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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5012248" data-attributes="member: 51942">While I think healing is extremely powerful, I wouldn't use the word overpowered.There are several reasons why its power doesn't cause issues:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It's a really a party buff.  A lot of balance issues surround keeping various members of the party somewhat balanced.  Healing may be crucial, but it's also firmly relegated to being a supporting feature.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It gives the party another shot at success, but it doesn't directly contribute to success: if something's really hard to beat, healing won't be your ticket; you'll need some way of generating damage and particularly attack bonuses.  It's a swinginess buffer.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It stacks poorly.  The first few minor action heals available make a huge difference.  Having a bit more healing than one leader can by default provide matters.  But, as you get more, well, you'll be able to take trickier encounters more reliably, but you'll need ever more healing to compensate when compared to just having an extra +1 to hit.  Surgeless healing tends to be low in amount per round, so it's not a true replacement.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Right now, it's very hard to keep up with monster damage - despite that not being high - with healing.  Unless you've got some shtik (say a hospitaler who's mark constantly triggers or damage resistance), even multiple leaders will be hard pressed to compensate for incoming damage.  Your best bet isn't to constantly heal (it doesn't work well enough for that), but to mitigate particularly critical issues.  Since most healing is per-encounter, that means that you'll burn through these high-healing rounds very quickly, and need to use the time that buys to get a head start.</li> </ul>Healing becomes problematic when it's essentially at will and significant enough to seriously dent focused fire.  Say, a pre-errata battle-ragers THP buffer, high damage resistance, or a hospitaler's blessing (if you could somehow manage to extend it to many foes and force them to actually trigger it).  That kind of healing really negates attacks almost entirely, and that really poses issues because it can enable you to deal with entirely new kinds of threats.So, three factors contribute when "healing" becomes problematic: it's at-will (or more frequent than per encounter, anyhow), it's reactive to incoming attacks and doesn't have an action cost (so focused fire won't help), and it's reliable.By contrast, per-encounter stuff with an action cost that's not reactive to incoming damage is very unlikely to cause imbalances.  Hospitaler's blessing is unreliable (and limited to one opponent), but probably comes closest to being problematic, certainly against solos.</blockquote>

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