Healing the Good the Bad and the Ugly


General Discussion


This thread is about should you be required to play a healer in Pathfinder/D&D?

Generally the answer is yes, you need some amount of healing to play the typical D&D dungeon hack adventure.

This is also a side effect of the modern expectation of 4 encounters a day (6-8 in 5E, I don't remember the 4E assumption).

The guts of the game has always been about the 4 roles- Warrior, Artillery, Support and Expert which more or less means Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief. Some classes share a bit from other classes in 5E addressed this in the pillars- combat, exploration, and social.

A Paladin for example traditional is not as good at combat as a fighter (less feats or weapon specialisation, less attacks than a fighter in 5E) but it kind of 25-50% of a Cleric (varies by edition). Rangers have a similar ratio in regards to a splash of Druid.
5E addressed this by making it ok for a class to have up to a 3rd of another class built in or being better at say combat (eg Fighter Champion vs Eldritch Knight).

If you have to much healing however the game becomes to easy and ultimately boring. This would be a large bag of wands of CLW, or a party focused on healing in 5E (life domain cleric, thief with healer feat).

D&D/Pathfinder has also spread the healing around with Clerics, Druids, Rangers, Paladins and sometimes Bards (depending on edition) all being able to do it to some extent.

So what do you do if you have no healer? I have played games like this in D&D, put simply you run less combat or use easier encounters. Often in games where the PCs have copious amounts of healing the DM directly or indirectly puts in more damage or the designers do (compare 3E-5E critters vs AD&D ones). An adventure like Tomb of Horrors is going to require more healing than X1 The Isle of Dread and the Pathfinder APs do not generally require a massive amount either as they tend to be on the easy side (some more than others).

Older D&D adventure designs often had Staves of Healing along with potions and scrolls of healing. You could not buy them a'la 3.X but if you ran prepublished adventurers they were fairly common. And level 1 clerics may not have even be able to heal you anyway.
NPCs were often in the adventure along with a magical fountain, font or something similar that could heal.

Basically I don't think there is a right or wrong answer here, if you have a lot of damage built into the game on the monsters (5E) you will want a generous amount of healing. If damage is low and monsters struggle to hit healing can be less (B/X-AD&D). Clerics should still be the best at it IMHO but they can spread the healing around buffing classes if need be (5E did this).

That still does't deal with the what type of adventure you are running- Kingmaker vs one of the harder APs will be very different but I think at that point its up to the GM to figure out what the players like or if they like variety such as doing a dungeon hack after returning from the Isle of Dread.

Its an art form, not a science, 4E tried and failed to enforce a daily limit ultimately boring people and making the game grindy while 3.X has wands of CLW and 5E missed the boat here and there as well (life clerics being to good at it relative to other clerics and clerics being better than everyone else).

Whats more important IMHO is how big the gap is between classes that are good at healing vs the ones that can do it but are not expected to do it all of the time. A Paladin or Ranger for example could maybe heal themselves, a cleric can have some of the best cure spells (shared with Druid), while a cleric with the healing domain should probably be the best (bonus dice of healing or group radius etc). Right now the PF2 cleric is a bit to good at healing relative to the other classes so one step forward two steps back since wands of CLW are going bye bye. But you can buff that and add generic feats perhaps (blessed by XYZ healer god can heal ABC per day).

Reducing monster damage is also another option, once upon a time you could really only heal with your daily spell slots and what you could find. Personally I would put some healing options in the game, and let the players and GMs figure out how much they want to use. No cleric? Well a Bard, or Druid with a side helping of Ranger or Paladin might be an idea. Want to focus on damage instead, well see if you can kill stuff faster reducing the need to heal. Or be nice to NPCs.


7 people marked this as a favorite.

The problem is not that the game forces someone capable of some healing on you, that has been a staple of the game for decades. The problem is that this game forces you to have a dedicated healer.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

I will again reinforce my support of Stamina in Pathfinder. Even just adding it in as an optional rule will probably appease a lot of people. It just makes sense and it works perfectly with Resonance as is. I explained in this thread.

It doesn't even need to have a healing factor, just make it so you can heal it 2 ways, a number of times per day equal to your Con modifier +1 or rest for 8 hours. In my post I showed how a Lvl 1 Barbarian with no Healer and only 1 Potion of Healing fared MUCH better than the current system. Even having a healer didn't make it broken because Stamina cannot be healed by magic. So it was this nice give and take of managing your resources for healing and Stamina regen.

I like the idea so much I'm probably going to houserule it into my games no matter which direction the playtest goes.


Rameth wrote:


It doesn't even need to have a healing factor, just make it so you can heal it 2 ways, a number of times per day equal to your Con modifier +1 or rest for 8 hours. In my post I showed how a Lvl 1 Barbarian with no Healer and only 1 Potion of Healing fared MUCH better than the current system. Even having a healer didn't make it broken because Stamina cannot be healed by magic. So it was this nice give and take of managing your resources for healing and Stamina regen.

Saying healers can't heal stamina is a nerf to healers by reducing their effective ability to heal. It's worse when someone has relatively fewer HP and can get blasted from just over half to dying in one turn, because the healer has absolutely no way to prevent that, whereas they could have with straight HP by healing them to full. (In 1e we could also use buffs and other spells to mitigate it, but that was nerfed into the ground in 2e.)

This is a problem that can be solved without yet another pool of numbers that does the same thing as an existing pool but works slightly differently. We don't need that complexity.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
thorin001 wrote:
The problem is not that the game forces someone capable of some healing on you, that has been a staple of the game for decades. The problem is that this game forces you to have a dedicated healer.

In D&D 3e and PF1, anyone who could use wands could provide out-of-combat healing. In 4e, there were healing surges. In 5e, you have a certain amount of HP per day you can regain by resting, and healing potions are pretty cheap. Starfinder used Stamina.

Having to use daily spells to heal wounds hasn't really been essential since AD&D. It's a relic of the 20th century.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
thorin001 wrote:
The problem is not that the game forces someone capable of some healing on you, that has been a staple of the game for decades. The problem is that this game forces you to have a dedicated healer.

Exactly. In previous editions, you needed a healer to activate the cheap, consumable magic items you used for most healing. The "healer" was then free to use spells and other powers on buffs, control, or debuffs - giving them an actual role in the party beyond "guy who spams cantrips or basic attacks so he doesn't waste potential healing"

In this edition, the Cleric's Spell Point class feature may as well read "You may cast heal a number of times per day equal to your Wisdom modifier". I feel obligated to tell players that domain powers are a trap, designed to punish you for trying to have fun because they use up the SP that you have to use on healing.

In previous editions you could avoid damage. Monsters can now hit on a roll of 10, you can't avoid the damage and every way you had to recover has been nerfed.

They successfully recreated the feeling of playing WoW's dungeon finder in a tabletop game. I'll be playing 5e if they don't give us healing on short rests, stamina, or cheap and easily used consumables.


8 people marked this as a favorite.
Matthew Downie wrote:

In D&D 3e and PF1, anyone who could use wands could provide out-of-combat healing.

Having to use daily spells to heal wounds hasn't really been essential since AD&D. It's a relic of the 20th century.

According to the developers, this was playing the game wrong and daily spell slots are supposed to be for healing.

Pathfinder was only popular because WOTC dropped the ball with 4th edition. They took away a ton of character options and forced everyone to choose a "spec". The game started to feel more like an MMORPG than D&D and players fled in gigantic numbers to Pathfinder.

Now Paizo is telling us that the way we've been playing for decades is wrong and trying to explain to us why they know best. Their reasoning for nerfing the longbow is consistent with this. "Your imagination is wrong so we forced you to wield the shortbow we think you're really imagining your character wielding"

If they hated healing wands they should have addressed the problem they were being used to solve instead of just doubling down on the stance that 75% of their own players were wrong.

Wands of CLW were popular for years before Pathfinder even existed. It wasn't unique to this game, and EVERY other developer seems to have realized that the lack of nonmagical, out of combat healing was the problem.


Robert Bunker wrote:
thorin001 wrote:
The problem is not that the game forces someone capable of some healing on you, that has been a staple of the game for decades. The problem is that this game forces you to have a dedicated healer.

Exactly. In previous editions, you needed a healer to activate the cheap, consumable magic items you used for most healing. The "healer" was then free to use spells and other powers on buffs, control, or debuffs - giving them an actual role in the party beyond "guy who spams cantrips or basic attacks so he doesn't waste potential healing"

In this edition, the Cleric's Spell Point class feature may as well read "You may cast heal a number of times per day equal to your Wisdom modifier". I feel obligated to tell players that domain powers are a trap, designed to punish you for trying to have fun because they use up the SP that you have to use on healing.

In previous editions you could avoid damage. Monsters can now hit on a roll of 10, you can't avoid the damage and every way you had to recover has been nerfed.

They successfully recreated the feeling of playing WoW's dungeon finder in a tabletop game. I'll be playing 5e if they don't give us healing on short rests, stamina, or cheap and easily used consumables.

Actually, unless you're a healing domain cleric, spell points can't be used for channeling. And even then it's a 3 point conversion rate. They've got a separate pool for channels which really makes playing a Cleric nice because you don't have to worry about using your resources on fun options.

They really need to do similar things for the other classes intended to be capable healers.

Lantern Lodge

5e has very little healing problems due to everyone having limited short rest healing, full hp on long rest, and almost all classes having some way of minor healing (fighter second wind, warlock temp hp, Druid wild shape heal, barbarian and rogue damage reduction, etc). With a cleric you are getting more in combat healing / a prolonged adventuring day but it is certainly not necessary.

Im not the biggest fan of how short rests work in 5e (unlimited uses 1 hr) but some type of limited short rest mechanic.... might work in PF2?

Personally I don’t see what was the big problem with wands of CLW. It kept the plot moving and allowed GMs to throw more challenging / interesting encounters at player’s without worrying about exhasuting their hp. Players still had to manage their resources through abilities / spells / limited per day magic items.

Number inflation is a bigger problem :/


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Tridus wrote:
Rameth wrote:


It doesn't even need to have a healing factor, just make it so you can heal it 2 ways, a number of times per day equal to your Con modifier +1 or rest for 8 hours. In my post I showed how a Lvl 1 Barbarian with no Healer and only 1 Potion of Healing fared MUCH better than the current system. Even having a healer didn't make it broken because Stamina cannot be healed by magic. So it was this nice give and take of managing your resources for healing and Stamina regen.

Saying healers can't heal stamina is a nerf to healers by reducing their effective ability to heal. It's worse when someone has relatively fewer HP and can get blasted from just over half to dying in one turn, because the healer has absolutely no way to prevent that, whereas they could have with straight HP by healing them to full. (In 1e we could also use buffs and other spells to mitigate it, but that was nerfed into the ground in 2e.)

This is a problem that can be solved without yet another pool of numbers that does the same thing as an existing pool but works slightly differently. We don't need that complexity.

Actually making it so Stamina can't be healed by magic is exactly what would make Healers and items still relevant. I'll explain.

If a player has let's say 14 HP and 9 Stamina. He takes 4 damage in one battle. He knows he can only regain his Stamina twice in one day (let's say) and he doesn't want to waste it yet, as he still has most of his total Health. So he trudges on. In the next battle he takes 13 damage. He then has to drink a potion or get a heal from a buddy which could be anywhere from 1 (if the potion) to 12 (from Heal). So let's say he heals 5 (around average). He was at 6 HP now he's at 11. After the battle he can use one of his rests and now he's back at 20 total health (11 HP and 9 Stamina). Now the Healer doesn't have to use one his heals on him and can wait until he really needs it again. He would also still have a potion on hand in case of emergencies, like the Healer going down mid combat. But that can't be misused because of Resonance, and cash restrictions.

Also because the dying rules you are never in fear of absolutely dying even if you are at half health, as the worst that can happen is you go to dying 2 with a crit. Therefore you would always want to wait until you Stamina is all gone (or almost all gone) before you rest so that would mean you're bound to take HP damage, and make the Healers useful.


Rameth wrote:
Now the Healer doesn't have to use one his heals on him and can wait until he really needs it again.

When people talk about making healers relevant, they often mean healers so dedicated to the job of healing that any time they aren't casting healing spells, they feel like they're unable to perform their primary function.

"I don't need you to heal me so you can use your spells for something else," is the last thing they want to hear.

Sovereign Court

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Tridus wrote:
Rameth wrote:


It doesn't even need to have a healing factor, just make it so you can heal it 2 ways, a number of times per day equal to your Con modifier +1 or rest for 8 hours. In my post I showed how a Lvl 1 Barbarian with no Healer and only 1 Potion of Healing fared MUCH better than the current system. Even having a healer didn't make it broken because Stamina cannot be healed by magic. So it was this nice give and take of managing your resources for healing and Stamina regen.

Saying healers can't heal stamina is a nerf to healers by reducing their effective ability to heal. It's worse when someone has relatively fewer HP and can get blasted from just over half to dying in one turn, because the healer has absolutely no way to prevent that, whereas they could have with straight HP by healing them to full. (In 1e we could also use buffs and other spells to mitigate it, but that was nerfed into the ground in 2e.)

In Starfinder, mystics can heal your HP while envoys can heal Stamina. You could have the same in P2, where clerics heal HP and bards talk some fresh Stamina into you.

It's of course also a matter of balancing the scale of HP to monster damage so that an appropriately challenging monster isn't likely to deal your whole HP in a critical hit. Although that balance still needs some tuning in P2.

But I don't think it's bad that you can get knocked down by monsters now and then. For a cautious party, it shouldn't be frequent, but a combat where you're not really at risk is also not that exciting. While playing Starfinder I find I rather enjoy that the monsters seem to pose a real threat but we also manage to fight back rather well. And because healing feels both cheaper and simpler (spend a point of Resolve, get all your Stamina back, as opposed to needing multiple spells or doing math to figure out how many wand charged), being injured feels like less of a bad thing metagame-wise.

Stamina feels a lot to me like a kind of Die Hard heroism, where you get smacked around quite a bit in one scene but a bit later you just have some bruises and a burst lip and fight like you can keep doing this all day.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

As I've said before, I feel this is primarily a symptom of the nerfing to consumables and spellcasting. The solution is to bring back affordable healing items, and classes that are effective at disruption roles. This means running a party without a dedicated healer just incurs an additional cost overhead.

One of the things I've been thinking of playtesting is dropping the price of all PF2 consumables to 1/10th their current cost and seeing how things play out with resonance being the primary limiter.


Healers should be required; clerics and CLW shouldn't be.

If you look at any other role, I can think of multiple ways to fill it:

Damage dealers can be fighters, barbarians, monks, paladins, rangers, rogues, or even blaster mages.

Trapfinding can be a rogue. But it can also be a bard using dispel magic to handle magical traps, or even a barbarian using their d12 HD to absorb all the damage.

The skillmonkey can be a rogue. But it can also be a bard with versatile performance, or even split among multiple characters, like a sorcerer acting as face.

But because natural healing is so horrible in 1e, there's a single method of playing healer- using CLW in some way. This can be a cleric, but that cleric can also grab a healstick to not feel pressured to save all their slots for healing. Or it can be someone using a healstick with UMD.

If Paizo's going to insist that using UMD to play healer is wrong, then there are really only two alternatives (which aren't mutually exclusive):

1. Wounds and Vigor / Stamina / whatever you want to call it. A second pool that, at a minimum, gets refilled daily, and that you might even be able to partially refill on your own when resting.

2. Letting people trained in the Heal/Medicine skill use a medicine kit to restore a substantial amount of hp.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Ascalaphus wrote:
In Starfinder, mystics can heal your HP while envoys can heal Stamina. You could have the same in P2, where clerics heal HP and bards talk some fresh Stamina into you.

Yes, I get that. I don't think that's helping. Now instead of one mechanic and one pool, you have two mechanics and split pools. If half the drive of PF2 is to reduce excess complexity, that is the absolute opposite.

Quote:
But I don't think it's bad that you can get knocked down by monsters now and then. For a cautious party, it shouldn't be frequent, but a combat where you're not really at risk is also not that exciting. While playing Starfinder I find I rather enjoy that the monsters seem to pose a real threat but we also manage to fight back rather well. And because healing feels both cheaper and simpler (spend a point of Resolve, get all your Stamina back, as opposed to needing multiple spells or doing math to figure out how many wand charged), being injured feels like less of a bad thing metagame-wise.

We don't have resolve, so it would by necessity be different here anyway. I mean, I get that people like Starfinder, and that's cool. But that doesn't mean we need to port over part of a core mechanic over there when the problem we're trying to address has straightforward solutions that don't require adding a second health pool.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
kaisc006 wrote:
5e has very little healing problems due to everyone having limited short rest healing, full hp on long rest, and almost all classes having some way of minor healing (fighter second wind, warlock temp hp, Druid wild shape heal, barbarian and rogue damage reduction, etc). With a cleric you are getting more in combat healing / a prolonged adventuring day but it is certainly not necessary.

Yeah, I don't know why people here are so reluctant to see that the problem they're struggling to solve has already been solved by 5e, and it doesn't require having Stamina as a second health pool.

Quote:


Im not the biggest fan of how short rests work in 5e (unlimited uses 1 hr) but some type of limited short rest mechanic.... might work in PF2?

Did you see the ritual healing thread? That was pretty interesting as a downtime healing method.

Quote:

Personally I don’t see what was the big problem with wands of CLW. It kept the plot moving and allowed GMs to throw more challenging / interesting encounters at player’s without worrying about exhasuting their hp. Players still had to manage their resources through abilities / spells / limited per day magic items.

Number inflation is a bigger problem :/

Me neither. This whole thing started by trying to solve a "problem" that was itself the solution to a bigger problem. CLW spam was a reaction to a bigger problem, and attacking CLW spam has simply brought back the problem it fixed.


I don't see a second health pool as being a big deal. Spell slots are a pool. Resonance is a pool. Wand charges are a pool. 4e's Healing Surges are a pool. 5e's short rest healing hit dice are a pool. Does anyone really find Stamina too complicated to track?

Sovereign Court

Tridus wrote:
Ascalaphus wrote:
In Starfinder, mystics can heal your HP while envoys can heal Stamina. You could have the same in P2, where clerics heal HP and bards talk some fresh Stamina into you.
Yes, I get that. I don't think that's helping. Now instead of one mechanic and one pool, you have two mechanics and split pools. If half the drive of PF2 is to reduce excess complexity, that is the absolute opposite.

Not all complexity is excess complexity. If simpler is always better we'll be playing snakes and ladders soon.

Stamina in Starfinder has prevented a CLW problem AND a mandatory healer without introducing anything as baroque as Resonance. I think that qualifies as a pretty simple solution.

Quote:
But I don't think it's bad that you can get knocked down by monsters now and then. For a cautious party, it shouldn't be frequent, but a combat where you're not really at risk is also not that exciting. While playing Starfinder I find I rather enjoy that the monsters seem to pose a real threat but we also manage to fight back rather well. And because healing feels both cheaper and simpler (spend a point of Resolve, get all your Stamina back, as opposed to needing multiple spells or doing math to figure out how many wand charged), being injured feels like less of a bad thing metagame-wise.
We don't have resolve, so it would by necessity be different here anyway. I mean, I get that people like Starfinder, and that's cool. But that doesn't mean we need to port over part of a core mechanic over there when the problem we're trying to address has straightforward solutions that don't require adding a second health pool.

Resolve Points are basically Hero and Resonance points folded into one mechanic: they stabilize you while dying, heal you up, and power abilities that are supposed to be somewhat limited per day. So it's actually fewer separate mechanics than P2.


Matthew Downie wrote:
I don't see a second health pool as being a big deal. Spell slots are a pool. Resonance is a pool. Wand charges are a pool. 4e's Healing Surges are a pool. 5e's short rest healing hit dice are a pool. Does anyone really find Stamina too complicated to track?

Short rest is a pool you only care about when you are thinking about doing a short rest.

Having two health pools is relevant every time you take damage or healing. And yes, it is more complicated to track.

Some of the people I play with have difficulty doing math due to learning disabilities and mental health issues. They will find having to say "I took 27 damage but have 19 stamina, so that means..." harder than simply dealing with one number.

If there was no other way to solve the problem, then that might be worth it. But there are simpler ways, so the complexity isn't needed.

Sovereign Court

Alright, the argument about people who need less math is a fair one. How about a variant? You have a limited pool of short rests (limited by hero points, resolve points, resonance points, or some other limit; but not any more pools than we have right now). Each time you use it, you regain up to half your full HP.

That's one number that you only have to calculate once per level and can write down on your character sheet. No separate Stamina and HP pools.

I think the easiest limiter would be to make the pool of hero points a bit bigger and use only that.

Resonance, quite frankly, can just be scrapped. Because Item Bonuses don't stack, most of the other problem Resonance tried to solve (too many small items adding up cheaper than one big item) is already solved.

So you'd have one pool, Hero Points, one HP pool, and one number that you need to calculate once per level (HP regained per short rest).


  • Healers are still fine to have, because they let you start encounters fully healed instead of at about 75%. And they give you a safety net with burst healing in combat when needed. But it's not a necessary role, and not a full-attention role. The healer can and should do other stuff too.
  • Wands of CLW are acceptable as a top-off method because they're no longer making a whole mandatory character class un-mandatory.
  • The price curve for healing items should be made a lot less geometric. You're paying more for big ticket items only because they provide in-combat burst healing, not because they let you get around resonance. So a slight instead of massive increase in GP per HP is appropriate.
  • Scenario writers have a good baseline of what to expect from parties going into an encounter: 75-100% health. That allows them to consistently scale challenges. Instead of having to write for two audiences at the same time, one of which is always at full health and one which is struggling to stay up.


As I see it the 2 pools keeps any sources of healing from being overpowered. You can have a feat, skill, spell, or ability that heals a tremendous amount if it can only heal half of your Health at any given point. By making the second pool only refillable a few times per day it means that they'll hold off using it as they'll want the entire refill, which means they're more likely to take HP damage and require a heal making Healers still very useful.

It also has this nice give and take where after hard fights you can almost always go up to 70%plus of your HP which means you're able to keep fighting but not just walking around like nothing happened. Which is good for the roleplaying aspect. Fights should mean something. Healing back up to full should be a rare thing. The Stamina system works well for that.

It also fixes several current problems with the system, Resonance (item) healing, 15 minute adventuring day, and weak healing classes outside the Cleric. All without having to really change anything at all. So not wanting to do it based on it adding just a small amount of complexity (and I mean really small) seems odd to me.

The math complexity can easily be solved by just having a calculator if people aren't capable of doing basic math, which isn't meant to be an insult I know some people have problems with math. It's just if you have problems doing math subtracting 27 from 54 is going to be just as problematic as subtracting 27 from 35/19. I could argue the smaller number would actually make it easier but I can't say for sure as I don't have that issue myself.

Community / Forums / Archive / Pathfinder / Playtests & Prerelease Discussions / Pathfinder Playtest / Pathfinder Playtest General Discussion / Healing the Good the Bad and the Ugly All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Pathfinder Playtest General Discussion