I do think maybe the best thing is to make the heal skill really good at repairing HP damage if the party has like 15-60 minutes to kill and someone has invested in it? If you did this, you could leave healing magic for emergencies in combat, when you can't stop for a bit, and for the really nasty stuff and you wouldn't need wands or potions otherwise.
The big obvious ways to improve healing would be:
* Healing spells and items scale with the target and not just the caster. So a potion or CLW spell heals the 20th level fighter for more than the 1st level wizard.
* Some form of healing during short rests between combat. Ideally limited in how much you can get out of this per day, like how 5E had you "spending" and rolling your Hit Dice.
* Make the Heal/Medicine/whatever skill actually... you know... good.
* Give more classes options for either healing damage, or mitigating / preventing damage to begin with. As much as I loved the 4E Warlord, it was weird he could just shout you better... but it'd have been totally fitting if his shouts instead either gave you temp HP ("morale") or instead were used as reactions to prevent damage at the moment it happened.
Then there's one more mitigation option a lot of us older players tend to like if we've played with it from Unearthed Arcana and so on:
* Armor mostly gives damage resistance instead of giant AC bonuses, and instead characters (especially fighter and rogue types) just get better at defending themselves as they level up and preventing blows from landing with superior skill, represented by a class-based bonus to AC similar to how Fort / Ref / Will improve by class. Way more realistic than the old standby, while still managing to be lots of fun, and yet people tend to be scared of it for some reason.
I would like to see the characters heal skill points added into a healing spell - so 1d8 + caster level + heal skill points. a reward for putting ranks into it. The idea that all your heal spells really increase in potency as you level up.
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Make the Heal skill work like the kinetic healing blast - a very good amount of healing with a 'can't get rid of without sleep' non-lethal damage.
I actually kind of like the kinetic heal...
If the game has ANYTHING that looks like burn as a core element, I'm out of here... :P
After thinking about it a bit, I'm of the idea that something that works like healing surges isn't a bad thing after all.
When he has a little time to rest, the hero realizes that those wounds she got during the last combat weren't really that serious, so she bandages up (or drinks some booze or recites a simple prayer or whatever), and the worst is over.
Of course, the most HP the hero has, the more wounds she should be able to ignore.
Can she do it all day long? Not indefinitely, I'd say. Still, it should go a long way to reduce the need of out-of-combat healing and to prolong the adventuring day, while still making chain encounters dangerous because you don't have the time to rest.
That said, I would definitely let a mechanic like this apply to other resources as well.
* Armor mostly gives damage resistance instead of giant AC bonuses, and instead characters (especially fighter and rogue types) just get better at defending themselves as they level up and preventing blows from landing with superior skill, represented by a class-based bonus to AC similar to how Fort / Ref / Will improve by class. Way more realistic than the old standby, while still managing to be lots of fun, and yet people tend to be scared of it for some reason.
Although I doubt the first part (armor as DR) will make it into PF2.0, there have been suggestions that the second part (using actions to better defend yourself) has definitely been gaining traction. We know that you can use a Raise Shield to basically use your shield as DR, and IIRC there was some mention of a rogue feat to dodge a blow. I suspect that many classes will have some access to dodge and parry actions, so the more wounded you are, the more of your action economy you will invest in defense.
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* Armor mostly gives damage resistance instead of giant AC bonuses, and instead characters (especially fighter and rogue types) just get better at defending themselves as they level up and preventing blows from landing with superior skill, represented by a class-based bonus to AC similar to how Fort / Ref / Will improve by class. Way more realistic than the old standby, while still managing to be lots of fun, and yet people tend to be scared of it for some reason.Although I doubt the first part (armor as DR) will make it into PF2.0, there have been suggestions that the second part (using actions to better defend yourself) has definitely been gaining traction. We know that you can use a Raise Shield to basically use your shield as DR, and IIRC there was some mention of a rogue feat to dodge a blow. I suspect that many classes will have some access to dodge and parry actions, so the more wounded you are, the more of your action economy you will invest in defense.
There might be a Reaction introduced like the Shield one but for Heavy Armor.
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* Make the Heal/Medicine/whatever skill actually... you know... good.
Well if they made Treat Deadly Wounds:
* once per encounter rather than per day* not have that stupid penalty for consumption of heal kit
and
* maybe reduce the DC a bit
It would already be pretty good in the hands of someone with some ranks in it. If you changed it so that it gave more with skill unlocks or better DCs (+5,+10,+15 and so on), it would be very potent.
And I feel that would be far more cinematic and suspension-of-disbelief-maintaining than a random heal surge that somehow magically heals mundane people because they what, grunt really hard?
I would like to see the characters heal skill points added into a healing spell - so 1d8 + caster level + heal skill points. a reward for putting ranks into it. The idea that all your heal spells really increase in potency as you level up.
Yay!
As I said elsewhere, I always have max rank Heal skill, even when I'm only getting 3 skill points/level.
I'll be tending your wounds and taking care of you, even in an anti-magic zone.
I would like to see all hit point recovery-- whether natural, medical, or magical-- tied to either a duration-limited character resource or to actual elapsed time.
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So, as treat deadly wounds has been mentioned in several threads I thought I would check my assumptions on it as I have never seen it used at a table and remember thinking "Well, that is useless" after reading it.
So a couple of points.
1.) Using the heal skill or in PF2 the medicine skill for level appropriate healing is good in my opinion.
2.) The line
You must expend two uses from a healer’s kit to perform this task.You take a –2 penalty on your check for each use from a healer’s kit that you lack.
I always took to mean, you must use 2 uses of a healers kit to use treat deadly wounds and that if you did not have enough uses left in your kit, i.e. 1, or did not have a kit at all you took the -2 for each of the 2 uses you did not use. I had never read it as "your healers kit is at 6/10 uses so you take a -8".
3.) Treat deadly wounds in PF1 takes an hour.
4.) Treat deadly wounds heals either creatures level on a DC20 check or creatures level + your Wis mod on a DC25 check. This means with taking 10 you are able to use treat deadly wounds at DC20 at around level 1 if you invest skill ranks, have it as a class skill, and have a 4+ wisdom mod.
You can start taking 10 to beat the DC25 check at level 6, with the same investment.
5.) This means at you are taking an hour per patient to heal each patient for 1-5 damage, at levels 1-5, when you can make the DC20 check, and 10-32, at levels 6-20, when you can make the DC25 check.
6.) You may only do this once per day, per patient.
7.) At level six when you change over to the DC25 check you are at the greatest % total HP healed. It scales down from there as the scaling on TDW is very very slow. If this is on a D10 martial with average HP a two con mod and no con belt or level up bonuses spent in con, you are healing ~22 % of his/her 49 HP at 11 HP healed.
8.) Actual average % healed over all levels is 13%. This is assuming a user of TDW has a starting 4 Wis mod and uses all level ups for Wis along with buying a Wis headband and a Wis Tome +5. The D10 martial is buying a con belt starting at level 7, and keeping it upgraded but making no other concessions to con.
9.) The cost of TDW is the same as a CLW wand in HP/GP at level 4. It is more expensive before, and less expensive after, becoming much less expensive once you can make the DC25 check.
Conclusions:
A.) Treat deadly wounds is only a level appropriate amount of healing at ~levels 6-9, and then only with a specific and large investment.
B.) At once per patient per day the periodicity of TDW is punitive.
C.) At an hour per patient the use time of TDW is punitive.
So, I would argue that TDW is effectively useless in PF1 due to its low effective healing, long periodicity, investment required and use time.
If we change it to alleviate these issues I believe we should have it do the following.
I.) Heal 20%-25% of a D10 martial's HP, at every level, not just at its peak, with similar investment from the martial to what I described above.
II.) Have a periodicity of 1/encounter.
III.) Have a use time of from 3 actions to a maximum of 5 minutes. I personally prefer closer to the lower end.
IV.) Do not require any investment beyond Skill ranks and a healers kit, so that more classes can use it. Effectively lower the DC.
Tl;DR: TDW is a great thematic vehicle via the heal skill to defeat the "It's your turn to play the healer" syndrome, it just needs a complete rework, which hopefully we will get.
Math!: Yeah!
Personally, while I like most of that, I think putting a hard limit on the number of times in a day (including roundabout ways of per encounter) the skill can be used to treat deadly wounds is the wrong way to go. I think it would be better bounded by time involved. Even if you shrink the time it takes to treat deadly wounds down to 20 minutes, you're looking at over an hour to treat an entire party of four. So then the trade-off is "do we have another 20 minutes to treat Bob who's not hurt as badly?" And the answer might be "Sure, let's do it" or "No, this 20 minutes is worth spending a resonance on a potion or wand charge."
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2.) The lineYou must expend two uses from a healer’s kit to perform this task.You take a –2 penalty on your check for each use from a healer’s kit that you lack.I always took to mean, you must use 2 uses of a healers kit to use treat deadly wounds and that if you did not have enough uses left in your kit, i.e. 1, or did not have a kit at all you took the -2 for each of the 2 uses you did not use. I had never read it as "your healers kit is at 6/10 uses so you take a -8".
I was really confused what people were complaining about regarding healer's kits. Thanks for clearing that up.
Yeah, most skills that require tools give you a -2 penalty if you don't have the tools. Treat deadly wounds is a -4 penalty if you don't have the kit, or only -2 if you want to preserve uses and only use one.
No time to read the whole thread.
As for magical healing and resonance I don't know enough to comment at this time.
For mundane healing I'd say make it worth while.
Strictly for out of combat unless you have a feat or something. Well maybe stopping a minor bleed effect I'd be okay with. Yes you have to remove armour to sew up your torso etc(special feats, armours and other items aside). :)
People should be able to be healed many times per day possibly with increasing DC's but maybe not.
Regardless it would be available for all. I think it's thematic for tough warriors to sew themselves up between fights. So it would spread around the healing duties and negate the need for a specific healer in the group.
Now I remember hearing the high level martials could do things completely not possible in real life so why not have people be able to do something akin to micro surgery at high levels or whatever else to heal conditions etc?
Videis surgeon Paladin for the win! :)
If CLW wands need to be reigned in then change them from 50 charges total to 3/day. No resonance or healing surges.
Or have healing spells do like magic missile and cure more damage the more actions you use to cast it. But at the same time allow you to use more than a turn's worth of actions out of combat.
Side Note: I hate hate HATE "per encounter" as a frequency. An encounter is not a measurement of time. A day is a measurement of time. So is an hour, or 10 minutes. Use actual measures of time when determining frequency.
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I'm playing Iron Gods and we found an advanced Medical bag(actual name escapes me) that gives a bonus to heal checks and/or flat healing on use.
I see no reason why normal medical kits + bandages can't do the same
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If CLW wands need to be reigned in then change them from 50 charges total to 3/day. No resonance or healing surges.
Possibly undesired workaround: Just buy more CLW wands. That is still a better deal than wands of the next spell level up.
2.) The lineYou must expend two uses from a healer’s kit to perform this task.You take a –2 penalty on your check for each use from a healer’s kit that you lack.I always took to mean, you must use 2 uses of a healers kit to use treat deadly wounds and that if you did not have enough uses left in your kit, i.e. 1, or did not have a kit at all you took the -2 for each of the 2 uses you did not use. I had never read it as "your healers kit is at 6/10 uses so you take a -8".
I took that to mean 6/10 = -8. And complained to my DM. He agreed with that interpretation and immediately houseruled it away on the spot because it was crazy. Plus he lets me refill it at 5 gold/use (it costs 5/use anyways).
That's a perfect example of weird phrasing that was being discussed in another thread. /sigh
The first sentence says, "You must expend two uses". Must. So logically, you can't be using a kit that's 1 of 10 uses. But that other interpretation makes sense.
It should probably read something like this: "Performing this task uses two uses from the kit. If the kit is low or empty, a -2 to -4 penalty applies: -2 if the kit has 1 uses left, -4 if no uses remain". Assuming that this -4 interpretation is okie. That's a very flexible definition of "must" here. :P
If that -4 stuffs is right, btw, you could always carry an empty kit around and have 0 gold cures assuming you can handle DC24/29.
Oh um I think a medicine cleric can use it much faster than a regular person, FYI.
I don't agree with making it super-accessible though. Let's reward people that think outside the box and have like say, a high-wisdom fighter (and make it a class skill for fighties and monks as well). Maybe it could do like.. always have the wis modifier in there (0 if negative), and do +1 health/level for DC15, +2 for DC20, and +3 for DC25 and so forth?
Or have healing spells do like magic missile and cure more damage the more actions you use to cast it. But at the same time allow you to use more than a turn's worth of actions out of combat.
I like that idea. They're already doing that with Magic Missile, btw. It fires like.. one missile per action I think (and PF2 has three actions/round)..
That reminds me though, one of our 3.5 DMs made cantrips like they are in Pathfinder (long before PF1).... He regretted that instantly of course because I remembered that I had Cure Minor Wounds~
Personally, I love healing.
I do too! <3
Choosing to play without a healer should be harder... Not impossible but it should hurt.
Exactly!!