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

Voadam said:

I consider it superior game play to prior negatives rules that often kept downed PCs out of the fun action for longer on game night. There is only so far you get in roleplaying unconsciousness.

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Whoa there bro. Some of us enjoy 10 turns in a row of saying Yeah, I just keep lying here bleeding. That's where immersion happens.

Fenris-77 said:

Whoa there bro. Some of us enjoy 10 turns in a row of saying Yeah, I just keep lying here bleeding. That's where immersion happens.

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Option one

"Valkyries? Freyja? You like me! You really like me!"

Option 2

"Gurgle, gurgle." I lose one more hit point. Bob you are up!

Fenris-77 said:

So, not to be rude, but that seems like a pretty standard reading of the 5E action economy. What am I missing?

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I don't know, what do you expect to be missing? My point was, 5e healing is either too good or too bad without the sweet spot that actually enables dedicated healers.

Fenris-77 said:

I have two questions. First, did anyone actually suggest that in-combat healing should be on par with damage? That's silly.

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Not silly at all, it is the most important measurement of the matter. How a character spends their actions in combat is telling. In combat, an action and equal resources should be on-par. If an action spent healing is always inferior to an action spent doing something else, there is no call for healing. Which is the case in 5e. The only time healing in 5e is not inferior is when it also saves an action - e.g. brings up a downed character.

That's clear that an action spent on in-combat healing is inferior. What other metric can there be?

Fenris-77 said:

The fact that they aren't on par doesn't really say anything about their relative strength or effectiveness compared to other editions. Second, are you contending that healing in 5E is poor? I'm just trying to get things on straight here.

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I'm not talking about other editions, I'm talking about 5e. Not sure where that came from. Though if you look at earlier editions like 4e with healing surges or 3.x with a Heal spell that did I think cured all HPs except d4, the idea that an action to heal should be less than an action doing something else can easily be put to rest. But each edition has it's own balance, I wasn't bringing that in.

Thank you for asking about my point, because I am quite particular about it: I put forth that 5e in-combat healing is so inefficient as an action that it needs multiple other rules, namely heal-from-zero and death saves, in order to protect characters.

Voadam said:

I consider it superior game play to prior negatives rules that often kept downed PCs out of the fun action for longer on game night. There is only so far you get in roleplaying unconsciousness.

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Oh, I completely agree. And I love the buffer 5e has between Fear-of-Death and Death.

But Heal-from-Zero and Death Saves are both outside the realm of "Is in-combat healing poor". If healing were on-par, we'd see a lot more proactive healing of characters that are still up. But instead it is an inefficient use of the action and resources except in the cases where those other rules come into play.

I'm not trying to make an argument that when you take all of the rules together 5e doesn't work - it definitely does. I'm making the case that in-combat healing on it's own is well below par for spending an action on except when it has additional rules propping it up.

Blue said:

Not silly at all, it is the most important measurement of the matter. How a character spends their actions in combat is telling. In combat, an action and equal resources should be on-par. If an action spent healing is always inferior to an action spent doing something else, there is no call for healing. Which is the case in 5e. The only time healing in 5e is not inferior is when it also saves an action - e.g. brings up a downed character.

That's clear that an action spent on in-combat healing is inferior. What other metric can there be?


I'm not talking about other editions, I'm talking about 5e. Not sure where that came from. Though if you look at earlier editions like 4e with healing surges, the idea that an action to heal should be less than an action doing something else can easily be put to rest. But each edition has it's own balance, I wasn't bringing that in.

Thank you for asking about my point, because I am quite particular about it: I put forth that 5e in-combat healing is so inefficient as an action that it needs multiple other rules, namely heal-from-zero and death saves, in order to protect characters.

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Ahh, I see. I should have been more specific. I did say healing, which is possibly misleading, what's perhaps more correct is that character survivability in 5E is at an all time high. I don't actually disagree with your reading of the action economy.

As for other editions, no, you weren't comparing, but the overall thrust of the conversation has a built in comparison. To say that healing in 5E is under or over powered or whatever is manifestly a comparative statement. So to what are we comparing it? Well, previous editions seems like the least troublesome answer. The answer could be GURPS, but I suspect not.

Fenris-77 said:

Ahh, I see. I should have been more specific. I did say healing, which is possibly misleading, what's perhaps more correct is that character survivability in 5E is at an all time high. I don't actually disagree with your reading of the action economy.

As for other editions, no, you weren't comparing, but the overall thrust of the conversation has a built in comparison. To say that healing in 5E is under or over powered or whatever is manifestly a comparative statement. So to what are we comparing it? Well, previous editions seems like the least troublesome answer. The answer could be GURPS, but I suspect not.

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I'm the person who was debating with Snarfy-poo (said lovingly) in another thread that caused this. I wasn't the one who used the word anemic, but we did go back and forth a bunch. There is was very much about in-combat healing. I understand he's expanded it here, and I don't have any complaints with out-of-combat healing, or the general survivability and lack-of-downtime for characters in 5e.

But the ways the various knobs are tweaked is:
1. Weak in-combat healing so combats don't last too long.
2. Heal-from-zero to stand up characters who have dropped. A good thing, but it masks how weak healing is beacuse if characters actually went negative the healing would be too little to do this reliably with the same resources used now.
3. HPs not interacting with death except in the Immediate Death rules which are very hard to trigger because unlike everything else they don't treat HPs are cumulative. This also masks how weak healing is.

In other words, I think we both find the end result acceptable.

But I do find that the healing is weak, and at least one of the methods of masking that I find a bonus (heal-from-zero) to allow players the least boredom, regularly gets brought up on ENworld and elsewhere as problematic. Even in this very thread we have a person mentioning that they give exhaustion at zero, so the practical effects of that rule isn't universally well received. But if we removed that rule and associated death with cumulative damage again, we would really see how weak 5e healing is.

I am not advocating changing it, I like how it all hangs together. But in-combat healing is weak, likely intentionally to keep combat length down, and propped up with other rules to make it give the results the designers wanted.

James Gasik said:

When given proof of it's existence, he ranted that "this is the problem with new gamers, they get all this stuff handed to them so the game is easy mode, this spell is ridiculous, it needs to be nerfed".

Now the older players here will immediately go "uh, hold up a minute...", because I surely did. I popped open my 1e PHB on pdf and bade him read the Heal spell.

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I swear I read a version of this every week if not every day on these and other boards...

MoonSong said:

@Snarf Zagyg It isn't tha hraling is weak, just very unrewarding and unengaged. I am proud healbot player, the kind that would prepare only heals. The problem with 5e healing is that it is too generous and done for people who don't like to heal. The party starting a day at full hp used to be a meta goal for the party healer. Gone. Patching up comrades after a combat was something valuable you could do. Gone as well. Then tending to a fallen comrade in combat was this dramatic rush to get there, fend off attackers and then hope you could stabilize them without losing the spell to a stray attacker. It was a unique and cool spotlight. Gone also, just sneeze and they are back to the fight. You don't even need to "waste" your turn doing so! You can now do your "real" contribution on top of it!
Hit points across the board are just too many, and combats drag for too long if people aren't focussing fire. In making dedicated healers nonmandatory, they have effectively soft banned them.

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I believe that this neatly articulates the reason why someone would assert that healing in 5th Edition is "anemic." The crux of the issue is not that the healing options available are somehow insufficient. Rather, the low lethality of combat coupled with the ease with which health is restored to full during rests means that trying to actively restore lost hit-points mid-fight is horribly inefficient, while patching up your friends after a fight is unnecessary.

My job is not to rush into the fray to try and save a dying comrade, or to give the paladin the strength she needs to survive just one more round against the marilith's onslaught of seven attacks, or to make sure that we can all start our next adventure at full health. It's to cast Spirit Guardians, bonk people with a mace, and occasionally use Healing Word when someone falls unconscious. Mathematically, everything checks out, but this does not make one "feel" like a "healer."

Medic said:

I believe that this neatly articulates the reason why someone would assert that healing in 5th Edition is "anemic." The crux of the issue is not that the healing options available are somehow insufficient. Rather, the low lethality of combat coupled with the ease with which health is restored to full during rests means that trying to actively restore lost hit-points mid-fight is horribly inefficient, while patching up your friends after a fight is unnecessary.

My job is not to rush into the fray to try and save a dying comrade, or to give the paladin the strength she needs to survive just one more round against the marilith's onslaught of seven attacks, or to make sure that we can all start our next adventure at full health. It's to cast Spirit Guardians, bonk people with a mace, and occasionally use Healing Word when someone falls unconscious. Mathematically, everything checks out, but this does not make one "feel" like a "healer."

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Exactly! It is impossible to feel like a healer when your main contribution is smacking heads, sorry wrong edition, I meant blasting away goblins.