Dungeons & Dragons: How To Build A Zeal Domain Cleric

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• What Are The Best Ability Scores for A Zeal Domain Cleric?

• What Are The Best Species For A Zeal Domain Cleric?

• What Are The Best Spells For A Zeal Domain Cleric?

The Zeal Domain can be challenging to grasp in Dungeons & Dragons. Its relatively self-explanatory what a Cleric of Tempests, Life or Nature represents and the types of deities that would bestow those powers. It's hard to conceive of a Cleric wielding divinely bestowed powers who doesn't exhibit some form of zeal.

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The best explanations for what a Cleric of Zeal embodies can be found through the lore of their patron deity, Hazoret. Representing the final trial in the Planeshift Amonket supplement the Goddess of Zealotry is both a patron and opponent. Zeal Clerics are meant to embody and evoke fervid emotions.

What Are The Best Ability Scores for A Zeal Domain Cleric?

The Zeal Domain works well as a dedicated caster, focusing on dealing damage with their spells. A player familiar with the Light and Tempest domains will find the Zeal cleric treads similar ground to each in the features it offers, notably the ability to use a Channel Divinity to deal maximum damage on a spell.

The main priorities for building a Zeal cleric are the ability to cast strong spells and the survival skills that allow them to dedicate those spells towards incinerating opponents instead of healing their own wounds.

Ability Score

Priority

Benefits

Wisdom

First

A high wisdom score makes your spells harder to resist. The Zeal domain gains strong damaging spells such as fireball and flamestrike, which are harder to evade the greater the casters' wisdom.

Constitution

Second

Constitution helps you to maintain concentration on your spells and grants you more hitpoints. A high constitution paired with the Zeal Cleric's heavy armour and the War Caster feat mean that you'll be near impossible to stop from casting spells.

Strength

Third

The Zeal cleric gains some features that improve their weapon fighting, but the main draw of strength is that it allows you to wear heavy armour without a penalty to speed.

Dexterity

Fourth

The most common types of saving throws often target dexterity. Your heavy armour will protect you from weapon attacks, but you'll need dexterity when enemies start to use lightning bolts and fireballs of their own. If you are playing a flying species you will want this to be much higher (second priority) as you will not be able to wear heavy armour.

Charisma

Shared Last

Zeal clerics embody strong emotions, but that doesn't translate into them needing a high charisma or strong emotional intelligence. This ability score doesn't help any of your class features.

Intelligence

Shared Last

It's possible to have a really strong zeal for your religious doctrine but unless your GM gives you permission to cast spells with your intelligence instead of your wisdom, it'll be a challenge to make use of intelligence on this class.

What Are The Best Species For A Zeal Domain Cleric?

A character's ancestry grants not only mechanical bonuses but roleplaying hooks that can be used to expand upon their story. Different people will prioritise the two in varying ratios but here are some options appealing to both sensibilities:

Species

Main Mechanical Bonus

Roleplaying Potential

Human

Additional feat at first level.

Humans can be found in almost any setting, making them easy to tie into the local narratives and factions. A feat at first level can be used to represent an influence from their backstory, potentially borrowing features from another class or gaining abilities other clerics wouldn't.

Aasimar

Selection of angelic themed features including healing, flight and the ability to cover yourself in divine fire.

Aasimar characters have a strong expectation foisted on them as a result of their celestial heritage. In roleplay this might be expressed as a strong desire either to live up to those expectations or an aim of escaping those preconceptions.

Tiefling

Learns devil themed spells not available to most clerics.

Resistance to fire, making it less dangerous to cast fireball in close quarters.

Tiefling characters face discrimination in many of the common D&D settings. A tiefling cleric might be overtly zealous as a way of confronting their infernal heritage or combating the social issues they face because of it.

Githzerai

Resistance to psychic damage and advantage on saving throws against charm and fear.

Both the Githzerai and the Githyanki are most often shown through their interactions with psionics. A Gith cleric can be unusual and head turning while allowing for complex stories about how they found their faith.

What Are The Best Spells For A Zeal Domain Cleric?

The Zeal Domain has a powerful list of always-prepared spells that aren't available to normal clerics. The damaging spells all deal either fire of thunder damage, the two types you can empower with your Channel Divinity.

Other spells from the cleric list will struggle to compete for raw damage so can be better used to fulfill other needs you may encounter.

Spell

Effect

Best Use

Create Or Destroy Water

Creates a large quantity of water

A creative use of this spell can circumvent many puzzles. Additionally, water conducts sound much better than air giving you potential new ways to use your thunder based spells.

It can be a bad idea for any class to gain access to fire spells without learning some way of putting out fires. Most other casters can do so with a cantrip, ray of frost, but the Zeal cleric is not as fortunate.

Prayer of Healing

Heals numerous creatures after a 10-minute casting delay.

The Zeal Cleric's toolkit is focused largely on dealing damage. This means that you'll have fewer resources available to devote towards healing, allowing efficient but slow healing spells such as prayer of healing to shine.

Silence

Deafens an area, preventing all sound from entering or leaving.

Silencing an enemy spellcaster can lock them out of the majority of their abilities. As a ritual spell you can also use this to prepare ambushes, preventing people from calling help or teleporting away.

Any creatures inside a silence spell are immune to thunder damage. As your spells deal thunder damage you can position allies inside this area to protect them from collateral damage, but any enemies who manage to force their way in will also be protected (until you swap to fire spells).

Borrowed Knowledge

Gain proficiency in a skill for one hour

Small parties especially can have gaps in how well they can respond to unexpected situations. Borrowed knowledge lets your cleric fill in for an expert on a subject when nobody is proficient enough to act.

Continual Flame

Covers an object in harmless but permanent fire

Using a hair product enchanted to permanently appear on fire makes for an incredibly intimidating Cleric of Zeal, as well as meaning you'll never be caught in the dark.

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