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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6600519" data-attributes="member: 5834">I believe you're overestimating the value of healing word.Many years of playing in other DM's campaigns. I haven't met a group that played like we do. Not a single one. I have met many groups that run very standard, by the book campaigns. I've quit a ton of online campaigns due to boredom because the DMs create so few challenging encounters that a mild power gamer can't crush. They aren't very challenging or interesting. I wouldn't mind trying your campaign just to see if it lives up to the hype that you would "smoke" me. I haven't been "smoked" in a long, long time, especially by DMs running encounters out of the book. That stopped being interesting years ago. Do your NPCs target them? If an NPC group knows the PC's capability, they generally target the wizard or cleric first for assassination, usually the cleric. They are aware that the cleric surviving means resurrection and they want to knock that capability out. If you do this as well, great. I see your parties are excessively large. That changes a lot of things. Last time I ran a party as large as yours, the entire undertaking was a nightmare to prepare for.Your party is larger than usual and four PCs capable of healing? Are we talking paladins and rangers or clerics, druids, and bards?  And you're adding a 7th player? That throws CR off by an immense amount. We generally have one healer. Please don't discuss non-standard parties. We play with five, one more than recommended. Seven PCs is too much for these games. Even five can be a pain for encounter design. I no longer have the time or patience to deal with parties that reach six and seven members. Five is my limit at this point.Please stop trying to sell me that there is any substantial difference between healing word and cure wounds. There isn't. You can use healing word and attack with your cantrip or use cure wounds and attack with your spiritual weapon or do damage moving with spiritual guardians. Neither will have a substantial effect on the game. Neither will be cast with any regularity. I don't waste the spell slot on two spells that do the same thing. Cure wounds does give me more bang for the buck using a higher level slot which we have used quite often. Healing word has proven too weak in the fights we've been in to do the job. That is why we go with cure wounds. If you get more bang for the buck from healing word because you have a very large party with a lot of healers, good for you. It doesn't work that way for our party. We use it because experience has shown it is better than healing word because of its potency using higher level spell slots. When you have one healer, we have found you need a more potent healer.They determine who the healer and wizard are because we usually only have one of each. They are obvious due to their capabilities. Do the five PCs that can cast spells do so often? The NPCs  you fight can't see a fire bolt or similar spell versus the occasional spell of an Eldritch Knight? Yet somehow they've survived attacks from humanoids for ages? We don't use metagame knowledge. We wait until the classes show what they do.We even have NPCs that have mistaken the Eldritch Knight for the wizard because he cast the Thunderwave spell first. It's very organic how they come to choose their target. At higher level against intelligent PCs, I had them assassinate the healer and wizard outside of combat. The BBEG didn't even bother engaging the martials. They knew exactly who the healer and wizard were and they were given orders to kill them. This happens all the time in campaigns against intelligent enemies that have intelligence on the party, meaning just about every campaign that isn't a general dungeon crawl.</blockquote>

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