Divine Soul Sorcerer 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@Crier Kobold

Do you crave the chosen-one archetype? Does all the benefits of devotion to a fictional deity sound great, yet the constraints of being a cleric seem a bit too strict for you? If so, Divine Soul may be the perfect option for you. It takes everything great about the sorcerer spell list and combines it with all the biggest hits from the cleric list to provide you with a robust pool of options to do whatever you want with.

Divine Soul tends to play more like a cleric with metamagic than a sorcerer. It doesn’t completely solve the problem in limited spells known, which in this case I think is probably for the best. If you love the idea of two or three cleric spells specifically and want them to be the majority of your character, that’s what this option does well.

1st Level: Divine Magic and Favored by the Gods

Divine Magic is what defines this option: anytime you’d learn a new spell, you can learn spells from the cleric spell list instead. Additionally, you get Cure Wounds, Inflict Wounds, Bless, Bane, or Protection from Evil and Good depending on the alignment of the source of your divine power. You can exchange it on level up for any other cleric spell of your choice making the selection fairly moot, as past 1st level it equates to one bonus known cleric spell.
Doubling the spell list on the class that gets Metamagic has some exciting opportunities. Clerics tend to have the best single-target defensive buff spells in the game like Shield of Faith; these play great alongside Twinned Spell. Spells like Spiritual Weapon are just good, too, and give you a consistent thing to do with a bonus action while firing off the usual suspects you’d see on a typical sorcerer like Fireball.
It may seem innocuous but Divine Magic is insanely powerful. You basically get to pick the best of the best spells from two wildly different lists. Your spells known may be small, but the average power of your spells is going to be higher than basically every other character in the game with this kind of selection.
Favored by the Gods gives you a 2d4 bonus to a failed saving throw or attack roll once per short rest. In play this often feels like a +5 when you need it to a save that would debilitate you. It affects the upper tiers a bit more than the lower tiers when saves are a larger issue. In the early tier, having a tool to make your Firebolt hit instead of miss can be a perfectly fine use case for it as well though.
Its strict use gate can often leave players banking it indefinitely; generally speaking, I’d recommend using it whenever you think it could turn a relevant failed outcome to a success.

6th Level: Empowered Healing

Healing magic isn’t great in 5th edition, especially in combat healing. Empowered Healing lets you reroll a bunch of dice, meaning you’d want to use it when you’re rolling lots of dice to heal a single target. That situation is not that common. Typically, you’ll want to use effects like Healing Word to quickly get downed allies off of zero and back into a fight. With how few spells known you still have, there’s a real chance you’ll have no good spells to synergize with this feature, nor do I think you should prioritize getting something like Mass Cure Wounds on your sheet just so Empowered Healing can potentially increase the damage healed by 2 or 3.

14th Level: Angelic Form

Lifted near directly from Draconic Bloodline, the 14th level feature you get is a fly speed you can manifest as a bonus action and keep forever, but without the armorless restriction and with a set fly speed instead of letting it scale with your ground speed.
Angelic Form does contribute to feeling angelic, but flight as the only new thing you’re getting at 14th level isn’t going to have that massive of an impact at most tables. Flight is fairly accessible these days. Fly is a 3rd level spell, and lower-tier effects like Find Familiar and Summon Beast offer flying companions even earlier. Some races come with flight out the gate. A 14th level feature can’t ever be that good if it equates to a racial feature, even if that racial feature is generally accepted to be excellent.

18th Level: Unearthly Recovery

Unearthly Recovery usually is a conditional bonus action self-cast of the Heal spell, but worse in terms of hit points regained. With a +1 Con at 20th level, you’re looking at an average of 92 hit points as a sorcerer, meaning Unearthly Recovery heals 46 hit points total. If we add two points to your Con mod to try to maximize this feature’s effectiveness, we’re still looking at healing just 66 hit points. Heal takes an action, doesn’t require you be under half your max hit points, and restores 70 hit points. For a bonus action and with all the restrictions, I definitely prefer Heal. As an 18th-level feature, this isn’t anywhere close to being powerful.
That being said, it doesn’t need to be great, as the real meat of what you’re getting here is 9th-level magic. That’s good enough to carry you comfortably for the rest of the game.

All Together

Divine Soul’s power is nested in functionally providing you a cleric multiclass without needing to actually leave the sorcerer class while not gaining the advantages that come with domains and expanded proficiencies. It leads to primarily being all about a cultivated spell list showing off only the very best of both classes’ spells, which honestly is still great. The limited spells known make you need to lean heavily on these, but given they’re the best of the best, that’s not a hard feat to accomplish.

Divine Soul’s features outside of Divine Magic aren’t amazing, but they don’t need to be if you come to the table having done the work and cultivated a specific list. The bonus spell at 1st level is a major asset in the early tier, and once you’ve got a spell routine in place with applicable metamagic, you can feel incredibly powerful with this option. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but if you’re the kind of player that loves scouring through book after book for the best little features to compile together and pair with your metamagic, this option is for you.

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