Cure spells are a joke. Touch range? Single target? Need concentration checks?Lack of player skill in eliminating or mitigating all of the above.
I gotta agree with you Volkard. I hate when people go on and on about how bad Cure Spells are. I've been in many situations where the party would have lost if the healer hadn't cast a cure spell, or used some other form of healing. Sure, it's not that effective when you built a melee cleric blender, but sometimes, it's exactly what the situation calls for.
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Cure spells are pretty bad it does not mean there is not a time and place where they should be cast but most times casting them is suboptimal or would be covered by stabilize.
5th-6th level barbarian does 25 damage a hit often multiple times around using a pretty abundant resource rage.
A seventh level cleric burning one of their top-level spells heals 25 damage around.
Alternately, a murderous command could stop that attack entirely and redirect it to the enemy, and do that for two rounds if extended for a second level spell.
Bestow Curse can reduce a full 50% of total damage taken for a spell level less. Most of the time way more than 25.
Blessing of fervour can net you 100s of damage a fight.
Summon monster will absorb and deal more than 25 damage for the same spell slot if you know what you're doing.
Cure spells are weak options, that does not mean they should never be cast but should be done so sparingly.
I have seen them kill as many people as save. An example I have seen several times cleric uses a cure spell to save an unconscious and dying person they come up with fewer 15 hit points get attacked and immediately die. If the cleric use stabilize they would have been fine.
If you look at most situations in terms of net damage meaning healing/mitigation/damage done vs damage taken a cure spell is rarely optimal but if you did not prepare spells well it is better than nothing.
Cure spells are pretty bad it does not mean there is not a time and place where they should be cast but most times casting them is suboptimal or would be covered by stabilize.
** spoiler omitted **
My rationale is that Cure Spells are always going to work if your positioning is right. Even if you specialize into being a caster, your not always going to get your spell to stick. Things like Blessing of Fervor I didn't take into consideration because those should be cast at the beginning of the fight, not in the middle when a cure might be needed.
One of the best clerics I've ever had the pleasure playing with was a Merciful Healer. She wouldn't just heal, pulling out buff spells and condition removal, but her ability to keep the party alive was fantastic, and saved us multiple times. (Especially once she had gotten Heal.)
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They work if your positioning is right and you make your concentration check. Heal and breath of life are actually good healing spells no debate there.
Empowering healing spells help.
But the math still does not add up. Your turn to undo a fraction of the opponents turn. This make the heal less reliable than it seems. Let me explain my thoughts. Heing does not have saves, miss chances, target ac etc though is may have a concentration check if you don't hold a charge. But it is unreliable in that it is only ever effective at a narrow range of values.
Example:
Your front liner (level 7) is down to 15 hp and you heal them. Then the barbarian full attacks for 50 damage. Your healing only reliably helps if it provides <36hp enough to keep the Barb standing or <18 enough to keep him from dying. So the average for a cure mod is 14 so you need to roll well to make a difference. Or you have to burn you 4th level spell which can be used in another fight today to a much greater effect and roll near perfectly.
The amount of value the healing has and whether it helps is hard to know from the player side of the screen. Obviously, the threshold for not dying and not going down change for each situation. And times it will be easier to achieve and other impossible.
In the above example if the barbarian misses one attack the heal will not change to outcome of the next round in either direction. If the barbarian is hasted a cleric of the same level does not possess healing that can sway the tides of this particular battle.
There are time when all you can do is heal and in those moments one should. There are character we like to play that heal and people should pay them but from a mechanical standpoint there are not that many situations where using start actions and limited resources to heal is a great plan.
If you cleric have a decent strength score a weapon and some feats attacking will almost always out perform healing.
I'm just talking from personal experience. That cleric saved characters many times with healing, though to be fair, I think our group on average tended to play differently than an average group. It just annoys me when people say in combat healing is trash. It's not.
5th-6th level barbarian does 25 damage a hit often multiple times around using a pretty abundant resource rage.
A seventh level cleric burning one of their top-level spells heals 25 damage around.
Alternately, a murderous command could stop that attack entirely and redirect it to the enemy, and do that for two rounds if extended for a second level spell.
If the barbarian is getting ready to fall down, that same 25 point heal enables the barbarian to continue dealing his damage.
Stabilize won't fix that, and Haste has no affect on an unconscious player.
I'm not advocating that a cleric should memorize only cure spells. Quite the opposite, a cleric has no need to memorize any at all. But when the chips are down, converting a couple spells into cures can be the difference between a TPK and everyone surviving.
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See above comment for why that only helps for narrow ranges of healing that are hard to predict as a player but are worth the spell when you can make them. Consider your referencing an example I made intentionally to give the cleric a chance. It's being compared to a barbarian cr-2. Compare this in more reasonable fight and the math only gets worse and the cleric is spending its most valuable resource to do it. A more reasonable comparison would be 65 damage from the enemy off set by 14 from cure mod.
Murderous command nets 75 point of damage (extent 2nd lvl) + barbarins damage, or 50 damage if you make it persistent(4th lvl).
I like said there are times when it is the right heal but it is hard to know and there are options that are literally two or three times better in many but not all situations.
To rephrase: As a GM you should discourage the 15 minute adventuring day.To rephrase it in a different way:
Don't let anyone play a wizard because it will be boring due to the GM forbidding you from doing anything.
In other words, wizards are simultaneously the most overpowered thing in the history of things AND unfairly put upon when the GM doesn't let them re-prep spells after every single combat.
See above comment for why that only helps for narrow ranges of healing that are hard to predict as a player but are worth the spell when you can make them. Consider your referencing an example I made intentionally to give the cleric a chance. It's being compared to a barbarian cr-2. Compare this in more reasonable fight and the math only gets worse and the cleric is spending its most valuable resource to do it. A more reasonable comparison would be 65 damage from the enemy off set by 14 from cure mod.
Murderous command nets 75 point of damage (extent 2nd lvl) + barbarins damage, or 50 damage if you make it persistent(4th lvl).
I like said there are times when it is the right heal but it is hard to know and there are options that are literally two or three times better in many but not all situations.
Murderous command nets zero points if the target makes their saving throw. You can’t just assume a spell with a saving throw is successful when making these comparisons.
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Murderous command nets zero points if the target makes their saving throw. You can’t just assume a spell with a saving throw is successful when making these comparisons.See above comment for why that only helps for narrow ranges of healing that are hard to predict as a player but are worth the spell when you can make them. Consider your referencing an example I made intentionally to give the cleric a chance. It's being compared to a barbarian cr-2. Compare this in more reasonable fight and the math only gets worse and the cleric is spending its most valuable resource to do it. A more reasonable comparison would be 65 damage from the enemy off set by 14 from cure mod.
Murderous command nets 75 point of damage (extent 2nd lvl) + barbarins damage, or 50 damage if you make it [b]persistent(4th lvl)[b].
I like said there are times when it is the right heal but it is hard to know and there are options that are literally two or three times better in many but not all situations.
3x more effective on an on a success. I assumed that your an optimized caster has a great than a 50% chance to have their target fail. Still net improvement if you are playing and optimized casters.
But this should bring us back to the original commenter's point that the spells often require concentration checks so they can fail as well.
I also included persistent, which I assumed implied I'm considering success and failure rates but because we are not talking about specific builds I can't specifically calculate them.
I also show that the 25 hp actually does nothing for a fair range of incoming damage (ie does not change the outcome of the attack) and that 25 was already weighing the scales unreasonably in favour of healing giving 2 additional levels to the cleric letting them have 2 extra levels.
In my earlier post, I included a number of examples including summoning which has no save.