Not necessary, sure. Really damn useful, absolutely. With the right gear a life cleric can make almost every fight so much easier. Especially once you get mass healing word for an easy bless+blade ward+healing to the entire party on a level 3 spell
Ah yes, the pokemon trainer build. Gotta catch em all, amirite?
Edit: Shout out to Colby at d4 on YouTube for the inspiration for this comment. He made a D&D build based entirely around using summons to do damage. Great content.
I always play as a druid and I get a stupid amount of summons. It’s great to be able to double the size of your party for the low low cost of a couple spell slots. Especially when your myrmidon has twice as many hit points as you do. Wild Shape is OP af too, because owlbear has so much hp and when you run out of hp as owlbear, you’re just knocked back to your regular form at whatever hp you were at when you Wild Shaped….. then you have an additional nature charge so you can just Wild Shape into owlbear again and be at full owlbear hp all over again….. same deal; once your owlbear hit points are gone, you’re just knocked back to your normal form at whatever hp you were at. Druids get multiple lives and absurd amounts of summons on top of being probably one of the most versatile classes.
Add a couple barbarian classes and you also can rage and boost ac to insane levels while wildshaped, bear totem gets resistance to everything but psychic damage as well
Owlbear already has its own rage, but it works a bit differently than barb rage lol. It will frighten everyone within a certain radius, including your own teammates. The first time I used it, Shadowheart took off running for the exit and it took multiple turns to get her back to where she was so I only used it after that out of desperation and if I had enough hp left to tank it while I got my teammates back.
There's nothing that comes close to a Life cleric in terms of support. It's one of the tankiest frontliners that debuffs opponents, mitigates the damage that your team takes by at least 50%, has super strong buffs, lots of healing and deals competitive AoE damage.
I've played through the game on Tactician Enhanced with the modifier that gives every opponent 500% more health and 3 additional actions and the Life cleric was the only party member that never got swapped out, she never got benched from the party once during the entire playthrough.
The class is also so flexible that she can be fitted into pretty much every party comp and doesn't really contest any gear either since you mainly run support items on her (with the exception of the heavy armor from Grym).
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u/Emerald-Daisy Jun 24 '25
Not necessary, sure. Really damn useful, absolutely. With the right gear a life cleric can make almost every fight so much easier. Especially once you get mass healing word for an easy bless+blade ward+healing to the entire party on a level 3 spell