Tempest Cleric Ability Scores

[BLUESTORM2112]

If I want to make a melee focused tempest cleric, which ability scores should I focus on? I was think of primarily focusing on Strength/Con and running heavy armour, with wisdom/dexterity for spells and some occasional bow use. Never played before, but cleric seems like the combat will be more engaging.

[BLUESTORM2112]

Originally posted by Nauct:

Life Domain Cleric I used as my tank/support on Tactician
15 STR
8 DEX
16 CON
8 INT
17 WIS
8 CHA
Used heavy armor and a shield, kinda low AC because 8 DEX until you get your first piece of heavy armor.
You wont use the bow much because your cantrips are usually better because of low dex.
Get Ability Improvement for 16STR 18WIS and War Caster. Spirit Guardians and your channel divinity OP

You didn't find low initiative to be a problem?

[Nauct]

Originally posted by BLUESTORM2112:

Originally posted by Nauct:

Life Domain Cleric I used as my tank/support on Tactician
15 STR
8 DEX
16 CON
8 INT
17 WIS
8 CHA
Used heavy armor and a shield, kinda low AC because 8 DEX until you get your first piece of heavy armor.
You wont use the bow much because your cantrips are usually better because of low dex.
Get Ability Improvement for 16STR 18WIS and War Caster. Spirit Guardians and your channel divinity OP

You didn't find low initiative to be a problem?

Usually starting combat by moving her in first, after sneaking my rogue somewhere, so she's already in good position. Then since she's support I find the low initiative helpful because then I know what I need to do, instead of just picking something.
I have high initiative on all my other characters

[Snake_In_The_Eye]

Warlock path of the blade is fun. Barbarian is good. You can either go into wildheart and get wolf spirit, that gives everyone advantage against targets close to you when you rage, or berserker and throw around allies, enemies, whatever. You can literally kill an enemy throwing at it another enemy.

Eldritch Knight fighter is also fun, because you get to use spells only for buffing yourself since you will dump intelligence. With jump feather fall and logstrider, all of them you can cast as ritual so you spend no spell slots, you get very mobile.

If you want to hit hard and do a lot of damage Paladin. Especially good if half orc. If you start using the parasite powers you can get a thing that trasform an attack into a critical hit, With hald orc you throw 3 times the dices instead of twice on crits, and with paladin you add smites. So potentially you deal a lot of damage in a very short time on a single target.
On top of that it's all radiant dealing extra damage on undeads and fiends.

Cleric is also fun, inflict wounds does 3d10 at lever 1, which is more than twice what most classes can do as damage.

[Daliena]

Tempest Cleric can tank well enough, by all means. You get heavy armor and shields from your (sub)class, so you're covered on that front. You just won't be doing a ton of damage with your melee swings, but Tempest can A: Retaliate with a reaction when hit (and at level 6+ this will also allow you to push them back) and B: Throw down quite a bit of crowd control to make ignoring them a poor idea. So by all means, wade in up close with Tempest.

Just keep in mind that your damage won't really come much from your melee strikes as opposed to your spells, but there's plenty opportunity to serve as a warmage that gets in close and takes hits away from squishier teammates - and Spirit Guardians, one of Cleric's premier spells, very much encourages you to get in the midst of the fight.

[pascal.difolco]

I've found Clerics a bit underwhelming, they have nice buffs (Aid, Bless..) and Hail Mary spells like Command and Hold Person, but are really poor damage dealers
Not much tanky neither with average AC and HP
With Cure spells mostly useless (because good play is to annihilate enemies fast, then Rest, and cure with potions when needed) and only 4 party members, I think you'd better swap a Cleric for a mage/sorc or fighter type...

[Snake_In_The_Eye]

Originally posted by pascal.difolco:

I've found Clerics a bit underwhelming, they have nice buffs (Aid, Bless..) and Hail Mary spells like Command and Hold Person, but are really poor damage dealers
Not much tanky neither with average AC and HP
With Cure spells mostly useless (because good play is to annihilate enemies fast, then Rest, and cure with potions when needed) and only 4 party members, I think you'd better swap a Cleric for a mage/sorc or fighter type...

inflict wounds does 3d10 when casted with a level 1 spell slot, at level 5 with a 3rd level inflict wounds you do 5d10. Not to speak about spirit guardians AoE(3d8 per turn to every enemy that comes 3 meters from you, lasting 10 turns).

Spiritual weapon is a nice summon. This without even touching bonuses they can give as support.

You can also play minions, raise a zombie and build a zombie army.

Tempest clerics have a feature that allows to channel divinity and inflict maximum damage with every lightning based spell. This means a level 2 tempest cleric, level 5 sorcerer can wet enemies on a line and then quicken spell bonus action lightning bolt dealing 96 damage at every enemy on the line.

At level 2 tempest cleric, level 3 sorcerer it can bonus action create water and twin spell chromatic orb electricity level 2, dealing 96 damage to two opponents.

Both no save, no rng, in one single turn. Plus water and electricity will give electrocuted status effect.

[Umberjack]

Good call. i think Tempest cleric is the most fun of all the domains due to the retribution you do to anyone that managed to hit you. :)

[Toebeans4ever]

Tempest and Light Clerics are very good spell damage dealers, but all Clerics can use Spirit Guardians to good effect to provide AoE damage in battle and help protect other party members. Very good spell to deal with swarms of weaker enemies, too.