Pathfinder 2E Healing as a Playstyle in Pathfinder 2e

[The-Magic-Sword]

Usually what happened in practice is that unless there was a time crunch, we'd establish what kind of healing our characters were capable of, and then full heal with the knowledge that we most certainly have enough time, actually counting it when time is short as a minigame. If you know for example, that my life boost heals 16 HP over the course of a couple rounds at a given level, and that I can do that every ten minutes, over the course of like an hour or two its pretty deterministic.

As for spells with different action economy, yeah it would be pretty cool, right now the model is that you mix 2 action spells (soothe, 2 action heal) with 1 action stuff, e.g. Life Boost, Lay on Hands, Guidance, Shield, Demoralize, Strike for the most part, sometimes it makes sense to pop 3 separate 1 actions (for instance throwing Life Boost on one person, Spirit's Absolution on myself, and then moving has come up.)

 

[Kichwas]

Are you talking in combat healing, out of combat healing, or both?

For me I do both.

I like healers and I'm playing a Kineticist / Bard right now, that will soon also be a Blessed One.
Free Archetype game so I'm going nuts with it.

We're level 5, so I only have my first Kineticist heal, but I also have a fast healing ability through bard, and battle medicine.
In a level I will have Torrent in Blood, which I can pair with Safe Elements to AoE heal without it healing enemies in the area.

Out of combat I'm covered enough to bring the whole group up unless we're "on a timer", simply through the kineticist healing. If you have anyone with either focus based healing or kineticist based healing the 'medicine' skill is only needed for poisons, disease, etc, and battle medicine. So I'm not bothering with feats into it (though I would for disease / poisons if I felt those were a big issue in the campaign).

Battle Medicine means I can heal everyone in the group twice per fight for the first fight of the day, plus one bard heal. Next level I get the AoE for one more heal in combat per target.

I'm Fire/Water, so I'm also still a decent DPS.

At level 5 I had a tough choice between boosting my Fire die, or branching into Wood for tree sentinel. I chose Fire but it's still an open question if that was the right choice.

I'm enjoying this more than something like a cleric because I'm not worrying about spell slots. I'm just thinking that every fight I can toss out 1 heal to each person, and so I can be somewhat free with doing that.

 

[Kichwas]

In one shots I've also played a Druid and an Air / Water Kineticist. The Druid did not hold up well in combat, but excelled out of combat because I had feats to spare for solid medicine skills even though I did not go down the berry route (at the time I wasn't sure of my ability to have berries on hand).

The Kineticist was in a level 6 one-shot so right out of the gate had 2 water heals so I felt very powerful healing wise, and Air gave me the ability to do forced movement on enemies. But it was a very short game so I didn't get to explore it deeply, this I made a Fire / Water kineticist when my prior Abomination Vaults GM started a new AP (Kingmaker) and invited us all to join up again.

I think that in an AP like Kingmaker where most of the time you have less than one combat per day a Cleric would outshine any other class for combat healing, but then medicine or blessed one archetype for out of combat, if we were to go into Abomination Vaults again where the typical "day" had 5-10 encounters the Kineticist becomes very potent over not just other healers, but other magic classes also as its a completely non-Vancian caster.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'm actually doing wood/fire myself, I won't get a proper heal until Dash of Herbs later (right now, it costs my target actions and a free hand to eat my fruit, like a potion) but Timber Sentinel is very worth it in terms of filling the same role, especially since its a deterministic reduction of damage, rather than a roll.

 

[Kaodi]

For a while I played a plant summoner/wood kineticist and timber sentinel proved to be so good in our group that I retrained out of it after discussing it with the DM to make combat more intense, XD . It is bonkers levels of damage reduction.

 

[Kichwas]

I'm actually doing wood/fire myself, I won't get a proper heal until Dash of Herbs later (right now, it costs my target actions and a free hand to eat my fruit, like a potion) but Timber Sentinel is very worth it . . .

I really like how Kineticist opens up different ways to be the "support / heals", all of which are active gameplay options.

And yeah. Timber Sentinel was very hard for me to pass up. Especially as when we were level 4 and almost 5, we hit a plot point where a fae wanted 3 trees to replace those cut down by loggers. Right there I thought, if I was a wood kineticist, this entire side quest would be over before it began.