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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 3509939" data-attributes="member: 3146">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.</blockquote>

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