What Is a Cleric in D&D 5e?
A cleric is a full spellcaster who does the job in armour. Spellcasting is online at 1st level, the hit die is a d8, Wisdom is the ability everything runs through, and your saving throw proficiencies are Wisdom and Charisma — two of the most useful in the game. Armour proficiency starts at medium armour and shields, which already puts you further forward than any other full caster, and several domains push that to heavy. The class heals, buffs, blasts and answers questions, and it does all four out of one list.
What really separates the cleric from every other caster is when the subclass lands. You choose a Divine Domain at 1st level — not 2nd like a wizard, not 3rd like a fighter or a paladin — and the domain hands you bonus spells and a working feature immediately. That means a 1st-level cleric is already a specific kind of cleric. A Life cleric and a Trickery cleric are not the same character wearing different holy symbols; they have different armour, different spells and different jobs from the very first session.
After that the class levels in clean steps. Channel Divinity and Turn Undead arrive at 2nd. Destroy Undead and 3rd-level spells at 5th, which is where the cleric stops being a support act. A second Channel Divinity use per rest and a second domain feature at 6th. At 8th you take either Divine Strike or Potent Spellcasting depending on your domain — the class’s own fork between hitting things and casting at them. Divine Intervention at 10th, a final domain feature and 9th-level spells at 17th, and at 20th the intervention needs no roll at all.
Which Cleric Domain Is Best in 5e?
There is no single best domain, but there is a clear answer per job, and this page carries eight. Life is the most efficient healer in the game and among the hardest clerics to kill: heavy armour plus Disciple of Life, which makes every heal you cast land harder, and Preserve Life on top. Light is the blaster — Warding Flare imposes disadvantage on the attack that was about to hurt you, Fireball comes in as a domain spell, and Radiance of the Dawn clears a room of undead. Those two cover the two most common reasons people play the class.
War and Tempest are the front-line domains. War grants heavy armour, martial weapons and War Priest, a free attack as a bonus action, with Guided Strike and Divine Strike behind it — a cleric who functions as a knight with a much better spell list. Tempest brings Destructive Wrath: maximum damage on lightning or thunder, no roll involved, which makes it the loudest opening move at the table. Nature sits beside them, bolting druid spells and heavy armour onto the cleric chassis for a faith made of weather and root rather than scripture.
The remaining three trade armour for angles. Trickery gives Blessing of the Trickster and Invoke Duplicity — a decoy of yourself that you cast spells through, and the cleric nobody is sure is a cleric. Knowledge grants expertise in two knowledge skills and Read Thoughts, and becomes an expert in whatever the session happens to need. Death is written for villains in the Dungeon Master’s Guide: Reaper and a necrotic touch, the priest of something that stopped answering a long time ago. Peace and Twilight, from later books, are widely rated the strongest of all — read their own source for specifics.
Do Clerics Know Every Spell on Their List in 5e?
Yes — and this is the most misunderstood thing about the class. A cleric has no acquisition step at all. The entire cleric list, a hundred and five spells in the SRD running from Guidance up to True Resurrection, is permanently available to you the moment you are high enough level to cast it. You never hunt for a spell, never spend gold copying one, never regret a pick made three levels ago. What you choose after each long rest is only which subset of that list is loaded for today.
Set that against the other two models. A wizard’s power is a physical object: a spell has to be written into the spellbook before it can ever be prepared, so a wizard can genuinely be missing a spell for an entire campaign. A sorcerer knows a small fixed set and is stuck with it until a level-up allows a swap. The cleric sits at the far end of that spectrum — the library is complete and permanent, and the only scarcity is the daily preparation count, which scales with your Wisdom modifier and your cleric level.
The practical effect is that a cleric can never be permanently wrong, only wrong for one day. Walking into a crypt, load the anti-undead kit; going to court tomorrow, swap in Zone of Truth and Tongues instead. Domain spells sit on top of all this — granted from 1st level and always ready, so they never eat into your prepared count. The cost is decision fatigue, and it is a real one: a cleric who prepares the same eight spells every single morning is playing a far worse class than the one written on the sheet.
What Spells Should a Cleric Prepare?
Cantrips are the one permanent choice, so take them seriously. Sacred Flame is your damage cantrip and the target gets no benefit from cover against it; Guidance adds a d4 to an ability check; Spare the Dying, Light and Thaumaturgy fill the rest. At 1st level Bless is the strongest thing in the tier — a d4 on the attack rolls and saves of up to three allies at once. Guiding Bolt does 4d6 radiant and gives the next attacker advantage, and Healing Word is a bonus action, which is why it beats Cure Wounds for standing someone back up.
Second level is where the action economy opens up. Spiritual Weapon is cast as a bonus action, lasts a minute and takes no concentration, so it runs underneath whatever you are already holding — it is the most-prepared spell in the tier. Aid raises three allies’ hit point maximums for eight hours, Lesser Restoration cures the condition that would otherwise end someone’s day, and Warding Bond gives a friend +1 AC, +1 to saves and resistance to all damage — you take their hits in exchange. Then 3rd level arrives at character level 5, and with it Spirit Guardians, the concentration spell the whole class is built around.
From there, prepare for recovery. Revivify undoes a death inside the last minute; Mass Healing Word picks up six people as a bonus action; Dispel Magic and Beacon of Hope round out the tier. At 4th, Death Ward pre-empts the killing blow, Banishment removes a problem outright and Freedom of Movement shuts down grapples and restraints. Fifth brings Greater Restoration, Mass Cure Wounds and Raise Dead — and the top of the list, Heal, Resurrection, Mass Heal and True Resurrection, is where the cleric becomes the class that undoes things.
What Stats Should a Cleric Prioritize?
Wisdom first, always, and it is not a close call. It sets the save DC every enemy rolls against, it is added to your healing, and it decides how many spells you get to prepare each morning — so a low-Wisdom cleric is running a smaller toolkit as well as a weaker one. Constitution goes second, because a cleric’s best spells are concentration spells and the cleric holding Spirit Guardians is standing in the middle of enemies while doing it. Hit points and concentration saves are the same purchase.
The third stat is the one your domain chooses for you. A War or Tempest cleric who swings a weapon in heavy armour runs Wisdom, then Strength, then Constitution and lets Divine Strike do the rest. A caster or healer in the back runs Wisdom, Constitution, Strength. A Trickery or Knowledge cleric has no heavy armour to lean on and runs Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution — Dexterity for armour class in medium armour and for the stealth that domain actually wants. Intelligence and Charisma come last for everybody.
Your saving throw proficiencies are Wisdom and Charisma, which is a genuinely strong pair — they cover most of the effects that remove a character from a fight. The hole is Constitution, and the feats that patch it are the ones clerics take first: War Caster gives advantage on concentration saves and lets you cast with a shield in hand, Resilient (Constitution) adds the save proficiency outright, and Fey Touched raises Wisdom by one while adding Misty Step. Between them they protect the one thing a cleric cannot afford to drop.
What Are the Best Feats for a Cleric?
Start with what a cleric never needs a feat for. The list is already yours, so no feat will hand you a spell you were missing — the good ones buy what the list cannot supply: concentration that survives being hit, a Constitution saving throw you were never given, and movement that appears nowhere on the cleric list. Every pick competes with a straight Wisdom increase, and Wisdom sets your save DC, your healing and how many spells you load each morning, so a feat must beat the stat the class runs on.
War Caster reads as though it were drafted for this class: all three clauses fire at once here and on almost nobody else. Advantage on concentration saves matters because Spirit Guardians radiates fifteen feet out from you — keeping it up means standing where the enemies are. Somatic components with a shield in hand matters because no other full caster is as likely to be holding one. And a spell as your opportunity attack only comes up if creatures are leaving your reach. On a back-line caster two of the three are dead weight; on a Life, War or Tempest cleric none are.
Resilient (Constitution) closes the same gap from the other side. Your saving throw proficiencies are Wisdom and Charisma — excellent against being charmed or frightened, and no help for concentration, which is a Constitution save. The class is proficient in the wrong save for its signature spells, and this feat fixes it. Fey Touched is the third pick, for a less obvious reason: it raises Wisdom by one and adds Misty Step — which is not on the cleric list, so it buys the one category a cleric cannot prepare. Behind those, Metamagic Adept Twins a Healing Word or Quickens a spell, and Lucky buys three rerolls a day.
What Is the Best Race for a Cleric?
Most classes choose a lineage around one attack stat. A cleric chooses around a question the domain already answered at 1st level: do you need Dexterity, or not? Because heavy armour is a domain grant rather than a class feature, a Life, War, Tempest or Nature cleric can leave Dexterity where the dice dropped it and pour everything into Wisdom and Constitution. A Light, Trickery, Knowledge or Death cleric is in medium armour, where Dexterity does real work on your armour class. No other class has a subclass that hands out armour, so no other class has this fork.
On the heavy side, Hill Dwarf is close to the best cleric lineage there is: +2 Constitution and +1 Wisdom lands on both of your top two stats, and the extra hit point per level compounds into the most immovable cleric you can build — exactly what you want from a character who plans to stand inside their own Spirit Guardians for a whole fight. Half-Orc takes the same wing louder: +2 Strength and +1 Constitution, Relentless Endurance and a critical-hit rider, for a War or Tempest cleric who swings as often as they cast.
On the light side, Wood Elf is the answer: +2 Dexterity and +1 Wisdom is precisely the medium-armour spread, and Mask of the Wild with a 35-foot speed suits a Trickery or Knowledge cleric who would rather not be found. Variant Human, where allowed, takes +1 Wisdom plus a feat at 1st level, so War Caster or Resilient (Constitution) is running before you have ever cast a 3rd-level spell. Aasimar is the thematic pick that is better than it looks — darkvision, healing hands and radiant damage — and its +2 Charisma is not wasted, because Charisma is one of the cleric’s two saving throw proficiencies.
What Are the Best Cleric Multiclass Builds?
A single cleric level is one of the most generous dips in the game, and the reason is the 1st-level subclass. One level carries away medium armour, shields, cantrips, spellcasting that is already switched on, and a full Divine Domain with its bonus spells and its opening feature — plus heavy armour if that domain is Life, War, Tempest or Nature. Classes that choose their subclass at 2nd or 3rd level cannot offer that on the way past, which is why casters who want to stop dying take one level here.
The combinations worth building follow from that. Cleric 1 into wizard is the classic: armour, healing and a domain bolted onto the broadest spell list in the game, which had no other route to armour at all. Cleric as the base with two levels of paladin runs it in reverse — just enough paladin for Divine Smite and a Fighting Style, so a full caster’s slots become smite fuel on a chassis already wearing plate. Cleric 1 into sorcerer adds Font of Magic and Metamagic under a domain, so a Healing Word can be Twinned or a spell Quickened for a second action.
The bill arrives in the middle levels and it is larger than the dip looks. Every level spent elsewhere pushes back the 8th-level fork between Divine Strike and Potent Spellcasting, the second Channel Divinity use at 6th, and Divine Intervention at 10th — and your domain’s later features at 6th and 17th are the payoff for a choice you committed to before session one. There is a quieter cost too: your preparation count scales with cleric level, so a split cleric loads fewer spells each morning even though the whole list is still nominally yours. Dip two or three levels and come home; an even split leaves the domain half-built.
How Does Channel Divinity Work for a Cleric?
Channel Divinity arrives at 2nd level and it is a rest resource rather than a spell slot: one use at first, two from 6th level, refreshed on a short rest. Every cleric gets the same baseline option, Turn Undead, which forces nearby undead to flee for a minute or until they take damage. At 5th level Destroy Undead upgrades it — the weakest undead in range are simply annihilated instead of driven off, which is why a cleric changes the shape of an undead campaign more than any other class in the party.
The second option comes from your domain, and this is where the level-1 subclass choice reaches into your rest economy. Life clerics get Preserve Life, a burst of healing spread across the party. Light gets Radiance of the Dawn, War gets Guided Strike, Trickery gets Invoke Duplicity and Tempest gets Destructive Wrath. One pool, two buttons — so the practical question every short rest is whether you are more likely to need the domain trick or the undead answer before the next rest arrives.
Divine Intervention sits above all of it from 10th level: you call on your deity for direct aid, and if the call is heard, the god acts. It is the rare feature that is a roleplay prompt and a mechanic in the same breath, because you have to say out loud what you are asking your god for. At 20th level it stops being a request — the capstone makes the intervention automatic, no roll required. Very few classes end with a feature that is literally divine attention, and no other class has one that costs no spell slot at all.
Can a Cleric Wear Heavy Armour in 5e?
Only if the domain says so. The base class gives you medium armour and shields, which is already unusual for a full caster, but heavy armour is not a cleric feature — it is a domain feature. On this page, Life, War, Tempest and Nature all grant it, and Light, Trickery, Knowledge and Death do not. That single line in your subclass is why two clerics of the same level can have wildly different armour classes and completely different positions in the marching order.
It changes the build downstream. A heavy-armour cleric can ignore Dexterity entirely, put the points into Strength, and stand in the front rank with Spirit Guardians ticking on everything that comes close. A medium-armour cleric wants Dexterity for armour class instead, plays at range behind the line, and leans harder on Warding Flare or Invoke Duplicity to survive contact. Deciding this at level 1 rather than level 3 is the reason clerics feel committed early in a way most casters do not.
Kit follows the same split. Early on it is a mace and shield with scale mail — or chain mail if your domain grants it — plus a holy symbol to focus your spells through. In the middle tiers, a +1 weapon or shield, half or full plate, and a Cloak of Protection, with an Amulet of Health if your Constitution is lagging. Late on, a Mace of Disruption, +2 plate, a Staff of Healing and a Ring of Spell Storing. And whatever your armour, War Caster is what lets you keep the shield strapped on while still casting spells with somatic components.
Is a Cleric Just a Healer in 5e?
No, and the belief that they are is the most common way to play the class badly. Healing is the highest single number on a cleric’s role profile, but it is not the whole shape: utility, tanking, damage and control all sit at real values behind it. The clearest evidence is on the level table itself — at 8th level every cleric takes Divine Strike or Potent Spellcasting, both of which are damage upgrades. A class that expects to spend its turns healing does not hand out a damage feature to everyone.
The damage is genuinely there. Spirit Guardians punishes every enemy that enters or starts its turn near you and halves their speed while it does; Spiritual Weapon adds an attack every round from your bonus action without touching concentration; Guiding Bolt, Inflict Wounds and Flame Strike cover burst, and the upper list runs through Blade Barrier, Harm and Fire Storm. Meanwhile Bane, Command, Hold Person, Silence and Banishment make the cleric a serious control caster, and Knowledge or Trickery clerics quietly do the rogue’s job as well.
The healing you do keep should be triage, not a damage race. Healing Word as a bonus action returns a downed ally to their feet while you still cast a real spell with your action — that is almost always worth more than a large heal on someone still standing. Better still is prevention: Bless before the fight, Death Ward on whoever is going to be targeted, Warding Bond on the party’s glass cannon, Beacon of Hope to maximise every heal that follows. A cleric who plays that way is not a healbot; the healbot is what happens when you only prepare the healing spells.
Can a Cleric Be Evil in D&D 5e?
Yes, and the rules make room for it explicitly. The Death Domain in the Dungeon Master’s Guide exists for exactly this, with Reaper and a necrotic touch, and any other domain works for a villain if the god behind it does. Alignment is not what gates the class — the deity is. A tyrant’s war priest, a plague cult’s healer and a temple thief who robs rich shrines to fund a poor one are all mechanically ordinary clerics; what changed is who is answering.
This is the class’s real roleplay engine, and it is structurally different from a paladin’s. A paladin swears an oath and is measured against a promise they made themselves. A cleric receives power from someone else — a character with opinions, standards and the option of silence. Divine Intervention makes that explicit at 10th level, because you have to state what you are asking for and then find out whether it was granted. No other class asks a player to voice their power source out loud and wait.
The best evil cleric is not a cynic; it is a believer. The most unsettling version of the archetype is the one who still takes confession, still tends the sick, and is entirely sincere about serving something that stopped being a god centuries ago. And because the domain lands at 1st level, none of this waits for tier two — the faith, the armour and the first miracles are all on the character sheet before session one, which is precisely why the cleric is easier to roleplay from the start than most casters.