Well the first thing i can say is give up being a dedicated healer. Healing spells do not scale up quickly enough to compete with damage, either on the physical or magical side. You also do not have enough slots per day to fulfill all the needs.
Its much more effective to use support and summoning spells to assist your group. Summoning Monsters to help your team means more targets for the enemy and more damage being done per turn.
Metamagic for healing, like youve said, just cast a higher tier spell rather than use Metamagic, namely Empower Spell.
Items, namely potions, scrolls, and especially wands are the primary ways to heal. a Wand of Infernal Healing costs 750 gold for 500 Hit points worth of healing.
If You wanted to be a Oracle better at healering, you would probably have to be a Life mystery oracle. Is gains an ability called Channel Positive Energy to heal several party members between 1d6-10d6. The Oracle is actually much better as Channeling than the Cleric as the Oracle requires Charisma for Spells while a Cleric will have Charisma as a secondary stat at best. The Feat Selective Channeling is very useful as it allows you to select what living things to target or ignore, so heal your allies not your enemies. You can also use is to damage undead.
the Life mystery also has as small bonus to Cure spells, but its not significant.
Infernal Healing is a tier 1 spell. You can pick it up as early as level 1, but its better to skip learning it and just buy a wand of Infernal Healing for 50 uses. You dont need to "know" or "prepare" a spell to be able to use a wand version of it. Infernal Healing is an oracle/cleric spell so you can use a wand of it no problem.
How did you build your character in stats and equipment?
You could be a decent warrior with a Morningstar, medium armor, shield, a sling/light crossbow, and whatever else with simple weapon proficiency.
Don't spend feats on improving healing. It really sucks. There are a few feats that help you do things better in general though
Combat Casting
Additional Traits
Improved Initiative/Noble Scion
Extra Revelation
Eldritch heritage is fun and you have the charisma for it
Craft wand lets you spend your spell slots on actually doing things in combat
Rather than taking metamagic I recommend getting Craft Rod(reach, extend, and quicken mostly)
Hmm, I think you rolled dice for your stats as that would be a 37 in Ability Score Buy method of character creation.
Why did you pick the Oracle? You say would want a healer, but you picked an offense oriented mystery and made you stats into a Ninja/Caster. You may actually want to multiclass into a Ninja as your high Charisma means alot of ki points and hopefully the ability to use Sneak attack while using Ash Cloud.
The first eldritch heritage feat gives you the level 1 power of the bloodline - nothing else. The improved version, which you can't take until level 11, gives you either the level 3 or the level 9 power of the bloodline. The greater version, which you can't take until level 17, gives you any one power of the bloodline up to level 15.
The fun part is that you can do some weird things with them. For a while it was the only way for many characters to get a familiar (arcane bloodline). The ghoul sorcerer bloodline level 1 claws actually scale fairly well, as does the nanite level 1 poison. The level 9 power of the shadow bloodline is great for stealthy characters. All the powers of the rakshasa bloodline are good for a social character. There's more - but nothing particularly relevant to healing, sad to say.
Honestly a better "combat healer" would be a hospitaler paladin, or a Oradin ( Oracle + Paladin ) And be both combat effective and effective at healing. Arguably Infernal healing might piss off some good aligned people as its a evil spell so be aware of that.
The clue here is that you dont specialize yourself into a position where you dont feel you contribute, as healing goes you dont have the slots to heal every round, and what are you to do if there is nothing to heal?
You may actually want to multiclass into a Ninja as your high Charisma means alot of ki points and hopefully the ability to use Sneak attack while using Ash Cloud.
Don't. Multiclassing a caster is pretty much the surest way to weaken your character. Ash Cloud doesn't have the range to enable Sneak Attacks, either.
Regarding healing: The only spell that doesn't completly suck for infight healing is Heal, which you don't get until 12th level. Everything else heals less damage than an enemy is expected to do, and really not worth running across the battlefield to deliver as a touch spell. Buffs of Debuffs can easily prevent more damage than cure spells heal. Channeling can be ok, but that would require a different mystery.
With your stats, you could consider going archery. Pretty feat intensitive and you don't have any strength for composite longbow, but ranged attacks out of your ash cloud wold be kinda cool, although I'm not 100% sure if you get the bonuses for being invisible.
The key to playing a great healer (as opposed to a good healer) is having lots of ways to heal without spending spell slots and standard actions. You can't really get that with feats. You need something like the Life mystery.
However, you don't need much to be a good healer. Just a wand of cure light wounds is all you need.
People say that combat healing doesn't keep up, but that is a myth these days.
Infight healing with cure spells doesn't keep up. That's a fact. I've yet to see anyone claiming that every single method of infight healing was bad. It's just normaly generalized because most people mean the cure spells when they talk about healing.
People say that combat healing doesn't keep up, but that is a myth these days.Infight healing with cure spells doesn't keep up. That's a fact. I've yet to see anyone claiming that every single method of infight healing was bad. It's just normaly generalized because most people mean the cure spells when they talk about healing.That normal generalization to which you refer is exactly why it is a myth, correct.
You say that but dont provide any proof or citation otherwise.
Damage outgrows healing very quickly. Healing spells just gain a +1 hit point per caster level, while damage spells gain +1d6.
At level 5 a Wizard/Sorcerer/arcanist can cast Intensified Snowball as a tier 2 spell that averages out at 35 damage. Cure Moderate Wounds is a tier 2 healing while at the same level is 14 healed. Fireball is a tier 3 offense spell, a healing equivalent Mass Cure Light Wounds is tier 5/6.
Heal and Mass Heal are the only great healing spells I know of. They add +10 to healing every level, so you can keep up with healing One person. Mass heal is awesome, but as a tier 9 spell you wont see it until so far into a campaign that you might forget you even had it. Both are so powerful, but to use them you would basically need to reserve all your slots of that tier for the one spell.
There are better ways to heal, but it would still be wise to have everyone in your party with at least 1 rank In Use Magic Device so they can activate Wands and heal each other or themselves.
Edit: The Cleric/Oracle/Druid dont have more than a few scaling offensive spells, such as Flame Strike. This makes it hard to gauge within those classes which is better. If it was Sorcerer Vs Oracle damage, Sorcerer would probably win through raw damage.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: a caster's cure spells are like a barbarian's longbow. There will be times when it's the strongest thing to use, but the more often that happens, the worse of a character you probably built.
Hmm. You probably have the feats free for variant multiclassing. If you get Witch, Wizard, or Arcane Sorcerer, you get a familiar. They're handy for healers, delivering your healing spells to allies. You'd want one with a good move speed, or scent to navigate in the ash cloud. There's not a lot of healing feats, but the Healer's handbook comes out in a couple months.
With your likely low strength, Weapon Finesse might be a good backup. What are your curses?
I was frustated when i found out that the Cleric I was making at the time(and still have) would be so low in terms of healing AND damage. However summoning monsters is another possible method.
By Summon Monster 3+ you can summon monsters with practical durations to last in combat, and there are feats to increase the strength, constitution, and possibly numbers of monsters summoned.
Group buffs such as Blessing of Fervor and Bless also help alot. You can summon a small army of buffed up minions to take down your enemy.
I agree that just using cure spells won't keep up with damage, but there are times when using them is the right thing to do. Later on, heal and high-level spells become de rigeur.
Reach Spell allows you to use spell slots to help someone at range, sometimes considerable range.
Best healing you could do would be a Life Oracle with the VMC cleric (Healing Domain).
Takes a long while to get working, but you have two pools of channel energy, all your cure spells aren't capped on their potency, and they all get Empowered for free.
|
|
Level 11 you Take Divine Interference
It is the "Healer" Divine Capstone.
Negating a critical for a 1st level spell slot is totally worth it and has saved more people than I can count. I know other Divine Players will attest to it being a Mid Level Capstone ability.
As the Groups Support Player you should look for ways to negate as much damage as possible.
(for example) Spells Like: Resist energy, Protection From X (blocking mental control and Keeping summons at bay), Life Bubble, Death Ward.
They either completely negate damage or make it so dismal that the enemy has wasted a turn to do 10 damage instead of 40. This keep people IN the fight and allows you to heal AFTER combat. If you need a spot heal you can do that but typically Cure spells are a bad waste of a standard action in combat. Also negating Say a CloudKill with a Life bubble is much better than trying to fix the entire team of all the CON problems as well as robbing the BBEG of his entire turn casting the spell. Putting the BBEG on his heels and playing catch up to the Groups superior Action economy.
One of the problems I see with using the Ash Cloud Revelation the way you're describing is that - as you know - at 7th level it starts damaging anyone within it's area of effect and most cure spells are delivered by touch.
Have you considered taking the Flame Mystery with the Gaze of Flames Revelation, then dropping Obscuring Mist in the first round?
Feats for healers:
Improved initiative, reach spell, divine interference, combat casting (unless you are an oracle of life), selective channeling (if you had channel), quicken spell (much later), persistent spell, spell penetration
Everything else is up to you. There are no feats which boost healing unless you count extra channels. There are no class features equivalent to an evokers damage boost either.
Your character sounds like something your advisers would want to experiment with, btw. A simple human oracle works fine, especially since you are feat starved as a divine caster :)
Looking at some spells:
- communal spells are better than the single ones; you will usually not be able to buff everyone with resist energy (they won't stand next to you for starters), but you can pull off a communal resist with reach spell (costs a 4th level slot) which protects everyone; same goes for protection from evil, air walk, spell immunity and the others
- check out the various healing spells besides the cure X wounds line; things like path of glory (and the greater version) allow for an easier mop up after a fight and might sometimes help during it; be careful when reading though, some are crock (like symbol of healing)
- restoration is a critical spell for a healer and you don't get the line for free with your mystery; many effects come down to a stat reduction and the restoration line covers that; even if you cannot cure a poison, you might hold off death by CON damage by restoring enough of it; so get it
- some spells look really nice when you need them and don't have, like deathward; but when attacked by 5 dread wraiths, can you really buff everyone with it?; check out what the cure for the problem is and maybe that is easier to get/use (in this case, restoration will cover negative levels)
And a look at the problems of healing:
- forget the famous wand of CLW once you left the first 3 levels, except maybe for aftercare
- death comes usually in form of crits and AE damage, which hurts everyone at once and several times; you need ways to deal with the crits, the other problem is usually not as problematic (some classes have features against AEs or good saves and resist items are not uncommon)
- we were attacked by a buffed cleric with a bastard sword when we were 4th and she critted for 32 damage; at level 14 we got a hydra with 14 heads which critted for 80; the earliest way to deal with that problem is Shield Other on the main tank (= victim), which requires you to have good HP; later on Divine Interference will work wonders
- when an enemy caster nukes you with a delayed blast fireball followed by a quickened fireball for 25d6 (87 average) out of his invisibility, you are in trouble; in lower levels, two sorcerers 6 can nuke your group for 12d6 every round; shutting down casters is very tricky - counterspelling might work, but only against a single caster, handing out communal resist spells with reach spell is somewhat more reliable (but the darn wizards usually stock more than one energy type), a silence spell would be ideal, if you can get it to stick, anything to stun or delay them is good; sometimes your only hope is to go all out and blast instead of prevent to shut down the nuker
- as you can guess, you won't save your party all the time; there is a horrible spell, Breath of Life, which can alleviate a bit of the failures; I say horrible, because it is touch, works only in the next round (if it does work) and the target won't have a lot of HP after recovering...and he and you are standing next to whatever killed him now