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How is healing going to work in PF2 overall? We've gotten some hints, and I'm sure there will be a blog on it eventually, but I want to lay out what I hope for it in the context of what they've revealed.
Healers: No one should have to play a dedicated healer to keep a group alive. There should always be other options, even if less efficient, because a lot of people just don't like playing that kind of character and the expectations (from often ungrateful players) that go with it. BUT, a lot of people really DO like playing healers, so it should be a very viable and powerful option.
A character dedicated to healing should be very, very good at it. They should be far more efficient than any alternative like wands and potions. They should also still be able to participate in other parts of the game, like combat. I'd love to see viable single-action healing abilities that still let you attack or cast a normal spell that round, as well as giant bursty things like Channel Energy... except, you know, good.
I imagine divine casters will still be the main sources of big bursty immediate healing, because tradition. That goes all the way back to the beginning and I don't see them breaking that chain. But I'd like to see more of stuff such as nature casters like the druid granting "regrowth" in the form of Fast Healing and so on. Help give them their own flavor, instead of their PF1 status as a random grab bag that also includes just getting the regular cure spell a level later.
A good intermediary role for something similar to the 4E Warlord, if and when it appears, would be "pre-emptive healing" in the form of temporary hit points and other damage mitigation. It does not make sense for a nonmagical combat marshall to shout you back to health. But temporary hit points from boosted morale? Shouting encouragement as a reaction to help you reduce incoming damage from an attack that just hit you? Sure, why not! It's cool and fun, without stepping on the actual healing classes toes.
Items: We know one of the driving factors behind Resonance is the magic gatorade bottle CLW wand. Magic healing items will still exist in PF2, but will cost Resonance to use. Items will mostly cost 1 Resonance to use regardless of level, the intent being to drive people to use higher level, more powerful sources of healing. Trying to be cost-efficient with lower-level items will just burn out Resonance.
People have already proposed getting hirelings to use the wands to game the Resonance system. I believe they've already thought of this and what will happen is that for a beneficial effect like receiving healing or a buff, an item will cost the target's Resonance and not the wielder. No way around it, you're only getting X number of gulps of Gatorade wand taps per day.
Now, in their current state potions also cost Resonance. I don't personally agree with this. We'll see how it works in the playtest proper, but having already heard stories about someone's second potion of the day just failing, that just feels... gross. Also, while I actually feel it's pretty thematic to tie Resonance to Charisma, with your personal force of personality affecting how well you can bend magic items to your will and make them work, I don't feel this is thematically appropriate for potions.
So, again, I guess we'll see in the playtest. But I'm still proposing what I've proposed here before: your potions should be limited by Constitution, not Charisma. Maybe half your Constitution score plus your Fortitude proficiency rating (+1 for Expert etc)? In any event, you can drink up to that number per day without issue, but then after that point, you start rolling on something like the old Potion Miscibility table for each subsequent potion. I think this would be really flavorful, and decouple potions from Resonance so there's not too much strain being put on that one trait.
I may not be likely to get my way on this, but I have to put it out there... haha. At the very least, that will be the house rule in my own campaign if I end up dissatisfied with Resonance in its final form after the playtest.
Heal/Medicine Skill: I hope they make the Heal skill really useful this time. With other skills like Athletics being super beefed up and getting legitimate combat uses, it'd be really disappointing if Heal got left behind, and I hope they're leaving the crappy 3.x paradigm behind here. The Heal skill should be able to recover a good amount of HP, as well as treat negative conditions and statuses so you don't need a caster with Restoration or any of those other spells, as useful as said spells will still be due to increased convenience and decreased time-to-proc.
I listed these in my Skills thread a few days ago, but here are some guesses for how at least I hope this might break down with the new proficiency system where Master bends reality and Legendary breaks it:
- Untrained: Applying a bandage to stop bleeding; provide basic long term care.
- Trained: Helping someone who's dying; stitching wounds and otherwise recovering HP; treating afflictions like poison and disease to give someone an improved chance to recover.
- Expert: Using massage and qigong to provide buffs; using surgery and pharmacology to repair stuff like stat drain, insanity, and affliction end states; using pressure points for stuff like "Stunning Fist" and similar old combat feats.
- Master: Reviving the recently killed; reattaching severed limbs, and adding grafts like extra limbs; not just curing someone of disease or poison but actually extracting it in physical form to reuse later, as well as being able to do this to monsters that have such abilities and stripping said abilities from them in the process.
- Legend: Removing curses and ending demon possessions through psychomedical judo; treating afflictions and deadly wounds in one round or one action instead of taking a lot of time to do it; maybe turning regular hits with weapon attacks into critical hits because you have such a good knowledge of anatomy.
Also please get rid of only 10 charges per healing kit. If it can't be unlimited like every other skill kit in the game, at least have it be like 50 charges. Yes I get the flavor of using bandages and such but it should be trivial to restock a healing kit during downtime; the cost should primarily be for permanent items that are part of the kit like the box or pouch itself, good scissors, etc.
Rest: I would expect some kind of short rest system to finally appear in Pathfinder like in basically every other game at this point. This would give players the chance to lick their wounds over the course of like 10-15 minutes, recover some HP, and catch their breath. Since HP represents some mix of stamina, luck, and actual physical health and injury, I think this is fair, as long as you maybe limit it so a short rest can't recover more than half the HP you have lost.
Long rests will of course heal more than a short rest. I don't think they'll go full-on video game with full healing after every night's rest.
Resting is one of the more fiddly things to balance and I'm honestly not sure what kind of numbers they're going to go with. I expect they won't go with spending and rolling Hit Dice like 5E, just so they don't get accused of copying it. (I'd actually be perfectly happy to see it get copied since it IS a good solution; I just doubt they will.) It will be interesting to see what they do land on.
Other Considerations: I hope "HP threshold or suck" spells like Symbol of Death and Power Word Blind are completely reworked. These are part of the reason why higher level characters in PF1 still carry buckets of CLW wands and strive to be at full hit points after every encounter. You don't know when you're going to trip a stupid trap that just arbitrarily kills you or takes you out of combat for the day because you just happened to be a few HP below max. If these are gone or reworked, there will be less pressure / incentive for players to feel like they have to even have CLW wands and the like.
They probably won't, but I would like sources of healing to restore more HP to a higher level target with more max HP. Like, go ahead and make Cure Serious Wounds always be better in every way, but even a Cure Light Wounds or basic healing potion should restore more to someone with 200 max HP than they do to someone with 20 max HP. Something proportional in some way. Sadly, I recognize this probably won't happen.
Scrolls... while I think they'll use Resonance, who knows. Maybe this will be your one option for "healing from GP," because they're less efficient than a wand and have more restrictions than a potion. But nah, the designers are probably going to wall them behind Resonance like everything else.
Agreed on everything, but the healing scaling thing.
A wound so serious to endanger an high-level character isn't something that a simple spell can take care of easily: to effectively cure that, you need stronger magic.
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I'm into old school resource management part of the game. The PCs have to be smart about how they proceed. Its not expected that they cover every inch of every dungeon and kill every inhabitant. 3E spell in a can really messed with that paradigm. One benefit was opening up the healing space for less reliance on a cleric. I'd like to see that encouraged.
4E and 5E introduced healing surges and short rests baked into each character. My experience is that those mechanics have extended the adventuring day beyond my preference. It is very difficult to dial that down since the system is built on those expectations.
I like resonance because I can see a modular space of design with it. If you think 1+CHA is too few, than dial it up to 5+CHA. You could even allow potions to operate on their own without resonance. This is of course assuming PF2 is avoiding the ADEU structure of 4E and 5E, which the fighter preview seems to suggest. Of all the "lessons" that Paizo is learning from 5E, I hope they maintain at least this level of differentiation.
So what you are suggesting is: let characters prolong their adventuring day by giving them more uses of consumables, but don't let them do the same with an innate ability.
Short rests, healing surges and such things (however you call them) can be balanced so that they don't take away the resource management aspect of the game that I like, too.
Letting a character regain some HP when resting for a while alleviates the CLW spam problem, but you still need healing for more serious wounds.
A Wizard should definitely need a night of sleep to use again her best spells, but stopping to focus and take another look at her book for a few minutes should, IMO, let her regain some lower-level spells without having to rely on a collecion of pearls of power (which could still be useful for lower level casters).
I would like to see a way for a class be a dedicated healer. I try to do this with channels, and I will say variant channeling helps (since I can do smaller channels and still provide some usefulness in the beginning of combat). It would be a nice option if it's flushed out...the only problem you have is people bringing a "heal bot" as an npc.
Well i might be wrong, but im assuming the heal skill now is very powerful, that or i cant conceive how a barbarian, that was mentioned, managed to keep the group healed decently.
Outside that, personally i dont care much for healing, so as far as it is something nobody has to trully focus on, it is fine by me.
I liked the wands actually. It was something the entire group could share of the cost and at the same time didnt weight heavily on one PC having to be able to have this spell in their list. It wasnt cost free, but it was cheap.
Hoping whatever they come up with dont greatly increase the cost for a PC. Cause honestly, if it falls on me to heal, for example cause nobody else wants it, i will literally say we either play another system or adventure 15 mins a day, cause i aint doing it either. The city/town/NPC/world... be dammed.
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I like a lot of it, Fuzzypaws. It's well written and has great ideas!
Just a lil thing - adding something to constitution? CON is already a critical stat...does it rilly need more stuffs? I mean, how many times do you see a CON-dumped character in PF1? It's both hit points and fortitude saves....
As for the healing kit, it's charges should only apply to the higher level functions like status affliction removals. Treat Deadly Wounds should be considered a lower level function in this set-up. Also don't forget, there should be some level where it's not curing things like poisons or diseases, but suspending them (like Delay Poison)...