D&D 5E 5e, Heal Thyself! Is Healing Too Weak in D&D?

[Horwath]

So I don't consider out of combat healing really the discussion here when people talk about "weak healing". Now compared to 4e's short rest healing, and 3e if you used wands of CLW (which personally I never played in a group that didn't have them starting about 3rd level or so), 5e's out of combat is much weaker....but when I hear people gripe about healing its not about that.

Amateur

you use wands of Lesser vigor. 11HP over 11 rounds per cast. Double of 5,5 what you get on average with 1d8+1

 

[Leatherhead]

In order for combat healing to be viable, it needs to be worth not one, not two, but three actions.

And quite frankly, at that point it's just a degenerate gameplay loop that massively extends the length of combat in order to artificially create a niche for a small subset of players. Sidestepping the issue with bonus action healing and "whack-a-mole" is honestly an easier to swallow solution than what I would have come up with.

 

[Fenris-77]

Sorry, could you unpack that 3 action idea for me? I'm curious.

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah I would personally be happy if a fully upcast Cure Wounds could negate one enemy turn with a little extra healing on top. When you think about action economy if you give up your action to negate one enemy's action, that's not really a good deal (which is why nobody at any table I played in during 3.X or Pathfinder ever bothered to counterspell enemies- yes, I could give up my fireball to counter his fireball, or I could just cast my fireball- note that now, such things are reduced to a reaction, allowing you to do everything else you might want to in a turn).

In my 2e games, the Cleric healed at every opportunity, because there wasn't really any other choice- hit points weren't coming back any other way any time soon. In 3e games, however, everything was suddenly doing more damage than in 2e, so that wasn't going to cut it, and players found other things to do rather than cast cure spells.

I mean, when Orcs go from doing 1-8 to 1d12+3, and your cure light wounds goes from 1d8 to 1d8+1, you start to see an imbalance. And of course, once players did find other things to do besides heal, we got all the complaints about the Cleric class in 3e- Clerics using magic to turn themselves into engines of destruction.

(The same thing happens on the Wizard side- 5d6 fireballs stop feeling great when an Ogre, for example, goes from 4d8+1 hit points to 4d8+11. So Wizards found something better to do, and boom, we have God Wizards turning combats into exercises in futility.)

So my frustration with 5e healing is pretty much the same thing all over again. When the system says "doing X is less effective, find a way to do Y". I don't want to do Y! I want to play a Cleric that focuses on making my party better, not turn into a point defense system! I'm supposed to be a force multiplier for my party, not a roving damage zone that pops people up to 1 hit point so they can keep acting like fools!

Because personally, I think some players are too laissez-faire about whether or not their characters are at risk! "Oh it's ok if the monster goes all out on my Rogue this turn, I get some damage in, there's no way it can kill me, and the Cleric can just Healing Word me so I can do it again next turn".

And all the arguments about how this is perfectly fine make me laugh, since I've been hearing complaints about the way this works since the edition started!...hell actually before, because in 4e, the same complaints existed, but at least there, Healing Word healed more than a token amount of hit points and didn't have funky rules preventing you from doing whatever else you wanted to that turn!

ASIDE: the rules for bonus action spells are absurd and I honestly don't understand the point. What in the world is busted about casting Healing Word or Spiritual Weapon and another levelled spell anyways? If the problem is Quickened Spell, fix that, it's not like a lot of people are happy about the Sorcerer class to begin with!

As for temporary hit points, if you have a great source of them, that's fantastic, and I love "pre-healing". Unfortunately, even though Aid is more efficient by far than an upcast Cure Wounds, players don't get excited about getting 5 temporary hit points when you get more from a friggin' Feat!

TLDR: being a healer is a thankless job. 5e reinforces this thanklessness by making players not really care too much about their hit points. Healing and damage mitigation efforts are largely dismissed by people I've played with. Playing Clerics in a completely alien way (which used to be the source of a lot of complaints by DM's) is now the new normal. So in the edition that's supposed to be a return to older values, traditional Cleric players are told "you're doing it wrong", and a lot of people don't care, because they're too busy griping about how "easy mode" the game is.

ALSO: being told "you can change it" only matters if you're the one who can change things!

 

[Staffan]

But never--not even once--have I seen anyone in our party use the hit dice option in a short rest. It just hasn't happened. We just get our Tiny Hut up and running, take a long rest, and come out of there fresh as daisies.

That's because short rests take too long. In 4e, short rests were five minutes, so you were assumed to take one after each encounter. In 5e, they're one hour. Absent outside time pressure, there are very few situations where you can take a short rest but not a long one.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Uh ho, Snarf is starting off with Opening Statements again!

But yea, you're right. What is any argument that healing is not more than sufficient in 5E?

I pretty sure the fundamental premise (and, as OP mentions, it is exclusively about in-combat healing, not healing in total) hinges around the notion that spending a regular action or a spell of level X to heal an ally is almost never optimal compared to using said action or spell to directly end the fight instead (or in the case of the spell slot, wait until your ally has fallen and spend the same slot on a bonus action ranged heal to get them back up and in the fight).

Since I was one of the people who triggered this essay, albeit not the very first, I can explain my thoughts.

Firstly: All the discussion about daily healing is irrelevant. Neither the other poster nor I said anything whatsoever about daily healing, which I completely agree is more than adequate in terms of daily HP regain. As a result, a significant chunk of Snarf's essay is irrelevant to me...with one minor caveat. Hit Dice.

Snarf's characterization of Hit Dice is incorrect. They do not actually recover your full HP, at least on average, and they only approach that if you actually have all of them. You only recover half your total HD with a long rest, so that isn't a reliable source of healing. E.g., a level 8 Fighter with 16 Constitution gets eight 1d10+3 hits (average 68) of HP, while having 13+7*(6+3) = 13+63 = 76 HP, so those Hit Dice only restore 68/76 = ~89.5% of your total HP if you have all your hit dice. If you only have half, as will be common if you're burning through them to heal, you'll only get ~44.7%. Meanwhile, a puny 10 Con (non-Dragon) Sorcerer of the same level would get 8d6 flat, for a total of 8*3.5 = 28 HP while having 6+7*4 = 6+28 = 32 HP (gaining 28/32 = 87.5% on average). Edit: Further, as noted by @Staffan the longer length of "short" rests actually encourages taking more long rests and fewer short rests, which further erodes the value of Hit Dice. It's a very unfortunate "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation: if you do use them up regularly, you're constantly at half-strength. If you don't, well, not only are you not getting that healing, but you're probably taking advantage of the nightly full heal up instead, since it is not easy to make truly consistent time pressure where 8 hrs rest is totally unacceptable but 2-3 hours rest is completely fine, no problems.

Second: everything Snarf has said about "of course damage should be higher than healing" has missed a key point. I was not talking about damage players do vs healing players do, I was talking about damage players take vs healing they do. PC damage output is one of the two variables (alongside monster HP) that feeds into overall combat pace, which is an important design concern, but not directly relevant to topic of PC healing input. Instead, monster damage output is the directly relevant factor, which adjusts the volatility (how quickly PC status changes) and lethality (how likely PCs are to die). My issue is that the extant healing rules produce very little volatility, which means they aren't very "exciting" because once you hit near-dead status there's little (if any) reason to change that until combat ends, while producing high lethality unless the players resort to the oft-maligned "whack-a-mole" or "pop-up" healing. Since I am making no claims whatsoever about whether PC healing output should exceed PC damage output, a further chunk of the original essay is also irrelevant.

Third, as alluded in my previous post, it is a mistake to presume that the only way to ensure that healing is scarce (and thus encourage risk-taking behavior) is to make healing small relative to incoming damage. One can, instead, make healing rare in comparison to incoming damage, tweaking frequency down and therefore amount up. That causes players to have to make a nontrivial choice: risk the extra danger of maybe not having enough resources to bounce back, for the reward of ending the fight quickly so it doesn't drain even more resources. This is a critical area that Healing Surges introduced extremely well in 4e and which is very poorly supported by the Hit Dice rules in 5e (in part for the reasons listed above).

So....I have very little to say to Snarf directly here because the vast majority of his points are completely irrelevant to the question of whether in-combat healing is worthwhile. He highlights a valid point--that there must be comparative scarcity of healing, in order to force choices to be made--but falls down by presuming that scarcity means small amounts when it could instead mean few uses. Had 5e retained more of what makes Healing Surges work, it would in fact have very little of either "whack-a-mole" healing or "rocket tag."* Instead, it would have much more engaging combats that were more volatile (frequent and significant changes of state, creating tension and excitement) while actually being (somewhat) less lethal (as critical danger would be more easily averted).

TL;DR: End-of-day healing is fine, but irrelevant, and HD do not work as Snarf described. Damage output vs healing output is irrelevant; damage taken vs healing output is, and that's very different. If we tune healing frequency down but healing amount up, we can make healing worthwhile but limited, rather than worthless unless "whack-a-mole."

*For those unfamiliar with the term, "rocket tag" refers to gameplay where damage or debility occurs extremely rapidly, causing very quick wins or losses with little time to shift gears or rally. In the most extreme (sometimes literal) cases, both sides are armed with rocket launchers and a single successful attack causes instant death to the target(s). Obviously, 5e is not quite that instantaneous, but monster damage output is extremely significant compared to player HP and player healing quantity (as opposed to frequency).

 

[James Gasik]

You're right, EzekielRaiden, but player action vs. player action is an easier to gauge metric. Not all monsters are the same, and how much damage one big monster deals each turn vs how much damage a group of smaller monsters deals is really impossible to gauge- a recurring theme in these discussions is the high degree of player experience variance (and I've been told, repeatedly, that establishing any kind of consensus is a bad thing).

So wizards blast multiple enemies for 8d6 and Clerics heal a single target for 3d8+4 (not assuming any subclass features). Even knowing that damage dealt to enemies =/= damage players take from enemies, it's pretty easy to see one of these things is not like the other.

Heal from Zero, liberal Death Saves, class features (Second Wind being huge, and the more I think about it, the unsung workhorse of the Fighter class, maybe even it's strongest ability), and the potential availability of Hit Dice, plus out of combat healing spells like Prayer of Healing or Healing Spirit, plus, the more efficient (if usually less sexy) option of temporary hit points, skew the discussion, because if you take those into account, healing spells seem unnecessary in many combats.

Which is utterly ridiculous, but that's the game WotC made, and apparently, a large number of people are so happy with this, the idea of healing spells being better strikes them as absurd.

 

[Lyxen]

I wasn't giving you a word problem to solve for X, I was posing a situation I keep seeing where healing is just a waste of a turn because it doesn't heal enough to absorb one full hit before going down again. There's no goalposts and no windmills.

Then my answer is, for all the reasons that I've posted, first that whoever is doing the healing, usually has a fairly clear view as to whether it's going to be impactful, and that if he decides to do so, it will have a certain impact, probably more than any other 1st level bonus spell can have anyway.

 

[James Gasik]

Until you get better bonus spells to cast. How about a level 3 Cleric, who now has to compare an upcast 2d4+3 healing word to Spiritual Weapon?

 

[Lyxen]

ASIDE: the rules for bonus action spells are absurd and I honestly don't understand the point.

The point is that very, very few people like playing healbots. Even I who played one now and then (I still prefer tank) in MMORPG never ever wanted to play one in TTRPG, and absolutely no-one in our 20+ people group wants to play one. Everyone prefers having characters who can do more things than heal all the time. Even in the loooong years of BECMI then AD&D, people who played clerics mostly wanted cool gods and the associated roleplay, not the "healbot role". And let's not forget that people NOT wanting to heal is the reason for which clerics have almost been one of the most powerful classes (which is also why some people hated clerics who did not want to heal, some people thought they got all the good things and none of the bad).

TLDR: being a healer is a thankless job.

Yes, it is, 4e then 5e made it entirely optional, and I think it's a good thing. You can still be one and contribute in other ways, which is cool, because, again, there are very very few people who want that role anyway.

5e reinforces this thanklessness by making players not really care too much about their hit points. Healing and damage mitigation efforts are largely dismissed by people I've played with. Playing Clerics in a completely alien way (which used to be the source of a lot of complaints by DM's) is now the new normal.

And it's not a good thing, it wanting a healbot which is a completely alien way, because IT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE GENRE. And that's a really important point for me, by the way, that way of playing it totally technical. There are non-combat healers in the genre, usually for low magic settings, and for a good reason, hit points are totally abstract and represent many things and thinking that a healer heals the loss of confidence, skill, luck, divine blessing, etc. is something that self-respecting writers don't put in their books/movies because it would break the suspension of disbelief (and make people dislike their production). 4e then 5e acknowledged the fact that it's all abstract anyway and we are just trying to simulate a genre in which no hit/effect has any immediate or lasting impact unless it downs you (which is dramatic, and therefore cool), and even that can be extremely temporary because otherwise it's not fun to play.

So in the edition that's supposed to be a return to older values

And still making it way better, see the success of 5e...