D&D 5E Short Rest Healing Spells
- Thread starter Xeviat
- Start date
Kurotowa
Legend
It wasn't a big deal at all. Firstly there's none of the high efficiency heals like Prayer of Healing, just Cure Wounds. Secondly it's only two spell slots per short rest, and those are competing with any other spell the Warlock might want to cast. Use a single utility spell like Spider Climb, or a damage spell like Hex or Shatter, and that's half those Cure Wounds gone.
The vast majority of our Celestial Warlock's healing came from their Healer feat, followed by the Healing Light class feature, with Cure Wounds a distant third.
The vast majority of our Celestial Warlock's healing came from their Healer feat, followed by the Healing Light class feature, with Cure Wounds a distant third.
Kurotowa
Legend
Well that's a whole other kettle of fish. Warlocks work (sort of*) because they have a very limited choice and number of spells. I make no promises about what'll happen if you try to scale up the Warlock model to other classes.
*I'm not entirely convinced the 5e Warlock model works very well. The Invocations are more limited because you get the two spell slots, but two spell slots isn't worth much unless you're running the style of campaign where you actually get multiple shorts rests in an adventuring day. To date I've played in a campaign like that exactly never, and my experience doesn't seem uncommon. It's like they tried to split the difference between a 5e Wizard and a 3.5e Warlock and landed on something that isn't as fun as either of them. The only style of 5e Warlock people seem to regard well is Hexblade Blade Pact, where the martial options make up for the lack of casting ones.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Interesting. Do you get /any/ short rests? vs how many encounters in a day?
The standard is supposed to be something like 6-8 encounter with 2-3 short rests. If you're getting only one short rest, but only 3-4 encounters, it's not that far off. If you're getting a full day of encounters and 0-1 short rests, that's going to distort things.
With 2 short rests the Warlock is fine. The whole short rest issue needs to be brought for every campaign before dice even hit the table. More builds than just the Warlock suffer with no short rests and it only seems fair that players should know what the game day standard is going to be.
Generally I do 1-2 encounters per day with 0-1 short rest. My games are much more sandboxy, I only occasionally do the hardcore dungeon many many fight adventure.
Tony Vargas
Legend
The move from "Encounter" (even though it was really 5-min-short-rest-recharge) to "Short Rest Recharge" has really complicated things.
Kurotowa
Legend
My current group usually runs more sandbox scenarios or story events and fewer dungeon crawls or wilderness exploration means we're usually doing 2-4 encounters with 0-1 short rests in a day. That's enough that the short rest classes like Warlock and Monk really don't shine as much as the long rest classes. I think that divide is one of the biggest failures of 5e, which I otherwise like a great deal. The short rest/long rest balance really depends on campaign and play structures that are far from universal.
Which is exactly what I'm trying to warn Xeviat about. If your campaign day falls on the lower end of the encounter spectrum with less freedom to take multiple short rests, having short rest based healing isn't going to impact things. If your campaign days fall on the longer and more packed end, losing the slow attrition of HP and available healing will have a major impact.
ETA: I think a lot of it comes down to your DM's encounter design philosophy. The ones I play under want challenging encounters rather than a slow attrition of multiple encounters that aren't difficult on their own. That pushes us towards shorter days and benefits the long rest classes who can dump a majority of their daily resources in one or two encounters. The short rest classes just have so much less to offer in that dynamic because their resource allotment is gated by the assumption that multiple short rests will reset their resource pools, allowing them to catch up with the long rest classes.
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The problem is that the classes, especially the spell casting classes, are pretty obviously balanced on a 2 Shorts/day basis. On that basis the Warlock, Sorcerer, and Wizard all balance out really well as regards spell levels available per day (as do Bards and Clerics for that matter). If you don't plan for, or allow (whatever) the 'standard' 2 short rests you need to be upfront about how it changes the game. House rule something to fix the short rest dependent characters or recommend that players avoid them. To each his own of course, but I'm not the kind of guy to let someone play a Warlock and then take away 2/3 of his spell casting because I don't like the mechanic for resting and I find it more convenient to just skip the whole issue.
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