain, they could get away if they aren't stopped. But we'll assume they're standing and fighting.
This deals, as mentioned above, 22.5 damage on a failed save, and 11.25 on a success. The Wyvern has a Wisdom save bonus of +1. Our saving throw DC is 16. So, the Wyvern saves on a roll of 15 or higher, meaning that they fail 70% of the time. 22.5x70% is 15.75 and 11.25x30% is 3.375, so the total damage each turn we get from this spell (assuming that the wyvern remains within it and we maintain concentration) is 19.125 (we'll shorten that to 19.1).
Next, we have our War Priest attack. With only +3 to Strength (and that's if we're willing to dump three stats to -1. More likely we have a +2) we have a +7 to hit. The Wyvern's AC is 14, so we'll hit on a 7 or higher, or 70% of the time. Our hits land for 2d6+3, or 10 average, and we add 7 for crits. 10x70% is, obviously, 7. 7x5% is .35, so the average damage for this is 7.35 (rounded to 7.4).
So, turn 1, we do 26.5 damage (well, round 1, as the Spirit Guardians damage doesn't happen until their turn).
Turn two, we are really just adding our True Strike damage to that. With this, we have a +8 to hit, meaning we land 75% of the time. This also hits for 3d6+4 damage, or 14.5, with an extra 10.5 on a crit. 14.5x75% is 10.875, and 10.5x5% is .525, so we do 11.4.
Thus, on round 2, we're getting 37.9 damage.
Ah, but what of Guided Strike?
Well, honestly, it feels a little silly to use it on a Wyvern. For our True Strike, we would only benefit from it if we rolled a natural 2-5, meaning that we're actually only getting at most the equivalent of a +4 from it.
But on this round, we'd essentially turn our hit chance into a 95% chance, which means we'd get 13.775 (rounded to 13.8) from our hits (crits don't change), adding 2.4 damage per round.
Ok, now, if we ran out of War Priest attacks (maybe this isn't our first fight since our last short rest) we can use War God's Blessing to cast Spiritual Weapon. Note that this shares the resource with Guided Strike, though that's not having an enormous impact.
This would have the same hit chance as our True Strike, and takes the bonus action place of our War Priest attacks. 1d8+4 is 8.5 on average, with 4.5 extra on a crit, so it's 8.5x75%, or 6.375, with an extra .225 on a crit, for 6.6 damage per turn.
Thus, it's about .8 less damage than our War Priest maul attacks, meaning we're going down to 37.1 - not too bad.
There are some nuances here, of course:
The biggest is that if we do catch more than one target in our Spirit Guardians, our damage per round skyrockets. Just a second equivalent foe in the area gives us an extra 19.1 damage, which would put us at 57 damage per round. A third would mean 76.1.
That being said, if we get hit hard enough and lose concentration (hopefully unlikely thanks to War Caster and Resilient Con) we'd be in trouble. If we didn't need the actions for healing, I might just re-cast Spirit Guardians each time.
How likely is it that we lose concentration? Well, it depends a little on what armor we have. But if we assume by level 10 we have mundane plate, our AC is now 18 (we've got a Maul, so no shield). A Wyvern has a +7 to hit, so a 50% hit chance against us.
Their bite does 13 damage on a hit, and an extra 9 on a crit. We'll abstract this to say that 50% of the time, we get hit for 13, and 5% of the time, we get hit for 22. With +3 to Con, Resilient Con, and War Caster, we have a +7 to Con saves and advantage on them. Thus, on a hit, we need to just hit a 10, requiring us to only hit a natural 3 or higher with advantage (90% success). On a crit, we need to hit an 11, and so we need to get a natural 4 or higher with advantage (85% success).
So, in the 45% of the time we're hit but not crit, we have only a 1% chance to fail. And then, in the 5% of the time we're crit, we have a 2.25% chance to fail. So, if we get attacked with the bite, that's 1%x50%, or .5%, and then 2.25%x5%, or .1% (rounded). Basically, there's a .6% chance we lose concentration if we're attacked with a bite.
However, the Sting is a lot nastier. It has the same hit chance, but it deals a ton more damage: 35 on a hit (mix of piercing and poison) and 66 on a crit.
So, if we're hit, we have to beat a 17 con save for concentration, meaning we have a 55% chance to do so. If we're crit, we need to beat a DC 33, which is just not possible without a ton of stacking buffs or a Mind Sharpener from an Artificer. So, for our chance to fail, we've got basically 45%x50%, or 22.5%, and then 100%x5%, which is obviously 5%.
Therefore, if we're targeted by the Sting, we have a 27.5% chance to lose concentration.
Inverting those again, we can figure out the chance that we maintain concentration through a full assault by a Wyvern - 99.4% of the time we succeed against the bite. But only 72.5% of the time do we succeed (I should say succeed or don't need to make the save in the first place) against the Sting. So, that means we have pretty close to a 72% chance to maintain concentration. It's still more likely than not, but we shouldn't be shocked if Spirit Guardians drops.
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