cliffhanger's page

In response to Marc Radle 81:
I LOVE playing clerics, and I'm usually more effective than the party's fighter in combat.

If one simply uses the spells in the core books, the cleric's "over-powered-ness" is highly dependent on the player's competence and teh situation. Since clerics have to select spells before-hand, a player must know which spells are best for what circumstances the party migth face each day. If you select dungeon-crawl spells and end up in a city, the cleric sucks.

The problem lies in the spells from all fo the splat books, which ARE over powered. Some of those things are pretty much auto-kill spells. It's GG the minute the players opens the book to the spells section. But this has a simple solution: GM's should disallow anything they think is overbalanced, and if a player starts abusing a spell, the GM should have the discretion to Nerf it mid-game and discuss it with the group.

The Cleric class was always a little boring IMO, since there were so few option you had as a player. I like the new domain powers, since it now gives me some interesting options as a PC.

My argument to those who say ANY class is overpowered remains: Is the classoverpowered, or simply an effective player?

right now most of the focus on the druid seems to be stuck on the wild shape and animal companion abilities, so i thought i might throw in my analysis of both of these.

1)The Animal Companion- at low levels, the druid can't wild shape or cast most of his truly useful spells, so at that point it becomes his animal companion who does most of the actual playing combat-wise. Early on the companion has the HP and fighting abilities to make up for the druid's slow development, keeping the PC from feeling useless early game. If youw ere to remove the animal companion, low level druids would become only passably competent.

2) The Wild Shape Ability- I love wild shape. It's great. The biggest argument against it seems to be the natural spell feat. For those of you who think a wild shaped druid is effective without it: The druid begins wild shaping at 5th or 6th level (not sure), just about the time monsters start having damage reduction. A wild shaped druid becomes an animal,relying only on un-magical, natural weapons. He may be able to hit, but without the ability to overcome monsters DR with Magic fang or Greater magic fang, he'll end up doing 2 points of damage per round. If he buffs himself before going into animal form, he usually ends up losing those bonuses when he wild shapes (i.e. +1 to hit with natural weapons doesn't help a human with NO natural weapons). Plus there's usually three rounds prep time involved with that, and with that much time ANY spell caster becomes beastly. No. An unbuffed druid in animal form becomes a big fat target.
The one thing about wild shape I dislike as a GM is the fact that when the druid wild shapes he regains his lost HP. THAT is the brokeness. With that, you can have low HP druids popping in and out of animal form to recover HP. The flaw is not in Natural Spell, but in the HP recovery.