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^ Basically. I just posted my recent experience as healing is the underdog here (it seems) and wanted to give it a good show of worth/need. In most situations it isn't needed. You can just play smarter and get through an encounter. The one I described above was a brawl and about pure power. In such a case as that, being smart didn't do us much good, being prepared is the only reason we had a chance and healing was the only reason we didn't die.
And again so as not to misrepresent, I'm not saying that healing is always the best option. However, in that instance, it was.
A reach cleric may have got some AOOs in addition to that healing with some group cooperation:
1. Grease spell can be great vs low reflex save opponents.
2. The tank could move and force the enemy to take AOOs, sure they'd take an AOO too but wouldn't eat a full attack.
3. Potentially combat manoeuvres to trigger AOOs (tends not to scale well but is viable at low level, particularly if you use a reach weapon to trip)
Reading this thread I get the impression that both side think the same thing, but are misrepresenting the other side so that they can Win the argument. Unless anyone really thinks that the best action for a cleric is to Top up the parties HP in the middle of combat when they are not likely to go down that round?
Sometimes it is, if (a) it might prevent a party member from dying three rounds later, and (b) you can't think of anything better to do with your action.
This is why I prefer reach cleric in general. Heal/channel/cast in turn and AoO in the monsters turn. You get the best of both tactics.
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Timid Toad.
Reading this thread I get the impression that both side think the same thing, but are misrepresenting the other side so that they can Win the argument. Unless anyone really thinks that the best action for a cleric is to Top up the parties HP in the middle of combat when they are not likely to go down that round?
I suspect another point of disagreement might be exaggerated by the unexpected and unknown nature of tabletop RPG. Saying something is better then another option requires a baseline, however that is represented at best by the CR system and few charts... So, basically there is no baseline.
But I suspect that about 25% of people would say you should almost never heal in combat, 50% would say that you should heal when it is needed to keep someone from excess risk of dropping, and 25% would say you should heal when there isn't a better option. I don't think anyone thinks you should ALWAYS or NEVER heal.
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I am going to play a Cleric of Nethys who has pretty average stats (except his Wisdom, which is 19) and the Guided Hand feat.
Is this optimal? Probably not. But it's the only way I figured I could be a full-caster Cleric and still be a pretty decent beatstick when necessary.I played a Life Oracle to level 4 in Carrion Crown, and he was a lot of fun, but I think focusing on hitting stuff (and being able to heal after fights, of course) would have been more fun in the long run.
There are quite a few ways to build a cleric on a beatstick chassis. Guided Hand is one way: your hits are accurate, but not very hard. Here are some other ways. With just STR 14 and no feats your 5th level cleric can melee at +11 to hit for 1d8+10. With just a little optimization you can make that +11 to hit for 2d6+15. The Reach Cleric approach is noteworthy for being a full-caster cleric and a powerful melee beatstick, both at the same time.
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Elementals and outsiders need feats to be healed.
No they don't. They're treated like any other living creature for the purposes of positive/negative energy.
I think what you mean is that they cannot be raised or resurrected without special circumstances involved.
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A reach cleric may have got some AOOs in addition to that healing with some group cooperation:
1. Grease spell can be great vs low reflex save opponents.
2. The tank could move and force the enemy to take AOOs, sure they'd take an AOO too but wouldn't eat a full attack.
3. Potentially combat manoeuvres to trigger AOOs (tends not to scale well but is viable at low level, particularly if you use a reach weapon to trip)
Sure, but maybe our cleric did not want to play a reach cleric. Maybe he dislikes the idea of using a reach weapon or finds them all ugly looking. It's like saying that a super optimized high DC wizard could have done better/more. What if he did not want to play a wizard, let alone one of a particular race with an extremely narrow selection of feats, an even more narrow focus on school specialization and more narrow than that race pick? This aspect of thinking leads to people playing the same sort of stuff because 'well, a this is better than that in this situation'.
If all you are trying to do is play whatever is best in as many situations as possible rather than playing a character you like and attempting to make the character useful in as many situations as possible while not forsaking your own interests, then that sounds boring. I cannot invest hours of my day playing someone else's ideas and fantasies out for them. I'd rather play what I enjoy.
And a reach cleric would have added some damage but the fight would not have ended much sooner. He still would have been healing first and foremost. A reach cleric would not get many zoo's as our for had at least 10' reach, possibly 15. Once we entered melee few of us did more than 5' steps because the damage we were receiving needed to be mitigated through intelligent play. Our inquisitor had a teamwork feat allowing him to move through adjacent ally squares without provoking and he used that to get into a flanking position which I set up for him by being next to an adjacent square for him to move into.
Nobody had the ability to cast grease, even if they did there is no guarantee they would have had it known. Reflex saves seemed like they would have been the bosses weakest save. But it was largely irrelevant since breaking through the spell resistance required good rolls.
Touch attacks were fine and landed but scorching rays for 8d6+24 were blocked by spell resistance. Uggh.
The fighter could not afford to provoke aoo's because that would result in far more damage than we could handle. The enemy had reach and multiple attacks. We didn't have the reach advantage and the room was shrouded in darkness or deeper darkness this time around (we faced him before and had to flee very quickly- there was no darkness previously and we looked at our options and decided that healing was the only realistic way to have a shot at beating the guy).
We knew that the boss could gobble the inquisitor and cleric in a single round (both of them). We also knew it would take about two rounds to drop the fighter or myself, individually. We knew that we could not let him reach the inquisitor or the cleric and we had to keep ourselves alive because the fighter and my oracle do the most damage by far and have the best defenses. With buffs but no healing, neither of us can survive two rounds with the guy and cannot afford to risk provoking zoo's after a full round with him because that may very well drop either of us. Relying on save or suck spells or offensive magic seemed a wasteful tactic since we couldn't easily penetrate the SR and the remaining SR ignoring options wouldn't significantly change the outcome. He also had a pretty decent reflex save even after I slipped through the SR.
Melee damage was reliable but the miss chance and his decent ac and high HP just meant we were in for a grind. Without healing the right would have been 4-5 rounds shorter with us futiley attempting offensive tactics that worked some of the time while he killed 1-2 members per round since even with every buff up and running, we still barely beat him. Yes, our tank was fighting defensively and yes, I was glorious heating the tank and having him burn moment of glory on his iterative so he could land the second attack, possibly. We didn't play like newbies. We chose healing because not choosing healing as a major combat strategy in that situation would have meant starting a new campaign and rolling up new characters. Empowered heals were the difference between some of us even being able to take more than one hit.
But no. I'd say that 65-80% of our encounters don't require any healing. It's not our strategy. But we won't hesitate to use it, or build entirely around it, when it is the best option.
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Elementals and outsiders need feats to be healed.
No they don't. They're treated like any other living creature for the purposes of positive/negative energy.
I think what you mean is that they cannot be raised or resurrected without special circumstances involved.
I think he may be confusing the Alignment Channel feats as being required to heal outsiders rather than being useful for ONLY targeting outsiders.
Sure, but maybe our cleric did not want to play a reach cleric. Maybe he dislikes the idea of using a reach weapon or finds them all ugly looking.
Of course that's his prerogative but many people find healbotting boring and as far as optimisation goes only healing is sub optimal.
The best way to keep your tanks alive is to mitigate the damage. You can do that to an extent with healing but crowd control is often better and the best crowd control is killing the enemy.
With good party tactics a reach cleric can contribute significantly to damage will still being a full caster.
And a reach cleric would have added some damage but the fight would not have ended much sooner. He still would have been healing first and foremost. A reach cleric would not get many zoo's as our for had at least 10' reach, possibly 15. Once we entered melee few of us did more than 5' steps because the damage we were receiving needed to be mitigated through intelligent play.
I've noticed that many players are afraid to take AOOs but are perfectly happy to tank full attacks which doesn't make any sense (assuming the thing you're fighting has multiple attacks). If you force the enemy with multiple attacks to move, you'll take the same damage or less and facilitate AOOs from your party (this gets even better with held actions. I.e. get the big bad to move several squares within the reach of the cleric and Bob the barbarian. Both get AOOs and bob's triggered action to full attack goes off). Net result is party damage probably goes up, and incoming damage likely goes down. Obviously you can get stuck in some narrow environments but those are usually bad places to fight.
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Sure, but maybe our cleric did not want to play a reach cleric. Maybe he dislikes the idea of using a reach weapon or finds them all ugly looking.
Of course that's his prerogative but many people find healbotting boring and as far as optimisation goes only healing is sub optimal.
The best way to keep your tanks alive is to mitigate the damage. You can do that to an extent with healing but crowd control is often better and the best crowd control is killing the enemy.
With good party tactics a reach cleric can contribute significantly to damage will still being a full caster.
And a reach cleric would have added some damage but the fight would not have ended much sooner. He still would have been healing first and foremost. A reach cleric would not get many zoo's as our for had at least 10' reach, possibly 15. Once we entered melee few of us did more than 5' steps because the damage we were receiving needed to be mitigated through intelligent play.
I've noticed that many players are afraid to take AOOs but are perfectly happy to tank full attacks which doesn't make any sense (assuming the thing you're fighting has multiple attacks). If you force the enemy with multiple attacks to move, you'll take the same damage or less and facilitate AOOs from your party (this gets even better with held actions. I.e. get the big bad to move several squares within the reach of the cleric and Bob the barbarian. Both get AOOs and bob's triggered action to full attack goes off). Net result is party damage probably goes up, and incoming damage likely goes down. Obviously you can get stuck in some narrow environments but those are usually bad places to fight.
And sometimes you don't get to choose where you fight. And tanks moving away may mean BBEG gets to into a less tank like target, such as the reach cleric, who now has a bad guy with reach able full attack even after cleric steps back to use his reach.
This is not a situation to second guess the scenario presented. This is a scenario where healing was obviously more effective than anything else the party had access to.
On a side note, as a DM who occasionally throws his own encounters into APs, or merges encounters together as enemies react to players actions, it's much easier to defeat groups that aren't healing in combat (for whatever reason they've chosen), than it is when they are healing.
You don't need to keep up with damage output, you just need to keep the best damage dealers up and in the faces of big bad so their damage output is better than the baddies.
Eg. Big bad May be dishing 50 damage per round (low ball for all the big builds out there, but an easy number to work with) Your fighter might be doing 35. Cleric heals 25 damage, now your mates are out damaging the enemy, for a guaranteed success action.
Or, you could attack, but must make sure you are consistently getting more than 15 damage for the outcome to be positive.
Healing doesn't need to be better than damage, it just needs to keep,the damage equation in your favour. If other actions do that, then don't heal. If you can't guarantee that though, then healing isn't such a bad idea.
Cheers
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@silas, healing is not suboptimal. If I make a healer who can out heal the damage dealt to all party members, it is just as valid as preventing that damage depending on the circumstances.
I understand that the philosophy is that offense is the primary thing that matters. This philosophy is opinion, though. It is equally viable to make a defensive strategy that can work as well as or even better than a given offensive one. Optimization is about efficiently and effectively accomplishing a goal. If we meet our goal that way, then we are optimized.
Reach clerics are fine but would have been no better or worse during that encounter. And as I said before, our enemy had 10-15 feet of reach. None of us did. We went into his abode to vanquish him on his home turf (because we could not encounter him anywhere else). We purchased potions, scrolls and used them all as well as every buff we thought would help us before the battle began. We entered that encounter as strong as our parties wealth and resources would allow with every advantage we could muster. Despite the themes on these forums, that does not guarantee success. Being offensive does not mean you automatically win. Heck, in quite a few cases, it means you die...and we nearly did the first time we faced him. Playing offensively and trying to win quickly nearly cost us two party members.
After considering what we knew, we approached the combat from an actual gameplay point of view....a realistic, non-theorycrafted angle. We wanted to live so we acted like it. We used defensive feats, actions and spells first and foremost, switching off to offense only when it was prudent. Then, we relied on healing as that was the crux of the issue. Nothing we did offensively or defensively would be enough to win the fight barring sheer luck. And relying on luck to prove or support a message board theory that is not nearly as correct as often is stipulated was not worth us starting the campaign over.
Also there was no way to move without still subjecting us to full attacks. The demons size was large and his reach combined with any 5' step would have likely proved to be to his decided advantage. Furthermore, due to the limited additional space surrounding the demon, any movement away from the entrance would have been a tactical suicide as we *needed* the clerics heals and we needed every damage buff and supportive ability we could muster. The cleric had enough HP to take a single hit and then have to heal or die on the following hit...not go unconscious but die...negative con+.
Our enemy had good offense (probably great offense) and almost as daunting defenses. But the defenses had some variations which we used to our advantage but we coild not rely on being lucky and offensive. Sure, when you are stronger than the enemy you can just ignore complex tactics and careful strategy and go in guns blazing and let the odds win the combat in 1d3 rounds. But there are plenty of other gameplay/combat styles that have more engaging encounters where a given roll of the dice is irrelevant and consistency is more important. Where no one knows who win until the encounter is closer to round 5, 6, 7, or longer.
That battle took us maybe 10-15 minutes, too. Quite fun. I don't often play with people where we are that organized and working that well together as a team. I felt quite reward for our strategic and tactical gameplay. Easier fights our strategies are just to position our melee in such a way that I can blast the enemy to near death so the martials can finish them off. They are nowhere near as engaging as a real challenge and only occasionally require healing.
@silas, healing is not suboptimal. If I make a healer who can out heal the damage dealt to all party members, it is just as valid as preventing that damage depending on the circumstances.
It normally is unless you specialize in and/or the bad guys don't do a lot of damage plus other factors such as how long do you have to keep it up for the party to survive. How long also includes number of combats.
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Healing may or may not be suboptimal in any given situation and playing suboptimally may or may not be a bad thing. I defy you to prove me wrong!
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I guess debating this further is pretty pointless :)
If people dont want to take advantage of AOO game mechanics (which have a low opportunity cost and a great boost to the action economy) that's fine by me. Play how you want, just please don't pretend its an optimal strategy.
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The only optimal strategy is the one that works best for the situation you are in. Assuming that a prescribed format of character builds and decisions is always the best (aside from be factually untrue) it would lead to tedium as every character essentially becomes the same when attempting to be good at or the best at adventuring.
No matter how many ways you may want to argue, no cleric you can design will be the best cleric or most optimal cleric except in certain circumstances. Even what is considered common circumstances and experiences may not be common in many areas or time frames or individual gaming tables. Nevermind that a mechanically better option at a given time still does not mean it is a better option due to things like variance in play style, nuance of circumstance, tone, and so many other deeper considerations go beyond 'play x because it's better far more often than y every could be'.
So play how you want but please don't pretend that common, efficient ideas are the best or most efficient ideas at anybodies table or at any given session but your own.