Rating: 
Summary: Not half bad - or, for that matter, half good...
Review: Discounting the uninteresting or unusable parts (which still take up about half the book), The Complete Priest's Handbook is a pretty useful source. The main problem is in the half the book that's taken up by flotsam and fluff. The reader from Detroit was very right in saying that "the... specialty priests are vastly underpowered compared to the priests in any other AD&D work"; hence why it's necessary to tweak and add to them extensively. The powers are also so restricting that they're worth ignoring entirely; the only thing they'll do is make dozens of AD&D pantheons clones of each other. The main purpose of this book is to give some ideas on what gods may exist and what their priesthoods are like. If you do buy this and use it in your campaign, however, DON'T USE ANY OF THE SPECIALTY PRIESTHOODS AS IS... It would be an insult to priests everywhere!
Rating:
Summary: get faiths and avatars instead
Review: faiths and avatars and demihuman deities come up with better kits/specialty priests. personally, i prefer that the campaign filler stuff come at the end of the book instead of at the front but that's just me. for me the book didn't seem to ignite an interest in the priest class as much as the other two books.
Rating:
Summary: Could be better
Review: I have been a gamer for many years across many worlds and more often than not I play a priest. This book, while providing one or two decent kits, does not have a lot of new information and is not as big a resource as some of the other PHB extensions such as the fighter's handbook, or others. If you are looking for variations on the typical cleric, I would recommend buying a book specific to the world that you would be playing in, such as "Faiths and Avatars of the Realms" written for the Forgotten Realms world (one of my personal favorites). If you are looking to complete a set then by all means buy it, but otherwise I would look elseware
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointed
Review: I was pretty happy with almost all of the other Complete Handbooks but I was REALLY disappointed with this one. I found it lacking a lot of information specific to realms and gods. You're better off buying the Faiths & Avatars or Player's Options: Spells & Magic books as they are more detailed. Save up your money and upgrade from this handbook to something that will be more useful to you.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a good reference
Review: I would have to agree with others that the Kit's in this book are a little weak. In playability as well as game terms. However, the Mythos section gave me many ideas for creating specialty priest's for games that I run as well as characters for other's. It works well if you ignore the sample priesthoods and just use the guidlines it gives to come up with new ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Best thing to do with this book...
Review: Read it in the bookstore as a reference book when you are creating your world and putting Gods into it. But thats it...leave it there. This is the book in my TSR library with the most dust on it. But I pass it to new DM's more then i read it so it's not completely useless unless you don't know that many-would be DM's.
Rating:
Summary: Obselete, and not just because of the 3rd edition.
Review: Since the introduction to the 3rd edition D&D a year ago, some 2nd edition books were obsolete, while others were still useful. This very book, "the complete priest's handbook" fits into neither category, however, as it was never good to begin with. It begins fine with relatively good ways to make up your own pantheons of gods. This is helpful to an inexperienced DM, but for a seasoned DM or any DM using campaign settings providing unique pantheons, this is very little help. Things go downhill from there. The sample priesthoods are pretty weak. Not one of them comes close to having the spells of a cleric or granted powers of a druid. If you're using 2nd edition rules, you're better off creating priesthoods under the guidelines provided in the players handbook. Almost everything else is kits and Role-playing personalities taken from other sources. Uninspired and unimaginative are good words to use for this book.
Numerous superior 2nd edition products are out of print, yet this
one still exists. Go figure.
Rating:
Summary: Obselete, and not just because of the 3rd edition.
Review: Since the introduction to the 3rd edition D&D a year ago, some 2nd edition books were obsolete, while others were still useful. This very book, "the complete priest's handbook" fits into neither category, however, as it was never good to begin with. It begins fine with relatively good ways to make up your own pantheons of gods. This is helpful to an inexperienced DM, but for a seasoned DM or any DM using campaign settings providing unique pantheons, this is very little help. Things go downhill from there. The sample priesthoods are pretty weak. Not one of them comes close to having the spells of a cleric or granted powers of a druid. If you're using 2nd edition rules, you're better off creating priesthoods under the guidelines provided in the players handbook. Almost everything else is kits and Role-playing personalities taken from other sources. Uninspired and unimaginative are good words to use for this book.
Numerous superior 2nd edition products are out of print, yet this
one still exists. Go figure.
Rating:
Summary: hey it helps some, not much but some
Review: the book lacked most of what has made the other additions to this series great. As stated before you can probably find all the info included therein as well as some more useful stuff in the Faiths and Avatars as well as the Spells and Magic supplement. IT's ok if you just want to play a boring cleric( but then again wouldn't you just be better off taking the example from the players handbook). Take my word for it, save yourself the money to spend on something that would be really worth your while, but if you have to look at it just flip through it, you can get the important stuff outta there fairly quick.
Rating:
Summary: Why bother? It's all been duplicated elsewhere.
Review: The Complete Priest's Handbook is one of those TSR works that is almost completely replaceable with other works. First, the Faith creation system and specialty priests are vastly underpowered compared to the priests in any other AD&D work. You're better off using the class customization rules from Player's Option: Spells & Magic, or even raiding a world-specific work and tweaking the priests. The kits are generally boring, and most are essentially identical to similarly-named fighter or wizard kits. The personalities are okay, but any experienced roleplayer won't need them, whereas an inexperienced player would be better off looking at potrayals of clergymen in general fiction for archtypes. Finally, the equipment and combat rules are essentially identical to those in the Complete Fighter's Handbook. In short, it isn't very useful.
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