“Elven runners” team:
Elf, fey bloodline sorcerer. Technically able to heal as a nature caster, in fact - an energy damage dps build. His ability were strongly underused in this game, since we had trouble sorting how spontaneous heightening works. He should be doing way more 3-round heals the way it actually works. The way he was played, it was a pretty much classic “acid arrow, fireball, lightning bolt” guy, who spent a number of actions just waiting for a better moment to strike.
Elf druid, storm order. Ran out of healing rather fast, but having tempest surges was crucial for the end fight.
Elven cleric of Desna, with Luck domain. Great at using heals, but found himself in trouble as soon as we needed some dps NOT against undead.
Elven cleric of Nethys, magic domain. Having magic missiles on a cleric is sweet, it is like all good spellcaster classes in one pot.
The druid and both clerics were using shields, that somewhat affected our tactics. Since the group consisted of 4 healers, all prepared casters prepared a lot of non-healy spells, rightfully believing it is not healing that is our weak spot…
Overall, I feel like we strongly underused the potential of our characters, mostly because of forgetting rules. By level 7, characters already have a lot of abilities difficult to remember, plus a bundle of magical items. If you played your character for the previous 6 levels, you already know the tricks, but starting with a fresh lvl 7 character in an unfamiliar game system is pain. For this reason, I am not sure any playtests for high level characters created on the fly are going to actually reflect how high-level game goes. 7th level is just beginning; later levels only make it more difficult, double pain for players generally inexperienced in d20 games.
We did not run out of resonance, think nobody even went below 3-4 points. We mostly used healing items and several wand of mending charges to restore broken equipment (namely, thief tools and shields).
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Soon after characters arrive as guests, GM says “Looks like the adventure assumes you should go and investigate all the house before the night falls” . “But why?” “Well… it’s just written as if you do”. “So we should just sneak into our hosts rooms, unlocking stuff and all?” “Yea, looks like you are expected to. Think this is kind of a trope.” “They have some strange customs there in America!”. Well, we went around checking rooms, put some garlic in our pockets, cut off the ivy that allows one to climb to our rooms (that felt like very unnatural behavior), laughed at the chandelier setup and expert(!) silver knives. We did not attempt to convince professor to tell anything, since it did not feel important at all.
Event 1: We grouped in the entrance hall, stopped the professor from opening (“Are you waiting for somebody? How about asking who is there?) and pushed him away from the door before the ghasts finished breaking and entering. 1 partial round, full round (a 3-round channel from each cleric), 1 partial round to finish the ghouls off. Shield blocks worked great against these weaker opponents.
Now the professor tells everything and goes to his shelter, we send the students away to the rooms upstairs. Instead of barricading anything, we opened the front door and the side doors that allowed us to watch the big side windows, put some torches into the yard to better se approaching creatures and waited in the hall.
Event 2. Fireballed the enemies moving across the yard… oops there were more creatures in the yard that we could see? Sorry, vampire spawns. A single 3-round channel from Desna cleric when they approached, cantripped the rest to death. Easy mode.
Event 3 Suddenly a long 6-round fight, with poltergeist sending the Nethys cleric to flee in panic and wights enervating the sorcerer. Again, used lots of non-healy magics like acid arrows and cantrips (disrupt undead rocks!), plus 1 touch heal from druid and Desna cleric each, one 3-round heal from the sorcerer and a couple of healing wand uses. Overall, messy and poor tactics on our side.
Event 4 7 rounds of serious trouble. We made a mistake letting sorcerer run to the 2nd floor to check strange sounds from the lakeside (that were zombies falling in attempts to climb up without ivy). Sure he destroyed them in one fireball, but wasted lots of time running around, so the 3 of us had to deal with the shadows ourselved. Enfeeblement hurts, and 3 created shadows hurt too! Overall, I really liked the way these shadows are written, suddenly stylish and dangerous. We used 2 3-round heals from the Desna cleric and one more from Nethys cleric, felt a bit out of resources by that time.
event 5 Used wands to heal up before last fight, and cast our fly/airwalk spells at it start. Did not help us much, because the boss was good at flying. 7 rounds of nightmare.
Almost died, we were poorly prepared for encounters other than undead. Minions did nothing except distracting one of our clerics for a couple of rounds, but the boss required some actual dps we lacked (should not have wasted magic missiles on the shadows! If you are not a true martial character you have little chance to damage such bosses with your meager nonmagical weapons). We kept failing most of the saves against poison and enervation, boss DCs are pain. Spells like blindness (that do something good even when the opponent succeeds at the save) work great in such fights, this time boss blindness gave our gravely wounded sorcerer a chance to escape and heal up. We used the total of 9 personal heal spells, both spell-slot and wand-based. Had to save our Nethys cleric from dying-2 state, with poison ticking.
Overall, I am not sure what type of survey one might create to get any useful information from such playtesting. PC’s healing behaviors primarily reflect the player’s understanding of the system, group build and the availability of other means of dealing with the problems at hand. This has little to do with ‘how many heals a particular class might have” and more to do “what spells players actually prepare when they know they are in a group already overfull of healers but lacking tanks and stable melee dps". Prepared casters tend to modify their spell choice in such situations, which predictably affects the fights later.