Knowledge Domain Cleric 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Nobody likes a know-it-all; want to be said know-it-all, that once again, nobody likes? Knowledge Domain is here for you. It is the skill-based cleric domain that wants to be an expert in Intelligence based skills and have access when needed to any skill or tool in the game. There are some issues with both of these. Without all that empowering of a Domain Spells list and mediocre other features, this domain ultimately feels like it fails to deliver on its fantasy alongside failing to give you powerful options.

1st Level: Domain Spells, Blessing of Knowledge

For how underwhelming most of this option is, I can say at least its Domain Spells at 1st level are pretty solid. Command and Identify both offer a decent chunk of utility out of combat. Identify also has the ritual tag, making it feel a bit more like a passive feature that makes you the magic item identifier. Command is handy in combat too for getting enemies disarmed or setting up fun moments with specific command words that’ll catch your DM off guard and lead to wild improvised moments of lunacy.
Blessing of Knowledge is functionally expanded proficiencies with Expertise. You learn two skills from Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion, and double your proficiency bonus for checks made using either skill. Unfortunately, these may be the four least impactful skills in the game at most tables. Turns out that knowing the rich lore your DM is often coming with on the spot just doesn’t have a major impact on decisions being made. Where Perception, Stealth, Athletics, Sleight of Hand, Investigation, and even Animal Handling will act as tools to confront challenges and open doors (sometimes literally), the odds of one of these lore skills doing something similar is even less likely.
Yes, you could find yourself in cryptic ruins where a History check uncovers a solution to a puzzle or something, but a lot of those kinds of puzzles end up actually being in-game puzzles you’ll be solving, not skill challenges. They’re flavorful, and contribute to learning and being immersed in a world, but certainly shouldn’t carry all of the weight as this domain’s 1st level feature.

2nd: Knowledge of the Ages

Knowledge of the Ages suffers a different skill-based problem: overlap. D&D is a collaborative experience where groups of three to eight people come together with various characters aimed at playing a specific role as part of a larger team. Each has at least four skills at their disposal, and there are only eighteen in total. Seeing as you’ve got six already, should you have just three other party members, you’re likely covering most, if not all, the skills in the game. This makes having a tool to get temporary access to one skill fairly pointless.
You might find uses for it in group checks, but most of the time everyone doesn’t always make checks together; Stealth might be something the whole group makes checks for, but otherwise, single characters with the highest modifier will make a skill check for the entire group. You don’t need access to Athletics proficiency when you’re not already built to be good at Athletics because you’ve very likely got a barbarian or fighter friend that will still do it better and make that skill check instead.

3rd Level: 2nd Level Domain Spells

Augury and Suggestion are the 2nd level Doman Spells knowledge gets.

Augury is fine, especially for discerning if you’re on the right track in a complex dungeon or adventure, but isn’t a tool you’ll be able to bust out all the time.
Suggestion, on the other hand, is a major boon to always have prepared as it is readily castable in most environments and offers a splashy magical effect that can majorly impact the world.

5th Level: 3rd Level Domain Spells

Nondetection and Speak with Dead are spells. That I can say for sure.

Speak with Dead at least is a fun, yet somewhat niche exploration tool for information gathering that can be a blast to play with even if it's a bit over costed.
Nondetection, on the other hand, is nearly uncastable. The minigame centered around divination magic tends to be an unrewarding massive headache that is frustrating to navigate and rarely will matter, making a spell that only exists to play within that minigame pointless.

6th Level: Read Thoughts

Read Thoughts finally is a feature I’d be excited to get, and it competes with all the other Channel Divinities you get, minimizing my excitement. Still, it marries two of my favorite effects, Detect Thoughts and Suggestion, into a save or die with a minute of full control over a creature. It doesn’t scream “knowledge” to me, at all, even a little bit, but at least its interesting. With access to Suggestion already at such a cheap cost of just a 2nd level slot, I’m further pushed back from actually wanting this ability, but out of everything Knowledge Domain has had to offer thus far, this is probably the best new toy unique to the subclass.

7th Level: 4th Level Domain Spell

Arcane Eye and Confusion continue the trend of pretty lackluster domain spells.

Arcane Eye is like Find Familiar but it takes your concentration and costs a 4th level slot, leaving it feeling terrible by comparison.
Confusion has a bit of potential, as a mass save or suck kind of effect can be good, but it is inconsistent and has a few too many effects that end up making me feel like the spell did close to nothing for me to be comfortable regularly casting it.

8th Level: Potent Spellcasting

Adding your Wis modifier to cantrips in the mid game, with no supporting features bolstering your cantrips further, is pretty bad. Adding +4 or +5 to the damage of a Sacred Flame doesn’t suddenly make me want to use it more than just casting higher-level spells. It might replace a Guiding Bolt here or there, but once you’ve got 5th level and higher slots, you’re going to regularly have way better ways to spend your actions in combat than casting cantrips.

9th Level: 5th Level Domain Spells

Legend Lore and Scrying have no business being the level they cost.

Legend Lore in particular is a joke of an effect, a spell that costs a 5th-level slot for what functionally an encyclopedia could do. If you want to look up a legendary figure, go to a library.
Scrying at least has some potential for scouting ahead long distances and tracking enemies over miles and even countries. Its use cases are niche still, but at least it's castable and doing what I’d expect a Knowledge Domain cleric to do: learn.

17th Level: Visions of the Past

If you can make it to 17th level, I’m betting it was from the raw power core cleric offers, as there isn’t much else here to get you going. Visions of the Past deserves to be lower level, and if it were, would define this subclass as its own unique and spectacular thing. You learn about the world in a cinematic and unique fashion by viewing the previous owners of an object or events in a space, playing back in dramatic fashion around you. It's cool as hell. It's deeply and flavorfully rich. It is nowhere close to 9th-level spells in power, nor does it constitute its harsh restrictions of once per rest. A version of this subclass with a version of this feature at first level would get me excited to play it. Waiting till 17th level for improved detective skills? Yeah, hard pass.

All Together

Knowledge Domain is a hollow shell with glaring skill problems, a mediocre Domain Spell list, and no features that actually bring the fantasy together until most people have stopped playing. Read Thoughts being the only compelling feature that could be considered worth it's level and cost highlights just how bad this is, as Read Thoughts isn’t really doing anything that can’t be done with lower-level spells. I wouldn’t recommend anyone play Knowledge Domain. It's boring, bland, and bad through and through.

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