Building a tank cleric?

[Troll Slayer]

How do you recommand creating and building a cleric that will serve as a tank/healer. What skills, feats, weapons to use? How would you distripute your character points? Would you mult to a fighter? What church would you belong to?

[koz-ivan]

i'd focus on wis, con, & cha. (heavy armour negates dex, int not really needed, str can be boosted w/ bulls strength) make sure you can carry 70 pounds (10 str) (cleric gear is kinda heavy)

weapon - hammer, (it's pretty typical, there are some nice "returning" hammers in game.) you may want to pick up a bow if you are an elf.

feats - anything that helps you cast spells w/ being interupted, improved initaive, disipline, combat casting, perhaps reflexes.

make sure you have a good aligned god, (spontaneous casting of healing spells) illamter or tempus (if tempus then focus on axes)

[1-800-DOCTORB]

I'd avoid charisma to be honest cause all it affects with Clerics is the ability to turn undead and undead are few and far between in IWD2, unless of course you plan on having your Cleric be your leader, then take charisma. But generally you'd be better off putting those extra character points into strength.

[Groth]

Cleric of the Mask. Cleric x/Barb 4

Throw in 4 levels of barbarian after he reaches about level 5 or 6 cleric or so, sneak in some forester skills perhaps (I did).

You got yourself a raging, mirror imaged machine ready to rock.

That one mirror image a day he gets comes in real handy (goes good with rage too).

8 char. 6 int. Lots of wis, decent dex .. good str and con. Heck with turning undead. Made mine plain ol human, still gets a few skill points each level.

I created a new party awhile ago. Last time I went with a cleric of the mask/fighter. Cleric of the mask/Barbarian I'm finding to be much better.

When I was leveling his barbarian class up, I gave him an extra feat on great swords. Sure glad I did.

Anyway, just my opinion. Probably a bias opinion though because I'm over here watching my cleric/bard kill tons and tons of monsters.

[1-800-DOCTORB]

Originally posted by Groth
Throw in 4 levels of barbarian after he reaches about level 5 or 6 cleric or so, sneak in some forester skills perhaps (I did).

If you mean Wilderness Lore, thats a bit of a waste in this game. If it's a Cleric, you want as much concentration as you can get. When selecting skills, as long as there's a minimum of 1 skill point left, you can skip skills and save it for next level-up. Obviously a Barbarian would require 2 skill points just to go up 1 in concentration, so you can leave the 1 skill point and it'll carry over to the next level-up in which case you'll have 2 (1+1) Of course higher intelligence means more skill points as well.

[Groth]

I'm not considering it a waste. He has 16 const, combat casting .. concentration skills maxed. My guy has no problem with concentration.

Kind of nice having one character going around with a little bit of wilderness lore. He was it. Didn't take much to make it effective. I gave him the forester feat, the wisdom of course adds to it.

Sure, after I beat the game, heck with it. I haven't beat the game yet though.

It's probably a waste.. but, I'm making use of it.