Hi there! I'm going to be talking about the Cleric redesign. It's not as much as the Fighter changes so this should be shorter.

The Original

First, the original Cleric. I love the general setup it has: all Talents represent Domains and it has Spells. Simple, but effective. What's not to love? Well, it was a little too good, mostly. Each Talent gave you a daily ability, and on top of that you got a bunch of very effective spells, and you could easily have similar offensive capability to Fighter/Paladin. It wasn't quite the classic 3.X CoDZilla or anything but it was definitely in that conversation.

Spells in general had some weird qualities in 13th Age compared to, for instance, weapons. For one, they do different things at each level, compared to weapons that scale with level. The leveled spell slot thing always struck me as a quadratic-caster kind of thing. So they're both changed now. A given ability (only Wizards get Spells, Clerics have Miracles) now scales with level rather than an arbitrary spell slot, and there aren't spell slots of arbitrary levels - you just have a set number of abilities of your level or lower.

The Remake

A secondary goal with these class redesigns that I had was to add some evenness to the daily/not-daily situation with regards to ability choice. The idea is to make it so there's not a wrong way to build a class and even out the ability to pace encounters. My conclusion was as follows: offload some shared "encounter" abilities to use a similar power pool (Focus, in the Cleric's case), have Talents/Domains determine at-will abilities, save daily/recharge abilities for Miracles.

Let's start with those "encounter" abilities. Original Cleric had Heal, which was a 2/encounter simple recovery ability. The clear move was to make that run off of Focus instead of simply be 2/encounter and add some more stuff to give options to split Focus. I also wanted to add something for Clerics who weren't going to focus on healing quite as much (they'll inevitably do a little, but it's a question of emphasis). So Clerics now have Channel Positive and Channel Negative. The former is basically Heal, but Channel Negative is a quick-action attack that gains/gives Disadvantage if you attack with this and also something else in the same turn. (It started as a pretty normal Standard action ability but I accidentally typoed it and decided I liked it better as a quick so I scaled it down.) This way a Cleric who wants to be a little more offensive but lean on standard-action buffs can still keep up pressure. The alternative was changing those buffs to be quick-action but this felt a little more distinctive.

For Domains/Talents, each one gives a passive or Focus ability and an At-Will. These range from offense (Sun/Zeal gets Javelin of Faith) to more utility (Healing/Structure has one that gives Temporary HP) to others (a few are basic attacks with an extra benefit.)

As for Miracles, they mostly work as-is. The Cleric gets less of them than most but they're largely straightforward and effective. Where possible, Advantage/Disadvantage is leveraged for buffs and debuffs instead of various bonuses.

And that's all! Rogue is up next. To give a little preview of that, I leaned harder into the Momentum idea for it.

Until next time!