Touch of Healing [Reserve] feat from Complete Champion Excerpt

[Twowolves]

"Unless he has a higher fire spell (which is not a certainty"

Huh? The mage that took the Reserve Feat which grants him unlimited fireballs and you think somehow he'll forget to prepare that? I mean, maybe if they are battling inside a volcano or on the Elemental Plane of Fire, but short of that, expect the characters to use their feats.

And some people do have a problem with the concept of a Wizard able to chuck 5d6 'firebursts' all day long (until he actually has to use his Wall of Fire, or whatever higher level fire spell he memorized).

Or a Heightened Burning Hands. Or a Fire Substituted Cone of Cold. Or is a sorcerer and has a 5th level fire spell known and slots remaining.

These reserve feats may do the same thing as cheap wands, but even cheap wands cost something. Every gold piece spent on a wand or scroll is a gold piece that isn't going into some other magic item. And never mind the whole "pop off to the corner Wizards 'R' Us store for some magic toys" standard that 3rd ed has become.

Seriously, why have gold pieces at all, or even hit points? If resource management is such a drag and unfun, why not get rid of all of it? No more gold, no more arrows, no more hit points, it's just too much to keep up with after all...

 

[blargney the second]

And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

 

[Nyeshet]

I've been expecting something like this . . .

The design philosophy at WotC has changed over the last few years. It used to be that the group adventured from X number of encounters to X number of encounters. Casters had to pace themselves to make it through X number of encounters before having a chance to re-charge.

Now, however, the philosophy is to balance against one encounter. Recharging totally between encounters seems almost expected. In the midst of a combat, healing a few points is useful, but it is not game breaking, as a typical attack will often take off more than is healed. It basically allows the healed character another round or two before they are back where they were before, at the cost of the cleric (or caster, as bards, druids, etc can probably also use this) not attacking, etc for that one round. Between encounters, this more or less means that the entire party can be healed up before the next encounter. With other reserve feats allowing near infinite minor to moderate magic and (semi) new classes like the warlock having infinite casting, this means that the party is fully re-charged between every encounter - instead of between every few encounters.

Its part of a paradigm shift.

I'm most surprised, I think, not by the reserve feat that allows for infinite (albeit in small increments) healing, but instead by the surprise some people are having over this.

As I said above, I've been expecting something like this . . .

 

[Egres]

PCs in other games start any battles with less than full hp?

Yes, of course.

1) They often don't have enough time to restore their resources.

2) They often don't have enough resources.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Unfortunately, this is a feat without any real "they can do it too" mitigating power. Bad guys typically live four one to ten rounds after opening hostilities with the PCs. On the few occasions where bad guys do escape, they typically use some of the PCs treasure (potions, scrolls, etc) before joining the next group of monsters. Reserve healing would only mean that the BBEG can heal all of his minions who live through combats without expending resources (so the bad guys still have their potions when the PCs encounter them again--and the PCs then loot said potions from the bad guys' corpses).

In short, unless you are playing a VERY unusual game where the bad guys' expendable healing resources are insufficient to allow the few who escape to recover fully AND the bad guys frequently are able to withdraw and heal up, the PCs will experience more pain from a BBEG taking Weapon Focus or Spell Focus than Healing Reserve.

For PCs, on the other hand, it's another story entirely. Since the PCs' normal mode is to be injured but not defeated, the near elimination of resource cost for out of combat healing is a dramatic power increase for them. If your parties devote resources to be able to push on when they need to, the feat could be approximately priced by estimating the value in wands of cure light wounds (or lesser vigor) that would otherwise be expended. It's possible that some parties at least would find it a relatively mild savings (I think my Living Greyhawk characters have averaged about two wands of cure light wounds between levels one and 15 so for a party that was like them, it would work out to only about 6000-9000 gp of savings for the feat; that said, I think my Living Greyhawk characters' usage is abnormally low and is probably influenced by the fact that my highest level character was a defensively oriented fighter/mage, my next highest level character is a cleric (who figured on using his spells instead of wands) and my next highest level character also uses saving throws, armor class, and a deceptively harmless appearance as defenses rather than hit points). It is also possible that parties who only rarely face endurance tests where they have multiple battles without a chance to recover their spells would not find it a useful feat at all. On the other hand, parties of damage trading barbarians will find the feat extraordinarily powerful. Even so, I think the wand of cure light wounds analysis misses some of the power of the feat. My characters have frequently spent spells on healing when they thought they could afford to do so in order to avoid expending wand charges. Sometimes my characters were wrong in their estimations of when they could afford to do so. This feat would remove the guesswork from that equation as well as the opportunity cost or the worry that expendible resources could give out. That in itself is a dramatic change in the game since there would be much less worry about getting in over our heads while running on reserves.

I know what feat my BBEG (Cleric) will take next! So, one mitigating factor will be that the NPCs will have access to this feat as well.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

The big difference between what the reserve healing reportedly enables characters to do and the existing reserve feats is that the existing reserve feats are mostly useful during combat. Unlimited 5d6 firebursts are combat actions and, as such are less effective than 10d6 fireballs or 10d6 firebrands. Sure, you can do them as often as you want, but the cost is being less effective per action with the limited number of actions allotted to the character during combat. Reserve healing, on the other hand, fills a non-combat function and thus most likely does not have the same balance by available actions factor that existing reserve feats have. Outside of combat, it will only occasionally be significant whether you cast a heal spell and are ready to go right away or if you use reserve healing ten times and are ready to go one minute later.

Um, you still have resource management with the reserve feats in complete mage (I'm not going to mention the reserve healing until I see it in print) since they only work as long as you don't use a spell.

What the reserve feats do is increase the effectiveness of arcane casters at low levels but pretty much are non-even worthy mentioning at mid levels or higher.

Ex: a 5th level mage has the fiery burst reserve feat. Means he can throw around 3d6 fireballs (assuming he has fireball prepared/known) all day long and when compared to his single 5d6 fireball, that's pretty impressive.

Change it to a 10th level mage and unless he has a higher fire spell (which is not a certainity), he's still stuck at the 3d6 point whereas his regular fireball has now jumped up to 10d6. Even if he did have a 5th level fire spell, he's only doing 5d6.

For a 10th level party, even the mooks/grunts are going to laugh off a 5d6 fireburst since they're expected to be able to handle the 10th level mage using his 3rd level spells. In fact, this is equivalent to what a first level spell can do thanks to the cap.

 

[yipwyg42]

I don't really have that much of a problem with this feat.

My players spend a lot of time buffing themselves up before battles. How I look at it is if the party wants the cleric to spend minutes healing everyone up to full hit points, while their buff spells are wearing down that is fine with me.

I would have a bigger problem with this if buff spells went back to the hours per level they used to be.

I also see this system as being more in line with how current fantasy books are, magic users tend to cast spells as needed.

So maybe there can be some middle ground, healing spells maybe are on a per day basis, and others are on a per encounter basis.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

Reserve Feats were introduced in the complete mage. They allow a mage to use a certain kind of effect as supernatural ability without limit, as long as they have a certain kind of spell prepared (or spell slot for sorcs). The strength of the effect usually depends on the level of the spell prepared.

Now while we don't know how this reserve feats works exactly, considering there are many examples of reserve feats to fall back on right now, you can make some decent assumptions.

i see now why people were chiming in before actually read the feat as printed. It seems broken but not game breaking. Just way too strong for a feat. It would seem that power creep is very much alive. With damage spells is balanced because those are only useful in combat and actions are valuable. healing out side of combat has no down fall. I can only hope that the full feat accounts for use outside combat with a limitation of some sort.

 

[shilsen]

Seriously, why have gold pieces at all, or even hit points? If resource management is such a drag and unfun, why not get rid of all of it? No more gold, no more arrows, no more hit points, it's just too much to keep up with after all...

You do realize that there may be different levels and forms of resource management, right? It's not a case of all or nothing.

Even assuming this feat works with no restrictions (which we can't know for sure till someone gets the book and posts about it), it doesn't remove all the other forms of resource management. It doesn't change the fact that the cleric will have a limited number of spell slots, and will have to use them for in-combat healing just as much as he did before the creation of the feat, since it's almost useless in a fight. There's an element of resource management in taking the feat itself, since that means one less feat that one can spend on something else.

People play the game differently and appreciate different parts of it. I, for example, am not a big fan of resource management and generally try to minimize it in my game. Doing so doesn't affect my ability to challenge the PCs or create interesting and varied encounters (which may, sometimes, have some emphasis on resource management for a change) or run a successful long-term campaign. But if resource management is important to your game and helps it, I'm not the least bit surprised, say more power to you and heartily recommend that you don't use the feat. Is it that difficult for you to understand that some people might not play the way you do?

 

[Doug McCrae]

Instead of the "4 fights per day" paradigm, it's "one fight at a time".

Four fights per day never worked. There was no reasonable way to enforce it. PCs are almost always the attackers. They can decide when to retreat (or use Rope Trick) and rest up. Wandering monsters are boring and implausible, a relic of earlier editions.