So, if you've accepted the Warlock's 9d6 Eldritch Blast; what if it healed?

[Nifft]

And another good point. It's so much easier to post half-baked ideas here for cooking rather than attempting to think for myself

I'd just like to note that I hate when people actually do this. No smiley. I know you're joking, but I've felt like it's happened here before, and it's annoying.

Please, kids, do try to think stuff out before posting, to the best of your ability. Soon, your ability will improve through practice, and your ideas will come out more fully baked with less effort.

Thanks, -- N

 

[Seeten]

"I like having 19 encounters a day, and this ruins my crazy adventure."

This is the silliest argument ever. Always at full strength? Well, throw 4 straight encounters at the party assuming full strength then. Plus the healing Warlock doesnt heal ability damage, or remove status, or poison, it is not better than a cleric.

If they can fight full hp 20 times in a day, honestly, who cares?

 

[Koewn]

I'd just like to note that I hate when people actually do this. No smiley. I know you're joking, but I've felt like it's happened here before, and it's annoying.

Heh - fair enough. Honestly, you did get me on that one; calling the group I play with...unsubtle in tactics is an understatement, and nonlethal damage comes up so little it may as well not exist. No-one but I tended to play rogues; and I'm a wizard right now.

I dunno. I don't really look at the prestige class or spell posts, so I'm not sure how they start off but I haven't seen people coming in and developing d21 off of the shoulders of the posters.

Koewn

 

[Koewn]

Plus the healing Warlock doesnt heal ability damage, or remove status, or poison, it is not better than a cleric.

If they can fight full hp 20 times in a day, honestly, who cares?

Well, I'd been considering having 'Essences' for this Healock that modify it's heal-touch to also perhaps do poison, or disease, or whatever.

I'll grant that with only...what, 12 invocations?...you'd never be able to fully replicate a Cleric, but you could only emulate fully certain roles - the Healer role, the Protector role, the Vs. Undead role, etc. The idea struck me as interesting, but I figured the largest hurdle would be the idea of unlimited healing, so I threw it out here to see if I was truly mad.

In the end with invocations and essences you'd be able to do certain things alot, but you'd never have all the resources of the Cleric at your disposal - the Healock in your party may be no help versus disease or ability drain, but can cure the heck out of poison.

At higher levels when damage isn't just in HP, I think the unlimited-healing, even if it's left as just straight-d6 heal, no split-nonlethal kludge, won't be as valuable as having someone who can actually get the fighter up above 5 STR quickly.

Koewn

 

[Kelleris]

"I like having 19 encounters a day, and this ruins my crazy adventure."

This is the silliest argument ever. Always at full strength? Well, throw 4 straight encounters at the party assuming full strength then. Plus the healing Warlock doesnt heal ability damage, or remove status, or poison, it is not better than a cleric.

If they can fight full hp 20 times in a day, honestly, who cares?

Well, it makes published adventure scenarios practically impossible to use, for one thing. Also, in the sense of status quo encounters, it means that the "weight" of the bad guys the PCs go through is much higher - they're on a nonstop diet of BBEGs. I don't know about you, but I start having trouble justifying all those super-mooks after a while. It also makes encounters pretty bland - they all have to be at close to your upper limit to be interesting, because there's much less in the way of resource-conservation involved.

 

[Seeten]

This is the first fight for today! 4 big baddies, 2 little guys.

This is the second fight of the day!(How do we know they didnt rest the full night in leomunds secret shelter?) 2 baddies, 3 little guys.

This is the third fight of the day!(Rest number 2 in shelter) 1 baddy, 3 mooks.

How is this different than healed to full? No idea.

My group rests whenever it runs out of spells. Don't want us to rest? I hope all your encounters can bust through our magical wards and items. So it is easy to replicate full hp all the time without a "Healock" and I fully dont get the complaint.

Encounter as written says 2 hobgobs and 4 kobolds? make it 4 hobgobs and 2 kobolds? How tough is this? The statblocks are there already.

 

[Kelleris]

This is the first fight for today! 4 big baddies, 2 little guys.

This is the second fight of the day!(How do we know they didnt rest the full night in leomunds secret shelter?) 2 baddies, 3 little guys.

This is the third fight of the day!(Rest number 2 in shelter) 1 baddy, 3 mooks.

How is this different than healed to full? No idea.

My group rests whenever it runs out of spells. Don't want us to rest? I hope all your encounters can bust through our magical wards and items. So it is easy to replicate full hp all the time without a "Healock" and I fully dont get the complaint.

Encounter as written says 2 hobgobs and 4 kobolds? make it 4 hobgobs and 2 kobolds? How tough is this? The statblocks are there already.

Good for you. I suppose I should've added a YMMV sticker to my post.

And what about my other two possible sticking points?

(I'll go ahead and do it now: YMMV. Some DMs and campaigns won't have a problem with some or all of these possible objections to the healock. But I know I would, and I suspect other people have had similar experiences. If you don't feel that way, congratulations, but I expect you're in the minority.)

 

[Seeten]

This is also the same argument that is used to "prove" the Warlock is "overpowered" compared to a sorcerer, which is utter rubbish. But they can keep on blasting in the 39th fight of the day! Overpowered!

But they only do 9d6 1 time per round.

But they can keep on blasting in the 39th fight of the day!

You give up the great heal right now, for the ability to heal all day.

I am sorry, but I'll take the cleric that can bring me from 3 hp to 170 hp in a single "Heal" over the Healock with his 1 9d6 heal a round. There are high level enemies that will blow through 9d6 in one iterative attack. Color me unimpressed and unswayed by this argument as to the overpowered nature of a healock, or a warlock.

 

[Kelleris]

Overpowered? Unswayed? I never said they were overpowered, just tricky to deal with. And I only suggested a few reasons they might be difficult to deal with. It would require a heroic effort for me to care about your state of swayedness.

The analogy with the warlock's damage-dealing is, incidentally, extremely poor. Consider the relative power of fast healing 1 and the ability to deal a point of damage to any enemy within range once per round as a free action. I know which one I'd go with...

Equally incidentally, it's impossible for a cleric's heal to remove more than 150 damage per casting in 3.5.

 

[Crothian]

The real problem is at the lower levels when the cleric has just a few spells for curing. Even at 7th level the cleric has good healing for in combat but out of combat the Healock will still do much better.