The main risk I'd see with a wand having 30 charges and being able to recharge 4 a day is that this could make wand balance quite variable depending on available downtime: with sufficient downtime, you might as well cast that wand spell at-will, and even with no downtime that's 4 free casts of a spell per day. Given that staves can do the same for lower-rank spells, perhaps that could be fine, though I'd probably get annoyed as a GM if a high-level party each got a wand of quandary or the like to casually poof monsters out of existence every fight without dipping into their spell slots.
I also feel there are two problems being tackled here which could probably be handled in parallel: the first is that wands in 2e don't feel terribly satisfying, and the second is that healing in 2e is a feat tax that is also more time-consuming than is interesting for parties that just want to get moving. Here's what I'd personally suggest for these:
I don't necessarily know for sure if this will address the desires mentioned in the OP, but hopefully these should help make wands feel a little more useful, and out-of-combat healing require a little less investment.
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TLDR: Mandatory Medicine checks are kinda annoying.
Yeah, that's not really controversial at this point. Six years ago people thought Medicine to do complete healing out of combat was shockingly generous. Now when a party actually has to resort to Medicine for their unlimited out of combat healing it feels like this party is doing last resorts. I mean, compared to stuff like champion Lay on Hands, wood/water kineticist and so on.
The limit on out of combat healing isn't whether you can do it at all, but how fast it is. Sometimes you're under pressure and by the time you run into the next fight you haven't fully healed for free yet. That's when you start looking at the bag of random leftover potions, or Heal spells.
Comparing that the PF1 healing practices; PF1 didn't strictly have unlimited out of combat healing, but the CLW wand was so cheap and still relatively fast, that given 10m to rest you could heal up a whole party.
In PF2, a multi-charge Heal wand could also fill that niche, of "we have a few minutes, but not an hour, to heal", where you'd otherwise go dig around for all those random healing potions that you never used because you already had Medicine.
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So back to "mandatory medicine checks": have you considered just waiving the checks? If someone is at 1HP and a critical failure on the check would be hilarious, ok roll it. But if people are at 40HP and need to heal 50HP more, it's just a matter of rolling and time, but there's no realistic risk that they're going to crit-fail five times in a row, roll max damage each time, and perish. You might as well say "ok, so your party is capable of out of combat healing, and you have plenty of time, so everyone just set your HP back to full".
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I don't personally view "medicine checks" as mandatory, but rather as generous compared to other options for healing. Comparing to many other options, medicine checks are better for out of combat healing (assuming you take the feats to support it). Which really just means continual recovery and ward medic (and battle medicine might as well). It's honestly a pretty low amount of investment (I guess I should mention spending skill proficiency advancements too).
Compare that to other healing options, it takes a lot more of a characters class power to do, or more time, or isn't as effective. Champion's lay on hands can only heal one at a time and is limited by focus points for instance. Torrent in the Blood (Water Kin) is limited to 10 minutes, and took a class feature (impulse choice) which are more limited. Sure it's better than medicine, except for the class resource cost.
Medicine is the class agnostic, build agnostic healing resource that can always be available.
I honestly don't understand the idea that medicine is annoying.
I guess compared to cheap wands of CLW that were used in PF1 it could be annoying, but I found the wand paradigm in PF1 to be annoying. Ignoring time, level 1 wands of CLW were the most cost efficient method of healing, barring some "broken" items that gave infinite healing. Honestly even those were kind of worse for the character because you had to keep wearing that item as opposed to wearing another item in that slot.
Personally I like the paradigm that class healing options are available and effective for in combat healing, some are decent options for out of combat healing, but everyone has the choice for a good out of combat healing option via medicine skill.
But if you really hate the medicine skill, I wouldn't suggest trying to do what you're doing with wands. Instead, I would just implement the Stamina variant rules.
I'd also add, Scrolls in this edition are the "i want to cast a lot of a spell" vehicle. Although, they're not very cost effective for healing.
There's also potions, but again while they're good in an emergency, they're not cost effective for out of combat healing.
There are staves, which is almost what you're describing, but simply put your proposal for "chargeable wands" is straight up better than staves. Personally I view that as a big reason not to do it.
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I'd also add, Scrolls in this edition are the "i want to cast a lot of a spell" vehicle. Although, they're not very cost effective for healing.
There's also potions, but again while they're good in an emergency, they're not cost effective for out of combat healing.
There are staves, which is almost what you're describing, but simply put your proposal for "chargeable wands" is straight up better than staves. Personally I view that as a big reason not to do it.
I think this kind of gets at why wands feel a bit out of place in 2e: there's a ton of different options for casting a particular spell or getting a particular effect, and the one thing wands are good at are letting you cast the exact same spell once every day. This causes wands to naturally lend themselves well to casting long-duration buffs that you only need once a day anyway, but poorly to most other things.
Personally, I'd be keen to try a model where wands simply let you expend any appropriate spell slot you have on the spot to cast the wand's spell: this would lend itself particularly well to healing, because you wouldn't need to have healing prepared or in your repertoire; you'd just need the wand for it, the spell in your list, and you'd be fine. Ideally, the wand could still give you a free cast once per day, but even without that, wands would be able to differentiate themselves from scrolls and staves by letting you draw directly from your spell slots to cast the same spell over and over. This could be a big help to prepared casters looking for a reliable fallback option in particular, and would basically offer an extra spell in a spontaneous caster's repertoire.
I'd also add, Scrolls in this edition are the "i want to cast a lot of a spell" vehicle. Although, they're not very cost effective for healing.
There's also potions, but again while they're good in an emergency, they're not cost effective for out of combat healing.
There are staves, which is almost what you're describing, but simply put your proposal for "chargeable wands" is straight up better than staves. Personally I view that as a big reason not to do it.
I think this kind of gets at why wands feel a bit out of place in 2e: there's a ton of different options for casting a particular spell or getting a particular effect, and the one thing wands are good at are letting you cast the exact same spell once every day. This causes wands to naturally lend themselves well to casting long-duration buffs that you only need once a day anyway, but poorly to most other things.
Personally, I'd be keen to try a model where wands simply let you expend any appropriate spell slot you have on the spot to cast the wand's spell: this would lend itself particularly well to healing, because you wouldn't need to have healing prepared or in your repertoire; you'd just need the wand for it, the spell in your list, and you'd be fine. Ideally, the wand could still give you a free cast once per day, but even without that, wands would be able to differentiate themselves from scrolls and staves by letting you draw directly from your spell slots to cast the same spell over and over. This could be a big help to prepared casters looking for a reliable fallback option in particular, and would basically offer an extra spell in a spontaneous caster's repertoire.
That's kind of what staves do, although not quite that flexibly because you have to sink spell slots into it ahead of time. I think making it so that with staves you could simply expend a spell slot of the appropriate rank, to cast the spell would be an improvement. Prepared casters don't have to prepare that specific spell and spontaneous casters wouldn't have to know the spell. And you could let higher tier staves cast the slots flexibly, in the since of you could let a Major Staff of Healing cast the heal spell at any rank up to 5.
It doesn't give you more spell slot resources, but does allow for a lot of flexibility.
That's kind of what staves do, although not quite that flexibly because you have to sink spell slots into it ahead of time. I think making it so that with staves you could simply expend a spell slot of the appropriate rank, to cast the spell would be an improvement. Prepared casters don't have to prepare that specific spell and spontaneous casters wouldn't have to know the spell. And you could let higher tier staves cast the slots flexibly, in the since of you could let a Major Staff of Healing cast the heal spell at any rank up to 5.
It doesn't give you more spell slot resources, but does allow for a lot of flexibility.
Staves I think are a bit different, as they give you multiple spells to choose from, and you need to prepare them in advance to determine how much juice you want to put into a staff. That much is fine, and while one could certainly improve the flexibility of staves, such as by letting characters cast heightened versions of spells on staves as you mention, I think that leads to meaningfully different gameplay than an item to let you directly and immediately convert whichever spell slots you have into this one spell.
I mean, I guess one could view that way. I just view what you're talking about as being functionally closer to what Staves do than wands.
IME, both staves and wands in PF2 aren't something I see get used a lot (outside of the edge case of long duration spells being used with wands). Scrolls get used a lot to expand a casters "top level spell slots" for an adventuring day. Especially on a day where the party expect to fight bosses or something, having scrolls to dip into is very popular.
In my own experience, I don't see scrolls get used super-often for top-rank spells, but I've seen them used frequently for lower-rank spells at a point where they're so cheap that it's easy to stockpile lots of "just-in-case" scrolls that are otherwise not seen as worth preparing or having in a caster's repertoire all the time. This, in my opinion, is meaningfully different from staves, which offer a reserve of spells to expand on the spells you can already cast, should you choose to commit the resources towards them. This, in turn, I think is meaningfully different from an endlessly reusable pipeline that transforms spell slots into a single spell, without any preparation needed or any upper limit beyond your own spell slots. If you purchased lots of wands then sure, you could sort of replicate the functionality of a staff by being able to cast lots of spells, but at a far greater cost in currency and action economy, in the same way that purchasing lots of scrolls of the same spells you expect to cast every day would not be cost-efficient relative to a staff or even just a wand with those spells.
In my own experience, I don't see scrolls get used super-often for top-rank spells, but I've seen them used frequently for lower-rank spells at a point where they're so cheap that it's easy to stockpile lots of "just-in-case" scrolls that are otherwise not seen as worth preparing or having in a caster's repertoire all the time. This, in my opinion, is meaningfully different from staves, which offer a reserve of spells to expand on the spells you can already cast, should you choose to commit the resources towards them. This, in turn, I think is meaningfully different from an endlessly reusable pipeline that transforms spell slots into a single spell, without any preparation needed or any upper limit beyond your own spell slots. If you purchased lots of wands then sure, you could sort of replicate the functionality of a staff by being able to cast lots of spells, but at a far greater cost in currency and action economy, in the same way that purchasing lots of scrolls of the same spells you expect to cast every day would not be cost-efficient relative to a staff or even just a wand with those spells.
Well, I should maybe rephrase.
It's not that they use top level scrolls frequently (as in every adventuring day) but I see them used frequently on days the party is expecting a long adventuring day or challenging fights. They will either acquire them while adventuring or stock up before a specific known challenge. It happens multiple times a campaign (usually in an AP each book final boss is well telegraphed). So while it's not an every day thing, it is a common tactic for more firepower for a specific time frame.
I also see spontaneous caster with them for low level spell that they want access to, but don't want to spend a spell known on because they don't need them that frequently.
I will say, staves and wands as implemented right now I think have a lot more in common than, say, a model where staves let you flexibly cast any heightened version of a spell on their list, and where wands let you expend spell slots freely during the day to cast their one spell. I do think the benefit of staves ought to be their added flexibility with a touch of extra spellcasting output, and the benefit of wands ought to be the one spell they let you cast without too much trouble, and if we feel there's no meaningful difference between the two we might as well combine them into one big item group.
Re Medicine checks:
Claxon kinda said that they were not compulsory, and then outlined the the reason why I, and others, feel that they are. PF2 is an unforgiving game - if you don't get your hp back after one fight, you are probably going to die in the next one. Other methods of getting your hit points back are not good enough to get your hp back after each fight, which means they are not good enough, full stop.
My framing and thought comes from this perspective, imagine the medicine skill and related feats didn't exist in game. Or was basically the same as PF1's version of the heal skill (where max you were going to heal like 20hp a day).
Now think about what you would need to do in PF2 if that were the case? You would require healing focused characters in every group, and back up healers. You'd probably want like a cleric and champion in every group for healing. So, from my perspective the Medicine skill is a generous change from PF1.
It's true that PF2 kind of assume players will be at full HP for every fight, though there are some places that offer guidance on how to run multiple fights in a row without allow players time for healing (hint, you make them fight multiple combat at or below party level).
And as I mentioned before, I feel it's a generous change for Medicine because PF1 had the same dynamic, no one wanted to go into a fight below like 75% health because, why would you? Everyone just grabbed a ton of wands of CLW and spent ~10 minutes bopping party members.
Anyways, as I suggested before if you don't like the medicine skill being so useful and prevalent, try the Stamina rules.
Re staves:
I don't have a lot of experience with them, but my impression is that they are kinda crap (which may be why I don't have much experience with them - nobody buys them, and people who find them rarely bother or remember to use them).Basically, AFAICT they're basically wands with a choice of spells rather than just one, and a couple of cantrips. They do have a slight advantage in that they they scale to your slot rank without spending extra cash on them. I think.
Staves in fact do not function much like wands. Wands are "cast this spell once per day". Staves are a magic battery (you store you spell slots into it) and then can cast certain spell from it (based on the kind of staff it is) using that battery. Some staves also have certain benefits whenever you cast appropriate spells (like the Staff of Healing gives more HP).
And if we feel there's no meaningful difference between the two we might as well combine them into one big item group.
I honestly feel there isn't too much difference in PF2, after wands were limited to only reliably being used once per day. Since staves will give you at least 1 casting from the battery per day. Although the fact that you have to charge staves from your spell is the biggest difference.
I would certainly get behind combining them. A new item that gets one cast per day of any spell on it's list, that could be charged from your spell slots for additional casts, has certain additional benefits depending on type, and could be overcharged with extreme drawbacks.
Yeah, I think wands and staves should've been combined.
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The lowest-rung staff of healing is actually kinda cute. It still gives you a number of charges equal to your highest spell rank, which you can dispense as a series of rank 1 Heals. So if you have rank 5 spells, that's 5 rank 1 heals which is the same amount of healing as one rank 5 heal, just over more rounds. But for a level 9 character that's a cheap item, so if you weren't gonna get a different staff, this one's a good bargain.
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I recently started a thread here on the idea of porting PF1-style 50-charge wands to PF2. The general consensus, which I have come to agree with, is that it was not one of my better ideas. However, in the course of conversation I hit on something that I though might be better. Before I get into the details, a little preamble about the perceived issue I am attempting to address: Both PF1 and PF2 have their near-mandatory post-combat procedures, which are different but both can be kinda annoying in their own ways.
PF2's version is making a whole bunch of Medicine checks, consuming quite a lot of time both in and out of universe. At my table we have already houseruled them to consume less of both (fewer die rolls, more generous results). But they still require someone (preferably at least two someones) to invest heavily in Medicine to keep the party on their feet. Which would be great if it were one option amongst several, but ATM it does not feel like it is.
It is, though:
- When we played Shadows at Sundown (an 11-13 adventure), no one was past trained in Medicine and no one had any Medicine feats. We recovered with Lay on Hands via Champion Archetype.- I'm playing Spore War now (11-20), and our primary recovery is the Alchemist using things like Healing Vapor & Soothing Tonic, and the Bard (when he was playing, the player recently had to leave the game due to real life) using Hymn of Healing. There is someone with Medicine but they don't have Ward Medic and so they can do that on one person while getting vials back.
- A bunch of other classes also have abilities that can basically handwave this given time.
TLDR: Mandatory Medicine checks are kinda annoying.
I think you're trying to solve the wrong problem, TBH. The problem you're having is downtime recovery feels annoying. It'd be a lot easier to address that directly.
eg: Create a new downtime activity:
Recuperate [Downtime]
10 Minutes
Target: You or one ally.
Restore HP equal to X% of target's maximum HP. If the target is yourself or it's appropriate as determined by the GM, you can Refocus while doing this activity. You can only benefit from this activity once per 10 minutes.
Set X based on how long you want a badly injured party to take to recover. So if you set it to 33%, then a party where everyone is at 1HP can simply declare "we spend 30 minutes recuperating" and they're all back at full health. No checks rolled, no investment in any skills/feats required. If someone is only slightly injured, they'll have extra time to identify items/search/whatever. If the party gets ambushed after 10 minutes, they at least can't fail to get some health back because there's no failure chance.
So how does making wands rechargeable help? It kinda brings back the PF1 "happy-stick dance" without the elements that made that annoying (ie, the supremacy of low-level wands even at the very highest levels, leading to huge numbers of charges being used).
Alchemical items can currently do that since you can get a pile of them and just use them as you need them. Drop the cost on the downtime recovery ones and you've given people downtime healing wand spam back, effectively.
Chargeable wands are "spells in a stick" like PF1 wands were, except that a fully charged wand only has 30 charges. Actually casting a spell from one works like a standard wand, except there is no daily restrictions (there may be a once-per-round restriction). They cost quite a lot up front, but the a significantly less to add charges. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four per day if you have nothing better to do).
My grasp on how to price them is less solid than in the PF1 version of this thread, largely because the relationship between rank and wand cost is not obvious to me. But I am leaning towards having the upfront cost the same as a standard magic wand. The cost to recharge would be linear with spell rank (maybe 4 gp per rank - same as a scroll at Rank 1). Because the HP restored per spell rank is linear (at least for heal and soothe), that conveniently keeps the cost per hp consistent across all versions (ignoring the upfront cost).
To charge the wand, you would probably need Magical Crafting, and would definitely need to match the spells level and provide a casting of the spell (from a slot). To make the thing in the first place, you would need all that plus an appropriate formula (and more time/castings, of course).
So what do you think? Any suggestions on price. Any flaws with my cunning plan that I have missed? Anyone want to weigh in on the costs? Any thoughts on a better name for the standard PF2 spell wand than "magic wand" (to differentiate it from this, and in general)?
EDIT: I meant to say, although I have focused on spells which restore hp, I was intending this option to apply to any wands. Are there any spells which would be particularly broken under than paradigm? I guess it would cut across the extremely restricted spells slots that PF2 caster have, but I am not sure how much of a problem I consider that to be!
If the cost is cheap, people will definitely spam wands of stuff like Synesthesia, Slow, Quandry, Chain Lightning, and such. it's great news for spellcasters in that sense because I can now have 30 Synesthesia castings available on demand and get them back at a fraction of the cost that it'd take to do that any other way.
And it has to be a fraction of the cost, otherwise it doesn't work for its purpose of downtime recovery as it'd be too expensive to actually use.
Hell, one of these of Heal and you've got nigh-endless in-combat healing. Sure it costs a bit, but it's way cheaper than a scroll (because it has to be to work for downtime recovery), and so it makes more sense to use it in combat and do downtime recovery in a more renewable way.
The only way this works as downtime without being combat appliable is if its a downtime only spell in the wand like Soothing Spring, or the wand increases the casting time so it's not viable in combat.
@Tridus, the new "Recuperate" action your suggesting is basically just the alternate stamina rules that I've suggested before.
But yeah, problem with cheap spamable wands in PF2 is that since the spells use your DC, offensive use would be viable. And even with a bad DC, as long as people aren't critically succeeding, a spell like Synesthesia being able to used as often as desired will trivialize a lot of enemies/encounters.
I just see it as a big problem to implement a change that gives a lot of uses of a spell for a low-ish cost.
@Tridus, the new "Recuperate" action your suggesting is basically just the alternate stamina rules that I've suggested before.
You're right. :)
But yeah, problem with cheap spamable wands in PF2 is that since the spells use your DC, offensive use would be viable. And even with a bad DC, as long as people aren't critically succeeding, a spell like Synesthesia being able to used as often as desired will trivialize a lot of enemies/encounters.
I just see it as a big problem to implement a change that gives a lot of uses of a spell for a low-ish cost.
Yes, 100% this. If you can use these wands for offensive purposes, any spell with a good outcome on successful save becomes the go-to item. I'd abuse the ever loving hell out of a Synesthesia chargable wand on every caster I make: pick up a dedication that gives you the Occult list (or a feature like Mysterious Repertoire to get it on your list) and you're golden.
In a campaign like Kingmaker with a lot of short adventuring days and a lot of downtime, the abuse potential of this is sky high since you can pretty much always have it fully charged and you can even get the money to charge it from Earn Income during that downtime.
I do feel that if wands simply let you convert your spell slots into their specific spell on the spot, instead of giving you free casts, the above problem could be avoided entirely, as you'd only have as many charges of synesthesia in your back pocket as you'd have spell slots of the appropriate rank to use. I know it's been said above that this might be similar to staves, but I don't think a Resentment Witch or the like expending a bunch of spell slots to cast synesthesia five times in a day is something a staff would ever achieve, nor is meant to.
My framing and thought comes from this perspective, imagine the medicine skill and related feats didn't exist in game. Or was basically the same as PF1's version of the heal skill (where max you were going to heal like 20hp a day).If you just took away Medicine, and left everything else the same? I am imagining TPK after TPK, until eventually you either house rule something back in or give up in disgust.
Yes, if you took away medicine and people didn't decide to play the classes with built in healing options, TPKs would very likely be common. That or you might have to limit combat to like twice per day before resting to get back to full. Even that second fight could be a high risk.
Now think about what you would need to do in PF2 if that were the case? You would require healing focused characters in every group, and back up healers. You'd probably want like a cleric and champion in every group for healing. So, from my perspective the Medicine skill is a generous change from PF1.Okay, maybe if you had a Cleric and a Champion you would avoid most of the TPKs I am imagining. But you didn't need a Cleric and and Champion(-equivalent) in every group in PF1, you needed a wand of CLW or infernal healing and some way to activate it.
True, you didn't need 2 healing "dedicated" characters in PF1, but in PF1 even a cleric and a paladin didn't actually guarantee enough healing (unless the cleric really just wanted be a bandaid and not use their spell slots for other things). It boiled down to HAVING to use a wand.
All your doing is suggesting replacing the necessity of Medicine in PF2, with the necessity of using wands (again) which I honestly feel is a worse and backwards solution.
Again just use the Stamina rules if you really hate medicine. Don't try to implement this wand change, which will greatly imbalance other portions of the game.
Edit: As an aside, I absolutely hated the CLW paradigm in PF1. It was too cheap and effective and I hated the imagery. Yes, Medicine does require someone in the party to make some investment of their character. It's going to take 2 to 3 of your skill feats (you get a lot) and 1/3 of skill increases to keep it relevant. As opposed to playing a specific class or other hoops to go through to use a wand of CLW. From my perspective, the CLW wand was far worse than what we have with medicine.
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I do feel that if wands simply let you convert your spell slots into their specific spell on the spot, instead of giving you free casts, the above problem could be avoided entirely, as you'd only have as many charges of synesthesia in your back pocket as you'd have spell slots of the appropriate rank to use. I know it's been said above that this might be similar to staves, but I don't think a Resentment Witch or the like expending a bunch of spell slots to cast synesthesia five times in a day is something a staff would ever achieve, nor is meant to.
I agree that there is probably room for some kind of item that just lets you spontaneously cast a spell (at a specific rank) if you're a prepared caster or gives you an additional spell known at a specific rank if you're already a spontaneous caster. Maybe limit it to only one invested item of this kind at a time.
I agree that there is probably room for some kind of item that just lets you spontaneously cast a spell (at a specific rank) if you're a prepared caster or gives you an additional spell known at a specific rank if you're already a spontaneous caster. Maybe limit it to only one invested item of this kind at a time.
I agree with this. A taste of spontaneous casting for prepared casters would go a long way towards alleviating some of the issues players have with prepared casting in the day, and a taste of prepared casting for spontaneous casters could similarly give them a bit of that desired flexibility. It'd also be thematically neat to have this thematic distinction where your Wizards and Witches would favor wands, whereas your Sorcerers and Psychics would favor some different kind of spellcasting item. Some kind of item that let you expend a spell slot to prepare a single spell in your list up to a certain rank for the day could achieve this.
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My referring to Medicine as mandatory is obviously hyperbolic. But the party needs to invest heavily in something to survive in PF2.
They also did in PF1 too: the something was just "burn a lot of money and make sure someone can activate endless wands." If you ran out of wands halfway through the dungeon, you were screwed and effectively forced to retreat to restock.
It also didn't work at low level there either because a healing wand was really expensive early on.
The only thing that actually changed is the game now expects people to get an ability to do it instead of spend gold to do it. But you can house rule the ability part away with a couple of the proposals you've been given.
Which alchemical items? Because the ones have costs that start way too high to be routinely usable while level appropriate, and then scale highly non-linearly with level (and hp restored). Exactly like other PF2 consumables (and not all that differently from PF1 consumables, in terms of relative costs across levels, although they tended to be a bit cheaper overall).
Healing Vapor and Soothing Tonic (which does exactly what Infernal Healing does). As I said: massively cut the price on them and you've regained item healing spam without changing anything else.
Teridax already pointed out quandary as a possible issue, and in response I changed the proposal to limit it to only spells whose base ranks is 4 or less. So there are not going to be chargeable wands of any of those except slow. Now that is definitely a spell that benefits from being spammable, since if you force enough saves eventually the enemy is going to fail one. I am not sure if I consider that to be a problem - I will have to ponder.
4th rank heal does an average of 50 HP of healing, or 18 in AoE mode to a party (which is the way to go if 3+ people are injured). Given high level characters easily clear 200 HP and many clear 300 HP, you're going to be burning through a LOT of charges to recover after a fight of any significant difficulty. The 4 charges a day you can restore won't heal a Fighter or Summoner back up after a single encounter, let alone a Barbarian or Guardian. And if the whole party is injured, you're looking at over 10 charges per fight. So in a time compressed AP scenario with little downtime, the recharge mechanic won't matter and you'll have to just carry a pile of wands.
Like even my 14th level Spore War party would completely drain one of these in 4-5 fights if we used it as our primary recovery method. It'd be faster if they all go like the last couple of fights we had went where we were barely surviving.
And this doesn't eliminate all the downtime rolls unless you're just going to take the average and not roll it. Otherwise you'll have to roll 4d8 a whole pile of times and everyone will get annoyed when they get single digit HP.
I really feel like you're too fixated on trying to do what PF1 did as a solution without recognizing why its not really suitable to PF2 and that there's better ways to go about doing the same thing. (Frankly it was a lousy solution in PF1 too, but it was what we had.)
There are probably other spells that are problematic on anything other than a critical success, if those spells are spamable.
Ultimate you're trying to put in bandaids that cause problems in other parts of the system when ultimately what you're trying to achieve is "with [enough] time everyone is back to full HP".
So you could start there. A 10 minute rest, everyone is back to full health. Although that is a little too, easy in my opinion.
So make is a little more challenging, and with some limits, and you're going to end up in a place that looks a lot like the optional Stamina rules. Without messing up game balance in the way your proposal does.
Because Wands, Scrolls, and Staves cast spell at your DC, it means they can be used offensively. It's their cost/low use limit that keeps them from being utilized a lot. If you remove or severely reduce the use limit restriction, you're just opening up the game to other problems.
I agree that wands and staves kind of suck as implemented. I'm not sure that there is a good solution that doesn't break other things. Although combining the effects of staves and wands into 1 item as I described earlier is a start.
An item that:
1) Works as a spell slot battery
2) Provides access to a certain spell (or closely related spells)
3) May have some related minor benefit (like Staff of healing)
4) Gets one free casting of a spell per day
5) Could be Overcharged for more use, but at great risk to the item.
Like, all of that combined together at least makes them kind of attractive.
Edit: Honestly, the least disruptive solution that kind of does what you want is to take healing items (like potions and alchemical items) and just change the cost. Now people stock up on potions of healing, soothing tonic, and healing vapor. Reduce the cost to 10% of the original, but non-healing items cost remains unchanged.
Double Edit: Like the only reason people used wands of CLW in PF1 is because it was literally the most low level cost effective (ignoring Infernal Healing) healing thing you could do in game. And chances are you had someone who was going to have access to the spell on their spell list.
In PF2, medicine is class agnostic (it literally requires 0 class resources) and minimal character resources (skill feats/proficiency) but is free (GP) and effective.
The devs didn't want items to be the main source of out of combat healing. But if you really want to bring that back, reducing the price of healing consumables is the best way to do it without having other impacts that throw off other parts of the game.
I agree that wands and staves are similar, but different, and I think there is room for them to be just that.
I don't necessarily agree with the concept that wands shouldn't be able to be used to place a cantrip in them. Although perhaps there should be special rules for when they are used. (perhaps cantrip wands grant the ability to use the cantrips for spellcasters with the cantrip on their list, if they are designated as their primary wand) Other wands by such a caster would only be able to cast the cantrip once per day, (or if they are activated by trick magic device). (although I think I'd be tempted to allow sorcerers to invest multiple cantrip wands to increase their cantrip scope, since they can't change their cantrips out as easily as prepared spellcasters. I sort of feel sorcerers should have leaned into more cantrips, if you asked me.
I'd be ok with wands potentially allowing casters with appropriate spell slots to instead of using the normal overcharge action, instead could burn one of their appropriate spell slots to cast the spell in the invested wand.
I.e. with a wand of Force Barrage (rank 1) you might let them cast the first one free using the daily use. Then instead of normal overcharge, the caster could begin using their first rank slots to power it. After using up the first rank slots, they could potentially be allowed to use their 2nd rank slots (but as the wand is only 1st rank, using a higher rank slot doesn't heighten the spell).
I think I'd maybe even allow your to make a wand of the 'same' spell, and have it have the spell in multiple ranks. Costing the additive cost. Granting one daily use of the spell in each spell rank embedded in it, and allowing them to spontaneously expend their own spell slots to cast the spell.
While I could imagine this being abusable for some things, it also deals with an early problem I had where early stories details were invalidated by wands becoming a once a day item from the multi-use role they used to represent.
You could also invent a healing cantrip that takes 1 minute to cast, and has a 10 minute cool-down per target, and then make it something a wand can have, and voila you have your easily healing stick. Higher rank ones can exist and heal you faster.
If you don't want to so greatly devalue the existing slotted healing spells, you could potentially have the cantrip not be able to heal past your Max HP - your level. So there is a small bit that might need some other source of HP to get to full. (although this would leave low rank slotted heal spells completely adequate to restoring you to full in downtime, even at high levels, which might be fine, if it is the intent)
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@Teridax, if you implemented wands as you've proposed, how would you change the spontaneous caster's ability with a staff to spend one charge and use a spell slot for a staff's spell? Your wands sound like they do exactly the same thing, so what would you suggest for a new staff-based benefit?
This isn't a challenge, BTW, it's a genuine question. The idea of an item that adds a new spell to someone's repertoire is one I've been surprised we haven't gotten yet. (Well not all that surprised, I guess. General design ethos puts spells at more of a premium in 2E than 1E.)
Also, just throwing this out there, but I'm someone who loves them both some wands and staves.
I do think there'd still be a meaningful difference here in that the staff offers more spells, but I honestly think it should be fine for any caster to cast all heightened versions of spells they get from a staff they've prepared, so my proposal would be to implement that and let spontaneous casters treat their staff spells as extra signature spells.
In addition to this, I'd like an extra counterpart item to be implemented where you could expend a spell slot during your daily preparations to prepare a single spell available to you, up to a maximum rank allowed by the item, and use the item to Cast the Spell. This would offer spontaneous casters a taste of prepared spellcasting, and potentially allow the thematic expression of other items associated with spellcasters, such as a magical orb, a floating skull, and so on.
TLDR: Mandatory Medicine checks are kinda annoying.Yeah, that's not really controversial at this point. Six years ago people thought Medicine to do complete healing out of combat was shockingly generous. Now when a party actually has to resort to Medicine for their unlimited out of combat healing it feels like this party is doing last resorts. I mean, compared to stuff like champion Lay on Hands, wood/water kineticist and so on.
The limit on out of combat healing isn't whether you can do it at all, but how fast it is. Sometimes you're under pressure and by the time you run into the next fight you haven't fully healed for free yet. That's when you start looking at the bag of random leftover potions, or Heal spells.
Comparing that the PF1 healing practices; PF1 didn't strictly have unlimited out of combat healing, but the CLW wand was so cheap and still relatively fast, that given 10m to rest you could heal up a whole party.
In PF2, a multi-charge Heal wand could also fill that niche, of "we have a few minutes, but not an hour, to heal", where you'd otherwise go dig around for all those random healing potions that you never used because you already had Medicine.
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So back to "mandatory medicine checks": have you considered just waiving the checks? If someone is at 1HP and a critical failure on the check would be hilarious, ok roll it. But if people are at 40HP and need to heal 50HP more, it's just a matter of rolling and time, but there's no realistic risk that they're going to crit-fail five times in a row, roll max damage each time, and perish. You might as well say "ok, so your party is capable of out of combat healing, and you have plenty of time, so everyone just set your HP back to full".
The main problem with medicine is just that ward medic and continual recovery are feats instead of built in. So in order for the party to rely on medicine (which it has to unless someone happens to have right focus spell, or multiple people for some focus spells) some poor SOB has to pay the skill feat tax.
I don't think having to have someone with the medicine *skill* is too big a deal, battle medicine is really good and feels great to use, and fits on any character with a free hand (most casters). So you probably have 1-2 battle medicine users in the party anyways. The sucky part is just the feat tax.
And of course the issues that arise when the only player who took ward medic and continual recovery (and there will only be one, even with multiple battle medicine users) is missing for the session and now you have to deal with the meta b&#&&%$$ that causes.
The main problem with medicine is just that ward medic and continual recovery are feats instead of built in. So in order for the party to rely on medicine (which it has to unless someone happens to have right focus spell, or multiple people for some focus spells) some poor SOB has to pay the skill feat tax.
Honestly you get 10 skills feats on a character. Spending 2 of them on medicine isn't that big a deal IMO. It's honestly more than you need to spend skill proficiency increases that is a little harder to stomach.
I am trying to achieve a lot of things, including having wands that do not suck (outside of very specific niches). The particular stone is aimed at a bunch of different birds.
I think this is your first problem. When making changes to the game system, it's much better to use prevision like a scalpel, than to use a shotgun approach. Trying to hit a bunch a birds at once means you might hit a lot of other stuff (unintended consequence that are disruptive to other parts of the game).
That takes Medicine from near-mandatory, to near-worthless. That's a rather large over-correction!
I agree that would be an overcorrection, hence why I said too easy. Again I refer you back to the optional Stamina rules. Stamina reduces your hp, in the sense that your HP pool is now only half your normal class amount. And you get another pool of Stamina equal to half your normal class amount + con modifier. So everyone will have a bit more Stamina than HP. Stamina can't be healed by magic or by medicine. A night's rest restores stamina, as do some other methods involving resolve point. You get resolve equal to your key ability modifier, and can spend it (+ 10 minutes) to regain all your stamina. This last bit put a limit of how much you can endure in a single day. It's a great system for doing what your trying to do with regard to healing, but you seem to refuse to even look it.
What "way [my] proposal does"? You keep talking like it will be a game balance disaster, but you've been extremely short on specifics.
Allowing wands to function as 30 uses and rechargeable, even when limited to 4th level spells, means casters effectively have unlimited (low level) spells. in PF1 this wasn't so much a problem because low level spell just didn't do much at high levels. The damage didn't scale and the save DC was a set low value. In PF2, the DC depends on the character not the item. And if you don't implement the level restriction on the wand, now you have a source of spells that hugely increases the available spell cast to a caster. That is hugely imbalancing. Bear in mind that spell casters are meant to use their cantrips at time, and not always be casting from their limited spell slot. Modifying wands in the way you propose also has the consequence of making scrolls a "why bother" unless it's something you only expect to cast a couple times while playing the character.
It would have to be more like 1% IMO, but even if I did that we'd still have scaling issued, leading to the aesthetic problem of people using dozens after each fight at higher levels. Unless we changed the scaling too, but that would just invert the problem rather than remove it.
Yes, the aesthetic issue is a big reason I dislike your proposal honestly. Whether it's spending 10 minutes casting from a wand or using consumables, all of it aesthically displeasing to me. It's just that adjusting healing consumables is less disruptive to the game.
If you want to make wands more usable, as a separate issue to address. I would go about modifying the overcharge rules. Make it a DC 5 flat check the first time. Each Additional attempts increases the DC by +3. And on a failure the wand breaks and can't be used again that day. Attempting to use it without repairing it destroys it. In this way you have a reasonable shot of getting 2 to 4 uses per day, but it's variable and not guaranteed. I think something like this is how you make wands more relevant/useful without a huge imbalance. Using a scalpel, not a shotgun.
I had another idea, which keeps the wands themselves as they are in PF2, but adds other ways to improve them that are optionally bought into by specific characters. Maybe that will be better received than this idea has been: Behold, the Resonator Archetype.
(Well, a very sketchy first outline of the Resonator Archetype at this point.)
This is an interesting concept. I like the concept, specifics could really make or break it though.
Being able to use a wand of a high level spell 10 times per day is probably on the side of too good. Especially on classes that have notoriously bad class feat options (a lot of casters have class feats that aren't that interesting compared to buying a wand once and using it 10 times a day)
@glass
As clarification, at present there is no Primary Wand designation for investing items. Staves have the concept of there being a 'staff' slot for investing, where you can only invest one staff. Wands you can obviously have more than one now, by design. If you increased what wands could do however, if there was a concern that some of the power might be too much for multiple wands, I was leaving room for granting some benefit to only one 'primary wand' being invested. Sorry if it was not clear, but it was me trying to leave potential balancing constraints in place, to avoid people saying it was way too powerful to allow.
The costs of those still scale quadratically, so even if you make the cost of the lowest-level versions reasonable, you still be better off spamming those than the higher-level versions.
Since you're changing prices, you can change them to not scale quadratically. You can change them to literally anything. Though there's some value in not having to spend a half hour chugging potions before being able to move on.
I am not sure what you're saying here: There is no 4 charge limit, you have 30 charges to play with. I deliberately make it only take 2 hour to recharge so that it would not be too much of an impediment. If you burn through 1500 hp before you can spare 2 hours, this won't work, but you've probably got bigger problems.
4 charges is how many you can restore in a day under this, IIRC. If you burn 4 or more in a single fight, the wand can't keep up that and will run out, so the recharge becomes a lot less useful unless its a campaign like Kingmaker with far more downtime than adventuring time.
In something like Ruby Phoenix for example, you'd basically only have one section where it would ever be rechargable, and the rest of the time it's just a consumable. That was the point I was trying to make.
I may have misunderstood Glass' original post, but I think everyone talking about "4 charges" misunderstood what glass was trying to say.
Chargeable wands are "spells in a stick" like PF1 wands were, except that a fully charged wand only has 30 charges. Actually casting a spell from one works like a standard wand, except there is no daily restrictions (there may be a once-per-round restriction). They cost quite a lot up front, but the a significantly less to add charges. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four per day if you have nothing better to do).
When Glass wrote this, I think he was saying you could recharge your 30 charges by spending 2 hours of time. And he was saying "if you had nothing to do all day (8 hours)" you could spend your time (discharging and) recharging the wand 4 times.
I may have misunderstood Glass' original post, but I think everyone talking about "4 charges" misunderstood what glass was trying to say.
Chargeable wands are "spells in a stick" like PF1 wands were, except that a fully charged wand only has 30 charges. Actually casting a spell from one works like a standard wand, except there is no daily restrictions (there may be a once-per-round restriction). They cost quite a lot up front, but the a significantly less to add charges. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four per day if you have nothing better to do).When Glass wrote this, I think he was saying you could recharge your 30 charges by spending 2 hours of time. And he was saying "if you had nothing to do all day (8 hours)" you could spend your time (discharging and) recharging the wand 4 times.
Oh. Yeah that would make a lot more sense. :)
The main problem with medicine is just that ward medic and continual recovery are feats instead of built in. So in order for the party to rely on medicine (which it has to unless someone happens to have right focus spell, or multiple people for some focus spells) some poor SOB has to pay the skill feat tax.Honestly you get 10 skills feats on a character. Spending 2 of them on medicine isn't that big a deal IMO. It's honestly more than you need to spend skill proficiency increases that is a little harder to stomach.
Some characters don't care much about losing 2 skill feats (though they might care a bit more about having to lose those right at level 2 and 4), but if you don't happen to have a character like that already on the team it really sucks to have to contort around the tax feats.
Some characters don't care much about losing 2 skill feats (though they might care a bit more about having to lose those right at level 2 and 4), but if you don't happen to have a character like that already on the team it really sucks to have to contort around the tax feats.Most Skill feats are kinda rubbish, so if it were just those two feats it would not be so bad.
But as I said upthread, you need to invest a lot more feats than that to keep pace IME. And even if that were not the case, the skill increases are a much bigger cost than the feats. Unless you are a Rogue or Investigator, you only get to scale up a tiny handful of skills. One of those being locked to Medicine is very limiting.
You need more feats for battle medicine. But it’s not mandatory to have someone with battle medicine in the party and having battle medicine is a fun ability that expands your array of available options in combat instead of just covering god’s most boring and passive party role.
Additionally, multiple people can have battle medicine and it scales fine - better than fine, because of robust health having more payoff. But ward medic + continual recovery is only needed on one character and any more is pure unused redundancy 95% of the time - it feels very different to have fairly free choice to take battle medicine or not depending on the particulars of your character and maybe a bit of party optimization, vs getting stuck holding the bag as far as ward medic and continual recovery go.
They’re not fun to use, they don’t do anything active, they’re purely party tax feats someone has to step up and take unless you’re lucky on what focus spells you have.
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Some characters don't care much about losing 2 skill feats (though they might care a bit more about having to lose those right at level 2 and 4), but if you don't happen to have a character like that already on the team it really sucks to have to contort around the tax feats.The main problem with medicine is just that ward medic and continual recovery are feats instead of built in. So in order for the party to rely on medicine (which it has to unless someone happens to have right focus spell, or multiple people for some focus spells) some poor SOB has to pay the skill feat tax.Honestly you get 10 skills feats on a character. Spending 2 of them on medicine isn't that big a deal IMO. It's honestly more than you need to spend skill proficiency increases that is a little harder to stomach.
I always felt like Continual Recovery should be just how Medicine works. Why is that a feat? The game designers don't want people going into fights at low HP and low level scenarios tend to go out of their way to give you time to recover so you don't. Continual Recovery just feels like a straight up feat tax on being allowed to do what the skill already does often enough for it to do its intended function. Like, there's no feat on Athletics that you have to take to be allowed to trip/grab/etc the same target twice.
Ward Medic a bit less so, but that feats makes everything feel so much better. Incredibly so at a large PFS table (6 players). I hate having to sit there going "do I heal the first time players first or the veteran that is effectively carrying the group?" All while hoping we don't get interrupted.
Toss in Battle Medicine and Assurance and Medicine has a ton of "core" skill feats. That's not even all the good ones. It's one of the most stacked skills for good skill feats, but it's also really stacked for ones that just feel necessary for the skill to do what it's supposed to.
(In fact now that I'm thinking about it, I may just house rule Continual Recovery away in my next campaign.)
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To your point Tridus, it'd almost be worth play testing giving Ward Medic, Continual Recovery, and Battle Medicine away to any player who meets the requirements (expert skill rank and level 2). In this way, it only costs skill proficiency bump to keep it relevant.
I think that's still a better solution than the proposed wand changes.
To your point Tridus, it'd almost be worth play testing giving Ward Medic, Continual Recovery, and Battle Medicine away to any player who meets the requirements (expert skill rank and level 2). In this way, it only costs skill proficiency bump to keep it relevant.
I think that's still a better solution than the proposed wand changes.
I'm fully in support in baking those feats into the base Medicine skill and its actions; I agree that they're feat taxes and that giving them for free to those proficient in Medicine would allow parties to recover properly without making characters feel like they have to sacrifice a large number of their options for the convenience.
I do, however, think that even after doing that, there's merit to changing how wands work, as I do agree with glass that they're disappointing. It doesn't have to be the OP's proposals exactly, and it doesn't have to be oriented towards healing, but if it gave wands more presence in a caster's build, all the better.
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I do, however, think that even after doing that, there's merit to changing how wands work, as I do agree with glass that they're disappointing. It doesn't have to be the OP's proposals exactly, and it doesn't have to be oriented towards healing, but if it gave wands more presence in a caster's build, all the better.
I agree that wands are disappointing. As set, they're really only good for long duration buff spells. This is a result of effectively only having one charge a day. It's 250gp for a 2nd rank spell wand and 12gp for 1 scroll. That's almost 21 castings via scrolls for an equivalent cost of 1 wand. The wand has more theoretical casting opportunities, but the flexibility to use more in one day (in my mind) would cause me to use a scroll over a wand.
I like glass' alternative idea for somehow investing in wands (even via archetype) to allow you get more uses per day out of wand. In my mind, somewhere between 4 to 8 casts per day is probably what we want the target to be for total uses per day. And it probably needs to be limited to 1 wand to be used in such a way.