Cleric Druid Multiclass Guide for Dungeons and Dragons 5e

Nature is Divine

Clerics are the favored hands of the gods, holy disciples of their faith who mend the sick and banish evil according to divine will. Druids are champions of nature, attuned to the vital essence of the world that binds us all through the deep primeval. Put them together and we get a prophet of Gaia, an avatar of the divine nature, in sync with both the powers of the earth and those from on high. Put aside baldurs gate for a second, recite your prayers and gather the beasts of the wood as we go through everything you need to know.   

Why Play a Cleric/Druid Multiclass?

In Dungeons & Dragons both the cleric build and druid build traditionally play a support casting role and with just a bit of work can be built into martial classes. Mixing the two gives us an opportunity to double up on that support casting or to build an even nastier combat monster. They’re both Wisdom based so we synergize easily using the same class ability score, and we can work with just a dip or as a fully split class combination. With such versatile classes this is one of those multiclass choices that is hard to mess up, and even built badly you’ll still likely end up with a pretty good character. 

What are the Downsides?

One of the biggest downsides is strangely the druid’s limitations on wearing metal armors which locks us out of most medium and heavy armor options (unless your DM is really nice and provides some magic ironwood armor or something). This is not the end of the world but it is an anti-synergy with the cleric’s typical heavily armored AC. There's also an unfortunate non-synergy with the nature domain since it uselessly doubles up on features making it pointless for us despite being a flavor win. While we can get some fun synergies out of the spell lists this will still be far from the best damage dealer. We don't have raw damage features like divine smite or abusable spellcasting like pact magic. If all you want is DPS consider swapping one of these classes for paladin, and if all you want is utility casting consider artificer.

No matter what combination you choose, in Dungeons & Dragons multiclassing means that you forego some late game class features like 9th level spells or 20th level capstones. A single-class character has more focused powerful features, while a multi-classed character will have more versatility and options. We’ll feel this especially hard when it comes to wild shapes, since that progression is based on druid level not overall character level.

What Class Features Do We Care About?

While not every class feature is going to play a big role in our builds, you should be aware of the following class features while putting your druid cleric multiclass together.

Significant Cleric Features

• Spellcasting. Clerics are a full prepared spellcasting class. This means you have access to the full cleric spell list, you just have to pick which spells you prepare each day. Clerics have a couple really good damage spells, but you’ll likely get the most value out of their utility, buffing, and healing spells.
• Channel Divinity. Clerics get a special divine resource in their uses of “channel divinity”. You first gain this feature with your 2nd cleric level and you get one of these “uses” of channel divinity every short or long rest and more uses at your 6th cleric level. The base use of your channel divinity is “turn undead” which is unsurprisingly only useful if you’re running into undead monsters. All the cleric archetypes, however, provide us with much more solid options of our channel divinity power. Tasha’s also gave us another “base” use of our channel divinity power called “harness divine power” that lets us spend it to regain a lost spell slot. You can only do this once per long rest to stop us from farming spell slots, but you can do it more often at higher cleric levels.
• Divine Domains. You gain cleric subclasses at 1st level and more than most classes you’ll be getting most of your unique class features from your archetype. Sadly because of our druid levels we can't really take advantage of heavy armor proficiency, so we lose out on a lot of the utility in many cleric domains such as Forge, Life, Nature, Order, Tempest, and War.

Significant Druid Features

• Spellcasting. Druids already have a wide and healthy spell list including healing, damage, and unique damage over time spells. Just like clerics, druids “know” every spell on their spell list and can freely choose from among them when they prepare every day.  Mixing spellcasting classes is a bit weird mechanically and we’ll get that in a bit but for now know that access to the cleric spell list gives us extra options and spell slots we can use.
• Wild Shape. I could write a whole article about wild shape, its applications and weirdness, but for now just know that wild shape is a powerful feature that you can use for builds that focus on combat. Even if we aren’t going for combat, the utility of becoming an innocuous or tiny creature on demand is an incredible utility power.
• Wild Companion. An optional rule out of Tasha’s, this lets us sacrifice a use of our wild shape feature to cast find familiar instead. Familiars are sneakily powerful and some of our builds will rely on it for shenanigans. 
• Druid Circle. We’ll go into them later, but the druid subclass options are powerful and at the core of some of our builds. Always pick moon druid if you want to focus on wild shaping though and consider spores druid for a straight martial option.

What Level Does a Cleric Druid “Kick In”?

This is a tad tricky to answer since depending on the build we go for we’ll be relying on different synergies. You’ll feel the wide range of utility that you gain from both spell lists with just a single level in each class, but we need to pick up wild shape at our 2nd druid level for the more aggressive strategies. So, depending on your goals the multiclass combination kicks in at your 2nd or 3rd character level.

Do I Take Cleric or Druid First?

Both classes have extremely similar starting proficiencies at character creation unless you count the weapons (which we don’t really plan on using anyway). With that being said I recommend starting with druid to gain proficiency with herbalism kits which can be very useful in the early game for pulling useful plants out of the woods during downtime. If you start out as a cleric, you miss out on that proficiency and don’t really gain much in return. 

Cleric / Druid Ability Scores

One of the nice things about this multiclass combination is that both druid abilities and cleric abilities are essentially the same ability scores.

Your highest ability score should be Wisdom as our spellcasting ability for both cleric and druid spells.

Your next highest ability score should be Dexterity as we’ll be relying on light armor for our AC.

Finally, we need to survive as much punishment as possible while maintaining our concentration spells so our third highest ability score should be Constitution. 

And that’s it really, we can dump Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma entirely making this a clean three ability multiclass combination. 

Multiclass Spellcasting

When you multiclass two different spellcasting classes, things can get weird with spellcasting progression.

Firstly, you technically need two different types of spellcasting focus. A “holy symbol” for your cleric spells and a “druidic focus” for your druid spells. Thankfully, holy symbols are the most freeform and forgiving foci in the game, and you can put the symbol of your god anywhere so long as it is clearly displayed. A lot of people wear a necklace with their god’s symbol, or put the symbol on their shield or weapon, both options importantly free up the hand. Druidic foci are a bit more limited and requires a wooden staff, a wand, or strangely a sprig of holly. If you want to simplify things and just have the one “spellcasting focus”, you can even put your god’s symbol on a staff or wand, cleanly combining the two items into one.

Next, your spells known stay completely separate, but since both druid and cleric “know” their whole array of spells anyway you really just get to pick and choose whatever spells you want from either spell list.

The spell slots however combine into a special “multiclass spell slots table” which basically counts “half-caster” levels as half a level and “full-caster” levels as one level. 

For our build, both clerics and druids count as “full-casters” so on the following table you’ll count your total levels to determine how many spell slots you have. The keen eyed will notice this is exactly the same spell slot progression as either cleric or druid, and you’re right. Since both halves of our class are full casters, we won’t skip a beat when it comes to spellcasting progression. 

Cleric Druid Equipment

After figuring out our spellcasting focus situation, we’ll still be occupying one hand with a druidic focus leaving the other hand free. I highly recommend putting a shield in that hand (a wooden shield) since we plan on committing to spellcasting or wild shaping and in either case we get nothing from a weapon and could use the armour class bonus from a shield.

Next for armor, the druid class restriction on “metal armors” locks us into light armor which means studded leather and sadly passing on the heavy armor proficiency. I’ve seen some particularly stingy Dungeon Masters argue that the “studded” part of the studded leather counts as metal, in which case try to argue out some “bone studs” instead. Some very forgiving DM’s might allow “ironwood” or “dragon bone” versions of typically metal armors but that’s up to DM discretion and this guide is written assuming rules as written (darn you Jeremy Crawford). If you do luck out and your setting has access to some non-metal heavy armors, you can go back and dump some Dexterity for even more Constitution to take advantage of heavy armor proficiency. 

Cleric Druid Spells

I won’t go over all the utility spells and healing spells in the cleric and druid spell lists (and there are oh so many) but as a doubled-up spellcasting multiclass we should try and take advantage of all that magical content to blow holes in our enemies with additional damage. You can think of this sort of war caster strategy as a "basic multi class" for cleric and druid combinations, simply using the two spell lists for maximum bonus damage.

Firstly, most of the damage spells from our druid half come in the form of “damage over time” concentration spells. Some of these spells let you move the effect or apply it again as a bonus action like flaming sphere or the criminally underused dust devil, and some use a whole action like moonbeam or call lightning. 

What druids tend to lack (other than in cantrips) are direct damage spells that don’t use concentration, which the cleric conveniently provides. Clerics have access to one of the most powerful direct damage spells in the game guiding bolt. For the low price of a 1st level slot you can reach out up to 120 feet and blast something for 4d6 radiant damage, and you even light them up with advantage on the next attack that goes for them.

What we want to do is pair up direct damage spells that use an action alongside concentration damage spells that use a bonus action, or pair up direct damage spells that use a bonus action alongside concentration spells that use an action. 

For example, with access to 2nd level druid spells and 1st level cleric spells, we can pair up flaming sphere and guiding bolt. We start by simply casting flaming sphere, but on later turns we can spend our action on a guiding bolt and our bonus action to move the sphere. A lowly 4th level character can dish out a consistent 21 damage (4d6 + 2d6) a turn this way, all while keeping a safe distance.

To flip this combination, we want to abuse one of the most powerful spells in the game, spiritual weapon. Spiritual weapon conjures up an ethereal blade that floats around and slashes an enemy for 1d8 + your casting modifier as a bonus action. This has always been a sort of “back up extra attack” for clerics but paired with a repeating concentration spell that uses an action we can absolutely pile on extra damage over the course of a battle at just the cost of a couple spell slots.

Call lightning is one of the best options for this. You cast it as an action and for the duration you can use your action each turn to call down a lightning bolt that hits everything within 5 feet of a point you choose. I’ve seen a lot of people get mixed up on that wording, but basically think of it hitting everything in a 2X2 grid when using 5-foot squares. The bolts deal 3d10 to each creature effected, and you can usually get at least 2 targets in the radius for 6d10 dealt each turn. With our actions tied up we can sprinkle just a bit more damage in there using spiritual weapon, clocking whoever survives the lightning for another 1d8 plus casting modifier for an average of 42 damage (6d10 + 1d8 + 4) per turn!   

Cleric Druid Multiclass Builds

There’s no one correct way to play this combination of classes but consider the following build ideas when putting these two together.

Magic Incarnate

The title may be overselling it a touch but our character concept here is to have as many spells as humanly possible and master all arcane magic and divine magic at an incredibly low level.

To accomplish this, we first need 3 levels of druid taking the circle of the land and 1 level of cleric picking the arcana domain. Both archetypes grant us not only extra spells but counts them as always prepared. For the choice of “land” we want to pick options that provide spells that are on neither the cleric or druid lists normally. For the land druids options, I rather like grassland for the invisibility and haste spells and coast for mirror image and misty step.

Very simply, our little 4th level character now has an INSANE number of spells prepared each day, and by picking up detect magic and magic missile through the arcane domain we can essentially be the party Swiss army knife caster capable of everything.

At level 4 we’ll get 5 spells and 3 cantrips prepared from 1 level of cleric, 7 spells prepared and 2 cantrips from our 3 levels of druid, 2 bonus spells and a bonus druid cantrip from the circle of land, and 2 bonus spells and 2 bonus wizard cantrips from the arcane domain. This all adds up to a whopping 8 cantrips and 16 spells prepared! Become the mystical master magic incarnate!   

Hero of Peace

Our goal for this build is to become a living force multiplier that provides massive buffs to our allies while never technically attacking our enemies. There are a surprising number of defensive buffs that we can stack up that don’t use concentration, and a lot of them even last for ages so you can set them up ahead of time.

To accomplish this, we need just 3 levels of cleric selecting the peace domain and at least 2 levels of druid selecting the circle of the shepherd archetype. 

So, let’s start stacking buffs. The spell aid lasts 8 hours and doesn’t use concentration, which means we can cast it way before combat starts and likely even at the start of the day. Aid just provides 3 creatures with 5 bonus hit points (not temporary hit points but rather an increase to their maximum) and if we upcast it as a 3rd level spell that increases to 10 hit points. Essentially this adds 30 hit points to the party total, and other than the cost of the spell slot is basically free.

Next, we want to use our wild shape wild companion option to summon a familiar. You can flavor your little animal companions to taste, but I highly recommend the owl option since it has the flyby ability making it immune to attacks of opportunity. I could write a whole article about how useful familiars are, but for our purposes here just remember that while their attacks are typically pointless, they can use the help action to provide advantage on attacks for your allies.

After that, we want to pick out our party’s best frontliner and cast warding bond on them. This is another buff that doesn’t use concentration, but it only lasts 1 hour so you’ll need to cast it as you get a bit closer to danger. Warding bond grants the target a +1 bonus to AC and saving throws, and most importantly resistance to all damage. This comes at the cost of essentially splitting that damage between you, as whenever the warded creature takes damage (after being halved) you’ll take an equal amount of damage. But as a healer, this just makes it easier for you to soak all the hits. Make sure not to use this on a barbarian though, since they’ll be getting resistance to most damage from rage anyway. 

Let’s get into some in-combat buffs, and for that we get a very powerful ability from the circle of the shepherd called a “spirit totem”. We get three modes for this totem, and each one is useful for different situations. The bear totem provides a bunch of temporary hit points to every ally within range, the hawk totem lets you grant advantage to an attack once per round as a reaction, and the unicorn totem provides a little extra healing to all your allies in range whenever you cast a healing spells.

In practice I’ve found that the hawk totem works best if your party is winning, the unicorn totem is best if you’re losing, and the bear totem is most useful when the battle is going to be quick and you just need an immediate healing spirit.

Next, we apply one of the absolute strongest buffs in the game, emboldening bond from our peace domain. Emboldening bond lasts for 10 minutes and buffs a number of creatures equal to your proficiency bonus. So long as a buffed creature is within 30 feet of another buffed creature, they get a 1d4 they can add to an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw every round. This doesn’t use your concentration either, and you can provide this 10 minute buff a number of times per day equal to your proficiency modifier. This can also stack with the guidance cantrip, giving your allies a 2d4 bonus on any ability check that matters.

Next let’s talk about keeping ourselves safe using the spell sanctuary, which we’ll actually use our concentration on. Sanctuary causes any creature that attacks the target to make a Wisdom save, and on a failure, it forces them to redirect or waste the attack. Against low-wisdom enemies this effectively makes attacking you useless, and even high-wisdom enemies are taking typically around a 50/50 shot. Normally, this huge defensive buff is balanced out because it ends if you make attack actions, but our hero of peace is all about the buffs and heals and won’t be attacking all combat!

Let’s put this whole retinue of buffs together as a 5th level build. Assuming you were able to prepare a bit before combat, you should have aid and emboldening bond cast on 3 of your allies, warding bond cast on our best frontliner, and a familiar flying around. Once combat actually starts we use our action to cast sanctuary on ourselves, and our bonus action to summon a hawk totem over the battlefield.

Between all of these buffs, we have added 30 hit points to our total party HP, we’re providing a total of 3 1d4 bonuses to attacks or saves every round, and between our own reaction using the hawk totem and our familiar’s help action, we’re providing advantage on two attacks a round. Our frontliner has resistance to all damage and a +1 bonus on all their attacks and saves, and if anything manages to get past our allies and get to us, they’ll have to make a save or waste their attacks thanks to sanctuary. With all your buffs active, simply stride across the battlefield with cure wounds and healing word at the ready to top off anybody getting low. Enjoy driving your DM mad as your party shrugs off everything that’s thrown at them! 

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