Garden of Healing and Discomfiting Whispers unfriendly and friendly fire!

[YuriP]

I notice that both Garden of Healing and Discomfiting Whispers affects "each creature" not only allies or enemies. This makes theses spells pretty difficult to use specially if you use it with Spiritual Expansion Spell.

If you not pay attention and constantly move Garden of Healing will heal the enemies too in a similar way Discomfiting Whispers risks to affect to closer allies. It's pretty rare in PF2 that spells can do "friendly" fire in this way. Spells like Bless and Bane take care with it and even Kineticists aura many times differ allies from enemies and also gives you a feat to use with auras that doesn't do this differentiation.

It's not the case to rewrite these spells to prevent "friend fire" or to add a target exclusion feat?

[Joyd]

This came up in the Twitch stream, where they mentioned that the non-selectivity of these options was a deliberate choice, as it allowed them to further push their power level. They also mentioned that they'd be evaluating whether that was the correct design.

[breithauptclan]

In general, the game mechanics actively punishes the strategy of 'run alone into a group of enemies and throw out a big emanation damage effect so that you hit all of the enemies and none of your allies'. It is unlikely to do enough damage to kill all of them, and you won't survive the retaliation from that group of enemies.

I have never been tempted to pick Eidolon's Wrath for my Summoner characters for that same reason.

[Errenor]

YuriP wrote:

It's pretty rare in PF2 that spells can do "friendly" fire in this way.

Well... Not really. There's a lot of that.

As a smallest example, Reaper's Lantern. The visuals and flavor are excellent. But effect on enemies is weak if they are undead, almost irrelevant if they are alive and effect on friendlies is very bad. I don't know how to use it at all. Only your character is probably unaffected.
Oh, and another extremely funny thing I just noticed: Reaper's Lantern is a Death effect, and so all undead are automatically immune to it. That's just an icing.
Also Bane is almost always better, and that's a tombstone.

Returning to the topic, I suspect more than half of emanations have friendly fire. As most of untargeted spells do.
3-action Heal has 'unfriendly fire'.

[Squiggit]

Discomfiting whisper is only a 5ft aura so it shouldn't be that hard to try to maneuver around... like if you're flanking with another martial they're going to be outside the aura while enemies still get pinged by it.

[Blake's Tiger]

Disconcerting Whispers is more of a defensive buff. You would cast it to protect yourself for the most part. If you pinned a creature between yourself and an ally for flanking, the two of you would be protected—if it cannot or is too dumb to move. So not a run in and blast/debuff.

However, if you use it, you’re probably making it harder for your allies or at least forcing them to spend an action moving.

[Squiggit]

Blake's Tiger wrote:

If you pinned a creature between yourself and an ally for flanking, the two of you would be protected—if it cannot or is too dumb to move.

Whispers activates at the start of a creature's turn, so moving away doesn't really help until the following round (and that's assuming you can't just follow).