Is Healing Necessary in Pathfinder 2e?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- It's the age-old question in RPGs: Does every party need a healer, or can a party function without having someone forced to perform this role. In this video, I show that while certain types of healers are necessary in Pathfinder 2e, no one needs to warp their build too much to be able to contribute to party healing.
Please let me know your thoughts and how you worked through the homework given in the video!
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5:30 under the refocus activity it is mentioned that you can refocus while doing other things. It even gives an example that a Cleric of a holy deity can recover focus points while treating wounds!
This is true! I admittedly forgot about that, partially because what activities you can perform can be fairly restrictive. Sometimes it will line up with what you want to do, but sometimes it doesn't. It's fairly gm dependent on how much leeway you have.
@@PathPrimers
Yup still important to note though, otherwise great work! (I have missed THAT ONE RULE in many of my own guides, so I have a mental checklist of stuff I always need to bring up)
(Also I really look forward to seeing what you do next! Let me know if you ever want to collaborate on something!)
@SwingRipper I'd love to collaborate! I don't have any ideas currently, but if I think of something I'll reach out!
@PathPrimers it needs to be something grapple related obviously.
I would say that Healing MUST NOT be a single character's responsibility.
That's fair! I think it is okay for one character to do the primary investment if that's something they enjoy, but I agree that the others should at least strongly consider having something to pick up the healer, even if that's just some healers gloves or a stash of potions
@@PathPrimersIn our group our emegency workaround when we are out of potions is to pick up the cleric's staff of healing and trick magic item to heal him, came up only once, but it was pretty clutch!
I agree with the OP comment. In my games, I mandate that one player be the emergency healer and a different person figure out OoC healing. If one person can't make game during a week, the game can continue.
@@PathPrimers For early levels we usually have a couple people with battle medicine. Usually one goes on the medic path, but it doesn't cost much to keep boosting medicine. Especially if you have a rogue or investigator.
@@Leonardo-fv4vu That's a pretty rough action economy, though. Stride, Interact, Trick Magic Item, no 4th action. If you don't have to stride, that's when you can do it on the earliest turn; Interact, Trick Magic Item, 1-action Heal
In my AV campaign, the main healer is the Barbarian Medic. And the wizard has a couple wands of healing with trick magic item.
I love seeing people address kineticists. They are one of the most versatile classes. For SoT I have a conrasu wood kineticist who is a tank/healer. Loads of fun to play.
very useful for a new player like me! I didn't know about a lot of these feats (like stitch flesh) and it will be useful to suggest to my players if they ask how to get healing
This video knocked my socks off. I LOVED the second half where you compared the emergency heal spells on the visual charts. So helpful!
I hope the channel grows!
Great content, and excellent topic that I thought differently of when I first started PF2e
In the campaigns I've played in I would say at least one person speccing into healing is necessary, but magic healing is not. Risky Godless healing is pretty nutty.
You definitely don't need magic healing! Just keep in mind that you can't use risky surgery on battle medicine, only treat wounds.
I test ran the beginner box with some random characters I made on pathbuilder and after the first fight I found myself without any other way to heal than to do a full rest or to sip the potions. Glad I did a test run. 😂
This is an excellently made video.
This goes hard for a first video on the channel
Great video! I always love playing cleric or tacking on some extra healing onto most of my characters. My table's campaigns have definitely gone smoother for PCs once we've all grok the importance of in combat and out of combat healing. Something to tell new players about Treat Wounds is that it removes the Wounded condition on success. Not a lot of ways to remove the Wounded condition early. Sure in theory most parties would probably do the 10 minute rest after all PCs are full HP, but Treat Wounds removing the Wounded condition upon success makes it essential if a party is stuck fighting without enough time to fully heal and rest.
I was going to mention the wounded condition as well. So a good comment to consider.
Great stuff, I will definitely link new people to this!
Nice content! Keep it up!
This is great! An excellent resource for new players!
Thanks for the video! I appreciate the more "meta" discussion on PF2e and trying to evaluate abilities for different scenarios.
Welcome fellow new PF2e Content Creator! Welcome to the club, and may the algorithm be kind to you
Keep a weekly upload and this channel will rocket.
Great video, I look forward to seeing more from you.
As a forensics investigator/medic, I literally had more healing power than a cleric, two Battlemedices per character, every hour! It was gross.
Good video!
Really nice video! I enjoyed it :)
Good video! Hard to believe it’s your first.
One of the best videos Ive seen so far about details from PF2e, Hope to see a lot more.
Commenting for the algorithm, welcome to PF2E Content Creation!
Awesome video, got into pf2e recently and this was something I was worried about
Subscribed so happy to see another person working on making their first pf2e video.
This is very high quality content, especially compared to what else is out there for PF2 right now. Please keep it up!
Nice video. I subscribed and wish you good luck with your future content for Pathfinder!
Brilliant video. Wonderful commentary, wonderful layout, and leaves the viewer with stuff to think about. Also, it helps that your voice isn't annoying to listen to like many 2e TH-camrs.
I'd like to point out, you often think of Resource cost as "how often can you do this/ what opportunity cost is better." But, keep in mind, some of those "slots" can *only* be used for that effect. Battle Medicine is pretty much resourceless, because it doesn't take anything other than a skill feat selection. Then fonts are crazy because those slots can *only* be used for healing, so you may as well use them without restraint because they aren't taking your normal slots
Super helpful video with some often-overlooked perspectives on usefulness! Fantastic content, keep it up!
Interaction for Algorithm Porpoises
The healing is quite abundant in p2e. We play with free archetype and my metal kineticist is a herbalist. So using nature for medicine and craftign some healing items. We have a champion in that group who did the Layonhands meditate dance during downtime couple of times already.
As someone running the Pearly White Spindle, I still run it at level 17! Sure, it's slow, and our Barbarian might not have THAT much use for it, but even so, it's only approx. 2.5 hours of ingame time from 0 to full. Assuming we're not being hounded by something, this means I can typically start any given fight at full health, because there's time between them. Time that I don't have to worry about our medic effing up their Medicine check, or spending spells from our cleric. In terms of HP? My Starlit Span Magus is the most self-sufficient of the party.
Emergency Healing is good to exist because it saves player time and it provides a healer minigame. In a normal RPG if you lose the battle you start from the old save point. It is a convenience to avoid that by being able to pad the battle with some healing. Basically its saying you can beat this challenge with 70, 80, etc % efficiency instead of 100. And then it gives the healer class player something to do, since they tend to enjoy the support role. So while mechanically healers might not be necessary in terms of general community if your game only has combat as its source of interest an emergency healer is useful. If the game adequately incentivized playing barmaids or cooks providing charm and sustenance probably many players would do that instead.
I love having emergency healing on multiple characters. In my AV group, my Summoner seldom casts Soothe - but when I do it is often a big deal.
Having emergency heals on only one character runs the risk of that character going down, but also runs the risk of you having big heals on the wrong initiative count(s). When multiple people can do it (even if they aren't particularly specialised in it) it is much easier to keep frontliners off the dreaded 0hp.
I really appreciate your higher level of thought on healing in this video. The consideration of action economy, action opportunity cost, and investment to reward ratio are concepts that are highly central to PF2E but rarely discussed in detail in video form.
Thank you for helping other players exercise their options and make more informed decisions (in relation to healing for this video). I look forward to seeing more of your videos.
Cool Video. I'd also love to see a video highlighting a few of the healer capable classes and comparing them with each other.
Comments for the Comment God! Likes for the Like Throne!
Awesome job! Love the content, keep it up!
I've actually got the opposite problem than what you're describing: I've been playing a Wave Druid in my Abomination Vaults campaign and frankly I struggle to find a use to preparing anything EXCEPT heal. Just attacking with my weapons (Javelins and a Trident) is comparable damage to any spell I can cast without spending resources, and the utility spells are so situational that I can't afford to prepare them with the Vancian magic system of preparing a single spell to each spell slot... and that's not even considering all the situational damage mitigation spells that are straight up less value than just casting heal at the same spell level.
It becomes a contest of "I could cast anything else, or I could cast Heal" and heal wins out 90% of the time, with all the situationally useful spells being better suited to sit on a scroll until just the right moment.
Druids are great at combining melee and spells. My lizardfolk druid in Extinction Curse kept going back and forth
@@philopharynx7910 I mean it's partly on me for picking Wave druid, trading the ability to transform into animals, conjure lightning from the sky or heal my allies for the ability to step out of the bathtub without slipping.
@@kevingriffith6011 And some of that is build choice. I play a healing Cleric in a small party of 3 (level 9). I have okay-CON and low-STR. I'm not trained in Athletics, so I can't even reliably climb a DC 10 ladder unless I Follow the Expert on the Monk outside of combat.
But that came at the benefit of having moderate CHA, and being the only person trained in Diplomacy and Intimidation, with another side investment into INT for a couple more knowledge skills.
I want you to consider what it is that your Druid CAN'T do because you are as invested into using weapons as you are? How many times did someone fail an INT-based knowledge check that you could've also taken a shot at if you had more INT (for modifiers as well as extra skills learned), and used your spells for damage?
@@AnaseSkyrider I guess my issue is that... If I wanted to have a high intelligence or charisma I wouldn't have gone druid. I very rarely play characters who try to cast a wide net when it comes down to what their skillsets are, probably because I play in a 5 person party who tend to have all the bases covered.
The thing is, if I used my (non-cantrip) spells for damage then I'd be out of juice in a single encounter. There's a trope of single powerful monster encounters in modules, which are particularly painful for spellcasters: If your save DC is 20 and the monster has a +15 to their save then burning your highest level spell slot on them to try to damage them is just wasteful. Better to not spend resources with your attempts to do damage and spend your spell slots on things that are more likely to have an effect. Things like using Gust of Wind in a narrow corridor to cut an encounter in half, or Loose Time's Arrow to save the entire party an action that they'd spend on their turn getting into position. If I didn't have martial combat stats I'd still probably prefer cantrips over damage spells.
We've run a couple campaigns with no emergency healing. One or two players takes medicine skill and recovery healing is just fine.
You don't need a healer if your party doesn't get damaged. In one of my campaigns we had a Champion going full on defense reaction with shield warden and champion reaction. He was negating so much damage it made it so that recovery healing between fights was often just 1-2 treatments and a few times we just pushed on cause 1 digit damage isn't much when most of party has triple digits.
If the game hinges on the party always being at full health at every encounter, how far fetched would it be to house rule that characters always return to full health after like 10 minutes of rest?
Or maybe something like (your level)d8s every 10 minutes if you want something slower?
It wouldn't be completely outrageous to handwave, but, access to healing is a choice that competes with other options, so players that don't have to worry about healing at all could spend those feats and proficiencies to get other abilities. It kind of becomes a question of how many considerations can you houserule away before the system does start to lose something. The threat of needing to step back and take some time can make for interesting choices.
@@PathPrimersis it really a choice if having access to recovery healing is necessary?
It does become an issue when time is significant. At higher levels, we often handwave it.
@@matthewparker9276 It becomes about the fiction and the situation.
Sometimes you don't have 6 hours to spend on failed Medicine checks with your +0 Wisdom, due to the 1 hour cooldowns. Sometimes you don't even have the 30 minutes for 3x Treat Wounds on a 3-man party.
A Continual Recovery + Ward Medic healer can probably expect to be able to find 10 to 20 minutes in almost any situation to heal up the party, so long as there's a broom closet they can hide in or a door they can bar.
It's a lot like most feats in PF2e. It doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does, and your choices are impactful in those situations. You'll often feel more powerful at higher levels because you find a feat has had impact more often.
Play Extinction Curse without a healer, hell just play it period- without a healer that campaign will kill you in 1-2 sessions
Algorithm comment keep it up man
you need someone to heal in combat and someone to heal outside combat, it can be the same person if that person wants to.
At low levels you're going to need emergency healing.
Stich Flesh is absolutely a feat tax, and I hate it.
You often have to spend a feat just to become undead, only to have to spend another (or have someone spend one) just to get back to the default position every other PC starts with. In addition to losing most player options of healing I might add. Oh, and Battle Medicine still won't work for you. Being undead sucks in PF2e. Stitch Flesh is just insult to injury.
My play experience from a 1-20 adventure path makes me think you underestimate the need for in combat healing. In the last half of the campaign I'd regularly take 150% of my hit points in a battle. Criticals at high level are brutal.
My GM allows me to use free archtype + exchange class feasts for dedication feats. How strong would a Fighter with Champion + Psychic Archtype be? At level 8 you can get 4 Healing Hands (Desperate Prayer) usages each battle. It only costs 1 action and can be combined with 2H. It will cost most class feats though.
Enemy monsters have to-hits nearly = to PC's ACs, and it is not uncommon for PCs to be literally 1 shot from full health down to 0. YES both healing is essential. Your advice will lead to player deaths.
That will depend highly on party composition. Wizards are unarmored and have low class HP, Champions are pretty much the exact opposite while ALSO having an alright emergency heal.
Even if you have low-defense, low-HP members of your party, there are also abilities you can use that buff everyone's defenses, such as a 3rd level Protection, or certain bard abilities iirc. There's that Wizard focus spell that gives people AC.
It's a dice game, after all. And just as much as anything "depends" on anything else, some people just might not find themselves in enough situations where they can't retreat and come back, even if it means not having the element of surprise the 2nd time around.