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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6658558" data-attributes="member: 82106">The theory was, most people that played a cleric (and by extension other similar leaders) would not want to do nothing but spend their entire turn every turn healing. People that played 3e clerics apparently found this rather boring. So the idea was to allow the healer to deploy 2 heals per encounter. Doing so effectively isn't always trivial BTW. For the rest of his part the healer would then be free to carry out another aspect of the character, attacking for damage, inspiring and directing others, buffing, debuffing, etc. Obviously this wasn't what you wanted. As for making a character that didn't participate in combat. Its kinda tough. There's only so much healing that you can bring to bear, and what do you have said character do otherwise to pull his weight? You can't really say &quot;oh, if you're a healer you don't count for encounter building purposes&quot; or something, that would just be weird, and create bizarre edge cases and add complexity. The inevitable conclusion was that either you'd have to make it much more critical to get lots of healing, so that said pure healer pulls his weight, or not have pure healers. Option 1 doesn't work because if you NEED that much healing, then the pure healer isn't optional anymore. If you don't, then he's at loose ends and needs some sort of damage dealing or similar shtick on top of healing.The end result of all that logic was the 4e cleric/bard/warlord/etc. It proved quite robust, but even later when they did add a true healer it proved quite problematic because sure enough Pacifist Cleric was overkill. It really was too much healing and too little oomph. They enjoyed a brief surge of popularity but players quickly found they weren't all that interesting and it was pretty hard to justify a non-combatant running around with a bunch of murder-hobos.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6658558, member: 82106"] The theory was, most people that played a cleric (and by extension other similar leaders) would not want to do nothing but spend their entire turn every turn healing. People that played 3e clerics apparently found this rather boring. So the idea was to allow the healer to deploy 2 heals per encounter. Doing so effectively isn't always trivial BTW. For the rest of his part the healer would then be free to carry out another aspect of the character, attacking for damage, inspiring and directing others, buffing, debuffing, etc. Obviously this wasn't what you wanted. As for making a character that didn't participate in combat. Its kinda tough. There's only so much healing that you can bring to bear, and what do you have said character do otherwise to pull his weight? You can't really say "oh, if you're a healer you don't count for encounter building purposes" or something, that would just be weird, and create bizarre edge cases and add complexity. The inevitable conclusion was that either you'd have to make it much more critical to get lots of healing, so that said pure healer pulls his weight, or not have pure healers. Option 1 doesn't work because if you NEED that much healing, then the pure healer isn't optional anymore. If you don't, then he's at loose ends and needs some sort of damage dealing or similar shtick on top of healing. The end result of all that logic was the 4e cleric/bard/warlord/etc. It proved quite robust, but even later when they did add a true healer it proved quite problematic because sure enough Pacifist Cleric was overkill. It really was too much healing and too little oomph. They enjoyed a brief surge of popularity but players quickly found they weren't all that interesting and it was pretty hard to justify a non-combatant running around with a bunch of murder-hobos. [/QUOTE]

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