Dwarven Cleric - Optimal Stats?

Dainank

I would like to run a Dwarf Cleric (I know it is not optimal with the Charisma debuff), for my first serious run of this game. I have played PoE and Tyranny and that is about the only experience I have in these types of games (I understand that they are vastly different from one another but still believe the experience will help me out in understanding BD: ED1). I am therefore curious what stats people run on Clerics. I was thinking high wisdom/charisma followed by priority on constitution/strength?

Many thanks in advance!

Grond0

If you're power gaming (as opposed to role playing), then charisma is not particularly important (and if you're playing with a party then one of the NPCs can be used to talk to people and buy things anyway). High wisdom gives you extra spells as a cleric, while strength, dexterity and constitution help with fighting abilities. High intelligence is not needed, but you will probably want at least 9 as less than that prevents you from using some magic items.

sarevok57

you want at least 15 STR so you can wear any kind of armor or use any shield, ideally you want to have at least 17 STR so when you hit level 6 your Draw Upon Holy Might will give you 19 STR so you can actually start hitting hard

depending on how anal you are on the gauntlets slot, if you dont mind suffering a tiny to hit/to damage penalty ( from not wearing the weapon gloves ) you can wear the gauntlets of DEX and literally start the game with garbage DEX if you truly want, although 8 would be as low as i would go, then you can pick those bad boys up and have your DEX cranked right up to 18, so this will give you some more breathing room to put points on other things

*one thing to note about this though is that who ever you are going to have in melee as well will need some decent DEX to make up for the fact that they will need be getting these gloves since your character is wearing them

so with that, if you dont want to give the gloves of DEX to your dwarf, you should try and at least start with 16 DEX so then again when you hit level 6, your draw upon holy might will give you that nice AC bonus

realistically since its only a cleric, and no fighter type along in there, you should have 18 CON ( 19 isnt really necessary accept for as follows: ) with 18 CON you will get the max saving throw bonus for your race ( aka save vs spells/death/wands which is very nice ) plus with draw upon holy might at level 6 you will start regenerating since your CON will hit 20 ( once you hit 20+ CON you start to regenerate slowly, and the higher your CON score, the faster you will regenerate, but even at 25 CON its not really going to be a life saver during battle ) although the regeneration is nice for before resting since you will heal up that many more HP upon rest

INT for bg1 for a cleric to be perfectly honest is completely useless, now if you import over into SoA, and you plan on going in melee i would highly suggest having at least 11 INT, or if you can squeeze it 16 ( although no necessary, this is just more for convenience ) now what you can do in BG 1 is start with 10 or 15 INT and give the tome of INT to your dwarf, to give it that little boost, but if you would rather give it to a party wizerd, then i would highly suggest starting bg1 with 11

wisdom, you would think this would be a no brainer, but to be honest i have done it both ways where a) i've played (fighter)/clerics with 12 WIS and (fighter)/clerics with 18, but since you dont have any fighter in ya, i would go with the 18 WIS, add that with 3 tomes of WIS and the ring of holiness and you are going to have quite the spell arsenal, which will be quite the boon since your melee combat won't be as great as that of a fighter/cleric this will really help bump that up a bit

charisma, really up to you, realistically in the long run, all a "high" charisma ( aka 18/19+ ) is going to do is make things at the store cheaper and occasionally you will get "better" rewards from handing in quests. The reality of the situation is; there is so much money in bg1/bg2 that even having 10 CHA won't be a burden, and the better items you would have received from quests weren't really that ground breaking anyway, but with that being said, however you are going to do your CHA, it never needs to be above 20 ( since store price discounts stop at that level ) and unless you are evil with 1 REP, 19 CHA is more than enough to get the "positive" reactions from all NPCs ( even if your REP is suffering a bit ) now with that being said, you don't want to go to low either or else no one will join your team ( except for imoen ) so if you are planning on being party leader with garbage CHA you will need to use another team mate to recruit companions, so i wouldn't start the game with anything lower than 7 CHA, rumor also has it that whoever the team leader is, their CHA affects morale failure, but a simple remove fear spell will fix that up in a jiffy ( plus you should always have at least one of those memorized since enemy casters love using that spell anyway )

so to sum up:

*These are the "minimum" "maximums" you would want if you really want to crank out as much horse power as possible, and if you have the patience having all or next to all 18s is nice or coarse, but not necessary


STRENGTH: 17
DEXTERITY: 8 (low end) or 16
CONSTITUTION: 18
INTELLIGENCE: 10/11 or 15/16
WISDOM: 18
CHARISMA: 7 (low end) or 16

*note:
if you have points to spare feel free to crank up other scores if you wish, whether that be STR just so you get that little extra edge on damage output or carrying capacity, or DEX just so you can get that AC bonus a little faster

*also note, BG2 spoiler:

there will come a time that you MUST permanently sacrifice one of your ability score points by one forever and you can't choose STR or CHA, so make sure to think ahead about that and make sure that ability score is 1 higher for that purpose, for me i usually make do it with INT so i would normally have 12 INT in bg1, so then when i hit bg2 it will go down to 11 and still be useful for that certain baddy that likes to drain INT upon attacks - hence the reason why having 16 INT is nice for melee characters, although potions of mind focusing and genius can help for those lower INT melee'ers

jsaving

In BG/BG2, wisdom has zero impact on spell DCs, charisma has zero impact on undead-turning, intelligence has zero impact on skill usage, and armor never limits your AC bonus from a high dexterity. So you'll want to wear full plate as soon as possible while maxing out dexterity, constitution, and strength. If you can take wisdom to 18 as well for bonus spells, you might as well do that, though it isn't critical. Any remaining points should go to intelligence because it is trivially easy in BG2 to boost your charisma to 18 whenever you want to.

If you're open to a slight character tweak, you might consider a multiclass fighter/cleric. You'd be a much stronger melee combatant and would still get your highest-level cleric spells relatively early in the game, unlike fighter/mages who wouldn't get them until the game is nearly over.

jmerry

The thing about high wisdom? There are more ways to boost a protagonist's wisdom (3 tomes in the first game, hell trial + machine + deck of many things in the second game) than any other stat. You can reach 24 Wisdom by the end of the game if you start at 18, and each point past 18 grants two bonus spells instead of one. That's really worth quite a lot, especially at higher levels when it's level 4, 5, and 6 slots you;re gaining.

The benefits for a high intelligence can all be gained by temporarily increasing your wisdom with potions. The benefits for a high wisdom can't; only permanently high wisdom will let you use those bonus spell slots.

A multiclass fighter/cleric does work very well. What do you give up for that? First, you lose a few things that scale indefinitely with caster level. Single-class clerics in the late game can reliably dispel effects cast by your foes, while mages can't. Also, turn undead scales all the way; a single-class cleric can blow up liches without raising a finger. Second, you lose spell slots - most notably, seventh-level slots, which you can't mitigate with high wisdom. A single-class cleric at the experience cap has 7 seventh-level slots, while a multiclass fighter/cleric at the experience cap has 3. Third, you get slower access to the high-level spells. Most notably, it'll take you 1350K experience instead of 675K for your first sixth-level slot, and 2700K experience instead of 1350K for your first seventh-level slot. That's most of SoA you'll be down a spell level compared to a single-class cleric.

sarevok57

jmerry wrote: »

The thing about high wisdom? There are more ways to boost a protagonist's wisdom (3 tomes in the first game, hell trial + machine + deck of many things in the second game) than any other stat. You can reach 24 Wisdom by the end of the game if you start at 18, and each point past 18 grants two bonus spells instead of one. That's really worth quite a lot, especially at higher levels when it's level 4, 5, and 6 slots you;re gaining.

The benefits for a high intelligence can all be gained by temporarily increasing your wisdom with potions. The benefits for a high wisdom can't; only permanently high wisdom will let you use those bonus spell slots.

A multiclass fighter/cleric does work very well. What do you give up for that? First, you lose a few things that scale indefinitely with caster level. Single-class clerics in the late game can reliably dispel effects cast by your foes, while mages can't. Also, turn undead scales all the way; a single-class cleric can blow up liches without raising a finger. Second, you lose spell slots - most notably, seventh-level slots, which you can't mitigate with high wisdom. A single-class cleric at the experience cap has 7 seventh-level slots, while a multiclass fighter/cleric at the experience cap has 3. Third, you get slower access to the high-level spells. Most notably, it'll take you 1350K experience instead of 675K for your first sixth-level slot, and 2700K experience instead of 1350K for your first seventh-level slot. That's most of SoA you'll be down a spell level compared to a single-class cleric.

plus if you want, you can wear the silver iounstone from the merchant in the tavern in amketran to give you a +1 to wisdom

jsaving

Caster level isn't too important for a cleric in BG/BG2 because you don't use it to overcome enemy spell resistance like you would in modern D&D/Pathfinder. However @jmerry is 100% correct that "dispel magic" is an exception so you would have to live with weaker dispels if you went the fighter/cleric route.

I'd argue however that the extra melee DPS of a fighter/cleric is worth the sacrifices. People rightfully point out the nice melee buffs on the cleric spell list, but singleclass clerics can't leverage them very well because their attacks per round are so low. By mid-BG1 a fighter/cleric would attack twice as often in melee as a singleclass cleric (2 per round versus 1 per round) and could also feasibly dual-wield flails or maces for an additional attack per round. Moreover the multiclass fighter/cleric would have key melee advantages in both early BG1 (18/00 strength) and late BG2 (whirlwind attack HLA) which give them vastly higher melee DPS compared to a singleclass cleric.

A possibly even better choice is ranger/cleric which gives you nearly everything a fighter/cleric would plus a somewhat broader class spell list and two bonus pips in two-weapon fighting. However this isn't possible with a dwarf.

jmerry

A note on the ranger/cleric spell list: unmodded, you only get the druid spells that you could cast as a ranger of your current level - which means it caps at level 3 spells once you reach ranger level 12. That amounts to Entangle (1), Charm Person/Mammal (2), Goodberry (2), Call Lightning (3), Hold Animal (3), and Summon Insects (3). It's not a very impressive list.
These gains also come at a price - slower leveling on the warrior side, as ranger levels require more experience than fighter levels. And, as noted, you can't be a dwarf.

I do agree that fighter/clerics and ranger/clerics are generally more powerful than pure clerics, and I'd go with one of them over a pure cleric unless that character's concept dictated otherwise. I've also gone so far as to use EEKeeper to build a dwarven defender/cleric - now there's a monster of a melee tank.

Chronicler

jmerry wrote: »

A note on the ranger/cleric spell list: unmodded, you only get the druid spells that you could cast as a ranger of your current level - which means it caps at level 3 spells once you reach ranger level 12. That amounts to Entangle (1), Charm Person/Mammal (2), Goodberry (2), Call Lightning (3), Hold Animal (3), and Summon Insects (3). It's not a very impressive list.
These gains also come at a price - slower leveling on the warrior side, as ranger levels require more experience than fighter levels. And, as noted, you can't be a dwarf.

Also the alignment restriction is a pretty big deal. You have to be good, and if you fall below a certain reputation you lose all your ranger abilities.

Very_BigSword

I more or less agree with @sarevok57

If pure cleric:
Str 15+
Dex 15+
Con 19 (to give best saving throws and natural regen opportunity)
Int 9 (or 10 if doing BG2 next)
Wis 15+
Cha 9

So a minimum roll of 83 to get this. If you have extra points add to Str (physical offense), Dex (physical defense) or Wis (extra spell slots) according to preferred style of play.

If Fighter/Cleric multi:
Str 18/XX
Dex 9 (use the Dex gauntlets) or 17 (give Dex gauntlets to NPC)
Con 19
Int 9 (or 10 if doing BG2 next)
Wis 9+
Cha 7+

A minimum roll of 81 but I strongly recommend taking the 17 Dex build so the target would be 88/89 range. A roll in the low 90s will allow for some more Wisdom which, if you play thoroughly, should allow you to gain some bonus spells eventually. For a F/C a roll in the 90s may take a few minutes to get.