Daztur
Hero
The Problem with Healing Powercreep
I just went and crunched some numbers so see how healing stacks up across the different editions. For all of the different editions I’m assuming 4 PCs of the classic four classes (fighting-man/fighter, cleric, thief/rogue, and magic-user/wizard). To try to make my comparisons at fair as possible, I’ve assumed that all Clerics have 16 Wisdom and spend all available spell slots on healing and that all PCs have 14 Constitution. In order to not have this take all day I’ve only crunched the numbers out to 5th level as that was enough to see some really stark differences emerge. In all cases the clerics DO NOT take healing/life domains and I’m assuming two short rests for 5.*e.
Some differences between editions are not being captured by this analysis, such as lot of old school characters having lower stats and how easy it was to make CLW wands in 3.*e but I think I’m getting the big picture here.
If you want to see my work, look down to the first reply to this thread as I didn’t want to gum up this post with a wall of numbers.
Here’s what I got for how much healing the party can pump out in one adventuring day as a percentage of total HPs across the first five levels:
0e
1st 0%
2nd 17.65%
3rd 23.38%
4th 18%
5th 14.4%
1e/2e (I couldn’t find any differences between the two)
1st 83.38%
2nd 56.25%
3rd 37.5%
4th 35.16%
5th 28.13%
3.0e/3.5e (I couldn’t find any differences between the two)
1st 38.89%
2nd 39.17%
3rd 60.12%
4th 72.22%
5th 92.42%
4e
Very approximately 250% across the board. See below for a more in-depth discussion of 4e healing and why it is hard to make apples to apples comparison of 4e healing vs. healing in other editions.
5e
1st 151%
2nd 149.97%
3rd 171.20%
4th 168.22%
5th 182.67%
5.5e
1st 190%
2nd 178.79%
3rd 219.57%
4th 214.41%
5th 247.20%
The Power Creep
We can see some pretty big differences in healing capacity across editions. 0e clerics just aren’t capable of pumping out much healing. Our 1/2e cleric did a lot better due to getting bonus spells for high Wisdom but then falls off badly as there are no 2nd and 3rd level healing spells in core 1e/2e. Meanwhile 3.*e clerics start off a bit behind due to 1st level PCs having max HPs and the changes to bonus spells for high Wisdom but then go quadratic. By 5th level 3.*e clerics are already capable of pumping out vast amounts of healing and they’re just starting to go quadratic at that point and the ratio of party HPs vs. clerical healing just gets absolutely nuts at higher levels in 3.*ed. This doesn’t come as a big surprise as everything goes nuts at higher levels in 3.*e.
Then we come to 4e, 4e is really hard to compare to other editions due to how Healing Surges work. The main upshot here is that 4e PCs don’t need a cleric in the same way that 3.*e PCs are absolutely and completely dependent on some form of magical healing. 4e Clerics can squeeze a bit more healing out of Healing Surges and do some very minor healing that doesn’t cost healing surges, but in 4e healing is pretty closely linked to Healing Surges that scale VERY tightly with HP. The other thing to note about 4e is just how MUCH the party can now heal, while the 3.*e cleric eventually goes quadratic enough to equal the entire output of a 4e party’s Healing Surges this takes a while and requires the cleric to sacrifice all of their non-Domain spells, while a 4e party can spend their Healing Surges with far FAR less in the way of opportunity costs.
Then, like with a lot of things, 5e is a messy compromise. You have a heavily nerfed version of Healing Surges in Hit Dice that are in addition to not instead of magical healing, but 5e healing spell scaling isn’t as nuts as in 3.*e which makes downtime magical healing very good to have but not utterly essential in the way it is in 3.*e. Also, it’s interesting to note that if you get two short rests, Second Wind can account for an absolutely massive amount of healing at level 1, although it does fall off to relative irrelevance later on. Still, while not being as potent as 4e healing, 5e healing is comfortably more generous than lower level 3.*e healing and you can do more of it before you start blowing your spell slots. However, a lot of 5e healing is gated behind Short Rests in a way that older edition healing isn’t.
5.5e provides a mild buff to Second Wind (while giving it other uses that make it unlikely to be used much for healing beyond the first few levels) and a big buff to Cure Wounds (you literally roll twice as many dice now). Due to this buff, a 5.5e party is quite a lot better at healing than any non-4e party and if we continue to look at how the numbers scale beyond 5th level you’ll find that the 5.5e party can soon crank out healings the like of which D&D has never seen before.
And this is a bad thing.
Out of the Newbie Trap and Into the Fire
I’ve seen some people complaining that the buffs to Cure Wounds in 5.5e makes fights too easy, but I don’t think that’s the real problem. In every edition except 4e, healing in combat was generally a sucker’s bet as you’d save more HPs by using your spell slots to kill the enemies faster. Again and again in non-4e D&D I’ve seen newbie clerics spend a lot of time healing in combat and then end up feeling bored and/or weak. Giving in-combat healing a nice fat buff to make it not be a newbie trap anymore is just good design.
The problem with the 5.5e power creep to healing is the enormous amount of downtime healing that 5.5e parties can now crank out. With 5.5e clerics now incentivized to spend more spell slots on Cure Wounds, they start off strong and then shoot through the freaking moon at higher tiers of play, increasing much faster than total party HPs. This means that if you want to attrition down a D&D party across a serious of fights, it’ll take longer than in 5e. For me, the single biggest problem I had with 5e was that attrition took too damn long and now it’s significantly worse.
So Who’s Going to Play the Cleric This Time?
One problem that a lot of people had with 3.*e was that parties NEEDED magical healing which meant that if someone wasn’t cranking out fistfuls CLW wands (which was really bad for the game as it basically took HP attrition off the table completely) you NEEDED a cleric or another similar dedicated healer. This lead to people feeling pressured into playing a class they wouldn’t have chosen otherwise and WotC raining down buffs on divine classes to make them more attractive (the infamous CoDzilla).
MEDIC!
This also meant that if your PC was a cleric in 3.*e you’d be under a good deal of pressure to spend a chunk of your spell slots on healing, even if that wasn’t what you really wanted for your character. This results in your having less chances to spend your slots on more fun spells like my beloved Command. 4e deep-sixed this dynamic for the most part and in 5e healing spells are more an emergency back-up than the cleric’s main job. But 5.5e’s buff to Cure Wounds is going to put more pressure on clerics to focus on healing, especially if monster damage gets cranked up to compensate for the overall powercreep we’re seeing in 5.5e.
There Are No Clerics on the Oregon Trail
My preferred play-style of D&D is exploration-based survival gaming. It’s all about the players slowly getting deeper and deeper into a dangerous area while their resources are slowly drained by environmental obstacles and small skirmishes until finally things start to get desperate and the party has to retreat to safety. The genius (to me) of this approach is that none of the individual encounters have to be all that life-threatening for the PCs to feel like they’re in constant danger. Even a minor skirmish with some goblins that costs the party 10 HPs can get their hearts pounding as those 10 HPs are not coming back and every HP lost brings the party that much closer to death.
You can still approach things in this way in 5e but it’s harder. Due to what big bags of HPs a lot of 5e monsters are, it’s a lot harder to run a serious of short skirmishes which was my bread and butter with TSR-D&D and 5e players have so many more resources than TSR-D&D PCs that the whole process of grinding them down until they’re out of spells and HPs and running in panic out of the dungeon just takes a lot longer and can dampen the fun of the kind of campaign I like best.
5.5e’s buff to healing just makes this worse. Downtime healing is now so generous that it’ll take even longer to grind down a party. Small skirmishes to with a few goblins that costs the party a few HPs stop being anything but a boring timewaster when the party can crank out big fat gobs of healing. Of course you can crank up the difficulty by adding nastier monsters in 5.5e, but that runs the risk of making combat take longer (already a big problem for me in 5e) and if you start upping the damage monsters are doing to compensate for how much clerics can heal now then you can end up screwing over parties that don’t have a cleric, which brings us back to the “So Who’s Going to Play a Cleric This Time?” problem.
The Illusion of Difficulty
As I said upthread, if the PCs suck at healing then even a five minute skirmish can be exciting as it costs previous HPs that are not coming back. But if the party has big gobs of healing than short easy fights become boring and pointless. That means that the more downtime healing you give PCs the more each fight has to MATTER and be difficult in and of itself (rather than mattering because it’s a step on the short road to being tapped out). One problem with this is that fights that matter generally take a long time and I prefer short fights. And also if you make EVERY fight be a real challenge to the PCs then you have a few choices:
A. Run fewer fights. A higher percentage of fights can be epic show-downs if there aren’t many fights. The problem with this is that 5.*e’s wheels fall off if there are few fights per adventuring day. Having the PCs nova most every fight causes a lot of issues and explodes any pretense of balance.
B. Kill a lot of PCs. If death is at least potentially on the line in most every fight then you’re going to have a lot of dead PCs. Most DMs don’t want that. I certainly don’t.
C. Fake the difficulty. A fight can look evenly matched in a lot of ways but if one side is MUCH better than healing than the other (especially healing KOed people) then the decision is never going to be in much doubt. Alternatively the DM can just fudge.
I don’t think any of these are good solutions but this seems like the corner that 5.5e is backing DMs into. Luckily there’s a pretty simple solution.
Bring Back Healing Surges
So how to make healing useful in combat without making attrition take all day? Simple: take a page from 4e and have basically all healing cost Hit Dice. That way you can have a cleric give out big stonking heals during a fight without letting the well of healing that a party can draw on across an adventuring day get too deep. Healing Surges got a bad rap because there were just too many of them, but the basic idea of putting a hard cap on healing was pure genius and this is coming from someone who REALLY didn’t like 4e as an edition of D&D.
Having Cure Wounds heal a big bucket of HPs is still workable if is eats Hit Dice as PCs will soon run out of Hit Dice if the Cleric is healing left and right, but it still lets the Cleric feel like a Big Damn Hero for healing a big stack of HP with one action while not locking them into being a walking Band-Aid.
There are a couple different ways to implement this and most any of them would fix the basic issue as long as they fix the basic problem of reigning in the excessive healing powercreep that 5.5e has.
I just went and crunched some numbers so see how healing stacks up across the different editions. For all of the different editions I’m assuming 4 PCs of the classic four classes (fighting-man/fighter, cleric, thief/rogue, and magic-user/wizard). To try to make my comparisons at fair as possible, I’ve assumed that all Clerics have 16 Wisdom and spend all available spell slots on healing and that all PCs have 14 Constitution. In order to not have this take all day I’ve only crunched the numbers out to 5th level as that was enough to see some really stark differences emerge. In all cases the clerics DO NOT take healing/life domains and I’m assuming two short rests for 5.*e.
Some differences between editions are not being captured by this analysis, such as lot of old school characters having lower stats and how easy it was to make CLW wands in 3.*e but I think I’m getting the big picture here.
If you want to see my work, look down to the first reply to this thread as I didn’t want to gum up this post with a wall of numbers.
Here’s what I got for how much healing the party can pump out in one adventuring day as a percentage of total HPs across the first five levels:
0e
1st 0%
2nd 17.65%
3rd 23.38%
4th 18%
5th 14.4%
1e/2e (I couldn’t find any differences between the two)
1st 83.38%
2nd 56.25%
3rd 37.5%
4th 35.16%
5th 28.13%
3.0e/3.5e (I couldn’t find any differences between the two)
1st 38.89%
2nd 39.17%
3rd 60.12%
4th 72.22%
5th 92.42%
4e
Very approximately 250% across the board. See below for a more in-depth discussion of 4e healing and why it is hard to make apples to apples comparison of 4e healing vs. healing in other editions.
5e
1st 151%
2nd 149.97%
3rd 171.20%
4th 168.22%
5th 182.67%
5.5e
1st 190%
2nd 178.79%
3rd 219.57%
4th 214.41%
5th 247.20%
The Power Creep
We can see some pretty big differences in healing capacity across editions. 0e clerics just aren’t capable of pumping out much healing. Our 1/2e cleric did a lot better due to getting bonus spells for high Wisdom but then falls off badly as there are no 2nd and 3rd level healing spells in core 1e/2e. Meanwhile 3.*e clerics start off a bit behind due to 1st level PCs having max HPs and the changes to bonus spells for high Wisdom but then go quadratic. By 5th level 3.*e clerics are already capable of pumping out vast amounts of healing and they’re just starting to go quadratic at that point and the ratio of party HPs vs. clerical healing just gets absolutely nuts at higher levels in 3.*ed. This doesn’t come as a big surprise as everything goes nuts at higher levels in 3.*e.
Then we come to 4e, 4e is really hard to compare to other editions due to how Healing Surges work. The main upshot here is that 4e PCs don’t need a cleric in the same way that 3.*e PCs are absolutely and completely dependent on some form of magical healing. 4e Clerics can squeeze a bit more healing out of Healing Surges and do some very minor healing that doesn’t cost healing surges, but in 4e healing is pretty closely linked to Healing Surges that scale VERY tightly with HP. The other thing to note about 4e is just how MUCH the party can now heal, while the 3.*e cleric eventually goes quadratic enough to equal the entire output of a 4e party’s Healing Surges this takes a while and requires the cleric to sacrifice all of their non-Domain spells, while a 4e party can spend their Healing Surges with far FAR less in the way of opportunity costs.
Then, like with a lot of things, 5e is a messy compromise. You have a heavily nerfed version of Healing Surges in Hit Dice that are in addition to not instead of magical healing, but 5e healing spell scaling isn’t as nuts as in 3.*e which makes downtime magical healing very good to have but not utterly essential in the way it is in 3.*e. Also, it’s interesting to note that if you get two short rests, Second Wind can account for an absolutely massive amount of healing at level 1, although it does fall off to relative irrelevance later on. Still, while not being as potent as 4e healing, 5e healing is comfortably more generous than lower level 3.*e healing and you can do more of it before you start blowing your spell slots. However, a lot of 5e healing is gated behind Short Rests in a way that older edition healing isn’t.
5.5e provides a mild buff to Second Wind (while giving it other uses that make it unlikely to be used much for healing beyond the first few levels) and a big buff to Cure Wounds (you literally roll twice as many dice now). Due to this buff, a 5.5e party is quite a lot better at healing than any non-4e party and if we continue to look at how the numbers scale beyond 5th level you’ll find that the 5.5e party can soon crank out healings the like of which D&D has never seen before.
And this is a bad thing.
Out of the Newbie Trap and Into the Fire
I’ve seen some people complaining that the buffs to Cure Wounds in 5.5e makes fights too easy, but I don’t think that’s the real problem. In every edition except 4e, healing in combat was generally a sucker’s bet as you’d save more HPs by using your spell slots to kill the enemies faster. Again and again in non-4e D&D I’ve seen newbie clerics spend a lot of time healing in combat and then end up feeling bored and/or weak. Giving in-combat healing a nice fat buff to make it not be a newbie trap anymore is just good design.
The problem with the 5.5e power creep to healing is the enormous amount of downtime healing that 5.5e parties can now crank out. With 5.5e clerics now incentivized to spend more spell slots on Cure Wounds, they start off strong and then shoot through the freaking moon at higher tiers of play, increasing much faster than total party HPs. This means that if you want to attrition down a D&D party across a serious of fights, it’ll take longer than in 5e. For me, the single biggest problem I had with 5e was that attrition took too damn long and now it’s significantly worse.
So Who’s Going to Play the Cleric This Time?
One problem that a lot of people had with 3.*e was that parties NEEDED magical healing which meant that if someone wasn’t cranking out fistfuls CLW wands (which was really bad for the game as it basically took HP attrition off the table completely) you NEEDED a cleric or another similar dedicated healer. This lead to people feeling pressured into playing a class they wouldn’t have chosen otherwise and WotC raining down buffs on divine classes to make them more attractive (the infamous CoDzilla).
MEDIC!
This also meant that if your PC was a cleric in 3.*e you’d be under a good deal of pressure to spend a chunk of your spell slots on healing, even if that wasn’t what you really wanted for your character. This results in your having less chances to spend your slots on more fun spells like my beloved Command. 4e deep-sixed this dynamic for the most part and in 5e healing spells are more an emergency back-up than the cleric’s main job. But 5.5e’s buff to Cure Wounds is going to put more pressure on clerics to focus on healing, especially if monster damage gets cranked up to compensate for the overall powercreep we’re seeing in 5.5e.
There Are No Clerics on the Oregon Trail
My preferred play-style of D&D is exploration-based survival gaming. It’s all about the players slowly getting deeper and deeper into a dangerous area while their resources are slowly drained by environmental obstacles and small skirmishes until finally things start to get desperate and the party has to retreat to safety. The genius (to me) of this approach is that none of the individual encounters have to be all that life-threatening for the PCs to feel like they’re in constant danger. Even a minor skirmish with some goblins that costs the party 10 HPs can get their hearts pounding as those 10 HPs are not coming back and every HP lost brings the party that much closer to death.
You can still approach things in this way in 5e but it’s harder. Due to what big bags of HPs a lot of 5e monsters are, it’s a lot harder to run a serious of short skirmishes which was my bread and butter with TSR-D&D and 5e players have so many more resources than TSR-D&D PCs that the whole process of grinding them down until they’re out of spells and HPs and running in panic out of the dungeon just takes a lot longer and can dampen the fun of the kind of campaign I like best.
5.5e’s buff to healing just makes this worse. Downtime healing is now so generous that it’ll take even longer to grind down a party. Small skirmishes to with a few goblins that costs the party a few HPs stop being anything but a boring timewaster when the party can crank out big fat gobs of healing. Of course you can crank up the difficulty by adding nastier monsters in 5.5e, but that runs the risk of making combat take longer (already a big problem for me in 5e) and if you start upping the damage monsters are doing to compensate for how much clerics can heal now then you can end up screwing over parties that don’t have a cleric, which brings us back to the “So Who’s Going to Play a Cleric This Time?” problem.
The Illusion of Difficulty
As I said upthread, if the PCs suck at healing then even a five minute skirmish can be exciting as it costs previous HPs that are not coming back. But if the party has big gobs of healing than short easy fights become boring and pointless. That means that the more downtime healing you give PCs the more each fight has to MATTER and be difficult in and of itself (rather than mattering because it’s a step on the short road to being tapped out). One problem with this is that fights that matter generally take a long time and I prefer short fights. And also if you make EVERY fight be a real challenge to the PCs then you have a few choices:
A. Run fewer fights. A higher percentage of fights can be epic show-downs if there aren’t many fights. The problem with this is that 5.*e’s wheels fall off if there are few fights per adventuring day. Having the PCs nova most every fight causes a lot of issues and explodes any pretense of balance.
B. Kill a lot of PCs. If death is at least potentially on the line in most every fight then you’re going to have a lot of dead PCs. Most DMs don’t want that. I certainly don’t.
C. Fake the difficulty. A fight can look evenly matched in a lot of ways but if one side is MUCH better than healing than the other (especially healing KOed people) then the decision is never going to be in much doubt. Alternatively the DM can just fudge.
I don’t think any of these are good solutions but this seems like the corner that 5.5e is backing DMs into. Luckily there’s a pretty simple solution.
Bring Back Healing Surges
So how to make healing useful in combat without making attrition take all day? Simple: take a page from 4e and have basically all healing cost Hit Dice. That way you can have a cleric give out big stonking heals during a fight without letting the well of healing that a party can draw on across an adventuring day get too deep. Healing Surges got a bad rap because there were just too many of them, but the basic idea of putting a hard cap on healing was pure genius and this is coming from someone who REALLY didn’t like 4e as an edition of D&D.
Having Cure Wounds heal a big bucket of HPs is still workable if is eats Hit Dice as PCs will soon run out of Hit Dice if the Cleric is healing left and right, but it still lets the Cleric feel like a Big Damn Hero for healing a big stack of HP with one action while not locking them into being a walking Band-Aid.
There are a couple different ways to implement this and most any of them would fix the basic issue as long as they fix the basic problem of reigning in the excessive healing powercreep that 5.5e has.
