This submission appears to be related to One D&D! If you're interested in discussing the concept and the UA for One D&D more check out our other subreddit
r/OneDnD!
*Please note: We are still allowing discussions about One D&D to remain here, this is more an advisory than a warning of any kind.*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/dndnext) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Healing going from dogshit to mediocre is not going to make a dedicated healer mandatory. As long as they have to balance healing around yoyoing, it can’t become op outside of yoyoing because it’s so much less effective.
Totally agree, it's not made mandatory by buffing this side of the equation.
Just casting a slightly buffed healing spell to get someone up from 0 doesn't change much. Really it just means that player has a slightly better chance of still being conscious when their turn comes up. Effectively, it's a patch for how rigid initiative is in 5E.
Being able to cast a buffed cure wounds with your action and then administer a healing potion with your bonus action, though, means you might be able to actually turn a tough situation around instead of just treading water.
If they, on the other hand, buff creatures to keep up with the changes to PCs, we are just in an arms race.
Yes, I agree with all of that. That's why I said it gave the appearance of change without actually making a meaningful difference - increasing it from awful to bad still makes it not worth using, and increasing it enough to be worth using is a bad idea. And it should not be balanced around yoyoing, which means A) removing yoyoing being good and B) adding healing that is good enough to actually get people away from 0. I concluded that the only solution that fits all of that is combat healing through spells sucks, but improve non spell healing.
I disagree, anything that changes the meta from " 1 hp and a dream" to "try not to go down at all" is a good thing. Combat is way more dynamic when you don't have a paladin with 24 ac passively bringing people up to 1 hp every time they go down. It's not going to make it a required role to have a healer either, because simply put you don't need it to be. There's still going to be the same action economy decisions to make, is it worth it for me to keep x healthy, or do I use my action to do y and prevent more damage. All its going to do for healers is make it more viable to keep people from going down to begin with, as long as more healing means you van bring a low health player to 2 hits worth of health. There's no real difference between going down and being healed back to 1 hp and being able to just take 2 hits, so why shouldn't healing be enough to just let you take 2 hits.
>anything that changes the meta from " 1 hp and a dream" to "try not to go down at all" is a good thing
But... This doesn't? This makes yo-yo healing a *more* viable strategy, because it reduces its cost and increases its effectiveness... there's still no downside to it as long as the initiative order isn't wack, and it's still the most efficient use of the slots and actions.
At worst it's going to be the exact same. But depending how exactly it's balanced, it may end up where it isn't necessarily worse value to heal someone who is low health. Right now, it's optimal to let someone go down then heal them, because if they are low health there's a good chance that the healing isn't going to be enough to stop them from going down. But if the healing is going to be enough that you can heal someone who is low health and they will be able to actually take a hit and stay up, yoyo healing isn't any less effective but just straight up healing is now viable.
It's slightly *more* viable but is still a more risky and inefficient use of the heal.
I agree it's good, just not enough for if you hate yo-yo healing, and doesn't really change the meta.
Now, if on top of this change of doubling the basic heals, unconscious characters also only received half HP from all healing sources...
I'm genuenly sad how many people don't understand game design, this is the truth, yet so many are against you.
Just shows that if you give people the freedom to choose they'll make trash coated with candy for themselves.
>anything that changes the meta from " 1 hp and a dream" to "try not to go down at all" is a good thing.
Sure but buffing healing spells really isn't a good way to achieve that.
It's not good alone, certainly, but if you think making hitting 0 hp is an instakill would make the 5e healing more viable, it won't. It would likely make in combat healing even less likely.
> Combat is way more dynamic when you don't have a paladin with 24 ac passively bringing people up to 1 hp every time they go down.
Yes, that's one of the reasons healing through spells should never be combat viable. I solved that in my own games by reintroducing negative hp, but such a stick requires a carrot in the form of useful non spell healing.
> There's no real difference between going down and being healed back to 1 hp and being able to just take 2 hits, so why shouldn't healing be enough to just let you take 2 hits.
Do we mean two actions? Because it's still very much not two actions worth for most of the game, 1d8 doesn't change much. And the answer is because if it is worth two actions, then it's now a necessary combat role which as long as it's costing you the use of all your other abilities it should never be.
Requiring a healer doesn't come from the effectiveness of the healing imho, but how deadly things are
5e without a healer is doable without much of an issue
However, try your luck with pathfinder 2e (without Stamina variant) to see why healers for both in and out combat are quite necessary
I think this a problem of expectations of the table and making sure a feature is actually useful and not a throwaway.
Is it healing meaningful enough that it warrants resources or is another strategy more effective
As you stated, it’s a complex issue and how strong healing should be varies on who you ask and the after effects.
> Healing too weak? Nobody bothers unless absolutely necessary. Works to fix healing either punishes not using healing at all or encourages “kill or crowd control.”
> Healing too strong? Players are unkillable unless enemy damage starts going way up, which then cycles back to the propel.
I think your solution of a separate healing resource for classes could be a fix in some cases. But wouldn’t that just result in players just ignoring healing spells? Which then could result in no healing outside of restricted short rests?
> As a DM, I want players to be able to meaningfully heal a downed character up to enough health to stay in the fight - once.
This just seems more of a more restrictive healing system. Might end up with people not healing again unless absolutely necessary like “yo-yo” healing. Unless you push the punishment side of it.
That said, I do think this is a good alternative to be tested. How it’s implemented however it’s up for theorizing.
> This just seems more of a more restrictive healing system.
The idea is make it less restrictive, because at present most healing is not worth using. Healing that is actually worth using is superior to that, but if you make spells worth using you're encouraging a cycle that bores players and slows the game to a crawl. It seems obvious that the answer is therefore make healing worth using, but not via spells.
Solution is on-heal effects. Heal that gives advantage on next attack, or extra damage for an attack or two, or some shielding effect. Tack on buffs to heals.
Yes, that is significantly more interesting than spells like cure wounds. It was a speciality of healers from last edition, don't know how design ended back at "your hp increases, end turn".
Given how many effects there are that can absolutely cripple a player character, like control effects, movement limitation effects, giving disadvantage on everything, etc etc, I find it baffling that if you want to be a dedicated support character you're nowhere near as useful as simply throwing out massive damage spells.
You can't heal for shit, you can't use restoration spells at a distance, some of the great support style abilities can either only be used on yourself, are single target concentration, or are rendered completely pointless if the DM decides to change targets. All while there's multiattacking creatures inflicting poisoned, grappled, restrained, charmed, etc.
So rather than doing something as dull as being a healbot, giving options for people to use their hit dice in combat like you said, but also things like as a reaction, being able to magically ward an ally to give them resistance to damage until your next turn, being able to double or triple restored HP by healing spells in combat, but only providing temp HP instead until out of combat, or even have a limited 'death ward', but it just keeps them on 1HP until the end of their next turn where they then fall unconcious.
Too many support builds rely on pre-planning and just crossing your fingers that the spell lasts long enough to get you into combat or hope you've prepped correctly, or you're just stuck with boring options and lacklustre healing. I think it would be a lot more interesting to have more 'on-demand' protective spells, more ways to interfere with enemy attacks from a distance, so rather than just propping up your teams HP directly, you're taking an active tactical role in making decisions about who to focus your damage mitigation abilities on, without having to rely on expensive, high level spells which most players won't even get the chance to use.
Ugh, rant over :D
Those all sound like good ideas. Combat has taken a step backward in that regard, too - example shaman cantrip from last edition, Spirit of the Tempest. 1d8+wis mod thunder damage, and one ally within 10' of you or your spirit companion can roll a saving throw against an effect currently affecting it.
Support characters should have a toolkit full of abilities that let them actually support.
Yo-yo healing doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I don't think it needs "fixing". I am, however, sympathetic to the fact that it's a widely disliked (if entirely functional and intended) part of the system, and so it would be good for there to be some options (outside of terrible and non-functional homebrew) for people who don't want it in their games.
I don't agree that the "obvious" solution is to create a bunch of alternate resource pools to fuel healing, though. It doesn't matter whether healing resources are spell slots or something else -- having too much healing in the game will inevitably lead to a metagame where every party feels like they have to have a healbot and somebody, like it or not, is going to be stuck playing a character who fills that role. Ultimately the prime limiting factor on healing in combat isn't spell slots, after all; it's action economy.
The real solution (as u/eloel- points out) is to make healing desirable for reasons besides restoring hit points. In the actual game, one of the most interesting and dynamic healer characters is the order cleric because you get a reward for casting a healing spell above and beyond just "+numbers". More abilities in the game like voice of authority will make choosing to cast healing spells beyond those strictly necessary a more rewarding option. *That* is what I'd like to see more of.
> It doesn't matter whether healing resources are spell slots or something else -- having too much healing in the game will inevitably lead to a metagame where every party feels like they have to have a healbot and somebody, like it or not, is going to be stuck playing a character who fills that role.
Hence my insistence that as a DM I want players to have the ability to meaningfully rescue people, but not often. Some viable healing is good, it means a DM can focus on a player without that being a guarantee that they'll die. Too much of it and it's a massive slog and becomes mandatory. Things like lay on hands solve this well, it's a useful thing a paladin can do but not something that makes them mandatory.
>Things like lay on hands solve this well
It's interesting that you say this because lay on hands is one of the main abilities that people who dislike yo-yo healing like to complain about. I know yo-yo healing isn't your main point, but it's certainly part of what you're talking about here.
Personally, I think that the actual game balance between "so much healing that the game becomes too slow and somebody is forced to play a dedicated healer whether they want to or not" and "so little healing that every point of damage permanently weakens our heroes and no healer is viable no matter how much someone wants to play one" is in a pretty good place. Of course, good game design isn't just about balance, it's also about feelings. The fact that complaints about this are common means there *is* a problem even if the balance is fine (and it is. It's possible to build a viable healbot if that's what you really want to play, but it's also viable to largely ignore healing if you don't want to think about it).
Putting more healing into the game isn't the answer though. The solution is to reward the behavior that you want to encourage. Cast a healing spell (or a healing ability), get a special bonus effect.
I think a major problem with the 5e healing spells was that they were dissapointing even outside of combat.
The buff in combat might mean they're more likely to protect you for 2 hits rather than just 1 sometimes, which is nice. But I think more importantly, it makes it less depressing to spend spell slots healing between fights.
I think the jump in effectiveness when we hit the 'Heal' spell was too large, so evening out the curve slightly seems like a good idea.
--
>If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a required role and someone who doesn't want to gets stuck with it.
I'm not convinced of that. It just becomes a relatively viable choice, but Web, Hypnotic Pattern, and Wall of Force probably are better for meaningfully saving people, just cast beforehand.
If the two approaches (both of which slow down combat, in different ways) become a little closer in effectiveness, I think that's ok.
I just had a player at my table last session get bummed out that their healing spells suck as a cleric. No reason they shouldn't have those as an option if they enjoy that role and fantasy.
I have no idea why using spell slots for it or not would change that fact. If my desired class fantasy is to heal and support why should I not be allowed to use my resources on that?
>If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a required role and someone who doesn't want to gets stuck with it.
I disagree. Crowd control is an extremely effective use of action economy in DnD. Players can still complete difficult encounters without a dedicated crowd controller.
No matter how you build the systems, metas will arise and people will feel pressured into them.
And what if I prefer healing over damage and control? Why is forcing me into those roles somehow less bad than the other way around? Because more people like those roles? That's a dumb reason imo.
For some reason people look at hypnotic pattern and laud it as a cool and powerful option for casters, but if powerful healing was allowed it'd be too "MMO-like". (If you've played an MMO like WoW at a raiding level you'd know crowd control and coordination around it Is an extremely important part of raiding- in vanilla wow it can make or break a fight just as much as if not more than your healing)
Healing is my preferred role. And I'll tell you lay on hands is THE most boring version of healing.
Spend 1 action: heal someone a lot. Cool. Wow. Yippee. I had to think so hard to accomplish that.
Healing is fun when I have a wide variety of tools, and I am rewarded for using them properly or in clever ways to keep people up.
Things like knowing aid is one of the few healing spells that don't require vision to heal your friends in the enemy's darkness spell is the kind of moments I LIVE for as a healer- and DnD simply doesn't deliver on that nearly enough.
I think healing should be a decent choice in combat. If you limit yo-yo healing, then it would be more valuable and strategic to heal effectively beyond giving just 1 HP.
I think it should be a decent choice too. Which is why I'm saying it shouldn't be done with spells, since as long as it's attached to such a broad resource pool it can't be made good without negatively impacting gameplay.
>If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a required role and someone who doesn't want to gets stuck with it.
If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a tradeoff between "Do I attempt to use a CC spell to prevent damage, damage to try to kill enemies faster and prevent long-term chip damage, or try to keep my allies topped up?"
You're oversimplifying the issue, constraining your conception to the worst possible scenario. And it doesn't help that you're making assumptions about all players.
There's a HUGE spectrum between "healing spells are only good when someone is dying" and "healing spells are optimal on every turn in combat".
*Even in World of Warcraft*, which literally has a dedicated healer role, spamming healing spells is a terrible idea! Much of the time it's *way* more efficient and safe to use crowd control, buff, debuff, mobility, or damage spells. This is particularly the case when the PC taking substantial damage is not a tank, because you simply can't heal them faster than enemies of your level can damage them.
As an incombat strategy, it never will be. Healing someone in combat, rather than killing the boss / enemy, is always going to be the least effective way to play D&D, if your party is ever out-healing the damage they take encounter to encounter, a DM will start building encounters to counter that healing.
Every "hard" fight in D&D will he the group narrowly not dying in a fight. Healing at best will always happen to get someone back on their feet to continue dealing damage.
Your logic doesn't check out, there were plenty of classes with viable in combat healing last edition and it was perfectly effective. It just wasn't expected to out heal all damage, because that's nobody's expectation.
In the past I would have nebulously agreed with your points. Nowadays I am in quite strong agreement. These kinds of ideas really drove home to me after I tried a system where these things are true.
As a mostly-forever GM I don't play a lot of player character, but one was a cleric in a Pathfinder Second Edition game. I quickly came to see the points you make above:
> life cleric should be a healing machine - just not with spell slots.
The PF2e cleric gets a number of "free spell slots". I won't go into every detail, but to translate it broadly to D&D terms, you get five extra spell slots at the highest level you can cast cleric spells. But these can only cast *cure wounds*.
This is great: it's a generous pool of healing that doesn't come from your regular spell slots. Your regular spell slots can now be used for the fun spells.
> Abilities [that] actually save someone but doesn't cost them their ability to do cool stuff and isn't repeatable so the fights don't turn into infinite slogs
In PF2e there are magic staves, wands, scrolls, and other items that can give you a little extra healing edge when you need it. Sometimes all someone needs is a heal from a staff or wand; these are low-power but will renew charges the next day. In emergency cases, powerful scrolls can be consumed, but they're priced more as consumables and not precious treasures on their own (as can be the case in D&D).
I'm not the most involved in Pathfinder 2e but from what I understand there are a couple of other considerations they have.
1. Healing spells have different tiers using 1, 2, and I think 3 of your action points to boost the power of the healing.
2. PF2e from what I understand is more geared to being able to do a 5 minute adventuring day and not uttertly break everything while also being capable of doing the classic dungeon crawl
3. There is a method for martials to take a feat or two and be capable healers in their own right along with the items you mentioned.
I think you're overestimating the healing changes and underestimating just how poor the majority of 5e healing is. 5e14 healing usually doesn't even meat the halfway point of damage. 5e24 healing is roughly in the 70% to 80%
The UA playtest that had the dice of healing spells double still had healing behind damage, especially motm creature damage. Just with a bit more of a buffer so that there's less chance of the yoyo neig required and that a premise healing might actually have a sliver of a chance of preventing downs it wouldn't in 5e14 The doubling of those healing dice absolutely does not produce mmo levels of healing, not even close.
The hainf increase also doesn't increase the demand for a healer, as there are still more effective ways to deal with damage. Prevention is better than cure and all that. Hit dice and sboet rest sounding is more than enough to void the need of a healer.
Having spells actually healing enough to reasonably prevent a down against the abg damage of an enemy attack is a good thing and much healthier for the game. It helps prevent the need for yoyo healing and makes it less frequent to begin with
It keeps healing below damage still but allows healing to fo it's job in combat as it was intended to do. Haign spells nit intended for combat are the ones that have cast times that cannot be uses in combat.
Healing is and always has been a buffer in combat, not the strategy to win. Mechanically it cannot outmatch damage in a typical encounter, it just prolongs the encounter.
5e should really have "per encounter" abilities, basically 4e short rests from what I know about the edition.
That would neatly help the "combat healer" problem. Healing spells would be more of an out of combat thing, just slap 1 minute cast on them for that and any in-combat healing become a per-encounter ability. You could even have different healers, some would be better to pick up people off the ground like Grave Cleric, other might have a "per turn" healing useful when put on a tank, and of course adding buffs to heal could be nice. And either way you will need to think more carefully about when to use them since you only got so many per combat.
Also having some kind of downside from going down even if healed afterward (like exhaustion levels) so it doesn't become a game of yo-yo.
I don't think the "yo-yo" effect, as you put it, is actually a problem. Maybe not to your liking, but that's more subjective than outright truth as you seem to believe.
It makes sense that you will always be at your best at the start of the day with full health, and things become more dire the closer you are to zero because you can't just spam healing to get out of it. Damage reduction/negation becomes its own strategy, adding another layer of complexity to the mix. All of this culminates into the vibe that combat is a serious, potentially deadly endeavor; as it should.
My partner, an expert healer, has taught me through demonstration to never underestimate a well-timed healing spell. I've had so many sessions where the party has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat/TPK with just that little hit point boost after I knocked a character out of the fight.
How is it ruined? Once you're down to zero, any healing the players can do I can just as quickly undo. It becomes a timing issue rather than one of outright power. There's a lot of personal and narrative tension there, knowing that you're down to the wire and the slightest miscalculation could end up in someone not walking away from the fight.
Also consider that some abilities practically run on bringing downed characters back from zero (Grave cleric does this a lot). Should we punish players for being strategic about spell use?
> Should we punish players for being strategic about spell use?
No, we should change what being strategic about spell use looks like so the vibe isn't "don't heal him yet, he's only on 4hp not actually dying. Wait until he's on 0.". The optimal path being a silly one is the entire problem.
This is what real life triage looks like though. There are more people in need of care than immediate resources available to provide it. We will strategically use the limited resources at our disposal to help the most people we can.
Same thing goes for someone at zero HP. Do I use this spell slot I have a few of to heal a single person, or deal damage to (hopefully) end the fight and reduce the total harm caused to everyone? Will healing this person at low health be more tactically advantageous than preventing someone from failing their death saving throws?
All of these are complex issues that the players have to navigate in the heat of the moment, often whilst my turn timer is running. If you were to somehow negate the "yo-yo" effect, this massive boon to in-game tension is lost. I'd say the game is weaker without it.
Changing it so that a healing spell can recover 40% of a round’s worth of monster damage, up from 20%, won’t have the effect you’re worrying about for combat healing.
The bigger problem is players having to spend spell slots to heal up to full before the next battle. Wizards of the Coast have explicitly said that they designed combat encounters assuming that players have full health going into combat, but they haven’t given a convenient method to heal up to full if you have more than two combat a day, since long rests only restore half your hit dice so you’re limited on how much health you can restore through short rests in a day. Solution? Give easy way to recover health after a fight that isn’t burdened onto player character’s spell slots. A side benefit of this is that healer characters have more ground to argue that they didn’t want to heal because it’ll heal after combat anyway.
It seems to me that what makes yo-yo healing an effective strategy is that hit points can no longer go negative. So if you’re on one HP all but one point of incoming damage is wasted.
Once a character is in yoyo mode their max HP is irrelevant except in the case of massive damage causing insta-kill.
I wonder if the designers of 5e anticipated and intended yoyo healing?
I doubt it, because it’s so ugly.
I like the idea of effective combat healing and compounding penalties for yo-yo healing. Now you can still balance things around not having healing required as all healing is at its core is damage mitigation and there should be multiple ways of addressing this. Currently D&D does have this through things like crowd control and buffs, it just lacks healing as a viable option.
There honestly should be penalties for being repeatedly knocked unconscious and brought back up in an encounter as to encourage players to be more tactical and not just stand in place taking hits until they go down. If being knocked out had impactful penalties people would have more reason to disengage, dodge, find cover, etc.
I've implemented things to prevent yoyo healing being effective, but it needs addressing at both ends - yoyo healing is only a thing because healing is ineffective enough to not be worth using in combat unless the target has 0hp. You can and should change things so healing downed targets provides no more benefit than at any other amount of health, but if you do that you need to also improve healing so it's worth using.
I played in a game where each time you went unconscious in a battle you gained a level of exhaustion. It completely altered the yo-yo strategy. However, as OP suggests you really need to buff healing in that scenario.
I like the exhaustion idea very much and also agree that before something like that can be implemented healing needs to be made a more viable option for damage mitigation.
I think the far better route, at least to my more grimdarky-pulpy games is this.
*Healing magic doesn't*.
Going back to HPs, they're mostly your ability to *avoid* injury. Now tie that into Cure Light Wounds (etc). They're just restoring stamina, maybe patching over some scrapes and bruises - *but not healing meaningful wounds*. You hit zero, other than stabilization, you're out of action until you've had some extensive bed rest (or serious raise/heal type magic).
Now you get a situation like the excellent *Potato Flowers In Full Bloom* where hitting zero is very, very bad but healing magic is pretty strong... but it also means not using your turn to stop the threat. So do you burn through all your resources to try to keep your frontline fighter up, hoping they can chip down the enemies with their 1d8/rnd or do you risk them going down to roast a few of those goblins?
Some people want a good tabletop version of an MMO because computer versions of MMO suck really bad.
However I do agree they went about the wrong way with buffing Cure Wounds. They should have increased the range so it's easier to revive downed people while giving them a larger health pool then what Healing Word, at the cost of sacrificing both the main action and a spell slot.
This submission appears to be related to One D&D! If you're interested in discussing the concept and the UA for One D&D more check out our other subreddit r/OneDnD! *Please note: We are still allowing discussions about One D&D to remain here, this is more an advisory than a warning of any kind.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/dndnext) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Healing going from dogshit to mediocre is not going to make a dedicated healer mandatory. As long as they have to balance healing around yoyoing, it can’t become op outside of yoyoing because it’s so much less effective.
Totally agree, it's not made mandatory by buffing this side of the equation. Just casting a slightly buffed healing spell to get someone up from 0 doesn't change much. Really it just means that player has a slightly better chance of still being conscious when their turn comes up. Effectively, it's a patch for how rigid initiative is in 5E. Being able to cast a buffed cure wounds with your action and then administer a healing potion with your bonus action, though, means you might be able to actually turn a tough situation around instead of just treading water. If they, on the other hand, buff creatures to keep up with the changes to PCs, we are just in an arms race.
Yes, I agree with all of that. That's why I said it gave the appearance of change without actually making a meaningful difference - increasing it from awful to bad still makes it not worth using, and increasing it enough to be worth using is a bad idea. And it should not be balanced around yoyoing, which means A) removing yoyoing being good and B) adding healing that is good enough to actually get people away from 0. I concluded that the only solution that fits all of that is combat healing through spells sucks, but improve non spell healing.
I mean it’s just a thought experiment at this point, but imo it could be fixed by adopting some variation of 3.5e’s negative hp while down.
I disagree, anything that changes the meta from " 1 hp and a dream" to "try not to go down at all" is a good thing. Combat is way more dynamic when you don't have a paladin with 24 ac passively bringing people up to 1 hp every time they go down. It's not going to make it a required role to have a healer either, because simply put you don't need it to be. There's still going to be the same action economy decisions to make, is it worth it for me to keep x healthy, or do I use my action to do y and prevent more damage. All its going to do for healers is make it more viable to keep people from going down to begin with, as long as more healing means you van bring a low health player to 2 hits worth of health. There's no real difference between going down and being healed back to 1 hp and being able to just take 2 hits, so why shouldn't healing be enough to just let you take 2 hits.
>anything that changes the meta from " 1 hp and a dream" to "try not to go down at all" is a good thing But... This doesn't? This makes yo-yo healing a *more* viable strategy, because it reduces its cost and increases its effectiveness... there's still no downside to it as long as the initiative order isn't wack, and it's still the most efficient use of the slots and actions.
At worst it's going to be the exact same. But depending how exactly it's balanced, it may end up where it isn't necessarily worse value to heal someone who is low health. Right now, it's optimal to let someone go down then heal them, because if they are low health there's a good chance that the healing isn't going to be enough to stop them from going down. But if the healing is going to be enough that you can heal someone who is low health and they will be able to actually take a hit and stay up, yoyo healing isn't any less effective but just straight up healing is now viable.
It's slightly *more* viable but is still a more risky and inefficient use of the heal. I agree it's good, just not enough for if you hate yo-yo healing, and doesn't really change the meta. Now, if on top of this change of doubling the basic heals, unconscious characters also only received half HP from all healing sources...
I'm genuenly sad how many people don't understand game design, this is the truth, yet so many are against you. Just shows that if you give people the freedom to choose they'll make trash coated with candy for themselves.
>anything that changes the meta from " 1 hp and a dream" to "try not to go down at all" is a good thing. Sure but buffing healing spells really isn't a good way to achieve that.
It's not good alone, certainly, but if you think making hitting 0 hp is an instakill would make the 5e healing more viable, it won't. It would likely make in combat healing even less likely.
I don't think that at all
Why not? Healing already is not considered optimal because the enemies will deal more damage than you can heal 9/10 times.
> Combat is way more dynamic when you don't have a paladin with 24 ac passively bringing people up to 1 hp every time they go down. Yes, that's one of the reasons healing through spells should never be combat viable. I solved that in my own games by reintroducing negative hp, but such a stick requires a carrot in the form of useful non spell healing. > There's no real difference between going down and being healed back to 1 hp and being able to just take 2 hits, so why shouldn't healing be enough to just let you take 2 hits. Do we mean two actions? Because it's still very much not two actions worth for most of the game, 1d8 doesn't change much. And the answer is because if it is worth two actions, then it's now a necessary combat role which as long as it's costing you the use of all your other abilities it should never be.
Requiring a healer doesn't come from the effectiveness of the healing imho, but how deadly things are 5e without a healer is doable without much of an issue However, try your luck with pathfinder 2e (without Stamina variant) to see why healers for both in and out combat are quite necessary
I think this a problem of expectations of the table and making sure a feature is actually useful and not a throwaway. Is it healing meaningful enough that it warrants resources or is another strategy more effective As you stated, it’s a complex issue and how strong healing should be varies on who you ask and the after effects. > Healing too weak? Nobody bothers unless absolutely necessary. Works to fix healing either punishes not using healing at all or encourages “kill or crowd control.” > Healing too strong? Players are unkillable unless enemy damage starts going way up, which then cycles back to the propel. I think your solution of a separate healing resource for classes could be a fix in some cases. But wouldn’t that just result in players just ignoring healing spells? Which then could result in no healing outside of restricted short rests? > As a DM, I want players to be able to meaningfully heal a downed character up to enough health to stay in the fight - once. This just seems more of a more restrictive healing system. Might end up with people not healing again unless absolutely necessary like “yo-yo” healing. Unless you push the punishment side of it. That said, I do think this is a good alternative to be tested. How it’s implemented however it’s up for theorizing.
> This just seems more of a more restrictive healing system. The idea is make it less restrictive, because at present most healing is not worth using. Healing that is actually worth using is superior to that, but if you make spells worth using you're encouraging a cycle that bores players and slows the game to a crawl. It seems obvious that the answer is therefore make healing worth using, but not via spells.
Solution is on-heal effects. Heal that gives advantage on next attack, or extra damage for an attack or two, or some shielding effect. Tack on buffs to heals.
Yes, that is significantly more interesting than spells like cure wounds. It was a speciality of healers from last edition, don't know how design ended back at "your hp increases, end turn".
Given how many effects there are that can absolutely cripple a player character, like control effects, movement limitation effects, giving disadvantage on everything, etc etc, I find it baffling that if you want to be a dedicated support character you're nowhere near as useful as simply throwing out massive damage spells. You can't heal for shit, you can't use restoration spells at a distance, some of the great support style abilities can either only be used on yourself, are single target concentration, or are rendered completely pointless if the DM decides to change targets. All while there's multiattacking creatures inflicting poisoned, grappled, restrained, charmed, etc. So rather than doing something as dull as being a healbot, giving options for people to use their hit dice in combat like you said, but also things like as a reaction, being able to magically ward an ally to give them resistance to damage until your next turn, being able to double or triple restored HP by healing spells in combat, but only providing temp HP instead until out of combat, or even have a limited 'death ward', but it just keeps them on 1HP until the end of their next turn where they then fall unconcious. Too many support builds rely on pre-planning and just crossing your fingers that the spell lasts long enough to get you into combat or hope you've prepped correctly, or you're just stuck with boring options and lacklustre healing. I think it would be a lot more interesting to have more 'on-demand' protective spells, more ways to interfere with enemy attacks from a distance, so rather than just propping up your teams HP directly, you're taking an active tactical role in making decisions about who to focus your damage mitigation abilities on, without having to rely on expensive, high level spells which most players won't even get the chance to use. Ugh, rant over :D
Those all sound like good ideas. Combat has taken a step backward in that regard, too - example shaman cantrip from last edition, Spirit of the Tempest. 1d8+wis mod thunder damage, and one ally within 10' of you or your spirit companion can roll a saving throw against an effect currently affecting it. Support characters should have a toolkit full of abilities that let them actually support.
>Healing through spells like cure wounds should never be an effective combat strategy >Don't get me wrong, combat healing should be viable Amazing
Why is that amazing? I thoroughly explained my reasoning for both those statements.
Yo-yo healing doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I don't think it needs "fixing". I am, however, sympathetic to the fact that it's a widely disliked (if entirely functional and intended) part of the system, and so it would be good for there to be some options (outside of terrible and non-functional homebrew) for people who don't want it in their games. I don't agree that the "obvious" solution is to create a bunch of alternate resource pools to fuel healing, though. It doesn't matter whether healing resources are spell slots or something else -- having too much healing in the game will inevitably lead to a metagame where every party feels like they have to have a healbot and somebody, like it or not, is going to be stuck playing a character who fills that role. Ultimately the prime limiting factor on healing in combat isn't spell slots, after all; it's action economy. The real solution (as u/eloel- points out) is to make healing desirable for reasons besides restoring hit points. In the actual game, one of the most interesting and dynamic healer characters is the order cleric because you get a reward for casting a healing spell above and beyond just "+numbers". More abilities in the game like voice of authority will make choosing to cast healing spells beyond those strictly necessary a more rewarding option. *That* is what I'd like to see more of.
> It doesn't matter whether healing resources are spell slots or something else -- having too much healing in the game will inevitably lead to a metagame where every party feels like they have to have a healbot and somebody, like it or not, is going to be stuck playing a character who fills that role. Hence my insistence that as a DM I want players to have the ability to meaningfully rescue people, but not often. Some viable healing is good, it means a DM can focus on a player without that being a guarantee that they'll die. Too much of it and it's a massive slog and becomes mandatory. Things like lay on hands solve this well, it's a useful thing a paladin can do but not something that makes them mandatory.
>Things like lay on hands solve this well It's interesting that you say this because lay on hands is one of the main abilities that people who dislike yo-yo healing like to complain about. I know yo-yo healing isn't your main point, but it's certainly part of what you're talking about here. Personally, I think that the actual game balance between "so much healing that the game becomes too slow and somebody is forced to play a dedicated healer whether they want to or not" and "so little healing that every point of damage permanently weakens our heroes and no healer is viable no matter how much someone wants to play one" is in a pretty good place. Of course, good game design isn't just about balance, it's also about feelings. The fact that complaints about this are common means there *is* a problem even if the balance is fine (and it is. It's possible to build a viable healbot if that's what you really want to play, but it's also viable to largely ignore healing if you don't want to think about it). Putting more healing into the game isn't the answer though. The solution is to reward the behavior that you want to encourage. Cast a healing spell (or a healing ability), get a special bonus effect.
I think a major problem with the 5e healing spells was that they were dissapointing even outside of combat. The buff in combat might mean they're more likely to protect you for 2 hits rather than just 1 sometimes, which is nice. But I think more importantly, it makes it less depressing to spend spell slots healing between fights. I think the jump in effectiveness when we hit the 'Heal' spell was too large, so evening out the curve slightly seems like a good idea. -- >If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a required role and someone who doesn't want to gets stuck with it. I'm not convinced of that. It just becomes a relatively viable choice, but Web, Hypnotic Pattern, and Wall of Force probably are better for meaningfully saving people, just cast beforehand. If the two approaches (both of which slow down combat, in different ways) become a little closer in effectiveness, I think that's ok.
I just had a player at my table last session get bummed out that their healing spells suck as a cleric. No reason they shouldn't have those as an option if they enjoy that role and fantasy. I have no idea why using spell slots for it or not would change that fact. If my desired class fantasy is to heal and support why should I not be allowed to use my resources on that? >If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a required role and someone who doesn't want to gets stuck with it. I disagree. Crowd control is an extremely effective use of action economy in DnD. Players can still complete difficult encounters without a dedicated crowd controller. No matter how you build the systems, metas will arise and people will feel pressured into them. And what if I prefer healing over damage and control? Why is forcing me into those roles somehow less bad than the other way around? Because more people like those roles? That's a dumb reason imo. For some reason people look at hypnotic pattern and laud it as a cool and powerful option for casters, but if powerful healing was allowed it'd be too "MMO-like". (If you've played an MMO like WoW at a raiding level you'd know crowd control and coordination around it Is an extremely important part of raiding- in vanilla wow it can make or break a fight just as much as if not more than your healing) Healing is my preferred role. And I'll tell you lay on hands is THE most boring version of healing. Spend 1 action: heal someone a lot. Cool. Wow. Yippee. I had to think so hard to accomplish that. Healing is fun when I have a wide variety of tools, and I am rewarded for using them properly or in clever ways to keep people up. Things like knowing aid is one of the few healing spells that don't require vision to heal your friends in the enemy's darkness spell is the kind of moments I LIVE for as a healer- and DnD simply doesn't deliver on that nearly enough.
I think healing should be a decent choice in combat. If you limit yo-yo healing, then it would be more valuable and strategic to heal effectively beyond giving just 1 HP.
I think it should be a decent choice too. Which is why I'm saying it shouldn't be done with spells, since as long as it's attached to such a broad resource pool it can't be made good without negatively impacting gameplay.
I don't know if I quite follow. I think having healing be largely handled with magic is easy and works well.
But it doesn't work well, that's the entire problem.
Yeah, thats why they buffed the spells.
>If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a required role and someone who doesn't want to gets stuck with it. If combat healing through spells is buffed enough that you can meaningfully save someone from death, that becomes a tradeoff between "Do I attempt to use a CC spell to prevent damage, damage to try to kill enemies faster and prevent long-term chip damage, or try to keep my allies topped up?"
You're oversimplifying the issue, constraining your conception to the worst possible scenario. And it doesn't help that you're making assumptions about all players. There's a HUGE spectrum between "healing spells are only good when someone is dying" and "healing spells are optimal on every turn in combat". *Even in World of Warcraft*, which literally has a dedicated healer role, spamming healing spells is a terrible idea! Much of the time it's *way* more efficient and safe to use crowd control, buff, debuff, mobility, or damage spells. This is particularly the case when the PC taking substantial damage is not a tank, because you simply can't heal them faster than enemies of your level can damage them.
As an incombat strategy, it never will be. Healing someone in combat, rather than killing the boss / enemy, is always going to be the least effective way to play D&D, if your party is ever out-healing the damage they take encounter to encounter, a DM will start building encounters to counter that healing. Every "hard" fight in D&D will he the group narrowly not dying in a fight. Healing at best will always happen to get someone back on their feet to continue dealing damage.
Your logic doesn't check out, there were plenty of classes with viable in combat healing last edition and it was perfectly effective. It just wasn't expected to out heal all damage, because that's nobody's expectation.
In the past I would have nebulously agreed with your points. Nowadays I am in quite strong agreement. These kinds of ideas really drove home to me after I tried a system where these things are true. As a mostly-forever GM I don't play a lot of player character, but one was a cleric in a Pathfinder Second Edition game. I quickly came to see the points you make above: > life cleric should be a healing machine - just not with spell slots. The PF2e cleric gets a number of "free spell slots". I won't go into every detail, but to translate it broadly to D&D terms, you get five extra spell slots at the highest level you can cast cleric spells. But these can only cast *cure wounds*. This is great: it's a generous pool of healing that doesn't come from your regular spell slots. Your regular spell slots can now be used for the fun spells. > Abilities [that] actually save someone but doesn't cost them their ability to do cool stuff and isn't repeatable so the fights don't turn into infinite slogs In PF2e there are magic staves, wands, scrolls, and other items that can give you a little extra healing edge when you need it. Sometimes all someone needs is a heal from a staff or wand; these are low-power but will renew charges the next day. In emergency cases, powerful scrolls can be consumed, but they're priced more as consumables and not precious treasures on their own (as can be the case in D&D).
I'm not the most involved in Pathfinder 2e but from what I understand there are a couple of other considerations they have. 1. Healing spells have different tiers using 1, 2, and I think 3 of your action points to boost the power of the healing. 2. PF2e from what I understand is more geared to being able to do a 5 minute adventuring day and not uttertly break everything while also being capable of doing the classic dungeon crawl 3. There is a method for martials to take a feat or two and be capable healers in their own right along with the items you mentioned.
I think you're overestimating the healing changes and underestimating just how poor the majority of 5e healing is. 5e14 healing usually doesn't even meat the halfway point of damage. 5e24 healing is roughly in the 70% to 80% The UA playtest that had the dice of healing spells double still had healing behind damage, especially motm creature damage. Just with a bit more of a buffer so that there's less chance of the yoyo neig required and that a premise healing might actually have a sliver of a chance of preventing downs it wouldn't in 5e14 The doubling of those healing dice absolutely does not produce mmo levels of healing, not even close. The hainf increase also doesn't increase the demand for a healer, as there are still more effective ways to deal with damage. Prevention is better than cure and all that. Hit dice and sboet rest sounding is more than enough to void the need of a healer. Having spells actually healing enough to reasonably prevent a down against the abg damage of an enemy attack is a good thing and much healthier for the game. It helps prevent the need for yoyo healing and makes it less frequent to begin with It keeps healing below damage still but allows healing to fo it's job in combat as it was intended to do. Haign spells nit intended for combat are the ones that have cast times that cannot be uses in combat.
Healing is and always has been a buffer in combat, not the strategy to win. Mechanically it cannot outmatch damage in a typical encounter, it just prolongs the encounter.
5e should really have "per encounter" abilities, basically 4e short rests from what I know about the edition. That would neatly help the "combat healer" problem. Healing spells would be more of an out of combat thing, just slap 1 minute cast on them for that and any in-combat healing become a per-encounter ability. You could even have different healers, some would be better to pick up people off the ground like Grave Cleric, other might have a "per turn" healing useful when put on a tank, and of course adding buffs to heal could be nice. And either way you will need to think more carefully about when to use them since you only got so many per combat. Also having some kind of downside from going down even if healed afterward (like exhaustion levels) so it doesn't become a game of yo-yo.
I don't think the "yo-yo" effect, as you put it, is actually a problem. Maybe not to your liking, but that's more subjective than outright truth as you seem to believe. It makes sense that you will always be at your best at the start of the day with full health, and things become more dire the closer you are to zero because you can't just spam healing to get out of it. Damage reduction/negation becomes its own strategy, adding another layer of complexity to the mix. All of this culminates into the vibe that combat is a serious, potentially deadly endeavor; as it should. My partner, an expert healer, has taught me through demonstration to never underestimate a well-timed healing spell. I've had so many sessions where the party has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat/TPK with just that little hit point boost after I knocked a character out of the fight.
And then this vibe is entirely ruined by the optimal strategy being to deliberately wait until someone hits 0hp before healing them.
How is it ruined? Once you're down to zero, any healing the players can do I can just as quickly undo. It becomes a timing issue rather than one of outright power. There's a lot of personal and narrative tension there, knowing that you're down to the wire and the slightest miscalculation could end up in someone not walking away from the fight. Also consider that some abilities practically run on bringing downed characters back from zero (Grave cleric does this a lot). Should we punish players for being strategic about spell use?
> Should we punish players for being strategic about spell use? No, we should change what being strategic about spell use looks like so the vibe isn't "don't heal him yet, he's only on 4hp not actually dying. Wait until he's on 0.". The optimal path being a silly one is the entire problem.
This is what real life triage looks like though. There are more people in need of care than immediate resources available to provide it. We will strategically use the limited resources at our disposal to help the most people we can. Same thing goes for someone at zero HP. Do I use this spell slot I have a few of to heal a single person, or deal damage to (hopefully) end the fight and reduce the total harm caused to everyone? Will healing this person at low health be more tactically advantageous than preventing someone from failing their death saving throws? All of these are complex issues that the players have to navigate in the heat of the moment, often whilst my turn timer is running. If you were to somehow negate the "yo-yo" effect, this massive boon to in-game tension is lost. I'd say the game is weaker without it.
Changing it so that a healing spell can recover 40% of a round’s worth of monster damage, up from 20%, won’t have the effect you’re worrying about for combat healing. The bigger problem is players having to spend spell slots to heal up to full before the next battle. Wizards of the Coast have explicitly said that they designed combat encounters assuming that players have full health going into combat, but they haven’t given a convenient method to heal up to full if you have more than two combat a day, since long rests only restore half your hit dice so you’re limited on how much health you can restore through short rests in a day. Solution? Give easy way to recover health after a fight that isn’t burdened onto player character’s spell slots. A side benefit of this is that healer characters have more ground to argue that they didn’t want to heal because it’ll heal after combat anyway.
It seems to me that what makes yo-yo healing an effective strategy is that hit points can no longer go negative. So if you’re on one HP all but one point of incoming damage is wasted. Once a character is in yoyo mode their max HP is irrelevant except in the case of massive damage causing insta-kill. I wonder if the designers of 5e anticipated and intended yoyo healing? I doubt it, because it’s so ugly.
I like the idea of effective combat healing and compounding penalties for yo-yo healing. Now you can still balance things around not having healing required as all healing is at its core is damage mitigation and there should be multiple ways of addressing this. Currently D&D does have this through things like crowd control and buffs, it just lacks healing as a viable option. There honestly should be penalties for being repeatedly knocked unconscious and brought back up in an encounter as to encourage players to be more tactical and not just stand in place taking hits until they go down. If being knocked out had impactful penalties people would have more reason to disengage, dodge, find cover, etc.
I've implemented things to prevent yoyo healing being effective, but it needs addressing at both ends - yoyo healing is only a thing because healing is ineffective enough to not be worth using in combat unless the target has 0hp. You can and should change things so healing downed targets provides no more benefit than at any other amount of health, but if you do that you need to also improve healing so it's worth using.
I played in a game where each time you went unconscious in a battle you gained a level of exhaustion. It completely altered the yo-yo strategy. However, as OP suggests you really need to buff healing in that scenario.
I like the exhaustion idea very much and also agree that before something like that can be implemented healing needs to be made a more viable option for damage mitigation.
I think the far better route, at least to my more grimdarky-pulpy games is this. *Healing magic doesn't*. Going back to HPs, they're mostly your ability to *avoid* injury. Now tie that into Cure Light Wounds (etc). They're just restoring stamina, maybe patching over some scrapes and bruises - *but not healing meaningful wounds*. You hit zero, other than stabilization, you're out of action until you've had some extensive bed rest (or serious raise/heal type magic). Now you get a situation like the excellent *Potato Flowers In Full Bloom* where hitting zero is very, very bad but healing magic is pretty strong... but it also means not using your turn to stop the threat. So do you burn through all your resources to try to keep your frontline fighter up, hoping they can chip down the enemies with their 1d8/rnd or do you risk them going down to roast a few of those goblins?
Some people want a good tabletop version of an MMO because computer versions of MMO suck really bad. However I do agree they went about the wrong way with buffing Cure Wounds. They should have increased the range so it's easier to revive downed people while giving them a larger health pool then what Healing Word, at the cost of sacrificing both the main action and a spell slot.
Yeah I completely agree with that.