So yes, at level 20 your Oracle of Life Assimar will channel for 15d6.
Most adventure paths don't go much past level 15, so I am not sure that progression past level 20 is really a big deal.
Also, because of the way the bonus progresses being Aasimar gives very little benefit at lower levels.
Level -> Difference(between Aasimar and non-Aasimar channel)
1 -> 0
2 -> 1
3 -> 0
4 -> 1
5 -> 1
6 -> 2
7 -> 1
8 -> 2
9 -> 2
10 -> 3
11 -> 2
12 -> 3
13 -> 3
14 -> 4
15 -> 3
16 -> 4
2 levels -> no benefit
4 levels -> +1 dice to channel energy
4 levels -> +2 dice to channel energy
4 levels -> +3 dice to channel energy
2 levels -> +4 dice to channel energy
That is incorrect. PC aasimars are outsiders with the native subtype, Smite Good only deals double damage aginst outsiders with the good subtype. And if the oracle is a neutral alignment, it won't work against them at all.The outsider (native) type would be a problem for a physical brute who wanted to get enlarge person or something like that. For a stand in the back finger-wiggler, it has almost no drawbacks.
Double damage from anti-paladins + level 11 paladin using Aura of Vengence on Oracle = Antipaladin and all allies withing 30 feet get +22 damage on their first successful attack...
There are a few other abilities like this. Native Outsider makes you immune to some things(like hold person), but it does open you up to a few specific abilities that are meant to be really nasty to outsiders.
Seems that PF changed a few things to be kinder to native outsiders, but the one thing I always hated was.
A creature who has been turned into an undead creature or killed by a death effect can't be raised by this spell. Constructs, elementals, outsiders, and undead creatures can't be raised. The spell cannot bring back a creature that has died of old age.
Cost if a human dies - 5450 and requires a large city
Cost if an Aasimar dies - 10910 gp and requires a metropolisThat was before they added the line to the native subtype that allows them to be raised as normal back in late 3.0, early 3.5.
And to those saying, "healing in combat is a sucker's game," it's not if you do it right. But doing it right feels counter intuitive because you're mostly healing yourself.
The point being made is not to never heal. The point is to do everything you can to avoid it being necessary.
And to those saying, "healing in combat is a sucker's game," it's not if you do it right. But doing it right feels counter intuitive because you're mostly healing yourself.
The point being made is not to never heal. The point is to do everything you can to avoid it being necessary.
There are some people on these forums who are very vehemently saying you should never heal in combat. Last year I made a life oracle and was told it was a completely useless PC, that if that was what I thought was good I should just quit the game, etc... They were really very insulting about it to the point that the moderators erased most of their posts in the thread.
I think we will disagree.
If you had the ability to heal 1000hp at a rate of 1hp/round.. would this make you a good healer? No better than a ranger with several wands of cure light wounds.. worse in fact.
Charender and I have a good discussion on this. Read that to catch up. No one is talking 1hp/round except you.
EDIT: Please do not take this as a snide comment, just in case. I simply answered the other two important metrics (burst single healing and burst group healing) to you and again to Charender already.
I was thinking about this last night, and it goes back to my comment about "If you have perfect usage of Life Link"
Lets say you have a party member who is down 45 HP.
You have a 5d6 channel. On you it heals 5d6 + 10 = 27.5 On them it heals heals 5d6 = 17.5.
So you spend 5 rounds transferring 30 hp of damage from them to you, then you channel once. So it takes you 5 rounds to heal 45 damage. So you are only healing 9 hp per round on average. A wand of cure light would heal 5.5 hp per round. This also assumes you get average rolls on your channel. If you get a better than average roll, the extra healing goes to waste, and if get a bad roll, you a left with the choice to go into the next battle down a 10 hp, or use energy body to top your self off(which will over heal).
Thus, while I do see that life link is a lot better than I originally gave it credit for, perfect usage of life link is going only about twice as fast as a wand of cure light. It is also going to be next to impossible to achieve due to the randomness of channel healing, you are going to have to deal with a lot of under and over healing.
There are some people on these forums who are very vehemently saying you should never heal in combat. Last year I made a life oracle and was told it was a completely useless PC, that if that was what I thought was good I should just quit the game, etc... They were really very insulting about it to the point that the moderators erased most of their posts in the thread.
And to those saying, "healing in combat is a sucker's game," it's not if you do it right. But doing it right feels counter intuitive because you're mostly healing yourself.
The point being made is not to never heal. The point is to do everything you can to avoid it being necessary.
I generally play battle clerics, and I would mostly agree that healing in combat is a waste until you get the heal spell. My reasoning is this.
Take my fire giants from earlier.
You have a balanced party Tank, DPS, cleric, wizard
Against an AC24 fighter, they deal about 50 damage per round and have 150 hp.
The same well build fighter does about 50-60 damage per round and has 80 hp.
The DPS is an archer who is hanging back and doing 60-70 damage per round.
The wizard is a battlefield controller all of his effort is going into making the giants attack us one at a time in melee with the fighter.
So now we come to the cleric. I have 2 options.
1. Focus on pure healing, My burst healing on the fighter amounts to a cure critical + quick channel + quickened cure light = 42 + 17.5 + 14.25 = 73.75 and I can keep that going for about 3 rounds.
2. I can be an archer battle cleric, and deal 40(without buffs) to 70(with buffs) damage per round.
So we fight 2 giants, and the wizard controls them so that they come at us single file.
Scenario 1(with healing cleric)
Round 1 - giant charges fighter whack 30 damage, fighter and archer full attack. Cleric heals fighter.
Round 2 - Giant full attacks fighter for 50 damage, fighter and archer kill him. Cleric Heals.
Round 3 - repeat of round 1
Round 4 - repeat of round 2
Total damage taken by the fighter 160.
Scenario 2(with a battle cleric)
Round 1 - giant charges fighter for 30 damage, fighter, archer, and cleric full attack and kill giant.
Round 2 - repeat of round 1
Total damage taken by the fighter 60.
Having another damage dealer in place of a dedicate healer can result in a lot less damage taken. This is why I would never play a pure dedicated healer. The healer needs to at least be able to pull double duty as a battlefield controller or damage dealer.
If you have to quick channel to burst heal a single party member who is hurt, you lose 64 points of total healing.I think you misunderstand me here.
I do not think there would be 100% efficient with the 691 single target healing metric. It only establishes for me the level of healing potential the build will possess prior to dipping spells.
I fully realize that burst healing and inefficient healing will happen during a real adventure. Still 75% efficiency of 691 is greater than 75% efficiency of 300.
The metric works for me, but you and James don't have to use it at all.
When you calculate the damage dealt by a character, you don't just say they hit for 15 damage, you also have to factor in the how often they hit, thus hitting for 10 damage 10% of the time is just the same as hitting fo 1 damage 100% of the time.
If you have a battle field emergency and you have to burst heal a single target, you life link 5 hp, pop a quick channel and a channel to heal a single target. Out of combat, you could have healed 8d6 + 8d6 + 16 = 72 with each of those 3 channel uses. That is 216 points of single target healing you just used. In combat you healed 61 hp. That is a loss of 155 points of potential healing every time you have a battlefield emergency.
The cleric who has to emergency heal pops a quick channel + cure critical = 59.5. Outside of combat they would have healed 77 hp with those same resources.
Your potential is higher, but I feel the odds of achieving that potential are a lot lower. If the cleric has 250 healing resources with a 90% chance of getting the most out of it, while the oracle has 600 healing with a 50% chance, that puts them at 300 to 225 in the final tally.
TLDR: You can't just look at the healing in the absolute best case scenario, you also have to factor in the odds of achieving that scenario.
My point is that you are using Aasimar racial abilities with a Human's bonus vs the cleric.
Your build also doesn't include Quicken spell or Combat Healing, which a lot of my burst healing calculations assume you have.
I'm not sure why my build must include your assumptions for your oracle. You confuse me there.
When you compare the cleric to the oracle, you are assuming you have both extra channel and the Aasimar bonus to channel. Even a human oracle is pushing it to be able to afford extra channel before level 10, there is no way an aasimar oracle can get extra channel while still getting all of the other goodies you want.
Thus your comparison of a human cleric to an aasimar oracle with extra channel is not realistic.
I think you are misunderstanding the main benefit of Life Link. Life Link just synergizes so well with all of your other healing options, including Enhanced Cures, Energy Body, Fey Foundling, and others. As a character who generally sits in the back and wiggles their fingers, a life oracle shouldn't be taking that much direct damage. Life Link allows you to transfer some of that frontliner damage to yourself and "take the edge off" before you channel. Life Link doesn't heal damage, it reassigns it to somebody who probably won't be taking direct damage themselves so that when you channel, it affects more people.
I am specifically responding to the commentary on the 600+ points of single target healing before spells. The only way to reach that number is is to use life link in a very specific way outside of combat, and that way of using it results in about 9 hp healed per round.
I know there are other ways to use it in combat, but we are on a specific tangent about total amount of healing without using your more versatile spell slots.
There's very little need to do this. You can talk about so many rounds worth of healing X amount. This is the actual use in the game, and is very little different from what you are doing in terms of calculations.
I could also say:
8 channels of 8d6 + Life Like to split damage easier + 2 hitpoints per die to heal self + Energy Body healing for 135 average
>>>>>>>
5 channels of 5d6 + 5 healing spells
But, I find it useful for me to split it up into numbers. If you don't find it useful, fine. Others might. I do.
Cheers!
A. The numbers are misleading, because you only get that kind of healing in a carefully controlled situation. The cleric just uses their abilities when healing is needed, the oracle has to have time to move damage around.
B. It also leaves out utility. One of those 5 healing spells is an empowered breath of life. Can your channel bring the recently deceased back to life?
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And to those saying, "healing in combat is a sucker's game," it's not if you do it right. But doing it right feels counter intuitive because you're mostly healing yourself.
The point being made is not to never heal. The point is to do everything you can to avoid it being necessary.
From a purely numerical standpoint I would say you are correct. However, there are actually good meta game reasons to heal rather than attack. Primarily it lets you keep the frontliners in the battle longer which gives them a greater chance to shine and thus makes their players happier. It also increases their survival rate. One thing I have noticed in PF is a distinct difference in mortality rate amongst front liners compared to back liners. This makes some people reluctant to play a front liner. Having a decent combat healer helps with that.
That said, I think every character should be capable of dealing some decent damage when necessary.
Life Link doesn't heal any damage. Anybody who says it does is smoking some really good stuff and they better share. Life Link does reasign damage from damaged characters to a character that was probably previously undamaged. So when you channel, you channel will not affect 1 more character than it would have without Life Link. So, Life Link doesn't heal damage, but it does make every single channel more effective. When you then factor in that the additional person being healed because of Life Link has Fey Foundling, the effectiveness increases even further.
Scenario, you have someone who is down 50 hp.
Without life link, you heal them for 50 hp using 50 hp in AOE healing resources.
With life link, you life link them for 25 hp, then use 25 hp in AoE healing resources heal both you and them back to full.
Effectively, link link healed 25 hp, because of the efficiency increase in AoE healing. The only way to compare life link to other abilities is to quantify this efficiency increase in the form of healing done.
And to those saying, "healing in combat is a sucker's game," it's not if you do it right. But doing it right feels counter intuitive because you're mostly healing yourself.
The point being made is not to never heal. The point is to do everything you can to avoid it being necessary.
From a purely numerical standpoint I would say you are correct. However, there are actually good meta game reasons to heal rather than attack. Primarily it lets you keep the frontliners in the battle longer which gives them a greater chance to shine and thus makes their players happier. It also increases their survival rate. One thing I have noticed in PF is a distinct difference in mortality rate amongst front liners compared to back liners. This makes some people reluctant to play a front liner. Having a decent combat healer helps with that.
That said, I think every character should be capable of dealing some decent damage when necessary.
Get me some smarter frontliners then.
What makes their life easier is only having to deal with one or two effective enemies at a time (if that). Not bandaids.
I could be a wizard at removing bullets and dealing with gunshot wounds but im pretty sure you'd rather have the bullet proof vest (or just not get shot at all) over my medical skills. Food for thought. :)
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Get me some smarter frontliners then.
Yes, because blaming the victims is alway preferable to actually solving the problem...Not!
Since I having been playing D&D since it first came out in '74 and play a lot of PFS my observations are not base on a single group of players.
What makes their life easier is only having to deal with one or two effective enemies at a time (if that). Not bandaids.I could be a wizard at removing bullets and dealing with gunshot wounds but im pretty sure you'd rather have the bullet proof vest (or just not get shot at all) over my medical skills. Food for thought. :)
I never said healing was the only way to accomplish this, simply that it was one way.
Here is a comparison of what I am talking about.
Blasting - killing the monsters before they can hurt you is a great way numerically to help people survive combat. But it clearly shines the spotlight on the blaster. Fine in small doses, not so much in every combat.
Controller - being able to turn a metaphorical lion into a metaphorical kitten is arguably the most powerful option and the one that probably increases survivability the most. It shines the spotlight on you less than blasting but more than the other options. However, player don't get as much of a feeling of accomplishment or the same threat of danger when they kill a kitten instead of a lion.
Buffing - this is another powerful option that allows other shine but can sometimes remove the perceived threat of danger more effectively than healing as never being hit doesn't convey the same sense of danger as being brought back from the brink of death.
Healing - increases survivability, while allowing other PCs time in the spotlight and maintaining a sense of danger.
Now you can argue that Healing is not the best of those options at keeping front liners alive but that is not the entire point.
Get me some smarter frontliners then.
Yes, because blaming the victims is alway preferable to actually solving the problem...Not!
Since I having been playing D&D since it first came out in '74 and play a lot of PFS my observations are not base on a single group of players.
I'm just going to be frank with you.
I don't know you. Telling me that you've played X amount of years is about as effective as posting that you're a navy seal with 100 confirmed kills and can find my house to do unspeakable things to me. Pretty much nil.
On the same token me telling you my credentials are next to meaningless since you don't know me.
That being said I was addressing your point about healing to what was essentially a common sense statement.
Is healing good? Yes sometimes. Is it worth heavy investment? No. If you have to invest heavily in keeping krognar facesmasher from committing suicide by goblin spear than maybe it's time Krognar took on a less dangerous profession. Like perhaps demolitions.
And ultimately there are no victims here. Krognar could have waited a whole round to let his casters get in gear before charging in. And if krognar does wait and his casters aren't doing there job. Well, then it's not exactly Krognar's fault is it?
And you know what, even with all the preventatives in the world Krognar sometimes still gets his face smacked in. That's fine, we have spells for that. But if it turns into an every encounter occurance we're going to need to reevaluate our approach before we send Richards of the Red Shirt to explain things to Krognar's mother.
AS for the spotlight..well I could honestly care less one way or another. I've always been more interested in overall narratives and character development rather than clutch moments of awesome in desperate situations more suited to movies and comics. But hey, that's just me.
How about an Ifrit life oracle? They get the same favored class option as Aasimars.
The numbers are misleading, because you only get that kind of healing in a carefully controlled situation. The cleric just uses their abilities when healing is needed, the oracle has to have time to move damage around.You don't like my metric. That's fine. Will you please list yours?
How do you compare 5X 5d6 Channel w/o Life Link to 8X 8d6 Channel w/ Life Link? Are they the same? How much better or worse?
First up, is is 5x 5d6 channel vs 7x 8d6 channel w/ Life Link. We have covered that the oracle does not really have the freedom to take extra channel, while the cleric does.
Second, you do it the way I have been. You quantify exactly how much healing you lose in an emergency.
The Oracle has 600 single target out of combat healing before spells. Every time they emergency heal, they lose about 150 points of total healing potential. Burst healing to OOC healing efficiency is 29%.
The cleric has about 250 points of single target out of combat healing before they have to dive into their other spells. If they have to emergency heal, then lose about 17 points of total healing potential. Burst healing to in combat healing efficiency 78%.
The oracles problem is that while they have better non-spell healing capabilities, but their burst healing is very inefficient in terms of resource usage.
It only takes 2 emergencies to erase any advantage the oracle has over the cleric.
Why does the oracle not have the freedom to take extra channel?
I'd guess because the Oracle build suggested is an Aasimar, which doesn't gain the bonus feat that the human Cleric gets.
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Get me some smarter frontliners then.
Yes, because blaming the victims is alway preferable to actually solving the problem...Not!
Since I having been playing D&D since it first came out in '74 and play a lot of PFS my observations are not base on a single group of players.
I'm just going to be frank with you.
I don't know you. Telling me that you've played X amount of years is about as effective as posting that you're a navy seal with 100 confirmed kills and can find my house to do unspeakable things to me. Pretty much nil.
On the same token me telling you my credentials are next to meaningless since you don't know me.
That being said I was addressing your point about healing to what was essentially a common sense statement.
Is healing good? Yes sometimes. Is it worth heavy investment? No. If you have to invest heavily in keeping krognar facesmasher from committing suicide by goblin spear than maybe it's time Krognar took on a less dangerous profession. Like perhaps demolitions.
And ultimately there are no victims here. Krognar could have waited a whole round to let his casters get in gear before charging in. And if krognar does wait and his casters aren't doing there job. Well, then it's not exactly Krognar's fault is it?
And you know what, even with all the preventatives in the world Krognar sometimes still gets his face smacked in. That's fine, we have spells for that. But if it turns into an every encounter occurance we're going to need to reevaluate our approach before we send Richards of the Red Shirt to explain things to Krognar's mother.
AS for the spotlight..well I could honestly care less one way or another. I've always been more interested in overall narratives and character development rather than clutch moments of awesome in desperate situations more suited to movies and comics. But hey, that's just me.
The point with the credential was to qualify that we are talking about a larger player base than just one table which could easily be explained by the frontliners simply being bad players. Of course this is anecdotal and I could be making it all up but if you go into an Internet discussion with that premise than what is the point in having the discussion?
I am also not stating that I am seeing chronic, massive deaths among front liners. Simply that their death ratio is noticeably higher than backliners. Since Crits to already injured PCs seems to be one of the more frequent causes of death, keeping them healed up is one solution.
Should a character focus solely on healing? No. But I don't think solely focusing on any one thing is good in D&D. I have witnessed versatility save more parties than I could possibly remember and usually proves more fun, to boot.
Regarding you personal style preference, nothing wrong with that. The point is this is a social game so from a meta game standpoint something can be better than it looks on paper if it also has a meta game benefit. I believe healing does.
I generally play battle clerics, and I would mostly agree that healing in combat is a waste until you get the heal spell.There are lots of different ways to play this same game, even from a purely tactical standpoint.
The game rewards a degree of specialization. People that merely dabble in something can come to think of it as a bad choice.
In-combat healing is a buffing action. It enables the front line to continue their actions unhampered, whereas without it they may have to curtail their choices to be reactive rather than proactive. It does presuppose that you have decent front lines where a round of their actions is worth it to do this for...
-James
PS: Cure critical is 5d8+10 empowered at CL10, healing 48.75 on average. This essentially undoes the giant's full attack. A cure moderate is 2d8+10 empowered for 28.5 nearly does a giant charging. The cleric never really needs quicken channel, or a quickened cure light unless both giants are attacking the fighter at one point... in which case he does and will ready a cure if needed.In your 'safer' scenario the fighter is routinely left within a hit of being killed. And that is with contrived situations to deny the enemy from ever full attacking. Should the party be thrown in such a situation, they are out of their element. They don't have enough depth there.
Now that's not to say that I don't think that characters shouldn't bring more than 1 thing to the table.. quite the opposite. But in-combat healing is a worthwhile thing to have at the table, especially if the environment tends to have the PCs being put in reactive situations rather than always proactive ones.
Let me sum it up a little more succinctly.
A cleric who only heals in combat is a waste of space.A cleric who never heals in combat is an idiot.
The problem with builds that focus on healing is that they often give up too much to be good at healing. As long as you are not giving up too much ability to do other things(buff, deal damage, debuff, etc), the you are probably a solid contributing member of the party.
First up, is is 5x 5d6 channel vs 7x 8d6 channel w/ Life Link. We have covered that the oracle does not really have the freedom to take extra channel, while the cleric does.
Okay, let's correct this mistake.
My aasimar oracle build has a 24 CHA at level 20. That is 8 channels without Extra Channel. Your 10 CHA human cleric build has 5 channels with Extra Channel.
Where are you seeing that my oracle is even trying to take Extra Channel? What does that have to do with it at all?
This is not your build vs my build. There were 2 builds posted. The purpose is to compare between those 2 builds. I intentionally created builds that have similar capabilities and defenses. I analyzed the benefit of going Aasimar on those builds.
I could easily get a lot more channel and spells per day by dropping my dex and con to 12, and dumping strength to 7, but that is beside the point. I went the no stat dump route, because dump stats create weaknesses.
I could take the craft wonderous item feat, and dump 3/4 of my wealth by level into crafting a +6 wisdom/+6 charisma headband at level 10.
I could do a lot of things with stats to make either build a better healer, but any manipulation of stats that the oracle can do to gain an advantage, the cleric can do something similar.
It only takes 2 emergencies to erase any advantage the oracle has over the cleric.
After the first 2 emergencies, the oracle has 2x 8d6 channels + Life Link + Energy Body while the cleric has 1x 5d6 + CLW + CMW + CSW. The oracle still has 1 emergency heal left while the cleric is out. Advantage is still owned by the oracle.
Okay, please continue with your example.
Stop. This. That is ALL my "healing before spells" metric is telling me. It tells me nothing about burst healing at all. Are you trying to read more into it? If so, that's the mistake that is being made.The oracles ... have better non-spell healing capabilities
No, your healing before spells metric is misleading because it requires an absolute perfect set of conditions to achieve. I might as well say that the greataxe is superior to a greatsword because it crits for a max of 36 damage and the greatsword only crits for a max of 24.
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There are some people on these forums who are very vehemently saying you should never heal in combat. Last year I made a life oracle and was told it was a completely useless PC, that if that was what I thought was good I should just quit the game, etc... They were really very insulting about it to the point that the moderators erased most of their posts in the thread.I generally play battle clerics, and I would mostly agree that healing in combat is a waste until you get the heal spell. My reasoning is this.
... The healer needs to at least be able to pull double duty as a battlefield controller or damage dealer.
That is a reasonable statement. Not sure I entirely agree with it, but it is at least not too far off, stated in a polite manner, and not an absolute negation.
My point was that some people on these forums are the internet equivalent of screaming, spittle flying, fanatics.If you are ever considering casting a cure spell from anything other than a wand of CLW you are an idiot and should find something simple to play like checkers. (I can't remember the exact wording since the post was removed, but that is close to a quote.)
My 'healer' is really an undead blaster. (We were getting killed before that in Carrion Crown.) Most of his spells can be used against undead or are to remove the effects of being hurt by undead. He has some non-undead control spells, but not too many. The healing is more in the line of a side effect of being good at positive energy from channel or cure. So I figured I might as well get some extra milage out of it by also being able to heal well.
A small number of times we have been up against someone that positive energy did not hurt and with high SR so I couldn't reliably hit him with spells, so the most effective thing I could do was keep the 2 martial types that were able to hurt him up and fighting.A couple other times a PC had some horribly bad dice karma and took a huge amount of damage. I could do a decent amount of damage and possibly kill it. But if I didn't, the PC would definitely die in another hit. OR I could heal him and get him to a safe location. Then kill it the next round. I took the second option. The first option would have been more efficient if it had worked, but if it had not it would have been greatly less efficient since we would have had to try and find someone to pay for a raise.
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There are some people on these forums who are very vehemently saying you should never heal in combat. Last year I made a life oracle and was told it was a completely useless PC, that if that was what I thought was good I should just quit the game, etc... They were really very insulting about it to the point that the moderators erased most of their posts in the thread.I generally play battle clerics, and I would mostly agree that healing in combat is a waste until you get the heal spell. My reasoning is this.
... The healer needs to at least be able to pull double duty as a battlefield controller or damage dealer.
That is a reasonable statement. Not sure I entirely agree with it, but it is at least not too far off, stated in a polite manner, and not an absolute negation.
My point was that some people on these forums are the internet equivalent of screaming, spittle flying, fanatics.If you are ever considering casting a cure spell from anything other than a wand of CLW you are an idiot and should find something simple to play like checkers. (I can't remember the exact wording since the post was removed, but that is close to a quote.)My 'healer' is really an undead blaster. (We were getting killed before that in Carrion Crown.) Most of his spells can be used against undead or are to remove the effects of being hurt by undead. He has some non-undead control spells, but not too many. The healing is more in the line of a side effect of being good at positive energy from channel or cure. So I figured I might as well get some extra milage out of it by also being able to heal well.
A small number of times we have been up against someone that positive energy did not hurt and with high SR so I couldn't reliably hit him with spells, so the most effective thing I could do was keep the 2 martial types that were able to hurt him up and fighting.
A couple other times a PC had some horribly bad dice karma and...
One thing this thread has done for me is allowed me to appreciate the value of the healing domain. If I run another battle cleric, I will be strongly tempted to take it as one of my 2 domains. The healing domain does give you a lot of flexibility, since you can switch to healing in an emergency, and actually be very good at it.
I am just wondering (after all this heated discussion about healing of all things) - would a dip in either cleric or oracle lead to any extra possibilities?
Got my flack jacket and Kevlar helmet on.
About the only one level dip that might be worth it would be a cleric taking a one level dip into life oracle to get life link and then you can burn feats to get safe curing and combat healer if you want. At 10th level, you are giving up a 4th and 5th level spell(107.25 points of healing). If you get you charisma up to 12, you gain a channel per day, and you gain 4 level 1 cures that will benefit from you healing domain ability(33 point of total healing). Also, the cleric quickly runs out of things to spend feats on that actually increases their healing.
Healing Oracles and Paladins rely on high level ability stacking to be good at healing so I think they would be giving up too much from a one level dip.
For example, combat a level 9 oracle to a level 10 oracles, you lose 3 5th level spells, and 1 4th level spell per day(158.5 total healing lost). You lose 1 round per day from energy body and you lose 1 point of healing per round from energy body(23.5 total healing lost). in return, you have to have at least an 11 wisdom, and you gain 2 level 1 cures(11 points of healing). I doubt any 1 level dip would be able to make up that 171 point loss in healing.