| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I favor cleric for everything but a pure caster based around mystery spells. The oracle has two gaping weaknesses for the healer and battle cleric roles.
First, they're prepared casters on a list designed around spontaneous casting.
Wait, don't you mean the opposite? Clerics are prepared; Oracles are spontaneous.
They'll never get all the remove and restore spells in a timely fashion even if you offset the delayed spell access spontaneous casters get. [
I wouldn't call a 1 level delay causing "not a timely fashion" -- yes, in an edge case it could cause a problem, but a little push either way and BOTH the Cleric and Oracle don't have these spells in time, or BOTH have them in time.
It may be possible to leverage HP healing if you like that kind of role for some reason, but remove and restore are the components of the healer role that can't be replaced with a bundle of 1st level wands.
Except in the edge case (as described above), Oracles are not thus restricted. And if they blow the caster level check on the first try of one of these bad status removal spells, they can try again, whereas the Cleric either has to wait a day or has to have prepared multiple castings of the spell in question (or paid a lot to scribe scrolls with full caster level), or somehow gotten hold of the Wizard Arcane Discovery Staff-Like Wand (and even then, Wands of bad status removal spells are still pretty expensive). Or they could use Staves, but that is expensive and inefficient, and nothing that an Oracle couldn't do anyway. Pearls of Power are also expensive. Of course, the magic items you want won't necessarily be available at all unless you make them yourself . . . If you have time to do so and can afford the Item Creation Feats or somehow manage to get yourself a Bonded Object of the right type so that you can enchant it without the normally required Item Creation Feat. And a Cleric who prepares multiple castings of 1 spell is running pretty thin on other spells of that level castable during that day. Best bet is probably to leave some spells of each level unprepared, but in some cases preparing them on the fly takes too long. (Also, Rules As Written, I'm not sure if the Cleric Spontaneous Casting works on spell slots that have not had spells prepared in them, in case you need a Cure Wounds fast in an emergency.)
Second, they have a poor fortitude save. You can go into combat without a good fortitude save, but only if you have someone available to clear you of touch range fort save nastiness. As a healer or battle cleric that would be your job. Recall that heal and breath of life and all the non-mass cures are all touch spells. So are half the removes and delay and neutralize poison. If you have to heal or condition remove someone (except of fear or paralysis) you're a 5' step away from whatever hurt them or inflicted the condition. That's not a good time to have a poor fortitude save.
A poor Fortitude Save does hurt, and ways of boosting this have their own costs. You could, however, use Reach Spell on the fly. So can a Cleric, but then they have to prepare the spell with Reach Spell baked in, unless it is one of their spontaneously cast spells (usually Cure-series) or they use a Reach Metamagic Rod (which an Oracle can also use).
There is no amount of flash that can overcome the poor fundamentals of spontaneous casting from a poorly suited list and a weak fortitude save for a front line role.
I think you're overstating the poor suiting of the spell list; as I said before, the poor Fortitude Save is the main thing that hurts.
|
You're missing Atarlost's point.
Oracles almost never take condition removal spells as their known spells. If they did, they'd never have anything else to cast. On the other hand, a cleric can prepare whatever spells they want for the day. If someone comes down with a disease, curse, blindness, etc, the cleric just prays for that spell the next morning and casts it. The oracle would have to fill up their known spells with condition removals if they wanted to have the right one for any situation.
|
You're missing Atarlost's point.
Oracles almost never take condition removal spells as their known spells. If they did, they'd never have anything else to cast. On the other hand, a cleric can prepare whatever spells they want for the day. If someone comes down with a disease, curse, blindness, etc, the cleric just prays for that spell the next morning and casts it. The oracle would have to fill up their known spells with condition removals if they wanted to have the right one for any situation.
Three things about this:
#1: People really overstate how many condition removal spells there are. There's a max of one spell per spell level with the exception of level 3, which has three of them.
#2: This is what scrolls are for. Or, at high levels, Pages of Spell Knowledge. We're talking two or three niche spells you might not have room for here.
#3: With the Human Favored Class Bonus, you can easily get them all by mid levels. At 9th, you can easily have added two bonus third level spells and have all the condition removal stuff, your Mystery Spell, and three others.
Now, none of this is to say that Clerics don't have an advantage in this regard. They do. But it's perfectly doable for an Oracle to manage this sort of thing.
Blaster ? Orcale black hand wins a fire cleric.
7
A ethologist spamming fireballs freely intensified is pretty awesome.
There's also half-elf's packing the level 3 spell Paragon Surge who take Expanded Arcana. They get to basically add 1 or 2 spells known to their list, and it can be almost any spell. They have to pick the same spells each time they use it per day, but they can pull them out at any time rather than waiting 15 minutes to make use of an empty slot.
Also 15 minutes is a long time if you're in an active dungeon, and let me tell you in my dungeons unless you've cleared everything but the boss you're not going to spend even a single minute without running into a hostile force.
They'll never get all the remove and restore spells in a timely fashion even if you offset the delayed spell access spontaneous casters get. [I wouldn't call a 1 level delay causing "not a timely fashion" -- yes, in an edge case it could cause a problem, but a little push either way and BOTH the Cleric and Oracle don't have these spells in time, or BOTH have them in time.
To be fair, there can be more than a 1-level delay to getting ALL the condition removal spells. Remove Blindness/Deafness, Remove Curse, and Remove Disease are all Level 3 spells, after all. The Oracle doesn't get three level 3 spells known until Level 9. Not to mention that those would be terrible picks for an Oracle, since they're all very niche spells that wouldn't see a lot of use.
The cleric (and prepared casters in general) have an advantage when it comes to spells that are only useful in corner cases, especially if it's a spell where caster level matters. That's just part of the paradigm.
I don't think this makes the Oracle less useful overall, though. It's just a case of each class having some advantages and disadvantages.
Oracles work as weaker, overspecialized, but more durable sorcerers with the right mystery. They aren't a good substitute for a cleric in any role the cleric is fit for. Their poor fortitude makes them vulnerable to a lot of touch range effects other front liners will resist, which also makes them risky healers. They can't standard action summon because they don't have an alignment aura, not that it'd be an efficient use of spells known even if they could.
Poor Fortitude and no Standard Action Summon -- I'll give you that. But people do post frontliner Oracles on these boards -- that's what the Battle Mystery is for (and some other Mysteries also work for this.)
You want a sorcerer with no arcane spell failure, one size larger hit dice, twice as many skill points, more than one spell known for your highest level slots, and you want to have a focus that happens to match one of the spell list for one of the published mysteries? Oracle is everything you ever wanted in a class.
Actually sounds pretty good, except you forgot better BAB, which means that you can actually whack things effectively at mid levels without an insane amount of buffing. This includes being able to use Reach Tactics (like a Reach Cleric, except you usually do stuff other than Summon). And as Deadmanwalking pointed out above, you actually can do bad status removal, except for having trouble with the 3rd level spells (for which you will need purchased Scrolls and/or Expanded Arcana to fill in).
|
|
Oracles work as weaker, overspecialized, but more durable sorcerers with the right mystery. They aren't a good substitute for a cleric in any role the cleric is fit for. Their poor fortitude makes them vulnerable to a lot of touch range effects other front liners will resist, which also makes them risky healers. They can't standard action summon because they don't have an alignment aura, not that it'd be an efficient use of spells known even if they could.
You want a sorcerer with no arcane spell failure, one size larger hit dice, twice as many skill points, more than one spell known for your highest level slots, and you want to have a focus that happens to match one of the spell list for one of the published mysteries? Oracle is everything you ever wanted in a class.
Uh...there are lots of ways to jack up Fort Saves. They aren't even hard or obscure.
Great Fortitude is only one Feat, and combined with decent Con leaves you, what, and leaves you at most -2 vs the Cleric on Fort Saves until 16th level. Metal Oracles are a classic melee build and actually have a Revelation for this, that if taken at 7th in combination with Great Fortitude lets you have equal or better a Cleric's saves all the way through 19th level.
And then of course there's the racial save boosters...
Now, does that mean they're better than a Cleric at Saves? Of course not, they aren't. They're notably worse at Will as well as Fort due to not being Wis based, in fact. But they aren't crippled or anything in comparison either. And, frankly, a melee Cleric or Oracle has Feats to burn, especially a Battle Oracle, so buying Great Fortitude isn't the hardship it would on some characters.
Plus, frankly, I haven't seen a lot of these 'Fort Saves targeting melee characters only' situations, and I've been running Pathfinder for years, including a few APs. I've seen nasty Fort effects in that time, but most of the really nasty ones targeted either everyone, or whoever got attacked, rather than only those focused in melee. There certainly are auras and the like, but most of them seem to involve penalty conditions like sickened more than they do 'you're completely screwed' stuff like poison and diseases. Or are we talking about ghouls paralyzing people, poisons, and other attack riders? Because those get thrown at ranged and caster characters quite a bit in my experience.
And, of course, there's Warsighted, which does some nasty things for a melee combat Oracle that Cleric lacks any good way to duplicate.
Now, they certainly are worse summoners...but frontliners? They do fine.
