D&D 5E (2024) Healing Isn’t What You Think: The Value Curve Across a Fight

The Healing Value Curve
Whack‑a‑Mole is just the poster child

Most people talk about healing as if its value is constant - “healing is good,” “healing is bad,” “healing is only for downed allies,” etc.

But healing doesn’t have a fixed value. Healing has a curve.

Early in an encounter, when enemy threat is high, healing rarely negates full enemy turns. Later in the encounter, when fewer enemies remain, healing can actually outpace incoming damage - but by then the risk of not healing is low unless someone is downed.

The incentives built into 5E push healing toward the later moments of a fight, or even better, after the fight altogether.

A typical encounter may look something like this:

Two insights fall out of this immediately:

1. Early healing doesn’t keep up with enemy output.​

If you heal early, enemies stay alive longer, which means:

• more total attacks
• more total incoming damage
• more healing required overall

You’re spending actions to slightly delay the inevitable instead of changing the board.

2. Healing gets stronger as enemy count drops.​

By round 3 or 4, healing can actually exceed incoming DPR - but at that point:

• the fight is nearly won
• the risk of a down is low

The best time to heal is often when the fight is already under control.

Delayed Healing vs Whack‑a‑Mole​

Because healing’s value increases as enemy count decreases, 5E naturally incentivizes delayed healing. Whack‑a‑mole healing (healing someone only when they drop) is just the clearest signal of this incentive.

Whack‑a‑mole isn’t a meme, it’s a symptom of the underlying math.

Why this Matters​

Once you understand the healing curve, it becomes much easier to talk about:

• when healing is wasted
• when healing stabilizes the fight
• when healing wins the fight
• why healing early is almost always low value
• action economy
• enemy turn prevention
• marginal value
• timing windows
• deeper decision‑making framework behind optimized play

I intend this thread to serve as an entry point into those kinds of conversations.

Agreed. In my opinion, it is very rarely worth spending an action to heal during combat. A bonus action to heal is a more tolerable trade-off, which is why 5.5E D&D made a number of changes in this direction. You're generally best off focusing actions to do damage to take as many enemies down as quickly. If you cannot attack effectively in a given round (e.g., stuck behind combatants in a tunnel) then maybe that is the time to heal up.

Late in the combat, you may spend an action to heal if you're low on HP, or to heal a fallen ally who is bleeding out, but again a bonus action say Healing Word is preferable to spending an action doing say Cure Wounds. The timing of that healing matters too - you want to heal your fallen ally before they miss their action for being down.

Healing in combat also matters more when your characters are lower level, as you're closer to the edge of dying with few HP.

D&D(and PF) has always functionally treated HP as ablative armor. A character is just a effective at 1HP as at full. Same for most opponents. As long as the party healer(s) keeps the party's characters above 0HP during an encounter, good job. Plenty of time during the after action time to restore the ablative armor to full(cast cures, drink potions, etc).

Koloth said:

D&D(and PF) has always functionally treated HP as ablative armor. A character is just a effective at 1HP as at full. Same for most opponents. As long as the party healer(s) keeps the party's characters above 0HP during an encounter, good job. Plenty of time during the after action time to restore the ablative armor to full(cast cures, drink potions, etc).

Click to expand...

That's true. I find it a better alternative than death spirals, which are not really more realistic - and a lot less fun.

FrogReaver said:

The Healing Value Curve
Whack‑a‑Mole is just the poster child

Most people talk about healing as if its value is constant - “healing is good,” “healing is bad,” “healing is only for downed allies,” etc.

But healing doesn’t have a fixed value. Healing has a curve.

Early in an encounter, when enemy threat is high, healing rarely negates full enemy turns. Later in the encounter, when fewer enemies remain, healing can actually outpace incoming damage - but by then the risk of not healing is low unless someone is downed.

The incentives built into 5E push healing toward the later moments of a fight, or even better, after the fight altogether.

A typical encounter may look something like this:

Round	Enemies	DPR	Cure Wounds
1	4	52	13
2	3	39	13
3	2	26	13
4	1	13	13

Two insights fall out of this immediately:

1. Early healing doesn’t keep up with enemy output.​

If you heal early, enemies stay alive longer, which means:

• more total attacks
• more total incoming damage
• more healing required overall

You’re spending actions to slightly delay the inevitable instead of changing the board.

2. Healing gets stronger as enemy count drops.​

By round 3 or 4, healing can actually exceed incoming DPR - but at that point:

• the fight is nearly won
• the risk of a down is low

The best time to heal is often when the fight is already under control.

Delayed Healing vs Whack‑a‑Mole​

Because healing’s value increases as enemy count decreases, 5E naturally incentivizes delayed healing. Whack‑a‑mole healing (healing someone only when they drop) is just the clearest signal of this incentive.

Whack‑a‑mole isn’t a meme, it’s a symptom of the underlying math.

Why this Matters​

Once you understand the healing curve, it becomes much easier to talk about:

• when healing is wasted
• when healing stabilizes the fight
• when healing wins the fight
• why healing early is almost always low value
• action economy
• enemy turn prevention
• marginal value
• timing windows
• deeper decision‑making framework behind optimized play

I intend this thread to serve as an entry point into those kinds of conversations.

Click to expand...

With 2024 handing out more Temp HP do you consider that different enough to change the math?
Or is it still in the late-but-not final round when those are best at a full action, with Bonus Action moving earlier in the round.

Edit: Adding my thoughts.
With an Artillerist Artificer Hobgoblin many of my Bonus Actions can toss out AOE Temp HP. When we're running a session with the full party I'm doing that early and as often as people run out because my other BA's are help action type things that add movement or disad

bedir than said:

With 2024 handing out more Temp HP do you consider that different enough to change the math?
Or is it still in the late-but-not final round when those are best at a full action,

Click to expand...

Generally I think the analysis is true for temp hp as well, though there are a few exceptions with temp hp vs regular healing.

One thing that changes for temp hp is that if you don't have a competing bonus action and the resource you are spending to grant them doesn't have many other great uses (or you have alot of that resource) then doing them early can be great - i guess this may technically be true of healing in theory but I'm struggling to think of an actual example of something meeting this criteria.

One other thing that changes is you may want to apply them a little earlier just because you cannot apply them once they reach 0 which is different than healing. If an ally was low hp but you decided to wait and they reached 0, you can still bring them back up with actual healing - assuming you aren't going full whack a mole mode and just waiting for them to drop to 0 before healing (i find in my actual games it can be high risk to intentionally do that every time - as eventually the dm will inevitably at some point still target the downed PC).

I think it's also worth noting there are alot of abilities like the old 2014 artificer cannon that forced you to make your temp hp cannon decision early in the encounter and so you already had spent that resource, essentially making that marginal decision of temp hp or some other bonus action be resource free temp hp vs whatever other bonus action you have.

There's probably some additional nuance that could be added, but i'm getting wordy enough.

bedir than said:

with Bonus Action moving earlier in the round.

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Bonus Action isn't the core consideration around timing changes, it's more that the set of actions you are comparing it against changes. Instead of all your possible actions, you compare it to your possible bonus actions, which are usually much weaker. Like I would rather generate 10 temp hp with my bonus action over 1 damage in almost every circumstance, even though in the general sense it's better to delay - though if my party was only doing 2 damage and had 100 hp each that could change, but that's not a realistic d&d scenario - just a hypothetical extreme to illustrate the point - context really matters and alot of our contextual assumptions aren't always clearly spelled out. So while we can get some nice rules of thumb, the whole context really must be evaluated if possible and practical for a given scenario.

bedir than said:

Edit: Adding my thoughts.

With an Artillerist Artificer Hobgoblin many of my Bonus Actions can toss out AOE Temp HP. When we're running a session with the full party I'm doing that early and as often as people run out because my other BA's are help action type things that add movement or disad

Click to expand...

For this specific scenario I think it mostly depends on the immediate tactical value you can extract out of your bonus action. Disadvatnage on an enemy attack is a bit easier to compare to the temp hp since it directly adds defensive value. I'd say whichever one grants the most expected value is the way to go there, and that's probably enemy dependent.

When it comes to added movement, that really depends on how that added movement maps to actual board state changes. Sometimes movement changes nothing, sometimes it completely removes a melee enemies turn. If the movement ultimately adds offense, by enabling allies or putting enemies into damage zones then i'd probably rate that as more important than temp hp. I guess on the edge case that you could generate 1000 temp hp a turn then obviously take the temp hp, but I don't think any typical values of 5e temp hp.

Tessarael said:

Agreed. In my opinion, it is very rarely worth spending an action to heal during combat. A bonus action to heal is a more tolerable trade-off, which is why 5.5E D&D made a number of changes in this direction. You're generally best off focusing actions to do damage to take as many enemies down as quickly. If you cannot attack effectively in a given round (e.g., stuck behind combatants in a tunnel) then maybe that is the time to heal up.

Late in the combat, you may spend an action to heal if you're low on HP, or to heal a fallen ally who is bleeding out, but again a bonus action say Healing Word is preferable to spending an action doing say Cure Wounds. The timing of that healing matters too - you want to heal your fallen ally before they miss their action for being down.

Healing in combat also matters more when your characters are lower level, as you're closer to the edge of dying with few HP.

Click to expand...

Yea. I agree with most of these observations.

I think it's worth considering that if you are deciding to spend a slot on healing in mop up phase that you consider cure wounds over healing word. There's a small chance that your cantrip (assuming your a caster) would put the enemy to 0 hp. Essentially there's a small risk of giving the enemy an extra turn and a very likely benefit that your healing results in more ally hp. Depends mostly on what percent of party DPR your cantrip attack would have been in that scenario I think.

Again, that's assuming you've already committed to the healing.

In a slightly different scenario, 1 enemy left and minimal multiattacks then the best plan assuming initiative is (you, ally, enemy) would be to only healing word if ally drops (minimal multiattacks and initiative means no immediate killing threat) and to make your decision to heal after the combat, unless it was a distinct possibility that there would be reinforcements.

Koloth said:

D&D(and PF) has always functionally treated HP as ablative armor. A character is just a effective at 1HP as at full. Same for most opponents. As long as the party healer(s) keeps the party's characters above 0HP during an encounter, good job. Plenty of time during the after action time to restore the ablative armor to full(cast cures, drink potions, etc).

Click to expand...

I would say that it's even more important in PF2e to prevent a character from going down (healing earlier) versus waiting to heal them when they're already down. Aside from the Wounded mechanic making yo-yo healing riskier (i.e. being downed and revived effectively starts you off with stacking failed death saves the next time you go down, so that you might just die outright), the action cost of going down is harsher ( e.g. standing up and grabbing/reequipping two items that you dropped from your hands would consume all three actions, all of which can provoke reactions like Reactive Strike ).

If you wanted to encourage D&D 5E players to heal earlier and not risk a hurt character actually going down, the Wounded mechanic would be a clear way to do so (along with, of course, figuring out the details of how to clear it).

I had an Artificer Artillerist in 5E and it was a lot of fun giving the party temporary HP on a regular basis with it. Not that effective a character in damage output, but good for our durability.

I've never understood the concept that you shouldn't heal in combat. Depending on the combat of course. Every game I've DMed or played in has had the healer and other characters keeping each other alive. It's always been a vital part of all but the easiest of encounters. Are DMs just not dealing enough damage or running easy combats?