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!
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Yep I dipped my MAD Bladesinger into a single level of Hexblade and Peace Domain Now I’m bound by my patron to not needlessly kill, and I must always try to go the peaceful way first ^^
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.
This is probably the best explanation. Though to be fair, that’s hard to balance around overall. If the game was better balanced around Short Rest Monks and Warlocks would have a lot less problems.
@@kevmbuck to be fair, with optimization more attacks are really good, since you can layer buffs that add damage per attack to do some pretty potent stuff. Start combining several of Rage, divine favor, eldritch claw, hexblade's curse, belts of giant strength, or similar features and you actually will be pretty busted with six attacks. Of course, absolutely gutting it isn't what anyone wanted.
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 ;)
@@captainpandabear1422 so yes it was not broken but as a dm attempting to hold a party at low resources before a fight to make it tough, healing spirit made me sad far too often. I banned it and never looked back until the errata. It was not broken but it was anti-fun. Anti- tension building.
@@ryansalmon6507 Hard disagree. If a party doesn't have a ticking clock and they're out of hit points and then have to use all their spell slots inefficiently restoring said hit points... often they'll just back out and long rest outside the dungeon. Sometimes they can't. Oftentimes they can. Healing spirit ate a resource and got them to keep going, at least in my experience, without me having to punish them for retreating to the forest like a bunch of cowards. :D
If you go back and read the feedback on the UA it consisted of people in an absolute panic over the unlimited range dark vision and ignoring the rest of the class features. Except the level 17 darkness thing. People panicked about that one too. UA feedback tends to either be people in an absolute panic over some random thing being too strong, or in an absolute rage about some thing being too weak and how it is proof Wizards hates the class. And most of the time they're dead wrong about what is too strong or too weak. UA is more marketing that feedback. Feedback from the masses just ain't gunna work. They need a smaller group of folks who know their stuff and can provide feedback in addition to the general feedback. If I was tweaking twilight I would change the Temp HP to be a scaling amount on the first turn only and have the dispel be recurring. And probably make Vigilant's Blessing only work on others. The recurring small amount of Temp HP is too swingy to work well. Its completely busted if you're dealing with small amounts of AoE, and nearly useless if you're dealing with burst single target.
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
I mean look at feats. Feats are optional but they take the power of archery and 2 handed weapons WAY above the bell curve with sharpshooter and great weapon master. You could just not use feats.
Because it's a foolproof way to absolve the game designers for taking responsibility for their decisions. Which is useful if what's more important to you is defending your fandom than making sure that the game is fun -- because in the minds of these people, they love their fandom so much that they can have fun no matter what. But if their fandom 'looks bad', because you drew attention to bad decisions, these will stop having fun no matter how well-designed the rules are. You laugh, but this kind of thinking is the majority of players in D&D, and not just 5th Edition. In fact, I think it was more virulent in the pre-3E D&D days.
I agree from a rules/design perspective 100%. I can only see this being relevant in terms of setting/lore mismatches (I.e. if the world a DM makes didn't have gods of a specific portfolio, maybe no clerics of X type staying with cleric specifically, otherwise Warforged is a fairly setting-specific race).
@@IamWalkingDead1 Except this is a fake CYA argument, because 99% of games I've ever played in that get to level 4 that point use feats. 95% of games that get into T2 drop magical items. 90% of all games allow multiclassing. That is exactly what I'm talking about how D&D's prerogative is 'it's more important to defend your fandom than design good rules', because as a cop-out to questionable rules design it tells you to play the game in a way no one does. It's denialism and also why we keep getting expansion material like the Chronurgist Wizard on the high end and Astral monk on the low end.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.)
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. 🤣
It's true, there was a decent baseline of acceptable-power subclasses and options for years now, and we've mostly been harping on the underpowered ones, or the ones whose class fantasy just felt wrong or anemic. As Treantmonk said in a recent video, most of the game-breaking was done through _theoretical_ optimization which only flies by loose or malicious interpretation of the RAW. But these two subclasses are very plainly intended. I actually kinda forgot what that was like...
I learned from 3.5 and keep my game core rules, anything beyond core books, and the player and I discuss what they want. I will allow players to have the options they want, for example, the campaign before the plaguedemic had a Kenku player. I just won’t allow game breaking RAW from supplements. WOTC breaks the game, mechanically, every time they release new supplemental books.
Other than the luck feats in Complete scoundrel, there is not much in 3.5 that breaks the game. This is because unlike 5th, 3.5 uses the same rules for the monsters and the players. It didn't matter what wonky things they players decide to do, the monsters were always up to the challenge to equal the players and make for an interesting game. kobolds that were 9th level warlocks are just part of the standard game.
@@alexandriamason2355 3.5 was made to correct the imbalance of 3E, which is what I was referring to. I should have typed 3.0. My apologies. I was making a joke anyways. On a more serious note, I get your point about 3.5, and I can partially agree with you. I say partially because 3.5 had Level adjustments for monsters and certain races. Kobolds had no level adjustments, but Drow, Aasimar, vampires, lycanthropes did have level “penalties”. Basically the 9th Kobold warlock would be equal to a 7th level drow warlock (if I remember correctly, which if I am wrong about the actual level penalties I am right about the system). This means that monsters were not balanced and 3.5 tried to fix it; which was good. But so many options came out that eventually balance was impossible. If the 9th level kobold warlock had certain feats from the Draconomicon then the kobold warlock would over shadow the power of a drow warlock of similar level. Also, magic was too powerful in 3.0 and 3.5. Any class that did not have magic just paled in power to those that did and very few people would play those classes. I felt bad for the fighter class. I played a straight up fighter and had fun with him, but every time a new gish class came out (especially the 3.5 Hexblade) I felt weak in comparison. Thankfully my roleplaying chops made for an entertaining and fun character. 3.5 wasn’t a bad system. It was a good system. But balance was not a strong trait in 3.5.
@@alexandriamason2355 Uh, that was not my experience. 3.5e was kinda infamous for 1-2 gamebreaking combos per splatbook. Remember the infinite spellcasting with Complete Arcane? I do. Or the infinite skill checks you could get with the Masochism feat and a bucket of water? Or Pun Pun? When 3.5 broke the game, it really broke it. By comparison, 5e has been quite tame in terms of what the players can actually accomplish.
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
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.
Yeah the Twilight domain cleric ups the powerlevel of the party but it doesn't break anything because it buffs everyone so the DM can just throw harder challenges on them. Unlike OP AC of OP damage which makes it really hard to balance challenges for the party because what's difficult for one player is beyond lethal to the rest. I would probably have the twilight sanctuary use concentration though.
I disagree with the logic that "it makes everyone better so it's not a problem". You know what else makes everyone do better in combat? Dealing a shit ton more damage than anything else in the game so you destroy all the enemies before they can hurt your teammates. Just because *you* are not thinking about the source of what gives the power to the party, doesn't mean it's balanced and not a problem. If I am to fight and know that the only thing that is keeping this combat alive is a ridiculous huge shield by the cleric every round to everyone, I know who is outshining who.
@@theWebWizrd No one player dealing loads of damage ends with your players feeling that one player is carrying them or even worse that they don't get a chance to contribute because the OP dmg player has already done everything. And if you balance for the OP dmg player you end up with the others feeling like they can do even less. Keeping you alive while you go do thrilling heroics however does not come with envy.
@@DaDunge The problem is it if as a DM you are balancing around these abilities then if for whatever reason that cleric doesn't use it in a combat then that combat is suddenly very Deadly. Whereas if you don't balance around them and the cleric does decide to use it then the combat is extremely easy. Thus these abilities are actually takes choices away from players. If you have a Twilight cleric & a Peace cleric in the same party then they HAVE to use Twilight Sanctuary and Emboldening Bond every combat and all the characters HAVE to stay within 30ft of them or the party will TPK.
Well, Twilight Cleric is a fantastic dip for a wizard now! But I do see these subclasses as very good options for small group campaigns of 2-3 players... or just 1, if you're running a solo. Great leader to rally around.
I‘m 6 minutes in, and I‘ve got to say, I really like the are-you-shitting-me tone and the images of overpowered characters in the background. Yeah, those subclasses are so busted it isn‘t even funny anymore...
I do think that protective bond using a reaction makes it a little less op than you described, for instance the barbarian can only tank the one attack per round, or likewise the character with the resistance. I agree that the two together is pretty busted tho.
I like how the Twilight/Peace combo is so strong defensively that you didn't even need to reiterate that if either (or both) of those Clerics casted Bless, three/six characters in that party will also be getting a bonus 2d4 for one attack every round and pretty much every saving throw to drive home how overpowered these abilities are.
I mean peace can do that themselves at somewhat later lvs. And at later lvs clerics can target up to 6 creatures with bless by up casting it (7th lv to be exact when u get 4th lv spells). Also u can’t stack bless with bless. So only peace can make it 2d4 (for most but not all since it’s once per turn for 1d4 with the bond). I really like peace but my huge issue with it is the fact that potent spellcasting makes no sense. Y does someone who worships peace and is the embodiment of peace get something that ups dmg? That’s just dumb. Not to mention they only get 3 cleric cantrips that do dmg (it was only one at first) and they r all saving throws so yea that’s bad. The only cleric subclass that gets potent spellcasting that actually benefits from it is Arcane cleric since they get wizard cantrips and they count as cleric cantrips (honestly potent spellcasting should just work on all cantrips and not just cleric ones). If even iffy about their bond adding to attack rolls. It should like apply to their ac instead (since most of this subclass is about negating dmg). They could’ve given them more movement speed to help with their channel divinity, make it heal more, make it so u can target the same creature more then once (really like their channel divinity but just wish it got better at the later lvs). That or maybe make it have something to do with the sanctuary spell (believe their is a monk subclass that does that) or maybe something like anyone who’s affected by your bond who’s within 10 feet can’t be like charmed or frightened (or maybe advantage cause immunity might be too strong at that lv). Just so many things that just would’ve made so much more sense and just flat out better.
Twilight could be fixed easily by removing scaling. The effect was good enough as is. Peace is the actual fuck up. Gnerally i would use the UA instead of the official.
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.
My thoughts exactly! I think they tried to scale both Domains back last minute, tried winging it and this happened. With Emboldening Bond, they probably thought if they tie the availability to the Proficiency Bonus, like most other things in Tasha's it would keep it from being too strong at low levels - in all the other cases tying things to the PB had worked out pretty well for balance, so they figured it was a safe bet. The 6th level Protective Bond thing definitely reads like it was rewritten in a hurry. Same with Twilight Sanctuary, but I'm not even sure why that was changed - the UA version seems like it would have still been pretty strong at most levels. Just like you said: a DM trying to balance for one or both of these in a party is going to be walking a fine line between not creating enough challenge and completely whipping the party out in one turn.
I feel like for both features they incorporated every request players made in the UA. The UA Twilight Sanctuary wasn't that great at higher levels because almost all good cleric spells are concentration, so CD that require concentration end up rarely used. Likewise 1d8 tmp HP is great at low levels but not much a higher levels. Either removing concentration or making the tmp hp scale would have been ok changes, but doing both is incredibly busted.
In my 15 years of experience most players kinda suck at playing their character. These clerics aren't scary in the hands of Timmy(80%), but Johnny(15%) or Spike(5%) would be a real problem.
I know its tredding into RAI territory, but I dont think they wanted Protective bond to work with AOE the way you described. But then again, they need to comb through books to look for exploits far more thoroughly
Yeah. I don't think the wording of it supports that interpretation, I highly doubt the intent does, and I sure as hell wouldn't allow it even if either did.
Player B teleports to player A and takes double the damage, player C teleports to player B to take triple the damage, player D ,who’s immune to fire, teleports to player C to take no damage. All you need to do is make sure player D is too far away...
@@theshadowbadger I think I would resolve everything at the same time so that player D can't tank everyone. He could only tank one. I haven't thought this through at all, just on top of my head of what seems fair.
@@theshadowbadger Reactions are supposed to be really quick instant things. I would not allow players to decide what order their reactions are resolved in if multiple are using their reaction in response to the same trigger.
I am playing a Twilight Cleric soon in a one shot game at lv5. The two things I’m looking for are how much damage the temporary hit points actually prevents and how many initiatives/fights are won simply because the wizard gets advantage on their initiative and simply shutdowns the enemy party.
@@milanmarkovic2721 Its' really not that extreme, 300ft is less than 100 meters. I don't think I could see the house in the other side of my yard with twilight domain darkvision, in total darkness. Really it shouldn't matter unless you're underground or in the shadowfell you shouldn't be in total darkness (I know the rulebook says night is Darkness but that's utter BS, humans see a lot better in darkness than that).
I'm not defending it, but I want to note that Emboldening Bond actually _does_ have a hidden drawback that wasn't there in the Unearthed Arcana: You apply it to a number of creatures equal to your proficiency bonus; no more, _and no less._ If you have less available targets than your proficiency bonus, then as written, _you can't use it._
Even if these two are broken, especially together, you gotta find weaknesses. That twilight cleric would be great banished to the astral plane, and with him gone the peace cleric would be a great target for a charm spell. Or if you can get the drop on the twilight cleric and charm him, now he's a nice support bubble for your monster. Either or both of these as a charmed ally would certainly make an encounter challenging.
That’s actually a good point. Both are great AOE buffs, but any magic user or clever Assassin is going to spot it a mile away. Poisons, Charms, and dirty tactics galore.
Banishment and charm both target cleric's high saves. A charm spell - if it can even work, since not all races are humanoid - would be made vs Wisdom, the cleric's strongest save, AND with advantage because you're fighting, AND only makes them regard you as a friendly acquaintance. "You seem a decent fellow...I hate to kill you" not "I'm going to sit this fight out or help you kill my crew". There's absolutely no way anything shorter than Dominate Person, Crown of Madness, etc. is turning a PC against the party. Yes, if you have every possible tactical advantage - surprise, poison, assassinate, a metric ton of cannon fodder, advantageous terrain, superior spellcasting, and DM intervention, you can partially negate some of the advantages of these cleric's low level, low cost abilities for a turn or two.
@@laneshadow yes, that is unfortunate that the cleric has the best spell save proficiencies. At the end of the day, I think the party using OP configurations is simply permission to scale up the difficulty.
Better still is if you have a small party, you can use Emboldening Bond on summoned creatures and use them as meat shields. A 2 man group Shepherd Druid + Peace Domain Cleric will be almost unkillable. Hill Dwarf with Tough, Stack Con. Peace Domain 6, Totem of the Bear Barbarian 3.... you ARE the party HP pool.
7:00 the on average doesn't even matter since every turn they get the chance to roll as see if they can get a bigger temp hp pool than they had before, over the course of 9 turns they are going to get a lot more than just the average and that's assuming they're not taking damage.
add in that most average combats from my experience last 3-5 rds at most and the temp hp doesn't fade at the end most of time you will finish with 6+cleric lv temp hp at the end of it all for the next fight/triggered traps
I’m not sure you understand how averages work. Over time, the more times you roll a particular die, you actually get closer to an average outcome. It’s the single rolls that get the most variability. For example, roll a d6 10 times. The final tally will be somewhere around 35, meaning an average of 3.5 per roll. So 35 is the average total. But if you roll it once, sure you might get a 6, but you also might get a 1. Just rolling a bunch more times means you’ll tend toward the average, not get higher than the average.
@@BrentDnD No it won't be, because you only replace the old one if the new one is higher than the old one. If you roll a 6 and then a 1 it's still a 6. Like I said averages don't matter what matters is the highest number of the set.
@@DaDunge I guess I'm a little confused then because that's not what it says in the book. It specifically says: "Whenever a creature (including you) ends its turn in the sphere, you can grant that creature one of these benefits: - You grant it temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level. - You end one effect on it causing it to be charmed or frightened." It doesn't say anything about rolling the 1d6 every round and only taking the new roll if it's higher than the last roll. When I was in a party with a twilight cleric, she rolled the 1d6 for every individual separately and rerolled it every round. For example: Round 1 - PC1 and PC2 both end their round in the sphere. PC1 got 9 temp HP, and PC2 only got 6 temp HP. Round 2 - Only PC1 ended their turn in the sphere, and this time they only got 7 temp HP. They don't get to receive another 9 temp HP just because that's what they got on the last round.
@@BrentDnD I think he's referring to the rules about temp hp, where you can decide to replace one instance for the next. So, if a player's temp hp roll was low, they could roll again next time and replace it if it was higher. Technically true, but situational in my opinion. (compared to the rest of the abilities at least) Most of the players are going to take damage every round removing the temp hp anyways.
Thank you for this video, the artwork selection was very funny. How about a Twilight cleric + Peace cleric + Ancestral Guardian Barbarian + Abjuration Mage + Fiend warlock party? :D
Imagine the peace cleric lvl 6 feature with a lvl 14 zealot barbearian. Basically infinite hp(just have whomever they protect use a medicine kit to stabilize them when then might fail)
I, personally, would like to see the math on the challenges for that group. I have a Dm who really doesn't think this combination (twilight + Peace cleric) is that bad. I've done some of my own math, but I'd still be interested in how this math looks on your end.
It's such a shame that the Twilight domain is so broken in Tasha's. Over the summer I played a UA Twilight Cleric, who has turned out to be my favourite of my characters - when I first read the class, a concept slammed together in my head so incredibly quickly and clearly, and that character ended up having some of the best RPing I've ever done. I didn't even care about the mechanics or how broken they were - it was the flavour and concept that I fell in love with. But if I wanted to do that now, well, I would face all of the resistance of having chosen a subclass that is, mechanically, absolutely overwhelmingly powerful. I'm spitballing an idea here to fix Twilight Sanctuary. Thematically, the Twilight Domain is all about exalting the beauty of nighttime while protecting against its dangers; what if, instead of getting temp HP at the end of each turn as well as ending effects, it just gave advantage on saves vs. charm and fear? If that's now too weak, it could allow a charmed or frightened creature in the sanctuary to repeat the save at the end of each of its turns, even if it normally couldn't. This change would take Twilight Sanctuary from a mechanically broken (and thematically confusing) ability to one that's much more situational, but more in line with other Channel Divinity options, while still being thematically appropriate.
I honestly don’t see the big deal about it. I mean yes it’s really good and is a little busted but peace is way more busted. Twilights whole thing seems to be around their channel divinity so u can only use it like 2-3 times (depending on how high u go in Cleric). Where as peace it’s based off their proficiency so they don’t have to even go that high and they can use it up to 6 times and each time it last for 10 minutes (where as twilights only last 1 min). That and Twilights final ability kinda sucks. Half cover gives u +2 to ac and at that lv it’s really meh. Peace is much better at dmg mitigation at any lv. I do hate that the twilight gets an ability (with their channel divinity) to get rid of charm or frightened when peace should be the one that has something like that. Potent spellcasting makes no sense on peace cleric and should be replaced by something like this or just any that actually makes sense and doesn’t suck (it suckk on a cause Clerics only get 3 dmg dealing cantrips and they r all saves, should work on all cantrips honestly).
So, a lv 6 peace cleric with a chain warlock teammate (get an imp familiar) or multi-class yourself, could now use the protective bond feature to negate the breath weapon damage from all sizes of red and green dragon. Really great....
I don't really get this complaint? You're the dm. Simply don't make the dragon green or red? If you think a creature would simply be too weak against your players... Don't use that creature.
@@Kolonite_ sure I'll just use all those acid monsters and never touch fire damage again cuz wizards has an equal variety of damage types /s my players will love that :D
I’m not sure how a yuan ti is preventing all the damage a green’s breath deals to the entire party, unless you just meant it saves one person. I also don’t think most players will reliably choose to use reactions to save a friend, regardless of the strategic strength of the maneuver. They’ll wait bc they want to be able to counterspell or opportunity attack, riposte, Hellish rebuke, etc.
Yeah, I think Chris is underestimating how limiting reaction requirements are to the 6th level ability. It's really good in the circumstances where you have resistance or immunity, particularly against single target attacks. It's much less good against AoEs.
Yuan-ti are immune to poison. Your second point may be true on some tables but not on others. You cannot count on a broken feature being fine because a party chooses to play suboptimally. A feature should be balanced even if a party decided to use it optimally. There may be cases where a wizard should rather save his reaction for counterspell. But for the majority of characters in the majority of partys using this feature very frequently to spread out damage as much as they can will be the clear best tactical choice.
One way to read the feature is that the teleporting creature takes on ALL of the damage of the triggering attack/spell/etc., not just the one of the original triggering target. So Yuan Ti with their poison immunity take the entire breath of the green dragon, not just the damage of their friend gettin hit. I personally don't think that was intended, but it is a way to read the feature and there will be players trying to do this.
@@MrMelkor98 even though Yuan-ti are immune to poison they can only protect one other player with their reaction, not the whole party. Burning most of the player's reactions also means enemies are free to move however they like, negating some of the teleport advantages.
Looking forward to the feats vid. Want to see what the consensus is on chef and poisoner, they seem to me like they should be things that are available from having proficiency with tool kits. Makes me think again what is the point in tool proficiencies. How do people handle tool proficiencies in their games?
In my games I have two systems to encourage tool use. The first one is that if you can think of a way to use a skill AND a tool on the same check, you can have advantage. For example, you're trying to track someone. The standard roll is survival, but if you have cobbler's tools, you can say that you also analyse their footprints to work out what sort of shoes they're wearing and have advantage on the roll. It has to be a skill and a tool, it can't be two skills or two tools, and I'm also picky about helping. If it doesn't make sense for someone to help then they can't, and the helper also needs to have proficiency. For the tracking, I don't think it makes sense to help unless you're splitting the party. The second way I encourage tool use is my overworld movement rules. These are adapted from some rules I stole from Matt Colville, which he stole and adapted from 4E. First off, I ask the players to route out their journey, and work out how long it's going to take. After that, I hand it over to the players and they narrate what happens on the journey, a problem that occurs, and then makes a skill check using a skill or tool (or both for advantage) that they are proficient in. Each player cannot use the same skill twice, but they can use a skill that another player has used. For example if Jim has used survival to fish in a river, he cannot then use survival again to read a map. Sarah could use her survival to read a map though. The players need a number of successes equal to the number of days of travel, and you can arbitrarily increase or decrease those numbers if they're going through dangerous territory or something. Every failure gets recorded, and then the party get a combat encounter scaled to the number of failures that they had. For example if they failed once, they might have to fight 3 wolves, but if they failed 3 times, they might have to fight 6 wolves and an evil druid. You can even make the combat thematic for the failures. If someone said that they tried to fix the cart wheel with woodcarver's tools but failed, the monsters can attack while they're fixing the cart wheel. I personally don't allow people to use things like Guidance or Portent on these skill checks, because they take place over a long period of time. Whilst there is functionally only one skill check, it represents a continuous effort over the entire journey, and Guidance and Portent don't allow you to aid those. You might want to allow them though, I don't see any real functional problem with it. Maybe only allow them to have one roll of Portent that lasts for the entire journey though. I absolutely love these overworld movement rules, because they mean that it's obvious that the adventure is taking place over a long time (so far my players have gained 3 levels in 2 in-game months, and it doesn't feel like it's dragging or they're wasting time), and it also means that I don't have to write a bunch of crap filler monologues about the great river that they cross on a bridge, or how dark and dank the forest is. They players make the descriptive text themselves while justifying how they're going to use their skills. It just speeds up overworld movement and makes it more interactive, while being less actual work for me.
I was most excited for the prospect of the poisoner feat... But honestly, unless you have some other means of accessing potent poison.. It's just not very good. I guess it depends on the campaign.. But 50 gold for 3 doses of 2d8 poison damage with a 14dc is pretty bad. If the DC somehow scaled it'd be pretty good.. but it doesnt. This means that you won't be able to afford it at early levels, and it'll rarely hit at higher levels.
@@MaMastoast yeah I guess the effectiveness is questionable, but I'm wondering if I need a feat for this then what does the poisoner's kit do. And why is this not part of the assassin subclasses features already. Hindsight is 2020.
Poison and potion making on vanilla 5e is pretty meh, I made my whole system for both of them with a shit-ton of recipes and my player's have a lot more fun with it. It does give a lot of options to your players, but thats true for their enemies too.
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.
The Peace Cleric dip is infinitely worse IMO. If you're playing a Monk or Ranger and you're optimizing, why WOULDN'T you pick up a level of Peace Cleric? IMO, Variant Human Peace Cleric 1/Way of Mercy Monk X with Fey Touched (Hex) is very viable.
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Twilight is insane and I love it. Dip a level of it on an assassin rogue and the enemy caster never get a chance to fireball you, or cast any other spells.
It’s cause they are defenders of night, protecting those from the clutches of the dark. It makes sense if you read the gods associated with this domain and the description
Echoing this. Night is the time of peace, quiet, and rest, so why should clerics of the night be wearing heavy metal armour that goes CLANK CLANK CLANK? In my opinion, Twilight should have joined Light/Knowledge/Arcana in getting Potent Cantrip.
for the twilight domain. 300 feet of darkvision isn't that big a deal IMO. Because most maps arent that big, 120 feet is usually more than enough to see everything on the map. And darkvision is already really common. Sleep is great at level 1, but it peters off quite quickly.
I'm in an online campaign where we've been playing deep gnomes (120' darkvision) hunting trolls (60' darkvision). With advantage because you can see them and they can't see you, the enemies just get wrecked. Increasing the range of darkvision is just going to make this worse as well as permitting the same advantage versus foes with 120' darkvision.
So, you clarify - this doesn't necessarily completely counter creatures that do massive single hits, or AOE that does significantly in excess of the temp hp in damage. They're still gonna leak through, but it does make it a lot easier to spread that damage. One way or another if a creature does 50 damage in a single hit, that's still gonna be around 30-40 damage to a character's hp. That is, unless someone has resistance or immunity.
The problem is that getting that hard hit on exactly the right player makes all the difference. You are attacking the Wizard that is using wall of force to block half the enemy forces? Boom, your damage goes on the raging barbarian instead.
I recently had a terrible DM who kept TPKing the group then blamed us on being bad players. So, we asked if the new tasha's was allowed, and he said yes. So, the party of an artilerist artificer, peace cleric, conquest paladin, and ancestor barbarian came in. It is safe to say that the party never took damage because the artilerist was pumping out temporary hitpoints, ancestor barbarian was reducing all the damage we took, the paladin and peace cleric made it so we could never fail a saving throw while healing the rest of us. paladin also scared the tits off of everything after the barbarian knocked them prone so they were stuck in the prone position. Additionally, everyone besides the barbarian had a dummy thick AC, so hitting us was a challenge especially since most enemies had disadvantage from fear.
This combo doesn't seem that bad, the counter is AoE. If the dragons breath weapon hits the entire party, sure 2 players can tank the damage for the other 2, but they in turn are taking double the damage. let's assume a party of 6th level facing a Young Bronze Dragon, if 2 players use their reaction to save the other 2, they themselves will take 20d10 lightning damage. 110 average! Double their max hitpoints meaning that if the entire party failed their save, instead of the weaker members simply getting knocked from full to 0, 2 members guarantee they die from overflow damage.
I feel like you're being rather generous with your readings of a couple abilities of both? Twilight Sanctuary - this is one effect or the other, not both. It's definitely still incredibly powerful, but that's an important distinction - it's temp HP OR ending a charm / fear effect. Balm of Peace - you say the movement in this feature doesn't use your regular movement? I just don't understand why that would be true. Protective Bond - if multiple people were in that green dragons breath, then the yuan-ti is only negating damage to itself and one other creature, not the entire party - several other of your examples follow this same pattern. Don't get me wrong, it's still fairly ridiculous in it's power, but you make the extent of that sound worse than it is here.
Balm of peace "as an action you can move up to your speed" sounds like it's essentially a dash action with extra benefits. Which is why it doesn't use your regular movement. Protective bond: idk how often it is for you that on the later rounds of a combat, a dragon is hitting 3 or more people in a breath. Everyone should have spread out. So 50 damage to three people, and if one is the yuan ti and it uses the teleport. You only did 50 damage to one target.
@@adamkaris The easiest solution there is to let the dragon use its breath every round, or at least every other round. A Dragon that stays high in the air is a lot scarier than one in easy reach of the ground.
Kind of a problem with the Twilight cleric is that it’s temporary hitpoints. You can’t even use effects that disable healing, since they don’t „regain“ hitpoints.
So that aspect of twilight clerics flight is actually even more broken. The 6th level flight doesnt need dim light the whole time for flight. It only needs the restriction to begin the flight. In addition even if you wanted to put that limit on it. While your CD is up it is filled with dim light so you could still activate it while your CD is up.
A 1 minute fly speed is not broken in any way whats so ever. Even with multiple uses per day. The dm can easily run combats with enemies that can attack a range.
For Twilight Sanctuary, how about reducing the temporary HP to approximately one weak hit (say d4 + 1/2 cleric level?), and add poisoned to the list of conditions that can be removed. The latter is a buff that doubles as a nerf: creatures in the area can _either_ receive temporary HP or have a condition removed, not both. Now, the DM can equip opponents with poisoned blades or arrows giving the DM an easy way to force the sanctuary to be used to remove a condition instead of granting temporary HP. The player still feels powerful and effective and it makes sense to me that Goblins, Kobolds, and many other opponents would routinely use poison; whereas, only Fae and Fiends seem likely to routinely use charm and fear effects.
Maths errors in the ranting - one big attack will bypass most of the temporary HP and as it's a reaction to use the bond damage sharing say 10 small attacks will also bypass most of that mitigation Not that it really changes things; focus fire is THE fundamental D&D tactic and this makes it very hard.
While I do agree that he should account for the limitations brought by this being and using a reaction, calling this a "math error" is pretty wrong. Let's call it an oversimplification. And at any rate, like he said often times 50 damage won't be 50 damage. There is resistance, mitigations, et cetera.
> So, in my next video I'll be looking at my feets. I think it's the devs who need to do that next. They should hang their heads in shame, and gaze into the burning stare of their FEETS, and mend their ways!
To be honest, I don’t find these _too_ broken. They’re amazing, don’t get me wrong. But they need the right group to really capitalize on it. I can’t say more about this than I can say about a Moon Druid or Bladesing Wizard. I do see the power creep, but every “decent” class got something good; maybe not as good, but definitely better than, say, 75% of the PHB. I think this is more because WOTC is getting a better grasp of not making terrible subclasses. Well, except for the Warlock, Monk, and Ranger which have either MAD or gimmicks that can’t be addressed with a single subclass, but a fundamental rework is needed. Honestly, you can argue that’s what is needed, a rework. The 8-13 encounters day WotC originally planned is starting to show its cracks.
I am a long-time DM and player. I am in a campaign right now. I went cleric because the rest of the group had ideas on the normal "cool" classes already. I didn't mind. I build a moderately powered Silver Dragonborn Lore Cleric/(will be)Scribe Wizard and absolutely feel like I need to "pull back" a bit to not seem overpowered. BUT we're running Lost Mines and we got the Staff of Defense and it went to me lol. So 18AC and 5 times daily Shield spell for free at level 3.
So as a minmaxer i have been eyeing twilight for circle of power originally a paladin spell only so broken but I would rule the peace domain as the second creature takes the damage but not all the damage if it is a aoe spell the rest of the party presuming they were hit would take the damage simply because it is open to interpretation because it doesn't specify if it takes all the aoe damage
Damn all that sh!ts powerful. Note of Protective Bond: It uses the reaction of the creature soaking the damage. So if your hypothetical fireball hits 4 people with 1 of them being fire resistance the resistant one can take their portion halved and someone else's portion (which is then halved) making the "soaker" take the full hit but saves the weaker member and the other two are taking full damage unless one of them wants to take double damage. Hmm this makes me think of what happens when you soak the damage of a successful save, is it quartered in the circumstance above? Another note: You can only soak the first hit so against multi-attack monsters that hit hard (giants) you're only reducing their damage output by ~25% if they land two hits and the soaker has resistance to their damage type.
I never understood why Unearthed Arcana doesn't just give you a couple of options and then say "what options did you try, what was the results, and what did we miss?" What is the point of the survey if it only gives you one result?
What I'm surprised about is how sloppy the wording on the subclasses are. It seems to me that Twilight's CD was meant to enable its flight, but it's not clear if dim light supersedes bright light, "dimming" the area magically. But the real stinker is the Peace domain. I can roll a d4 and add it to one thing? Okay, WHEN? By the wording, you might roll a d4 at the top of the round, and then when you roll a d20, after you see the roll, you can add it. That's highly irregular, but the wording is so sloppy that it's a very real possibility. And then the Protective Bond. It mirrors the Crown and Redemption Paladins' Aura abilities, but they missed the key line of text, "The damage can't be reduced or prevented in any way". Oh, but you see, they had to do that in order to get the 17th level feature to work! Give me a break. On top of that, there's some funny interactions with things that both deal damage and have a rider effect: e.g., if the enemy has cast Branding Smite, the teleporter takes the damage, but it's the first guy who becomes visible and sheds light. Minor, but dumb. There's no limit on "creature that you can see", so you can teleport through solid walls (there's also no limit on line of sight to forge the Bond in the first place). Also, reaction order isn't clear in 5e, so in the middle of a single attack, players might start arguing who's going to teleport and take the damage, which could go on a while.
If I ever had two players disagree about who would jump in with a Reaction and take the damage, I'd have them roll for it. What modifiers would I use? I don't know, I'd cross that bridge when I got to it.
In defence of the twilight sanctuary - the official rules state that temp hp don't stack. The simply replace your current pool of temp up and extend any applicable duration.
After finishing the video, I have to agree with you here. And for me to say something is broken that is saying a lot. I'm usually the one arguing, "No it is not broken" to the crowd who decries "min-maxers." Half the fun of optimizing is diving into the game mechanics to come up with cool and effective ideas. There's no thought into making these effective. You simply choose the class and now you're in God mode. That is not fun.
This is why I have resisted playing paladin, because they're just plain better than the majority of martial classes.... like it's eh, making a barbarian strong is fun tho.
I wanna make one correction. The twilight sanctuary either gives temp HP OR remove ONE charm or frighten. It doesn’t do all of them at once. However, it doesn’t mean it’s less broken.
Harness Divine Power is incredibly flavorful and useful on an Arcane Cleric with their magical shtick and circumstantial planar turning channel divinity. Really satisfied with that bit, two additional 2nd level slots on 6th level is great
A redemption paladin already has the feature to take damage for someone else but most DMs I've spoken to tell me they've never seen one use it. Probably with good reason because the paladin needs their reaction for opportunity attacks/counterspell/etc. I can't imagine the wizard ever using this feature even if they have temp hp left. Also, anyone concentrating on anything will never use this ability which should be everyone who can concentrate on a spell. It should also be noted that if you are to take the damage for someone else, the teleportation is not optional so that could pull you outside paladin aura or otherwise force you into a disadvantageous position.
Think pact of chain warlock with imp familiar. Immune to poison and fire, resistant to cold, resistant to non-magical or non-silvered bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. Using the reaction granted won't even break its invisibility. It'll just absorb the damage and the attacker will not even why it is unable to harm the target. Good fun.
One additional caveat of the paladin aura is that it transfers the damage, and this damage can't be reduced. The aura doesn't work with resistances and immunities. This feature definitely works better for beefy barbarians than it ever will for any paladin. I think ranged fighters and rangers also won't mind sacrificing some health to keep up the wizard's concentration. It's a lot better than the paladin aura because of it.
cold fusion I’m surprised to hear that. I thought the whole point of the redemption paladin was to tank. You wouldn’t take damage in place of a barbarian or other tanky character unless they were much lower in health than you were, obviously, but the redemption pally’s ability to absorb damage is a good way to protect more fragile party members.
Whenever I sit down to theorycraft a Twilight cleric I instantly get bored even before I pick my race. It feels like when a child is telling you about their new superhero they made up. You chuckle, then pat them on the head then thank God they don't write for Marvel. That's a Twilight cleric.
Twilight domain is my favorite domain in the game. between the adv on init that can be passed off as well as better DV then drow. The heavy armor, the CD has given mine so much temp hp that ive been able to handed out and kept people from dropping. i love the temps and it's just awesome.
I was going to use the Chef feat for a character concept. I was unable to as we had a Twlilight cleric, who could do my entire concept but better at level 2 with a single channel divinity. That channel needs to be once or require concentration.
When I’m a player then I want to use these subclasses but as a DM I do tend to die inside when I imagine a deadly combat being beaten easily just because the party has two clerics from Tasha’s in it.
I like these classes. They're "OP" in this weirdly academic theorycrafting, but in your typical group, the Twilight Cleric is just a cool cleric who gives shields. Evcn the Peace/Twilight combo would require buy-in from the whole party, and who really wants to reduce their games to just Round-Robin-Shield-Soaking? Anyone would be reasonably mad if 2 people suddenly dictated how everything at the table would go. I think these classes are cool, and it's about time classes got some actually good, cool powers main-line. The "brokenness" of all these things don't survive the social shaming of the game table.
I would argue that there are other ways to challenge this combo that arent in combat, and even in combat, there are ways to shut this down besides trying to kill the party. I'm a player that likes to bait out reactions from monsters to defend my team. This gets easier when I can set the amount of enemies that do this. Environmental hazards and things that artificially separate the party should work.
I specifically built a suboptimal twilight cleric so I could always use her. I built around using the 300ft of darkvision to make her an angel of death with levels in gloomstalker.
@@DAEDRICDUKE1 As a wood elf though trees could enable hiding though. I like trying to optimize how I represent a concept rather than for absolute power :)
Just think about any of these subclasses as dips. Not a single class would not be stronger with a dip in those clerics. Both Twilight Sanctuary and Emboldening Bond are not spells and scale of your proficiency, so literally anyone can take them for a 1/2 level dip and they will scale with them regardless of your cleric level. No need to be a spellcasting class either since they do not use spell slots or have an ability modifier attached anywhere. Not even starting with all the extra stuff a twilight cleric gets at first level. All in all, both are a better or at least more-versatile-while-just-as-good dip options than even the Hexblade.
I was going to run the Twilight Cleric in Out of the Abyss, my DM was very hesitant after reading it over. I didn't realize how strong it was until watching this. I decided to run a Light cleric instead.
If you hate it then you could make it COST the cleric hit points to use? Maybe half the amount you dish out to one person each round So if it costs me 3hp to give 6temp hp to the party (and to myself, just word it so that the hit points you sacrifice are clearly your actual hit points), then there's some fear to using it. I've only got 21hp as a 3rd level twilight cleric, so while I can last for a while it would still build up and prey on the minds of people who don't like to take any damage at all
I designed a boss encounter with a twilight cleric and a peace cleric that took dips in paladin and sorcerer. Bonus action booking blade followed by a smite and another booming blade with another smite with these broken subclasses. I decided it was way too strong so I have to nerf it. I was going for an Ornstein and Smough kind of fight. But I ended up with a final boss level fight.
A friend made a druid/cleric multiclass to get dragon starry form and enboldening bond with spirit guardians, pretty good. Feats are way more op though lol. Like Eldritch Adept for Devil's sight is insane value. My Sanic build is a scout rogue with mobile and magic initiate (booming blade and find familiar) owl familiar on shoulder for sneak attacks, bonus action dash for 80ft, attack and run away op attack free lol.
It makes me a bit salty. I know that wotc isn't generally able to use errata to "fix" things beyond typos (Healing Spirit was an odd exception), but variant features was a rare chance for them to fix a lot of broken stuff. They did mostly fix the ranger, and they greatly improved the sorcerer (mostly only for the 2 new subclasses, lifting their bonus spells feature as a homebrew is seriously welcomed for any older sorcerer subclass), but they left the monk broken, as well as a number of other things variant features could have patched... Instead of taking one of their only chances to improve their old work, they had more interest in publishing power creeped, stronger subclasses, and the new Cleric subs are definitely the worst offenders.
Order Domain is a reprint from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. Treantmonk already discussed that cleric subclass in a previous video, linked for your convenience. th-cam.com/video/gPq3wU1vNhA/w-d-xo.html
Counter the player’s twilight cleric with your own low level one. With how temp hp works, if the players are given temp hp a second time you can actually erase the higher number with a lower number.
Thank you for your videos, Chris. I have a theory. I think that over the last the math nerds who focus on mechanics and get a laugh out of RP, who used to be the core of D&D, were pushed out in favor of drama class nerds who focus on RP and consider mechanics a secondary necessity. I’d wager that the people who now write the classes don’t play the game very seriously/often. Their focus is with RP and social concerns, not with the mechanical viability of the game. I’d wager that if you asked Crawford if he’d ever played in a campaign with a Twilight and Peace domain cleric, and he answered truthfully, he’d have to say “No”. I can’t think of any other reason that monks are monks, rangers have had the 6.5 year saga they’ve had, and these two archetypes were released. These are people who are SUPPOSED to study and build D&D as a full time job...and they produce this? It’s frustrating. My table has largely moved on to other lesser known TTRPGs. TLDR: Current D&D creators care very little about game mechanics. Their focus lies elsewhere.
Playing a twilight cleric in a campaign atm and twilight sanctuary is very strong. We're looking at houseruling it into taking a reaction to use, that way it can only be used once a round. Should still be strong, but not as busted.
Twilight Sanctuary creates dim light around the Cleric. Steps of Night lets you fly in dim light for a minute. Use your action to Channel Divinity for Twilight Sanctuary and then bonus action for Steps of Night and you now have concentration free flight for a minute. This is honestly one of maybe 3 Cleric subclasses that peak my interest in the class.
To be honest WoTC have been power scaleing in splat books for the last few, and it's now gone way too far and is litteraly making combat unbalanced in too many ways.
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!
@Alaberti that’s a fantastic combo
I was thinking about doing this for a campaign with friends, but not anymore :/
This is how you make a good monk.
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Yep
I dipped my MAD Bladesinger into a single level of Hexblade and Peace Domain
Now I’m bound by my patron to not needlessly kill, and I must always try to go the peaceful way first ^^
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.
Cleric gang
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.
This is probably the best explanation. Though to be fair, that’s hard to balance around overall. If the game was better balanced around Short Rest Monks and Warlocks would have a lot less problems.
Between the Cleric subclasses getting busted while the Astral Self Monk got gutted I'm honestly wondering what the point of UA even is.
WOTC are drunk, change my mind.
I have a few ideas for what can be done to buff Monks, I can tell you these if you guys want
It is no secret wotc hate the monk and adore wizards and clerics
Most people thought astral self was the most busted thing to see print because more attacks=busted
@@kevmbuck to be fair, with optimization more attacks are really good, since you can layer buffs that add damage per attack to do some pretty potent stuff. Start combining several of Rage, divine favor, eldritch claw, hexblade's curse, belts of giant strength, or similar features and you actually will be pretty busted with six attacks.
Of course, absolutely gutting it isn't what anyone wanted.
False hope.
Peace really seems to want me to join my friends in combat!
Give Peace a chance
If your enemy is dead there is no conflict, only peace.
@@yotuel9064 Peace Clerics: Helping your enemies rest in peace.
I know right? You'd expect it to be all negotiation skills and stuff but no its peace through superior firepower!🤦
@@danbrown8731 Pax Ecclesia!
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 ;)
I mean, he was right and gave very solid reasoning for saying so.
@@captainpandabear1422 so yes it was not broken but as a dm attempting to hold a party at low resources before a fight to make it tough, healing spirit made me sad far too often. I banned it and never looked back until the errata. It was not broken but it was anti-fun. Anti- tension building.
@@ryansalmon6507
Hard disagree. If a party doesn't have a ticking clock and they're out of hit points and then have to use all their spell slots inefficiently restoring said hit points... often they'll just back out and long rest outside the dungeon.
Sometimes they can't. Oftentimes they can. Healing spirit ate a resource and got them to keep going, at least in my experience, without me having to punish them for retreating to the forest like a bunch of cowards. :D
I mean, TECHNICALLY they reduced the twilight domains powers in one way. The UA version had UNLIMITED range darkvision
If you go back and read the feedback on the UA it consisted of people in an absolute panic over the unlimited range dark vision and ignoring the rest of the class features. Except the level 17 darkness thing. People panicked about that one too.
UA feedback tends to either be people in an absolute panic over some random thing being too strong, or in an absolute rage about some thing being too weak and how it is proof Wizards hates the class. And most of the time they're dead wrong about what is too strong or too weak.
UA is more marketing that feedback. Feedback from the masses just ain't gunna work. They need a smaller group of folks who know their stuff and can provide feedback in addition to the general feedback.
If I was tweaking twilight I would change the Temp HP to be a scaling amount on the first turn only and have the dispel be recurring. And probably make Vigilant's Blessing only work on others. The recurring small amount of Temp HP is too swingy to work well. Its completely busted if you're dealing with small amounts of AoE, and nearly useless if you're dealing with burst single target.
I mean, 300ft is basically same as unlimited already.
And basically unlimited fly if they used their bonus actions
@@gorkon87 It's not unlimited, they can only do it a few times per day.
@@Klaital1 I meant in the UA it was unlimited
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
I mean look at feats. Feats are optional but they take the power of archery and 2 handed weapons WAY above the bell curve with sharpshooter and great weapon master. You could just not use feats.
Because it's a foolproof way to absolve the game designers for taking responsibility for their decisions. Which is useful if what's more important to you is defending your fandom than making sure that the game is fun -- because in the minds of these people, they love their fandom so much that they can have fun no matter what. But if their fandom 'looks bad', because you drew attention to bad decisions, these will stop having fun no matter how well-designed the rules are.
You laugh, but this kind of thinking is the majority of players in D&D, and not just 5th Edition. In fact, I think it was more virulent in the pre-3E D&D days.
I agree from a rules/design perspective 100%. I can only see this being relevant in terms of setting/lore mismatches (I.e. if the world a DM makes didn't have gods of a specific portfolio, maybe no clerics of X type staying with cleric specifically, otherwise Warforged is a fairly setting-specific race).
@@IamWalkingDead1 and have people not been ragging on GWM? To change the -5/+10 into a -prof/+2prof thing?
@@IamWalkingDead1 Except this is a fake CYA argument, because 99% of games I've ever played in that get to level 4 that point use feats. 95% of games that get into T2 drop magical items. 90% of all games allow multiclassing. That is exactly what I'm talking about how D&D's prerogative is 'it's more important to defend your fandom than design good rules', because as a cop-out to questionable rules design it tells you to play the game in a way no one does. It's denialism and also why we keep getting expansion material like the Chronurgist Wizard on the high end and Astral monk on the low end.
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.
Good advice. I think I’ll start playing my vampire twilight cleric like this. Lol.
Or float 10ft above the melee mob and hit with a glaive.
Edit: while having spirit guardians pelting them.
This is a Solid point.
B-b-b-but Wizards would never publish something that wasn't thoroughly playtested and balanced!
Love the joke but Mr Crawford already said repeatedly it was unbalanced. But this unbalanced ...maybe capitalize the “BALANCED” in your joke;)
@@leodouskyron5671 Mr Crawford can blow me if he thinks putting overpowered splat books into circulation is good for 5E
MTG Player with noose around their neck: First time?
@@GravyBoatable *Flashbacks to the fact that it wasn't even considered that people would use oko elk on opponents creatures and artifacts*
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."
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.
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
Yes, I get paid for the ads, thanks!
Maybe when players filled out the UA survey they got together on Reddit and GameStop’d these classes
stonks
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.)
Every time they "fix" a UA class there should be another round of UA until they finally get it right.
I agree. I prefer risking overpowered that can be watered down, than getting crap like the Undying Warlock or Purple Dragonknight Fighter.
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. 🤣
It's true, there was a decent baseline of acceptable-power subclasses and options for years now, and we've mostly been harping on the underpowered ones, or the ones whose class fantasy just felt wrong or anemic. As Treantmonk said in a recent video, most of the game-breaking was done through _theoretical_ optimization which only flies by loose or malicious interpretation of the RAW. But these two subclasses are very plainly intended. I actually kinda forgot what that was like...
I learned from 3.5 and keep my game core rules, anything beyond core books, and the player and I discuss what they want. I will allow players to have the options they want, for example, the campaign before the plaguedemic had a Kenku player. I just won’t allow game breaking RAW from supplements.
WOTC breaks the game, mechanically, every time they release new supplemental books.
Other than the luck feats in Complete scoundrel, there is not much in 3.5 that breaks the game. This is because unlike 5th, 3.5 uses the same rules for the monsters and the players. It didn't matter what wonky things they players decide to do, the monsters were always up to the challenge to equal the players and make for an interesting game. kobolds that were 9th level warlocks are just part of the standard game.
@@alexandriamason2355 3.5 was made to correct the imbalance of 3E, which is what I was referring to. I should have typed 3.0. My apologies. I was making a joke anyways.
On a more serious note, I get your point about 3.5, and I can partially agree with you. I say partially because 3.5 had Level adjustments for monsters and certain races. Kobolds had no level adjustments, but Drow, Aasimar, vampires, lycanthropes did have level “penalties”. Basically the 9th Kobold warlock would be equal to a 7th level drow warlock (if I remember correctly, which if I am wrong about the actual level penalties I am right about the system).
This means that monsters were not balanced and 3.5 tried to fix it; which was good. But so many options came out that eventually balance was impossible. If the 9th level kobold warlock had certain feats from the Draconomicon then the kobold warlock would over shadow the power of a drow warlock of similar level.
Also, magic was too powerful in 3.0 and 3.5. Any class that did not have magic just paled in power to those that did and very few people would play those classes. I felt bad for the fighter class. I played a straight up fighter and had fun with him, but every time a new gish class came out (especially the 3.5 Hexblade) I felt weak in comparison. Thankfully my roleplaying chops made for an entertaining and fun character.
3.5 wasn’t a bad system. It was a good system. But balance was not a strong trait in 3.5.
@@alexandriamason2355 Uh, that was not my experience. 3.5e was kinda infamous for 1-2 gamebreaking combos per splatbook. Remember the infinite spellcasting with Complete Arcane? I do. Or the infinite skill checks you could get with the Masochism feat and a bucket of water? Or Pun Pun? When 3.5 broke the game, it really broke it. By comparison, 5e has been quite tame in terms of what the players can actually accomplish.
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
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.
Yeah the Twilight domain cleric ups the powerlevel of the party but it doesn't break anything because it buffs everyone so the DM can just throw harder challenges on them. Unlike OP AC of OP damage which makes it really hard to balance challenges for the party because what's difficult for one player is beyond lethal to the rest.
I would probably have the twilight sanctuary use concentration though.
I disagree with the logic that "it makes everyone better so it's not a problem". You know what else makes everyone do better in combat? Dealing a shit ton more damage than anything else in the game so you destroy all the enemies before they can hurt your teammates.
Just because *you* are not thinking about the source of what gives the power to the party, doesn't mean it's balanced and not a problem. If I am to fight and know that the only thing that is keeping this combat alive is a ridiculous huge shield by the cleric every round to everyone, I know who is outshining who.
@@theWebWizrd No one player dealing loads of damage ends with your players feeling that one player is carrying them or even worse that they don't get a chance to contribute because the OP dmg player has already done everything.
And if you balance for the OP dmg player you end up with the others feeling like they can do even less.
Keeping you alive while you go do thrilling heroics however does not come with envy.
@@DaDunge The problem is it if as a DM you are balancing around these abilities then if for whatever reason that cleric doesn't use it in a combat then that combat is suddenly very Deadly. Whereas if you don't balance around them and the cleric does decide to use it then the combat is extremely easy. Thus these abilities are actually takes choices away from players. If you have a Twilight cleric & a Peace cleric in the same party then they HAVE to use Twilight Sanctuary and Emboldening Bond every combat and all the characters HAVE to stay within 30ft of them or the party will TPK.
@@richardwhaler8717 Then do that instead of dialing up the difficulty. Separate them.
Well, Twilight Cleric is a fantastic dip for a wizard now!
But I do see these subclasses as very good options for small group campaigns of 2-3 players... or just 1, if you're running a solo. Great leader to rally around.
Great dip for a gloomstalker too.
Really use that 600' longbow range with that 300(+?) darkvision
I‘m 6 minutes in, and I‘ve got to say, I really like the are-you-shitting-me tone and the images of overpowered characters in the background. Yeah, those subclasses are so busted it isn‘t even funny anymore...
I do think that protective bond using a reaction makes it a little less op than you described, for instance the barbarian can only tank the one attack per round, or likewise the character with the resistance. I agree that the two together is pretty busted tho.
Yeah I probably wouldn't allow that.
I like how the Twilight/Peace combo is so strong defensively that you didn't even need to reiterate that if either (or both) of those Clerics casted Bless, three/six characters in that party will also be getting a bonus 2d4 for one attack every round and pretty much every saving throw to drive home how overpowered these abilities are.
I mean peace can do that themselves at somewhat later lvs. And at later lvs clerics can target up to 6 creatures with bless by up casting it (7th lv to be exact when u get 4th lv spells). Also u can’t stack bless with bless. So only peace can make it 2d4 (for most but not all since it’s once per turn for 1d4 with the bond).
I really like peace but my huge issue with it is the fact that potent spellcasting makes no sense. Y does someone who worships peace and is the embodiment of peace get something that ups dmg? That’s just dumb. Not to mention they only get 3 cleric cantrips that do dmg (it was only one at first) and they r all saving throws so yea that’s bad. The only cleric subclass that gets potent spellcasting that actually benefits from it is Arcane cleric since they get wizard cantrips and they count as cleric cantrips (honestly potent spellcasting should just work on all cantrips and not just cleric ones). If even iffy about their bond adding to attack rolls. It should like apply to their ac instead (since most of this subclass is about negating dmg).
They could’ve given them more movement speed to help with their channel divinity, make it heal more, make it so u can target the same creature more then once (really like their channel divinity but just wish it got better at the later lvs). That or maybe make it have something to do with the sanctuary spell (believe their is a monk subclass that does that) or maybe something like anyone who’s affected by your bond who’s within 10 feet can’t be like charmed or frightened (or maybe advantage cause immunity might be too strong at that lv). Just so many things that just would’ve made so much more sense and just flat out better.
Twilight could be fixed easily by removing scaling. The effect was good enough as is.
Peace is the actual fuck up. Gnerally i would use the UA instead of the official.
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.
Sounds like they published the anticipated final versions in UA, and published the intended UA versions in Tasha's.
My thoughts exactly! I think they tried to scale both Domains back last minute, tried winging it and this happened. With Emboldening Bond, they probably thought if they tie the availability to the Proficiency Bonus, like most other things in Tasha's it would keep it from being too strong at low levels - in all the other cases tying things to the PB had worked out pretty well for balance, so they figured it was a safe bet. The 6th level Protective Bond thing definitely reads like it was rewritten in a hurry. Same with Twilight Sanctuary, but I'm not even sure why that was changed - the UA version seems like it would have still been pretty strong at most levels. Just like you said: a DM trying to balance for one or both of these in a party is going to be walking a fine line between not creating enough challenge and completely whipping the party out in one turn.
I feel like for both features they incorporated every request players made in the UA. The UA Twilight Sanctuary wasn't that great at higher levels because almost all good cleric spells are concentration, so CD that require concentration end up rarely used. Likewise 1d8 tmp HP is great at low levels but not much a higher levels. Either removing concentration or making the tmp hp scale would have been ok changes, but doing both is incredibly busted.
In my 15 years of experience most players kinda suck at playing their character. These clerics aren't scary in the hands of Timmy(80%), but Johnny(15%) or Spike(5%) would be a real problem.
I know its tredding into RAI territory, but I dont think they wanted Protective bond to work with AOE the way you described.
But then again, they need to comb through books to look for exploits far more thoroughly
I wouldn't rule aoe the way he described it. No way in hell you can decide where the breath of my dragon goes with your teleport.
Yeah. I don't think the wording of it supports that interpretation, I highly doubt the intent does, and I sure as hell wouldn't allow it even if either did.
Player B teleports to player A and takes double the damage, player C teleports to player B to take triple the damage, player D ,who’s immune to fire, teleports to player C to take no damage.
All you need to do is make sure player D is too far away...
@@theshadowbadger I think I would resolve everything at the same time so that player D can't tank everyone. He could only tank one. I haven't thought this through at all, just on top of my head of what seems fair.
@@theshadowbadger Reactions are supposed to be really quick instant things. I would not allow players to decide what order their reactions are resolved in if multiple are using their reaction in response to the same trigger.
I am playing a Twilight Cleric soon in a one shot game at lv5. The two things I’m looking for are how much damage the temporary hit points actually prevents and how many initiatives/fights are won simply because the wizard gets advantage on their initiative and simply shutdowns the enemy party.
Me, sad that they removed unlimited darkvision: :(
Me, reading the rest of the Twilight Cleric: :D
I mean 300feet darkvision is really great.
@@milanmarkovic2721 Its' really not that extreme, 300ft is less than 100 meters. I don't think I could see the house in the other side of my yard with twilight domain darkvision, in total darkness.
Really it shouldn't matter unless you're underground or in the shadowfell you shouldn't be in total darkness (I know the rulebook says night is Darkness but that's utter BS, humans see a lot better in darkness than that).
@@DaDunge Yes but in typical campaign 120feet is enough for party.
@@milanmarkovic2721 Actually as late as last session we had a situation where the parties darkvision wasn't enough.
@@DaDunge Was it invisibility spell,gloomstalker ability or good stealth?
I'm not defending it, but I want to note that Emboldening Bond actually _does_ have a hidden drawback that wasn't there in the Unearthed Arcana: You apply it to a number of creatures equal to your proficiency bonus; no more, _and no less._ If you have less available targets than your proficiency bonus, then as written, _you can't use it._
LOL! Love the Q from Star Trek cameo. I see what you did there.
Even if these two are broken, especially together, you gotta find weaknesses. That twilight cleric would be great banished to the astral plane, and with him gone the peace cleric would be a great target for a charm spell. Or if you can get the drop on the twilight cleric and charm him, now he's a nice support bubble for your monster. Either or both of these as a charmed ally would certainly make an encounter challenging.
That’s actually a good point. Both are great AOE buffs, but any magic user or clever Assassin is going to spot it a mile away. Poisons, Charms, and dirty tactics galore.
Banishment and charm both target cleric's high saves. A charm spell - if it can even work, since not all races are humanoid - would be made vs Wisdom, the cleric's strongest save, AND with advantage because you're fighting, AND only makes them regard you as a friendly acquaintance. "You seem a decent fellow...I hate to kill you" not "I'm going to sit this fight out or help you kill my crew". There's absolutely no way anything shorter than Dominate Person, Crown of Madness, etc. is turning a PC against the party.
Yes, if you have every possible tactical advantage - surprise, poison, assassinate, a metric ton of cannon fodder, advantageous terrain, superior spellcasting, and DM intervention, you can partially negate some of the advantages of these cleric's low level, low cost abilities for a turn or two.
@@laneshadow yes, that is unfortunate that the cleric has the best spell save proficiencies. At the end of the day, I think the party using OP configurations is simply permission to scale up the difficulty.
Better still is if you have a small party, you can use Emboldening Bond on summoned creatures and use them as meat shields. A 2 man group Shepherd Druid + Peace Domain Cleric will be almost unkillable.
Hill Dwarf with Tough, Stack Con. Peace Domain 6, Totem of the Bear Barbarian 3.... you ARE the party HP pool.
7:00 the on average doesn't even matter since every turn they get the chance to roll as see if they can get a bigger temp hp pool than they had before, over the course of 9 turns they are going to get a lot more than just the average and that's assuming they're not taking damage.
add in that most average combats from my experience last 3-5 rds at most and the temp hp doesn't fade at the end most of time you will finish with 6+cleric lv temp hp at the end of it all for the next fight/triggered traps
I’m not sure you understand how averages work. Over time, the more times you roll a particular die, you actually get closer to an average outcome. It’s the single rolls that get the most variability. For example, roll a d6 10 times. The final tally will be somewhere around 35, meaning an average of 3.5 per roll. So 35 is the average total. But if you roll it once, sure you might get a 6, but you also might get a 1. Just rolling a bunch more times means you’ll tend toward the average, not get higher than the average.
@@BrentDnD No it won't be, because you only replace the old one if the new one is higher than the old one. If you roll a 6 and then a 1 it's still a 6.
Like I said averages don't matter what matters is the highest number of the set.
@@DaDunge I guess I'm a little confused then because that's not what it says in the book. It specifically says:
"Whenever a creature (including you) ends its turn in the sphere, you can grant that creature one of these benefits:
- You grant it temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus your cleric level.
- You end one effect on it causing it to be charmed or frightened."
It doesn't say anything about rolling the 1d6 every round and only taking the new roll if it's higher than the last roll. When I was in a party with a twilight cleric, she rolled the 1d6 for every individual separately and rerolled it every round. For example: Round 1 - PC1 and PC2 both end their round in the sphere. PC1 got 9 temp HP, and PC2 only got 6 temp HP. Round 2 - Only PC1 ended their turn in the sphere, and this time they only got 7 temp HP. They don't get to receive another 9 temp HP just because that's what they got on the last round.
@@BrentDnD I think he's referring to the rules about temp hp, where you can decide to replace one instance for the next. So, if a player's temp hp roll was low, they could roll again next time and replace it if it was higher. Technically true, but situational in my opinion. (compared to the rest of the abilities at least) Most of the players are going to take damage every round removing the temp hp anyways.
Thank you for this video, the artwork selection was very funny. How about a Twilight cleric + Peace cleric + Ancestral Guardian Barbarian + Abjuration Mage + Fiend warlock party? :D
Imagine the peace cleric lvl 6 feature with a lvl 14 zealot barbearian. Basically infinite hp(just have whomever they protect use a medicine kit to stabilize them when then might fail)
I, personally, would like to see the math on the challenges for that group. I have a Dm who really doesn't think this combination (twilight + Peace cleric) is that bad. I've done some of my own math, but I'd still be interested in how this math looks on your end.
It's such a shame that the Twilight domain is so broken in Tasha's. Over the summer I played a UA Twilight Cleric, who has turned out to be my favourite of my characters - when I first read the class, a concept slammed together in my head so incredibly quickly and clearly, and that character ended up having some of the best RPing I've ever done. I didn't even care about the mechanics or how broken they were - it was the flavour and concept that I fell in love with.
But if I wanted to do that now, well, I would face all of the resistance of having chosen a subclass that is, mechanically, absolutely overwhelmingly powerful.
I'm spitballing an idea here to fix Twilight Sanctuary. Thematically, the Twilight Domain is all about exalting the beauty of nighttime while protecting against its dangers; what if, instead of getting temp HP at the end of each turn as well as ending effects, it just gave advantage on saves vs. charm and fear? If that's now too weak, it could allow a charmed or frightened creature in the sanctuary to repeat the save at the end of each of its turns, even if it normally couldn't. This change would take Twilight Sanctuary from a mechanically broken (and thematically confusing) ability to one that's much more situational, but more in line with other Channel Divinity options, while still being thematically appropriate.
I honestly don’t see the big deal about it. I mean yes it’s really good and is a little busted but peace is way more busted. Twilights whole thing seems to be around their channel divinity so u can only use it like 2-3 times (depending on how high u go in Cleric). Where as peace it’s based off their proficiency so they don’t have to even go that high and they can use it up to 6 times and each time it last for 10 minutes (where as twilights only last 1 min). That and Twilights final ability kinda sucks. Half cover gives u +2 to ac and at that lv it’s really meh. Peace is much better at dmg mitigation at any lv.
I do hate that the twilight gets an ability (with their channel divinity) to get rid of charm or frightened when peace should be the one that has something like that. Potent spellcasting makes no sense on peace cleric and should be replaced by something like this or just any that actually makes sense and doesn’t suck (it suckk on a cause Clerics only get 3 dmg dealing cantrips and they r all saves, should work on all cantrips honestly).
So, a lv 6 peace cleric with a chain warlock teammate (get an imp familiar) or multi-class yourself, could now use the protective bond feature to negate the breath weapon damage from all sizes of red and green dragon. Really great....
I don't really get this complaint? You're the dm. Simply don't make the dragon green or red? If you think a creature would simply be too weak against your players... Don't use that creature.
@@Kolonite_ sure I'll just use all those acid monsters and never touch fire damage again cuz wizards has an equal variety of damage types /s my players will love that :D
@@dah0heavy yeah I said to never use fire or acid. I definitely didn’t say to just not make your big bad not use it
I’m not sure how a yuan ti is preventing all the damage a green’s breath deals to the entire party, unless you just meant it saves one person.
I also don’t think most players will reliably choose to use reactions to save a friend, regardless of the strategic strength of the maneuver. They’ll wait bc they want to be able to counterspell or opportunity attack, riposte, Hellish rebuke, etc.
It's true. No matter how powerful a tool is, someone is too thick to see it.
But 90% of the people on this channel will.
Yeah, I think Chris is underestimating how limiting reaction requirements are to the 6th level ability. It's really good in the circumstances where you have resistance or immunity, particularly against single target attacks. It's much less good against AoEs.
Yuan-ti are immune to poison.
Your second point may be true on some tables but not on others. You cannot count on a broken feature being fine because a party chooses to play suboptimally. A feature should be balanced even if a party decided to use it optimally. There may be cases where a wizard should rather save his reaction for counterspell. But for the majority of characters in the majority of partys using this feature very frequently to spread out damage as much as they can will be the clear best tactical choice.
One way to read the feature is that the teleporting creature takes on ALL of the damage of the triggering attack/spell/etc., not just the one of the original triggering target. So Yuan Ti with their poison immunity take the entire breath of the green dragon, not just the damage of their friend gettin hit. I personally don't think that was intended, but it is a way to read the feature and there will be players trying to do this.
@@MrMelkor98 even though Yuan-ti are immune to poison they can only protect one other player with their reaction, not the whole party.
Burning most of the player's reactions also means enemies are free to move however they like, negating some of the teleport advantages.
Looking forward to the feats vid. Want to see what the consensus is on chef and poisoner, they seem to me like they should be things that are available from having proficiency with tool kits. Makes me think again what is the point in tool proficiencies. How do people handle tool proficiencies in their games?
In my games I have two systems to encourage tool use. The first one is that if you can think of a way to use a skill AND a tool on the same check, you can have advantage. For example, you're trying to track someone. The standard roll is survival, but if you have cobbler's tools, you can say that you also analyse their footprints to work out what sort of shoes they're wearing and have advantage on the roll. It has to be a skill and a tool, it can't be two skills or two tools, and I'm also picky about helping. If it doesn't make sense for someone to help then they can't, and the helper also needs to have proficiency. For the tracking, I don't think it makes sense to help unless you're splitting the party.
The second way I encourage tool use is my overworld movement rules. These are adapted from some rules I stole from Matt Colville, which he stole and adapted from 4E. First off, I ask the players to route out their journey, and work out how long it's going to take. After that, I hand it over to the players and they narrate what happens on the journey, a problem that occurs, and then makes a skill check using a skill or tool (or both for advantage) that they are proficient in. Each player cannot use the same skill twice, but they can use a skill that another player has used. For example if Jim has used survival to fish in a river, he cannot then use survival again to read a map. Sarah could use her survival to read a map though. The players need a number of successes equal to the number of days of travel, and you can arbitrarily increase or decrease those numbers if they're going through dangerous territory or something. Every failure gets recorded, and then the party get a combat encounter scaled to the number of failures that they had. For example if they failed once, they might have to fight 3 wolves, but if they failed 3 times, they might have to fight 6 wolves and an evil druid. You can even make the combat thematic for the failures. If someone said that they tried to fix the cart wheel with woodcarver's tools but failed, the monsters can attack while they're fixing the cart wheel. I personally don't allow people to use things like Guidance or Portent on these skill checks, because they take place over a long period of time. Whilst there is functionally only one skill check, it represents a continuous effort over the entire journey, and Guidance and Portent don't allow you to aid those. You might want to allow them though, I don't see any real functional problem with it. Maybe only allow them to have one roll of Portent that lasts for the entire journey though.
I absolutely love these overworld movement rules, because they mean that it's obvious that the adventure is taking place over a long time (so far my players have gained 3 levels in 2 in-game months, and it doesn't feel like it's dragging or they're wasting time), and it also means that I don't have to write a bunch of crap filler monologues about the great river that they cross on a bridge, or how dark and dank the forest is. They players make the descriptive text themselves while justifying how they're going to use their skills. It just speeds up overworld movement and makes it more interactive, while being less actual work for me.
I was most excited for the prospect of the poisoner feat... But honestly, unless you have some other means of accessing potent poison.. It's just not very good. I guess it depends on the campaign.. But 50 gold for 3 doses of 2d8 poison damage with a 14dc is pretty bad. If the DC somehow scaled it'd be pretty good.. but it doesnt.
This means that you won't be able to afford it at early levels, and it'll rarely hit at higher levels.
@@the_twig131 cheers for the response, praise be to Colville!
@@MaMastoast yeah I guess the effectiveness is questionable, but I'm wondering if I need a feat for this then what does the poisoner's kit do. And why is this not part of the assassin subclasses features already. Hindsight is 2020.
Poison and potion making on vanilla 5e is pretty meh, I made my whole system for both of them with a shit-ton of recipes and my player's have a lot more fun with it. It does give a lot of options to your players, but thats true for their enemies too.
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.
The Peace Cleric dip is infinitely worse IMO. If you're playing a Monk or Ranger and you're optimizing, why WOULDN'T you pick up a level of Peace Cleric? IMO, Variant Human Peace Cleric 1/Way of Mercy Monk X with Fey Touched (Hex) is very viable.
@@mistajames3213 true. I doubt there is a class I wouldnt think about a cheeky dip.
Fun Fact: Treantmonk's alternate persona is "Martin K. Ettington" - the God Wizard.
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Alias confirmed.
Twilight is insane and I love it. Dip a level of it on an assassin rogue and the enemy caster never get a chance to fireball you, or cast any other spells.
I don't get why Twilight cleric gets heavy armor proficiency. Fullplate != evening wear.
Neither do I
It’s cause they are defenders of night, protecting those from the clutches of the dark.
It makes sense if you read the gods associated with this domain and the description
@@TVMAN1997 not to mention that they are a striker type of Cleric. Divine Strike and get better weapon proficiency.
@@embodying8moth82 exactly
Echoing this. Night is the time of peace, quiet, and rest, so why should clerics of the night be wearing heavy metal armour that goes CLANK CLANK CLANK? In my opinion, Twilight should have joined Light/Knowledge/Arcana in getting Potent Cantrip.
for the twilight domain. 300 feet of darkvision isn't that big a deal IMO. Because most maps arent that big, 120 feet is usually more than enough to see everything on the map. And darkvision is already really common. Sleep is great at level 1, but it peters off quite quickly.
I'm in an online campaign where we've been playing deep gnomes (120' darkvision) hunting trolls (60' darkvision). With advantage because you can see them and they can't see you, the enemies just get wrecked. Increasing the range of darkvision is just going to make this worse as well as permitting the same advantage versus foes with 120' darkvision.
@@BigEd1001 yeah, but how many attacks can even go beyond 120 feet?
sure spell sniper exists, but I think it's fair that snipers get to, well, snipe
So, you clarify - this doesn't necessarily completely counter creatures that do massive single hits, or AOE that does significantly in excess of the temp hp in damage. They're still gonna leak through, but it does make it a lot easier to spread that damage.
One way or another if a creature does 50 damage in a single hit, that's still gonna be around 30-40 damage to a character's hp. That is, unless someone has resistance or immunity.
The problem is that getting that hard hit on exactly the right player makes all the difference. You are attacking the Wizard that is using wall of force to block half the enemy forces? Boom, your damage goes on the raging barbarian instead.
@@theWebWizrd Ugh yes, not to mention that as soon as your upping average monster damage to 50, a critical hit can insta-kill.
i've currently got a four man party with a twi cleric in it, and honestly it's busted ness is pretty much the only thing keeping them alive lol
I recently had a terrible DM who kept TPKing the group then blamed us on being bad players. So, we asked if the new tasha's was allowed, and he said yes. So, the party of an artilerist artificer, peace cleric, conquest paladin, and ancestor barbarian came in. It is safe to say that the party never took damage because the artilerist was pumping out temporary hitpoints, ancestor barbarian was reducing all the damage we took, the paladin and peace cleric made it so we could never fail a saving throw while healing the rest of us. paladin also scared the tits off of everything after the barbarian knocked them prone so they were stuck in the prone position. Additionally, everyone besides the barbarian had a dummy thick AC, so hitting us was a challenge especially since most enemies had disadvantage from fear.
This combo doesn't seem that bad, the counter is AoE.
If the dragons breath weapon hits the entire party, sure 2 players can tank the damage for the other 2, but they in turn are taking double the damage. let's assume a party of 6th level facing a Young Bronze Dragon, if 2 players use their reaction to save the other 2, they themselves will take 20d10 lightning damage. 110 average! Double their max hitpoints meaning that if the entire party failed their save, instead of the weaker members simply getting knocked from full to 0, 2 members guarantee they die from overflow damage.
I feel like you're being rather generous with your readings of a couple abilities of both?
Twilight Sanctuary - this is one effect or the other, not both. It's definitely still incredibly powerful, but that's an important distinction - it's temp HP OR ending a charm / fear effect.
Balm of Peace - you say the movement in this feature doesn't use your regular movement? I just don't understand why that would be true.
Protective Bond - if multiple people were in that green dragons breath, then the yuan-ti is only negating damage to itself and one other creature, not the entire party - several other of your examples follow this same pattern. Don't get me wrong, it's still fairly ridiculous in it's power, but you make the extent of that sound worse than it is here.
Balm of peace "as an action you can move up to your speed" sounds like it's essentially a dash action with extra benefits. Which is why it doesn't use your regular movement.
Protective bond: idk how often it is for you that on the later rounds of a combat, a dragon is hitting 3 or more people in a breath. Everyone should have spread out. So 50 damage to three people, and if one is the yuan ti and it uses the teleport. You only did 50 damage to one target.
@@adamkaris The easiest solution there is to let the dragon use its breath every round, or at least every other round. A Dragon that stays high in the air is a lot scarier than one in easy reach of the ground.
Kind of a problem with the Twilight cleric is that it’s temporary hitpoints. You can’t even use effects that disable healing, since they don’t „regain“ hitpoints.
I’d say the only downside to temp hp is that it can’t bring someone up from zero.
It also doesn't stack with temporary hit points from other sources.
So that aspect of twilight clerics flight is actually even more broken. The 6th level flight doesnt need dim light the whole time for flight. It only needs the restriction to begin the flight. In addition even if you wanted to put that limit on it. While your CD is up it is filled with dim light so you could still activate it while your CD is up.
A 1 minute fly speed is not broken in any way whats so ever. Even with multiple uses per day. The dm can easily run combats with enemies that can attack a range.
@@ryanbrodeur5105 ya it might be strong but not necessarily broken
For Twilight Sanctuary, how about reducing the temporary HP to approximately one weak hit (say d4 + 1/2 cleric level?), and add poisoned to the list of conditions that can be removed. The latter is a buff that doubles as a nerf: creatures in the area can _either_ receive temporary HP or have a condition removed, not both. Now, the DM can equip opponents with poisoned blades or arrows giving the DM an easy way to force the sanctuary to be used to remove a condition instead of granting temporary HP. The player still feels powerful and effective and it makes sense to me that Goblins, Kobolds, and many other opponents would routinely use poison; whereas, only Fae and Fiends seem likely to routinely use charm and fear effects.
Maths errors in the ranting - one big attack will bypass most of the temporary HP and as it's a reaction to use the bond damage sharing say 10 small attacks will also bypass most of that mitigation Not that it really changes things; focus fire is THE fundamental D&D tactic and this makes it very hard.
That’s why the eg peace domain also has warding bond, in case people get too cute with peppering one vulnerable target with multiattacks
While I do agree that he should account for the limitations brought by this being and using a reaction, calling this a "math error" is pretty wrong. Let's call it an oversimplification. And at any rate, like he said often times 50 damage won't be 50 damage. There is resistance, mitigations, et cetera.
However, the more temp hp is used, the less actual hp is drained.
In fairness, 10 small attacks are generally hard to focus fire, unless they are ranged attacks.
> So, in my next video I'll be looking at my feets.
I think it's the devs who need to do that next. They should hang their heads in shame, and gaze into the burning stare of their FEETS, and mend their ways!
To be honest, I don’t find these _too_ broken. They’re amazing, don’t get me wrong. But they need the right group to really capitalize on it. I can’t say more about this than I can say about a Moon Druid or Bladesing Wizard.
I do see the power creep, but every “decent” class got something good; maybe not as good, but definitely better than, say, 75% of the PHB. I think this is more because WOTC is getting a better grasp of not making terrible subclasses. Well, except for the Warlock, Monk, and Ranger which have either MAD or gimmicks that can’t be addressed with a single subclass, but a fundamental rework is needed.
Honestly, you can argue that’s what is needed, a rework. The 8-13 encounters day WotC originally planned is starting to show its cracks.
Party before Peace Domain lv. 6: "My Hit Points"
Party after Peace Domain lv. 6: "Our Hit Points"
I am a long-time DM and player. I am in a campaign right now. I went cleric because the rest of the group had ideas on the normal "cool" classes already. I didn't mind. I build a moderately powered Silver Dragonborn Lore Cleric/(will be)Scribe Wizard and absolutely feel like I need to "pull back" a bit to not seem overpowered. BUT we're running Lost Mines and we got the Staff of Defense and it went to me lol. So 18AC and 5 times daily Shield spell for free at level 3.
So as a minmaxer i have been eyeing twilight for circle of power originally a paladin spell only so broken but I would rule the peace domain as the second creature takes the damage but not all the damage if it is a aoe spell the rest of the party presuming they were hit would take the damage simply because it is open to interpretation because it doesn't specify if it takes all the aoe damage
Ps fore cage requires a charisma check to teleport through the cage
Damn all that sh!ts powerful.
Note of Protective Bond: It uses the reaction of the creature soaking the damage. So if your hypothetical fireball hits 4 people with 1 of them being fire resistance the resistant one can take their portion halved and someone else's portion (which is then halved) making the "soaker" take the full hit but saves the weaker member and the other two are taking full damage unless one of them wants to take double damage.
Hmm this makes me think of what happens when you soak the damage of a successful save, is it quartered in the circumstance above?
Another note: You can only soak the first hit so against multi-attack monsters that hit hard (giants) you're only reducing their damage output by ~25% if they land two hits and the soaker has resistance to their damage type.
I never understood why Unearthed Arcana doesn't just give you a couple of options and then say "what options did you try, what was the results, and what did we miss?"
What is the point of the survey if it only gives you one result?
Also, I feel that using "but it's an optional rule!" is a cop out. I shouldn't be rebalancing things for the devs.
What I'm surprised about is how sloppy the wording on the subclasses are. It seems to me that Twilight's CD was meant to enable its flight, but it's not clear if dim light supersedes bright light, "dimming" the area magically.
But the real stinker is the Peace domain. I can roll a d4 and add it to one thing? Okay, WHEN? By the wording, you might roll a d4 at the top of the round, and then when you roll a d20, after you see the roll, you can add it. That's highly irregular, but the wording is so sloppy that it's a very real possibility.
And then the Protective Bond. It mirrors the Crown and Redemption Paladins' Aura abilities, but they missed the key line of text, "The damage can't be reduced or prevented in any way". Oh, but you see, they had to do that in order to get the 17th level feature to work! Give me a break.
On top of that, there's some funny interactions with things that both deal damage and have a rider effect: e.g., if the enemy has cast Branding Smite, the teleporter takes the damage, but it's the first guy who becomes visible and sheds light. Minor, but dumb. There's no limit on "creature that you can see", so you can teleport through solid walls (there's also no limit on line of sight to forge the Bond in the first place). Also, reaction order isn't clear in 5e, so in the middle of a single attack, players might start arguing who's going to teleport and take the damage, which could go on a while.
If I ever had two players disagree about who would jump in with a Reaction and take the damage, I'd have them roll for it. What modifiers would I use? I don't know, I'd cross that bridge when I got to it.
@@mal2ksc I would make it an initiative roll
In defence of the twilight sanctuary - the official rules state that temp hp don't stack. The simply replace your current pool of temp up and extend any applicable duration.
After finishing the video, I have to agree with you here. And for me to say something is broken that is saying a lot. I'm usually the one arguing, "No it is not broken" to the crowd who decries "min-maxers." Half the fun of optimizing is diving into the game mechanics to come up with cool and effective ideas. There's no thought into making these effective. You simply choose the class and now you're in God mode. That is not fun.
At least being in god mode is very in theme for a cleric ;)
This is why I have resisted playing paladin, because they're just plain better than the majority of martial classes.... like it's eh, making a barbarian strong is fun tho.
I wanna make one correction. The twilight sanctuary either gives temp HP OR remove ONE charm or frighten. It doesn’t do all of them at once. However, it doesn’t mean it’s less broken.
Harness Divine Power is incredibly flavorful and useful on an Arcane Cleric with their magical shtick and circumstantial planar turning channel divinity. Really satisfied with that bit, two additional 2nd level slots on 6th level is great
A redemption paladin already has the feature to take damage for someone else but most DMs I've spoken to tell me they've never seen one use it. Probably with good reason because the paladin needs their reaction for opportunity attacks/counterspell/etc. I can't imagine the wizard ever using this feature even if they have temp hp left. Also, anyone concentrating on anything will never use this ability which should be everyone who can concentrate on a spell. It should also be noted that if you are to take the damage for someone else, the teleportation is not optional so that could pull you outside paladin aura or otherwise force you into a disadvantageous position.
Think pact of chain warlock with imp familiar. Immune to poison and fire, resistant to cold, resistant to non-magical or non-silvered bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. Using the reaction granted won't even break its invisibility. It'll just absorb the damage and the attacker will not even why it is unable to harm the target. Good fun.
One additional caveat of the paladin aura is that it transfers the damage, and this damage can't be reduced. The aura doesn't work with resistances and immunities. This feature definitely works better for beefy barbarians than it ever will for any paladin. I think ranged fighters and rangers also won't mind sacrificing some health to keep up the wizard's concentration. It's a lot better than the paladin aura because of it.
cold fusion I’m surprised to hear that. I thought the whole point of the redemption paladin was to tank. You wouldn’t take damage in place of a barbarian or other tanky character unless they were much lower in health than you were, obviously, but the redemption pally’s ability to absorb damage is a good way to protect more fragile party members.
Great! Please don't forget the wizard order of scribes, a guide up to level 20.
Whenever I sit down to theorycraft a Twilight cleric I instantly get bored even before I pick my race. It feels like when a child is telling you about their new superhero they made up. You chuckle, then pat them on the head then thank God they don't write for Marvel. That's a Twilight cleric.
trantmonk, you talk about what clerics needed on the game design side, but UAs and new subclasses are made for MARKETING and SELLING BOOKs
Mark of handling with these subclasses can basically solo all content meant for full parties.
Twilight domain is my favorite domain in the game. between the adv on init that can be passed off as well as better DV then drow. The heavy armor, the CD has given mine so much temp hp that ive been able to handed out and kept people from dropping. i love the temps and it's just awesome.
I was going to use the Chef feat for a character concept. I was unable to as we had a Twlilight cleric, who could do my entire concept but better at level 2 with a single channel divinity. That channel needs to be once or require concentration.
When I’m a player then I want to use these subclasses but as a DM I do tend to die inside when I imagine a deadly combat being beaten easily just because the party has two clerics from Tasha’s in it.
Well, it just illustrates the wisdom in releasing overtuned unearthed arcana and scaling it back for official release.
I like these classes. They're "OP" in this weirdly academic theorycrafting, but in your typical group, the Twilight Cleric is just a cool cleric who gives shields. Evcn the Peace/Twilight combo would require buy-in from the whole party, and who really wants to reduce their games to just Round-Robin-Shield-Soaking? Anyone would be reasonably mad if 2 people suddenly dictated how everything at the table would go. I think these classes are cool, and it's about time classes got some actually good, cool powers main-line. The "brokenness" of all these things don't survive the social shaming of the game table.
I would argue that there are other ways to challenge this combo that arent in combat, and even in combat, there are ways to shut this down besides trying to kill the party. I'm a player that likes to bait out reactions from monsters to defend my team. This gets easier when I can set the amount of enemies that do this. Environmental hazards and things that artificially separate the party should work.
8:50 don't forget that the channel divinity provides dim light around you so the dim light restriction doesn't really apply
No but other characters get flight with no such restrictions on their 6th level ability like say the genie warlock.
I specifically built a suboptimal twilight cleric so I could always use her. I built around using the 300ft of darkvision to make her an angel of death with levels in gloomstalker.
This seems like a build that could easily get fucked over by dungeons or trees, but I love the idea
@@DAEDRICDUKE1 As a wood elf though trees could enable hiding though. I like trying to optimize how I represent a concept rather than for absolute power :)
**Point at the PC destroying the city** COOOOOOOOOOOOOODZILLA! It's back.
Just think about any of these subclasses as dips. Not a single class would not be stronger with a dip in those clerics. Both Twilight Sanctuary and Emboldening Bond are not spells and scale of your proficiency, so literally anyone can take them for a 1/2 level dip and they will scale with them regardless of your cleric level. No need to be a spellcasting class either since they do not use spell slots or have an ability modifier attached anywhere. Not even starting with all the extra stuff a twilight cleric gets at first level. All in all, both are a better or at least more-versatile-while-just-as-good dip options than even the Hexblade.
Twilight Sanctuary scales off your cleric level, not proficiency. Its a nice dip for advantage on initiative.
If Tasha's had only come out a week or two ago, my first guess would be that WotC are pranking us. I don't know what to think now.
I was going to run the Twilight Cleric in Out of the Abyss, my DM was very hesitant after reading it over. I didn't realize how strong it was until watching this. I decided to run a Light cleric instead.
If you hate it then you could make it COST the cleric hit points to use? Maybe half the amount you dish out to one person each round
So if it costs me 3hp to give 6temp hp to the party (and to myself, just word it so that the hit points you sacrifice are clearly your actual hit points), then there's some fear to using it. I've only got 21hp as a 3rd level twilight cleric, so while I can last for a while it would still build up and prey on the minds of people who don't like to take any damage at all
I designed a boss encounter with a twilight cleric and a peace cleric that took dips in paladin and sorcerer. Bonus action booking blade followed by a smite and another booming blade with another smite with these broken subclasses. I decided it was way too strong so I have to nerf it. I was going for an Ornstein and Smough kind of fight. But I ended up with a final boss level fight.
A friend made a druid/cleric multiclass to get dragon starry form and enboldening bond with spirit guardians, pretty good. Feats are way more op though lol. Like Eldritch Adept for Devil's sight is insane value. My Sanic build is a scout rogue with mobile and magic initiate (booming blade and find familiar) owl familiar on shoulder for sneak attacks, bonus action dash for 80ft, attack and run away op attack free lol.
Tashas also added magic items that let you recharge your channel divinity
Imagine a 10th level Twilight or Peace Cleric and a Shepherd Druid in the same party. Yeesh
It makes me a bit salty. I know that wotc isn't generally able to use errata to "fix" things beyond typos (Healing Spirit was an odd exception), but variant features was a rare chance for them to fix a lot of broken stuff. They did mostly fix the ranger, and they greatly improved the sorcerer (mostly only for the 2 new subclasses, lifting their bonus spells feature as a homebrew is seriously welcomed for any older sorcerer subclass), but they left the monk broken, as well as a number of other things variant features could have patched...
Instead of taking one of their only chances to improve their old work, they had more interest in publishing power creeped, stronger subclasses, and the new Cleric subs are definitely the worst offenders.
The peace cleric seems balanced if it couldn't affect enemy creatures in harmful way since it's peacful.
Stuff like shadows would solve these issues. You can't negate ability damage super well but I agree that interaction is insane.
... Are we gonna gloss over that there is a third Cleric subclass in Tasha's, not just two?
Order Domain is a reprint from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. Treantmonk already discussed that cleric subclass in a previous video, linked for your convenience. th-cam.com/video/gPq3wU1vNhA/w-d-xo.html
Counter the player’s twilight cleric with your own low level one. With how temp hp works, if the players are given temp hp a second time you can actually erase the higher number with a lower number.
In the rules for Temp HP the player receiving the HP gets to choose if they accept new temp HP or not, so they can always keep the bigger number
Thank you for your videos, Chris.
I have a theory. I think that over the last the math nerds who focus on mechanics and get a laugh out of RP, who used to be the core of D&D, were pushed out in favor of drama class nerds who focus on RP and consider mechanics a secondary necessity.
I’d wager that the people who now write the classes don’t play the game very seriously/often. Their focus is with RP and social concerns, not with the mechanical viability of the game. I’d wager that if you asked Crawford if he’d ever played in a campaign with a Twilight and Peace domain cleric, and he answered truthfully, he’d have to say “No”.
I can’t think of any other reason that monks are monks, rangers have had the 6.5 year saga they’ve had, and these two archetypes were released. These are people who are SUPPOSED to study and build D&D as a full time job...and they produce this?
It’s frustrating. My table has largely moved on to other lesser known TTRPGs.
TLDR: Current D&D creators care very little about game mechanics. Their focus lies elsewhere.
Playing a twilight cleric in a campaign atm and twilight sanctuary is very strong. We're looking at houseruling it into taking a reaction to use, that way it can only be used once a round. Should still be strong, but not as busted.
Steps of Night is even better than you said! You only need to start in the dim light! You can then fly into the sunlight.
Twilight Sanctuary creates dim light around the Cleric. Steps of Night lets you fly in dim light for a minute. Use your action to Channel Divinity for Twilight Sanctuary and then bonus action for Steps of Night and you now have concentration free flight for a minute. This is honestly one of maybe 3 Cleric subclasses that peak my interest in the class.
To be honest WoTC have been power scaleing in splat books for the last few, and it's now gone way too far and is litteraly making combat unbalanced in too many ways.
I prefer risky overpowered than taking the coin toss and risking stuff like half the Warlock subclasses.