I suppose they're just trying to cut back the number of powers. There are like 8000 powers out there... finding a name for yet another "spend an healing surge" power must be getting difficult, and this way when they want to create a new leader class they can just slap "healing word" in there without cluttering the compendium.
Restoring Spirit
Healing Spirit
Mending Spirit
Just off the top of my head for the Sentinel to have a different kind of healing power, with spirit being far better for a primal character than the divine sounding "healing word". I mean it's not terribly difficult so long as it gets the point across. Also this hardly clutters up the compendium, because it's usually pretty obvious what class features belong to who at level 1. It's never been a problem in the past and it wouldn't be in future either I would bet. The only argument for this consolidation is for maximizing support with minimal feats. For example if every leader has "healing word" then you can have 1 feat for every class. They haven't done this though and so it's just a silly decision.
Furthermore, it's just more intuitive. If two powers are exactly the same, just call them the same and be done with it.
Except when you want other feats or class features to interact with it. This decision has broke the Pacifist Cleric in a critical manner: For no actual benefit. What is the sentinel gaining from having healing word?
Nothing. But the Cleric is ironically losing because of it. This is just silly and makes absolutely no sense.
The fact that HW doesn't work with the pacifist healer anymore is probably just a blunder on their part ( and probably proof of the fact that the designers care about RAI more than they care about RAW).
Really? Then why is encounters and LFR strictly RAW? In both examples, Pacifist Cleric wouldn't be able to give bonus healing to Healing Word. So to say this is utterly ridiculous.
Of course that it's a stupid mistake is obvious: The point is though that it shows how sloppy post-essentials design just is (at least as far as PCs are concerned). I'd also like to point out this is stealth errata that broke a core feature of some builds. That's overall really poor design and should be addressed sooner than later. We can hope that errata in June (the big update) changes how pacifist healing works so it again applies to healing word, but by RAW it now doesn't. It doesn't because of something
that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Honestly, was it truly that hard to call the sentinels healing something other than healing word? Was it really? Because I'm not buying any argument that says that makes sense, because it doesn't. Unless they errata ALL healing to the same kind of format, then I might be able to see the point.
But oh! They didn't change the fundamentally similar inspiring word from the Warlord to being "Healing Word". Yet logically if your argument on "sense" was true, this would have happened. But it didn't. So the cleric loses out here because an unrelated class in an entirely different power source got slapped with "Healing Word" when it shouldn't have and could
easily have been named different.
This is combined with all the significant nerfs to many of their powers, reducing the clerics off role abilities as a controller and defender. Now all of these were
fair. I was there when the game came out. I saw that many people complained Clerics were better controllers than Wizards at the time. Remember that initially clerics had big party friendly AoE powers and actually could out control a wizard in many ways (this is obviously no longer true). The thing is while nerfing these powers wizards threw away the opportunity to make them more appropriate. They could have increased the leader riders (or given them more leadery effects) of these powers instead.
All of this would have made "sense". Blatantly nerfing most of the clerics off role powers (
even if justified) while giving nothing back to make them more "leadery" instead, breaking the rather popular pacifist healing feat (for no real logic) and basically hammering this class
far more than the Warlord who arguably deserved more adjusting but didn't get anywhere near the nerfing, is just plain
nonsense.
I mean I actually played epic when all this cleric stuff was arguably most broken like Astral Storm, gigantic close burst 8 minor action (feat incidentally) turn undead (that affected elementals and immortals too) and other stuff. But even at its most broken this stuff never compared to what I saw Warlords do and what Warlords can still do. These nerfs to the clerics secondary role, without giving them back something on their primary to compensate leaves them behind Shamans, Bards and Warlords.
In terms of why this makes no sense, we have some token changes for strength clerics without fixing any of the problems they actually have. We then have the most bizarre thing in while they're nerfing the crap out of the cleric, Divine Oracle - one of the most whacky PPs in 4E that is the base to a
lot of broken builds is
not changed. I mean, whut?
The only thing that makes sense here is Mike Mearls writes an article about how nobody wanted to play a cleric, then we get this. Now that makes sense, it seems he wanted his article to be a self fulfilling prophecy.
