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5 Go to Tier 1 D&D Cleric Spells

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Ever wonder what D&D cleric spells you should take at early levels. We go over it for 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. We look at tier 1 D&D spells for clerics. We break it down by attack, buff, defense, overlooked, utility, and the bonus iconic spell category.

5 Go to Tier 1 D&D Cleric Spells Video

5 Go to Tier 1 D&D Cleric Spells Video Transcription

Ted: “Today we’re going to do another video talking about clerics.”

Dave: “Yeah, we’re going to have to have faith to make this one work.”

Ted: “If our viewers out there, you watching, if you’ve got the power, if you’ve got the belief in us, we can be able to reveal the go to spells.”

Dave: “Our belief is not strong enough, we need more Ted.”

Ted: “Do you believe?’

Dave: “Do you believe? Welcome to the Nerdarchy I’m Nerdarchist Dave, and as always I’m here hanging out with this nerd.”

Ted: “Nerdarchist Ted.”

Dave: “Maybe it’s your first time hanging out in Ted’s basement. It’s a place where we like to talk about views, news, and home brews for 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons and sometimes we talk about other role playing games.”

Ted: “If you don’t want to miss a single video, then don’t forget to crit hit that subscribe button and attune to that notification bell.”

Dave: “Now when we did the wizards, Go to spells, we include it fifth level, which is not tier one. Tier one is only one through fourth so we’re going to get it right this time and we’re only going to include spells from first and second level. For our go to cleric spells.”

Ted: “Right now. Cleric is something that’s, you know, you know, dear dear to my heart, it is my favorite character class. I like having the religion in D&D with all of the awesome options that you can have but, you know, that leaves to, well, what spells do we wind up taking So we’re gonna dive into it today.”

Dave: “So we’re going to do the same breakdown. We’re going to do the five goto spells plus one bonus spell. We’ve got attack, we’ve got buff, we’ve got the defense,”

Ted: “we’ve got utility, we’ve got iconic, and we’re going to add in that overlooked.”

Dave: “All right, so let’s dive into it. Our first one is attack spells . A ton of great choices for the cleric, but what’s our go to?”


Ted: “All right So the Go to is got to be hold person, Eh, it’s one of those things that a lot of people like, yeah, you know, it’s not that big a deal. But as we dive more into the conditions and we realized how insane it is to be paralyzed, it’s just crazy. You’re cleric casts hold person on your bad guy. And all the melee characters run up and just annihilated because the attacks come with advantage and any attack that it’s an automatic crit.”

Dave: “Long as they’re within five feet. Yeah. Well, as I sat the melee attackers go in, so hold person is actually a very old spell. It came from the very beginning and it’s always been like the staple of the cleric, so you know, being able to restrain people and hold them in place with your magic. It is a second level spell and action. The cast range of 60 feet and it lasts a whole minute. As long as you concentrate on it. Choose a humanoid that you can see within range. The target must succeed on wisdom savings throw or be paralyzed for the duration. At the end of each of its turns, the target can make another wisdom saving, throw on a successful save. The spell ends on the target. Now you can also cast at a higher level spell and for each spell slot you’d go above. It’s going to allow you to affect another target.”

Ted: “You’ve got multiple options when it comes to using this. Either you can do it to, to restrain an attacker that you don’t have to kill them. You can cast it as a higher level spell, hitting multiple targets or you know, straight up, I want that guy done. As I said, you cast it all, everybody runs it on the thing that can attack back and you’re just proceed the crit after crit after crit.”

Dave: “So next up we’re going to go to our go to buff spell. There are a lot of good choices for cleric, but one of them just really stands out more than any of the others. To me, what do you think that’s going to be?”

Ted: “And that’s going to have to be aid. So duration is eight hours, casting times single action. There’s no savings for him because it’s a, it’s a buff. We don’t, we don’t need to worry about, you know, saves. So it’s range is 30 feet you’re spell bolsters are allies with toughness and resolve. Choose up to three creatures within range, each targets hip point and maximum increases by five for the duration. So five extra hit points, not temporary. Five hit points added to your Max and your current for eight hours. That’s amazing.”

Dave: “It is. There’s no concentration that goes with it. You can pump this spell up to give even more hit points. And it also means when you get damaged and they get lowered by healing, you can bring them back up and have it. So it’s, it’s just a really strong buff spell.”

Ted: “So it was a low level spell that you can be able to use. And let’s face it, when you’re getting ready to fight that, that big bad who we’re talking campaign big bad and you look over at that Bard who’s got 99 hit points as a max and there’s that chance of that guy going to have, you know, power word spells now might be a good time to apply that.”

Dave: “So, uh, speaking of buffs spells, you might learn a buff your game up with D&D Beyond the sponsors for this video, which we’re giving our handy dandy devices available so that we can read this spells to you as we go along, which is super convenient. We’re not lugging around heavy big books with us. You know, just this lightweight phone, all the information right at our fingertips. Everything that’s come out for 5th edition, Dungeons and Dragons, that’s official content is on that site. If you have it unlocked, but there’s a bunch of free things you can do over there. Anything in the SRD or the basic rules is over on D&D Beyond. You can use it for free. You can build characters over there. Uh, they have articles, they have videos. There’s a ton of information.”

Ted: “If you’re trying to figure out what spells to pick for your cleric or your wizard or any, any spell caster, you’ve got the ability to pull up your D&D Beyond, go into your filters and limited by spell level, by school, by source material so that you can be able to go in and quickly look through what are your options as opposed to, you know, as I used to do, I’d pull out the player’s handbook. You got to look through, okay, what spells do I have access to I have to look through the entire index of options of okay. All the spells listed alphabetically here. I can just go, go through cleric spells in the player’s handbook for first and second level, all fit in once one scrollable page on D&D Beyond.”

Dave: “ Super convenient. Jump down to description and go check out some D&D Beyond.”

Ted: “All right, so what category are we going to next Dave?”


Dave: “Next we’re going to go to defense. So with that to go into our defensive spells and we’re ready to go with shield of faith. There’s a couple of reasons why I like this one.”

Ted: “All right. Now shield of faith we’re talking about at first level spell, so you’re going to get access to it right away. It’s a bonus action to cast so you don’t have to worry about, you know, uh, action economy or this, this being lost. You’re going to get to be able to do this. A shimmering field appears and surrounds a creature of your choice with an range which is 60 feet by the way, granting an a plus two bonus to ac for the duration, which is 10 minutes.”

Dave: “This is really nice cause you can increase your armor class or a party members armor class. It’s a great spell that you can use to defend yourself or someone else at the party. 60 foot. That’s a great range. Last for 10 minutes, only drawback, it’s a concentration, but overall for first level and second level of defensive spells, this one’s a great one.”

Ted: “There’s very few things in the game that are actually going to wind up adding to your AC. Uh, so getting a first level spell that you’ve got to be able to throw on there and have it stay 10 minutes actually has the chance, especially if you’re doing a dungeon crawl to last through multiple combats. So single first level spells going to be able to help you out from multiple. So next up we’re going to talk about utility spells. And there was definitely some debate here because there’s a lot of really good options. Uh, I think this is where cleric really has the ability to shine with utility, but you know, there’s something that’s going to certainly have to stand out.”

Dave: “Yeah, we went with zone of truth. We thought this would be a great spell for a cleric in those a utility situations, especially for interrogations or you’re trying to figure out if someone’s lying to you or not. It’s also going to facilitate a lot of role playing.”

Ted: “That was why I really put it, put it in there. There was, there was a couple of other things that were high contenders but to me Zone of Truth speaks highly to this is a role-playing spell whether you’re trying to deal with in our inner party conflict, NPC on PC conflict, or just you know NPC on NPC. This is a great thing that you can, you can be able to pull out and you know have at your disposal is a second level spell. It’s a casting time of an action. It lasts 10 minutes. It does require a charisma save, but it has a a range of 60 feet and then once you put it out it is a radius of, or sorry, a sphere of 15 feet from the point you choose and you know anyone who fails, they’re save in that zone is unable to willingly tell a lie. That doesn’t mean you can’t deceive. It’s up to the uh, you know, the person in there as to how they want to creatively word, uh, their, their statements and what have you. But I think it can be a lot of fun. And if you’ve got someone who’s really, you know, slick and suave, you can still mislead. You can still misdirect with telling the truth.”

Dave: “ Yeah. You create a magical zone that guards against deception and a 15 foot radius sphere senator on I point of your choice with them range until the spell ends. A creature that enters the spells area for the first time on a turn, we’re starts his turned there must make it charisma saving, throw on a failed save creature can’t speak a deliberate lie while in the radius, you know, whether the creature succeeds or fails on its saving throw and effected creature is aware of the spell and can thus avoid answering questions to which it would normally respond with lies. Such a creature can be evasive and its answer as long as it remains within the boundaries of the truth. This very much makes me think of like the, the classic fey that can’t actually speak lies but they deceive their asses off all the time.”

Ted: “Now we we’ve you know, shared on the, on the, on the channel different book series that we, you know, we really enjoy and you know, the one time it’s like, oh you know, you know, I can’t tell a lie. It’s like, but that hasn’t stopped you from deceiving people for for the hundreds of years.”

Dave: “Absolutely. So next up we are going to go to are overlooked spell. Now this category we found a little difficult because I feel like there isn’t a lot of overlooked spells when it comes to the cleric. The cleric they have a smaller spell list then the wizard and you know, I feel like we, we know a lot of what their spells did. So we went with a spell that we consider overlook just because we don’t see you get a lot of play at our table, although it really is a great spell.”

Ted: “So that’s going to be sanctuary first level spell bonus action to cast . So if you really want to be cheesy, you could technically, you know, attack with a cantrip and then casts sanctuary. Totally being Super Cheesy, but you ward a creature within range against attack until the spell ends. Any creature who targets awarded creature with an attack or harmful spell must first make a wisdom saving, throw on a failed saved the creature must choose a new target or lose the attacker spell the spell doesn’t protect the word creature from area effects such as the explosion of the fireball is awarded. Creature makes an attack. Casts a spell it effects an enemy or deals damage to another creature. This spell ends, your range is 30 feet. The duration is a minute. So it’s basically, you know, it’s a one, one combat use thing, but it has a lot of use because let’s face it, you know, how many times do you have an animal companion, an NPC that you’re trying to escort somewhere that is just there to, you know, try to stay out of the way. So great spell that you can use on them if they’re not going to be attacking anyway”


Dave: “or if you’re the cleric and you’re basically want to just buff your allies and heal them. Having sanctuary on you is going to be a great spell because it’s going to cause you to not be a target while you’re still eating your party and assisting in the combat even though you’re not directly damaging the enemy.”

Ted: “If you’re the type of caster like Dave says, that doesn’t want to actually be aggressive. It was a perfect spell to use.”

Dave: “Also, it’s always worth pointing out whether spells or concentration or not. This one is not. So that means you could be concentrating on bless and healing the party. Why you have the sanctuary in effect as well. Now lastly we come to our iconic spell right? So we have our five go tos plus the bonus and the bonus in this case is the iconic spell. And when you’re talking about cleric I can’t imagine anything is going to come to mind before actually healing the party.”

Ted: “Yeah, there there’s so many references out there to you Oh, where’s the cleric, cleric cleric, and all they are are, you know, the healing engine for the party. Now look within 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. You don’t have to play that kind of a cleric. But over the many years of playing in this game, everybody says, well that’s the role of the cleric. They got to heal the party. So the best way to heal the party is going to be cure wounds.”

Dave: “Yeah. Cure wounds. Uh, you know, in previous additions it’s slightly different names, but it’s an iconic spell. It’s been there from the beginning. It is essentially what the cleric was designed to do. Even though you can do other fun, cool things with the cleric, I think, you know, they’re best known for their healing. Even in video games, they’ve come up with roles that are based off of the cleric. And that role was called healer. So for our first level of cure wound spell, it’s touch. It’s one action. The cast, it’s instantaneous. Uh, you don’t have to worry about saving, throw it cause it just happens. A creature you touch for gains, a number of hit points equal to a d8 plus your spell casting modifier. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs at higher levels when you cast the spell. So using a spell slot that second level or higher, the healing increases by a d8 for each slot level above first.”

Ted: “So pretty nice. And let’s face it, the d8 is much better than the healing word of a d4.”

5E D&D Spells

Dave: “Yes. It is a yes that I would say it is twice as good, but yes, that is our go to tier one cleric spells. Uh, if you went to check out the cards, you can find our Go to tier one spells for wizard. And as we pointed out, we goofed a little bit in there, but it was still a lot of fun to shoot that video. Go check it out. There’s a card floating around here somewhere , go take a look at that. Hey, do you want us to do the, the higher level tiers? Do you want us to do go to tiers for other spell casters? We got a place where you can let us know and that is down in the comments below. While you’re at it, don’t forget to like share and subscribe.”

Ted: “On your way down to do all those things with Dave is asking, don’t forget to stop by the description and check out the link to D&D Beyond so that you can go check out all the awesome stuff over there on DnDbeyond.com.”

Dave: “So until next time.”

Both: “Stay Nerdy”

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david friant

My name is Dave Friant I've been gaming off and on for over 27 years. But here is the thing it's always been a part of my life I've kept secret and hidden away. I've always been ashamed of the stigma that gaming and my other nerdy and geeky pursuits summon forth. Recently I decided screw it! This is who I am the world be damned. From now on I'm gonna be a geek, nerd, or however folks want to judge me and just enjoy life. Currently one of my greatest joys is introducing my 13 yr old son to table top RPG's.

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