Addendum's page

They function entirely differently - a dying character can't spend an action to heal. A character with their hands occupied (either holding a two-handed weapon, a sword and a shield, grappling, or any other number of things) cannot benefit from Fresh Produce. Not to mention that waving away "sure the actions are spent by two different characters" is incredibly disingenuous as to the impact being dramatically different between Encounter mode and Exploration mode - to say nothing that essentially "giving your allied slowed 1" for a minor heal is a risk that many groups cannot take.

You're taking two different applications and reducing them to numbers that have nothing to do with how they function. Yes, that is disingenuous.

Every single healing ability or feat comes with some subsidiary effect. Should I try to somehow quantify value of Fresh produces Void resistance? Should I try to somehow quantify Rebuke Deaths wounded removal? How do I properly compare the value of the two between one another. How do I quantify the value of Fresh Produce not requiring focus points? How much value do focus points have? These types of differences end up not mattering because they all have some extra merit and the goal is to gauge its capacity to *heal*. I use health per action because it's significantly easier to do so and I find that Rebuke Death and Fresh Produce is an interesting thing to compare specifically because of how the action usage lines up so well to its projected healing output.

This metric makes a bit more sense if you view fights as an allotted number actions over the entire combat. The overarching goal is to kill your foes before your group dies. How much value are you getting with each individual action to accomplish this goal. To explain it another way, let's say 3 action rebuke death is used twice, this is 6 actions spent. Can we not then compare 3 total uses of Fresh Produce, or 6 actions spent, to the healing output of Rebuke death to gauge their overall contribution to your teams survival? This is still ~11 health per action spent for Rebuke Death and ~13 health per action spent for Fresh Produce.

Interesting analysis. I think with Garden of Healing they got carried away with the "yes but it could also heal your enemies" possible drawback, and the radius is restrictive. But out of combat it's a bit out of control.

Yes. The Exemplars Scar of the Survivor, to a lesser degree the Radiant Epithet, and the Animist's Garden of Healing are ones I wanted to point at as being pretty egregious but I didn't want to focus too much on them in this particular topic given that they are test material. It's more that the existence of these options being presented as possible future content does draw attention to how small the time investment needed for groups to attain full health is becoming with newer options.

Just a note that the latter is called Assurance (Medicine). It's a Skill feat that I take for all my PCs who do Battle Medicine.

I did all of this math without assurance factored in at all, if I did all of the medicine checks would have effectively been pushed back. This is to say I was being overwhelmingly generous with my projected medicine numbers.

But notice that these healing off-encounter abilities have their own unique costs. Medicine is just a skill that can be easily improved with just skill feats. Most other healing are part of a class chassis or require that you take some specific subclass or use class feats or choose an archetype.

I understand that some of them can heal pretty fast but in the end during most time all party will heal until full or will wait to refocus or use 10 or more minutes to investigate a room anyway. This won't change that much at all. In pathfinder most partys will usually try to stop 10-30 minutes to recover, investigate and refocus whenever they can and the healing speed usually doesn't change this at all.

This is actually in part my point. Let's isolate the comparison to two options instead, neither of which are medicine.

Lay on Hands and Ocean's Balm
They are both touch.
Both low level accessible.
They both come with subsidiary bonuses for combat.
And despite everything being almost a one to one comparison between the two, Ocean's balm provides roughly three times the health value and lay on hands requires a refocus while Ocean's Balm on the other hand doesn't come tied to a exploration activity.

What I mean by this is that the disparity between old and new is even more alarming when I don't consider medicine at all.

As for your point about groups healing until full, the question I would like to pose is, is it healthy for the game overall to have healing occur as fast is it is with the recent options? In my opinion it clearly cheapens older alternatives but the way these newer options are operating feels as though it also clashes with the expected norm for exploration activities. To touch back on the Ocean's Balm vs Lay on Hands for example, Lay on Hands interacts with exploration activities in the form of refocusing, the player utilizing it will need work with other group members to contribute to the healing knowing they'll need to invest more of their exploration activity time into refocusing if they choose to use it. Perhaps the group feels that player should instead have focused their efforts on searching or patrolling the area instead? Ocean's Balm on the other hand only interacts with exploration activities in the sense that the player utilizing it needs to stop what they're doing momentarily to use it again every 10 minutes, it doesn't have a time investment associated with it. The group could in theory continue traveling with the kineticist utilizing these types of tools every 10 minutes, to heal while moving, simply because it doesn't interact with exploration mode at all.

I'm of the opinion that the structure of the exploration activities hinges on an expected rest explicitly to heal. That a standard group of players will feel more inclined to continue with their journey instead of taking alternate options if healing has no time associated with it. And to further that I think players who do have subsidiary exploration activities they could be taking, such as players learning a spell with Magical shorthand or players who might want to finish repairing a dented shield, might feel bad for asking the group to stop their journey on their account if everyone is full hp at the snap of a finger.

Minor point, but I think your ward medic numbers are assuming Master proficiency before you can get it (you're multiplying by 4 and not 2)

This is true! Thank you for correcting me! I'm not sure if I can edit it, if I can I'm not seeing the option too. I'm a bit new to these forums.

I have not checked either the numbers nor the abilities, but I feel many of the "old" healing methods can be used in combat whereas the new ones you mention cannot. If such is the case, the difference in numbers might actually reflect this.

All of the new out of combat healing methods I mentioned are combat tools. In fact, I believe them being so much stronger than other medicine alternatives in the sphere of out of combat healing is as a result of them being designed specifically for combat purposes, they just don't come with the standard out of combat limitations the old ones had.

Also worth noting that many of the old healing sources are going to be remastered and potentially buffed.

This is true, it's possible the remaster addresses this disparity. Though as I mentioned in my response to YuriP the increased rate of healing, and the lack of time spent associated with these new ones, feels as though it hampers the normal relationship between the various exploration activities.

In hostile areas having Medicine expertise and its feats for fast healing can make a difference. I think having at least one character in the party dedicated to Medicine is mandatory. At least the Treat multiple targets one so you use 10 minutes then use spells and consumables for the remaining, saving a lot of resources.

I'm not sure that we're on the same page here. What I'm saying is that medicine and all previous medicine alternatives are being outpaced quite heavily by newer healing options.

Perhaps to try to help explain my concern I could list out some numbers at various levels for out of combat healing options? I'll list the amount of health that can be provided to the group during roughly a 10 minute period of time. I'll assume a group size of 4 and that medicine somehow always magically succeeds. Some of my numbers may be slightly off but they should be close enough to get my point across.

Level 1
Treat wounds DC 15: ~9
Lay on Hands: 6
Life Boost/Hymn of Healing: 8
Chalice*: 3

Ocean's Balm*: ~20 (1d8 per person)
Fresh Produce*: ~16 (1d4+1 per person)
Garden of Healing (Animist): ~100 (10d4 per person)

Level 5
Treat wounds DC 20: ~19
Treat wounds ward medic DC 20: ~76 (2d8+10 per person)
Treat wounds medic dedication and ward medic DC 20: ~96 (2d8+15 per person)
Lay on Hands: 18
Life Boost/Hymn of Healing: 24
Chalice*: 15

Ocean's Balm*: ~50 (3d8 per person)
Fresh Produce*: ~76 (3d4+11 per person)
Garden of Healing: ~300 (30d4 per person)
Radiant Epithet* (Exemplar): 16 (4 per person)

Level 10
Treat wounds DC 30: ~39
Treat wounds ward medic DC 30: ~156 (2d8+30 per person)
Treat wounds medic dedication and ward medic DC 30: ~200 (2d8+40 per person)
Lay on hands: 30
Life Boost/Hymn of Healing: 40
Chalice*: 30
Chalice Adept*: 50

Ocean's Balm*: ~92 (5d8 per person)
Fresh Produce*: 136 (5d4+21 per person)
Torrent in the Blood*: ~92 (5d8 per person)
Dash of Herbs*: ~104 (4d10+4 per person)
Garden of Healing: ~500 (50d4 per person)
Radiant Epithet*: 88 (22 per person)

Entries with a * do not consume downtime activities which allow for other things to be done within that 10 minute period. This can include other sources of healing which I will not factor for this math because I'm not a masochist. But this is still a very notable benefit, just not one I'm willing to quantify here however just imagine the use of two of the kineticist options or a focus spell added into the mix.

I hope you can see just from these examples I included that the older options all maintained a much tighter range for out of combat healing. That within this this old range medicine still came out on top but not so much that the class feat options were not decent alternatives. But with Kineticist and Animist there's a very large gap between even just medicine and these new feats. This gap is concerning me.

Also I was going to include Scar of the Survivor from exemplar but the amount of health that comes out of that when not in combat is effectively an instant full heal. It's like 100d8 in 10 minutes or something starting at level 1, granted it's all self healing but still.

Is it fair to compare class feat/features that lock someone into certain choices (or class options) to skill investment which can be acquired by anyone?

This doesn't make any sense to me. Medicine investment was always stronger than the class feat alternatives in the realm of out of combat healing.

Lay on Hands for example is 6 health for each spell rank.
Life boost is 8 health for each spell rank.
Hymn of healing is the same as life boost

This is all to say even if I don't bring medicine into the equation at all, the newer feats on kineticist and Animist/Exemplar are magnitudes higher than the old class options that provided out of combat healing.

out of combat healing has always been assumed to be more or less free and unlimited... so yes to the last part but no to the first.

I suppose I just fundamentally disagree with the notion that out of combat healing was free and without limit. Feat choices and time has always been costs. With Kineticist, and now Animist/Exemplar, these older feat choices and time investments seem increasingly less valuable which is just coming off strange to me.

To put it into perspective, Garden of Healing on Animist can put out an average of ~25 health to every group member every 11 minutes starting at level 1. While a DC 15 treat wounds is a possible ~9 to a single person in 10 minutes with a 50 minute downtime between uses. I question if the investment in medicine is going to feel good in the future if this is the kind of numbers we are to expect.

Sure Animist is test material but healing out of combat options have been getting increasingly higher since thaumaturge with kineticist being an alarming leap in output.