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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sage Genesis" data-source="post: 6254517" data-attributes="member: 6706099">I've played plenty of Next, both as a DM and as a player of a Cleric, and I think the spell is... eh, balanced... but the kind of balance you get from being broken in two different places at once. Bear with me for a moment.On the one hand, this spell can potentially remove every danger of dying except for dying outright in one blow. This becomes less likely as the levels go by.On the other hand I've found that this is not very likely to ever occur in real play. As a touch spell, you must be near the target. Said target is almost invariably right in the middle of a very dangerous situation, because why else would he be dying? Simply reaching the target might earn you an unhealthy amount of opportunity attacks. Then there's also the opportunity cost. You can't cast a "real" spell on the same turn and your melee attacks are not so phenomenal that you really want to keep doing that.  Sometimes there's other things you need (or just want) to do than to heal someone up to 1 hp. Maybe some other party member by now also needs healing, or maybe you yourself because you ate all those opportunity attacks getting here. Worse, since the healed creature has only a single hit point it's also trivially easy for them to collapse once more before your next turn comes up, potentially locking you into a loop of repeating the same turn over and over. It's a kind of guilt-tripping stun phenomenon that locks up both the Cleric and the victim. I've seen it happen only once in a fight where area damage was somewhat common and it was an absolutely miserable experience for everyone involved. The Cleric had another action thanks to the swift spell but he couldn't use it for anything because he already knew he'd have to stay next to his soon-to-be-dead-again friend. (The hell hounds' master had also noted this and had ordered them to simply walked away from the Cleric by this point.)My main problem with Spare the Dying is that it has very little middle ground. At its very best, it might be too good. At its very worst, it sucks all the fun out of the fight. At its most reasonable it's fine... but I haven't seen this really happen very often. Everything might have a corner case every now and then, that's fine, but Spare the Dying has them more often than not.</blockquote>

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