D&D 5E In-Combat Healing: How and Why?

[FrogReaver]

(I would add that I don't think whack-a-mole is driven by any desire to optimize use of spell slots. It's actions that are being optimized here. Actions are the currency with which you buy victory, and a healing spell is an investment: Spend an action now, to earn back actions later when a teammate is up and fighting instead of down and bleeding out. If your expected return on that investment is less than the action you spent on the spell, it's a bad use of your action. Whack-a-mole is a way to guarantee a return.)

Why aren't my proposed healing tactics not a way to get a guaranteed return?

 

[FrogReaver]

Which of course is my way of saying that in 5E it is a common occurrence that you're better off killing the enemies than healing your friends even as a Cleric; that the former ends up saving more of their precious hit points than the latter.

Counter-intuitive some might say. Not really I would say.

And this goes right back to my argument in the OP that hp a resource that you may can even save more of in the adventuring day via in-combat offense than in-combat healing. In fact let's assume that is true.

The argument I'm making is that the total amount of precious hit points lost in the day is actually less important than how, when and where those lost hps get distributed during the day. I'm arguing that there exists a tactic whereby you can give up very few in-combat actions during the day and you will greatly improve your chances of not losing battles even though your overall resources expended in the die may be slightly increased from said tactic.

 

[FrogReaver]

That's a small part of it, but not the major portion. Even if cure wounds healed for double its current amount, you still wouldn't cast it until the target was near death. It's just more efficient that way.

It might help if you define near death. If defined as very low hp then I disagree. Not risking an ally fall to 0 in battle is a better tactic than slightly more resource efficient strategies.

The only time this might not be true is if in your campaign you are constantly having to go on despite being out of resources.

 

[Tony Vargas]

2) a person who falls unconscious always loses their next turn, no matter when healed. This means initiative is less relevant. Right now if I drop and the healer goes before my next turn, I’m barely inconvenienced. But if I lose my turn regardless of when I’m healed, it’s a big deal.

Same benefit as re-rolling initiative, with less complication.

 

[Tony Vargas]

As in other whack-a-mole threads, one common theme I see is that the solutions generally seem to work by hosing the healer's allies.

To approach it from the other side, you could:
1) Make healing more potent for the slot cost.
2) Cut and/or power-down offensive spells from the primary-healer lists, like the Cleric, Bard (and, Gygax help me, the Druid, just as it's gotten cool again after 30 years).
3) segregate healing resources from spell slots, like the Pally's Lay on Hands.

 

[Krachek]

I think a cure serious wound spell can be add.
level 4. 8d8+spell casting ability. Single target.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm arguing that there exists a tactic whereby you can give up very few in-combat actions during the day and you will greatly improve your chances of not losing battles even though your overall resources expended in the die may be slightly increased from said tactic.

Theoretically, sure, but how often is the party in a position of losing a battle if they don't go all-out with their high-throughput but low-efficiency tactics? That's a pretty small window, where the party will probably lose if they're playing too conservatively, but probably win if they're more aggressive. That would be difficult to contrive, even if you were really trying.

 

[FrogReaver]

Theoretically, sure, but how often is the party in a position of losing a battle if they don't go all-out with their high-throughput but low-efficiency tactics? That's a pretty small window, where the party will probably lose if they're playing too conservatively, but probably win if they're more aggressive. That would be difficult to contrive, even if you were really trying.

Comparably it is significantly more often than without using my healing tactic. (By the way it's not about probably losing. Any chance that you could lose is taken away with the healing route, whereas those small 5% chances over 30-40 encounters do tend to add up).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Comparably it is significantly more often than without using my healing tactic. (By the way it's not about probably losing. Any chance that you could lose is taken away with the healing route, whereas those small 5% chances over 30-40 encounters do tend to add up).

Nothing is certain. Everything is just a probability.

I concede that there are some difficult fights where in-combat healing can be the difference between success and failure. For any given fight, there's a certain percent chance that you'll succeed without in-combat healing, and a greater percent chance that you'll succeed with in-combat healing.

What I'm not convinced of, is that the increased chance of success that you gain from in-combat healing is sufficient to make up for the increased risk of running out of resources over the course of a day. Aggressive healing will increase your chance of making it through the first five fights of the day, but when you start to hit your limit, that earlier aggressive healing might mean that you can't win the sixth fight. There are a lot of variables involved, but my intuition is that you're still better off by conserving resources, even if that increases your chance of failing in any single encounter.

 

[Mistwell]

An 8th level a Life Cleric (I chose that because that happens to be the level of the Life Cleric in my game right now) can use channel divinity twice each short rest for 40 points each time, divided however they want among up to 6 targets, at range. And they could, if they wanted to, follow that with a bonus action 2nd lev Healing Word for another 13 or so hit points to someone else, and 4 hp to yourself.

That is a lot of healing in a single round. And I've seen it bring the front line fighter back multiple times (who normally, as a polearm master fighter with sentinel is dishing out two normal attacks, a bonus action attack, and a reaction attack each round, sometimes with a battle master rider damage on top of it). I've seen it bring two PCs back at once in fact, in the same round. And then all the damage those PCs dish out with all their multiple attacks should be "counted" as damage that Cleric did. Because but-for that healing, those PCs would be wasting all their actions on death saves (or, if they were not down yet, wasting their actions getting out of there or healing themselves).

Healing is like buffs. They're sometimes difficult to add up, because the benefit is "soft" in that it depends on what the ally does to see what impact it had. But it's pretty darn powerful when you do add it all up.