Is the Healer Specialty Too Powerful?

[KidSnide]

I read it as being underpowered. It lets you craft items quickly (something players rarely do) and maximizes healing dice when the system lets you recover hit points ridiculously fast anyway. The only way it's good is if you use a lot of healing during combat.

The maximized dice while resting seems like a really big ability to me. Yeah, the system allows ridiculously fast healing overnight, but low level PCs are pretty limited during any given adventuring day. This feat dramatically increases the party's ability to endure damage from multiple encounters.

Personally, I'd like to see the benefit limited to potions and hit dice. What's awesome about this specialty is that it allows effective healing between battles without a cleric. That's a terrific feature.

The problem is that the ability to maximize in-combat healing is so great that the Healer specialty becomes something that is vastly more effective when the cleric takes it. This puts us back in the position where there is a lot of pressure for the cleric to specialize as the healer, and that's a dynamic I'd like to move away from.

-KS

 

[Salamandyr]

I agree with limiting it to out of combat healing, via kits and such. That both keeps the cleric from being forced to take the healer specialty, and helps normalize the danger of combat between different tables.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Despite, or maybe in addition to, my general agreement with Kid Snide on the out of combat aspect, I do think the out of combat healing shouldn't automatically be maximized, either. To me, this part pretty much screams for a dial.

To keep it simple for higher level play, I'd just say that when rolling healing dice, if a healer is present, the character gains some flat bonus to the die and/or has a floor (e.g. reroll 1s), which you can then set to your preference. Then include a big of rule advice that says if you set the floor high enough, might as well say "max very everyone". I think that is the thinking behind maximum in the first place, but the thinking has been obscured by the rule.

Me, I'd tend to set a healer floor as "roll less than half max roll on a given die, get half." That respects the differences in the die sizes by class, but is easy to do at higher levels when you've got 5 or 10 or whatever number of dice that you might roll at once. It's even easy to count, once you do it a couple of times.

 

[Victim]

Note that Healer making maximized potions is curing .32 HP per GP. Buying a level 1 wand of cure light in 3.x healed something like .366 HP per GP. So the cure stick strategy of negating HP attrition within an adventuring day is basically back.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I think the specialty as a whole is fine, but given that specialties are modular, it's important that the two feats be more carefully balanced against each other. (As it is, I would ignore the Herbalism feat in favor of a Guardian feat or Toughness or something unless the DM specifically forbade me from doing so.) I've been thinking they should divide the healer's kit portion of the Healer's Touch feat (the last two paragraphs of the description) back into Herbalism. So Herbalism lets you make kits and use them to maximum effect, while Healer's Touch lets you use spells to maximum effect.

That way, the Healer specialty overall remains awesome (just as all specialties should be), but you can split up the feats so that, say, a fighter can take Herbalist to be the party's out-of-combat bandaid dispenser, or a cleric can take Healer's Touch to maximize his in-combat healing effectiveness but has some incentive not to just drop Herbalism and combine it with another feat (like the awesome Leader feat mentioned in the second PA podcast).

In other words, the problem isn't that the Healer specialty is overpowered, but that its two feats aren't balanced against each other and that some of the OTHER specialties aren't up to par. (Some, like Guardian and Magic-User, are up there with Healer in effectiveness, IMO.)

 

[Ahnehnois]

The maximized dice while resting seems like a really big ability to me. Yeah, the system allows ridiculously fast healing overnight, but low level PCs are pretty limited during any given adventuring day. This feat dramatically increases the party's ability to endure damage from multiple encounters.

Seems like kind of a niche thing to me. I can't remember the last time I ran or played in a D&D session with more than one significant battle in a game day. A lot of style variation, so YMMV.

Personally, I'd like to see the benefit limited to potions and hit dice. What's awesome about this specialty is that it allows effective healing between battles without a cleric. That's a terrific feature.

I would agree with that.

 

[On Puget Sound]

Maybe healing dice could be "advantaged"; roll the dice twice and take the higher total.

I like this better than going up a die size. Both give about the same average (with a d6 hit die, 4.5 for going up to d8 vs 4.472222 for advantage) but the advantage greatly decreases the odds of a bad result (again with a d6, going to d8 gives a 37.5% chance of a 3 or less; advantage gives a 25% chance of a 3 or less). It's also a signature mechanic for the 5e game system, so it makes sense to use it in a lot of places, and retains the die roll (rolling dice is fun).

 

[TerraDave]

As it is, almost every party will have one. And seriously, are the dual wielder or archer or JoaT even close in terms of impact?

Also, I like the "advantage" mechanic noted above.

 

[Rune]

Maybe healing dice could be "advantaged"; roll the dice twice and take the higher total.

I introduced this houserule on the fly for all healing during the first packet playtest when a character got rolled a 1 on a much-needed cure light wounds.

I did not change the healer theme at all.

This narrowed the gap between regular healing and the "healer" theme (now, specialty) while also making poor healing roles a lot less likely. Which is a good thing, because, as I see it, being healed should never be a disheartening experience.

 

[Transformer]

The Healer specialty is all kinds of problematic.

The number one problem is this right here:

The problem is that the ability to maximize in-combat healing is so great that the Healer specialty becomes something that is vastly more effective when the cleric takes it. This puts us back in the position where there is a lot of pressure for the cleric to specialize as the healer, and that's a dynamic I'd like to move away from.

Any cleric who doesn't take this specialty is gimping himself. Voila, every cleric is now pigeonholed into being a healer. That would be a crying shame.


Second and closely related, Healer's Touch is, in fact, way too powerful. It's way too powerful for its effect on in-combat healing, and it's way too powerful relative to (all the) other specialties.


Third, a single specialty that nearly doubles the number of encounters a party can manage in an adventuring day throws off the daily resource management too dramatically.


Fourth, unlike most of you, I'm worried about Herbalism as well as Healer's Touch. Even without Healer's Touch, halving the cost of healing potions halved effectively doubles the amount of in-combat healing available to the party from non-cleric sources. The same amount of gold now gives you twice as much in combat healing. That, again, is a big swing in resources.


So Healer's Touch needs to be toned down. I personally like granting "advantage" on healing rolls or rerolling 1's and 2's, because they strike me as the least fiddly options.

I also want it to be a bit more expensive to craft healing potions. 40 gp? A 20% discount, rather than 50%?