This article was originally posted as a post on Patreon before the site upgrade, so at the time I didn’t have a regular blog to put this on. I’m re-posting this to make it more accessible to a broader audience of people.
Introduction
I’ve gotten some responses in various channels challenging my response to the Peace Domain introduced in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. I wanted to share my thoughts in a longer form than I can justify squeezing into my Cleric Subclasses Breakdown, so here we are.
To paraphrase several similar responses which I received:
“It seems a bit overboard to ban Order of Peace when Emboldening Bond is only an extra once per turn d4 that has limited uses per day. Compare that to all the other powerful stuff in the game and it is insignificant.”
The 1d4 is a problem with the subclass, but it’s not the only problem. I agree that one d4 on one roll per turn may not be enough to justify banning a subclass. But if you check my subclass assessment, fixing the d4 thing is one of several changes that I suggest to address a series of abuse cases.
Peace Domain’s d4 Issue
The d4 stacks with other similar buffs like Bless, which is a great example because the Cleric can cast it without multiclassing or help. In fact, Bless is among the best 1st-level buffs, and I frequently recommend it across the full level spectrum. Adding a d4 to one roll once per turn from levels 1 to 4 is a massive mathematical advantage because in that window your attack bonus is typically +5 or +6. Adding +2.5 on average is a 50% increase to your attack bonus at level 1.
The fundamental math of the game expects you to have that +5 bonus to hit the expected 65% chance of success on attacks/checks (8+ on a d20). There’s some nuance to that number, of course. I go into the fundamental math stuff in our article on the fundamental math of dnd.
So let’s say that hitting on 8 or higher is the expectation. Then we add a d4, and if we round the bonus down to 2 we’re hitting on a 6 or higher. If we add a second d4, the average total bonus is +5, so we’re hitting on 3 or higher. That’s a 90% chance of hitting with an attack.
You might reasonably say “oh, but that’s only level 1 and that’s a tiny window where that applies.” But 5e’s math progresses linearly, and the Attack Bonus vs. AC progression keeps the expected success rate at 65% (8+ on a d20). So those 2d4 give you a 90% hit chance for your entire career. Throw that behind high-damage single attacks like Sneak Attack or spells like Chromatic Orb and combat gets pretty simple.
Sure, Emboldening Bond only applies once per turn. But the vast majority of classes never make more than two attacks per turn, so even at once per turn that’s still a huge bonus. Emboldening Bold also lasts 10 minutes and doesn’t require Concentration like Bless does and doesn’t require actions from the players in combat like Bardic Inspiration or other effects which add dice to checks.
Defensively, the “once per turn” limitation is essentially a non-factor. Much like Sneak Attack, you can use it once for each creatures turn. If you’re affected by Emboldening Bond and you’re targeted by 10 breath weapons from separate creatures on those creatures’ turns, you get to apply the d4 on every one of those saves provided you don’t use it for something else on that creature’s turn. That means that in the vast majority of cases, you get the d4 on every save that you’re going to attempt.
Other creatures can’t do anything to make Emboldening Bond go away except wait for the duration to expire. You set it up, you walk through a fight or two, you take a short rest, and ideally you set it up again right before you go into another fight.
Too Much, Too Often, and for Too Long
The number of uses equals your Proficiency Bonus, so players will have 2 to 6 uses per day depending on their level. With a 10-minute duration that’s enough to cover most fights in a day, if not all of them, so the DM needs to expect that players will go into every fight with Emboldening Bond running and that becomes a defining consideration for every encounter for the whole campaign.
The DM can mitigate this to some degree by adding stuff between fights which consumes a lot of in-game time, but if the players have big blocks of time between encounters they’re going to start trying to abuse Short Rests and it becomes an arms race between the players and the DM to see who is willing to work the system harder.
That’s not a situation you want your game to be in. No one enjoys that.
What if Position Just Didn’t Matter?
After breaking the math of attacks, Peace Domain also breaks tactical positioning thanks to Protective Bond. Teleportation both in and out of combat becomes essentially free, with some restrictions. Grapples, area control effects, ongoing AOE damage, traps, and Opportunity Attacks all stop being a threat to the party because you can rescue an ally by punching yourself and having them spend a Reaction to intercept the attack.
That means that enemies lose most tactical options in combat beyond status conditions and hit point attrition. Players will nearly always win a game of hit point attrition, so get ready to have your DM hit your party with nothing but save-or-suck effects.
But even then, Emboldening Bond adds a d4 to saving throws, too. Again: it’s “once per turn” like sneak attack is, not “once on each of their turns”. Bless also adds a d4, so we’re right back to adding +5 to stuff. You can’t use area damage effects reliably because with those big saving throw bonuses everyone is going to pass saving throws way more than they should.
The problem gets worse as you add additional defenses like Absorb Elements and the Paladin’s Aura of Protection. Things which previously had a reasonable opportunity cost (spell slots, a bunch of levels, a feat, etc.) now pile on top of an already problematic defense so your players are mathematically unassailable.
Round Robin Damage Absorption
The teleportation from Protective Bond also allows them to distribute damage throughout the party based on who can safely endure the damage. If there are fewer hits directed at the party in a single round than there are party members, they can evenly distribute the damage throughout the party, then rapidly heal using bulk healing options like Mass Cure Wounds.
So you as the DM need to do massive amounts of single-target damage from multiple sources faster than the party can heal using more sources than they have Reactions within the set of creatures affected by Emboldening Bond.
Again: the game becomes an arms race.
You Can’t Even Kill Them
One other consideration: Emboldening Bond and Bless both apply to death saves (which are still saving throws, and therefore the bonus dice still apply), so even at first level players are looking at a near certainty that they won’t die due to failing death saves.
Conclusion
To summarize: right from level 1, a Cleric of Peace can use Emboldening Bond in conjunction with Bless to trivialize both attacks and saving throws, limiting the DM’s options to threaten the party to things that rely on attack rolls. As the Cleric gains levels, their subclass features further trivialize combat by trivializing any tactical option except direct hit point damage. That option is then trivialized by the ability to use a “round robin” method of distributing damage throughout the party, thereby preventing the DM from focusing damage on a single character and making it nearly impossible to drop a single character unless the DM drops the entire party at once.
All of these abilities are online by level 6.
Ban Peace Domain.
This does seem incredibly overpowered. Do you think you might ever make a rework to balance the subclass?
I suggest a whole bunch of potential fixes in our cleric subclass breakdown.
You forgot to point out that Emboldening Bond scales purely off PB, meaning that Cleric 1/Anything X with the minimum wisdom to multiclass is just as good at it as your pure clerics. It’s a stupid powerful 1 level dip even on a non wisdom based character. I personally think Emboldening Bond (with some of your suggested changes) should’ve been their Channel Divinity and they should’ve gotten something way weaker at level 1, maybe something like the Friends cantrip for free or ranged Guidance or something. That doesn’t mean it’s not completely busted (it still is) but at least it wouldn’t lend itself so readily to multiclass cheese.
Meh, I have built far more op and broken characters with battle artificer and forge cleric and anything fighter storm cleric.
also fun is the armor smith artificer, giant fighter, storm cleric. The shifter bear druid is great for just breaking things at lvl 1 and 2 aswell. then there is this cheese, Conjuration Wizard 2. It has no monetary restriction, only a size and weight one alongside an inability to be magical. So with every book that came out more tools to summon became available. There are some incredibly strong poisons that you can call forth Vials of with this being the case. A few lycanthrope bloods are also listed as non-magical but their consumption grants you lycanthropy which is a stat increase, and you can stack multiple kinds. Dragons blood is also a mundane object, in fact a trinket you can even start with, and there are mentions of becoming a half-dragon in Fizban’s just through consuming or bathing in enough Dragon Blood.
So with that in mind, you can easily become a half-dragon werewolf/bear/bird/rat/boar. Slap on 3 levels of Thief Rogue to be able to use any item you conjure as a bonus action to do it all in the same turn, and then progress wizard the rest of the way to have access to 9th level casting with Simulacrums and all the other high level wizard shenanigans, and you get a pretty crazy build, especially if you aim for lichdom on top of all of that, you also gain access to Keen Hearing/Smell for Advantage on Perception using smell or hearing, +1 AC, Flyby so enemies cannot make opportunity attacks on you, 50ft Flight speed, Plunging Attack (An Aerial Charge attack that has a DC 10 DEX save or be blinded for a minute), Relentless (An attack needs to deal 14 or more damage when it would reduce you to 0 HP otherwise you are only reduced to 1 HP.), Charge (If you move at least 15 feet before making a Tusk attack, deal a bonus 2d6 damage with that attack and the target makes a DC 13 Strength Save or goes prone.), Pounce (If you moved at least 15 feet and hit an enemy with a claw attack in the same turn, the enemy makes a DC 14 Strength Save or goes prone. If they’re Prone, you get to make a BA Claw attack.). You also get Darkvision to 60 feet.
Then there is the sonic the hedgehog gota go fast builds that break combat with movement, it is possible to get upto 12,000 feet of movement in a single action. that is 2,400 squares on the board, and includes vertical movement and flying and swimming.
Peace domain is nothing and only a bad DM would ban it.
That is exactly the point. Of course peace domain is no where near game breaking compared to many of the things you can and do in this game. But I would like to give you a friendly reminder that not everyone plays like you. In a game where people are new players, or roleplayers, or just not minmaxers to that level, a game where people are just picking classes and subclasses because they think it sounds cool and fits their character, then, and perhaps only then, is peace domain broken as the article writer states. Running a campaign for people who do not put much thought into minmaxing does not make you a bad DM, just as vice versa.
lmao, yes just starting chugging blood of various magical creatures to purposefully contract multiple curses, nothing to see here.
In the first campaign I ever really played, my character was kind of a “try it and see” guy and I definitely drank some archfey blood off the ground. It went poorly, of course, but my point is that it’s not crazy to think that someone would hear about drinking werewolf blood and then do it.
Most of the points you make here are quite valid, but I want to point of a very specific flaw with one very specific argument. To quote from your own article:
YOU CAN’T EVEN KILL THEM
One other consideration: Emboldening Bond and Bless both apply to death saves (which are still saving throws, and therefore the bonus dice still apply), so even at first level players are looking at a near certainty that they won’t die due to failing death saves.
This is actually a false argument out of the gate. You open this section of your article on an outright lie, which is quite sad since you consider the logical and mathematical elements of how the class alters the game. The core of your argument is that Emboldening Bond + Bless applies to Death Saving Throws, which is true, but you use this to reinforce the inability to die. When you are at 0 HP and you take damage from any source, you automatically fail 1 saving throw. If that source of damage is a critical hit (from a melee attack vs an Incapacitated opponent), it counts as 2 Death Saving Throws. This is all explained right in the PHB.
Once you achieve 3 successful saving throws, you are stable and don’t have to keep making death saves, but that doesn’t stop you from dying from still taking damage at 0 HP.
From the outset, Death Saves are inherently tipped in favor of success. On a roll of 10 or higher, you succeed. On a roll of 9 or lower, you fail. On a Nat 20, you automatically regain consciousness and return to 1HP. On a Nat 1, you fail 2 saves instead. From the outset, your chance of success is 55%. Add in Emboldening Bold and Bless and the odds of success increase to 75% assuming the nominal +2 bonus from each individual effect. That’s neat and all but that’s only a 75% chance of not be dead in 3-6 rounds and at no point considers that damage of any kind is an automatic failure.
I’ll just use Kobolds and Goblins as easy picks because these low CR enemies are notorious for trapping and relying on ambush tactics to face foes they know are much stronger than they are. They utilize their environments to beat their enemies, using spikes and narrow spaces to soften up enemies while slinging rocks and the like at them. If you get reduced to 0 HP by these guys, even if you pass 3 saves, you’re still likely to just get clobbered by 3 rocks and be dead with no involvement on your part, or 1/2 depending on whether or not enemies enter melee.
The tl;dr is that you shouldn’t just falsely assume that Peace Cleric means you can’t kill PCs. Quite the opposite. Most DMs simply don’t because they feel its mean. That’s not an issue of the class, though.
The DM trying their best to kill downed players in order to have any way to provide challenge because the players chose a busted class that can’t easily be harmed doesn’t seem very fun for anyone…
What kind of D&D is your table playing when the DM is pelting low level characters with rocks to murder them? The post isn’t lying, it just sounds like you have a hilariously antagonistic table to play at.
Looking at the now dead-and-buried Love Domain, it looks like the Peace Domain is just love domain, reflavored and repackaged from UA to official content without a lot of major tweaks. Kind of a shame since I think the theme of love fits the flavor better anyway, and the class is still a hot mess. But that’s my guess for why it’s so janky in both mechanics and theme.
Just give your monsters +2 AC and increase save DCs by +2.
I am not convinced. Twilight domain’s channel divinity seems much stronger.
I have not played with either yet and will keep an open mind.
I definitely would not have ID’d this as a potentially overpowered thing unless you mentioned here, so thanks for writing it out!