Life Domain Cleric 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

The larger nerd space has introduced this concept of a “healer” character type who entirely exists to keep their teammates alive; in competitive tactical games, this can be a valuable addition to the team. In a cooperative roleplaying game like D&D, the value of healing is suspect. With total action making up the most critical advantages obtainable, healing doesn’t affect that until your team is out of hit points. At that point, healing one hit point is as effective as any number up to the cutoff number the attacker deals in damage.

So when you’ve got an option whose entire identity is baked into empowering healing, it has to do a lot to justify taking, so much so that turns ineffective heals into effective means of bolstering your team's actions. Life Domain doesn’t really get there.

1st Level: Domain Spells, Bonus Proficiency, Disciple of Life

Bless is routinely a low-tier cleric spell I’m excited to prepare. In the upper tiers, it's not all that worth it given that it costs your concentration and there are so many better concentration effects offered. This makes it a pretty poor domain spell; sure, it lets you prepare a different cleric spell out the gate if you already wanted Bless, but the typical big boon domain spells offer is expanded options outside Cleric or options that are a bit niche, but you’ll be happy to find uses for in all tiers.
Cure Wounds has the exact same problems, but worse. Healing Word is typically the only healing spell I advocate low-tier clerics prepare because it's efficient. You spend a bonus action to get an ally off of 0 hit points and taking actions again. You can still cast cantrips and make weapon attacks, you can dash, dodge, disengage, or hide. Plus, it's at range. To make matters worse, Cure Wounds is comparatively worse on Life Domain compared to Healing Word when stacked against the other options because…
Disciple of Life adds 2 + a spell’s level to healing restored. Cure Wounds moves from 1d8+Wis to 1d8+3+Wis. With a Wis score of 16, that’s less than a 30% increase in total amount healed. For Healing Word, it jumps up 35%, making it a greater improvement to lower dice-sized healing effects. Beyond Cure Wounds versus Healing Word, Disciple of Life is a blanket boon to all healing that adds 3 to 11 total HP to your spells. I can’t emphasize enough just how little this matters, even in the case of Healing Word.
At the lowest tier, when you’re using 1st level spells to heal, the bonus 3 hit points regained need to be the difference in one extra attack needed to kill an ally. The majority of the time, a creature will already down your friend in the same quantity of attacks, as the total difference between just one attack that would have downed and two attacks is literally in the difference gained. As the game progresses, so does monster damage, and it out scales 1 every three levels when you account for extra attack and action efficiency.
It sounds great, but this effect doesn’t actually enhance healing in such a way that it makes it a lot more effective, nor more efficient.

2nd Level: Preserve Life

What does majorly empower your healing potential, both in efficiency and effectiveness, is Preserve Life. For one action, a 2nd level Life Domain cleric can provide any number of creatures 10 hit points divided as you choose, scaling up by 5 per level past that. This will feel like a 2nd level cast of Mass Cure Wounds in the right circumstances, specifically when you need to get two or more unconscious allies back up into a fight. Being able to assign just 1 to the backline wizard who is no longer in immediate danger and the rest to the unconscious paladin to try to get them to a spot where they can take a single hit is great.
Of all the features of this domain, by a large margin, this is the best. When the best Life Domain feature gets replaced by Mass Healing Word at 5th level, we’re in trouble.

3rd Level: 2nd Level Domain Spells

Lesser Restoration and Spiritual Weapon make up the 2nd level domain spells for Life Domain.

Lesser Restoration is a niche effect I regularly don’t find you need, but against paralysis or long duration debilitating poisons that are costing your allies majorly, having access to it is nice. When it matters, it matters a lot, so getting it as a domain spell will prove useful a handful of times a campaign.
This niche utility paired with the cleric all-star Spiritual Weapon, a spell you’ll be happy to cast and up-cast basically at every tier, leaves me pretty happy with this domain selection.

5th Level: 3rd Level Domain Spells

The third level offering I’m less thrilled with.

Beacon of Hope is wildly inefficient for what it does, basically asking you to sink two actions to get any benefit from it at all, and that benefit is a bolstered healing spell, assuming you maintain concentration. You’ll regularly find you're better off having taken any other action than casting Beacon of Hope in combat.
Revivify, on the other hand, at least is a major component of clerics' 5th-level power, giving them a safety blanket to keep friends alive from particularly lethal events. Having it always prepared is nice to have.

6th Level: Blessed Healer

Blessed Healer most dictates where and how this option is intended to play; you want to be in the front lines taking hits and giving out hit points to other people ALSO taking hits. This specific dynamic should line up well specifically with other heavy front-line characters, but there’s a problem: spending your actions healing to get advantage from this feature isn’t really worth it. We know this. Your actions are almost always better spent reducing enemy actions than trying to mitigate losing your own, making this a feature you’re benefiting from in a meaningful manner almost never. If you bring somebody off of zero near the end of a fight, you probably weren’t going down that fight, and if you were, the difference 3-11 hit points is going to make usually isn’t changing that outcome. I get the idea behind this feature, but with how terrible healing is, it ends up being awful by association.

7th Level: 4th Level Domain Spells

Death Ward and Guardian of Faith are two more reasonable spells from your domain, at least.

Death Ward shines brightest in the upper tiers when you can just spend one of your plentiful lower-level slots on a layer of protection for yourself to add a layer of protection for the whole group should your life be threatened.
It is not great early, but Guardian of Faith is. I’m pretty happy with 60 damage for a 4th level slot in a defensive area on clerics, and with no concentration requirement, you can put this up in the thick of a fight, get immediate value, and continue concentrating on bigger effects like Summon Celestial.

8th Level: Divine Strike

Divine Strike comes out of left field with a boon to melee weapon attacks. As a character with heavy armor proficiency, you do want to be using that AC by being in the frontline, but when everything else you’ve been doing up to this point has revolved around spellcasting, you’re very likely not going to care remotely about this boon to attacks you’ve not been using since 2nd level.

9th Level: 5th Level Domain Spells

Mass Cure Wounds unfortunately has the exact same issue Cure Wounds has when you compare it to the Healing Word alternative. For what it's worth, at least on Life Domain each target regains a bonus +7 hit points, which is a net total of a lot more hit points, so it is moderately better here, but the same can be said for an up-cast Mass Healing Word. I’m not thrilled with it, but of all the healing spells go, for bulk, efficient healing that can mitigate actions, Mass Healing Word is closest to Mass Heal in being worth using beyond just getting allies up from death.
Raise Dead is a horrendous inclusion on domain spell lists. The effect is good for up to ten days post a target's death. You will have at least ten opportunities to prepare it for then. You don’t ever need this prepared preemptively if you’re going to use it, and Revivify is already on your Domain Spell list for the exact circumstance you’d want Raise Dead for.

17th Level: Supreme Healing

Supreme Healing can kind of be viewed as doubling healing dice rolled, especially in larger dice pools. That is a lot of healing technically. Here’s my question: do you ever need this on top of Mass Heal? Enemies at this tier know that the thing keeping their allies alive with thousands of hit points has to die first, and given your hit point maximum isn’t gargantuan, you’re setting yourself to get obliterated with a round or two dunked into throwing 60-80 hit points on yourself. Those bonus hit points aren’t doing any work stopping incoming damage.

All Together

I will always steer new players and veterans alike away from Life Domain. This option fundamentally suffers from a healing system that just doesn’t gell well with actual fights. Disciple of Life doesn’t have nearly high enough of an impact, Blessed Healer comes nowhere close to being useful, and while Preserve Life is a great tool to get early, the moment Mass Healing Word comes online it feels a lot less special.

Life Domain is, ironically, overkill. Most games aren’t seeing the entire team drop every fight, and if people aren’t dropping unconcious in fights prior to you using Life Domain, this option has no relevant text outside heavy armor proficiency.

The lesson to learn here is proactive features are what drive 5th edition D&D, with the best reactive features costing your reaction and mitigating bad outcomes entirely. Life Domain looks to amend the bad outcomes after they’ve happened a bit better, and that’s just not a great tactical use of a character at most tables.

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