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Hmm yes I’d agree it mostly just seems interesting so far, the powers don’t seem great but I like some of the feats. I do like the Assured Healing feat, I suspect I’d pick that up for my Pacifist Cleric. The Pacifist’s Reward isn’t bad either.

Here’s my thoughts on the new feats.

Heroic Feats

Battle Cleric Armaments – Proficiency with Light Shields and with one military weapon of your choice. A cheap way to improve both your weapon and AC/Ref, wouldn’t you rather have a superior weapon though?

Domain Synergy – + 2 to attack rolls with the associated at will, after you’ve used the domains CD. This is actually really good but you do need both the domain feat and the domain’s divinity feat something that not all characters would want. (I’ll admit one of my clerics has both of the sun feats) Note this is a feat bonus.

Greater Divine Fortune – Makes Divine Fortune +3 which is reasonable, I think there’s better Channel Divinities out there though.

Harbinger of Rebirth - +2 to heal and allies with 5 get +5 to death saves, this is ok if you have a cleric who doesn’t focus on healing as much, but your allies shouldn’t really be dying on the floor in the first place if you’re doing your job healing them right.

Pacifist’s Reward – 2 temps when you hit an enemy but don’t damage them + 1 per tier. Nice but it doesn’t seem like enough temps to be massively worthwhile. That being said it combos quite well with powers like Life Transference and Stream of Life, reducing the damage you take nicely.

Word of Retaliation – You healing word heals extra hit points equal to the number of enemies adjacent to the target. I like this, I doubt a pacifist cleric would need it, but for others it can add a decent extra bit of healing.

Paragon Feats

Assured Healing – when you miss with an attack with the healing keyword that has no effect on a miss (read astral seal or healing strike) you or one ally within 5 squares regains hit points equal to Charisma mod. WOW this is awesome for Shielding Clerics. I really like this and will definitely get it for my pacifist cleric. On an aside can anyone see anything that would increase the healing on this? All the feats/items I’ve looked at only improve powers not feats.

Gambler’s Word – If you crit you gain an extra use of Healing Word. Nice, although the party only has so many healing surges. The wording is a little ambigious is it meant to give you an extra use of Healing Word which every single crit? With the right PP a cleric can be criting on a 18 or 19+, this would seem to be excessive. As noted above though the party only has so many healing surges, which would stop this from getting to silly.

Daniel. 

I had high hopes for this article but I found it somewhat underwhelming.

Domain Synergy is very nice if you possess both the feats for the domain.  Unfortunately, not all the domains have both domain and divinity feats worth taking.

Assured Healing is very potent if you have Recovery Strike, since it is an at-will with the Healing keyword.  Assured Healing means you can heal with Recovery Strike regardless of whether you hit or miss.

Greater Divine Fortune is a joke.  Divine Fortune should have given +3 as it was, and spending a feat to get it there is just wrong.

Some of the other pacifist build options are nice, but don't personally interest me.

I play a balanced cleric, and it looks like they just got kicked in the teeth again ("...taking both Strength and Wisdom powers probably isn't worth it").  Come on, Wizards.  With a +3 proficiency bonus weapon and a decent race choice, you can do just fine with both types.  It's like the designers don't even consider it a valid option.  In a smaller party where characters have to fill multiple roles, the balanced cleric is very nice.

It's interesting that all of the cleric builds tank Dex.  Why is having good Int so much better than Dex other than skills and rituals?  Some builds can benefit a lot more from Dex -- Astral Fire needs Dex 13 (and is pretty much designed for clerics), and if you go the Polearm Gamble route, there are a few nice feats related to OAs that need Dex.  Dex also adds to initiative, where Int does not. 

I see Lance of Faith was left off of the domain attacks list in the article. 

I was really hoping for some more cool powers like Gaze of Defiance and what we saw in Divine Power.  I can't really see myself taking many of the powers in this article.  It really annoys me that Gaze of Defiance and Sacred Flame totally got shafted in domain support, and this article even recommends that you take it because it's so cool.  I know that Gaze of Defiance and Sacred Flame didn't really need a lot of extra help, but it's not like Righteous Brand did either (which is arguably even more powerful). 

I like the domain support feats to boost at will powers, I think it would be great to have more domain-focused feats and abilities instead of god-specific ones (especially since then you could interchange pantheons without affecting anything).   This would be great for a future article.  The only problem with the domain feats is that you get rewarded only for certain combinations of power and domain choices.

Bah! IMO clerics didn't need an essetials artical yet.