Making the Heal Skill do more via feats (New Argonauts Conversion)

[Caedwyr]

I'm looking to do a conversion of the Asclepian Doctor feat from Sean K Reynold's New Argonauts book. The 3.5 text of the feat is below

Quote:

Asclepian Doctor [General]

Your knowledge of medicine lets you perform miracles of healing.

Prerequisites: Field Surgeon, Heal 10 ranks.

Benefit: You can use the Heal skill to perform complex surgery and use advanced treatment methods to cure mortal wounds and terminal afflictions. The required treatment determines the DC of the Heal check.

Treatment DC
Neutralize poison 15 + poison DC
Remove disease 15 + poison DC
Cure hit points 20
Repair injury 20
Raise the dead 30 + number of days dead

Neutralize Poison[/]i: You detoxify one poison from a creature or object, similar to using the spell of the same name.

[i]Remove Disease[/]i: You cure one disease present in the target creature, similar to using the spell of the same name.

[i]Cure Hit Points: You cure 1d10 hit points as if using a cure spell. This is immediate curing rather than the delayed effect of field surgery.

Repair Injury: You can repair permanent injuries or debilitations such as a crippled leg or blindness. The patient can’t regrow missing tissue, so recovering lost limbs or repairing blindness from having one’s eyes torn out cannot be accomplished.

Raise the Dead: You can restore life to a person killed by poison, disease, or injury, subject to the limitations of the raise dead spell. The gods do not appreciate mortals raising the dead, however, and Zeus hurled a thunderbolt at the last mortal to do so....

Treating a patient normally takes 1 hour. You may take 20 on this check. Reducing the time to 10 minutes, 5 minutes, or 1 minute respectively adds +5, +10, or +15 to the DC.

Try Again: Yes.

I'll probably make it a bit more campaign neutral, but I'm wondering what range and limitations should I put into the feat during the conversion to keep it balanced as a campaign agnostic feat. I'm thinking of keeping the Prerequisite Heal ranks at 10, rather than reducing it to 7 as the conversion guide suggests. This would give the Raise Dead effect two character levels after casters get it. Altneratively, I could change it to 8 ranks, which makes it obtainable at the same level as Raise Dead normally comes into play.

My other concerns are if the DCs for the Raise Dead effect are high enough and what, if any, other limitations should be put on the Raise dead effect. Should I add some sort of material component/cost. Should the DC be higher? Remember, I'm trying to retain the skill, not magic nature of the original feat.

[Drejk]

Raise dead normally becomes available to party at 9th Cleric level so it would be 9 ranks needed. It certainly should be made harder by adding costly components or special considerations to use (such as hidden check each use if the gods send avenging angel after healer... or inevitable/aeon/psychopomp considers that tampering with life abominable and starts hunting the character or revieved person).

Also, I would separate actual raising the dead effect from resuscitation characters that fell within minutes, maybe hours. Even separate it into different feats to make Asclepian Doctor a chain instead of a single feat.

Remember that in PF healers can already heal hit point damage (once per day, heal 1 hp per level of the patient, plus Wisdom bonus if check succeeded by 5 or more) so any additional healing should follow that model instead of becoming wild 1d10.

[Quatar]

I dunno, I wouldn't split it into even more feats. Clerics and so get that stuff basicly all for free, I don't think that if someone who wants to play a healer without being a cleric should be even more penalised than they already are in that.

Also it's not instant, it takes 1 HOUR to make that check, unless you increase the DC. So you can't really spam it on the party to heal them up and save your wand

You can also remove the Heal skill requirement (or lower it drastically), and then add certain levels to unlock those abilities.
"At 3rd level you can cure hit points. At 5th you can repair injury. At 5th level you can Remove Disease. At 7th Neutralize Posion and at 9th you get to Raise the Dead."

"At 7th level you can resuscitate a very recently departed person who's not been dead for more than your level in rounds by the time you start the action. This otherwise works as Raise the Dead."
(Yes thats earlier than RtD, but very limited)

Also to Raise the Dead you might need oils and stuff worth 5000 gp, just to keep it in line with other raise spells. Resuscitating probably needs stuff worth 1000gp.

[Caedwyr]

So, one suggestion I'm hearing is to add a 3rd column listing the minimum number of skill ranks in order to perform one of the actions. I can see doing something like that. I'll see what I can whip up.