Help! My party has no healer!

[Lostdwarf]

To the OP

A party without a leader will always be significanly weaker than a party with one. Period. No way around it.

In your particular case this is worse because you have three strikers and one defender. OF COURSE your strikers are going to go down alot. One defender can not lock down every enemy on the board, and you also have not controller support, who might otherwise be able to keep a few creatures out of melee for a while.

So far, you or your group members have vetoed all the possible responses. They don't want more healing items, they dont want anyone to change characters, you dont want to run an NPC. Basically, you want a solution but you are not willing to make a party change.

The only thing you can do is run less difficult encounters, run more of them per level, and hope player tactics picks up a bit(you said they have trouble focusing fire). Bad group design will be punished, and this is a suboptimal group. It may be sexy to dish out those big damage numbers, but this group would be vastly more effective with a real leader, and possibly a controler as well.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I agree that a party without a leader and a controller is weaker and running more lower level encounters is necessary. But i strongly disagree that the group is more "effective" with leader.

What the players need to do is focussing on the striking potential. As a DM, you don´t have to change the total number of monsters. Strikers have just to use their ability to move around and sneak up and scout, to snipe one or two combatants, before the big battle starts. This will maybe use up some of the big guns early in combat, but the rest may be manageable for the fighter to control.

If the party tries to fight like a party powered by a leader, it will however result in a lot of deaths.

 

[Herschel]

Hello, I play Maya! Retiring a character isn't really an option- We're all playing members of the same family, and we have a fantastic dynamic going on, swapping out a character wouldn't be preferable. And I can't think of anyone that could become a leader so easily unless I swapped from Fighter to Warlord, and I completely love love love 4e Fighters so I'd like to do everything to avoid it..!

You're the only defender, you are the one person who should NOT consider swapping roles. The best parties start with a leader and defender and build from there. Port in a cousin if you have to, but my suggestion is having someone play a leader. There's loads of options and builds out there and a Runepriest is enough of a damage monkey to make many a striker player happy if that's their big concern.

Sure, there's ways around it, but having a true leader is the easiest, best way to go.

 

[DracoSuave]

You're the only defender, you are the one person who should NOT consider swapping roles. The best parties start with a leader and defender and build from there. Port in a cousin if you have to, but my suggestion is having someone play a leader. There's loads of options and builds out there and a Runepriest is enough of a damage monkey to make many a striker player happy if that's their big concern.

Sure, there's ways around it, but having a true leader is the easiest, best way to go.

This.

I'd go one further and have your more controlly strikers concentrate on controlling powers a little more than blasty powers.

Basically, you've capped your offense, but your defense is slim to none, and a defender can't (and is not designed) to do it all alone.

The trick is... obviously everyone wants to play a go-get-them destroyer type and that's cool, so they should take a more offensive minded controller and leader.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

You know, this is such a good point that upon reading it struck me as "wow, that's so completely true! How have I not realized this before?"

I changed your entire worldview and didn't get xp for it? Lame.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

You're the only defender, you are the one person who should NOT consider swapping roles. The best parties start with a leader and defender and build from there. Port in a cousin if you have to, but my suggestion is having someone play a leader. There's loads of options and builds out there and a Runepriest is enough of a damage monkey to make many a striker player happy if that's their big concern.

Sure, there's ways around it, but having a true leader is the easiest, best way to go.

Leaders are not required any more than controllers, defenders, or strikers.

 

[Terraism]

I'm in a similar situation at the moment, where while the group does have a leader - and an incredibly potent healer, at that - the player is the least reliable of the group, and oftentimes doesn't make it. Which means that we're finding the group can't rely on having her there, and as a DM, it's a little trickier, balance-wise, because you can't always just yank 20% of the monsters from a fight and still have it be as well-structured.

What I've considered is, yes, the items that people are talking about. Healing potions, it was pointed out to me by a friend, are a great resource. Doing some digging, I've also been fairly happy looking at the Divine Boons - I don't know how your campaign is structured, but I'm looking at granting an altered version of Pelor's divine boon to all the PCs in my game. It's got a daily power to grant someone other than yourself a healing surge as a minor action, and I think that that will both help make up for some of the lack, as well as stand on its own for group cohesion.

Something worth considering, anyway.

 

[MrMyth]

I ran for a party that went through Epic with 1 Defender, 1 Controller, and 4 Strikers, and tended to do fine. Largely from either defensive tricks of their own, or killing enemies quickly - no one went out of their way to pick up leader abilities, and they managed relatively well via the occasional magic item, potions, and Second Winds.

I'd recommend just working a decent number of potions into the treasure. It gives them options without requiring too much change of characters or rebalancing. Keep track of how quickly they go through them - and who is doing so - and it might give more ideas on any changes you need to make.

 

[Mengu]

Why go look for complex solutions?

If things are out of balance, just re-balance.

If encounters suddenly are too easy for your party, what would you do? That's right, you would increase encounter difficulty.

So, if things change so that they suddenly are too hard, you just do the opposite; you lower encounter difficulty.

It does not matter if its because you lose or gain party members, lose or gain magic items, or the party's tactical acumen suddenly changes; when you, the DM, sit down and put the encounters on paper, you have the power to change each encounter in any way you like to make them fit your current party - you don't have to change the party. No need to cut off the toes to fit the shoe - just select another shoe.

It probably doesn't need repeating at this point, but this is indeed very good advice.

It's not about balancing encounters for loss of a PC. It's about balancing encounters for the existing group you have. 1 defender and 3 strikers is a fine group. There is nothing wrong with it. It just means your encounters need to be structured a little differently, compared to what you were using for 1 defender, 1 leader, 3 strikers.

When designing an encounter, spend more of the XP budget on minions. Especially if an encounter has something like 2 artillery, change it so there is 1 artillery and 4 ranged minions. They are not likely to drop anyone with focused fire, but will still give people plenty of trouble, and yet they can be taken out quite fast, and damage can be avoided. Rather than using more low level creatures, use fewer high level creatures or elites. This is what strikers are built for, and will be fewer targets for the defender to control. Use more brutes, fewer soldiers. Strikers love dropping brutes. But soldiers and lurkers who like to isolate and fight them one on one could quickly become a drag.

Party of 4 is not quite as fragile as a party of 2-3 so you don't have to worry quite as much about encounter difficulty, but with certain encounter configurations (like brutes, skirmishers, and minions with single controller) the party will have more fun, and certain encounter configurations (like multiple enemy controllers, artillery, and soldiers) will be problematic.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I have this problem (my party doesn't have a healer) fairly regularly, because I play a lot of Living Forgotten Realms. And you never know when you're going to be at a table of 3 defenders and 3 strikers, or 3 leaders and 1 controller.

I think it's incumbent upon each player to make his character somewhat self sufficient. If your PC needs a leader in the party, that's a weakness that you should try to correct.

PCs can become self sufficient in different ways. I'll give some examples of my own PCs.

13th level paladin -- this PC uses virtue's touch and NOT lay on hands, so he is not even a quasi-healer. Instead, he is a frequent (ab)user of the paladin level 2 utility power Virtue, which grants him his healing surge's worth of temp hp. (There is also a skill power version of this called something else.) It's like proactive healing. Also, he's a paladin, so he has high defenses.

9th level fighter -- he's Str & Con-based, and a dwarf, and has the Toughness feat, and he wears plate armor, so he is ridiculously tough. He enters every combat expecting and wanting to use second wind. He also has that fighter utility power that grants you regen while bloodied.

6th level rogue -- she only has Con 11 and 6 surges, but she has 20 Dex (so good AC/Reflex). She likes to dart in, hit hard, and dart out -- sometimes this means not getting off as many attacks as she would otherwise. She's also a drow, so if the crap hits the fan, it's drop some darkness and run away and/or hide. This character is probably my least self-sufficient simply becaue of how few surges she has; she really really benefits from healing a surge +2d6+Wis+whatever from a cleric, as opposed to just healing her base surge value.

Note that with all three characters I had to make some concessions to make them self-sufficient. The paladin has Virtue instead of Bless Weapon. The fighter spent a feat for plate armor prof and choose the regen utility over something else. The rogue makes decisions in combat that somewhat decrease her damage output but increase her survivability.

I think almost any PC can make a few choices to increase his/her survivability without doing a full-blown multiclass into cleric, etc.