Best Feats for Tempest Cleric 5e
by Prince Phantom
Tempest is my personal favorite domain because it focuses on one of my favorite things to do in 5e: pushing people around. We get an ability to push an enemy 10ft when we deal lightning damage to them at 6th level, and this is an incredible build around option.
We also get the ability to maximize the damage roll of any instance of thunder or lightning damage, which clerics can have a tough time taking advantage of, leading many to suggest multiclassing. I, however, believe that you can extract all of the potential of this subclass with the help of just a few feats, so let’s get into those.
Best Feats for Tempest Cleric 5e
War Caster (ASAP): All clerics want this feat, but Tempest clerics REALLY want it. We are interested in holding a weapon and a shield, we’ll probably end up grabbing Booming Blade eventually to empower our opportunity attacks, and of course we will be wanting to concentrate on spells while in mid range combat. Yep, sounds like a character that wants War Caster to me.
Magic Initiate (Lv 4): This allows us to pick up Booming Blade, a spell I would be interested in because this cleric is actually wanting to make melee attacks sometimes, or at least can be built to do that. This also gives us Find Familiar, which can potentially give us advantage on every attack we make, among all the other great things a familiar provides.
Gift of the Chromatic Dragon (Lv 8): This is not a feat I’m normally super high on. A D4 of elemental damage just isn’t that impactful, especially when it’s only once per day for one minute. That is, it’s underwhelming if all you care about is the damage. We can use this to have our weapon deal lightning damage, allowing us to knock a creature away every turn with just an attack. Granted, all the limitations of this feat still apply, so if you are getting in many fights per day this may not be a great selection.
Telekinetic (Lv 8): If you aren’t interested in building for melee attacks, you find that you’re doing too many combats for Gift of the Chromatic Dragon to be effective, or if you just want to emphasize forced movement as much as possible, this will probably fit really well on your build.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 12): This feat is nearly a mandatory selection with how important holding concentration is for a full caster. We take it here because it’s at this point where War Caster is no longer enough to ensure our concentration checks.
Metamagic Adept (Lv 16): I wouldn’t normally recommend this for a Cleric, but we have a heavy incentive to cast spells that deal lightning or thunder damage, and a severe lack of spells (especially at high levels) that actually deal those types of damage. With this we can select transmute spell, and cast Fire Storm, transmuting it into the right damage type, and dealing 70 damage, 35 on save to a massive (and very shapable) area. This is a really good nova, almost like a mini Meteor Swarm, and keeps our channel divinity relevant up into the high levels of play.
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