Touch of Healing [Reserve] feat from Complete Champion Excerpt

[Rystil Arden]

Ah, but you don't have to succumb to the "just one more room" and tactically it didn't make much sense. Unless there was a time constraint ("we got to defeat the villain before he completes the ritual"), few parties IME would be willing to go adventuring at less than 50% of resources as this was asking for a TPK. Even in the above scenario, this feat doesn't get rid of that type of adventure.

Basic tactic I've seen is: at low levels, wizard casts rope trick and people rest until replenished and at high levels it was MMM time.

What this feat seems to do (assuming we are right and we don't have anymore restrictions) is actually encourage longer forays into the dungeon, however if you're a cleric/druid you still going to have to worry about limited resources since in combat, reserve healing doesn't pack enough of a punch meaning you're still going to need to have to worry about how many casting slots you have left.

What about--"If we don't kill them all this time while they are confused by the blitzkrieg attack tactics, next time they'll have recovered and regrouped, and they'll have a plan to kick our asses as a group" ? Our party's main strategy in a dungeon that is run by allied groups of enemies (as opposed to some random dungeon full of oozes and solitary critters, I guess) is to rush in and kill them all before they are even sure we're there.

 

[IanB]

I'm running it right now. I'm not sure how far in you are, so I will avoid spoilers, but suffice to say there are some significantly challenging encounters strung together in close proximity in certain parts of the AP, such that I know that my group will not currently be able to handle them in one go. There are also some difficult set piece encounters where OOC healing is irrelevant, and even some time sensitive stuff - sometimes you just can't take 20 rounds to heal everyone up.

Out of curiosity, how many characters in the group in your game?

 

[Rystil Arden]

I'm running it right now. I'm not sure how far in you are, so I will avoid spoilers, but suffice to say there are some significantly challenging encounters strung together in close proximity in certain parts of the AP, such that I know that my group will not currently be able to handle them in one go. There are also some difficult set piece encounters where OOC healing is irrelevant, and even some time sensitive stuff - sometimes you just can't take 20 rounds to heal everyone up.

Out of curiosity, how many characters in the group in your game?

We only did the first three adventures. We have me, the cleric, the ranger, the wizard, and the mountebank. So 5--that's less than the playtest group for Shackled City, I believe.

 

[IanB]

We have a mountebank too! Man, that class is weak.

We've got 6, so that's not the difference. I suspect my group must be significantly less optimized than yours. So far we've had one death per adventure (skipped Drakthar's Way, and are about halfway through Zenith Trajectory.) In the first adventure, I had to nerf an encounter on the fly to avoid a TPK (the hammerer/illusionary wall room - it seemed reasonable the collaborator prisoner guy would have known about what the guards did to get through there.)

 

[Rystil Arden]

We have a mountebank too! Man, that class is weak.

We've got 6, so that's not the difference. I suspect my group must be significantly less optimized than yours. So far we've had one death per adventure (skipped Drakthar's Way, and are about halfway through Zenith Trajectory.) In the first adventure, I had to nerf an encounter on the fly to avoid a TPK (the hammerer/illusionary wall room - it seemed reasonable the collaborator prisoner guy would have known about what the guards did to get through there.)

We have had no deaths so far, and I can assure you that we aren't optimised (the Cleric has Negotiator and Skill Focus (Diplomacy) for pete's sake And we have a Mountebank. Our main tank is a Ranger and our mage is a one-trick-pony Illusionist). What we have going for us is that my character has high Int and my strategy is fairly good when I play up the Int--that can be a big difference (For instance, I hear the Worldwide D&D Gameday was often a TPK and almost-always had several deaths, but I led the group to a victory with no deaths, even the god-awful Paladin with the 10 Cha).

For Life's Bazaar, we didn't go the way with the hammerer/illusionary wall, I think--wait, is the Hammerer like the Pulveriser construct? My character thinks those are cute--our gnome commanded them to stop and then my Archivist brought them up to fix them. The way we went was from the room with the haunted statue where you use Sovereign Glue up to the barracks of the hobbos and then sideways into the room with the BBEG and his pet.

 

[IanB]

We have had no deaths so far, and I can assure you that we aren't optimised (the Cleric has Negotiator and Skill Focus (Diplomacy) for pete's sake And we have a Mountebank. Our main tank is a Ranger and our mage is a one-trick-pony Illusionist). What we have going for us is that my character has high Int and my strategy is fairly good when I play up the Int--that can be a big difference (For instance, I hear the Worldwide D&D Gameday was often a TPK and almost-always had several deaths, but I led the group to a victory with no deaths, even the god-awful Paladin with the 10 Cha).

For Life's Bazaar, we didn't go the way with the hammerer/illusionary wall, I think--wait, is the Hammerer like the Pulveriser construct? My character thinks those are cute--our gnome commanded them to stop and then my Archivist brought them up to fix them. The way we went was from the room with the haunted statue where you use Sovereign Glue up to the barracks of the hobbos and then sideways into the room with the BBEG and his pet.

In our case, the group decided to head into the prison (which is what that hammerer room is guarding) to look for more prisoners after going through the Big Final Fight, losing the archivist (the only healer at the time) and suffering heavy wounds on most everyone else. The hammerer, with its 2d8+10 damage attack, would have brutalized them even with its 50% instability.

Current composition is knight, wizard, mountebank/fighter, cleric, bard, scout/ranger. I'm hopeful they'll handle the next bit a little more easily than the things so far, but I have a feeling they're really about to go into the grinder.

The sonic cone pulveriser almost did them in as well (it had a lucky string of activations.)

 

[Rystil Arden]

In our case, the group decided to head into the prison (which is what that hammerer room is guarding) to look for more prisoners after going through the Big Final Fight, losing the archivist (the only healer at the time) and suffering heavy wounds on most everyone else. The hammerer, with its 2d8+10 damage attack, would have brutalized them even with its 50% instability.

Current composition is knight, wizard, mountebank/fighter, cleric, bard, scout/ranger. I'm hopeful they'll handle the next bit a little more easily than the things so far, but I have a feeling they're really about to go into the grinder.

The sonic cone pulveriser almost did them in as well (it had a lucky string of activations.)

Oh, we did do that one. The way we didn't go was the heavily trapped hallway--the GM mentioned that we were lucky not to go that way.

That party sounds better optimised than ours, and with more characters (though if we pretend that the Bard or Knight is gone and the other is replaced by the Archivist you mentioned died, it is eerily similar to ours--it would nearly identical class set-up). My Archivist took the Draconic Archivist feat, I thought just for fun and with little use, but it turned out there were more constructs than I expected. Also, we were very gentle with the constructs--my Archivist would not have us hurting the poor things, so we had our Gnome command them to stop. The only encounter we actually had to deal with after killing the BBEG was the Mimic, but our Ranger keeps the heads of the BBEGs we kill, so the clear death of its employer combined with threats and Intimidate scared the Mimic into submission.

So was it the first three adventures where the PCs would have needed this infinite healing to do the dungeons in one sitting, or is this just Zenith Trajectory (we haven't started that one, so maybe that one is different from the others).

 

[IanB]

Oh, we did do that one. The way we didn't go was the heavily trapped hallway--the GM mentioned that we were lucky not to go that way.

That party sounds better optimised than ours, and with more characters (though if we pretend that the Bard or Knight is gone and the other is replaced by the Archivist you mentioned died, it is eerily similar to ours--it would nearly identical class set-up). My Archivist took the Draconic Archivist feat, I thought just for fun and with little use, but it turned out there were more constructs than I expected. Also, we were very gentle with the constructs--my Archivist would not have us hurting the poor things, so we had our Gnome command them to stop. The only encounter we actually had to deal with after killing the BBEG was the Mimic, but our Ranger keeps the heads of the BBEGs we kill, so the clear death of its employer combined with threats and Intimidate scared the Mimic into submission.

So was it the first three adventures where the PCs would have needed this infinite healing to do the dungeons in one sitting, or is this just Zenith Trajectory (we haven't started that one, so maybe that one is different from the others).

They couldn't have had it in the first adventure anyway, thinking about it - 3rd level character minimum!

It would have helped a lot in the kopru ruins in the 2nd half of Flood Season - they were down a player that day and ended up losing the fighter to the ogre zombies and having to rest a day (fighter came back as a wizard; the knight's player was a barbarian at the time, who later died to a potential-TPK encounter in Z.T.)

As it was they hit the later encounters at full strength anyway, so if anything the reserve feat might have made them attempt those encounters with *fewer* in-combat resources to spend, not more.

The real test will be the next session. The cleric won't be able to get the feat until he can retrain, and that won't be until after what I think may be a mighty bloodletting.

 

[Rystil Arden]

They couldn't have had it in the first adventure anyway, thinking about it - 3rd level character minimum!

It would have helped a lot in the kopru ruins in the 2nd half of Flood Season - they were down a player that day and ended up losing the fighter to the ogre zombies and having to rest a day (fighter came back as a wizard; the knight's player was a barbarian at the time, who later died to a potential-TPK encounter in Z.T.)

As it was they hit the later encounters at full strength anyway, so if anything the reserve feat might have made them attempt those encounters with *fewer* in-combat resources to spend, not more.

The real test will be the next session. The cleric won't be able to get the feat until he can retrain, and that won't be until after what I think may be a mighty bloodletting.

The ogre zombies? Wow, for us those were a completely laughable pushover. That darned T-Rex was much more troublesome. If not for quick-thinking and an incredibly inefficient kiting, it could have gone much worse. Our biggest trouble came in two fights--Triel (almost killed a PC until quick thinking of an illusion of the trapdoor opening, our guy leaving, and the door closing again tricked Triel into opening the door again so our guy could get out, then almost killed the Cleric with a Smite Power Attack) and the Halfling dude (he was combined with so many encounters that there were over 20 things in the room where we fought him--we would have certainly failed if my Enlarged Archivist hadn't ridden through the room, overrunning everything until she reached the Ranger to heal him with her best shot so he could survive long enough to leap up and grapple the Wizard before the Wizard could Spider Climb out of reach and do more harm than his icky lead-in Lightning Bolt).

 

[IanB]

Yeah, just goes to show you never know what the problem encounter is going to be. I never thought there'd be any problems with the ogre zombies either, but the fighter went down fast, while the t-rex earlier was relatively easy.