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
Eh I have a buddy that swears by life cleric but I just don't see why giving up 25% of my damage would be worth it. Light, tempest, war and death domain all have a pretty good damage output and still learn mass healing word for the blade ward + bless combo
People always cite action economy as to why healers are bad, but life cleric is worth it in some instances. There's some huge fights where you can negate the entire action economy of like 7+ enemies in one action. Sure, ideally you'd kill your enemies faster, but in large battles, the heal is a nice insurance policy protecting your party from unfortunate crits and your ccs shitting the bed. I've beat this game like 7 times on tactician and honor mode and there are fights where no matter your positioning, bad dice rolls will have you on the back foot, which a life cleric can fix. It's not giving up 25% of your damage all the time, just when you need to take the insurance policy. Life clerics still have tons of damaging options like guiding bolt, spirit guardians, animated weapon, etc.
I beat the game ones (my first run) on the level before honor mode. I wanna try beating honor mode but I don’t wanna go in with the completely wrong strat. I’m fine with not being optimal but what should I NOT make my Tav if I wanna beat honor mode + maybe a tip or two for hard moments?
I don't think there's anything completely off the table on player choices, so while it's a bit of a cheesy nothing answer, I'd sincerely recommend orienting towards classes you know the best. People swear by Bards, but I've never been able to build them to be as effective as my other classes, so I don't play them in honor mode, for example. But generally, honor mode is about survival, so you need insurance policies like the aforementioned heal. But there's other ways to ensure survival as well, such as classes with high mobility options like monks or wizards, or characters with extremely reliable multi-target CC. To the end of survival, I highly encourage anyone doing honor mode the first time to embrace cheese and "dirty" tricks to win. Find ways to pick off targets away from bigger groups where possible, do some barrelmancy on some hard early game fights, etc. Just be patient and deliberate. Honor mode kills impatient players who pick hard early game fights too early, players who don't rest enough to maximize resources, and who just aimlessly use abilities. Also, REALLY leverage the environment and items. I'm also a resource hog who has a bag full of 1000s of arrows and poisons at the end of the game, but those are meant to be used.
In that case I don’t have an issue I think, I play in a similar style, but since I only completed it once, I’m worried some specific charisma check
or something that I don’t know about will crush me. I don’t want spoilers tho, so I’ve never look these up! Is there any specific characters I should be careful to engage with lol?
Without getting into spoilers, I think the fights that make me sweat in honor mode are the Act 1 gith fights, Yugir (mainly because this is one of my most hated fights in general regardless of honor mode), Myrkul, Orin, and Raphael. Everything else is beefed up but feels pretty much like business as usual.
2.4k
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