One of the crazy things about making homebrew the way I do is that sometimes, there are problems I clearly know exist, but I'll be damned if I know how to solve them, or even where they are.
That's part of why peer review is so important to the process: you guys manage to hammer down my material, find the faults I know have to be there, and give me a pretty clear idea of how to fix them.
The rough draft of the Madness cleric was a combat monster across the board, powerful without much exception. Hopefully, this draft helps remedy that.
Let's see how:
WHAT I CHANGED:
- Reworked Eyes of Insanity, again. It now does only movement, no opportunity attacks, but is a bonus action. It also requires an additional save if you attempt to walk an enemy into bad stuff, and no longer works on targets that can't be charmed.
- Tweaked Sow Madness such that it also does not apply to charm-proof creatures. I also changed a few of the effects on the roll table, most notably number 7 in a way that makes it more fun and less broken.
- Berserking no longer excludes some targets, so, y'know, no one get too close to the crazy rage guy.
- Voices in Your Head no longer grants Deep Speech because I just plain didn't like how it felt, and languages are easy enough to get from backgrounds besides.
- Gates of Madness has updated verbage specifying limits on the ritual.
CONCERNS:
- If there was THAT MUCH stuff needing fixing that I didn't see, is there more?
WHAT I LEARNED:
- If you only use the most powerful abilities in a class as benchmarks, you'll end up with something obscenely powerful. Whodathunk.
So our group has been playing for about 6 months now with a Madness domain cleric. It has been an absolute blast- Sew Madness has proven to be a crazy powerful ability when paired with lots more save or dies, but after getting past the first three levels it became less and less of an issue. Voices in your Head has lead to incredibly memorable moments and the cleric picking random NPCs to "convert" by using this feature and some illusion shenanigans with the parties help to slowly drive them mad. Eyes of Insanity has been an interesting ability- some encounters it has been quite strong while others it has been utterly worthless. Of all the features, this one felt the least interesting. The madness domain cleric went full tank/melee madness cleric and just hit 6- can not WAIT to see the beserker rage feature drop on our Pact of the Dragon (another of yours) Bladelock or our Fighter or Rogue.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to let you know how awesome your content is and share my groups experience with this option. Thanks so much for all the hard work- can't wait for more Stronghold and other options, and neither can my players!
Thanks for the kind words and feedback!
DeleteI'm glad to hear the Madness cleric has about the level of swing-y, situational utility I planned for it. It wouldn't be a cleric of Madness if it was across-the-board consistent.
Hi! First of all, this website is amazing and you, sir, are a true hero!
ReplyDeleteI just stumbled upon Walrock Homebrew and, while looking around, I found that only the first page of this very interesting Cleric subclass is loaded form the PDF-page-thing... is there a way to get the other pages too?
Thank you and keep up the good work! :D