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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lancelot" data-source="post: 7073927" data-attributes="member: 30022">Y...eah. Okay. Kind of an interesting premise, and an even more interesting resolution.I'd dispute the thought that healing spells are crap. Your hypothetical 17th level cleric is complaining about healing the paladin for 3d8 damage, and then he goes down again, so what's the point of healing spells? Firstly, that paladin has an 85 HP lay-on-hands of his own, right? That's clearly not shabby healing. If he's in dire straits, he can help himself. Secondly, what 17th level cleric is burning a 3rd level slot to chuck cure wounds in the heat of combat? If the paladin needs serious healing, you drop heal. Boom; 70 HP back. If you don't want to burn a big slot, then chuck a healing word. You've only spent a Bonus Action, letting you (the cleric) smash away with your mace, or drop a damaging cantrip, or drink a potion of something cool.The most common complaint from experienced players is that high-level 5e D&D (and, in truth, high-level D&D in every version) is too easy. The players have access to too many potential resources, too much healing, and can safely ignore death in most cases. I don't see how doubling the power of all healing spells fixes this. Combats become much longer, which means more boring. To threaten the party, you have to add more monsters to the encounter, which increases complexity. You all have to make massive changes to a ton of things for balance reasons. Rangers will hate short rests because they gain literally nothing from them (they don't have short rest recharge mechanics, can't spend HD, and the short rest simply burns the duration of spells like hunter's mark). The cure wounds spell becomes irrelevant at 1st level; if healing word cures double strength after modifiers, then it's probably healing 8 HP minimum with a roll of 1-on-d4... as a bonus action. Feats change; non-healing spells become irrelevant for clerics; magic items change...[shrug] I'd go on, but I just don't see the point. Why not just leave it as it stands? If you want to play a healing cleric in 5e, you can. As mentioned above, healing spells are not crap... and the Life domain buffs them even further. If you want to play a heal-bot, you can play a heal-bot. But you also don't have to! I personally play a cleric (Arcana domain) who has healing word and mass healing word as my only healing spells. Both are bonus actions, which means I get to do cool things on my turn even if I'm healing someone else. My party knows that I'll be burning slots on other things as well. I'll cast animate dead to give us some meat-shields, silence to lock down enemy casters, spiritual weapon to add some punch to our combats, and magic missile (domain spell) to do some direct ranged damage. Could I do more healing? Sure. But the party fighter has Second Wind, and the monk can heal himself, and the rogue can halve damage from most attacks, and the ranger/bard/druid/paladin have healing spells of their own, and the wizard has shield and mirror image. And, if all else fails, they can burn HD between rests. They're less reliant on me as a heal-bot than most (or all) previous editions, which is great. They can play what they want to play, and I can play what I want to play.5e: D&D for people who enjoy choices, and don't want to pigeon-hole clerics into a single role.</blockquote>

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