Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

NOW I'm thinking of making either a neutral or good melee priest. Cleric, Hospitalier, and Hierophant. I'm not fully familiar with all the new feats custom to this server, so I was wondering which early level feats would be good for a strong balance of spellcasting and melee prowess?

Sorry for all the threads on character ideas. I'm having trouble making up my mind and I tend grind my teeth into powder whenever I level up wrong and find out afterward.

Priest don't really get to many over-the-top and exotic feats to choose from especially if you look to be a melee priest.

I would just go with the normal rotation of feats of your choosing.

Stuff like:

Extend Spell

Power Attack

Toughness

( Maybe cleave)

(Maybe monkey grip)

Practice spell caster of course

Would any of the shield bash feats be worthwhile?

I thought you needed fighter level's to take shield bash?

If not then sure you could take some sheild bash feats

Maybe even some combat insight feats if you have the feat room and 16+ WIS for the extra HP regen and AB.

If you aren't deadset on your deity, here are a few domains that would prove useful:
-Water: Evasion, which leads into expose weakness.
-Fire: Fireseeds is a pretty good spell, if not exactly melee focused. It lets you create alchemist fire flasks (perfected, at CL 25), which do around 70-90 damage a hit.
-Darkness: Free Blindfight.
-Plant: Barkskin, natural AC in a spell. Something clerics lack.

There are also a few deity specific spells. I only know Azuth's Spell Shield, which mystra and azuth give. It gives the player 50 spell resistance for 1 round/level, which can turn out to be pretty nifty when fighting spellcasters.

As for your build, it should be pretty straight-forward:

Take cleric to 13.
Take Hierophant at levels 14, 15, 16, and 17.
Take hospitalier at 18, 19, and 20.
Take Hierophant at levels 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27.
Take hospitalier at 28, 29, and 30.

For your stats, if you are a melee cleric then you really only need 20 TOTAL wisdom. If you have a +2 wisdom item, you only need 18 wisdom. If you have a +3 wisdom item, you only need 17 wisdom. If you have a +4 wisdom item, you only need 16 wisdom.

Pump your STR to max, and keep pumping it at each level up. Take 14 INT if you plan on grabbing improved knockdown. Take 13 DEX if you plan on using a mithril fullplate. Otherwise, leave DEX at 10. Take 12 CON, or more if you can. Try to get an even CON score.

For your hierophant feats, I recommend the following:
-Spellpower I, II, and III.
-Faith Healing (Doubles the healing power of Heal and Mass Heal, as well as Cures.)
-Blast Infidel (Doubles the damaging power of Harm, as well as the Inflict spells.)

For your general feats, I recommend the following:
-(Essential) Extend Spell (take before you take hierophant)
-(Essential) Practiced Spellcaster
-Luck of Heroes (only can be taken at level 1)
-(Essential) Blindfight
-(Don't take if you have an item) Improved Critical (The weapon you want to use). This can be replaced with the use of items that grant keen edge.
-(Do not take) Toughness. There are several rings that can grant this, one of which is relatively cheap at the Bereghost blacksmith. Don't take this feat as a general feat, use one of the rings that grants it.
-(Do not take) Quicken Spell. If you plan on PvPing, a quickened silence or a quickened mantle can save you!
-Craft Wand. An alternative to quicken spell that costs a bit of money. You can also make money selling cleric spells as wands. I'd personally go with this over quickened spell, it opens up more options.
-(If you aren't using a shield, essential) (Improved) Power Attack
-(Improved) Knockdown
-(Improved) Heavy Armor optimization (if you aren't using a mithril fullplate).

For your epic feats, I recommend the following:
-Epic Prowess (you can take this as your hospitalier bonus feat) ONLY if you took the water domain and thus have evasion.
-Great STR feats. Try to end your STR at an even score.
-Epic Gate is alright, if you want it.

For skills:
Spellcraft to 30.
Tumble to 10.
Concentration to 33.
Lore (Religion) to 15 (Hierophant Requirement).
Diplomacy 5 (Hospitalier Requirement).

I didn't see Divine Might or Divine Shield in the mix here. They can be nice additions depending on your deity. EG if you want to go Morninglord of Lathander, you want higher charisma to boost your turning and Divine Might/Divine shield goes very well with the class to add that extra oomph of damage/AC and you will have plenty of Turn Undead to burn using them.

You have to min-max a little bit to make a non-aasimar, non-drow, non-wood elf EDM cleric. Not sure if that is desirable. And you certainly are unlikely to make it happen with anything other than a pure cleric, as you will need the epic feats for strength and charisma feats.

On the other hand, there are great strength focused clerics. I could suggest cleric15/hierophant10/frenzied berserker, for instance. Hits like a truck.

I didn't say EDM though. I only said Divine Might/Shield, two reasonable feats if the character has the charisma (min base 16) to make them worthwhile, esp. with Morninglord and their 15+ turn undeads they can use.

So, this doesn't relate to feats per se, but from your forum join date it looks like you're new and this is an important thing to keep in mind when planning your caster character:



So plan accordingly.

With regards to Divine Might, I would say unless you plan on going Epic Divine Might, don't bother.

Divine Shield can be a life saver if you have a decent charisma score and struggle with AC (you shouldn't) or if you should suddenly draw the attention of an epic boss (a more likely scenario).

Of course with these feats you are going to be very dependent on turns/day, so Extra Turning is also a great feat to squeeze out a few more uses between rests.

Hmm, thanks for all the input everybody. I was actually thinking of making an Aasimar, so I might be able to fit in DM/DS but likely won't aim for the epic versions. Sounds like the minimum of Wis needed to cast all spell level is what I should aim for, correct? Does it hurt to not have good DCs, or is it a non-issue with cleric brand divine spells?
P.S. obviously it couldn't benefit from DM/DS, but how would a favored soul measure up as a melee priest? Might not want to deal with the headache of agonizing over levelup spells though... Just read that Favored Soul is not among the classes allowed for Hierophant.

I wouldn't go a DC cleric, personally. The cleric spell book is very much tailored to buffing the self, healing, and support. It has a handful of DC spells, none of which are particularly spectacular (implosion is ok). However, it has too few good offensive spells to be considered worthwhile. Fire domain adds fire seeds, which is ok, but druid/spirit shaman (especially SS) can achieve far better DCs and get fire seeds as well. Of course, the wizard spell book is chalk full of offensive spells as well.

The cleric spell book just wasn't built for spectacular offensive-casting. It does make for a powerful gish, however. I'd stick to what the spell-book is good at, specialization tends to serve you far better.

That isn't to say you can't do DCs. It just won't be as good as doing a DC Wizard/Spirit Shaman/Druid/Sorcerer or making a melee cleric/favored soul.

I'd stick to melee for this one.

Not true at all... prop built a cleric can equal a wizard. Yes they dont have nearly as many offensive spells as a wizard but the ones they get are potent and with the right domains you can gain quite a few extra offensive spells to your spellbook. Add hierophant and you become a dps god. I have seen such clerics take on dozens of people in pvp and wipe them all out in less then a minute.

Pics, V'rass. That claim suggests:

1) The cleric was high level (30), the players were very low level (1-10).
2) The "dozens of players" were afk.
3) The cleric was fighting a bunch of wizard 7/sorcerer 9/rouge 9/harper agent 5s.

A properly build cleric could handle a wizard, if the wizard was fairly inept or had a shoddy build/spellbook at the time. That is true.

Which domains would you suggest for offensive spells? Also, what build would you consider properly built?

Fire is good for fire seeds (probably the best offensive domain) and firewall.
Cold is ok for polar ray (though without metamagic, its a little lackluster. And clerics cannot metamagic that stuff.).
Spider gives creeping doom, which is a good spell.
Storm gives call lightning and ice storm, which are alright (not great to rely on).

Most are your save spells are save-or-die effects, and there are only a handful of them (much of the time, you'll likely end up bashing just because of sustainability issues with only using the handful of spells you have.). You'll have storm of vengeance, flame strike (which becomes obselete) and firestorm, which are alright as well (but again, not great). You don't have any save-less spells unless you take Fire or Cold (fire being the reliable one to choose).

Perhaps you could offer some insight into spell selection as well, especially the spell selection for taking out dozens of people in PvP! I'll offer you some light bdsm RP in exchange, no worries

This is getting a bit off topic as the subject is clearly about melee clerics, not DC clerics. Further discussing what can be done in PvP is always suspect as metaquad4 points out it's very dependent upon the skill level of the various players involved.

To the point of feats for melee priest, basically you will rely heavily on Divine Power to boost BAB to 30. For an Aasimar there is NO REASON not to go for EDM. I would recommend starting stats along the lines of:
STR: 16
DEX: 8 (depending on domains/build you may need more, but 8 with +4 bracers is good for Full Plate)
CON: 10-12
INT: 10-12
WIS: 16
CHA: 18

For feats you want Power Attack, Divine Might, Divine Shield and Extend Spell. If you want to have Lathander as your deity STR domain gives more casts of (extended) divine power and you can take the morning lord PRC for tons of extra uses of EDM/Divine Shield. You should have no issues getting to 22 STR and CHA and you can either use a +3/4 WIS amulet or increase WIS a bit as you level. Other beneficial feats are IPA, Blindfight, Luck of Hero's, etc. If you want to add in Frenzied Berserker 5 you can gain Enhanced IPA for more damage, which may lend itself if you want to lower CHA and go for more STR/WIS, though Caster Level will be 29 unless you also take levels in Hierophant for Spell Power.

*Simply shakes his head and laughs*