Touch of Healing [Reserve] feat from Complete Champion Excerpt

[Pyrex]

What it does is make sure the entire party is fully healed between battles with zero expenditure of consumable resources.

 

[pawsplay]

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.

My suspension of disbelief is somewhere in a corner, crying.

 

[Deset Gled]

I'm starting to wonder if WotC will eventually just edit the cleric out of the core books.

The original concept of cleric was a healer. But WotC realized that not many people want to be healers, so they decided to give the cleric a notable power boost above other classes to make it attractive. Medium BAB, full casting, two good saves, etc. Then, with general power creep going on in the Complete Divine and Spell Compendium, clerics got buffed up even more. Now, it's to the point that cleric spells and rounds are so valuable that clerics never want to waste them on something as trivial as healing, so we now have the infinite healing items in the MIC (and Eberron, IIRC), and apparently an infinite healing feat as well.

With all of these infinite healing methods, it seems that constant healing is pretty much expected to be the norm, now. To cut down on the paperwork, lets just rule that all characters are healed back up to full HP at the end of an encounter. Then we can just rename the Cleric the Divine Powergamer and be done with all of this healing nonsense altogether.

/sarcasm

 

[pawsplay]

In the future, everyone will be a cleric for fifteen minutes.

 

[frankthedm]

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

Because it cuts to the heart of the issue of how much should out of combat healings cost? IanB, blargney the second, Wish, Erywin and jcfiala all sound like they would give the feat a go right now. Pawsplay saying "Not broken, but distasteful." Hell even I am thinking If CLW wands are always availave for sale, the feat might as well be allowed since 750 gets to be real cheap real fast in D&D economics.

 

[Technik4]

Sounds balanced in combat, unbalanced (and goodbye fantasy belief suspension) out of combat. It's probably just a patch for what will eventually be:

Lay on Hands at will for low points of healing from a cleric

 

[Erywin]

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 would have to disagree with you on this, even if the cleric in the gestalt game I run had this feat he would still be stretched in combat. In combat this feat won't help much against hard hitting foes, it will help a little but then the cleric/fighter is better off just beating the foe into submission before it manages to do too much damage. Where this feat shines is out of combat. But for a major battle where the cleric has to use up most if not all of his healing spells to keep the party alive, he is very likely to be out of spells to fuel this feat Just my 2cp.

Cheers,
E

 

[James McMurray]

The only thing I mind about the feat is how it devalues other classes, especially the Dragon Shaman. The fast healing aura and healing touch of the DS was one of its biggest selling points, and this feat takes their place in between most fights.

 

[Alzrius]

I think it's too early to say anything about this. The descriptive text in a feat table is never as much as in the full text of the feat itself. I'll reserve judgment on this reserve feat.

 

[Twowolves]

What it does is make sure the entire party is fully healed between battles with zero expenditure of consumable resources.

Bingo.

If this is the direction 4th ed is heading, I don't want to go. Farewell lifetime hobby, it was nice knowing ya. Cancel Dragon, cancel Dungeon, then finish off the mortally wounded beast with some Reserve feats.

R.I.P.