MechaPilot
Explorer
There was plenty of good stuff that was discarded during the playtest and the transition to the final game. Rogue's skill tricks, characters doing more damage simply by virtue of being a higher level, the improved magic initiate feats that gave a once per day spell of a level higher than first, and so on.
I recall listening to the podcast that transcript is from, and I recall thinking that Mearls put his foot in his mouth with the comment about growing the hand back. HP recovery doesn't regrow lost limbs, regardless of whether the HP recovery is magical or non-magical in nature. There is a spell that does restore lost limbs, but it explicitly states that it does so. Since that text would be extraneous if all magical healing restored lost limbs, I am forced to conclude that the text serves an intended purpose of stating that limbs are not regrown by magical healing unless it is specifically stated that they are in the description of the spell.
The other reason that I think Mearls put his foot in his mouth with that comment is that it could very easily appear to people who were heatedly engaged in the martial healing debate that he was choosing a side.
The specialties did become the feats system. Before that (as early as 06/04/2012), they were actually called themes (you can find a reference to it here).
I have to say that I don't see Inspirational Leader as inspirational healing. It suffers from the same problem that the original version of the fighter's second wind, the temporary nature of the HPs means it will be used before any combat is seen. I referred to that version of the fighter's second wind as "get hard," because if it granted temporary HPs then fighters would simply use it as part of "getting it up" before a fight.
While I get that Inspirational Leader is the type of thing that you'd prefer, and that's perfectly fine, abilities that grant temporary HPs are, thematically speaking, "get hard" abilities, not healing; and I suspect that observations of play would see most people using them as part of "getting it up" for battle instead of waiting until they had actually lost non-temporary HPs.
I recall listening to the podcast that transcript is from, and I recall thinking that Mearls put his foot in his mouth with the comment about growing the hand back. HP recovery doesn't regrow lost limbs, regardless of whether the HP recovery is magical or non-magical in nature. There is a spell that does restore lost limbs, but it explicitly states that it does so. Since that text would be extraneous if all magical healing restored lost limbs, I am forced to conclude that the text serves an intended purpose of stating that limbs are not regrown by magical healing unless it is specifically stated that they are in the description of the spell.
The other reason that I think Mearls put his foot in his mouth with that comment is that it could very easily appear to people who were heatedly engaged in the martial healing debate that he was choosing a side.
The specialties did become the feats system. Before that (as early as 06/04/2012), they were actually called themes (you can find a reference to it here).
I have to say that I don't see Inspirational Leader as inspirational healing. It suffers from the same problem that the original version of the fighter's second wind, the temporary nature of the HPs means it will be used before any combat is seen. I referred to that version of the fighter's second wind as "get hard," because if it granted temporary HPs then fighters would simply use it as part of "getting it up" before a fight.
While I get that Inspirational Leader is the type of thing that you'd prefer, and that's perfectly fine, abilities that grant temporary HPs are, thematically speaking, "get hard" abilities, not healing; and I suspect that observations of play would see most people using them as part of "getting it up" for battle instead of waiting until they had actually lost non-temporary HPs.
