Second Wind is just poorly thought out and designed from the start.
They bypassed the Hit Dice mechanic, which was specifically invented for this sort of thing (characters being able to restore their own HP), and therefore will require a special tweak to fix when we enable a wounds or vitality module. It also won't even scale up or down with different healing rates, like if you change the short rest to 5 minutes all of a sudden this problem gets MUCH worse, more pronounced and more severe, and therefore that's no longer even an option.
They were originally saying that you could tune the game by changing the time required for a short rest. Now that only makes Second Wind stick out even worse.
Bag of rats, definitely, but it's actually worse than that because it is cheesy to have a bag of rats (or golf club of weapons), it SHOULDN'T be cheesy for a character to spam their own abilities. If it is, you've failed as a game designer if your goal is to make the game not feel cheesy. I expect at my game we will be using slow healing, lingering wounds & vitality, but it would be nice to play the normal game and not realize that fighters have effectively unlimited hit dice / self healing in 5th edition, or have to hunt around for mechanics like this that don't fit elegantly within the rest of the game rules. Why should a fighter ignore hit dice or have an ability which makes it obsolete and undesirable to use? I can see lots of fighters never running out of their daily hit dice at a certain point. Just wait another hour. 30 seconds of battle for every two hours rest and fighters never need a cure wounds cast on them.
When you look at it that way, they goofed up big time. It looks amateurish and that's because it is. They can try to rationalize their mistake away by hiding behind (DMs won't allow this), but that's an old fallback to poor game design. The DM shouldn't have to fix the system right out the gate.
I hope this is errata #1. Don't leave known bugs in the game, dudes. And they shouldn't blame players for exploiting their broken fighter self-healing ability. It's there and it's meant to be used and it will be. In 4th edition, at least all self-healing was built on surges in a unified way, and surgeless healing was supposed to be special and the domain of clerics only. It's like, as 4th edition era designers, they completely misunderstood their own game design.
I bet it's going to either go back to Temp HP which is erased after 5 minutes, or it's going to get a hard cap per day, or it's going to use hit dice to fuel it. Even being able to spend your own hit dice during combat as a bonus action is still pretty good, and it's comparable to what a barbarian can do with his rage ability.
Wizards, don't blame players for your mistakes and oversights. That's the real cheesy thing going on here. I would never have the balls to release a product into the wild and then tell people they're using it wrong when they are actually using it well. Why should fighters not maximize their own self-healing? Second Wind giving a self-heal is cheesy, on its own, regardless of spamming it. Spamming it because you can because there is no hard limit on its uses per day is merely playing your fighter well. If that's cheesy, that's not the player's fault, that's the designer's.
