Death Domain Cleric 5e
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
The Dungeon Master’s Guide has a few sneaky expanded options for villainous player characters. For Clerics, you get Death Domain: clerics dedicated to worshiping gods of slaughter or death. If you want a cleric with extra edge, Death Domain has your back. Pick up your darkest cloak, put on that eye shadow, pull out your scythe, and be prepared to kill some people.
See Also: Best Feats for Death Cleric
1st Level: Domain Spells, Bonus Proficiency, and Reaper
False Life and Ray of Sickness are Death’s 1st level Domain Spells. Oof. Neither are effects I have ever cast (with a spell slot) and felt good about. Fortunately, there is more here.
Bonus Proficiency opens up martial weapons to death clerics, with Divine Strike eventually lining you up to be decent at making weapon attacks. I’d say this pushes you toward playing a frontline death domain cleric wielding a greatsword, and that is something you can try, but Reaper… oh, Reaper.
Reaper makes your early game excellent. You pick and learn a necromancy cantrip from any spell list to start. Then, any time you cast any necromancy cantrip that targets one thing, you can target two things next to each other. At 1st-4th level, this feature slaps.
There are four total cantrips as of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything that work with reaper: Chill Touch, Toll the Dead, and Sapping Sting are the damage options, with Spare the Dying technically being improved should there be two unconscious creatures within 5 feet of each other you want to stabilize.
Toll the Dead is a cleric cantrip many already take as it's just the best ranged damage option available to the class, making it something you can have without needing to pick it up with this feature. That opens up Chill Touch for you should you want a twinned slow with undead debilitation, which is an underrated element of the spell, or if you’re playing with Explorer’s Guide to Wildmont spells, Sapping Sting. Sapping Sting is a necromancy spell for some reason, and it can knock creatures that fail its save prone. Gross!
Where this gets particularly fun is with a sorcerer dip for Quickened Spell; this gives you a route to take advantage of reaper during all stages of the game as you can cast these doubled cantrips as a bonus action alongside potent 1st level and higher effects.
Reaper is a sweet feature to build around and play with; it's reason enough to commit to a full-caster backline damage dealer if that’s what you want to do.
2nd Level: Touch of Death
Touch of Death takes a page out of the paladin playbook by giving you a “smite” like feature on your Channel Divinity that pairs beautifully with your new arsenal of martial weapons at your disposal. 5 + twice your cleric level damage feels great at basically every stage of the game- in the early, the 5 is doing most of the heavy lifting, but past 5th level, your level is upping the damage to 20 or more damage out of a single feature. Touch of Death is an easy place to stick your Channel Divinities regularly and a great reason to keep a martial weapon on hand and play more towards the frontline.
3rd Level: 2nd Level Domain Spells
Blindness/Deafness and Ray of Enfeeblement are death’s 2nd level domain options.
Blindness/Deafness has been a tried and true fair save or die, as the blinded condition is reasonable but not utterly debilitating. Having access to this kind of effect makes it easier to prepare non-save or die effects instead with comfort knowing you’ve got a spell to kneecap a single threatening force.
Ray of Enfeeblement ages like a fine wine. It being a ranged spell attack instead of a save makes it effective against creatures with Legendary Resistances, plus halving the damage higher damage enemies deals scales superbly well. Enemies with two or three attacks that each deal more damage on average than a lower-tier enemy's single attack will be massively hampered by this cheap 2nd level spell. Concentration is a bit of an issue, as it makes it disrupts longer-duration effects you’d like rather have up, but should that concentration get knocked off and you need to gut the Storm Giant’s weapon attack potential, Ray of Enfeeblement is the real deal.
5th Level: 3rd Level Domain Spells
Animate Dead and Vampiric Touch come with 3rd level spells as your domain spells. While Vampiric Touch is a joke of a spell that has no business existing in its current form and shouldn’t ever be cast if you’re going for efficient tactical gameplay, Animate Dead has proven its value time and time again by providing you with a homegrown army of skeleton archers. This spell is mandatory for the evil death-embracing Death Domain fantasy in my eyes. Plus, the look of leading your undead legion of troops into battle from the frontlines is metal as hell.
6th Level: Inescapable Destruction
Inescapable Destruction needed a ribbon or two stapled to it to get me excited by it. As is, ignoring resistance to a specific damage type could be fine especially given it's basically all you want to be doing between Reaper, Touch of Death, and Divine Strike. Necrotic isn’t commonly resisted, though- only 11 monsters in the Monster Manual resist it, making the vast majority of the time this will have no text. Some campaigns will literally never have an opportunity for it to function. I’ve never been a proponent of features that allow for ignoring resistance as they don’t affect most encounters, and Inescapable Destruction is no exception.
7th Level: 4th Level Domain Spells
Blight and Death Ward are the two 4th-level domain spells Death gets.
Death Ward is handy in the upper tiers when it doesn’t cost comparatively as much, but at 7th level, I find it incredibly hard to justify casting. Blight is a big 8d8 damage single target nuke; that damage isn’t great, but given clerics aren’t loaded with big single target damage spells, you’ll definitely find moments where
Blight gets the job done when no other spell you’ve got prepared will do. Both are reasonable additions to your character.
8th Level: Divine Strike
Divine Strike competes with Reaper for your action if you’re at tables where you aren’t working with an abundance of spells per adventure. That makes it a bit lackluster in my eyes; Potent Spellcasting would have been outrageous, though, and this pairs well enough with Touch of Death that you’ll still feel fine about it.
9th Level: 5th Level Domain Spells
Antilife Shell and Cloudkill close out the Domain Spells for death clerics.
Antilife Shell has always been clunky and will be challenging to get a ton of use out of simply by the nature of how it limits your movement and does so little against creatures with any ranged options (which is most).
Cloudkill is a big area of rolling damage that similarly can be challenging to get great utility out of, as the cloud’s movement often works against its damage utility. Of the two, Cloudkill I can actually see getting cast with some amount of success, though, making it an underwhelming addition, yet one that isn’t without any value.
17th Level: Improved Reaper
Do you like Reaper doubling cantrips? Well, what if it could double ALL your single target necromancy spells 1st through 5th level?
Here are all of the options available as of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything from 1st to 5th level that work with Improved Reaper. Not all are cleric spells, though, and I’ll denote those with *. If you want to twin those, you’ll need to get them outside of preparing them as a cleric.
| Spell Level | Spells |
|---|---|
| 1st | Cause Fear*, Inflict Wounds, Ray of Sickness |
| 2nd | Blindness/Deafness, Ray of Enfeeblement |
| 3rd | Bestow Curse |
| 4th | Blight |
| 5th | Contagion, Enervation*, Negative Energy Flood* |
This isn’t the most robust list of spells to empower, especially given that you have to really go out of your way to get access to Cause Fear, Enervation, and Negative Energy Flood. Still, even with something like Inflict Wounds, with a 3rd level cast you get 10d10 necrotic damage, which is pretty solid. Ray of Enfeeblement in particular I adore with this feature, as debilitating two storm giants for one 2nd level spell is gross.
Blight also shines brightest here, as 16d8 damage for a single 4th-level slot is a decent chunk of damage. There are area-of-effect damage spells that are certainly better, but these improvements to mediocre damage spells do let them perform pretty well, and doubling the save or dies for how cheap their costs are is powerful.
All Together
I wish more subclasses were like Death Domain simply for the sheer versatility it offers. Martial weapon proficiencies paired with Divine Strike and Touch of Death make it function great in melee combat, especially in the early tiers, while Reaper pulls you towards wanting to get as many cantrips casts in as possible to take advantage of the doubling. The restrictions placed on the doubling effects make it easy for DMs to account for and plan around, as so long as creatures stay 10 feet apart or further, the cleric can’t take full advantage of their busted feature constantly.
You get power, flexibility, and fantasy all bundled together. Divine Strike is on the weaker side as far as features go, but everything else here from the reasonable Domain Spell list to the absolutely stellar scaling features leaves this in a spot where I’m eager to play it and recommend it to anyone wanting to build a cleric who plays in a unique way with all kinds of damage options. You can build a dozen different death domain clerics, and depending on what each focuses on they, they can all look different and still play great. That, to me, is a glowing endorsement for this subclass.
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