I'm forking this from the now-quiet Banishment thread because something the Jester said has stuck with me.

If removing [the Cleric of Life] from the field [with Banishment] is an "uncounterable win button", then there is a problem far worse than a single spell here.

Is this true? From my experience, at least, Clerics of Life are definitely worth more CR than your average damage-sponging murderhobo. I ran a "deadly" encounter for a balanced eight-man 5th-level party including a Cleric of Life, and it ended with everyone on their feet.

At some point during the encounter, nearly every PC was knocked unconscious, only to be brought back to consciousness by magical healing before the final blow was struck. Admittedly, the encounter was not optimized -- the enemies were mandated by the story and the map was provided and much too cramped to really allow the enemy forces to bring their strength to bear. But the heroes brought low more than 50 enemies over the course of a nine-round combat.

And throughout it all, the Cleric of Life just kept healing. He didn't run out of healing options until the bitter end. In general, the party's resources were depleted by the time the last echo of steel on steel faded away, but everyone was on their feet.

So my question is this: given that the Cleric of Life does seem to make the other members of the party effective beyond their actual level, providing a sort of CR multiplier, is this a problem? Is the class broken? Or is the inclusion of such a class bad design to begin with?

For my part I'm not sure it is. I know D&D4 moved away from this design, but I think clerical healing is enough of an ancient and storied D&D trope that I'm willing to say that the Cleric of Life is working as intended in D&D5, but I'm interested in other perspectives.

Another question I'd be interested to discuss is this: if the Cleric of Life is working as intended, and we agree that it provides the whole group with a CR multiplier, what is that multiplier?

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