Touch of Healing [Reserve] feat from Complete Champion Excerpt

[Erywin]

Yay!

QFT, bout darn time they made this available As a DM and player I would rather be beating the crap out of stuff rather than waiting around to heal up cause one or two people are out of spells. I like fairly fast paced campaign with small amounts of downtime, I honestly like where Wizards is going with the reserve type feats and the ToB classes.

Cheers,
E

 

[pawsplay]

Not broken, but distasteful. I just can't fathom the logic of a fantasy world where everyone can get healed up willy nilly by the village cleric.

 

[pawsplay]

I have just anticipated a new archetype: the grappling cleric. Since a supernatural ability requires no concentration, you can grapple an undead creature, then burn them for 9 or so points of damage a round.

 

[Mistwell]

I think it's fair to wait and see what the text of the feat actually says before jumping to conclusions.

 

[frankthedm]

Not broken, but distasteful. I just can't fathom the logic of a fantasy world where everyone can get healed up willy nilly by the village cleric.

No cleric of St. cuthbert will be healing "willy nilly".

Considering how well even normal folks heal in a D&D world, a few days and any injury is healed, it is not that major for a town priest to be able to do this. The D&D system is not designed for mass combat with troops, so while this feat efects that GREATLY, they never mattered in the first place unless artificial focus was placed on them.

 

[frankthedm]

It is handy for not blowing all of the cleric's spells on healing, which has been a goal of the game designers since the advent of 3.0.

I'd love a quote on that! The only way to keep the cleric balanced is to rip though the party's HP so fast the ceric has to spend his combat actions casting his best healing spells.

I think it's fair to wait and see what the text of the feat actually says before jumping to conclusions.

But lets say there are no caveats and the feat works like it is worded in the preview. What would your thoughts be on that ability?

 

[brehobit]

At a guess, there will be a limit. Perhaps one use per target/day or something...

Even then it changes the game. It will be interesting to see what they're thinking.

Mark

 

[Mistwell]

But lets say there are no caveats and the feat works like it is worded in the preview. What would your thoughts be on that ability?

I'd rather debate which came first, the chicken or the egg. At least that debate would have some interesting ramifications for life, the universe, and everything.

Why debate a new rule for a game that might or might not happen, and that nobody is currently using.

 

[jcfiala]

Touch of Healing
[Reserve]
Heal 3 points of damage per level of the highest-level healing spell you have available to cast

Wow.

There's *got* to be a mitigating factor in the full-text of the feat, right?

I think the mitigating factors are these:
The highest-level healing spell you can possibly have is half your casting class level
and
Using it is probably a standard action.

So, you've got access to heal - 6th level spell, so you're what, an 11th level caser at the least? So, your wizard just got knifed by the evil rogue twice for 7d6 damage plus god knows what damage for a total of about 50-70 hp of damage... and you can either use a standard action to heal him for only 18 points, or you can rip out a big healing spell to actually heal him properly.

It will be helpful healing up between battles, but that's not too bad - After the first or second encounter of the day, you can use the reserve effect to heal everyone up to full... but eventually you're going to hit that point when you're going to need to use your serious healing spells to prevent people from dying during a fight, and after that your reserve effect is going to be almost nothing.


Also, all we have here is the feat list - it's possible that there are restrictions to using it that we don't know about until the book is released, such as only being able to use the reserve effect on someone a limited number of times a day.

 

[AllisterH]

Maybe I'm missing something but this feat seems pointless....

Er, doesn't the wand of lesser vigor and the dragon shaman do the "out of combat" healing better than this feat?

The actual cure spells are still needed for in-combat use since this reserve feat seems to be useless after level 5.

So what niche is it trying to fill?