This article requires a lot more thought than the pally article, after all, cleric is a full caster, spirit guardians does a ton of damage on average, and it has access to good spells like bless, healing word, sanctuary, ect. So, why do I consider cleric bad, when so many in the optimization community consider it good and many outside of it consider it amazing?

Spirit Guardians

Clerics premier offensive option, Spirit guardians makes hoards of melee enemies a cakewalk, and limits their ability to charge us. Why would I consider it bad? Well, because that’s basically all the spell does.

Spirit guardians halves the movement of enemies within 15ft of the caster, and will deal damage, 3d8 radiant wis save for half at base. This isn’t bad damage for a continuous AOE, but it’s also not amazing, and dealing 8d6 at the start of a fight might be much more impactful overall, as killing things early is better for your chances of survival than a slow burn spell if the fight is challenging.

most of the time, people counter this argument by saying “oh but spirit guardians lasts 10 minutes, it can go through 2 fights!” or something like this. I’ve personally seen this actually happen once in my time playing dnd, but for other tables it might be more common. This is an argument that is trying to say cleric is better in games with more encounters per day. There is a very small window of encounter difficulty, type, and timing that needs 3rd level spells but can otherwise be finished at-will and will allow the cleric to bring it through 2 combats.

While i’m on the topic, lets look at all the things spirit guardians gets countered by:

-Dispel magic casters (more-so than most casters would be)
-Flying enemies (who can choose to avoid you, even if they are melee-only, they can make improvised attacks with rocks at range)
-Enemies with ranged attacks
-Blaster mages
-All dragons
-big bad melee enemies who have enough movement speed and/or reach to get into your spirit guardians and smack you into the ground (IE, giants)
-Spread out enemies (a common issue for AOE users)

Basically, any time a fight could be considered ‘difficult’, the clerics offense goes so far into the toilet they become a liability

The difference between having fireball countered and spirit guardians countered is that the wizard or sorcerer casting fireball has other options. The cleric is now reduced to casting bless and cantrip spamming, usually using toll the dead, which sucks in encounters where enemies have high wisdom saves and toll the dead can not benefit from bless. Bless is alright, but just about anyone has the capacity to cast it, and it might not be enough to win a fight, especially if you’re in a high-op party of casters where the attack roll buff isn’t making as big a difference

We can also get spirit guardians from a background, meaning in cases where it would win us the fight we could also just have it. This is largely inferior to taking conjure animals from a background.

Bless and other 1st levels

Yes, Bless is great, Sanctuary is good, ceremony is a free +2 AC, this is all achievable by taking a single level into cleric. Clerics best spells are mostly concentrated into the first level, meaning a single level dip with them is fantastic, but full-classing them is sad.

Divine Intervention

entirely DM fiat

Greater and lesser Restoration

These are fine, undoing a curse or major debuff like feeblemind, this only comes online at 9th, we have an option to get these anyway using fountain water on conj or creation bard, and divine soul sorcerer could take them, but the spells are actually useful to have in a party, but very much not enough for a full PC. especially considering that in most situations, a cure is present for these, as most DM’s aren’t going to feeblemind you and leave you feebleminded for an entire session.

Twilight

Twilight’s ability to spam temp HP for the entire party is good. So good it almost redeems the entire class, however, dybbuk’s live off of temp hp which does not stack, making them irrelevant later on. Temporary HP is also generated by a lot of other cheaper features we don’t need a whole PC for.

Keeping in mind it still requires a use of channel divinity, so we may not always have twilight’s temp hp ready to go. While it is a very good survivability bonus, I think once things begin to focus fire you and/or we come into more difficult fights, the temporary hp begins to look like less and less of a boon. Still amazing AOE protection, though.

Death Ward

good but available from the witherbloom background and cleric is not the best caster of it, warlocks do this better, or divine soul can at least twin it. Chronurgist with the witherbloom background can cast it 3600 times with a single slot thanks to wristpocket arcane abeyance.

Conjure Celestial

a cool spell, but 7th level. It does have some interesting uses, like getting us a pudding king we can jar into via conjuring a coutle who uses shapechange. The two issues with it are that we can make our own things to jar into, and true polymorph isn’t that far away, and we can get this spell via minor conjuration or song of creation and getting the fountain water from spelljammer.

Planar Binding

Available to wizard, cleric, druid, bard, ect. It’s a fantastic spell but not cleric specific. A fair few spells have this effect as well, and I won’t mention all of them, but if the wizard has it then I’m likely not considering it as a reason for cleric to be played at ultra-op tables.

Aura of Vitality

an action to have a 2d6 healing word every turn for a minute. Even if this is worth the slot and concentration, it’s also available to druids.

Temple of the Gods

a worse mordenkainens mansion, provides a save vs not being able to enter and is targetable vs mansion which has no save and is not targetable.

Holy Aura

Good, i suppose, but not much more than we’d get from good obscurement tech, especially considering it’s an 8th level slot

Mass heal

a 700hp healing spell at 9th level. This is good, but is again, 9th level, and cleric lacks true poly or wish at this level outside of being an arcana cleric. This is also once a day max, and we don’t want to rely on it. Ice troll hearts likely means we won’t have to use it.

True Resurrection

Great for getting someone who’s died horrifically back, however, this is available to druids, and wish can often be used to bring someone back the same way, this risks wish, but we can make a Zodar or simulacrum do it, and is again a t4 spell.

What is better than a cleric?

So far i’ve picked apart clerics list and examined it, but what classes beat clerics? What is considered ‘good’ in this situation?

Almost always better:

Wizard: so unfathomably high above cleric and everyone else it’s hard to name all the ways.

Druid: Conjure animals does a lot of damage and druid has access to most of the good healing spells cleric has as well as the ability to un-do the effects of particularly bad debuffs.

Bard: could easily steal clerics best spells, but has better things to grab. Bard also provides save protection. Creation bard is close to conj wizard in busted ability to make nonmagical objects as well.

Sorcerer: Divine soul sorcerer with 2 levels in hexblade does clerics job better than cleric as well has better at-will damage and access to sorcerer’s spells. Sorcerer in general has a nice list and metamagic makes them alright at doing nova or twinning certain buff spells.

Warlock: Warlock has short rest slots making them easy to recharge, with ebarb and other invocations for at-will effects, warlocks out-last clerics by a long shot, as well as having access to true polymorph in later tiers.

Situationally better:

Ranger: ranger can deal good damage at range, and proper range builds have good nova capacity that allows them to take down threats that clerics would die to solo. Good for killing dragons with.

Fighter: Fighter lacks the half-casting capacity of a ranger but is a great platform for buff spells, as well as having the capacity for even higher damage. Action surge is a good nova tool, but a good ranger takes levels into fighter anyway. Echo knight also is a fantastic nova character, though usually melee, still has more reach than a cleric’s spirit guardians.

Conclusion

Cleric’s best features (armor, spells, ect) come at first level. We can dip cleric 1 and use a background to get most of the benefits of having a cleric. Cleric lacks a lot of good offensive protentional in non-melee-horde fights, and often dies in difficult fights, namely against dragons and the likes. A lot of clerics best spells are shared among many lists, particularly druids list, who we would often prefer to have.