a spell of hubris

I'd like to officially welcome Sam to the collective of Cleric Suffering™

(im really just adding this because it took me less than a minute to find as i literally went to an episode i knew had combat and jumped like an hour in hfjdshfjdjh)

all the empire and cleric sibling hugs we’ve been getting!! my soul is nourished 

looks cool . .… ✳︎꙳⭒ 🍄🧚🏽‍♂️✹⭒

i rly do only draw them now :’-3 sorry. i care them sm 

I just...

Cad being at 1HP, barely hanging on through a deathward and using his turn to not only bring Jester back but DRAG HER to safety, both probably bloodied, shaky, heaving and terrified. The image of this two battle medics saving each other.

Jester getting up, still mortally wounded, and thanking Caduceus before healing him in return and bringing him up from the 1HP that kept them both alive. And not only that, but spreading that healing energy towards the rest of her family as her first act back to life. Jester, who everyone loved to tease about how little healing she did, being clutch at keeping them all alive and just spreading that warm energy as her very first instinct after literally dying???

I love the clerics so much ok?

apparently i’m not done yet because look

i play clerics a lot. in one-shots, in long campaigns, from low levels to high.

and clerics have one of the toughest roles in the game: the art of slot conservation. clerics and their parties live and die by this mechanic. they aren’t warlocks, they don’t recharge on a short rest. you get what you get at the start of the day and hope it’s enough. the cleric action economy is all about holding back as many slots as possible for healing, reviving, and getting your party of out danger. lower level healing has the massive drawback of healing one creature at a time or only being useful outside of combat. that’s why they get things like spirit guardians, spiritual weapon, guardian of faith, toll the dead (which has been expanded to other classes, yes but it was created for clerics as their eldritch blast). that’s why their low level de/buffs tend to affect more than one creature at a time. all support casters do this to a certain extent but clerics in particular are very, very good at it if you give them enough time and space to learn.

playing a cleric is about learning the rhythm of your party and learning what precisely you can afford to lose. which one of your precious thirds, fourths, fifths, etc you can actually use on attacking or non-healing/buffing spells without risking your party. some dms will have one big battle a long rest. others have multiple. still others, like the fabled mr. mercer, mix it up to the point that it’s hard to gauge which situation you are in. 

i say this because, while the nein weren’t a weak party before caduceus, they were a party particularly vulnerable to this, the cleric action economy. lower levels mean fewer spells selected, fewer spell slots, and almost no reviving. compounding this immutable fact is the fact that nein had two members who were heavily vulnerable to damage and needed those precious slots to stay up. combine caleb’s d6 hp and insanely low ac with the damage mollymauk would take whenever he tried to do something with his class abilities and it was almost a matter of time before one of them (or one of the others) died at those low levels. even if jester had been present. even if she used none of her slots on anything but healing.

look at how this fight (and the previous) goes with only one cleric. assuming the cleric isn’t the one outright killed, you probably only get one fifth level mass cure wounds before facing cognouza lucien. you only have five spells at fifth or higher and you’re probably saving one slot in particular for plane shift in case you all win and this place goes to hell in a hand basket fast. you’re trying to position yourself so that you aren’t in immediate danger but are also close enough to get to your friends in a couple of rounds in case you need to revivify. your party members are probably going to drop faster in this scenario than in canon because of that smaller mass cure wounds healing. you have to decide fast how exactly to buff support your team: do you support their attack rolls and saving throws or is it better to buff their damage? should you focus on your own survival first and make sure that enemies pay for targeting you? with all the attacks flying around you, can you make those concentration checks or are you going to lose that slot in a round before it really had a chance to do anything?

good cleric players learn how to grind it out. they learn to do an almost clinical, detached analysis of how everything can go wrong and what they will do to counter it. they learn to prioritize. they learn exactly how far they can push themselves and their party before the whole thing snaps. more than anything, clerics learn how to give their party chances.

which brings me back to the nein and taliesin and laura. laura had that very steep learning curve back in the day and with the support aspect mostly handled by taliesin, she could primarily focus on giving the nein chances with attacks and battlefield control. with laura and later travis as a backup healer, taliesin could focus on buffing, debuffing, and holding slots for emergencies. taliesin and laura each could tailor their cleric stuff to fit the play style they are most comfortable with: taliesin playing the tactical ‘what can i/we afford to use or lose’ game that has shone across three characters and laura playing the equally tactical ‘i’m going to burn everything to the ground leave it all on the battlefield’ game which eggs her party on to victory.

it’s only fitting that their skill sets combined for the final How Do You Want To Do This of the campaign.

team cleric!!! ＼（＾○＾）人（＾○＾）／