D&D (2024) December 1st UA Spell changes

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I don't agree with either of those statements. Clerics can heal. Wizards can't. What's the most important utility in the game? Healing. And you can spec either class to be pretty strong DPS.

Put it another way: the one class every party would like to have is a cleric.

Everyone can heal. Take a short rest, spend your hit dice. Or guzzle a potion, it's not like gold matters by the default removal of player agency in meaningful purchases. It isn't utility so much as "let the game proceed". Having a horse isnt much utility either, it's just getting you to the fireworks factory on time.

Mind control, divination, illusions, summons, breaking action economy, altering terrain... now THAT'S utility.

 

[tetrasodium]

Everyone can heal. Take a short rest, spend your hit dice. Or guzzle a potion, it's not like gold matters by the default removal of player agency in meaningful purchases. It isn't utility so much as "let the game proceed". Having a horse isnt much utility either, it's just getting you to the fireworks factory on time.

Mind control,

command
sanctuary
Planar Binding
etc

divination,

Augury
Locate: object, creature.
Commune
Detect: evil, magic, Poison & disease.
A spell literally named divination.
Find the path
Ok I'll give you one, find traps doesn't count as a spell.
Legend Lore
I expected to not see this one in a cleric vrs wizards comparison.... scrying
Tongues
True seeing
What divination spells are missing?

illusions

Limited to silence unless gnome or whatever but illusions aren't exactly the powerhouse in 5e that they once could be

, summons,

Conjure celestial
guardian of faith
Planar Ally
Summon Celestial

breaking action economy,

I have no idea what this means...
Healing word?
command?
Hold Person?
silence a caster?
revivify?
Banishment?
animate dead?
Create undead?

altering terrain...

Hallow
Earthquake
Forbiddance?
Control weather

now THAT'S utility.

5e clerics seem to have all but one of those & not a big one...

 

[Chaosmancer]

I think the assumption is that short rest abilities will be going away, so this is really just a solid recovery spell (and no issues with that whatsoever). So it will be a very solid spell, but it won't give you some of the oomph that catnap used to give in the new model.

Some short rest recovery is going away, but we have seen it popping up here and there. The thaumaturge Cleric ability allows a single Channel Divnity to recover on a short rest, for example.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

command
sanctuary
Planar Binding
etc

Augury
Locate: object, creature.
Commune
Detect: evil, magic, Poison & disease.
A spell literally named divination.
Find the path
Ok I'll give you one, find traps doesn't count as a spell.
Legend Lore
I expected to not see this one in a cleric vrs wizards comparison.... scrying
Tongues
True seeing
What divination spells are missing?

Limited to silence unless gnome or whatever but illusions aren't exactly the powerhouse in 5e that they once could be

Conjure celestial
guardian of faith
Planar Ally
Summon Celestial


I have no idea what this means...
Healing word?
command?
Hold Person?
silence a caster?
revivify?
Banishment?
animate dead?
Create undead?


Hallow
Earthquake
Forbiddance?
Control weather


5e clerics seem to have all but one of those & not a big one...

I'm not saying that clerics don't have utility. I'm saying that HEALING isn't utility. It's the necessary butt wiping to allow the party to have fun and the adventure to proceed. Moreover, it competes with the other stuff clerics can do, and shares the same resources.

There's a reason healers are typically the least played classes in MMO's.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I'm not saying that clerics don't have utility. I'm saying that HEALING isn't utility. It's the necessary butt wiping to allow the party to have fun and the adventure to proceed. Moreover, it competes with the other stuff clerics can do, and shares the same resources.

There's a reason healers are typically the least played classes in MMO's.

Healing at the right time with a bonus action is breaking (or better fixing) the action economy.

The reason healers are the least played is also because if anything goes wrong it is usually the healer (or the tank) being blamed. It seldom falls on the striker who can just not manage their aggro correctly...

Also many people just find it most fun when their damage numbers are high.
The same is true in pen and paper. Just look at DPR discussions and the neglegance of reliability, sustainability and general defence and mobility.

It falls on the healer to salvage those builds at times and then you feel like the babysitter.

 

[Willie the Duck]

RE: healers - There are plenty of people who enjoy being healers, few that enjoy games where being healer is the majority of what they do/actively competes with them doing other things. If I wanted to armchair shrink the thing, I'd say it's because healing just places their ally in the same position as they were 5 seconds ago before they got hurt, which feels less impactful or rewarding than direct attacking or support effects which actively move your allies into a more advantageous position (going from normal mode to win-condition mode instead of them going from unhurt to hurt to unhurt again). All of this does differ based on how often your party members get knocked down/would be if not for you (do you feel like a hit-point battery or like the guy keeping the soldiers on the line?).

Re: clerics and wizards: -- I get the idea behind the notion that wizards get more utility. Historically, wizards got most of the dungeon-crawler utility spells like comprehend languages, featherfall/spiderclimb/fly, knock, invisibility/see invisibility, and passwall. Clerics got (more of the) negative status removal effects (again, the boring 'return to what you were pre-injury' spells), silence, shape earth, and late-game fly-alike (airwalk); plus everyone got tongues, plane shift and energy protection spells of some kinds. Exactly how much that resonates today likely has to do with whether those spells still dominate in your chosen playstyle, and whether status-effect removal feels like being the rest of the party's 'okayness battery.'

Oh shoot, didn't see that, there go my dreams for them to drop a short rest to 5/10/15 minutes across the board.

The one thing the videos included with this made clear to me is that no, not everything they are throwing out there as all-but-certain. If they threw out inspirations on 20 in one UA, then inspirations on 1 in the next before they tabulated results for the first, then they are genuinely experimenting and testing the waters on all this. Voice your preference. If the new Prayer of Healing doesn't hit 70-90%, or even if it does but in the meantime they experiment with a shorter Short Rest and that scores even higher, then they very well might scrap this in favor of something close to what you want.

 

[Chaosmancer]

RE: healers - There are plenty of people who enjoy being healers, few that enjoy games where being healer is the majority of what they do/actively competes with them doing other things. If I wanted to armchair shrink the thing, I'd say it's because healing just places their ally in the same position as they were 5 seconds ago before they got hurt, which feels less impactful or rewarding than direct attacking or support effects which actively move your allies into a more advantageous position (going from normal mode to win-condition mode instead of them going from unhurt to hurt to unhurt again). All of this does differ based on how often your party members get knocked down/would be if not for you (do you feel like a hit-point battery or like the guy keeping the soldiers on the line?).

Re: clerics and wizards: -- I get the idea behind the notion that wizards get more utility. Historically, wizards got most of the dungeon-crawler utility spells like comprehend languages, featherfall/spiderclimb/fly, knock, invisibility/see invisibility, and passwall. Clerics got (more of the) negative status removal effects (again, the boring 'return to what you were pre-injury' spells), silence, shape earth, and late-game fly-alike (airwalk); plus everyone got tongues, plane shift and energy protection spells of some kinds. Exactly how much that resonates today likely has to do with whether those spells still dominate in your chosen playstyle, and whether status-effect removal feels like being the rest of the party's 'okayness battery.'


The one thing the videos included with this made clear to me is that no, not everything they are throwing out there as all-but-certain. If they threw out inspirations on 20 in one UA, then inspirations on 1 in the next before they tabulated results for the first, then they are genuinely experimenting and testing the waters on all this. Voice your preference. If the new Prayer of Healing doesn't hit 70-90%, or even if it does but in the meantime they experiment with a shorter Short Rest and that scores even higher, then they very well might scrap this in favor of something close to what you want.

I will take some of the healing discussion a bit further, because I honestly don't see healing as broken in 5e. Far from it.

In your analysis you rightly point out that people can get frustrated that healing can only reset a party member back to where they were before. But, let us say you have a situation like a Choldrith or something else. The enemy hits your ally with an attack, deals damage, and poisons them. That was a single action from the enemy.

To heal the poison takes a single action. To heal the damage takes a different single action. So to reset them, which isn't satisfying to many people, takes double the action economy that harming them took. That's... not good. That is actually really bad to trade two of your actions for the enemies single action.

But it actually gets worse. Taking the Choldrith specifically they can deal an average of 21 damage a turn. To heal that would require a 4th level Cure Wounds on average? For a CR 3 enemy? Or, again, multiple actions.

So, a single round from a single enemy has the potential to take up to three turns to reverse. Which leaves them more turns to inflict more damage. So, it doesn't feel like the healer can actually even hit the point of just reseting their allies. Instead it is "I can make us lose slower"

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I will take some of the healing discussion...

Snip

So, a single round from a single enemy has the potential to take up to three turns to reverse. Which leaves them more turns to inflict more damage. So, it doesn't feel like the healer can actually even hit the point of just reseting their allies. Instead it is "I can make us lose slower"

While you are correct, you are also wrong.

You need not undo all damage to be an effective healer. Actually it is very frustrating if healing in general outperformes damage dealing. This will just make fights very unsatisfying.

What you need to do is heal at the right time. Sometimes healing 10 damage is enough to keep your tank from going down from the next 30 damage.
The poison condition might be irrelevant to the tank.

 

[James Gasik]

I will take some of the healing discussion a bit further, because I honestly don't see healing as broken in 5e. Far from it.

In your analysis you rightly point out that people can get frustrated that healing can only reset a party member back to where they were before. But, let us say you have a situation like a Choldrith or something else. The enemy hits your ally with an attack, deals damage, and poisons them. That was a single action from the enemy.

To heal the poison takes a single action. To heal the damage takes a different single action. So to reset them, which isn't satisfying to many people, takes double the action economy that harming them took. That's... not good. That is actually really bad to trade two of your actions for the enemies single action.

But it actually gets worse. Taking the Choldrith specifically they can deal an average of 21 damage a turn. To heal that would require a 4th level Cure Wounds on average? For a CR 3 enemy? Or, again, multiple actions.

So, a single round from a single enemy has the potential to take up to three turns to reverse. Which leaves them more turns to inflict more damage. So, it doesn't feel like the healer can actually even hit the point of just reseting their allies. Instead it is "I can make us lose slower"

I had this comment months back, because I'd noticed the same issue. That led to this thread: Heal Thyself. The, ah, majority consensus of the forum is that healing can't be good because hit dice exist. I still think that it's ridiculous you can't even rely on a max-level spell to even 1:1 the damage a party member can take, let alone give them a reasonable buffer, with a touch spell that has a single target, but you can read what others have to say, I suppose.

 

[Pauln6]

We use the lowest form of non magical healing, which works well for us. In that context, I find magical healing quite lacklustre, especially compared to paladin laying on hands (which in my view should just be free cure wounds/lesser restoration proficiency bonus times per day plus Charisma bonus). I allow an extra die of healing so baseline is 2d8+wisdom instead.