Alright, so I've had enough time reading this and I've come to a worrying hypothesis. Oracle, even life Oracle, doesn't have the spellpower to keep a party healthy on their own at low levels and has to spend everything to do so at higher levels.
In PF1, a level 1 oracle as the solo healer often ends up blowing all 4 spell slots on healing the party. It doesn't matter if they get a bunch of 1's or a bunch of 8's, with the limited health pools those 4 slots burn up fast. However as health pools and spell slots increase with level the need for you to burn your slots to heal decreases.
So what's the deal? The deal is this Oracle never gets more than 3 spells per level per day. Even with d8+8 healing I'm not entirely confident this class can keep up as a solo healer at level 1 with how few spell slots they got. Later on, who knows how much they're gonna be forced to heal when they would rather use that fancy new holy water carpet bomb spell. (Granted I love being the healer but I understand it's a chore for other people.) That said, I do have some solutions for this.
1) Hey remember Starfinder's Mystic? Remember how it has some healing hands that heals 5HP per level each day? It helped Mystic keep up with the damage most of the time, though stamina also played a role in that. Maybe let Oracle have something similar in the first level feats.
2) Bring back virtue the cantrip and make it a d4 heal you can use once per person per minute. Or 5 minutes if you're that scared of out of combat healing.
3) You know how cleric gets free slots dedicated to Healing/Harming? I'm thinking maaaaaaaybe Oracle could also have that?
4) This doesn't help the situation but free heal/harm each new spell level like in PF1 where you get free cure/inflict known for each spell level would be very much appreciated.
The healing oracle looks pretty strong this go round. Once you are up to your moderate curse you are healing for d12's and if you are the parties only healer the limitation of you can only heal yourself is not much of a limitation. Also when you are at your moderate curse you also heal your target of your spell or nearest creature for healing = the level of spell being cast. So even using buff type spells on party members is giving them healing and makes your d12 healing spells yet again more effective.
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A healing cantrip would require some kind of roll. 1st level characters should not have a spammable, infallible healing option. Even if it was something like 1 HP per minute, it absolutely demolishes other magical and even medicine skill based healing. Maybe if it was limited, like guidance, to once an hour and healed as much as your spell casting modifier it would be alright. (remember, guidance only gives a +1 bonus to any one check and has an hour reset. Even 1 hitpoint every 10 minutes as a cantrip starts to get too close to just: "we might as well say every character just heals to full after every combat."
It has come to my attention that the Medicine skill actually restores 2d8 HP if used correctly, which I was not aware of at the time of making this post. I retract my concerns...I still want the old cure/inflict system from PF1 on oracles though.
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Healing from spell slots is very resource intensive, especially at low levels.
Healing oracles kinda suffer from the same problem Divine Sorcerers do, in that the Cleric's Healing Font seems like a really important tool to allow for active healing without consuming all of your resources and those classes have nothing that can keep up with that.
Would be cool if instead of Delay Affliction the Oracle had some form of focus spell heal that could give them a little more staying power in that regard.
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also, with combat in general being longer and it being i think impossible to make yourself almost impossible to hit in combat, we'll be taking a lot more damage in general in 2e, with no increase to the amount healed. :/
though with medicine being good this time around, the party can probably stay afloat outside of combat.
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It almost feels like the designer s heard 'how broken' Life Oracles allegedly were in PF, and decided to go in the opposite direction.
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Healing from spell slots is very resource intensive, especially at low levels.
Healing oracles kinda suffer from the same problem Divine Sorcerers do, in that the Cleric's Healing Font seems like a really important tool to allow for active healing without consuming all of your resources and those classes have nothing that can keep up with that.
Would be cool if instead of Delay Affliction the Oracle had some form of focus spell heal that could give them a little more staying power in that regard.
I think the biggest issue of delay affliction is if you are not in an area where afflictions are being inflicted early on you basically are never going to encounter your curse with its negatives/benefits unless you are using it on somebody who does not have anything wrong with them which is weird. I think the first focus power you get for an oracle should be something that they are going to WANT to use each encounter.
Healing from spell slots is very resource intensive, especially at low levels.
Healing oracles kinda suffer from the same problem Divine Sorcerers do, in that the Cleric's Healing Font seems like a really important tool to allow for active healing without consuming all of your resources and those classes have nothing that can keep up with that.
Would be cool if instead of Delay Affliction the Oracle had some form of focus spell heal that could give them a little more staying power in that regard.
It basically is there to give them extra throughput for healing when doing other things or making a direct heal spell yet more effective.
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It almost feels like the designer s heard 'how broken' Life Oracles allegedly were in PF, and decided to go in the opposite direction.
Every "broken" thing Life Oracles could do was either something every other oracle could do or was related to life link, usually alongside lay on hands to make yourself an HP battery.
While Life was one of the stronger mysteries it was far from broken. Mostly because it focuses on healing which in a rocket taggy system like PF1 is pretty difficult to do well.
Yeah, you want crazy? Build a Life Spirit Shaman with the Witch Doctor archetype and Cleric Variant Multiclassing for far too many channels a day. Plus spell slots.