~Attention~
This is not a cleric vs. x thread. Please do not treat it as such. Thank you in advance.
I've been looking over cleric ideas for the past couple weeks, and I'm not quite understanding the cleric. They have a channel ability that doesn't seem to have a lot of use. Healing spells, other than those that restore levels or damaged ability scores, seem to be largely ignored unless absolutely necessary. Domains are pretty much the bread and butter of the class, and almost everything else is salt and peppered in for flavor. I'm going to list some questions that focus on the factors that seem most prominent to me, and I accept any contributions you have to this topic.
1) If the focus of a cleric's spell list is summoning, curing, and buffs, why would you focus on anything else when other classes can do what a blast cleric, battle cleric, archer cleric, or any other cleric can do, but better?
2) If there's not really a need for cure spells when other classes have them, why play a cleric in the first place? Summoners can summon better than clerics, and bards/skalds can buff better than clerics, which essentially runs this question back to the whole, why play a cleric if they're not needed?
3) I've read up on treantmonk's guides as well as looked on the forum, and the general consensus is that preventative magics (stuff that wizards and similar arcane casters can do) are superior to reactive magics. Is there something a cleric can do that counters this perspective?
Again, this is not a "cleric vs. x" thread. Please stay away from the want to start unnecessary arguments. I truly want this to be a constructive and beneficial conversation between you guys and I. Clerics are one of my favorite classes in the game, and I would very much like to see how they can be properly used in the game.
Thank you in advance.
Ahhh, flavor - the one thing people always forget about isn't the "why play x when other classes do the same but more efficiently" threads.
Sure, a bard is better at buffing (same with summoner and summoning and so on), but
A. None can do all at once
B. None are agents of a divine being spreading their god's word across the world.
So why play a cleric? Because it's awesome.