Establishing true parity between Harm and Heal


Homebrew and House Rules


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Harm and heal are, in my opinion, two of the best-designed spells in the game. Their flexible action costs and variable effects give them a large variety of different applications, and as the iconic vitality and void spells, they're perfect mirrors of each other, affecting the living and the undead in opposite ways, and each applying healing and damage. Surely, this must mean they're equally good?

Well, not really, and in my opinion this is because parity is broken on the two-action version, in a way that favors heal much more than harm.

Heal is, as the name indicates, a healing spell first and foremost: party members are generally much more likely to be living than undead, and the damage against undead is more of a side benefit: this makes its two-action version really good, because the boost to healing caters directly to its main function. It doesn't really matter that the healing doesn't get increased, because you'd be using the two-action version to heal and will probably have other spells to blast instead.

Harm, by contrast, is a damage spell first and foremost: although this can be used to heal party members with void healing, even heal an entire undead party, that requires a lot of party buy-in and limits other healing options, so its main purpose is to damage the living. So when the two-action version boosts its healing, but not its damage, that doesn't cater to its main function: although it's really good when you do heal an undead party member, 1d8 void damage per spell rank is barely above cantrip damage, making its two-action version quite a poor blasting option.

This disparity I think matters because of the Cleric's divine font: it's generally known among experienced players that heal font deities tend to offer more benefits than harm font deities unless you're running a party setup specifically built to benefit more from void healing, simply because heal is the best healing spell in the game, whereas harm... well, it's not that great a spell. Although the two are treated as equal, one spell is markedly better than the other, and this imbalance has a meaningful impact on deity and build choices.

With this in mind, here's the fix I propose: have the two-action version of both spells increase the damage by 1d8 per spell rank.

... and that's it. The single- and three-action versions would remain unchanged, and that's fine because they offer benefits in action economy and massive AoE respectively. While this would buff heal, an already strong spell, that buff would be a lot more situational than for harm, whose two-action version would become a solid blasting option against the living. Whereas a heal font Cleric would be a top-tier healer, a harm font Cleric could become a solid single-target blaster, able to also heal undead party members while still generally lacking in AoE blasting until later on.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Harm font feels okay because you get a bunch and feel like it's a bonus, and the flexibility is appreciated. I don't know if I've ever considered using a slotted harm for its two action potential. I have planned on using the one action harm for its decent nova potential.

It does seem like 2 action Harm could probably get a modest boost.

What about changing Heal and Harm's 2 action bonus to increasing damage/healing by 1d8, but if you're using it to heal a target, maximize the second die.


WatersLethe wrote:
What about changing Heal and Harm's 2 action bonus to increasing damage/healing by 1d8, but if you're using it to heal a target, maximize the second die.

That's a good way to frame it, yes! Mechanically it'd be identical, but it'd feel quite neat to maximize one of the dice instead of just saying "increase it by 8", so I'd definitely be in support of this wording.

Shadow Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I'm using this one!
Specifically, the adjusted version.

Dark Archive

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Just ran into this recently, actually. I am running a PF2e version of Way of the Wicked that I have been converting as we go, and the main party has an artifact that converts them all to void healing. So I see Harm used to heal the party all the time, and the only time, but they have never once bothered to use the two action version to harm the living, because why would they? They have much better damaging spells already (though occasionally a 3 action Harm to heal the party and hurt the their foes simultaneously is nice, especially since the enemy tends to do the same if/when they notice that the party is using void healing).

So last session we started MinionQuest, a little side adventure in which the players take control of the 2nd level minions of their 8th level party and we all laugh at how goofy and ineffective they are. But one of these minions is a cleric of Asmodeus, and that is when I was made aware of something I had never noticed before, namely that the 2-action version of both spells does not get the +8 rider when used to harm, and thus we came to exactly the same conclusion OP made: a harm font cleric sucks in comparison to a heal font cleric because their extra spells are so much better at their primary purpose! Obviously the primary purpose shifts when the party has void healing, so in all the sessions prior to this I simply did not notice.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Tl;dr is that I am seriously thinking of presenting this idea as an option to my players. 9-16 damage per spell rank would probably be too much, but 2-16 per spell rank seems perfectly reasonable...

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Second Edition / Homebrew and House Rules / Establishing true parity between Harm and Heal All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Homebrew and House Rules