Let's Break D&D! Clerics in Tasha's

I review the Optional Class Features for Clerics in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and analyze the two new subclasses, the Twilight and Peace domains. These two subclasses are the only two I will not recommend for use in the book, but I will discuss how you could address this if players are drawn to the concepts.

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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:24 Optional Class Features (Cleric)
4:17 Twilight Cleric Level 1
6:10 Twilight Cleric Level 2
8:32 Twilight Cleric Level 6+
10:42 Peace Cleric Level 1
13:40 Peace Cleric Level 2
14:49 Peace Cleric Level 6+
17:05 When good becomes too good
21:52 What happened?
23:45 Conclusions

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[joshuagaliley]

One of the even stupider things about the Peace Domain ability is that the level 1 feature is tied to proficiency bonus, meaning the wizard (or whoever) who dips a level gets the full emboldening bond progression!

[Ahglock]

Its kind of hilarious how they scaled back the wild magic barbarian to the point its a weak barbarian choice when they did this with the clerics.

[maltheopia]

I think the Twilight Cleric shows that the game designers don't actually do the 6-8 encounter workday paradigm but instead do 0-2 Hard-to-Deadly encounters and call it a day. The subclass isn't all THAT game-breaking if your typical T2 encounter (justified because you get frequent long rests) is something like 'three hill giants and a fire giant'. But if you mainly run encounters that are of Easy or Medium difficultly but have a lot of them between long rests, Twilight Cleric is OMG good.

[texteel]

25:05 "Tasha's is all optional stuff and you can just not use these"
Thats never been a good arguement for creating things that are way above or below a baseline, and I will never understand why anyone would say that arguement seriously

[EdBurke]

Between the Cleric subclasses getting busted while the Astral Self Monk got gutted I'm honestly wondering what the point of UA even is.

[kazebaret]

You know that something is TRULY broken when even Treantmonk (who thought that the pre-errata Healing Spirit "was good, but not broken") thinks that something is broken ;)

[solarupdraft]

My fun in games comes from picking a B tier option, and seeing how far I can push it with creativity and skill. These subclasses are sort of the opposite: I could cast Spiritual Weapon, activate the respective subclass features, and spend the rest of the combat taking the dodge action, and I'd still be a strong part of the party.

[stranger]

Jibbs the kobold reports back to Bob the necromancer at the lair.
"It was bad, boss. They slaughtered us."
"Did you incompetent fools at least manage to kill one of them?"
"Not even close. One of them with a robe and funny hat put the giant inside of a big glowing cage. While he was trapped, another one controlled some kind of ghost that flew all over the place firing crossbow bolts faster than a whole line of archers. We couldn't even catch him."
"Mystra's balls! Did you return fire?"
"We tried, but two of them in the back kept some kind of shroud over the entire area. Every time we thought we hit one, another would suddenly appear in front of that one and take the hit."
"But how?"
"I don't know. And they had magical shields, too. I don't think we actually touched them. And they just kept killing us. Even the one with an emblem of the Peace Domain bashed Letty's head in with a hammer."
"That's awful! How did you survive?"

"That's the strangest part. They were about to kill me, but suddenly one of them said something about his turn being skipped. I don't know what a turn is...do they take turns killing prisoners? Then they started arguing about something to do with 'initiative' and wandered off, like they just forgot about me. The last thing I heard one of them say was 'hot pocket.'"
Bob sits back on his throne and stares straight ahead, eyes unfocused, shock and horror on his face.
"Boss?"
"Tell the others to pack up. These guys are more evil than us."

[quincybriley]

I mean, TECHNICALLY they reduced the twilight domains powers in one way. The UA version had UNLIMITED range darkvision

[maesterxd]

Peace really seems to want me to join my friends in combat!

[jayl]

First time I've seen an ad in one of your videos. Not sure how youtube works, but I hope that means your getting some compensation for what you do. You deserve it, big fan of all your vids and have learnt a lot from you. Keep up the good work

[fyng.]

I remember giving feedback on the Twilight Cleric. "Oh getting 1d8 every turn is way too much at low levels, and not scaling sucks. Maybe start it with a d4 and scale it up with level like Spore druid? Or half cleric level?"

Wizards: "Right, scale it directly to full cleric level, got it!"

Really had no feedback on Peace/Unity, because like you said, the UA one seemed fine.

[foolycoolytheband]

Astral self 6 attacks on a monk to op better nerfed it

Favored foe concentration free hunter mark a few times a day, op nerf it

The entirety of the twilight and peace domain clerics, hmmm needs more spice better buff it till it breaks the game

[Wlerin]

I think this is actually perfectly in line with what Jeremy Crawford said in that interview. They felt that they made the UA classes too weak, and they are really bad at buffing classes in a balanced way, so we get this. (I'd argue they're just as bad at nerfing them, but that causes much less disruption at the table.)

[mes]

Maybe when players filled out the UA survey they got together on Reddit and GameStop’d these classes

[yosharian]

B-b-b-but Wizards would never publish something that wasn't thoroughly playtested and balanced!

[daverobinson]

I have to give the creators of 5e credit - they took a long time to make reasonable DMs the bad guys.

I mean in 3e I was saying “No!” to things from like week two. 🤣

[MrMelkor]

I agree that:
- the combo between Twilight and Peace cleric breaks the game and cannot reasonably be accounted for by the DM
- individually, both subclasses are way stronger than anything that came before

I think, having a RAW Twilight *or* a RAW Peace cleric at your table can work, though. It depends on a whole lot of factors, primarily if the DM is fine with it and capable of balancing encounters appropriately, but also on the relative power level of the rest of the party.

But at least for us, RAW Twilight cleric seems to work. We have 4 highly optimized characters in the party, so there is not any signigicant power discrepancy between them. This way our DM can just make encounters harder overall and account for the Twilight cleric's strength that way.

Though, I still do not quite get why these two subclasses were published either. Some of the features that are added onto them just seem so bizarrely superflous. As a Twilight cleric, I find it pretty weird that I get heavy armor, martial weapons and advantage on itiative, for example. These are all unneeded additional goodies. Especially since the Trickery Cleric doesn't get these bonus proficiencies either, even though some aspects of its class seem to point to closee quarters combat as well.

My best explanation would be that the developers are interested in powercreep to sell the new book: "If I want to be THE strongest boi around, then I NEED to buy Tasha's!" For example in Xanathar, Hexblade was a significant jump for Warlocks as well. But I think with the clerics in Tasha's, they overdid it.

[TheLotusPanther]

Great video guy. Probably the only dnd vids I have found where the dm exposits clearly and understands the source material. I was shocked by the new clerics too. I was also thinking how effective a dip of a lvl or two into the twilight cleric would be. Such a huge amount of benefits. A terrifying bard or wizard dip for sure.

[Oðrun]

I'd probably have to go with having the deities in my campaign being incredibly jealous of "clerical positioning" in an adventuring group, leading to holy war if Bong'hit the god of peace were to infringe upon the established favoritism Can'tsee has already bestowed upon the party. Basically, one cleric per group.