brehobit said:
I _always_ heal people to full, or at least within 2 or 3 of full. And I'm playing a ranger with a wand.
The money saved on the charge just ain't worth diein' over.
This assumes you are in a world (say Sharn in Eberron) where buying level 1 wants is as easy as buying a masterwork greatsword or full plate.
Yeah, even a little bit of extra healing can make a big difference. In a high level 1 shot, our Shifter - err, Master of Many Forms/Warshaper - ended up dying by 1 HP with more than 400 total HP. If you're using Cure sticks, then people should probably be within 5 HP of their max.
CLW wands (and Lesser Vigor ones) are probably too cheap, given their power. Market forces in our game have sometimes pushed the price to around 1k GP, and we still thought it was worth it. Being able to eliminate normal downtime healing spell uses is really nice.
But it's not like people don't run out of spells anyway, so the party still needs to rest. If they don't need to rest as often, well is that really bad? In many ways, there are still too many incentives to pull out, turtle up, or Rope Trick after an encounter to reload spells even if the group has cure sticks. To use a CRPG example, I played through Neverwinter Nights with my monk. He had max ranks in heal, so he could easily recover his HP with cheap healer's kits - I hardly ever needed to rest. Or you could just play like my brother did and rest after every fight, which usually isn't anymore difficult than using the kit.
And really, the serious life and death operation feel is mostly reserved for in combat heals.