Builds that don't suck - Radiant Servant

Class: Radiant Servant of Pelor (dnd 3.5)

Flavor – The ultimate example of a righteous, undead blasting, heal-casting sun-god loving son of a bitch

Books needed – Core + Complete Divine
Cheese meter – Medium unless your in a heavy undead game, then high– the class basically makes you slightly better at stereotypical cleric duties. You heal, turn and use light spells slightly better. It’s overbalanced, but not broken. In an undead heavy game, it edges towards the broken side.
Best Variant – None: get into the class ASAP then go back to cleric. Could easily fit under any sun-god concept
Role – Healer and undead smasher.
Pros – More powerful heals when cast from the domain slot, better light spells, improved turning
Cons – None really. Have to worship pelor.

The skinny – This class is effectively “A good aligned cleric, but better” if you are planning to do much party healing or undead bashing there’s really no reason not to take this route. While that may seem a bit cheesey, any regular cleric players can attest that 1. Normal turning is fail at high levels and 2. in hard high-level campaigns getting 9 improved healing spells a day is practically a necessity.

As a radiant servant all of your light spells are lightier, any healing spell you cast from the domain slot gets free metamagic feats attached to it and on top of all this you get bonus greater turnings a day. The increased healing kicks butt and on top of that, the healing, the turning and the light spells make you into a real undead-destroyer. Even a blaster wizard has to pull out all the stops to top your undead damage.

Concept - Pelor hates undead, hates the dark and likes to help people. His servants do the same. If you want to be the super cleric, this is the class for you.

Break down – You have to be neutral good, be a level 6 cleric and worship pelor. The other requirements, extra turning and skill ranks in heal and knowledge: religion aren’t that big of a deal and fit the concept well.

As I have said, the class is basically just a supped-up cleric. You get full casting and turning. In addition you gain cha mod + 3 greater turns a day (blow up undead instead of scaring them). As the class progresses any healing spell you cast from a domain slot becomes meporwered, then maximized and eventually empowered and maximized. Light spells have a double radius and you get an extra domain! You become immune to magic and non-magic disease and you get a +2 will save aura.

Finally you get the ability to spend 2 turns to do a 1d6 per class level undead-damaging explosion of 100 foot radius. Yeah. Boom.


Build – Cleric until level 6, then radiant servant 7 – 16, followed by cleric. It’s pretty straight forward. I also can’t stress the awesomeness of the glory domain, especially if you want to even further increase your ability to kill undead.

Variant builds – At level 16 you’re a pretty kick ass cleric. If you don’t want to go back to cleric I recommend picking a prestige class that offers full spell casting and stacks turning.
Feats – Because you gain the ability to do so many greater turnings in a day, taking feats that improve the power for you turns is still a viable option.
Divine metamagic: yeah it’s a bit cheesey, so try not to over do it. As a personal rule of thumb I try not to allow any of my clerics to do it more than 3 times per day and I never stack it with other metamagic effects like using a metamagic rod.

Check out the healing feats in the complete champion, some of them are pretty sweet.