The issue on healing has been gone over quite a bit, especially the limitded use in combat and how the cleric never has enough with their inate abilities. So, here is a rough idea on how clerics heal or inflict.
Healing Touch(Inflict has the same rules except with harming)
At 1st level, a cleric can touch a target as a standard action and heal 1d8+level of damage. This can be done each round, but only once a round and cannot be done multiple times with such spells such as haste active.
At third level, the damage healed increases to 2d8+level(Same as Cure Moderate) up to an eventual 4d8+level
So while this doesn't provide super healing for combat, as long as there is time available, everyone can get topped up at the end of a combat.
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This is way to powerful to have as an orison. A neutral cleric would just grab Harm and Heal and use it as their primary attack, it being far better than any weapon they could wield.
If you just want an orison that allows for downtime healing, give them an orison that heals 1 hit point. After a battle have the cleric put his hand on your head and mutter prayers for a minute and you've gained 10 hp.
I think a better option, and something I always go for in games I'm in, is have available for purchase a wand of (Infernal) Healing. You can either leave the spell as is or house rule it to not have the Evil descriptor.
Healing is a major resource in the game. Providing an at-will healing ability would outright break the game and drastically alter it on a fundamental level.
Healing is a major resource in the game. Providing an at-will healing ability would outright break the game and drastically alter it on a fundamental level.
I assume you mean only early levels - after all....
Maybe a spell that lets you heal someone as the heal skill after they have used it once for the day but the person making the check take a penalty equal to the targets HD on the check, and is treated as having the skill unlocks for heal while the orison is prepared:
Lvl10 cleric spends an hour in the forest healing Tankie McBarbarian (lvl 8 barbarian), he rolls heal and subtracts 8, from the roll but passes, the Tankie regains HP as per "1 day rest with long term care" 8HD*4HP/HD=32HP.
This is not a viable combat option but will make healers seem useful in long run crawls and make it so the party isn't having to rest 8 hours every couple chambers.
Healing is a major resource in the game. Providing an at-will healing ability would outright break the game and drastically alter it on a fundamental level.I assume you mean only early levels - after all....
Finding an obscure item from a campaign setting book that provides infinite healing doesn't make for an argument. Especially Inner Sea Gods, which had several other screw ups like that.
I was pulled away and didn't have time to explain more, but 'Healing as an Orison' was just a way of saying 'Healing as an inate ability instead of a spell that has to be prepped/converted. So a battle cleric can get more milage out of their divine favors rather then having to deal with patching up wounds(at low levels of course)
I agree that being able to slap healing on undead and inflict on everyone once per round can really get out of hand
As for Cure Minor wounds, 1 hp every 6 seconds adds up to 10 ho a minute, good for poking people when you are bedding down for the night but if under time pressure it just won't be enough.
Finding an obscure item from a campaign setting book that provides infinite healing doesn't make for an argument. Especially Inner Sea Gods, which had several other screw ups like that.Healing is a major resource in the game. Providing an at-will healing ability would outright break the game and drastically alter it on a fundamental level.I assume you mean only early levels - after all....
It is PFS legal and does see quite a bit of use there - thus a perfectly valid item to bring up. Don't move the goalposts.
I'd suggest taking a look at the Strain-Injury HP Variant that Evil Lincoln cooked up. It addresses your issues with healing in a pretty elegant way. Works great for low-magic campaigns/games without a divine caster.
I don't understand what you're suggesting. "Healing as an orision" seems pretty clear to me.
The cleric is already really good in Pathfinder and was given so many buffs so they don't have to waste preparation slots or use spells. Wands make it pretty trivial to stock up on out-of-combat healing.
"This can be done each round, but only once a round and cannot be done multiple times with such spells such as haste active."
Just want to point out that the spell haste was changed between 3rd edition updated to 3.5. Haste does not grant any ability that would allow an extra spell to be cast, and it's the same for the PF rules.
Also, I think that unlimited healing would detract from the game.
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Instead of using healing as an orison, it's probably easier to say "Combat over, everyone heal up to full", since that's effectively what this would be. It would definitely take a lot of utility out of the other healing spells, and if you went ahead with this orison you'd need to do a large rework on the other healing spells to keep them viable.
That said, I think this would probably work better with the wounds and vigour system, if the orison only heals vigour points. A healing orison makes more sense with that form of health abstraction; it's not healing actual damage, it's just re-energising you. It's still a very powerful orison, but it's less powerful than using conventional HP.
If you did use the orison, you'd likely need to compensate by throwing harder encounters out more frequently. Or just not give them the time to heal up between encounters and just throw wave after wave at them.
Instead of Orison, perhaps a supernatural ability like the domain powers
As for other healing spells, this would effectively replace them except for Heal which does a full top up. I can see the potential of this giving more room for other curing spells. instead of 'Larry was blinded but I can't cure him because I had to burn that spell to heal Jim!" said cleric now has a cure blindness spell still prepped.
Changing it to an at-will healing supernatural ability doesn't really change anything.
What do you actually want to accomplish? As Wolin points out, providing at-will healing has a dramatic affect on the game.
Well a common issue that is brought up is that one either doesn't heal enough to keep up with damage as levels go up, and one doesn't have enough healing either. One starts converting spells that they intened for something else(Like sacrificing a Divine Favor for Cure Light for example)
At will healing of say 1d8+level would address part of this such as 'Out of healing!' part A cleric could Divine Favor and get into melee, and if someone eats a crit, they can still offer healing without regretting using divine favor.
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Well a common issue that is brought up is that one either doesn't heal enough to keep up with damage as levels go up, and one doesn't have enough healing either. One starts converting spells that they intened for something else(Like sacrificing a Divine Favor for Cure Light for example)
At will healing of say 1d8+level would address part of this such as 'Out of healing!' part A cleric could Divine Favor and get into melee, and if someone eats a crit, they can still offer healing without regretting using divine favor.
So the problem is that PCs cannot out-sustain the damage they take? Because healing spells aren't powerful enough to do so? That's an intentional feature of the game.
The whole game centers around mitigating risk and preventing damage by playing smart and preparing. This better emphasizes tactical gameplay and helps prevent battles from getting too long. It also prevents battle outcomes from becoming too binary. Even if you survive a fight, you can still "lose" if the battle proved too costly. If the cleric spent too many spells or uses of channel energy patching up the fighter, the party might have to rest for the day, losing precious time. Continuing the adventure becomes more tense and risky. So, you must play smart to mitigate this situation. This whole system keeps combat from getting stale.
An at-will healing ability would completely change all of this.
If a non-low-level party needs more out of combat healing, they can simply stock up on cure light wound wands. In fact, I actually think wands trivialize preparation too much. Though, the above dynamics are still at play since even having those 20 wands in your pocket still cost you a significant investment.
Very well put Cyrad. I would upvote your post if I could.
By level 2 everyone's hauling a wand that can heal in some capacity.
Yes, but those wands are a limited resource - you still need to spend those 15 or more gp per charge of healing - an equivalent of a day and a half of comfortable living - that won't be spent on something else, and the value of that healing will reduce as the party levels up as 1d8+1 points of healing become a smaller and smaller fraction of their health.
As was said before, the proposed rule is a game changer, changing the balance of the way the healing and hit points works, from being a medium-term resource, to being a short term resource. If it is what you want from your game, fine, but by making it an orison, you are forcing party to have a divine caster to keep up with the changed game. Having the short rest heal all the lost hit points is a viable option to avoid shoehorning one or more players to be a divine caster. Having a normal rest heal all the hit points would be a practical must in such campaign. Heal skill treat deadly wounds should probably heal all hit points too.
On the other hand, if you want to expand healing capabilities without redesigning the hit point paradigm, you could have a 0th level healing spell that works like witch's Healing hex: provides healing as cure light wounds but each creature can be affected with it only once per day.
Someone one said something about out of combat healing and it got me thinking: what if cure spells healed a certain percent of total HP out of combat (or the caster can choose to roll at low levels), light heals 25%, moderate 50%, serious 75%, and critical 100%; heal spell is still useful because it now heals to full out of combat and removes pesky conditions. To be honest, it doesn't really make sense why cure light wounds is god tier at level 1 and a waste at level 20; light wounds are still light wounds and even serious wounds is very meh at level 20 even though when you imagine a barbarian with serious wounds, you expect him to be missing 200+HP.
Thoughts?
Someone one said something about out of combat healing and it got me thinking: what if cure spells healed a certain percent of total HP out of combat (or the caster can choose to roll at low levels), light heals 25%, moderate 50%, serious 75%, and critical 100%; heal spell is still useful because it now heals to full out of combat and removes pesky conditions. To be honest, it doesn't really make sense why cure light wounds is god tier at level 1 and a waste at level 20; light wounds are still light wounds and even serious wounds is very meh at level 20 even though when you imagine a barbarian with serious wounds, you expect him to be missing 200+HP.
Thoughts?
CLW is already better than CCW for wands, because it heals more per GP. Out-of-combat healing already borders on trivial past level 1. Probably don't need to make it even better.
Although I don't agree with the arguments made above that healing is a major resource factor (is really isn't, I did a bunch of maths on it a few weeks ago in a thread to prove channel energy wasn't worth boosting CHA for.), really the optimal solution if you want out-of-combat healing to be better is exactly as they have suggested: do away with out-of-combat healing entirely and just have your players heal to full after 10 minutes rest.
This changes the dynamic earlygame (1st and 2nd level) but means absolutely nothing in the mid to late game. Giving a buff to very low level parties is only a risk in that it requires you to have encounters with a chance of death if you want to challenge them (a bad idea because low level combat is swingy and there is no access to raise dead yet). Low healing resources is good for early levels because it gives your players a very clear 'let's retreat now' moment where they can feel like they have been challenged without actually dying.
Mostly though, there's not much point to it because healing just isn't that important in pathfinder. Get a wand of infernal healing/CLW and eventually boots of earth. That's literally it.
CLW is already better than CCW for wands, because it heals more per GP. Out-of-combat healing already borders on trivial past level 1. Probably don't need to make it even better.Someone one said something about out of combat healing and it got me thinking: what if cure spells healed a certain percent of total HP out of combat (or the caster can choose to roll at low levels), light heals 25%, moderate 50%, serious 75%, and critical 100%; heal spell is still useful because it now heals to full out of combat and removes pesky conditions. To be honest, it doesn't really make sense why cure light wounds is god tier at level 1 and a waste at level 20; light wounds are still light wounds and even serious wounds is very meh at level 20 even though when you imagine a barbarian with serious wounds, you expect him to be missing 200+HP.
Thoughts?
Do you mean that its useless to heal out of combat by "trivial" because if so why wouldn't it deserve a boost?
Turning HP in to a consumable sits in poor taste to me and im sure isn't what the OP intended. Plus everyone with a healing spell has cure light so its not like wands of it are useless when you can just pop a squat for 8 hours.
CLW is already better than CCW for wands, because it heals more per GP. Out-of-combat healing already borders on trivial past level 1. Probably don't need to make it even better.Someone one said something about out of combat healing and it got me thinking: what if cure spells healed a certain percent of total HP out of combat (or the caster can choose to roll at low levels), light heals 25%, moderate 50%, serious 75%, and critical 100%; heal spell is still useful because it now heals to full out of combat and removes pesky conditions. To be honest, it doesn't really make sense why cure light wounds is god tier at level 1 and a waste at level 20; light wounds are still light wounds and even serious wounds is very meh at level 20 even though when you imagine a barbarian with serious wounds, you expect him to be missing 200+HP.
Thoughts?
Do you mean that its useless to heal out of combat by "trivial" because if so why wouldn't it deserve a boost?
Turning HP in to a consumable sits in poor taste to me and im sure isn't what the OP intended. Plus everyone with a healing spell has cure light so its not like wands of it are useless when you can just pop a squat for 8 hours.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. Trivial as in, trivially easy to acquire and not costing a great deal of build resources to use unless you have no magic users at all.
Outside of specific builds it is useless to heal in combat, not out of combat, and as mentioned above that is a specific design feature of the 3.x system and should not be buffed.
Not sure what you mean by HP as a consumable.
Ok that makes more sense.
HP being consumable means that if you just buy wands or potions for all of your healing, HP starts costing gold which I personally don't like and people I play with in real life generally don't like consumables in general as their usage is not encouraged as it counts as gold for level (so now your HP indirectly factors into your valence gold).
Although I don't agree with the arguments made above that healing is a major resource factor (is really isn't, I did a bunch of maths on it a few weeks ago in a thread to prove channel energy wasn't worth boosting CHA for.), really the optimal solution if you want out-of-combat healing to be better is exactly as they have suggested: do away with out-of-combat healing entirely and just have your players heal to full after 10 minutes rest.
This changes the dynamic earlygame (1st and 2nd level) but means absolutely nothing in the mid to late game. Giving a buff to very low level parties is only a risk in that it requires you to have encounters with a chance of death if you want to challenge them (a bad idea because low level combat is swingy and there is no access to raise dead yet). Low healing resources is good for early levels because it gives your players a very clear 'let's retreat now' moment where they can feel like they have been challenged without actually dying.
Mostly though, there's not much point to it because healing just isn't that important in pathfinder. ..
What I described in my above post relates to the fundamental game system at its heart. Even if healing gets more easily obtained or stockpiled, it still plays a major role in that system. Taking damage still ultimately costs you money and/or party resources, even if you hoard 5000 CLW wands in your pocket.
Make gasoline cheaper; the car engine still runs on gas.
Invent a device that magically conjures gas and attach it to your car; you completely revolutionize combustion engineering forever.
Thanks for your answers and ideas. I guess I was just trying tot hink of ways to help keep healing viable even in combat. Perhaps just ditching the random part and saying
CLW=8
CMW=16
CSW=24
CCW=32
If healing is max, then maybe the +level could be discarded.
Like I said, the game rewards preventing damage than recovering it. However, you can still play a healing specialist with some success. I've seen plenty of players who rolled up an Oracle of Life, a cleric, or a witch, and spent every other round pushing out big heals. It's viable, but not optimal.
If you want to change your home game to make sustain more useful in combat, a better approach would be reducing the action economy of cure spells, which is what 4th Edition did. Action economy is the greatest limiting factor on cure spells because unless you have an ally low on hit points, it's better to spend your standard action to help end the battle faster.
Like people have said, there are more efficient ways in combat to prevent damage: end combat faster or preventative magic.
Thus, healing is often relegated to outside combat. Who needs it the most? Martials.
Thus, more out of combat healing means more staying power for Martials. They actually get to "do it all day long", as opposed to worrying about having hitpoints left to continue.
Yes, it's a fundamental change to the encounter game. One that benefits characters that get beat up the most. Perhaps the group will feel it's okay to take on that 4th or 5th encounter without needing the Wizard to restore his big spells, if all the martials are still ready to go.
By level 2 everyone's hauling a wand that can heal in some capacity.
I have never been in a group that had more than one healing wand in the party. I take that back - one time we briefly had a second wand. Never had the disposable wealth to do so, and I thinks it's pretty cheese anyways.