Isn't the Vestments of Eyes the one that makes it to where you can't be caught flat footed or something? Its been a long time since I looked through the magic items. So Famine was the cleric of Incabulous, which domains did he take? Preparing spells must have been complicated for the Cleric seeing as everyone but on person in the party was undead. That one mortal needed positive energy to heal, Bah!

The vestment of eyes gives +2 to initiative and spot checks, and can't be flanked, but you can't avert or close your eyes to a gaze attack. *evil chuckle* Famine has the domains of Hunger and Thirst, so he can turn someone into a pillar of salt, or infect them with ghoul fever, among other things. Preparing spells isn't too complicated, Death is the primary healer for the undead members, and Famine's role in the party is buffer/blaster. Since Pestilence is a druid he can handle his own healing, plus since he's a craven coward he normally keeps his distance from close combat, sneaking around to tag enemies from the shadows with his arsenal of slow death.

Okay that makes sense. Blaster cleric is not something I've seen often from NPCs or PCs so that is rather cool. Also to know their battle tactics and have it planned out is grand as well. So I'm guessing he has tons of nice pretty gaze attacks since you bother with the vestment. A humanoid with a gaze attack or spell isn't something you see every day.

Well, yes he does have gaze attack spells, and one gaze attack from his crown. But really the vestment of eyes has the downside of not being able to avert your eyes or close them, which means a normal pc can't protect themselves from gaze attacks. Kind of a moot point with Famine though since most gaze attacks require a fort save and he's undead so no danger there. You really haven't seen any blaster clerics? Funny that, they are lots of fun since they have the capacity to overcome any resistances the target has.

Most people I've seen make a buffer and healer type cleric. The closest to that I've played myself is an undead slayer character. Oh I misunderstood that it means he can't avert his eyes. That vestment's upsides doesn't really seem to balance out its downsides in my opinion.

Ack, I made a mistake. This is what the vestments do. 120 ft darkvision, see invisibile and see ethereal with the same range. Retains Dex bonus to AC when flat-footed and can not be flanked. Downside, can not avoid gaze attacks and can be temporarily blinded by light spells or continual flame spells directed at robes or daylight spells in area.

It's true that most players create clerics in order to fulfill the primary healer spot in the party, but it takes no special measures to do that. That means a cleric can spend all their feats and equipment slots filling another role, such as summoner, battlefield controller or blaster. Hell, with divine metamagic persist they can do all their buffing at the beginning of the day and spend all their other spell choices on combat or utility spells.

Okay, THAT sounds useful and balances out. I can see why he would wear those vestments now in place of something else.

I've normally played Clerics as using their spells for healing, buffing, and protection. Their armor and weapons would be their main form of attack. I've never taken metamagic feats as a cleric so that would be interesting to see for sure. Summoner and Battlefield Controller seem like a more natural fit for clerics to me then nuker/blaster. However a buff that persists for the whole day is amazingly useful and removes some of the dangers of a fight too.

All the different possibilities in D&D are the things I really really enjoy about it.

Since I've spent a lot of time on the optimization forums, I've gotten used to seeing divine metamagic persist on all cleric builds, with that and spontaneous casting of healing spells, the rest of the build can be targeted to another combat role. Course if you want a really sick broken summoner specialist then check out Druid/Planar Shepherd builds, have an army of multi-element elementals with maxed and boosted stats surrounding the party 24-7 within a planar bubble that boosts spellcasting. It's one of those builds that gives DMs nightmares. Yeah, 3.5 was the best for customizing a character, another reason I hate the 4e set up, it's all skill trees like your playing Diablo.

Yeah I had 4e for that. And I really do enjoy Diablo as I'm sure you do, but its not what I go to D&D for. The Optimization forums and builds are a headache for any DM. Because they exploit rules and powers the often take a lot of tension out of a scene. What books is the divine metamagic stuff from?

I've actually been thinking of putting together a summoner build. I came up with the idea for a blind summoner during a pathfinder game and have been wanting to put it into 3.5 rules. I'd just have to find a way to make it not to much of a pain. Because being blind would mean I'm always flat footed. Or at least all the enemies are considered invisible to me at all times.

Hmm, the divine metamagic feat is found in Complete Divine, it lets you spend turning uses to reduce the level increase on metamagic affected spells. So if you wanted to apply Consecrate Metamagic to a spell to make it half divine damage, you could spend one of your daily uses of turn undead instead of using a higher level spell slot. Most builds use this to pay for the increases from Metamagic: Persist so they only have to spend the original spell slot which frees up higher level spell slots for other spells.

Blindness makes all enemies count as invisible, which makes you flat-footed unless you take a feat or magic item to grant you an extra sensory abilitiy like tremorsense or blindsight. At one time I thought of building a blind swordsman who wears the Blindhelm from the magic item compendium.

Wow thats actually an amazing feat. After a while turning undead gets hard because you star getting such high HD monsters. Do you have to take normal metamagic feats in addition to the divine metamagic feat? I will probably start taking that on clerics now.

Would a blind summoner be able to target spells or direct their summons? Cause its magic after all, might they just be able to sense targets for the energies and then release them? Or would I need a spell like detect life or something?

It requires one other metamagic feat before you take it and you have to choose which metamagic feat you already have to apply it to. So if you wanted to use divine metamagic on persist and consecrate, you would not only have to have both the metamagic persist feat and metamagic consecrate, you would also have to spend 2 feats on divine metamagic to apply it to both.

You would have to use the rules for targeting invisible enemies in order to tag them with attack spells, but you only need to be able to talk in order to direct summons. Detect life just makes a visible glow around living things I believe so that wouldn't help you, but there are spells on the druid list to give you extra senses.

Okay I see how it works now. It can be really good when applied well. But otherwise it will feel like your dumping money into a bin basically. So yeah, probably persist and maybe enlarge at most is what I'd do. However I love how that works as well. Powerful but not to much. More along the lines of just adding more options to your character's abilities.

Wouldn't I be able to see the glow though. Like I couldn't identify people by it, but I'd be able to tell that there is a haze there and there so there must be alive things there. So wouldn't I be able to use that haze to target? Or does it require me to have vision for the spell period? I don't remember it saying it needed that.