Finally, if people feel the Cleric still needs to be watered down, then I'd say that the armor is a function of the war domain, and that spontaneous healing a function of the healing domain. (Or some combination). My point being that we don't really have to entirely take these features away to keep the Cleric as is. We'd just say that the PHB cleric is a War/Healing cleric.
Hell no. The whole concept of the cleric from the first time it appeared was wearing armor and healing and casting "sticks to snakes" .
Also on dropping the BAB, HD size and/or good Fort save, leaving those to specific domains. Basically the idea is to have it be interesting and moderately powerful, instead of bland and extremely powerful.
... and more hell no...
...
Listen I really dont' mean to be rude (but it's christmas and Bah humbug) but this is a pretty delicate thing.
I don't know what any of your experience level with D&D is so please understand where I'm coming from with this: The cleric we have in 3.5 is a result of everyone hating being the cleric cause no one wanted to be the band-aid, it was hated cause they got non of the glory and generally were a "blah" but needed class. Everyone seemed to love the traditional flavor of the armored guy with the mace. (Which was originally one of thier things they could only use blunt weapons I suppose that mattered a bit in earlier editions)
So to fix those weaknesses, so that people would play clerics they pushed cleric to its limit of goodness and took it over...
So before
any fixes Any at all... we need to have a
discussion and
analysis of the cleric, what makes it good, what makes it too good.
I'm going to start by reiterating The clerics role was orignally, healer slash secondary fighter, which I think we should maintain that. Bab and Hp hits don't matter. actually...
The arcade game. Where I'm going to fighter you is making cloisterd cleric the standard at which point we make the cleric a wizard with a worse spell list. Although if you'll notice cloisterd cleric is constanly used in optimization, so I'm going to tell you flat out that frankly it also lends itself to brokenation. You prolly haven't experience it though...
and a note to all but specifically @ Robbypants.
The reactionary response to "fix" the cleric initially will be to make is WAAAAY less powerful, and probbably overshooting the mark if we don't address what specifically is wrong with the class.
I think thats what happend with the wizard fixes infact but I wasn't there so it is what it is. . .
Soo... the cleric. What's up with it?
You know what it is? Spells.
The spell were too powerful. The ability to cast persited spells with night sticks was broke. The ability to cast off the wizard list with anyspell was broke.
Like so many things in the game the brokenation of the cleric stems from spells.
If nothing else in this post THIS:
I say keep the base chasis... do a quick rundown of the cleric spells. We change the domain interaction a bit, check it vs, somthing we consider balanced. "Binder for instance or Crusader" and against some of the other fixes that people have created from around the net and through that process we should end with a more balanced, and true to what the class has been Cleric. It is easier to power something up to playable levels than power something down into playablility cause you know exactly whats wrong. Going down the scale we don't know whats wrong only that the "class is too powerful" ... We need to isolate "why" specifically.
before we make any changes.