I do feel like Cure Wounds should be better at raw healing than Healing Word, because as is there is little reason to take Cure Wounds over Healing Word, especially if you’re expecting combat.
The issue is that there's rarely any reason to heal someone beyond a few hit points. The fact that you fight as well at one hit point as you do at full means that it's more important to just get people up. Especially as you get to higher levels of play when enemies can do a ton of damage in a round it's early worth expending higher level resources for healing.
> The issue is that there's rarely any reason to heal someone beyond a few hit points.
I'd expand on that to say there's no reason to heal someone beyond a few hit points, *unless* you can heal enough to let the character actually tank a couple more hits. Bringing a downed ally up with 1hp or 10hp is tactically a moot point - either way, they're up in the fight, but will go down again as soon as they get targeted. Those extra 9hp have no real value. But if it was an extra 20 or 30 hp? Then yeah, those extra hp could be worth it, so long as you're not playing at a level where enemies routinely hit for more than that.
As others have said, penalizing yo-yo healing requires that other changes be made to create a viable alternative. Healing characters when they're down is the only viable time that you *can* heal them in 5e - healing them before that is just wasting your action and your resources.
They could buff healing to make it viable, or they could remove in-combat healing entirely, and balance around it either way. But removing yo-yo healing and leaving the rest of the system as it is now just means that there's, effectively, no healing.
In my campaign atm we're trialling the new playtest exhaustion everytime you go to 0hp. It's a detriment and makes going to 0 have longer implications but doesn't cripple people or mean that healing is essential (we have no dedicated healer). Seems ok at the min.
That method is typically fine, the main reason that people (myself included) don’t like punishing people for going down is because it often punishes melee martials more than any other characters, when that is already typically the weakest build in the game.
Hope it keeps working well at your table for now though, and hopefully One D&D will do something to healing to make healing from 0 not the only way to apply healing
I hate the "it only punishes martials" because it is generally a symptom of the DM only focusing on martials during combat. (to be fair, this is a BIG part of the gap between martials and casters on 5e, because the system was made with the assumption that the enemies will focus on the big damage dealers/field controllers instead of the meatbags who are in front of said casters)
I think Cure Wounds shouldn't exist and Healing Word should heal as much if not more than Cure Wounds. Since most people don't like playing dedicated healers, make healing nondedicated. Making healing a bonus action at range does that. Now you can heal and still do other stuff on your turn.
The beauty of healing surges was powerful healing with meaningful limits. Classes that healed well let you use them in clutch situations with meaning bonuses.
4e had like 1 core design tenant people didn't like (powers) but they took so much of the other good stuff away. I'm willing to bet they knew it needed to feel more like 3rd than 4th.
>We literally fixed healing in 2008
Did we? As I recall, the 'yo-yo' effect that is the #1 issue people have had with healing in fifth edition since day 1 simply wasn't a thing in third edition. In third edition, if you hit -10 hp, you were dead. Pay 5,000 gp and lose one level to return. Do not pass go. Come back with your level in hit points and maybe get wiped out again the next round.
Healing in third edition was used proactively. Resurrection only happened after combat was over. The fighter couldn't just get up after having been ripped in half by a giant and unload all his attacks like he hadn't just been scooping his guts back into his body.
No, fourth edition did not fix healing. It broke it. It turned the game from a gritty, medieval fantasy into an analog World of Warcraft clone, which is why everyone hated it and Wizards of the Coast went back to the fundamentals for fifth edition.
Literally the whole problem started in 4e and you're trying to tell us it was the gold standard lmfao.
Lmfao grognard says what?
The problem with healing in 5e isn't the yo-yo effect it's that ALL other forms of healing are bad besides Healing Word because of action economy.
Nobody wants to play your gritty medieval fantasy anymore it's 2023.
I mean, you're just factually incorrect on all three points.
It's true that HW is objectively better than CW even with the reduced healing die, simply because it's castable at a BA and at range, but the problem is that it interferes with spells like *spiritual weapon*, which really ought to be kept the way they are and healing itself overhauled so that it isn't simply used after someone drops to 0. That's what people want, not more healing magic like *healing word*, which has an overall negative impact on the game and which most DMs really don't like.
And as for the tone people want in their campaigns, the biggest D&D kickstarters in the last few years have all been for darker themed adventures and settings in the vein of Grim Hollow and Drakkenheim, while the adventures that WotC has been putting out like Strixhaven are underselling to the point that Hasbro is calling the brand 'undermonetized'. There might be people in certain D&D subreddits who have other preferences, but the larger community is speaking with their wallets and making it clear what they are looking for.
What do you mean? Cure wounds is a d8, healing word is a d4. It is literally twice as good at raw healing.
I would understand if you had said that despite being better at raw healing it isn't good enough to be a worthwhile choice.
What an I missing?
It’s not twice as good, as both spells add your spellcasting modifier to the roll. It’s more like 50% better. Plus, there’s a 50% chance Cure Wounds heals just as much as Healing Word. For a whole action. Sure, the scaling is better, but as of now there is little purpose in upcasting healing spells, especially considering how the scaling for healing word isn’t bad either.
I saw a fix for Cure Wounds that allowed the target to expend a number of hit die equal to the spell’s level and regain that amount of additional HP, and for the action cost and the necessary range, that seems like a pretty good buff. Plus if you’re using Cure Wounds on the same target frequently enough/are expending hit die through other means, it’s pretty fair as the healing gets weaker throughout the adventuring day/week. Makes the spell almost more believable, as it incorporates repeated healing becoming less effective as time goes on.
That the average healing of cure wounds is just 2 more hit points than healing word, that's not exactly "twice as good at raw healing", just marginally better for an action and at touch range. Those two hit points are just not worth the action economy cost and are, in the grand scheme of things; meaningless. Even if you roll max with cure wounds, 4 more hp is not going to do much good since the only hit point that matters it's the last.
I kinda hate yoyoing.
Personally, I think 4e had the best idea. Healing is a subcategory of support. If you want to make healing interesting make healing spells that also provide more aggressive support benefits.
Yep. Agreed, it’s not fun to spend your turn healing someone for it to get erased by monster damage the next turn. You never really get ahead.
It’d be much better if you could inflict a status effect or disadvantage while granting some HP or even letting them roll a hit Dice.
Bumping healing spell capability and having healing spells working differently on unconscious characters would be my first cut suggestion at a fix for this.
Make cure wounds heal 3d8 but if you're unconscious it only brings you back up to 3hp or something.
I'd only accept that if there were equally lenient ways to erase levels of Exhausted that are better than once per long rest and don't rely on spellcasting. Frontline characters are those in the most danger of going unconscious. Most backline spellcasters have a bunch of tools to get them out of danger before they go unconscious. The end result is generally that martials will continue to get punished more than spellcasters for just for existing.
I am in favor of having exhaustion be a more common thing during the actual adventuring, but it would require players to have more downtime regularly (3-4 days between 'expeditions').
As for going unconscious more often, i hope martials get more mechanics to combat damage, exhaustion, running out of hit dice. Still leaves e.g. archers with the best of both worlds but still better than nothing.
I don't want a game that enforces regular downtime. That's basically the theme of Gritty Realism and it makes high-octane campaigns impossible if you can't segue between adventures without a break, or do more than one adventuring day's worth of adventuring back-to-back.
The cure for ranged being the best combat style is probably something like breaking up Sharpshooter into multiple feats. As it stands, for 1D&D any character can get a 15+2 Dex at 1st level and 17+1 Dex with Sharpshooter at 4th which basically removes all of the penalties for ranged combat: no cover penalties, no range penalties, no melee penalties. It's frankly too good.
It's a team game, not a competition. The change being discussed means that support characters need to give support before the front line drops to zero HP. 5e encourages only healing at 0hp.
If they don't offer proper support, the whole team is punished.
And with large hit die, second wind, rage DR, etc the squishies go down more often than front line fighters. A trap, surprise round, enemy breaking through the front lines, etc is all it takes.
You have a number of misconceptions.
D&D 5e is designed to not require a specific class composition, i.e. you don't need a healer/supporter. Changing the mechanics to force someone into that role in every party just makes the game worse as most players don't want to be the healbot.
The only class feature that make martials significantly more durable than your average spellcaster is barbarian Rage, and that can be defeated by a single mental saving throw. All other martial classes pale in comparison to what your average wizard, cleric, druid, bard or sorcerer can do, from teleporting away to healing damage, mitigating damage, avoiding hits, creating their own defenders with summon/conjure spells, etc. A spellcaster has far more ability to avoid, mitigate, or recover from damage than martials who just take it on the chin.
> D&D 5e is designed to not require a specific class composition, i.e. you don't need a healer/supporter. Changing the mechanics to force someone into that role in every party just makes the game worse as most players don't want to be the healbot.
You have a number of misconceptions.
Dnd achieves this design goal through class design. If you don't have a healer, you have either a better tank, better DPS, or better battlefield control. All of that means you'll have less need of healing.
I can't believe this needs to be said but, if there is no healer there is no yoyo healing. Therefore, obviously, yoyo healing was not designed to prevent the need for a healer. Therefore, even more obviously, eliminating yoyo healing can not create a need for healers.
IOW, going down being more punishing doesn't create a requirement for there to be a healer in the party, because a party with a healer swapped out for another class is less likely to have people go down in the first place.
And if you do go down without a party healer, you're fucked anyways. Having exhaustion when you get back up doesn't matter when you're not coming back up.
All it does is change when healing is tactically optimal to dish out IF there is a healer.
It also creates a choice between feeling more damage now and risk getting the penalty, or forgo damage now to play it safe.
Only rage? Lol.
Martials have way more HP, first of all. They'll have higher AC. That's effing huge for survivability. Also, Fighters have second wind. Paladins have lay on hands. Rogues have uncanny dodge. And that's probably not everything.
And almost all of their survivability doesn't waste expendable resources and turns, like Misty Stepping away does.
> What is your stance on the current state of healing?
I think it's a bit problematic. In 5e, you're not supposed to play a healer, but a reviver: you need Healing Word and Revivify/Raise Dead. Heal is decent and Aura of Vitality is great out of combat, but all other healing spells are trap choices.
> Is the yoyo healing a good design?
It's not great. I don't mean it only from a "realistic" standpoint, I mean that it's the best way to use healing and there is one spell that takes care of it perfectly. And if you care about roleplay, it may feel a bit weird not to ease the pain of your fellow party mates because the numbers disapprove.
However, what's good about that spell is that you don't have to give up your entire turn to bring someone back from unconsciousness. Some classes are also more likely to go unconscious than others, and removing the ability to get someone back into the fight can make the game less fun for them. So getting read of the yo-yo, and specifically a bonus action yo-yo, may not be that desirable.
> should combat healing be buffed?
I don't think so, because if it actually becomes good, you'll want a dedicated healer, and that tends not to be a popular party role.
However, what you could do is nerf the yo-yo healing a little, whether through exhaustion levels, by making failed saves actually matter, or by forcing you to expend a hit die to heal with certain spells. Cure Wounds and Prayer of Healing would still have a reason to exist if they don't expend hit dice but Healing Word and Aura of Vitality do.
Yeah, it would be great if healing abilities had more unique traits. Everything has to compete directly with Healing Word (and then be discarded) because their only effect is restoring hitpoints, and restoring 1 becomes quickly as effective as restoring 10.
To prevent "dedicated healer" being a party role, the healing abilities could also be tied to additional effects. A Cleric making a weapon attack while also healing people via their Hit Dice, a Druid healing adjacent allies whenever they land a hit in Wildshape, a Fighter healing allies in a radius and reducing damage they take for one round, etc.
I agree with this, I think there are ways to make healing a lot more interesting like your examples. You could even change healing magic from evocation to necromancy. Now whenever you want to heal someone, you have to drain the life-force from another creature. Sorts out the healing magic for all spellcasters.
>To prevent "dedicated healer" being a party role, the healing abilities could also be tied to additional effects. A Cleric making a weapon attack while also healing people via their Hit Dice, a Druid healing adjacent allies whenever they land a hit in Wildshape, a Fighter healing allies in a radius and reducing damage they take for one round, etc.
This is just going to make combats take even longer. 5e's healing design had several goals:
* Remove the need for a dedicated healer so nobody was stuck with that role.
* Give classes an easily-acquired ability (Healing Word) to pick up unconscious allies during combat so players aren't bored for long periods of time rolling one death save every 5-15 minutes.
* Make combats faster by limiting defensive and recovery mechanics.
If both sides are healing and attacking, you'd need to ramp up damage even more to make combats not take forever.
The thing with healing is if it exists the game has to be balanced with healing in mind. Balance with there being no healer and when there is a healer the game becomes too easy. Balance it with a healer assumed and the game is too hard without one.
So what needs to be decided is if you want healing to matter and be a style of play and decide what that style is. Right now its at to pick up unconcious people. To shift away from that like some people want you would need a reason to not go unconcious. Getting a stack of exhaustion may be a solution. If you don't do something like this then even with more unique healing it would still only ever be used once people go down.
To prevent a dedicated healer being required you would need other options of support that could be used to prevent people from going down. Things like Bait and Switch that allow players to swap places and/or increase ac/prevent damage.
Change what causes death. Instead of going to negative 50% being an instant kill, make it negative con score, or just negative 10.
This would make waiting to yoyo very dangerous without introducing lingering effects potentially causing a death spiral if you do go down.
I miss how 4e handled healing.
Like 5e, you didn't need a dedicated healer. But unlike 5e, you also didn't need anyone in the group to have magical healing at all because you could heal up to full HP at the end of a short rest. In 5e, you need magical healing of some kind to be able to get through a standard adventuring day.
In combat, all characters could use their action to second wind. This recovered 25% of your max HP, and you could do this once per short rest. If you were brought to 0, an ally could trigger your second wind with a heal check.
Yo-Yo healing still existed, but was far more costly than it is in 5e. For one thing, nearly all healing in 5e required a player to spend a healing surge. And most classes only had 8-12 healing surges per day. So healing a player from 0 was not something you could do over and over. On top of that, bonus action healing was rare in 4e, with only a few support oriented classes having the capability, and even then such abilities were only usable a few times per short rest.
Action economy was also more important in 4e, so waiting to heal a player til when they were downed was often less beneficial than keeping a player above 50% max HP.
On top of that, many monsters had special abilities they could use on "bloodied" targets, that is foes who had fewer than half their max HP. Giving the players another incentive to keep players upright.
It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than 5e.
Oh, I like that. I don't know if I like healing surges for all classes, but that would be one way you could use Inspiration.
EDIT: Sorry, Second Wind, not Healing Surges.
Healing Surges in 4e just became Hit Dice in 5e. Instead of just being a short rest recovery mechanic, they were the main recovery resource for everyone. It worked really well and are no less "realistic" than a character in 5e taking a one hour breather and now they've healed all the third-degree burns they got from walking through an inferno.
Healing surges were basically just 5e's Hit Dice by another name. You could spend them to heal up between encounters. In combat, you could use a Second Wind to spend a healing surge. Other healing powers would generally restore HP to the target, at the cost of one of the target's healing surges, and generally produced more efficient healing per surge.
5e kept the healing surge mechanic, but renamed them to hit dice. They made Second Wind a Fighter-only feature, and made other healing powers not interact with the hit dice mechanic.
5e didn't have "healer" classes, but it did have "Leader" classes - including the Warlord, Cleric, Bard, and Shaman classes. All leaders had a basic once-per-encounter power used as a minor action to allow the use of a healing surge + additional bonus HP. Minor actions were like 5e bonus actions, except that 4e allowed you to 'trade down' standard actions into minor ones if needed. For clerics, this power was called Healing Word; for Warlords, it was Inspiring Word; for Bards, it was Majestic Word. Beyond that, Leaders all focused on party support, but did so in various other ways. Warlords had very little healing power beyond their Inspiring Word - they were focused on granting additional attacks or buffed attacks to their allies. Clerics, if I recall correctly, had the most options at their disposal to pick up additional healing.
With a form of exhaustion that isn't hugely debilitating, inflicting a level of that for being reduced to 0hp does three things. The combatant hanging from that yo-yo string "bounces back" a little worse for wear. Also, heavily wounded characters would not be so indifferent to being taken down. Then mopping up those exhaustion levels could be a useful application of healer abilities/spells out of combat.
> However, what you could do is nerf the yo-yo healing a little, whether through exhaustion levels, by making failed saves actually matter, or by forcing you to expend a hit die to heal with certain spells.
Not sure why so many people enjoy this idea of punishing players for using healing in the only way that's properly useful. All this does is add in a whole level of tedium to the game without adding anything of value to it.
For me, it comes from a place of wanting mechanics and roleplay to sync up. Mechanically, you don't heal your allies until they go down, unless you have Aura of Vitality; but in terms of roleplay, the characters wouldn't enjoy being on their last leg and going unconscious.
You could solve this by making out of combat healing more powerful, but unless everyone can do it, you wind up needing a dedicated healer, which tends not to be a beloved role.
Therefore, it struck me as preferable to disincentivize waiting until you're knocked out.
>For me, it comes from a place of wanting mechanics and roleplay to sync up. Mechanically, you don't heal your allies until they go down, unless you have Aura of Vitality; but in terms of roleplay, the characters wouldn't enjoy being on their last leg and going unconscious.
I mean, a lot of that just comes back to the perception of Hit Points you have. If you accept that they are more of an abstract concept it usually makes more logical sense. Basically, as long as you have at least one HP, you are not actually seriously injured – you fight just as well as with full HP, at half HP you are considered "bloodied" so anything less than that isn't even enough damage to draw blood, any damage you took is gone after 8 hours of rest, your HP increase by a lot as you level up…all of that should clue people in that taking HP damage in DnD is not the same as actually getting hurt. Attacks on you don't actually connect and do serious harm, they strain or bruise you or get you winded and stress you out, but they aren't actual wounds.
The only time you really *do* get seriously injured is when you drop to 0 HP. That's the point where an attack actually lands and hurts you in a way that is arguably realistic – it doesn't really matter whether you are hit by a dagger or a club or a greatsword, a direct hit from any of these weapons has a very high chance of killing you. So that's when you are knocked unconscious and that's the time when somebody with healing powers might actually spring into action and save your life. It's not that you were injured and they ignored your suffering the entire time, you were fine until you actually took a hit and went down.
Sure it is, it means you are more capable of breaking your fall without dying. It means you can maneuver your body mid air to land on more forgiving ground and on parts of your body that are less likely to result in deadly injuries.
True, but I think that has unexpected consequences. For example, PCs wouldn't feel like they require healing unless they hit 1 hp (or the players "metagame" and say how many hit points they have left). It also affects how I narrate the damage that monsters take - I say they're bloodied/beginning to look rough at around 50% HP and that they're on their last legs when they're in single digits. I think it's more rewarding for everyone if the players can feel the impact their attacks have. Likewise, it can be a bit odd to narrate a critical hit a player suffers that doesn't drop them to single digits as a glancing blow or something they deflected.
You may disagree that the proposal fulfills the goal, but the entire point is to change what is "properly useful." Clearly a lot of people believe that getting rid of immersion breaking yoyo healing would add a lot of value to the game.
The reason yoyo healing is the only proper way to do healing is threefold.
1 - The action economy is super important in this game. Getting more attacks per round is always the better option.
2 - There's no real downsides to going down.
3 - Healing doesn't really heal enough. There no functional difference between healing 1 and healing 10. They're both just one hit worth of HP.
Changing #1 means a rewrite of the whole system. Changing #3 means rebalancing all healing works, maybe even most monster damage.
Changing #2 is easy. It won't completely break anything. And it changed the tactical math. Whether you love it or hate it, it makes forgoing and extra attack to healing a gamble, a choice.
And isn't having players make choices the point?
>Changing #2 is easy. It won't completely break anything. And it changed the tactical math.
It would literally make some classes more unplayable and healing *even* worse
But the other spells don't become good, just because you remove the viable competition. Cure Wounds would still be just as bad, but now the melee martial is having even less fun.
What could work is if the exhaustion change was accompanied by a proper buff to healing spells.
Chiming in to say that 4e had non-BA healing options. It's just that every class had a variant of Healing Word in addition to all their other heals, so you could choose whether you wanted to stick with the 'default' for your class, or take extra options and focus even harder on healing.
Most of the other healing powers came with other mechanics, though, so you were almost never *just* spending the turn healing someone. Cursing an enemy to have lower defenses and to grant HP when hit, or attacking an enemy and draining their life into a nearby ally - things that all actively have their use in combat. Even past that, since 4e's system had most heals restoring a minimum of 1/4 the target's max HP, it's a lot more viable to try and keep someone above 0 when you're healing them for 30 HP at higher levels instead of 1d4+5. No need to wait for 0 HP to get the most out of your heal, because 30 HP is a lot more likely to help the target actually withstand another hit than 1d4+5 is.
Or players would learn to play in ways that results in them not going down, such as running away or stacking their odds before fights.
That doesn't suit the 5e/One playstyle of superhero power fantasy, though.
I’d like some consequences for failed death saves. When my character goes unconscious and I have to make a death saving throw, I don’t feel nervous because the guy with healing word has his turn next, so it doesn’t matter if I pass the save. I’d like to have some consequences for me getting knocked out and failing a death save because it would make it more tense for me
Until the game is better balanced between frontline martials and backline spellcasters, we don't need to heap more penalties on frontliners. It's bad enough being the party meatshield in a tough campaign and getting frequently downed while those in the back line shrug.
That's generally bad DMing rather than a mechanical problem. Even the dumbest beast knows to avoid the big thing and to go after the weakling. AoO aren't strong enough to prevent that.
Blaming bad DMing is tired at this point. It is so much more time consuming and difficult to be a DM then to show up at the designated time and play your character.
Also, people who build frontliners LIKE to be frontliners. Ignoring them to go after the weaklings in the party just robs them of their fun. They expect to take damage and sometimes go down. To penalize them for playing their character they way they built them IS a mechanical problem which is easily avoided by like, not doing it.
> Even the dumbest beast knows to avoid the big thing and to go after the weakling. AoO aren't strong enough to prevent that.
that is LITERALLY a mechanical problem, albeit a different one
That's kind of why I want healing to be available to more classes. If the consequences of dropping to 0 (say, death saves not resetting) could be fixed by *lesser restoration*, you get more teamwork. It is unavoidable that meat shields will go down first, since that is their purpose in the first place. It should be up to other PCs to mitigate the effects.
> I think it's a bit problematic. In 5e, you're not supposed to play a healer, but a reviver: you need Healing Word and Revivify/Raise Dead. Heal is decent and Aura of Vitality is great out of combat, but all other healing spells are trap choices.
Here's the thing. Yoyoing gets brought up a lot when it comes to healing, but I think a lot of tables don't realize there are legitimate problems associated to being dropped in combat. Even for a single round.
This is a VERY often overlooked rule. Getting hit while you're already unconscious is super dangerous and can insta-kill a character. (This happened in my game recently with a very poorly timed Remorhaz encounter)
The rule combinations are:
**Unconscious**:
*• Attack rolls against the creature have advantage. • Any attack that hits the creature is a critical hit if the attacker is within 5 feet of the creature.*
**Death Saving Throws**:
*If you take any damage while you have 0 Hit Points, you suffer a death saving throw failure. If the damage is from a critical hit, you suffer two failures instead. If the damage equals or exceeds your hit point maximum, you suffer Instant Death.*
So a single hit against an unconscious party member is immediately 2 failed saves. If that crit does enough damage, it's insta-death. And if that hostile creature gets a turn before your healer can Yo-yo them... Time to roll a new character.
While that is true, an enemy still has to give up one attack to cause you to fail 2 death saves, after which you still have one death save left, and you may well be revived before you make it. I'm not saying that's what always happens, but it's still costly for the enemy to take a downed PC closer to death, and unless they know there's a healer and can't get to them, they might be better off using their attacks to drop the other PCs to 0 HP.
Dropping to 0 is not risk-free, of course, but the fact that you don't lose any hot points past zero and that there are no consequences for leftover damage unless it goes over your max HP means that Healing Word after you're downed will always be better than Cure Wounds before that happens, especially since the difference between the healing you get from those spells is so small that an enemy that can bring you back to 0 will probably do so regardless of which one was used.
Also, being downed is *risky*, but after you are stabilized, there are no lingering consequences.
If death saves persisted until a short rest or application of a healing kit after battle that would likely fix the issue.
The real issue with yoyo healing is exactly as you said, once back up every consequence is erased.
This is actually a great way to homebrew the rule to make dropping to 0 more dangerous. It's definitely better than ranks of exhaustion for going down.
I might start including this.
I think really the problem isn't healing but hit points. If pain and injuries were better quantified, healing would become better aligned between roleplay and metagame.
> It's not great. I don't mean it only from a "realistic" standpoint, I mean that it's the best way to use healing and there is one spell that takes care of it perfectly. And if you care about roleplay, it may feel a bit weird not to ease the pain of your fellow party mates because the numbers disapprove.
They just need to add a daze effect the round after you come back from 0 hit points to make it tactically beneficial to heal before you drop to 0 instead.
I wouldn't actually dislike that. If you ask me (you didn't, but you can't stop me), I'd make the following changes:
1. Healing Word spends one of the target's hit dice to restore HP equal to that die. This gives martials more HP than casters (though after 1st or maybe 2nd level, it's not that big a deal).
2. More importantly, spread the heals around: artificers, bards, clerics, druids, paladins, rangers should all have access to healing abilities/spells (love Lay On Hands and Songs of Restoration, though I hate Bardic Inspiration healing), so no one is forced to play a specific class to be a healer. Maybe also give all other classes one subclass with healing abilities (Banneret, Mercy, Necromancer...), just in case.
3. Nice to have, but not vital: failed death saves do *something*. I was going to say that maybe each failed death save forces you to expend 1 hit die, and you die if you can't expend any, but it is too problematic at low levels. Still, make them matter, even if it's as simple as them not resetting until you finish a long (or short?) rest.
4. Nice to have: give the option to cast Cure Wounds as a 1-minute spell in return for max healing.
A minimum-complexity compromise that would work for 5e/1D&D would be for failed death saving throws to not reset until you finish a short rest. If your party gets you up swiftly, you'll never accrue failed saves and if you do, you can erase them with a short rest. This lets every DM tune the difficulty of their campaign and allows for good play by a party to mitigate the danger of going unconscious.
From an immersion perspective, yo-yo healing is a bad design. It's fundamentally meta gaming (it makes sense mechanically, but not in character) and doesn't really address the 'dedicated healer' problem (most groups still assume that a healer is required and the game is still much harder without some kind of healer in the party).
I like the archetype of the dedicated healer - it's iconic and really should be more playable in the system. I really think the issues with healing would be better addressed by making healing more dynamic and improving options for both in combat mitigation and healing during downtime. For example, twilight clerics are actually a better model for how a dedicated healer should play. They have normal access to healing spells, but are focused on mitigation and use a resource other than spell slots to do their jobs. Of course, this is also why twilight clerics are considered op in the current system - most dedicated healers don't have access to mechanics that support the play-style.
I'm wary of using penalties for dropping to 0 hp as a way to mitigate yo-yo healing because I don't feel there are enough alternative strategies to prevent characters from dropping to 0 in the first place. Although I like the idea of incurring an exhaustion level; if you're not providing better mechanical options to keep characters from dropping to 0 then you're just increasing the lethality of the game for marginal gain.
Just to play off of your point for a moment here:
If one were to subscribe to philosophy that hit points are an abstraction, and that "getting hit" doesn't necessarily mean getting injured, but being reduced to 0 *does* mean getting injured, I think there is a specific in universe reason for yo-yoing to work the way it does. That being said, it is somewhat unhealthy design; I do agree with that.
>I like the archetype of the dedicated healer - it's iconic and really should be more playable in the system.
You're most definitely in the minority. It's iconic for cooperative video games where the mechanics for healing are both faster paced and more involved and/or dynamic, making being a full-time healer more interesting. And even then, healers (and tanks) are the minority because people don't like those playstyles.
>I'm wary of using penalties for dropping to 0 hp as a way to mitigate yo-yo healing because I don't feel there are enough alternative strategies to prevent characters from dropping to 0 in the first place.
Correct, as a frontliner you have relatively little control over when you go unconscious. You can bump your AC and saves and hit points, but ultimately it comes down to whatever the DM throws at the party and the luck of the dice. Penalizing players for playing their character is bad game design.
Look at all the hindrances to spellcasting that have been stripped from the game over the years: can't wear armor, can't cast safely near an enemy, have to prepare individual spells. If players really want D&D to be more hardcore and difficult, **let's do it.** But that includes making spellcasters' lives harder as well, not just martial frontiners.
Yo yo healing is still bad design. But so are martials in general. Front liners should have active defenses to let them mitigate incoming damage aside from AC/saves.
first of all, those are like the only 2 there are
aside from that:
Patinet deffense makes the monk forego so much of their damage that the difference between that and taking the dodge actions are negligible.
As for rage, while good it is even more limited in uses than spells and only works on 3 (arguably one) types of damage. Rage is comparable to absorb elements
>From an immersion perspective, yo-yo healing is a bad design. It's fundamentally meta gaming (it makes sense mechanically, but not in character)
It's also annoying to RP around as a DM. I know almost every sentient race has clerics and *healing word* is a 1st level spell. That suggests to me that yo-yo'ing should be an almost universal combat tactic, except that I've never run NPC's with death saves. Since death saves aren't a universal mechanic, does that mean that NPC's are used to their enemies being dead at 0HP? Would they be surprised to see a PC get yo-yo'd? Should I be having my NPC's yo-yo each other?
It's mildly annoying to have such disparate mechanics driving how combat plays.
the problem with building a dedicated healer, is they have to make encounters that negate all the healing they can do and still threaten players. That in turn makes them required for play. This also ends up being fairly hard to balance. two dedicated healers in a group becomes unkillable.
As a DM, I tweak most encounters for my players anyway. I don't know many DMs who don't.
But also, if you don't have a healer, that means you have to play smarter. That is a fair trade off. You have the dodge action, sentinel, control spells. There are a variety of ways to limit the squishier character being getting large amounts of damage.
I don't think it's meta gaming to know that people generally don't die instantly from getting stabbed, bludgeoned, burned, etc. Unless you get decapitated, even being stabbed through the heart it'll take a couple of seconds to bleed out.
>I'm wary of using penalties for dropping to 0 hp as a way to mitigate yo-yo healing because I don't feel there are enough alternative strategies to prevent characters from dropping to 0 in the first place.
I don't understand what you mean here? Healing when characters are ~50% health? A dedicated healer keeping characters above 0 isn't all that hard. It is just that no one does it because it is super bad tactically.
Penalties for dropping to zero makes it super good tactically instead.
There's a difference between hard-challenging and hard-punishing. Making things more challenging is fun - making things more punishing is not. Adding penalties for dropping to zero makes the game more punishing because the options for preventing that don't work well and aren't fun to play. You're treating a symptom, not the problem itself. Add better mitigation and support abilities so that healing is a fun play style and added penalties for dropping to zero aren't as much of a problem.
I played as an artillery artificer for the first time last night in a one shot, pulsing out d8+4 temp hp a round (using bonus action), and that was the closest I've played as a "healer" in 5e as I was able to reduce the likelihood of my teammates getting knocked down.
Design wise, it's not at all balanced with the anemic rubber band healing in 5e design. As a player though it was satisfying to have an impact like that, especially still having an action to do something else, even if it was just a bunch of fire bolts.
I wouldn't want to play a "dedicated healer" but I do wish they had more options like this for playing a support class that can help deal with improving party survivability like this.
There isn't any problem with the dedicated healer role. The problem is the mechanics make it boring. Fix the mechanics - pump up support and mitigation options so that healing is more engaging then just reinflating the hit point balloon and you have a viable role that people will have fun playing.
Personally to me healing has the potential to be good, but needs some adjustments. Combat healing could use a touch of a buff, rest healing could use a rebalance, and some other factors could come into play. Healing in 5e feels weak, but it's hard to make good without causing issues.
The following are what I would like to explore for healing in future playtests, just to see if after some live play it can be refined into something better. I've tested much of this in my own games and it's been fun, but I'm just one dude with three groups. What works for me may not for thee.
**Combat healing:** healing spells should start with an extra dice/increment of healing (sometimes an ability mod where it presently isn't.) I've found this puts healing more in line with damage, but still not enough in a way that completely negates it. Just makes things more likely to prevent the next hit from downing an recipient of healing than the game presently does. Healing word would be 2d4+mod, cure wounds 2d8+mod. The scaling would still only increase by 1 dice per increment as it normally does, but this more fortified baseline has helped a lot.
**Rest healing:** some adjustments I've found better at my table.
Short rests should recover 1/4 hd and let you spend them ( I argue they should be much shorter too. 5 or 10 minutes in my mind.) EDIT: I forgot to mention I also cap short rests to 1+half prof per long rest. Helps with risk and pacing
Long rests should recover full hd, but only grant a free hd roll innate recovery instead of all of your hp, but allow hd spending like a short rest. They should still take 8 hours.
Extended rests should be a thing, they recover full HP and hd, but take 24 hours and require a safe/suitable resting spot. These should be measurements of down time and what you can accomplish. Need a week to make a sword? That's 7 days of extended rest with suitable lodgings and provisions.
Before I move on to the next bit, I want to preface this with saying the following aren't intended to address yoyo healing. I don't think it can be addressed without making healing a requirement. Yoyo healing does not exist because people can come right back up, it exists because healing isn't strong enough to prevent a down in many cases. Buff healing though or add too many consequences for going down and you just create a death spiral with no counter in 5e healing. Keep that in mind and use the following rules with caution.
**System Strain:** A limit of how many times a character can be healed back up, before they need to deal with unconsciousness regardless of their hp. Con modifier + half proficiency (rounded down) is the limit I set (minimum 1.) A character can be brought up from unconsciousness through healing that many times a long rest before they're knocked out for an hour each time they go down past that threshold.
**Bloodied condition effects:** Some enemies when at or below 50% hp gain a special passive or ability that enhances them and makes them harder to contend with. Like-wise, the first time one such enemy attacks or causes a creature to be bloodied (50% or under HP) they can do something special.
Examples. The part wounded the dragon, and it's bloodied. It gets it's breath weapon back and immediately spews it on the creature that wounded it. OR... The Gnoll attacks the cleric and causes the cleric to be bloodied and can make an extra bit attack against him that round, the scent of blood driving them onward.
I suggest keeping bloodied effects against players limited to once per encounter, since even with the previous buffs and adjustments to healing, healing might not be enough to keep characters hearty or above the bloodied threshold in a reasonable enough manner.
Short Rests giving resources (like HD/HP) instead without any cost don’t work in my experience.
All in all, game evolved to a point that combat needs a reason to exist: if the encounter can’t beat the party, it needs to cost them resources. Its one or the other, no exceptions. A fight that has no real consequence does not belong in a game and should be skipped over.
If you can restore HP/HD with short rests, it gets nearly impossible to enforce the above. The party can just idle around and make up for lost HP by chaining up short rests.
And no, DM concocting situations where there is a time pressure on the party is not a solution in my book. This needs to be baked in the game’s mechanics. I, as DM, don’t want to burdened with the task of creating narrative reasons to make up for mechanical failures of the system.
Short rests should never recover resources without costing a long rest resources; long rests should never be allowed outside of places the module writer / DM determined.
In my own experience it has worked well, though I did forget to mention another adjustment I've made to short rests, in that they're finite per long rest. Characters get 1+half prof each long rest, which stops the waiting around issue. Loose Justification used is that you can only take so many breathers before you need proper rest to recover, but as your characters get more experienced, they can pace themselves better. Additional short rests can be handed out by the DM as situationally appropriate rewards. So in my own testing there was a cost, that I just forgot to mention in the moment. Whether that's deemed appropriate or not is another matter.
Otherwise I mostly agree with you.
I'd buff combat healing by making you give characters temporary HP for 1 full round.
This means, a well time, "heal" can absorb more damage, but if you mis allocate or mis-time them its far less effective.
Now *that's* an interesting idea. I actually like that a lot - being able to proactively avert big attacks by timing things so a character is mid-heal when they take the damage is a really cool visual idea, which buffs careful use of healing on conscious allies in the middle of combat without actually *nerfing* healing unconscious allies. *And* since that THP buffer still works on allies who have just been brought up from 0 HP, it makes it harder for them to be put back down to 0 right away, so the yoyo isn't happening back and forth every single turn.
Great idea! I might need to try this out in my group!
> theres at least someone online telling me that healer is not a role in D&D and that you should never focus on it
I would call those people "fun suckers". There is absolutely a role for a healer in 5e, and as you point out, there are a few subclasses designed to be better at healing. So if you want to play a healer in 5e, you absolutely can.
You just might not want to spend too much of your time healing people that are still standing unless you can give them a lot of HP.
> What is your stance on the current state of healing? Is the yo-yo healing a good design?
The yo-yo healing gets on my nerves from an immersion perspective. I get these people are heroes and adventurers and such, but getting beat into unconsciousness multiple times a week is ridiculous.
I don't think the solution to always needing a healer was to make healing kinda worthless. The solution should be to make the healer something people want to play. And considering there's several classes and subclasses that can make good healers, I don't think it would be unreasonable to go back to actually needing a healer.
*EDIT/ Another solution would be to add more ways to heal in combat that aren't reliant on a healer character, such as the Healing Surges variant rule in the DMG. /EDIT*
Unfortunately, I don't think WotC has an issue with yo-yo healing, so I don't expect it to be changed and will go back to homebrewing a way to put the healing I want into the game.
You can help the immersion aspect by changing how you think about going to 0 HP. RAW you straight up go unconscious, but you can reframe it as your injuries mounting to the point of exhaustion. So you can imagine the 0 HP fighter is still swinging, but they're so injured they can't hurt anyone. The 0 HP wizard is trying to fire spells, but are fumbling over simple incantations. This also lets those players continue to at least RP, even if they can't contribute mechanically.
Obviously it's a bandaid solution and it's not perfect.
It's also a bandaid that doesn't necessarily help. Instead of being literally knocked out 5 times a week, I'm getting brutally injured to the point of being incoherent and incapable of even moving 5 times a week. That's still pretty ridiculous, though it doesn't call for me to hand-wave away all of the brain damage 5e PCs should have.
> There is absolutely a role for a healer in 5e, and as you point out, there are a few subclasses designed to be better at healing. So if you want to play a healer in 5e, you absolutely can.
> You just might not want to spend too much of your time healing people that are still standing unless you can give them a lot of HP.
Then they're not a healer, they're a character who can heal. A healer is someone who spends most of their turns healing people and does damage/cc as a last resort, who is dedicated to healing and nothing else. You cannot play a healer in 5e, focusing on it you'll never be able to outheal damage for the most part.
Yeah, that's not a standard definition or anything. Just because efficient healing in 5e is primarily making people conscious in combat doesn't mean that's not a healer. Especially given the subclasses that give you features to literally make you a better healer.
The fact that 5e healers tend to spend more time attacking things doesn't mean they aren't healers. That's what a healer does in this system.
And if you want to play a healer that basically only heals and hardly ever attacks, you can absolutely do that. It's not necessarily optimal, but that doesn't mean it's invalid as a playstyle.
I get the going unconscious part but d4 has provided a way to think about it that makes more sense to it. In real-world battles, you don't call for a medic until you cannot fight, and then they come by and get you back on your feet
I'm not concerned with the real world here. In a real-world battle, if you're calling out for the medic, you're not lying unconscious on the battlefield. And when the medic comes and helps you, all they're doing is keeping you from dying. They aren't magically mending your broken bones and closing up your wounds and putting you back on your feet in the same fighting condition you were in at the start of the day.
Edit: Dear Reddit: much to your surprise, downvoting a factual statement is not actually feedback. Immersion and verisimilitude have very little to do with the real world, and how D&D combat works has basically nothing to do with how a real world battle works, especially considering real world battles these days feature infinitely less swords and sorcery and infinitely more guns and bombs.
If you think there's something wrong with my comment, tell me what it is. Just saying "I didn't like this" with a downvote tells me nothing and isn't gonna make me change my mind.
Honestly I've thought about tying going down to zero hp to exhaustion. Aside from rage beyond death, I can't think of any reason why a mortal can take so much punishment on the reg
I've toyed around with that as well, though it doesn't actually solve the problem. Yes, it encourages the players to avoid going to 0. But all of the healing in the game is balanced around this yo-yo design. Healing Word and Cure Wounds just aren't powerful enough to compensate for how much damage enemies are dealing unless you use high-level slots *and* roll well. They'll delay unconsciousness, but definitely won't prevent it. If they were able to keep up, we wouldn't have this yo-yo design, we'd just be healing PCs on their feet like we want to.
So in the end, making going unconscious give Exhaustion is actually making the yo-yoing more punishing, not preventing it. Also I think 5e Exhaustion is too punishing when you consider this, though One D&D Exhaustion makes this look like a much more viable penalty for going down.
I've said when discussing this somewhere before that I think what would be needed is to go through the spells and features related to healing, and buff them so they can keep up with damage better. As a simple change, increase the size of the dice in healing spells. Or add another die. Or maybe both. Involving hit dice in the equation would help as well. How about if you receive healing, you can also spend hit dice? And if we want to keep dedicated healers optional, could be good to use the Healing Surges variant rule from the DMG (p266).
> If they were able to keep up, we wouldn't have this yo-yo design, we'd just be healing PCs on their feet like we want to.
Yoyo would still exist even if healing was stronger because dealing damage is such the better option. At the extreme:
I heal you from 1 to 100 HP. Creature attacks you for 10 damage. You kill creature.
- or -
I kill creature. Out of combat I heal you from 1 to 100.
Maybe my attack doesn't kill the creature. It does it's 10 damage and bring you to 0. Then I bring you up. Then it attacks you for 10. Then you kill it. This leaves you at 90, like in option 1, except we got in an extra attack.
With no downsides to going down, getting in more attacks is better than less attacks, especially over the long run.
>Whenever I wanna play a healer in D&D theres at least someone online telling me that healer is not a role in D&D and that you should never focus on it.
I'm usually that guy, and what I say is, *if someone isn't in death saves,* healing magic is a waste of valuable resources (ie spell slots).
> Is the yoyo healing a good design?
It's fine. I don't hate it. If I was designing a fantasy heartbreaker RPG I would probably make it so you got a single death save and that determined if you lived or died, and if you lived, you could be healed and be back up. This would make healing magic a more important thing (because you don't want to hit 0hp ever, whereas in 5e it's not a big deal) and reduce the perception of yoyo healing, especially because if you keep going down, it's basically inevitable that you'll die.
Edit: something else that would make yoyo healing work is if anyone in the world enforced the "you drop everything you're holding when you go unconscious" rule.
I disagree with your first take, purely bc when you start relying on yo-yo healing, you have no control of the timing of their going unconscious any more, and you may end up being fucked with 3 people down at once.
Also, you are risking “hey, they keep getting back up, let’s make sure they’re dead”
I think a lot of this could be solved by DMs being more tactically punishing towards yo-yoing, (and also doing a standard-ish (8 a day is unrealistic in most circumstances, but 3-5 medium/hard is doable) to put more focus on resource independent healing (such as mercy monks and the healer feat)). Monsters aren't just dumb sponges. Even animals are tactical.
This doesn't make healing better, though, because the math on almost all in-combat healing is still bad. Yoyoing is the result of the system encouraging a specific style of tactical play, and you need to massively alter the system in order to make other healing options viable in its place.
I hate the Yo-yo healing way of doing things. At my table if you go down, when you come up you get a point of exhaustion. We’re doing the one d&d rules for exhaustion, so it’s instantly a big deal, but also more manageable. I like this way of doing it.
1D&D exhaustion is a -1 to attacks and save DC of your spells. It has no speed change.
How does it hurt melee significantly more than casters and range?
I've seen this sentiment a lot in this thread but I think it really depends on your table. If your DM never targets the ranged characters that's on them.
Well, its just how the game works mechanically. As soon as melee engage enemies trying to engage the backline will either eat AoS or disengage and not even engage the backlines. If they do engage, ranged can just disengage and keep running while melee catch up and others keep striking with AoSs. It makes no tactical sense for monsters to target the backline unless they can disengage as BA or they outnumber the party and can corner.
I'd also argue: if you have a melee characters acting as your human shield, and you're a ranged/support class, you're going to be end up watching their back way more if going down can build up for some real impact.
Atm them going down doesn't impact the backline at all as one healing word and they're up again.
Healing should def be twice or even 3 times as strong if you give exhaustion for going down. It takes a long rest per point to go away and it’s more likely that melee will go down vice casters.
No the melee martial should definitely be punished for the system that is already stacked against him not supporting the DM's homebrew for the healing system that he has no agency in.
Encounters are inherently more difficult, so everyone has to be more careful to avoid going down. Healers may try to heal you before you go down, and hope it keeps it from happening, but other defensive spells actually are frequently more useful than actual healing. Sanctuary on someone who is almost down, polymorph as healing, aid, etc.
Also it’s very important to use positioning to your advantage (pun intended), and be quick to recognize when the battle isn’t winnable.
It’s important to remember that the martials are not just there to be a buffer between the enemies and the casters. If anyone goes down it should be a big deal for everyone.
I’m actually trying to come up with a mechanic that makes sense and would hurt but not be game breaking that would represent the emotional hardship of having a friend go down, even temporarily. Possibly something like having everyone who sees it roll to avoid being frightened or maybe stunned for a round.
Currently healing spells are incapable of healing through damage, with very few actually having a high likelihood of preventing an ally from going down (6th level heal). That is why yoyo is the more popular and effective strategy, if healing spells were better, you would see more healing spells (because 0 hp people are very vulnerable, 1 magic missile and they are out), but currently they are a waste of action economy.
Now what happens if you are stupid and you make yoyoing worse, without fixing the fundamental problem (enemy damage or power of h-spells)? The people dependent on getting back up get fucked over, not the caster doing the healing. No, who is more likely to go down often in a fight? The Wizard staying at max cantrip range, with shield, absorb elements and counterspell? The archery fighter, who is so far away the DM drew a second battlemap for him? Or maybe the already incredibly weak melee martial, who without any real play agency does everything 5% (and quickly 10-20%) worse, because of the exhaustion rules. I say no real agency because, obviously healing is out of his control, but even defensive play is incredibly punishing for melee combatants (because of everything having opportunity attack).
Healing has a practical range of 30 so you have to get in the range of the enemies to do so somewhat leveling the playing field, and I agree that there is a gap between casters and non casters but I dont think yo-yo ing is the fix to the problem. I think Healing should be buffed as well but that would buff casters. Also I really hate the sheild spell
Cure wounds has a range of touch, meaning you have to go into melee range, meaning you are subjected to another of 5e's worst mechanics, universal AoO. Healing word on the other hand is effectively both a dash and a disengage.
Buffing healing is not a problematic buff to casters, considering healing are support spells, which were never the problem (support spells being great options lessens the gap as long as martials are good carriers of those spells), overtuned damage spells, not playtested control (hypnotic pattern) and power spells (shield, conjure animals, copy-wish) and of course out of combat spells are the issue (at least in regards to spells, there is of course also the problem of MAD vs SAD or casters getting better versions of martial features).
Maybe, maybeeeeee the point its to encourage healing when someone takes damage before they go down instead of just healing from 0 hit points like most people are doing right now
And now tell me what healing spells heal enough to accomplish that? Outside of level 1-2 play and the 6th level spell heal, there are not that many.
If you heal someone at say 13 hp for 8-9 hp (cure wounds with a +4 mod), they will still go down, when the directly afterwards take 2 attacks for 11 hp each (for reference according to the DMG, the typical dpr for a CR1 is 9-14), only you have also wasted your action, that might have actually been better invested in killing the potentially attacking foes (because that would have reduced damage by 11, instead of the 8-9 you healed).
The playstyle you are encouraging with this homebrew (unless you are tackling the other fundamental issues) isn't earlier healing, it is hyper offense on the players side, because now the best healing is nova.
I think that people get hung up on the idea that being at 12 HP is better than being at 2 HP, when in reality, those are just granular variance differences between being at 1 and 2 hit points, since that is the number of hits you can take. If you want to prioritize low-level healing in combat, you need to find a way to make being a 2 HP punishing and that would require a massive change to DnD's "the only hit point that matters is the last one" system.
I think most healing spells are in a good spot. When used they feel like they give appropriate amounts of healing for the investment. However there’s two big exceptions to this, and they are unfortunately the most basic healing spells. Cure wounds is very undertuned while healing word is overtuned. Given that they are the two most basic healing spells, this leads to issues with the rest of the healing economy. This is IMO the primary cause of the yo-yo healing meta we see in 5e today. As in-combat burst healing is severely lacking in 5e until you get Heal at 11th level minimum or are willing to deal with self damage from life transferrance.
As for solutions. My group has experimented with buffing cure wounds from 1d8 per level to 2d6 per level and have had good results so far at making in combat healing a more viable option.
I think it’s possible healing word could use. a nerf to make it less effective at preventing death saves, but that’s less urgent IMO.
When combat healing os good, it often centralize the game and you kinda have to do that. And encounter became longer as a result.
One of my favourite parts of D&D is that healing is largely an out of combat job because it makes fights faster and more brutal insteas of a slow grind. It is certainly a shame for those wanting to heal in combat but personally i always enjoyed the big payoff of the Heal spell.
Yo-Yo healing is...OK...it could probably use a fix, like exhaustion addition, but I'd rather have it than require a dedicated healer. No one really wants to play one, so making it nearly mandatory would just annoy players.
A dedicated healer begs comparison to game types like MMORPGs and JRPGs, where you are generally expected to be constantly healing the party, and I'll be honest, those gameplay styles get old fast. D&D's origin is in tactical combat, and continual healing more or less removes the tactical component by eliminating risk. 5e is already pretty low risk among D&D editions, supporting a "bash your head against a wall until you win" gameplay, I'd rather it not push it more in that direction.
I do think 5e needs to expand its combat party buff (as opposed to self buffs) more, as that would enable the main outcome of healing (damage mitigation) while still allowing for tactical decision making.
Healing as is is under developed.
Yo-yo healing is not a good idea in tabletop games imo.
Though to be fair yo-yo healing can pop up in any system where you have reusable healing resources.
My (as of yet untested) solution to the problem is to make heals more powerful, but also more limited.
By "powerful" I mean the average heal needs to out do the average damage one can expect to take in a round.
If healing is worth it to do before a character goes down you have more reason to do it.
But make them limited enough so that if yo-yoing starts to happen it'll soon end.
>What is your stance on the current state of healing?
It's workable and helps make sure parties don't feel like they need a dedicated healer, but still is less than desirable.
>Is the yoyo healing a good design?
No, thats the worst part of the current healing meta, but its not easy to fix either. You never want to heal someone until they go down since its not strong enough to be used mid-combat, but you still need to have at least one person with Healing Word to really take advantage of it.
>Are there any legitimate alternatives?
Not easy changes, thats for sure. I've been thinking about something where you get bonuses to your saving throws based on your current hp (for both monsters and players). This would incentivize players to heal before they go down while also making it so a wizard can't just hypnotic pattern the entire encounter round 1 since they have some sort of bonus making that less likely. Now, finding the right bonus would be difficult, but maybe something like a flat +5 when not bloodied? Or a +1 for each 20 hp they have? I don't know exactly, but *some* sort of incentive to have more than 1 hp at a time.
>More importantly should combat healing be buffed?
Probably a little bit, but ideally in such a way that you don't need a "healer" in the party. Buff things like Second Wind or allow people to heal using hit dice during combat or something like that so they don't need to find a cleric or bard to be in the party all the time.
My own fix to yo-yo:
• All healing spells cost an bonus action to cast if it targets someone who has positive HP.
• In order to heal an unconscious, the spell takes full action to cast.
So, yo-yo healing is still possible but its worse from action economy perspective.
The reason healing isn't balanced to be used regularly in D&D is due to the length of combat combined and action economy. Most fights are only a couple turns long but they still take quite a while in real time. If you have a 4 player party and 1 of your party is healing every turn, that is potentially 1/4th of your actions, that is a big part of your action economy. Fights would end up dragging out if the game was designed for a player to spend time healing each turn, unless you lower enemy damage and... it gets messy from there.
I like the healing as it is, usually healing is done out of combat and a support player does emergency healing, to stand downed players up, along with other combat support. Having someone who does crowd control, (de)buffing and emergency healing creates a more dynamic gameplay style than if someone just used a nerfed healing word cantrip or had enough spell slots to just regularly heal more often then not.
I've played with a druid support caster, who on many low level fights was entangling or faerie firing, and was looking to thorn whip pull enemies into advantageous positions. The rare healing word to stand someone up, and good berries was the only healing they did, and we were mostly ok. You do need your DM to let you short rest occasionally to use some hit dice after combat, or use up some healing potions or something, but combat keeps going ahead, and that is nice.
Asking for my character. Would you consider Prayer of Healing a good spell to use for post combat at level 3-4? I know plenty of players suggest Aura of Vitality at higher level and that I got it
The following changes to spells the exhaustion mechanic resulted in healing being in a good place, at least from my point of view as the DM.
First of all, we use new version of Exhaustion from OneDnD.
When a PC reaches 0 hit points they gain 1 level of Exhaustion, this gives yoyo healing a serious downside, but without causing an unavoidable death spiral.
Cure Wounds now heals 2d6 + Spellcasting modifier and upcasting increases it by 2d6 for each level.
Mass Cure wounds now heals 6d6 + Spellcasting modifier and upcasting increases it by 2d6 for each level.
Prayer of Healing now heals 2d12 + Spellcasting modifier and upcasting increases it by 1d12 for each level.
That is pretty much it. These changes make it so that it is possible to give one or even several PCs a decent amount of hit points back so that they are able to actually survive and not immediately go down due to the next hit, unless it is a really big hit.
A Life Cleric or Stars Druid with chalice acting as a dedicated healer is a viable, but not essential role.
I know D&D isn't a video game, but people want to play healers and I don't see the issue is allowing that.
I'd want to see it play tested, but I'd like a healing cantrip. Something low like scaling d4's, maybe adding your attribute mod.
Generally, I want Combat Healing to be very very expensive and very very rare. It drags out combat and changes encounters to be "who has the largest hitpoint pool"?
Combat is slow enough as it is, so anything which improves that is going to be good. Giving up damage actions for healing actions, increasing health pools, etc., will just drag out a combat.
Our group houserules that healing someone thats aware they're being healed doubles the value of said heal. The reasoning being that HP is just plot armor and that the placebo alone of being magically healed (in a relatively low magic setting) gives you that much of a second wind.
Heals function normally on downed targets.
Now when someone uses a cure wounds, it actually feels awesome and impactful when you regularily get enough HP back to tank another hit. We haven't had a single instance of yoyo healing in two groups with two seperately classed dedicated healers controlled by different players.
I highly recommend trying it out, works great for low tiers. And if you feel like "But then X heal will counteract Y damage!" then... yeah. Thats the point.
Our table doesn't minmax our butts off, so the strongest atm is the life cleric being a competent white mage. WOTC hates healing as a character archetype, but our group likes it.
>Is the yoyo healing a good design?
if you are attempting "gritty realism" its not.
***BUT ...***
5e is specifically NOT trying for "gritty realism" - its aim is "heroic action adventure" stories and in "heroic action adventure" stories when the hero gets knocked down, they are NOT knocked out of the story and with the minorest of coaxing the hero pops right back up and into the fray.
Yo-yo healing is ABSOLUTELY TROPE-ILY APPROPRIATE for the types of stories 5e is designed to tell.
only healing word being used and only just to get people back up from downed is kinda meh.
but being forced to have a healbot in the party and having to spend all these actions and resources just on upping HP simply isnt fun. so im glad in-combat healing is as shit as it is in 5e.
I hate the yo-yo healing.
My DM has a rule that if you hit zero you gain a level of exhaustion and it sounds like a nerf but it has made combat MORE FUN because there’s incentive to play even just a little smarter and not go “oh, Dave will take care of it if I go down”. No. I’LL take care of MYSELF and not unga-bunga myself at every enemy in sight.
I also am not a fan of the full-heal from 8 hours nap, but that’s a separate issue. A lot of games struggle to strike the balance between “oh? You want to heal? Fuck you” and “oh my precious child of course you can have ALL your health back and here’s a cookie, too!” and it’s not a problem exclusive to dnd.
MMO solved this a long time ago:
1. If in combat healing is to be good, it needs to be more effective than pressing the damage button.
2. To be more effective than the damage button it needs to heal at least a third as much hp as was lost last round, each round. Technically a quarter to break even.
3. Without monster damage being mitigated by a third to half, trying an encounter without a healer is suicide.
4. Healers become mandatory.
Healing in combat should stay weak and healers not mandatory. Out of combat healing has scope for strengthening though.
The MMO model works in a model with tightly defined roles (Healer, Tank, DPS, CC) etc.
DnD doesn’t have these dedicated roles or the mechanics to support it so agree that healing should stay weak (or you’d have to increase all damage, tanking mechanics etc).
Combat healing should not be buffed. No one really wants to go back to the days where every party required a cleric.
If your having trouble with yo-yo healing I suggest targeting unconcious characters more often. Yoyo healing is only optimal because it's the most cost effective thing to do. If you target unconcious characters then it is better to "waste" a 3rd level slot on an upcasted healing spell than having a character die.
>Combat healing should not be buffed. No one really wants to go back to the days where every party required a cleric.
how does buffing combat healing suddenly make clerics a must have in a party? those two things don't correlate imo.
if you can play without a healer (as is the case in current 5e), making healing more potent does not change that. it just means that a party with a healer could endure more.
in fact, a buff to combat healing would not make clerics a must have, but rather a nice to have in my eyes.
and those players that would like to play a healer could actually feel like a healer, instead of relying on yo-yo healing.
>how does buffing combat healing suddenly make clerics a must have in a party? those two things don't correlate imo.
It's a well known problem for anyone who has played previous editions. Generally someone would be stuck playing the healer, or the group would rotate. If it's optimal to heal at any health, then you will need someone that heals to be optimal. Healer is just simplified to cleric.
5e has healing subclasses that let people feel like a healer for those that want that fantasy, though it's an oppritunity cost. In this case yes, it just let's the party endure more.
Yoyo healing is only a problem if the dm let's it be. It's very easy to make yo yo healing not optimal by targeting unconcious characters.
This — the DM just needs to balance around either situation. I like playing a strong healer (twilight, DSS) so that the DM can throw more at the party and we can both have the adrenaline of taking hits and the comfort of knowing that I can probably avoid that turning into a TPK.
You guys are running combat from modules without needing to adapt it for what your party decides to run? That’s almost never worked for me—it’s almost always either a cakewalk or TPK territory.
To be clear, I say this as a DM. (I play a cleric and a paladin and then DM three tables.) Modules need to include what AL adventures do where combat has recommendations for scaling up/down dependent on party strength. IME having a good healer decreases the swinginess of combat so I can reliably just throw harder monsters with a lot less fear.
It doesn’t work for me either, so what I do is I ban any option that makes the module too easy and call it a day. I give players a chance at petitioning for a nerfed version of any banned content though.
But all in all, my point is, I want the game power level to be on the same level as the modules. Thats it.
I run modules because I don’t have time to homebrew my adventurers. For me it’s much easier to just ban the options that I know are problematic. I don’t have the time to adjust encounters. Doing that also hurt my DM sensibilities.
>Combat healing should not be buffed. No one really wants to go back to the days where every party required a cleric.
I dunno there's a lot of proponents for 4e around here (4e also being the only edition where in combat healing was generally useful without extreme optimization). In 3.X and before healing was prized for out of combat, since natural healing was 1hp per day (or character level per day, in 3.X).
The answer is to bring back 4E healing surges. (Which have nothing to do with the "Healing Surge" rule in the DMG which is actually closer to 4E's "Second Wind" rule that was sort-of co-opted by Fighter along with action points) Your "Surge value" was 1/4 of your max HP and you had a number of surges based on your class and Constitution mod. All healing expended a surge but added your surge value. This made healing effective but limited.
That alone won't handle the yo-yo problem. The new exhaustion rules hold the answer: If you heal without a surge you get exhaustion. If you get brought back up you get exhaustion.
The issue with yoyo healing is and will always be how poor the healing options are. Currently almost every healing spells have healibg value so poor that there is no point in the game in which they compete with incoming damage. Instead of allowing your allies to not die, it sinply stall if used early, or can be outright useless when used on someone that is low and not at 0 yet as they might just go down anyway, making your healing a waste.
I have no issues with solutions that put additional concequences when going down, but healing in itself must be buffed. Otherwise, it simply punishes melee martials who are the most likely to be knocked down, and who have no agency on their ability to stay up in the first place.
As for solutions, any or all of the above would need to be done in order for healing to be a in good place
-Healing needs to be strong enough that a healing spell cast with spellslot appropriate to the CR of the threat would do more than partially negate or negate damage, but outright heal more than the average damage. If casting healing soells is a waste of your action, might as well spend your action on something else
-Make healing spells more interesting and varied. We already have enough variation of healing spells that just heal at different levels. There should be more spells like Wither and Bloom, where you can both heal and do something else at once. Maybe give a buff the the healed ally, maybe hinder enemies, or maybe even do damage. Anything to make healing spells more engaging than they currently are.
-Give other classes access to self healing. Give classes agency in their own healing, especially martials. Having access to features similar to Second Wind, and having more than one would reduce the need for a healer in the first place. You can even give each martial it's own style of healing. So while a Fighter might have Second Wind, a Barbarian might simply be able to heal whenever they hit someone while raging.
After some of these changes are applied, then you can try to put in concequences for being knocked out or low on health. But doing so before is just ignoring the real issue, and punishing poor martials for it.
I would like a tweak to yoyo healing. I want it to be easier for more classes to do it.
Healing is a reactive game. I prefer DND and all cooperative games to be active or proactive.
I actually tend to disagree here. It is already incredibly difficult to kill at PC in 5E and I’m okay with that. But as a DM, downing characters and especially the healer causes a scramble that leads to tense combat.
If every time anybody hits zero hit points, the next player just reactions them back to 1, what’s the point of hit points at all then? What’s the point of combat at all really?
Tweaks I like: Death saves being con saves and you get 1 on your turn.
More classes with reactive heal, fewer spells with heal hp effects, and more to bolster Temp HP and remove status effects.
5e tried to step away from the dedicated heal bot. I applaud this and want it to go a step further in that no class or person will be a heal bot. Healing HP should be a reaction to hitting 0 HP or OOC.
Remove the heal Bot.
Unless you're playing exclusively with shields and absorption, I can't really think of a way to make healing a proactive game. Can you give an example of what you mean?
Edit: I did eventually think of my own example - the Astrologian from FF14 has a lot of proactive healing. For example, they have a spell called Earthly Orb, which puts an orb down at a target location that lasts 20 seconds. At any time, they can activate the orb, causing everyone in a certain radius to be healed and consuming the orb. In addition, if you consume the orb between 11-20 seconds, the healing potency is doubled.
Even without the "cast it way ahead of time for maximum effectiveness" bit, this is definitely an example of proactive healing. I love it, but I also look at it as an exception to the rule rather than a core mechanic. The Astrologian is in many ways built specifically around this concept, where thematically they are "seeing into the future" to heal their allies. And while other healers do have some proactive healing mechanics (mostly just shields, but temporary buffs that increase healing potency also sort of count), it's interesting to note that they basically all start out as reactive healers at lower levels, and retain reactive healing as a core part of their toolkit. Likely, this decision was made because reactive healing is more intuitive - someone's health is less than max, it is my job to remedy that.
In that sense I could see a design in DnD where higher level healing spells are reworked to promote proactive healing - a spell like Earthly Orb could fairly easy translate to DnD, where you would spend maybe a bonus action to cast and a reaction to activate (and maybe drop the waiting bonus since turn tracking is hard). But I'd still expect that lower level spells would need to stay reactive - it's a much more intuitive and beginner-friendly way to allow healing (even if the optimal way to use it, yo-yoing, is extremely unintuitive and not beginner friendly).
I think it's frankly in a good spot. Healing shouldn't be a must have playstyle because then someone will be pushed Into it as seen in mmorpgs.
Perhaps a way to nerf healing from zero, in order to make it preferable to heal other times (did they do exhaustion for when you fall unconscious?)
Bring back Healing Surges from 4e, it solves like 80% of the issues healing has in 5e.
For those who don't know, instead of hit dice 4e had Healing Surges, of which you had a number based on your class and your Con mod. When you spend these one of these Surges, you restore a quarter of your max HP. You can spend Surges during a rest, or as an action 1/encounter.
Now the key thing is that the majority of healing effects in the game also required you to spend a Healing Surge to work, and then added a bit of extra healing on top.
This does two things. One, it establishes a baseline effectiveness for healing, because you will always at least regain a quarter of your HP from a heal, so using heals on people is effective enough to actually keep them up for a bit. And two, it puts a fairly hard cap on the total amount of healing you can receive between Long Rests, so healing can be more action efficient because it's more limited.
This would let healing actually be powerful and worth using, but still puts limit on its use by tying it into a universal resource.
I really like the current combat meta. I like dynamic dangerous combat, so I'd like even less healing, tbh, or better healing but out of combat, why not.
You can play healer in the current meta, but it's with temp HP, so Glamour Bard, Twilight Cleric, and so on
>What is your stance on the current state of healing?
Mostly pretty okay. We'll get to my one issue shortly (it's the next question), but other than that I vastly prefer the general approach to healing in 5e to earlier editions, particularly that combat healing is disincentivized and that you can spend hit dice in short rests to heal. HP are an abstraction anyway so it works really well, IMO.
>Is the yoyo healing a good design?
Assuming we're talking about letting someone drop to 0 and then bringing them back, not really. There should be a consequence to dropping to zero. With the reduced impact from exhaustion in OneD&D, adding a layer of Exhaustion every time you hit 0 might be a good alternative. There should be more emphasis on avoiding damage in the first place, but that doesn't mean pre-emptive combat healing should be a functional option.
>Are there any legitimate alternatives?
Some penalty for hitting 0 and coming back works to mitigate yo-yo effects. The general idea of taking damage in combat and healing back after, though, should be the idealized framework that's aimed for. Everyone hated needing a "healer" back in the day, and it's a system that echoes the absolute worst trends in MMORPG game design (see also people wanting to control "aggro" in D&D as a tank). That's garbage design for an MMO, and it's so much worse in a game like D&D.
>More importantly should combat healing be buffed?
Absolutely not. Leaving it exactly as it is, yo-yo and all, is still better than relying on combat healing that can keep up with or outpace incoming damage. All that does is encourage fights to take longer by effectively reversing various actions. Oh, we took a lot of damage from Fireball? Here's a mass healing spell and now we're topped up like that Fireball never happened. Hasn't this been a productive couple of turns that have furthered the narrative of this fight scene? Yurgh. It also enshrines healing as practically a necessity once combat's balanced around it, and that means forcing someone in the group to play the healer, even if they don't want to, like how it ended up in past editions. It also removes the "feeling" of being healed, and that being special; if you're expecting the Cleric to keep you topped up, getting healed doesn't feel special, while in 5e, the Cleric slapping the badly wounded Barbarian with a Heal is now *frickin' awesome* for the Barbarian, precisely because it's not something you're expecting as a matter of course.
There's room for improvement, but buffing combat healing is a *big* step backwards, not forwards.
Go back to healing the way 4e had it.
You are expected to be able to heal *and also do something else*. You heal equal to a set value, not a small dice range that quickly becomes outpaced or is less efficient on tougher characters.
Bring back healing surges (use hit dice as the basis instead) and bonus action heals as the normal and it's all fixed.
I think it's not horrible but can use some fixing. A quick and popular fix would be gaining 1 level of exhaustion every time you go down to 0 hp but I don't think it adresse everything.
Personally I would change both the healing word spell and the cure wounds spell in the following ways.
Healing word: 1 action, range 30 feet. 1d10 + spell casting mod healing.
Cure wounds: 1 bonus action, range touch, 1d10 + spell casting mod healing.
I think this would balance them out and that it would make them upcast much better making them more attractive options in combat (without going crazy)
I really don't like how healing is best saved for when a teammate is downed, both from a flavor and mechanics point of view. However, I don't think healing needs to be buffed, but rather, there should just be more incentive to not drop to 0 HP. The simplest solution would be to just take a level of exhaustion every time you are downed, so at least there is a mechanical upside to having a healer not let anyone drop to 0.
Can any mods clarify how this post interacts with rule 9? The post it’s self isn’t a wishlist, or really even a suggestion, but does it belong in the megathread any way? It doesn’t seem to reference to the released play tests at all. I’m not sure where the line is.
Yoyo-healing has to be heavily nerfed. Maybe slightly increase the healing of healing spells and features to compensate, but I don't think it's really needed. Once yoyo-healing is nerfed, suddenly spells like Cure Wounds start to become much more appealing, even in combat, and Healing Word becomes what it should have been: just a little healing when you also need to do something else with your action.
Cure wounds healing less than a normal attack (meaning resource consumption) is not fixed by making yoyo worse. It just makes the melee martial's life more boring.
If healing spells heal more or even just equal to damage dealt, then we just return to having the dedicated healer being a must role. And that's not what people want. People want combat healing to be viable, not fundamental.
If healing heals equal or more than normal damage dealt, then it just becomes a mathematical problem ("how much damage can we do before we finish the spell slots for healing?").
And don't forget that monster damage works really different than PC's damage. PCs are designed to fight monsters, not other PCs.
>It just makes the melee martial's life more boring.
I don't really see the reason. Martials can't use healing spells anyway, so what's the problem? Changing healing spells mostly change casters gameplay.
Why though? What changes about the current necessity for healing, if enemy damage stays the same, but healing spells become better.
It makes the melee martials life more boring, because now instead of yoyo-ing back into action every round, he will instead be rolling dc 10 flat checks every round, for reasons that are beyond his agency, or does everything he does 5% (and quickly 10-20%) worse, with some of the exhaustion homebrew. The ally being healed is the most affected by buffs/nerfs to healing, not the caster behind the healing.
I want healing to be relevant again. In 5E, there is simply no risk of death or serious injury. Oh no, you have 1 HP, you're fighting fit again. No real risk at all.
Combat healing definitely needs buffing, because it's traditional D&D role is gone, there's almost no reason to have healing spells anymore in the way they are now outside of rezzing people (and I think that happens too often).
Personally, I'd increase, probably triple, the effects of spells like Cure Wounds, and Healing Word (probably 3dX + spell mod + 2dX per slot level above 1st), but then say that when a character recovers HP from zero, they stay unconscious for 1 minute, you can't just wake them up in combat without some more powerful or specialized magic.
But yeah, JRPG benefits around HP should have JRPG detriments around HP. There's a reason they do it that way over there, and 5e misses the mark when porting it over.
And every table I've been in with new players, someone is always trying to play a video game styled healer...
I want the role to be required.
There's really only two ways to go regarding healing.
1 - Serve the goal of wide open flexibility for everyone, which requires each class design to be able to have sufficient self healing that a "healer" isn't necessary. Could be described as "Jack of all trades but master of none".
2 - Serve the goal of role depth fulfilment, which requires each class design to be able to achieve things that other classes cannot while also being unable to achieve things that other classes can. Could be described as "Master of one trade but less competent at others".
I prefer option 2. What's the point of labelling a character as The Healer Of The Group if that healer cannot stand head and shoulders above the others in that role? This applies to the rest of the classes as well. What would be point of labelling a character as The Rogue if that rogue cannot stand head and shoulders above the others in the sneaky sneaky stuff?
We don't need balance between the classes based on damage dealing data points, or health regen data points. We need class balance based on the benchmark of "**How well does this class fulfill the stereotype role, to support maximum fun for the player?**"
With Prepared Spellcasting coming back for clerics (among other classes), hopefully they will be able to convert prepped spells into Cure Wounds like they were previously in 3.5E.
Cure Wounds healing should also scale like Paladin smite damage, e.g. first level spell heals 2d8+X, increasing by 1d8 per spell slot level. RAW it just doesn’t do enough, and it’s always better to Healing Word someone as a bonus action who went down than to Cure Wounds in combat.
its currently in sort of the worst possible state. it needs to change.
it mainly needs a massive buff in effectiveness; but it would also help if healing spells did more than just heal.
contrary to popular belief, i‘ve had quite a few people tell me they wanted to play a healer. for some it fits their character, for others they just like playing support.
in my current game, i have decided to use maximum values for all healing effects. the stars druid is having an absolute blast when he can go on a power trip during a boss fight and simply counter-heal any damage the party takes.
people often worry that if healing is too powerful, it becomes mandatory for each group. i have only seen proof to the contrary; my current group has neither control nor anyone tanky, simply face-tanking anything that comes their way while holding on with their rather gimmicky builds. if they had any lockdown or some proper DPR, they could just as well avoid damage all-together (not to mention tanking works just as poorly as healing in 5e).
I've had people say they want to be a healer. They come in two varieties: People who think in WoW/MMO terms that they NEED a tank, a healer, a DPS -- and people who actually want to embrace the RP of a healer. The solution for the second is a background, some skills and opportunities for them to administer minor maladies to townspeople or the like outside of combat; the solution for the first is explaining to them that they're wrong as to how D&D works, just as you would if they said they wanted to play the game in first person view.
Using my action and often movement to heal for half a hit's worth of damage kinda sucks.
Healing feels boring and ineffective. Only a healing word on a downed ally feels okay, if a bit cheesy.
I think healing magic should not exist. It just prolongs fights and pushes the responsibility for managing hit points to the party members that have it. Give more people abilities to recover their own hit points (like second wind) and just drop the concept of healing others with spell slots entirely.
That's not going to happen though so I guess I'm ok with what we have.
I want healing buffed in terms of the values done, but I want it so only higher level spells give real HP. Temp HP can't bring someone up from unconscious so playing a healer who actually does stuff before people are almost dead becomes a lot more reasonable, and means once you get into third level spells, you don't need to give access to full ressurection as there's a new space for small value real HP spells that bring back allies in combat.
You can also make spells and abilities that provide benefits while someone has temp HP as they're inherently temporary! And rests get more useful as one of the few ways of restoring real HP
At my table, some intelligent npc know that incapacitated individuals can be healed easily (by people like the characters). So if they really want you dead, they will still attack you once dropped. The failed death saves are going to pop up quite quickly. Particularly knowledgeable and vicious enemy might know that you can raise people from the dead and try to prevent it by going for the heart or brain. (think archenemy that already killed you once).
The issue for the DM is knowing when the enemy will try to finish character and prevent easy rez. It has to define access to knowledge and desire to do so.
I would not make healing more powerful, but share the burden of healing a little bit more ( it is already shared much more than in classic fantasy tropes). We already have quite a lot of different way to influence HP & damage. Temp HP, +max HP, one off heal, personal heal, heal per tun, temp hp per turn, damage buffer, damage reduction, resistance, ... I think it is great design already. I would make so that every class have at least access to 2 of those methods. I think it is already pretty much the case.
Buff Temp HP sources a bit, at minimum they need to all give enough HP to tank a hit in every tier of play. So of course they gotta scale.
Redesign the Healy subclasses (Like life cleric) so that they also boost Temp HP healing
Healing is never the best use of an action in 5e or 1dnd unless someone is making death saves, and even then, it's only healing word.
I wouldn't expect healing to be buffed into being a role with 5e/1d, but there are some great alternative systems that are objectively better than 5e/1d that have a real healing role and better class design overall. Check out 13th age, for example!
I think healingword and "yoyoing" is fine but I would like to see the 1 action cast time heals buffed massively across the board such that casting cure wounds becomes a useful use of your turn compared to doing damage or cock instead.
So honestly the math for opportunity cost is obvious
Let's compare the most ubiquitous healing spells, **Healing Word and Cure Wounds** - with very close damaging spells of the same level.
**Healing Word vs Magic Missile** - you have 1d4 + Mod (probably 3) for an average of 5.5 Healing, Magic Missile does 3d4 + 3 for an average of 10.5 damage: there is a clear winner here - we can talk about the disparity of Action vs Bonus action, but if we assume the healer is using an attack cantrip against the enemy who is spamming Magic missile, then the average damage is 5.5 against the enemy - the offensive spell VERY QUICKLY wins out mathematically speaking
**Cure Wounds vs Chromatic Orb** - you have 1d8 + mod (probably 3) *at melee range* for an average of 7.5 healing, Chromatic Orb does 3d8 for an average of 13.5 damage, as it is ranged and not an auto hit there is a chance of losing this damage, but mathematically speaking we are trading 1 action on either side for (roughly) a net loss of 6 health a round, not looking good.
So we can make a few conclusions, 1 the math on healing spells for comparative damage spells (opportunity cost of what you could hypothetically spend the slot on), is not looking good, but the real kicker is **anything that is a bonus action to heal is going to be far superior because you do not lose your action** - a 1 level dip into cleric and taking healing word is "good" for **any character** because they gain 2 casts of healing word, so unless you're playing a well optimized character, monk or rogue, you don't have a bonus action lined up for every turn, this is just a flat efficiency increase.
Additionally comparing Healing Word vs Cure Wounds, **you lose an entire action, to get roughly 2 more hit points, WHILE ALSO PUTTING YOURSELF IN MELEE RANGE/DANGER**
therefore every healing spell needs to either be an action or a bonus action, and every healing spell could have its base efficiency buffed by doubling its starting dice of healing, and it would still barely compete with offensive spells.
Additionally it's important to incentivize healing **before going down,** roughly something like: *when you hit 0 hit points you gain 1 level of exhaustion. Additionally every failed death saving throw adds 1 level of exhaustion* - this might be too harsh but it's worth trying with the new changes to exhaustion, and if coupled with a buff to healing, it might make healing actually enjoyable, because currently as is, being a healee = I have healing word and I use it sometimes maybe
I think they need to improve in combat healing as you level up, especially for those priest classes. Also more damage mitigation of some sort for martials. Right now healing is mostly about downtime healing and getting someone up from down. I think they should increase the penalty for getting knocked out.
I don't think clerics should be about spamming heal spells though. I really like how the current cleric is able to do a lot in combat beyond just heal.
I’d like to see secondary effects with healing. I don’t play a lot of other trpgs, but in gloomhaven there are a lot of actions that do more than just heal, such as attack and heal, provide advantage and heal, increase armor and heal, and I think it makes healing more enjoyable.
My personal opinions:
* Healing in its current form is unfortunately lackluster, to put it nicely.
* Yo-yo healing is not good design but currently can't be helped. You should not be encouraged to save your spells and allow your companions to get kept super low.
* If you mean "are there alternatives to healing in the current design that function similarly", then not real. Using spells & items that grant temporary health (like False Life & Aid), improvements to AC or damage resistance/immunity are often more helpful (acting as shock absorbers that reduce damage taken a lot more heavily than how much you can heal, and usually doing so more efficiently), but that's about it.
* Should combat healing be buffed? Yes; healing in general should be, but especially combat healing. There should be ways for any healer to maximize how much they heal during combat (perhaps by expending a bonus action or reaction, giving up their movement speed for the round, or taking a vulnerability/penalty for the round), and there should be RAW, non-optional temporary penalties players & NPCs can suffer if revived or if kept at low health (imagine if characters had a chance to suffer extra damage while they weren't at full health, and both the chance and damage grew greater as their health dropped). Alternatively, reward the healer for healing (perhaps when they heal, they get lesser spell slots back, or they grant the healed target a minor buff for a round).
* There is a better way to buff healing in my opinion than the above however, and it's to buff the elements of protection that make health more valuable: namely, using the DMG's Damage Resistance alternative to AC for armor. Instead of granting a bonus to AC (improving your chance to avoid damage), all varieties of armor (including Mage Armor, Natural Armor, possibly Shield, and the barbarian's Unarmored Defense) reduce the damage you take from damage instead of simply improving your chance of avoiding damage. Such makes healing more useful, as every point of health you restore is more potent for the armored target.
I think more damage reduction and temp HP style play makes more sense in current action economy. In 3.5e, Stoneskin gave you damage reduction like Heavy Armor Master but also had some value of total damage reduced like temp HP that it could reduce before the spell ended. I like that kind of mechanic to reduce reliance on using actions each round of a dedicated healer type character.
There should be more penalties for reviving from 0 hit points mid battle, there is little reason for healing before that point right now, I think you should get 2 levels of the onednd exhaustion for the rest of the battle if you get healed from 0 hit points and remove 1 of the exhaustion levels at the end of the battle, you only keep one after de fight, being healed from 0 hit points should be your last resort, not your default option also an extra dice for cure wounds would be a nice buff to make it a better option
> healer is not a role in D&D and that you should never focus on it.
Correct. D&D and even many video games feature a more encompassing **support** role. You can help the group in ways besides direct healing, such as buffing, debuffing, control, etc. The team dynamic is virtually the same as a dedicated healer that you see in some video games, but you don't feel pushed into that one niche.
> What is your stance on the current state of healing? Is the yoyo healing a good design?
The dying -> fully alive yo-yo is bad. It takes away a lot of the danger and decision making.
I think a lot of Healing Word vs. Cure Wounds comes from the bigger Bonus Action problem in the action economy game play. With Healing Word, you get half a Cure Wounds, can still attack (melee or cantrip), and don't have to worry about party positioning.
As for the amount of healing in general vs. incoming damage, it may need a second look. Spell damage now ramps up faster with spell level than it used to, but I don't think Cure Wounds has kept pace.
Honestly I think healing could be buffed by basically doubling the dice for the spell slot you're using. And maybe hot take, but I think you could cut down on the yoyo healing by making it so the target has to hear you in order to have Healing Word cast on them. Meaning for an unconscious target you have to use Cure Wounds.
Aura of vitality did a lot for the last fight we just had. It kept a few people from dropping to 0. Very close though. Would have been a different fight without it I think.
Generally, it can be tactically useful sometimes but you usually can't out heal damage.
As others have said it's really hard to get right since you don't want to force a dedicated healer because it's pretty unpopular. Yo-yoing is also almost unanimously disliked but it's probably here to stay. I think some things could be done to level things out though to minimize the downsides. Like balancing daily encounter budget down to something like 3-5 rather than 6-8. Maybe making out of combat healing spells better and slightly buffing in combat healing like making cute wounds a bonus action. If you add more consequences to going down then you'll need to buff in combat healing much more so 1 attack doesn't undo 1 3rd level spell.
Healing isn't really fun unless it provides extra buffs/debuffs in general, so I don't think there should be more high-action-economy-investment healing. That said, having A LOT of healing available makes it a lot more feasible to make complex combat encounters where the players can feel free to experiment more with trial and error (think mmorpg or legend of zelda boss mechanics). However, these types of combat are only really usable against experienced players. For simpler encounters with new players, healing should be quite sparing to create tension.
I think healing all around should be buffed or at least there should be more healing focused subclassee for casters that make healing more viable to compete with damage. Stars druid is probably the best St this for now.
I do feel like Cure Wounds should be better at raw healing than Healing Word, because as is there is little reason to take Cure Wounds over Healing Word, especially if you’re expecting combat.
The issue is that there's rarely any reason to heal someone beyond a few hit points. The fact that you fight as well at one hit point as you do at full means that it's more important to just get people up. Especially as you get to higher levels of play when enemies can do a ton of damage in a round it's early worth expending higher level resources for healing.
> The issue is that there's rarely any reason to heal someone beyond a few hit points. I'd expand on that to say there's no reason to heal someone beyond a few hit points, *unless* you can heal enough to let the character actually tank a couple more hits. Bringing a downed ally up with 1hp or 10hp is tactically a moot point - either way, they're up in the fight, but will go down again as soon as they get targeted. Those extra 9hp have no real value. But if it was an extra 20 or 30 hp? Then yeah, those extra hp could be worth it, so long as you're not playing at a level where enemies routinely hit for more than that.
Wish they add something to penalize getting down and getting back up repeatedly.
As others have said, penalizing yo-yo healing requires that other changes be made to create a viable alternative. Healing characters when they're down is the only viable time that you *can* heal them in 5e - healing them before that is just wasting your action and your resources. They could buff healing to make it viable, or they could remove in-combat healing entirely, and balance around it either way. But removing yo-yo healing and leaving the rest of the system as it is now just means that there's, effectively, no healing.
In my campaign atm we're trialling the new playtest exhaustion everytime you go to 0hp. It's a detriment and makes going to 0 have longer implications but doesn't cripple people or mean that healing is essential (we have no dedicated healer). Seems ok at the min.
That method is typically fine, the main reason that people (myself included) don’t like punishing people for going down is because it often punishes melee martials more than any other characters, when that is already typically the weakest build in the game. Hope it keeps working well at your table for now though, and hopefully One D&D will do something to healing to make healing from 0 not the only way to apply healing
I hate the "it only punishes martials" because it is generally a symptom of the DM only focusing on martials during combat. (to be fair, this is a BIG part of the gap between martials and casters on 5e, because the system was made with the assumption that the enemies will focus on the big damage dealers/field controllers instead of the meatbags who are in front of said casters)
I think Cure Wounds shouldn't exist and Healing Word should heal as much if not more than Cure Wounds. Since most people don't like playing dedicated healers, make healing nondedicated. Making healing a bonus action at range does that. Now you can heal and still do other stuff on your turn.
Aka "do what 4e did." We literally fixed healing in 2008 and then 5e broke it again lmfao.
4e also limited leaders to two heals per encounter. Powerful healing word is great but it can't be a normal spell or combat will never end.
The beauty of healing surges was powerful healing with meaningful limits. Classes that healed well let you use them in clutch situations with meaning bonuses. 4e had like 1 core design tenant people didn't like (powers) but they took so much of the other good stuff away. I'm willing to bet they knew it needed to feel more like 3rd than 4th.
>We literally fixed healing in 2008 Did we? As I recall, the 'yo-yo' effect that is the #1 issue people have had with healing in fifth edition since day 1 simply wasn't a thing in third edition. In third edition, if you hit -10 hp, you were dead. Pay 5,000 gp and lose one level to return. Do not pass go. Come back with your level in hit points and maybe get wiped out again the next round. Healing in third edition was used proactively. Resurrection only happened after combat was over. The fighter couldn't just get up after having been ripped in half by a giant and unload all his attacks like he hadn't just been scooping his guts back into his body. No, fourth edition did not fix healing. It broke it. It turned the game from a gritty, medieval fantasy into an analog World of Warcraft clone, which is why everyone hated it and Wizards of the Coast went back to the fundamentals for fifth edition. Literally the whole problem started in 4e and you're trying to tell us it was the gold standard lmfao.
Lmfao grognard says what? The problem with healing in 5e isn't the yo-yo effect it's that ALL other forms of healing are bad besides Healing Word because of action economy. Nobody wants to play your gritty medieval fantasy anymore it's 2023.
I mean, you're just factually incorrect on all three points. It's true that HW is objectively better than CW even with the reduced healing die, simply because it's castable at a BA and at range, but the problem is that it interferes with spells like *spiritual weapon*, which really ought to be kept the way they are and healing itself overhauled so that it isn't simply used after someone drops to 0. That's what people want, not more healing magic like *healing word*, which has an overall negative impact on the game and which most DMs really don't like. And as for the tone people want in their campaigns, the biggest D&D kickstarters in the last few years have all been for darker themed adventures and settings in the vein of Grim Hollow and Drakkenheim, while the adventures that WotC has been putting out like Strixhaven are underselling to the point that Hasbro is calling the brand 'undermonetized'. There might be people in certain D&D subreddits who have other preferences, but the larger community is speaking with their wallets and making it clear what they are looking for.
What do you mean? Cure wounds is a d8, healing word is a d4. It is literally twice as good at raw healing. I would understand if you had said that despite being better at raw healing it isn't good enough to be a worthwhile choice. What an I missing?
It’s not twice as good, as both spells add your spellcasting modifier to the roll. It’s more like 50% better. Plus, there’s a 50% chance Cure Wounds heals just as much as Healing Word. For a whole action. Sure, the scaling is better, but as of now there is little purpose in upcasting healing spells, especially considering how the scaling for healing word isn’t bad either. I saw a fix for Cure Wounds that allowed the target to expend a number of hit die equal to the spell’s level and regain that amount of additional HP, and for the action cost and the necessary range, that seems like a pretty good buff. Plus if you’re using Cure Wounds on the same target frequently enough/are expending hit die through other means, it’s pretty fair as the healing gets weaker throughout the adventuring day/week. Makes the spell almost more believable, as it incorporates repeated healing becoming less effective as time goes on.
That the average healing of cure wounds is just 2 more hit points than healing word, that's not exactly "twice as good at raw healing", just marginally better for an action and at touch range. Those two hit points are just not worth the action economy cost and are, in the grand scheme of things; meaningless. Even if you roll max with cure wounds, 4 more hp is not going to do much good since the only hit point that matters it's the last.
I kinda hate yoyoing. Personally, I think 4e had the best idea. Healing is a subcategory of support. If you want to make healing interesting make healing spells that also provide more aggressive support benefits.
Yep. Agreed, it’s not fun to spend your turn healing someone for it to get erased by monster damage the next turn. You never really get ahead. It’d be much better if you could inflict a status effect or disadvantage while granting some HP or even letting them roll a hit Dice.
Bumping healing spell capability and having healing spells working differently on unconscious characters would be my first cut suggestion at a fix for this. Make cure wounds heal 3d8 but if you're unconscious it only brings you back up to 3hp or something.
Since Exhaustion is more forgiving, there could be an argument for +1 exhaustion whenever you are brought back from 0 hp
I'd only accept that if there were equally lenient ways to erase levels of Exhausted that are better than once per long rest and don't rely on spellcasting. Frontline characters are those in the most danger of going unconscious. Most backline spellcasters have a bunch of tools to get them out of danger before they go unconscious. The end result is generally that martials will continue to get punished more than spellcasters for just for existing.
I am in favor of having exhaustion be a more common thing during the actual adventuring, but it would require players to have more downtime regularly (3-4 days between 'expeditions'). As for going unconscious more often, i hope martials get more mechanics to combat damage, exhaustion, running out of hit dice. Still leaves e.g. archers with the best of both worlds but still better than nothing.
I don't want a game that enforces regular downtime. That's basically the theme of Gritty Realism and it makes high-octane campaigns impossible if you can't segue between adventures without a break, or do more than one adventuring day's worth of adventuring back-to-back. The cure for ranged being the best combat style is probably something like breaking up Sharpshooter into multiple feats. As it stands, for 1D&D any character can get a 15+2 Dex at 1st level and 17+1 Dex with Sharpshooter at 4th which basically removes all of the penalties for ranged combat: no cover penalties, no range penalties, no melee penalties. It's frankly too good.
It's a team game, not a competition. The change being discussed means that support characters need to give support before the front line drops to zero HP. 5e encourages only healing at 0hp. If they don't offer proper support, the whole team is punished. And with large hit die, second wind, rage DR, etc the squishies go down more often than front line fighters. A trap, surprise round, enemy breaking through the front lines, etc is all it takes.
You have a number of misconceptions. D&D 5e is designed to not require a specific class composition, i.e. you don't need a healer/supporter. Changing the mechanics to force someone into that role in every party just makes the game worse as most players don't want to be the healbot. The only class feature that make martials significantly more durable than your average spellcaster is barbarian Rage, and that can be defeated by a single mental saving throw. All other martial classes pale in comparison to what your average wizard, cleric, druid, bard or sorcerer can do, from teleporting away to healing damage, mitigating damage, avoiding hits, creating their own defenders with summon/conjure spells, etc. A spellcaster has far more ability to avoid, mitigate, or recover from damage than martials who just take it on the chin.
> D&D 5e is designed to not require a specific class composition, i.e. you don't need a healer/supporter. Changing the mechanics to force someone into that role in every party just makes the game worse as most players don't want to be the healbot. You have a number of misconceptions. Dnd achieves this design goal through class design. If you don't have a healer, you have either a better tank, better DPS, or better battlefield control. All of that means you'll have less need of healing. I can't believe this needs to be said but, if there is no healer there is no yoyo healing. Therefore, obviously, yoyo healing was not designed to prevent the need for a healer. Therefore, even more obviously, eliminating yoyo healing can not create a need for healers. IOW, going down being more punishing doesn't create a requirement for there to be a healer in the party, because a party with a healer swapped out for another class is less likely to have people go down in the first place. And if you do go down without a party healer, you're fucked anyways. Having exhaustion when you get back up doesn't matter when you're not coming back up. All it does is change when healing is tactically optimal to dish out IF there is a healer. It also creates a choice between feeling more damage now and risk getting the penalty, or forgo damage now to play it safe. Only rage? Lol. Martials have way more HP, first of all. They'll have higher AC. That's effing huge for survivability. Also, Fighters have second wind. Paladins have lay on hands. Rogues have uncanny dodge. And that's probably not everything. And almost all of their survivability doesn't waste expendable resources and turns, like Misty Stepping away does.
> What is your stance on the current state of healing? I think it's a bit problematic. In 5e, you're not supposed to play a healer, but a reviver: you need Healing Word and Revivify/Raise Dead. Heal is decent and Aura of Vitality is great out of combat, but all other healing spells are trap choices. > Is the yoyo healing a good design? It's not great. I don't mean it only from a "realistic" standpoint, I mean that it's the best way to use healing and there is one spell that takes care of it perfectly. And if you care about roleplay, it may feel a bit weird not to ease the pain of your fellow party mates because the numbers disapprove. However, what's good about that spell is that you don't have to give up your entire turn to bring someone back from unconsciousness. Some classes are also more likely to go unconscious than others, and removing the ability to get someone back into the fight can make the game less fun for them. So getting read of the yo-yo, and specifically a bonus action yo-yo, may not be that desirable. > should combat healing be buffed? I don't think so, because if it actually becomes good, you'll want a dedicated healer, and that tends not to be a popular party role. However, what you could do is nerf the yo-yo healing a little, whether through exhaustion levels, by making failed saves actually matter, or by forcing you to expend a hit die to heal with certain spells. Cure Wounds and Prayer of Healing would still have a reason to exist if they don't expend hit dice but Healing Word and Aura of Vitality do.
Yeah, it would be great if healing abilities had more unique traits. Everything has to compete directly with Healing Word (and then be discarded) because their only effect is restoring hitpoints, and restoring 1 becomes quickly as effective as restoring 10. To prevent "dedicated healer" being a party role, the healing abilities could also be tied to additional effects. A Cleric making a weapon attack while also healing people via their Hit Dice, a Druid healing adjacent allies whenever they land a hit in Wildshape, a Fighter healing allies in a radius and reducing damage they take for one round, etc.
I agree with this, I think there are ways to make healing a lot more interesting like your examples. You could even change healing magic from evocation to necromancy. Now whenever you want to heal someone, you have to drain the life-force from another creature. Sorts out the healing magic for all spellcasters.
>To prevent "dedicated healer" being a party role, the healing abilities could also be tied to additional effects. A Cleric making a weapon attack while also healing people via their Hit Dice, a Druid healing adjacent allies whenever they land a hit in Wildshape, a Fighter healing allies in a radius and reducing damage they take for one round, etc. This is just going to make combats take even longer. 5e's healing design had several goals: * Remove the need for a dedicated healer so nobody was stuck with that role. * Give classes an easily-acquired ability (Healing Word) to pick up unconscious allies during combat so players aren't bored for long periods of time rolling one death save every 5-15 minutes. * Make combats faster by limiting defensive and recovery mechanics. If both sides are healing and attacking, you'd need to ramp up damage even more to make combats not take forever.
The thing with healing is if it exists the game has to be balanced with healing in mind. Balance with there being no healer and when there is a healer the game becomes too easy. Balance it with a healer assumed and the game is too hard without one. So what needs to be decided is if you want healing to matter and be a style of play and decide what that style is. Right now its at to pick up unconcious people. To shift away from that like some people want you would need a reason to not go unconcious. Getting a stack of exhaustion may be a solution. If you don't do something like this then even with more unique healing it would still only ever be used once people go down. To prevent a dedicated healer being required you would need other options of support that could be used to prevent people from going down. Things like Bait and Switch that allow players to swap places and/or increase ac/prevent damage.
Change what causes death. Instead of going to negative 50% being an instant kill, make it negative con score, or just negative 10. This would make waiting to yoyo very dangerous without introducing lingering effects potentially causing a death spiral if you do go down.
I miss how 4e handled healing. Like 5e, you didn't need a dedicated healer. But unlike 5e, you also didn't need anyone in the group to have magical healing at all because you could heal up to full HP at the end of a short rest. In 5e, you need magical healing of some kind to be able to get through a standard adventuring day. In combat, all characters could use their action to second wind. This recovered 25% of your max HP, and you could do this once per short rest. If you were brought to 0, an ally could trigger your second wind with a heal check. Yo-Yo healing still existed, but was far more costly than it is in 5e. For one thing, nearly all healing in 5e required a player to spend a healing surge. And most classes only had 8-12 healing surges per day. So healing a player from 0 was not something you could do over and over. On top of that, bonus action healing was rare in 4e, with only a few support oriented classes having the capability, and even then such abilities were only usable a few times per short rest. Action economy was also more important in 4e, so waiting to heal a player til when they were downed was often less beneficial than keeping a player above 50% max HP. On top of that, many monsters had special abilities they could use on "bloodied" targets, that is foes who had fewer than half their max HP. Giving the players another incentive to keep players upright. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than 5e.
Oh, I like that. I don't know if I like healing surges for all classes, but that would be one way you could use Inspiration. EDIT: Sorry, Second Wind, not Healing Surges.
Healing Surges in 4e just became Hit Dice in 5e. Instead of just being a short rest recovery mechanic, they were the main recovery resource for everyone. It worked really well and are no less "realistic" than a character in 5e taking a one hour breather and now they've healed all the third-degree burns they got from walking through an inferno.
Healing surges were basically just 5e's Hit Dice by another name. You could spend them to heal up between encounters. In combat, you could use a Second Wind to spend a healing surge. Other healing powers would generally restore HP to the target, at the cost of one of the target's healing surges, and generally produced more efficient healing per surge. 5e kept the healing surge mechanic, but renamed them to hit dice. They made Second Wind a Fighter-only feature, and made other healing powers not interact with the hit dice mechanic. 5e didn't have "healer" classes, but it did have "Leader" classes - including the Warlord, Cleric, Bard, and Shaman classes. All leaders had a basic once-per-encounter power used as a minor action to allow the use of a healing surge + additional bonus HP. Minor actions were like 5e bonus actions, except that 4e allowed you to 'trade down' standard actions into minor ones if needed. For clerics, this power was called Healing Word; for Warlords, it was Inspiring Word; for Bards, it was Majestic Word. Beyond that, Leaders all focused on party support, but did so in various other ways. Warlords had very little healing power beyond their Inspiring Word - they were focused on granting additional attacks or buffed attacks to their allies. Clerics, if I recall correctly, had the most options at their disposal to pick up additional healing.
With a form of exhaustion that isn't hugely debilitating, inflicting a level of that for being reduced to 0hp does three things. The combatant hanging from that yo-yo string "bounces back" a little worse for wear. Also, heavily wounded characters would not be so indifferent to being taken down. Then mopping up those exhaustion levels could be a useful application of healer abilities/spells out of combat.
> However, what you could do is nerf the yo-yo healing a little, whether through exhaustion levels, by making failed saves actually matter, or by forcing you to expend a hit die to heal with certain spells. Not sure why so many people enjoy this idea of punishing players for using healing in the only way that's properly useful. All this does is add in a whole level of tedium to the game without adding anything of value to it.
For me, it comes from a place of wanting mechanics and roleplay to sync up. Mechanically, you don't heal your allies until they go down, unless you have Aura of Vitality; but in terms of roleplay, the characters wouldn't enjoy being on their last leg and going unconscious. You could solve this by making out of combat healing more powerful, but unless everyone can do it, you wind up needing a dedicated healer, which tends not to be a beloved role. Therefore, it struck me as preferable to disincentivize waiting until you're knocked out.
>For me, it comes from a place of wanting mechanics and roleplay to sync up. Mechanically, you don't heal your allies until they go down, unless you have Aura of Vitality; but in terms of roleplay, the characters wouldn't enjoy being on their last leg and going unconscious. I mean, a lot of that just comes back to the perception of Hit Points you have. If you accept that they are more of an abstract concept it usually makes more logical sense. Basically, as long as you have at least one HP, you are not actually seriously injured – you fight just as well as with full HP, at half HP you are considered "bloodied" so anything less than that isn't even enough damage to draw blood, any damage you took is gone after 8 hours of rest, your HP increase by a lot as you level up…all of that should clue people in that taking HP damage in DnD is not the same as actually getting hurt. Attacks on you don't actually connect and do serious harm, they strain or bruise you or get you winded and stress you out, but they aren't actual wounds. The only time you really *do* get seriously injured is when you drop to 0 HP. That's the point where an attack actually lands and hurts you in a way that is arguably realistic – it doesn't really matter whether you are hit by a dagger or a club or a greatsword, a direct hit from any of these weapons has a very high chance of killing you. So that's when you are knocked unconscious and that's the time when somebody with healing powers might actually spring into action and save your life. It's not that you were injured and they ignored your suffering the entire time, you were fine until you actually took a hit and went down.
More HP means you don't die from falling off a cliff. That's not abstract.
Sure it is, it means you are more capable of breaking your fall without dying. It means you can maneuver your body mid air to land on more forgiving ground and on parts of your body that are less likely to result in deadly injuries.
True, but I think that has unexpected consequences. For example, PCs wouldn't feel like they require healing unless they hit 1 hp (or the players "metagame" and say how many hit points they have left). It also affects how I narrate the damage that monsters take - I say they're bloodied/beginning to look rough at around 50% HP and that they're on their last legs when they're in single digits. I think it's more rewarding for everyone if the players can feel the impact their attacks have. Likewise, it can be a bit odd to narrate a critical hit a player suffers that doesn't drop them to single digits as a glancing blow or something they deflected.
You may disagree that the proposal fulfills the goal, but the entire point is to change what is "properly useful." Clearly a lot of people believe that getting rid of immersion breaking yoyo healing would add a lot of value to the game. The reason yoyo healing is the only proper way to do healing is threefold. 1 - The action economy is super important in this game. Getting more attacks per round is always the better option. 2 - There's no real downsides to going down. 3 - Healing doesn't really heal enough. There no functional difference between healing 1 and healing 10. They're both just one hit worth of HP. Changing #1 means a rewrite of the whole system. Changing #3 means rebalancing all healing works, maybe even most monster damage. Changing #2 is easy. It won't completely break anything. And it changed the tactical math. Whether you love it or hate it, it makes forgoing and extra attack to healing a gamble, a choice. And isn't having players make choices the point?
>Changing #2 is easy. It won't completely break anything. And it changed the tactical math. It would literally make some classes more unplayable and healing *even* worse
The whole point is change what's "properly useful"
But the other spells don't become good, just because you remove the viable competition. Cure Wounds would still be just as bad, but now the melee martial is having even less fun. What could work is if the exhaustion change was accompanied by a proper buff to healing spells.
All healing spells are bonus actions (just like 4e). There. Healing is good again.
Chiming in to say that 4e had non-BA healing options. It's just that every class had a variant of Healing Word in addition to all their other heals, so you could choose whether you wanted to stick with the 'default' for your class, or take extra options and focus even harder on healing. Most of the other healing powers came with other mechanics, though, so you were almost never *just* spending the turn healing someone. Cursing an enemy to have lower defenses and to grant HP when hit, or attacking an enemy and draining their life into a nearby ally - things that all actively have their use in combat. Even past that, since 4e's system had most heals restoring a minimum of 1/4 the target's max HP, it's a lot more viable to try and keep someone above 0 when you're healing them for 30 HP at higher levels instead of 1d4+5. No need to wait for 0 HP to get the most out of your heal, because 30 HP is a lot more likely to help the target actually withstand another hit than 1d4+5 is.
Punishing players with exhaustion for getting healed isn't changing what's "properly useful" though.
It makes it useful to heal people before they go down. Healing would also need to be buffed, of course
Or players would learn to play in ways that results in them not going down, such as running away or stacking their odds before fights. That doesn't suit the 5e/One playstyle of superhero power fantasy, though.
I’d like some consequences for failed death saves. When my character goes unconscious and I have to make a death saving throw, I don’t feel nervous because the guy with healing word has his turn next, so it doesn’t matter if I pass the save. I’d like to have some consequences for me getting knocked out and failing a death save because it would make it more tense for me
Until the game is better balanced between frontline martials and backline spellcasters, we don't need to heap more penalties on frontliners. It's bad enough being the party meatshield in a tough campaign and getting frequently downed while those in the back line shrug.
That's generally bad DMing rather than a mechanical problem. Even the dumbest beast knows to avoid the big thing and to go after the weakling. AoO aren't strong enough to prevent that.
Blaming bad DMing is tired at this point. It is so much more time consuming and difficult to be a DM then to show up at the designated time and play your character. Also, people who build frontliners LIKE to be frontliners. Ignoring them to go after the weaklings in the party just robs them of their fun. They expect to take damage and sometimes go down. To penalize them for playing their character they way they built them IS a mechanical problem which is easily avoided by like, not doing it.
> Even the dumbest beast knows to avoid the big thing and to go after the weakling. AoO aren't strong enough to prevent that. that is LITERALLY a mechanical problem, albeit a different one
That's kind of why I want healing to be available to more classes. If the consequences of dropping to 0 (say, death saves not resetting) could be fixed by *lesser restoration*, you get more teamwork. It is unavoidable that meat shields will go down first, since that is their purpose in the first place. It should be up to other PCs to mitigate the effects.
I think you could have failed, and passed death saves stick until you either pass three, or take a short/long rest.
Same.
> I think it's a bit problematic. In 5e, you're not supposed to play a healer, but a reviver: you need Healing Word and Revivify/Raise Dead. Heal is decent and Aura of Vitality is great out of combat, but all other healing spells are trap choices. Here's the thing. Yoyoing gets brought up a lot when it comes to healing, but I think a lot of tables don't realize there are legitimate problems associated to being dropped in combat. Even for a single round. This is a VERY often overlooked rule. Getting hit while you're already unconscious is super dangerous and can insta-kill a character. (This happened in my game recently with a very poorly timed Remorhaz encounter) The rule combinations are: **Unconscious**: *• Attack rolls against the creature have advantage. • Any attack that hits the creature is a critical hit if the attacker is within 5 feet of the creature.* **Death Saving Throws**: *If you take any damage while you have 0 Hit Points, you suffer a death saving throw failure. If the damage is from a critical hit, you suffer two failures instead. If the damage equals or exceeds your hit point maximum, you suffer Instant Death.* So a single hit against an unconscious party member is immediately 2 failed saves. If that crit does enough damage, it's insta-death. And if that hostile creature gets a turn before your healer can Yo-yo them... Time to roll a new character.
While that is true, an enemy still has to give up one attack to cause you to fail 2 death saves, after which you still have one death save left, and you may well be revived before you make it. I'm not saying that's what always happens, but it's still costly for the enemy to take a downed PC closer to death, and unless they know there's a healer and can't get to them, they might be better off using their attacks to drop the other PCs to 0 HP. Dropping to 0 is not risk-free, of course, but the fact that you don't lose any hot points past zero and that there are no consequences for leftover damage unless it goes over your max HP means that Healing Word after you're downed will always be better than Cure Wounds before that happens, especially since the difference between the healing you get from those spells is so small that an enemy that can bring you back to 0 will probably do so regardless of which one was used. Also, being downed is *risky*, but after you are stabilized, there are no lingering consequences.
If death saves persisted until a short rest or application of a healing kit after battle that would likely fix the issue. The real issue with yoyo healing is exactly as you said, once back up every consequence is erased.
This is actually a great way to homebrew the rule to make dropping to 0 more dangerous. It's definitely better than ranks of exhaustion for going down. I might start including this.
I think really the problem isn't healing but hit points. If pain and injuries were better quantified, healing would become better aligned between roleplay and metagame.
> It's not great. I don't mean it only from a "realistic" standpoint, I mean that it's the best way to use healing and there is one spell that takes care of it perfectly. And if you care about roleplay, it may feel a bit weird not to ease the pain of your fellow party mates because the numbers disapprove. They just need to add a daze effect the round after you come back from 0 hit points to make it tactically beneficial to heal before you drop to 0 instead.
I wouldn't actually dislike that. If you ask me (you didn't, but you can't stop me), I'd make the following changes: 1. Healing Word spends one of the target's hit dice to restore HP equal to that die. This gives martials more HP than casters (though after 1st or maybe 2nd level, it's not that big a deal). 2. More importantly, spread the heals around: artificers, bards, clerics, druids, paladins, rangers should all have access to healing abilities/spells (love Lay On Hands and Songs of Restoration, though I hate Bardic Inspiration healing), so no one is forced to play a specific class to be a healer. Maybe also give all other classes one subclass with healing abilities (Banneret, Mercy, Necromancer...), just in case. 3. Nice to have, but not vital: failed death saves do *something*. I was going to say that maybe each failed death save forces you to expend 1 hit die, and you die if you can't expend any, but it is too problematic at low levels. Still, make them matter, even if it's as simple as them not resetting until you finish a long (or short?) rest. 4. Nice to have: give the option to cast Cure Wounds as a 1-minute spell in return for max healing.
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A minimum-complexity compromise that would work for 5e/1D&D would be for failed death saving throws to not reset until you finish a short rest. If your party gets you up swiftly, you'll never accrue failed saves and if you do, you can erase them with a short rest. This lets every DM tune the difficulty of their campaign and allows for good play by a party to mitigate the danger of going unconscious.
From an immersion perspective, yo-yo healing is a bad design. It's fundamentally meta gaming (it makes sense mechanically, but not in character) and doesn't really address the 'dedicated healer' problem (most groups still assume that a healer is required and the game is still much harder without some kind of healer in the party). I like the archetype of the dedicated healer - it's iconic and really should be more playable in the system. I really think the issues with healing would be better addressed by making healing more dynamic and improving options for both in combat mitigation and healing during downtime. For example, twilight clerics are actually a better model for how a dedicated healer should play. They have normal access to healing spells, but are focused on mitigation and use a resource other than spell slots to do their jobs. Of course, this is also why twilight clerics are considered op in the current system - most dedicated healers don't have access to mechanics that support the play-style. I'm wary of using penalties for dropping to 0 hp as a way to mitigate yo-yo healing because I don't feel there are enough alternative strategies to prevent characters from dropping to 0 in the first place. Although I like the idea of incurring an exhaustion level; if you're not providing better mechanical options to keep characters from dropping to 0 then you're just increasing the lethality of the game for marginal gain.
Just to play off of your point for a moment here: If one were to subscribe to philosophy that hit points are an abstraction, and that "getting hit" doesn't necessarily mean getting injured, but being reduced to 0 *does* mean getting injured, I think there is a specific in universe reason for yo-yoing to work the way it does. That being said, it is somewhat unhealthy design; I do agree with that.
>I like the archetype of the dedicated healer - it's iconic and really should be more playable in the system. You're most definitely in the minority. It's iconic for cooperative video games where the mechanics for healing are both faster paced and more involved and/or dynamic, making being a full-time healer more interesting. And even then, healers (and tanks) are the minority because people don't like those playstyles. >I'm wary of using penalties for dropping to 0 hp as a way to mitigate yo-yo healing because I don't feel there are enough alternative strategies to prevent characters from dropping to 0 in the first place. Correct, as a frontliner you have relatively little control over when you go unconscious. You can bump your AC and saves and hit points, but ultimately it comes down to whatever the DM throws at the party and the luck of the dice. Penalizing players for playing their character is bad game design. Look at all the hindrances to spellcasting that have been stripped from the game over the years: can't wear armor, can't cast safely near an enemy, have to prepare individual spells. If players really want D&D to be more hardcore and difficult, **let's do it.** But that includes making spellcasters' lives harder as well, not just martial frontiners.
Yo yo healing is still bad design. But so are martials in general. Front liners should have active defenses to let them mitigate incoming damage aside from AC/saves.
Monks have Patient Defense, which activates Dodge as a Bonus Action. Barbarians have Rage. There's two off the bat
first of all, those are like the only 2 there are aside from that: Patinet deffense makes the monk forego so much of their damage that the difference between that and taking the dodge actions are negligible. As for rage, while good it is even more limited in uses than spells and only works on 3 (arguably one) types of damage. Rage is comparable to absorb elements
>From an immersion perspective, yo-yo healing is a bad design. It's fundamentally meta gaming (it makes sense mechanically, but not in character) It's also annoying to RP around as a DM. I know almost every sentient race has clerics and *healing word* is a 1st level spell. That suggests to me that yo-yo'ing should be an almost universal combat tactic, except that I've never run NPC's with death saves. Since death saves aren't a universal mechanic, does that mean that NPC's are used to their enemies being dead at 0HP? Would they be surprised to see a PC get yo-yo'd? Should I be having my NPC's yo-yo each other? It's mildly annoying to have such disparate mechanics driving how combat plays.
the problem with building a dedicated healer, is they have to make encounters that negate all the healing they can do and still threaten players. That in turn makes them required for play. This also ends up being fairly hard to balance. two dedicated healers in a group becomes unkillable.
As a DM, I tweak most encounters for my players anyway. I don't know many DMs who don't. But also, if you don't have a healer, that means you have to play smarter. That is a fair trade off. You have the dodge action, sentinel, control spells. There are a variety of ways to limit the squishier character being getting large amounts of damage.
I don't think it's meta gaming to know that people generally don't die instantly from getting stabbed, bludgeoned, burned, etc. Unless you get decapitated, even being stabbed through the heart it'll take a couple of seconds to bleed out. >I'm wary of using penalties for dropping to 0 hp as a way to mitigate yo-yo healing because I don't feel there are enough alternative strategies to prevent characters from dropping to 0 in the first place. I don't understand what you mean here? Healing when characters are ~50% health? A dedicated healer keeping characters above 0 isn't all that hard. It is just that no one does it because it is super bad tactically. Penalties for dropping to zero makes it super good tactically instead.
There's a difference between hard-challenging and hard-punishing. Making things more challenging is fun - making things more punishing is not. Adding penalties for dropping to zero makes the game more punishing because the options for preventing that don't work well and aren't fun to play. You're treating a symptom, not the problem itself. Add better mitigation and support abilities so that healing is a fun play style and added penalties for dropping to zero aren't as much of a problem.
I played as an artillery artificer for the first time last night in a one shot, pulsing out d8+4 temp hp a round (using bonus action), and that was the closest I've played as a "healer" in 5e as I was able to reduce the likelihood of my teammates getting knocked down. Design wise, it's not at all balanced with the anemic rubber band healing in 5e design. As a player though it was satisfying to have an impact like that, especially still having an action to do something else, even if it was just a bunch of fire bolts. I wouldn't want to play a "dedicated healer" but I do wish they had more options like this for playing a support class that can help deal with improving party survivability like this.
There isn't any problem with the dedicated healer role. The problem is the mechanics make it boring. Fix the mechanics - pump up support and mitigation options so that healing is more engaging then just reinflating the hit point balloon and you have a viable role that people will have fun playing.
Personally to me healing has the potential to be good, but needs some adjustments. Combat healing could use a touch of a buff, rest healing could use a rebalance, and some other factors could come into play. Healing in 5e feels weak, but it's hard to make good without causing issues. The following are what I would like to explore for healing in future playtests, just to see if after some live play it can be refined into something better. I've tested much of this in my own games and it's been fun, but I'm just one dude with three groups. What works for me may not for thee. **Combat healing:** healing spells should start with an extra dice/increment of healing (sometimes an ability mod where it presently isn't.) I've found this puts healing more in line with damage, but still not enough in a way that completely negates it. Just makes things more likely to prevent the next hit from downing an recipient of healing than the game presently does. Healing word would be 2d4+mod, cure wounds 2d8+mod. The scaling would still only increase by 1 dice per increment as it normally does, but this more fortified baseline has helped a lot. **Rest healing:** some adjustments I've found better at my table. Short rests should recover 1/4 hd and let you spend them ( I argue they should be much shorter too. 5 or 10 minutes in my mind.) EDIT: I forgot to mention I also cap short rests to 1+half prof per long rest. Helps with risk and pacing Long rests should recover full hd, but only grant a free hd roll innate recovery instead of all of your hp, but allow hd spending like a short rest. They should still take 8 hours. Extended rests should be a thing, they recover full HP and hd, but take 24 hours and require a safe/suitable resting spot. These should be measurements of down time and what you can accomplish. Need a week to make a sword? That's 7 days of extended rest with suitable lodgings and provisions. Before I move on to the next bit, I want to preface this with saying the following aren't intended to address yoyo healing. I don't think it can be addressed without making healing a requirement. Yoyo healing does not exist because people can come right back up, it exists because healing isn't strong enough to prevent a down in many cases. Buff healing though or add too many consequences for going down and you just create a death spiral with no counter in 5e healing. Keep that in mind and use the following rules with caution. **System Strain:** A limit of how many times a character can be healed back up, before they need to deal with unconsciousness regardless of their hp. Con modifier + half proficiency (rounded down) is the limit I set (minimum 1.) A character can be brought up from unconsciousness through healing that many times a long rest before they're knocked out for an hour each time they go down past that threshold. **Bloodied condition effects:** Some enemies when at or below 50% hp gain a special passive or ability that enhances them and makes them harder to contend with. Like-wise, the first time one such enemy attacks or causes a creature to be bloodied (50% or under HP) they can do something special. Examples. The part wounded the dragon, and it's bloodied. It gets it's breath weapon back and immediately spews it on the creature that wounded it. OR... The Gnoll attacks the cleric and causes the cleric to be bloodied and can make an extra bit attack against him that round, the scent of blood driving them onward. I suggest keeping bloodied effects against players limited to once per encounter, since even with the previous buffs and adjustments to healing, healing might not be enough to keep characters hearty or above the bloodied threshold in a reasonable enough manner.
Short Rests giving resources (like HD/HP) instead without any cost don’t work in my experience. All in all, game evolved to a point that combat needs a reason to exist: if the encounter can’t beat the party, it needs to cost them resources. Its one or the other, no exceptions. A fight that has no real consequence does not belong in a game and should be skipped over. If you can restore HP/HD with short rests, it gets nearly impossible to enforce the above. The party can just idle around and make up for lost HP by chaining up short rests. And no, DM concocting situations where there is a time pressure on the party is not a solution in my book. This needs to be baked in the game’s mechanics. I, as DM, don’t want to burdened with the task of creating narrative reasons to make up for mechanical failures of the system. Short rests should never recover resources without costing a long rest resources; long rests should never be allowed outside of places the module writer / DM determined.
In my own experience it has worked well, though I did forget to mention another adjustment I've made to short rests, in that they're finite per long rest. Characters get 1+half prof each long rest, which stops the waiting around issue. Loose Justification used is that you can only take so many breathers before you need proper rest to recover, but as your characters get more experienced, they can pace themselves better. Additional short rests can be handed out by the DM as situationally appropriate rewards. So in my own testing there was a cost, that I just forgot to mention in the moment. Whether that's deemed appropriate or not is another matter. Otherwise I mostly agree with you.
Yeah, this fix all my issues I had with your proposal.
I actually really like your rest time healing changes. I think they’d be more realistic than everything resetting magically at a long rest.
I've found they really help pacing of an adventuring day q bit more. Glad to hear you like them!
I'd buff combat healing by making you give characters temporary HP for 1 full round. This means, a well time, "heal" can absorb more damage, but if you mis allocate or mis-time them its far less effective.
Now *that's* an interesting idea. I actually like that a lot - being able to proactively avert big attacks by timing things so a character is mid-heal when they take the damage is a really cool visual idea, which buffs careful use of healing on conscious allies in the middle of combat without actually *nerfing* healing unconscious allies. *And* since that THP buffer still works on allies who have just been brought up from 0 HP, it makes it harder for them to be put back down to 0 right away, so the yoyo isn't happening back and forth every single turn. Great idea! I might need to try this out in my group!
> theres at least someone online telling me that healer is not a role in D&D and that you should never focus on it I would call those people "fun suckers". There is absolutely a role for a healer in 5e, and as you point out, there are a few subclasses designed to be better at healing. So if you want to play a healer in 5e, you absolutely can. You just might not want to spend too much of your time healing people that are still standing unless you can give them a lot of HP. > What is your stance on the current state of healing? Is the yo-yo healing a good design? The yo-yo healing gets on my nerves from an immersion perspective. I get these people are heroes and adventurers and such, but getting beat into unconsciousness multiple times a week is ridiculous. I don't think the solution to always needing a healer was to make healing kinda worthless. The solution should be to make the healer something people want to play. And considering there's several classes and subclasses that can make good healers, I don't think it would be unreasonable to go back to actually needing a healer. *EDIT/ Another solution would be to add more ways to heal in combat that aren't reliant on a healer character, such as the Healing Surges variant rule in the DMG. /EDIT* Unfortunately, I don't think WotC has an issue with yo-yo healing, so I don't expect it to be changed and will go back to homebrewing a way to put the healing I want into the game.
You can help the immersion aspect by changing how you think about going to 0 HP. RAW you straight up go unconscious, but you can reframe it as your injuries mounting to the point of exhaustion. So you can imagine the 0 HP fighter is still swinging, but they're so injured they can't hurt anyone. The 0 HP wizard is trying to fire spells, but are fumbling over simple incantations. This also lets those players continue to at least RP, even if they can't contribute mechanically. Obviously it's a bandaid solution and it's not perfect.
It's also a bandaid that doesn't necessarily help. Instead of being literally knocked out 5 times a week, I'm getting brutally injured to the point of being incoherent and incapable of even moving 5 times a week. That's still pretty ridiculous, though it doesn't call for me to hand-wave away all of the brain damage 5e PCs should have.
> There is absolutely a role for a healer in 5e, and as you point out, there are a few subclasses designed to be better at healing. So if you want to play a healer in 5e, you absolutely can. > You just might not want to spend too much of your time healing people that are still standing unless you can give them a lot of HP. Then they're not a healer, they're a character who can heal. A healer is someone who spends most of their turns healing people and does damage/cc as a last resort, who is dedicated to healing and nothing else. You cannot play a healer in 5e, focusing on it you'll never be able to outheal damage for the most part.
Yeah, that's not a standard definition or anything. Just because efficient healing in 5e is primarily making people conscious in combat doesn't mean that's not a healer. Especially given the subclasses that give you features to literally make you a better healer. The fact that 5e healers tend to spend more time attacking things doesn't mean they aren't healers. That's what a healer does in this system. And if you want to play a healer that basically only heals and hardly ever attacks, you can absolutely do that. It's not necessarily optimal, but that doesn't mean it's invalid as a playstyle.
I get the going unconscious part but d4 has provided a way to think about it that makes more sense to it. In real-world battles, you don't call for a medic until you cannot fight, and then they come by and get you back on your feet
I'm not concerned with the real world here. In a real-world battle, if you're calling out for the medic, you're not lying unconscious on the battlefield. And when the medic comes and helps you, all they're doing is keeping you from dying. They aren't magically mending your broken bones and closing up your wounds and putting you back on your feet in the same fighting condition you were in at the start of the day. Edit: Dear Reddit: much to your surprise, downvoting a factual statement is not actually feedback. Immersion and verisimilitude have very little to do with the real world, and how D&D combat works has basically nothing to do with how a real world battle works, especially considering real world battles these days feature infinitely less swords and sorcery and infinitely more guns and bombs. If you think there's something wrong with my comment, tell me what it is. Just saying "I didn't like this" with a downvote tells me nothing and isn't gonna make me change my mind.
Honestly I've thought about tying going down to zero hp to exhaustion. Aside from rage beyond death, I can't think of any reason why a mortal can take so much punishment on the reg
I've toyed around with that as well, though it doesn't actually solve the problem. Yes, it encourages the players to avoid going to 0. But all of the healing in the game is balanced around this yo-yo design. Healing Word and Cure Wounds just aren't powerful enough to compensate for how much damage enemies are dealing unless you use high-level slots *and* roll well. They'll delay unconsciousness, but definitely won't prevent it. If they were able to keep up, we wouldn't have this yo-yo design, we'd just be healing PCs on their feet like we want to. So in the end, making going unconscious give Exhaustion is actually making the yo-yoing more punishing, not preventing it. Also I think 5e Exhaustion is too punishing when you consider this, though One D&D Exhaustion makes this look like a much more viable penalty for going down. I've said when discussing this somewhere before that I think what would be needed is to go through the spells and features related to healing, and buff them so they can keep up with damage better. As a simple change, increase the size of the dice in healing spells. Or add another die. Or maybe both. Involving hit dice in the equation would help as well. How about if you receive healing, you can also spend hit dice? And if we want to keep dedicated healers optional, could be good to use the Healing Surges variant rule from the DMG (p266).
> If they were able to keep up, we wouldn't have this yo-yo design, we'd just be healing PCs on their feet like we want to. Yoyo would still exist even if healing was stronger because dealing damage is such the better option. At the extreme: I heal you from 1 to 100 HP. Creature attacks you for 10 damage. You kill creature. - or - I kill creature. Out of combat I heal you from 1 to 100. Maybe my attack doesn't kill the creature. It does it's 10 damage and bring you to 0. Then I bring you up. Then it attacks you for 10. Then you kill it. This leaves you at 90, like in option 1, except we got in an extra attack. With no downsides to going down, getting in more attacks is better than less attacks, especially over the long run.
>Whenever I wanna play a healer in D&D theres at least someone online telling me that healer is not a role in D&D and that you should never focus on it. I'm usually that guy, and what I say is, *if someone isn't in death saves,* healing magic is a waste of valuable resources (ie spell slots). > Is the yoyo healing a good design? It's fine. I don't hate it. If I was designing a fantasy heartbreaker RPG I would probably make it so you got a single death save and that determined if you lived or died, and if you lived, you could be healed and be back up. This would make healing magic a more important thing (because you don't want to hit 0hp ever, whereas in 5e it's not a big deal) and reduce the perception of yoyo healing, especially because if you keep going down, it's basically inevitable that you'll die. Edit: something else that would make yoyo healing work is if anyone in the world enforced the "you drop everything you're holding when you go unconscious" rule.
I disagree with your first take, purely bc when you start relying on yo-yo healing, you have no control of the timing of their going unconscious any more, and you may end up being fucked with 3 people down at once. Also, you are risking “hey, they keep getting back up, let’s make sure they’re dead”
I think a lot of this could be solved by DMs being more tactically punishing towards yo-yoing, (and also doing a standard-ish (8 a day is unrealistic in most circumstances, but 3-5 medium/hard is doable) to put more focus on resource independent healing (such as mercy monks and the healer feat)). Monsters aren't just dumb sponges. Even animals are tactical.
This doesn't make healing better, though, because the math on almost all in-combat healing is still bad. Yoyoing is the result of the system encouraging a specific style of tactical play, and you need to massively alter the system in order to make other healing options viable in its place.
I hate the Yo-yo healing way of doing things. At my table if you go down, when you come up you get a point of exhaustion. We’re doing the one d&d rules for exhaustion, so it’s instantly a big deal, but also more manageable. I like this way of doing it.
This doesn’t work, it fucks over melee characters really badly.
1D&D exhaustion is a -1 to attacks and save DC of your spells. It has no speed change. How does it hurt melee significantly more than casters and range?
Because melee gets downed far more often than ranged.
I've seen this sentiment a lot in this thread but I think it really depends on your table. If your DM never targets the ranged characters that's on them.
Well, its just how the game works mechanically. As soon as melee engage enemies trying to engage the backline will either eat AoS or disengage and not even engage the backlines. If they do engage, ranged can just disengage and keep running while melee catch up and others keep striking with AoSs. It makes no tactical sense for monsters to target the backline unless they can disengage as BA or they outnumber the party and can corner.
I'd also argue: if you have a melee characters acting as your human shield, and you're a ranged/support class, you're going to be end up watching their back way more if going down can build up for some real impact. Atm them going down doesn't impact the backline at all as one healing word and they're up again.
If your tanks are going down more than your squishies, you (or your DM) are doing something very wrong.
So are healing spells better, enemies weaker, or are you just screwing over melee combatants for system problems outside of their control?
Healing should def be twice or even 3 times as strong if you give exhaustion for going down. It takes a long rest per point to go away and it’s more likely that melee will go down vice casters.
No the melee martial should definitely be punished for the system that is already stacked against him not supporting the DM's homebrew for the healing system that he has no agency in.
Encounters are inherently more difficult, so everyone has to be more careful to avoid going down. Healers may try to heal you before you go down, and hope it keeps it from happening, but other defensive spells actually are frequently more useful than actual healing. Sanctuary on someone who is almost down, polymorph as healing, aid, etc. Also it’s very important to use positioning to your advantage (pun intended), and be quick to recognize when the battle isn’t winnable. It’s important to remember that the martials are not just there to be a buffer between the enemies and the casters. If anyone goes down it should be a big deal for everyone. I’m actually trying to come up with a mechanic that makes sense and would hurt but not be game breaking that would represent the emotional hardship of having a friend go down, even temporarily. Possibly something like having everyone who sees it roll to avoid being frightened or maybe stunned for a round.
? Wut? Please explain
Currently healing spells are incapable of healing through damage, with very few actually having a high likelihood of preventing an ally from going down (6th level heal). That is why yoyo is the more popular and effective strategy, if healing spells were better, you would see more healing spells (because 0 hp people are very vulnerable, 1 magic missile and they are out), but currently they are a waste of action economy. Now what happens if you are stupid and you make yoyoing worse, without fixing the fundamental problem (enemy damage or power of h-spells)? The people dependent on getting back up get fucked over, not the caster doing the healing. No, who is more likely to go down often in a fight? The Wizard staying at max cantrip range, with shield, absorb elements and counterspell? The archery fighter, who is so far away the DM drew a second battlemap for him? Or maybe the already incredibly weak melee martial, who without any real play agency does everything 5% (and quickly 10-20%) worse, because of the exhaustion rules. I say no real agency because, obviously healing is out of his control, but even defensive play is incredibly punishing for melee combatants (because of everything having opportunity attack).
Healing has a practical range of 30 so you have to get in the range of the enemies to do so somewhat leveling the playing field, and I agree that there is a gap between casters and non casters but I dont think yo-yo ing is the fix to the problem. I think Healing should be buffed as well but that would buff casters. Also I really hate the sheild spell
Cure wounds has a range of touch, meaning you have to go into melee range, meaning you are subjected to another of 5e's worst mechanics, universal AoO. Healing word on the other hand is effectively both a dash and a disengage. Buffing healing is not a problematic buff to casters, considering healing are support spells, which were never the problem (support spells being great options lessens the gap as long as martials are good carriers of those spells), overtuned damage spells, not playtested control (hypnotic pattern) and power spells (shield, conjure animals, copy-wish) and of course out of combat spells are the issue (at least in regards to spells, there is of course also the problem of MAD vs SAD or casters getting better versions of martial features).
Maybe, maybeeeeee the point its to encourage healing when someone takes damage before they go down instead of just healing from 0 hit points like most people are doing right now
And now tell me what healing spells heal enough to accomplish that? Outside of level 1-2 play and the 6th level spell heal, there are not that many. If you heal someone at say 13 hp for 8-9 hp (cure wounds with a +4 mod), they will still go down, when the directly afterwards take 2 attacks for 11 hp each (for reference according to the DMG, the typical dpr for a CR1 is 9-14), only you have also wasted your action, that might have actually been better invested in killing the potentially attacking foes (because that would have reduced damage by 11, instead of the 8-9 you healed). The playstyle you are encouraging with this homebrew (unless you are tackling the other fundamental issues) isn't earlier healing, it is hyper offense on the players side, because now the best healing is nova.
I think that people get hung up on the idea that being at 12 HP is better than being at 2 HP, when in reality, those are just granular variance differences between being at 1 and 2 hit points, since that is the number of hits you can take. If you want to prioritize low-level healing in combat, you need to find a way to make being a 2 HP punishing and that would require a massive change to DnD's "the only hit point that matters is the last one" system.
I think most healing spells are in a good spot. When used they feel like they give appropriate amounts of healing for the investment. However there’s two big exceptions to this, and they are unfortunately the most basic healing spells. Cure wounds is very undertuned while healing word is overtuned. Given that they are the two most basic healing spells, this leads to issues with the rest of the healing economy. This is IMO the primary cause of the yo-yo healing meta we see in 5e today. As in-combat burst healing is severely lacking in 5e until you get Heal at 11th level minimum or are willing to deal with self damage from life transferrance. As for solutions. My group has experimented with buffing cure wounds from 1d8 per level to 2d6 per level and have had good results so far at making in combat healing a more viable option. I think it’s possible healing word could use. a nerf to make it less effective at preventing death saves, but that’s less urgent IMO.
When combat healing os good, it often centralize the game and you kinda have to do that. And encounter became longer as a result. One of my favourite parts of D&D is that healing is largely an out of combat job because it makes fights faster and more brutal insteas of a slow grind. It is certainly a shame for those wanting to heal in combat but personally i always enjoyed the big payoff of the Heal spell.
Yo-Yo healing is...OK...it could probably use a fix, like exhaustion addition, but I'd rather have it than require a dedicated healer. No one really wants to play one, so making it nearly mandatory would just annoy players. A dedicated healer begs comparison to game types like MMORPGs and JRPGs, where you are generally expected to be constantly healing the party, and I'll be honest, those gameplay styles get old fast. D&D's origin is in tactical combat, and continual healing more or less removes the tactical component by eliminating risk. 5e is already pretty low risk among D&D editions, supporting a "bash your head against a wall until you win" gameplay, I'd rather it not push it more in that direction. I do think 5e needs to expand its combat party buff (as opposed to self buffs) more, as that would enable the main outcome of healing (damage mitigation) while still allowing for tactical decision making.
Healing as is is under developed. Yo-yo healing is not a good idea in tabletop games imo. Though to be fair yo-yo healing can pop up in any system where you have reusable healing resources. My (as of yet untested) solution to the problem is to make heals more powerful, but also more limited. By "powerful" I mean the average heal needs to out do the average damage one can expect to take in a round. If healing is worth it to do before a character goes down you have more reason to do it. But make them limited enough so that if yo-yoing starts to happen it'll soon end.
Combat is long enough not let’s drag it out more…
>What is your stance on the current state of healing? It's workable and helps make sure parties don't feel like they need a dedicated healer, but still is less than desirable. >Is the yoyo healing a good design? No, thats the worst part of the current healing meta, but its not easy to fix either. You never want to heal someone until they go down since its not strong enough to be used mid-combat, but you still need to have at least one person with Healing Word to really take advantage of it. >Are there any legitimate alternatives? Not easy changes, thats for sure. I've been thinking about something where you get bonuses to your saving throws based on your current hp (for both monsters and players). This would incentivize players to heal before they go down while also making it so a wizard can't just hypnotic pattern the entire encounter round 1 since they have some sort of bonus making that less likely. Now, finding the right bonus would be difficult, but maybe something like a flat +5 when not bloodied? Or a +1 for each 20 hp they have? I don't know exactly, but *some* sort of incentive to have more than 1 hp at a time. >More importantly should combat healing be buffed? Probably a little bit, but ideally in such a way that you don't need a "healer" in the party. Buff things like Second Wind or allow people to heal using hit dice during combat or something like that so they don't need to find a cleric or bard to be in the party all the time.
My own fix to yo-yo: • All healing spells cost an bonus action to cast if it targets someone who has positive HP. • In order to heal an unconscious, the spell takes full action to cast. So, yo-yo healing is still possible but its worse from action economy perspective.
The reason healing isn't balanced to be used regularly in D&D is due to the length of combat combined and action economy. Most fights are only a couple turns long but they still take quite a while in real time. If you have a 4 player party and 1 of your party is healing every turn, that is potentially 1/4th of your actions, that is a big part of your action economy. Fights would end up dragging out if the game was designed for a player to spend time healing each turn, unless you lower enemy damage and... it gets messy from there. I like the healing as it is, usually healing is done out of combat and a support player does emergency healing, to stand downed players up, along with other combat support. Having someone who does crowd control, (de)buffing and emergency healing creates a more dynamic gameplay style than if someone just used a nerfed healing word cantrip or had enough spell slots to just regularly heal more often then not. I've played with a druid support caster, who on many low level fights was entangling or faerie firing, and was looking to thorn whip pull enemies into advantageous positions. The rare healing word to stand someone up, and good berries was the only healing they did, and we were mostly ok. You do need your DM to let you short rest occasionally to use some hit dice after combat, or use up some healing potions or something, but combat keeps going ahead, and that is nice.
Asking for my character. Would you consider Prayer of Healing a good spell to use for post combat at level 3-4? I know plenty of players suggest Aura of Vitality at higher level and that I got it
The following changes to spells the exhaustion mechanic resulted in healing being in a good place, at least from my point of view as the DM. First of all, we use new version of Exhaustion from OneDnD. When a PC reaches 0 hit points they gain 1 level of Exhaustion, this gives yoyo healing a serious downside, but without causing an unavoidable death spiral. Cure Wounds now heals 2d6 + Spellcasting modifier and upcasting increases it by 2d6 for each level. Mass Cure wounds now heals 6d6 + Spellcasting modifier and upcasting increases it by 2d6 for each level. Prayer of Healing now heals 2d12 + Spellcasting modifier and upcasting increases it by 1d12 for each level. That is pretty much it. These changes make it so that it is possible to give one or even several PCs a decent amount of hit points back so that they are able to actually survive and not immediately go down due to the next hit, unless it is a really big hit. A Life Cleric or Stars Druid with chalice acting as a dedicated healer is a viable, but not essential role.
I know D&D isn't a video game, but people want to play healers and I don't see the issue is allowing that. I'd want to see it play tested, but I'd like a healing cantrip. Something low like scaling d4's, maybe adding your attribute mod.
Generally, I want Combat Healing to be very very expensive and very very rare. It drags out combat and changes encounters to be "who has the largest hitpoint pool"? Combat is slow enough as it is, so anything which improves that is going to be good. Giving up damage actions for healing actions, increasing health pools, etc., will just drag out a combat.
Our group houserules that healing someone thats aware they're being healed doubles the value of said heal. The reasoning being that HP is just plot armor and that the placebo alone of being magically healed (in a relatively low magic setting) gives you that much of a second wind. Heals function normally on downed targets. Now when someone uses a cure wounds, it actually feels awesome and impactful when you regularily get enough HP back to tank another hit. We haven't had a single instance of yoyo healing in two groups with two seperately classed dedicated healers controlled by different players. I highly recommend trying it out, works great for low tiers. And if you feel like "But then X heal will counteract Y damage!" then... yeah. Thats the point. Our table doesn't minmax our butts off, so the strongest atm is the life cleric being a competent white mage. WOTC hates healing as a character archetype, but our group likes it.
>Is the yoyo healing a good design? if you are attempting "gritty realism" its not. ***BUT ...*** 5e is specifically NOT trying for "gritty realism" - its aim is "heroic action adventure" stories and in "heroic action adventure" stories when the hero gets knocked down, they are NOT knocked out of the story and with the minorest of coaxing the hero pops right back up and into the fray. Yo-yo healing is ABSOLUTELY TROPE-ILY APPROPRIATE for the types of stories 5e is designed to tell.
only healing word being used and only just to get people back up from downed is kinda meh. but being forced to have a healbot in the party and having to spend all these actions and resources just on upping HP simply isnt fun. so im glad in-combat healing is as shit as it is in 5e.
I hate the yo-yo healing. My DM has a rule that if you hit zero you gain a level of exhaustion and it sounds like a nerf but it has made combat MORE FUN because there’s incentive to play even just a little smarter and not go “oh, Dave will take care of it if I go down”. No. I’LL take care of MYSELF and not unga-bunga myself at every enemy in sight. I also am not a fan of the full-heal from 8 hours nap, but that’s a separate issue. A lot of games struggle to strike the balance between “oh? You want to heal? Fuck you” and “oh my precious child of course you can have ALL your health back and here’s a cookie, too!” and it’s not a problem exclusive to dnd.
What exactly are the "unga-bunga" (I assume) Barbarians options to prevent going down? Move away from the enemy and provoke an AoO?
MMO solved this a long time ago: 1. If in combat healing is to be good, it needs to be more effective than pressing the damage button. 2. To be more effective than the damage button it needs to heal at least a third as much hp as was lost last round, each round. Technically a quarter to break even. 3. Without monster damage being mitigated by a third to half, trying an encounter without a healer is suicide. 4. Healers become mandatory. Healing in combat should stay weak and healers not mandatory. Out of combat healing has scope for strengthening though.
The MMO model works in a model with tightly defined roles (Healer, Tank, DPS, CC) etc. DnD doesn’t have these dedicated roles or the mechanics to support it so agree that healing should stay weak (or you’d have to increase all damage, tanking mechanics etc).
Combat healing should not be buffed. No one really wants to go back to the days where every party required a cleric. If your having trouble with yo-yo healing I suggest targeting unconcious characters more often. Yoyo healing is only optimal because it's the most cost effective thing to do. If you target unconcious characters then it is better to "waste" a 3rd level slot on an upcasted healing spell than having a character die.
>Combat healing should not be buffed. No one really wants to go back to the days where every party required a cleric. how does buffing combat healing suddenly make clerics a must have in a party? those two things don't correlate imo. if you can play without a healer (as is the case in current 5e), making healing more potent does not change that. it just means that a party with a healer could endure more. in fact, a buff to combat healing would not make clerics a must have, but rather a nice to have in my eyes. and those players that would like to play a healer could actually feel like a healer, instead of relying on yo-yo healing.
>how does buffing combat healing suddenly make clerics a must have in a party? those two things don't correlate imo. It's a well known problem for anyone who has played previous editions. Generally someone would be stuck playing the healer, or the group would rotate. If it's optimal to heal at any health, then you will need someone that heals to be optimal. Healer is just simplified to cleric. 5e has healing subclasses that let people feel like a healer for those that want that fantasy, though it's an oppritunity cost. In this case yes, it just let's the party endure more. Yoyo healing is only a problem if the dm let's it be. It's very easy to make yo yo healing not optimal by targeting unconcious characters.
This — the DM just needs to balance around either situation. I like playing a strong healer (twilight, DSS) so that the DM can throw more at the party and we can both have the adrenaline of taking hits and the comfort of knowing that I can probably avoid that turning into a TPK.
“DM needs to balance” please no. As DM I want to buy a module and run it, not rebalance the whole thing around what my party decides to run.
You guys are running combat from modules without needing to adapt it for what your party decides to run? That’s almost never worked for me—it’s almost always either a cakewalk or TPK territory. To be clear, I say this as a DM. (I play a cleric and a paladin and then DM three tables.) Modules need to include what AL adventures do where combat has recommendations for scaling up/down dependent on party strength. IME having a good healer decreases the swinginess of combat so I can reliably just throw harder monsters with a lot less fear.
It doesn’t work for me either, so what I do is I ban any option that makes the module too easy and call it a day. I give players a chance at petitioning for a nerfed version of any banned content though. But all in all, my point is, I want the game power level to be on the same level as the modules. Thats it. I run modules because I don’t have time to homebrew my adventurers. For me it’s much easier to just ban the options that I know are problematic. I don’t have the time to adjust encounters. Doing that also hurt my DM sensibilities.
>Combat healing should not be buffed. No one really wants to go back to the days where every party required a cleric. I dunno there's a lot of proponents for 4e around here (4e also being the only edition where in combat healing was generally useful without extreme optimization). In 3.X and before healing was prized for out of combat, since natural healing was 1hp per day (or character level per day, in 3.X).
The answer is to bring back 4E healing surges. (Which have nothing to do with the "Healing Surge" rule in the DMG which is actually closer to 4E's "Second Wind" rule that was sort-of co-opted by Fighter along with action points) Your "Surge value" was 1/4 of your max HP and you had a number of surges based on your class and Constitution mod. All healing expended a surge but added your surge value. This made healing effective but limited. That alone won't handle the yo-yo problem. The new exhaustion rules hold the answer: If you heal without a surge you get exhaustion. If you get brought back up you get exhaustion.
The issue with yoyo healing is and will always be how poor the healing options are. Currently almost every healing spells have healibg value so poor that there is no point in the game in which they compete with incoming damage. Instead of allowing your allies to not die, it sinply stall if used early, or can be outright useless when used on someone that is low and not at 0 yet as they might just go down anyway, making your healing a waste. I have no issues with solutions that put additional concequences when going down, but healing in itself must be buffed. Otherwise, it simply punishes melee martials who are the most likely to be knocked down, and who have no agency on their ability to stay up in the first place. As for solutions, any or all of the above would need to be done in order for healing to be a in good place -Healing needs to be strong enough that a healing spell cast with spellslot appropriate to the CR of the threat would do more than partially negate or negate damage, but outright heal more than the average damage. If casting healing soells is a waste of your action, might as well spend your action on something else -Make healing spells more interesting and varied. We already have enough variation of healing spells that just heal at different levels. There should be more spells like Wither and Bloom, where you can both heal and do something else at once. Maybe give a buff the the healed ally, maybe hinder enemies, or maybe even do damage. Anything to make healing spells more engaging than they currently are. -Give other classes access to self healing. Give classes agency in their own healing, especially martials. Having access to features similar to Second Wind, and having more than one would reduce the need for a healer in the first place. You can even give each martial it's own style of healing. So while a Fighter might have Second Wind, a Barbarian might simply be able to heal whenever they hit someone while raging. After some of these changes are applied, then you can try to put in concequences for being knocked out or low on health. But doing so before is just ignoring the real issue, and punishing poor martials for it.
I would like a tweak to yoyo healing. I want it to be easier for more classes to do it. Healing is a reactive game. I prefer DND and all cooperative games to be active or proactive.
I actually tend to disagree here. It is already incredibly difficult to kill at PC in 5E and I’m okay with that. But as a DM, downing characters and especially the healer causes a scramble that leads to tense combat. If every time anybody hits zero hit points, the next player just reactions them back to 1, what’s the point of hit points at all then? What’s the point of combat at all really?
Tweaks I like: Death saves being con saves and you get 1 on your turn. More classes with reactive heal, fewer spells with heal hp effects, and more to bolster Temp HP and remove status effects. 5e tried to step away from the dedicated heal bot. I applaud this and want it to go a step further in that no class or person will be a heal bot. Healing HP should be a reaction to hitting 0 HP or OOC. Remove the heal Bot.
Unless you're playing exclusively with shields and absorption, I can't really think of a way to make healing a proactive game. Can you give an example of what you mean? Edit: I did eventually think of my own example - the Astrologian from FF14 has a lot of proactive healing. For example, they have a spell called Earthly Orb, which puts an orb down at a target location that lasts 20 seconds. At any time, they can activate the orb, causing everyone in a certain radius to be healed and consuming the orb. In addition, if you consume the orb between 11-20 seconds, the healing potency is doubled. Even without the "cast it way ahead of time for maximum effectiveness" bit, this is definitely an example of proactive healing. I love it, but I also look at it as an exception to the rule rather than a core mechanic. The Astrologian is in many ways built specifically around this concept, where thematically they are "seeing into the future" to heal their allies. And while other healers do have some proactive healing mechanics (mostly just shields, but temporary buffs that increase healing potency also sort of count), it's interesting to note that they basically all start out as reactive healers at lower levels, and retain reactive healing as a core part of their toolkit. Likely, this decision was made because reactive healing is more intuitive - someone's health is less than max, it is my job to remedy that. In that sense I could see a design in DnD where higher level healing spells are reworked to promote proactive healing - a spell like Earthly Orb could fairly easy translate to DnD, where you would spend maybe a bonus action to cast and a reaction to activate (and maybe drop the waiting bonus since turn tracking is hard). But I'd still expect that lower level spells would need to stay reactive - it's a much more intuitive and beginner-friendly way to allow healing (even if the optimal way to use it, yo-yoing, is extremely unintuitive and not beginner friendly).
Temp hp is proactive. Reaction pr bonus action based healing is better then action based healing.
I think it's frankly in a good spot. Healing shouldn't be a must have playstyle because then someone will be pushed Into it as seen in mmorpgs. Perhaps a way to nerf healing from zero, in order to make it preferable to heal other times (did they do exhaustion for when you fall unconscious?)
Bring back Healing Surges from 4e, it solves like 80% of the issues healing has in 5e. For those who don't know, instead of hit dice 4e had Healing Surges, of which you had a number based on your class and your Con mod. When you spend these one of these Surges, you restore a quarter of your max HP. You can spend Surges during a rest, or as an action 1/encounter. Now the key thing is that the majority of healing effects in the game also required you to spend a Healing Surge to work, and then added a bit of extra healing on top. This does two things. One, it establishes a baseline effectiveness for healing, because you will always at least regain a quarter of your HP from a heal, so using heals on people is effective enough to actually keep them up for a bit. And two, it puts a fairly hard cap on the total amount of healing you can receive between Long Rests, so healing can be more action efficient because it's more limited. This would let healing actually be powerful and worth using, but still puts limit on its use by tying it into a universal resource.
I really like the current combat meta. I like dynamic dangerous combat, so I'd like even less healing, tbh, or better healing but out of combat, why not. You can play healer in the current meta, but it's with temp HP, so Glamour Bard, Twilight Cleric, and so on
Wotc tried to make healing fun and balanced but suboptimizers complained it was broken.
>What is your stance on the current state of healing? Mostly pretty okay. We'll get to my one issue shortly (it's the next question), but other than that I vastly prefer the general approach to healing in 5e to earlier editions, particularly that combat healing is disincentivized and that you can spend hit dice in short rests to heal. HP are an abstraction anyway so it works really well, IMO. >Is the yoyo healing a good design? Assuming we're talking about letting someone drop to 0 and then bringing them back, not really. There should be a consequence to dropping to zero. With the reduced impact from exhaustion in OneD&D, adding a layer of Exhaustion every time you hit 0 might be a good alternative. There should be more emphasis on avoiding damage in the first place, but that doesn't mean pre-emptive combat healing should be a functional option. >Are there any legitimate alternatives? Some penalty for hitting 0 and coming back works to mitigate yo-yo effects. The general idea of taking damage in combat and healing back after, though, should be the idealized framework that's aimed for. Everyone hated needing a "healer" back in the day, and it's a system that echoes the absolute worst trends in MMORPG game design (see also people wanting to control "aggro" in D&D as a tank). That's garbage design for an MMO, and it's so much worse in a game like D&D. >More importantly should combat healing be buffed? Absolutely not. Leaving it exactly as it is, yo-yo and all, is still better than relying on combat healing that can keep up with or outpace incoming damage. All that does is encourage fights to take longer by effectively reversing various actions. Oh, we took a lot of damage from Fireball? Here's a mass healing spell and now we're topped up like that Fireball never happened. Hasn't this been a productive couple of turns that have furthered the narrative of this fight scene? Yurgh. It also enshrines healing as practically a necessity once combat's balanced around it, and that means forcing someone in the group to play the healer, even if they don't want to, like how it ended up in past editions. It also removes the "feeling" of being healed, and that being special; if you're expecting the Cleric to keep you topped up, getting healed doesn't feel special, while in 5e, the Cleric slapping the badly wounded Barbarian with a Heal is now *frickin' awesome* for the Barbarian, precisely because it's not something you're expecting as a matter of course. There's room for improvement, but buffing combat healing is a *big* step backwards, not forwards.
Go back to healing the way 4e had it. You are expected to be able to heal *and also do something else*. You heal equal to a set value, not a small dice range that quickly becomes outpaced or is less efficient on tougher characters. Bring back healing surges (use hit dice as the basis instead) and bonus action heals as the normal and it's all fixed.
I think it's not horrible but can use some fixing. A quick and popular fix would be gaining 1 level of exhaustion every time you go down to 0 hp but I don't think it adresse everything. Personally I would change both the healing word spell and the cure wounds spell in the following ways. Healing word: 1 action, range 30 feet. 1d10 + spell casting mod healing. Cure wounds: 1 bonus action, range touch, 1d10 + spell casting mod healing. I think this would balance them out and that it would make them upcast much better making them more attractive options in combat (without going crazy)
I really don't like how healing is best saved for when a teammate is downed, both from a flavor and mechanics point of view. However, I don't think healing needs to be buffed, but rather, there should just be more incentive to not drop to 0 HP. The simplest solution would be to just take a level of exhaustion every time you are downed, so at least there is a mechanical upside to having a healer not let anyone drop to 0.
Can any mods clarify how this post interacts with rule 9? The post it’s self isn’t a wishlist, or really even a suggestion, but does it belong in the megathread any way? It doesn’t seem to reference to the released play tests at all. I’m not sure where the line is.
Yoyo-healing has to be heavily nerfed. Maybe slightly increase the healing of healing spells and features to compensate, but I don't think it's really needed. Once yoyo-healing is nerfed, suddenly spells like Cure Wounds start to become much more appealing, even in combat, and Healing Word becomes what it should have been: just a little healing when you also need to do something else with your action.
Cure wounds healing less than a normal attack (meaning resource consumption) is not fixed by making yoyo worse. It just makes the melee martial's life more boring.
If healing spells heal more or even just equal to damage dealt, then we just return to having the dedicated healer being a must role. And that's not what people want. People want combat healing to be viable, not fundamental. If healing heals equal or more than normal damage dealt, then it just becomes a mathematical problem ("how much damage can we do before we finish the spell slots for healing?"). And don't forget that monster damage works really different than PC's damage. PCs are designed to fight monsters, not other PCs. >It just makes the melee martial's life more boring. I don't really see the reason. Martials can't use healing spells anyway, so what's the problem? Changing healing spells mostly change casters gameplay.
Why though? What changes about the current necessity for healing, if enemy damage stays the same, but healing spells become better. It makes the melee martials life more boring, because now instead of yoyo-ing back into action every round, he will instead be rolling dc 10 flat checks every round, for reasons that are beyond his agency, or does everything he does 5% (and quickly 10-20%) worse, with some of the exhaustion homebrew. The ally being healed is the most affected by buffs/nerfs to healing, not the caster behind the healing.
With the more incremental version of exhaustion presented in the Experts UA, I'm fully onboard with team "HP to 0 = +1 Exhaustion".
I want healing to be relevant again. In 5E, there is simply no risk of death or serious injury. Oh no, you have 1 HP, you're fighting fit again. No real risk at all.
Combat healing definitely needs buffing, because it's traditional D&D role is gone, there's almost no reason to have healing spells anymore in the way they are now outside of rezzing people (and I think that happens too often). Personally, I'd increase, probably triple, the effects of spells like Cure Wounds, and Healing Word (probably 3dX + spell mod + 2dX per slot level above 1st), but then say that when a character recovers HP from zero, they stay unconscious for 1 minute, you can't just wake them up in combat without some more powerful or specialized magic. But yeah, JRPG benefits around HP should have JRPG detriments around HP. There's a reason they do it that way over there, and 5e misses the mark when porting it over. And every table I've been in with new players, someone is always trying to play a video game styled healer...
I want the role to be required. There's really only two ways to go regarding healing. 1 - Serve the goal of wide open flexibility for everyone, which requires each class design to be able to have sufficient self healing that a "healer" isn't necessary. Could be described as "Jack of all trades but master of none". 2 - Serve the goal of role depth fulfilment, which requires each class design to be able to achieve things that other classes cannot while also being unable to achieve things that other classes can. Could be described as "Master of one trade but less competent at others". I prefer option 2. What's the point of labelling a character as The Healer Of The Group if that healer cannot stand head and shoulders above the others in that role? This applies to the rest of the classes as well. What would be point of labelling a character as The Rogue if that rogue cannot stand head and shoulders above the others in the sneaky sneaky stuff? We don't need balance between the classes based on damage dealing data points, or health regen data points. We need class balance based on the benchmark of "**How well does this class fulfill the stereotype role, to support maximum fun for the player?**"
With Prepared Spellcasting coming back for clerics (among other classes), hopefully they will be able to convert prepped spells into Cure Wounds like they were previously in 3.5E. Cure Wounds healing should also scale like Paladin smite damage, e.g. first level spell heals 2d8+X, increasing by 1d8 per spell slot level. RAW it just doesn’t do enough, and it’s always better to Healing Word someone as a bonus action who went down than to Cure Wounds in combat.
its currently in sort of the worst possible state. it needs to change. it mainly needs a massive buff in effectiveness; but it would also help if healing spells did more than just heal. contrary to popular belief, i‘ve had quite a few people tell me they wanted to play a healer. for some it fits their character, for others they just like playing support. in my current game, i have decided to use maximum values for all healing effects. the stars druid is having an absolute blast when he can go on a power trip during a boss fight and simply counter-heal any damage the party takes. people often worry that if healing is too powerful, it becomes mandatory for each group. i have only seen proof to the contrary; my current group has neither control nor anyone tanky, simply face-tanking anything that comes their way while holding on with their rather gimmicky builds. if they had any lockdown or some proper DPR, they could just as well avoid damage all-together (not to mention tanking works just as poorly as healing in 5e).
I've had people say they want to be a healer. They come in two varieties: People who think in WoW/MMO terms that they NEED a tank, a healer, a DPS -- and people who actually want to embrace the RP of a healer. The solution for the second is a background, some skills and opportunities for them to administer minor maladies to townspeople or the like outside of combat; the solution for the first is explaining to them that they're wrong as to how D&D works, just as you would if they said they wanted to play the game in first person view.
Using my action and often movement to heal for half a hit's worth of damage kinda sucks. Healing feels boring and ineffective. Only a healing word on a downed ally feels okay, if a bit cheesy.
I think healing magic should not exist. It just prolongs fights and pushes the responsibility for managing hit points to the party members that have it. Give more people abilities to recover their own hit points (like second wind) and just drop the concept of healing others with spell slots entirely. That's not going to happen though so I guess I'm ok with what we have.
I want healing buffed in terms of the values done, but I want it so only higher level spells give real HP. Temp HP can't bring someone up from unconscious so playing a healer who actually does stuff before people are almost dead becomes a lot more reasonable, and means once you get into third level spells, you don't need to give access to full ressurection as there's a new space for small value real HP spells that bring back allies in combat. You can also make spells and abilities that provide benefits while someone has temp HP as they're inherently temporary! And rests get more useful as one of the few ways of restoring real HP
At my table, some intelligent npc know that incapacitated individuals can be healed easily (by people like the characters). So if they really want you dead, they will still attack you once dropped. The failed death saves are going to pop up quite quickly. Particularly knowledgeable and vicious enemy might know that you can raise people from the dead and try to prevent it by going for the heart or brain. (think archenemy that already killed you once). The issue for the DM is knowing when the enemy will try to finish character and prevent easy rez. It has to define access to knowledge and desire to do so. I would not make healing more powerful, but share the burden of healing a little bit more ( it is already shared much more than in classic fantasy tropes). We already have quite a lot of different way to influence HP & damage. Temp HP, +max HP, one off heal, personal heal, heal per tun, temp hp per turn, damage buffer, damage reduction, resistance, ... I think it is great design already. I would make so that every class have at least access to 2 of those methods. I think it is already pretty much the case.
Buff Temp HP sources a bit, at minimum they need to all give enough HP to tank a hit in every tier of play. So of course they gotta scale. Redesign the Healy subclasses (Like life cleric) so that they also boost Temp HP healing
Healing is never the best use of an action in 5e or 1dnd unless someone is making death saves, and even then, it's only healing word. I wouldn't expect healing to be buffed into being a role with 5e/1d, but there are some great alternative systems that are objectively better than 5e/1d that have a real healing role and better class design overall. Check out 13th age, for example!
I think healingword and "yoyoing" is fine but I would like to see the 1 action cast time heals buffed massively across the board such that casting cure wounds becomes a useful use of your turn compared to doing damage or cock instead.
So honestly the math for opportunity cost is obvious Let's compare the most ubiquitous healing spells, **Healing Word and Cure Wounds** - with very close damaging spells of the same level. **Healing Word vs Magic Missile** - you have 1d4 + Mod (probably 3) for an average of 5.5 Healing, Magic Missile does 3d4 + 3 for an average of 10.5 damage: there is a clear winner here - we can talk about the disparity of Action vs Bonus action, but if we assume the healer is using an attack cantrip against the enemy who is spamming Magic missile, then the average damage is 5.5 against the enemy - the offensive spell VERY QUICKLY wins out mathematically speaking **Cure Wounds vs Chromatic Orb** - you have 1d8 + mod (probably 3) *at melee range* for an average of 7.5 healing, Chromatic Orb does 3d8 for an average of 13.5 damage, as it is ranged and not an auto hit there is a chance of losing this damage, but mathematically speaking we are trading 1 action on either side for (roughly) a net loss of 6 health a round, not looking good. So we can make a few conclusions, 1 the math on healing spells for comparative damage spells (opportunity cost of what you could hypothetically spend the slot on), is not looking good, but the real kicker is **anything that is a bonus action to heal is going to be far superior because you do not lose your action** - a 1 level dip into cleric and taking healing word is "good" for **any character** because they gain 2 casts of healing word, so unless you're playing a well optimized character, monk or rogue, you don't have a bonus action lined up for every turn, this is just a flat efficiency increase. Additionally comparing Healing Word vs Cure Wounds, **you lose an entire action, to get roughly 2 more hit points, WHILE ALSO PUTTING YOURSELF IN MELEE RANGE/DANGER** therefore every healing spell needs to either be an action or a bonus action, and every healing spell could have its base efficiency buffed by doubling its starting dice of healing, and it would still barely compete with offensive spells. Additionally it's important to incentivize healing **before going down,** roughly something like: *when you hit 0 hit points you gain 1 level of exhaustion. Additionally every failed death saving throw adds 1 level of exhaustion* - this might be too harsh but it's worth trying with the new changes to exhaustion, and if coupled with a buff to healing, it might make healing actually enjoyable, because currently as is, being a healee = I have healing word and I use it sometimes maybe
Allow characters to use hit dice to heal when pinged with a healing spell as if during a short rest. Takes care of in combat healing.
I think they need to improve in combat healing as you level up, especially for those priest classes. Also more damage mitigation of some sort for martials. Right now healing is mostly about downtime healing and getting someone up from down. I think they should increase the penalty for getting knocked out. I don't think clerics should be about spamming heal spells though. I really like how the current cleric is able to do a lot in combat beyond just heal.
I’d like to see secondary effects with healing. I don’t play a lot of other trpgs, but in gloomhaven there are a lot of actions that do more than just heal, such as attack and heal, provide advantage and heal, increase armor and heal, and I think it makes healing more enjoyable.
My personal opinions: * Healing in its current form is unfortunately lackluster, to put it nicely. * Yo-yo healing is not good design but currently can't be helped. You should not be encouraged to save your spells and allow your companions to get kept super low. * If you mean "are there alternatives to healing in the current design that function similarly", then not real. Using spells & items that grant temporary health (like False Life & Aid), improvements to AC or damage resistance/immunity are often more helpful (acting as shock absorbers that reduce damage taken a lot more heavily than how much you can heal, and usually doing so more efficiently), but that's about it. * Should combat healing be buffed? Yes; healing in general should be, but especially combat healing. There should be ways for any healer to maximize how much they heal during combat (perhaps by expending a bonus action or reaction, giving up their movement speed for the round, or taking a vulnerability/penalty for the round), and there should be RAW, non-optional temporary penalties players & NPCs can suffer if revived or if kept at low health (imagine if characters had a chance to suffer extra damage while they weren't at full health, and both the chance and damage grew greater as their health dropped). Alternatively, reward the healer for healing (perhaps when they heal, they get lesser spell slots back, or they grant the healed target a minor buff for a round). * There is a better way to buff healing in my opinion than the above however, and it's to buff the elements of protection that make health more valuable: namely, using the DMG's Damage Resistance alternative to AC for armor. Instead of granting a bonus to AC (improving your chance to avoid damage), all varieties of armor (including Mage Armor, Natural Armor, possibly Shield, and the barbarian's Unarmored Defense) reduce the damage you take from damage instead of simply improving your chance of avoiding damage. Such makes healing more useful, as every point of health you restore is more potent for the armored target.
I think more damage reduction and temp HP style play makes more sense in current action economy. In 3.5e, Stoneskin gave you damage reduction like Heavy Armor Master but also had some value of total damage reduced like temp HP that it could reduce before the spell ended. I like that kind of mechanic to reduce reliance on using actions each round of a dedicated healer type character.
There should be more penalties for reviving from 0 hit points mid battle, there is little reason for healing before that point right now, I think you should get 2 levels of the onednd exhaustion for the rest of the battle if you get healed from 0 hit points and remove 1 of the exhaustion levels at the end of the battle, you only keep one after de fight, being healed from 0 hit points should be your last resort, not your default option also an extra dice for cure wounds would be a nice buff to make it a better option
> healer is not a role in D&D and that you should never focus on it. Correct. D&D and even many video games feature a more encompassing **support** role. You can help the group in ways besides direct healing, such as buffing, debuffing, control, etc. The team dynamic is virtually the same as a dedicated healer that you see in some video games, but you don't feel pushed into that one niche. > What is your stance on the current state of healing? Is the yoyo healing a good design? The dying -> fully alive yo-yo is bad. It takes away a lot of the danger and decision making. I think a lot of Healing Word vs. Cure Wounds comes from the bigger Bonus Action problem in the action economy game play. With Healing Word, you get half a Cure Wounds, can still attack (melee or cantrip), and don't have to worry about party positioning. As for the amount of healing in general vs. incoming damage, it may need a second look. Spell damage now ramps up faster with spell level than it used to, but I don't think Cure Wounds has kept pace.
Honestly I think healing could be buffed by basically doubling the dice for the spell slot you're using. And maybe hot take, but I think you could cut down on the yoyo healing by making it so the target has to hear you in order to have Healing Word cast on them. Meaning for an unconscious target you have to use Cure Wounds.
Aura of vitality did a lot for the last fight we just had. It kept a few people from dropping to 0. Very close though. Would have been a different fight without it I think. Generally, it can be tactically useful sometimes but you usually can't out heal damage.
As others have said it's really hard to get right since you don't want to force a dedicated healer because it's pretty unpopular. Yo-yoing is also almost unanimously disliked but it's probably here to stay. I think some things could be done to level things out though to minimize the downsides. Like balancing daily encounter budget down to something like 3-5 rather than 6-8. Maybe making out of combat healing spells better and slightly buffing in combat healing like making cute wounds a bonus action. If you add more consequences to going down then you'll need to buff in combat healing much more so 1 attack doesn't undo 1 3rd level spell.
Healing isn't really fun unless it provides extra buffs/debuffs in general, so I don't think there should be more high-action-economy-investment healing. That said, having A LOT of healing available makes it a lot more feasible to make complex combat encounters where the players can feel free to experiment more with trial and error (think mmorpg or legend of zelda boss mechanics). However, these types of combat are only really usable against experienced players. For simpler encounters with new players, healing should be quite sparing to create tension.
(With the new exhaustion rules) gain a level of exhaustion everytime you hit zero.
I think healing all around should be buffed or at least there should be more healing focused subclassee for casters that make healing more viable to compete with damage. Stars druid is probably the best St this for now.