The Unselfish Warforged Variant PEACH [3.5]

[The Witch-King]

Okay--to make a long story as short as possible...

I don't like healing. Never did. I hate playing the healbot. I'd play Clerics all the time if they couldn't heal. The very first character I played was a cleric and I was a warpriest and that's what I'd want to be doing out there--taking names and kicking butt.

A couple of tangential asides...

When I started playing City of Heroes, there were certain power sets that appealed to me--the Dark powers and the Radiation powers. These powers could only be used by Defenders, so I made Defenders with these powers. But Defenders could heal--so they were EXPECTED to heal. I would just skip the healing powers since I didn't want to heal and more than once, I'd be added to a party, the party leader would scan my powers list, see I couldn't heal and then kick me from the party without a word.

In World of Warcraft, I wanted to play a Blood Elf Warrior but they didn't have them at the time, so I played a Blood Elf Paladin instead. Everything was fine while I soloed but when I joined a party, even if there was a main healer, at some point if the feces hit the fan, the party would expect me to stop everything else I was doing and spam heals. And I don't find that fun. For my money, at the point the party leader tells you to stop fighting the enemy and "stand in back and just cast heals," you stop being a Paladin.

So--just one more tangential aside--since you've read this far anyway.

I like that Pathfinder added those positive energy bursts--giving a Cleric a separate healing function away from his or her spells is a good thing. But they kept the whole "abort your chosen spells for healing spells" and I utterly hate that. It keeps the Cleric forever in the role of healers are needed but it would be nice to use the versatility of the Cleric to kick butt in the name of Thor or Odin. (And before you say, play a Paladin, I want the variety that clerical spells provide in addition to the ability to wear armor and kick butt.)

I guess what I'm laboring to say is that I lament the situation that if my class is CAPABLE of healing--people want me to do NOTHING BUT HEAL.


These days, I play a sorcerer or wizard so I can cast spells and blow things up and not have to work about healing. And I thought that role was safe.

But then there's Warforged. You can see the full argument here:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/63822

The skinny is that clerics don't want to heal Warforged because it eats up twice their healing spells and sorcerers and wizards don't want to blow spells on healing the Warforged. And believe me, I get that. I don't play a sorcerer or a wizard because I want to stand around healing anybody.

So I thought of this:

Give Warforged twice as many hit points and they can't be healed by magic at all. That way they can survive most initial encounters and be repaired by mundane repairs afterwards and if they have any sense, when they get too low in hit points they'll hit the road because they'll know it'll take days to fix them back up to maximum and if something happens between then and now, they're toast.

What do you think, sirs?

EDIT: I just had another thought. Give them twice the hit points and change the Repair spells from the Eberron Campaign Setting to non-combat Incantations. Artificers could automatically start with all of them as Incantations. What do you think of that?

[Shinizak]

That's a terrible idea that wouldn't encourage anything but munchkin tanking.

[Ouranos]

I dunno. the games I play in tend to be very low power, heck half the time my paladin or fighter is the most powerful character we have. usually healing comes from wands for us, and if even those won't function on warforged, they would NOT survive in our games. This looks rather nice is you ask me.

[DueceEsMachine]

Hmm.... what would I do with a 10th level warforged barbarian with 300 hit points....?

Answer: ANYTHING I wanted. lol

All joking aside, I understand the feeling of not wanting to play a healbot - we once had a character who played a cleric archer - his solution was to make "Arrows of healing" - he would just shoot all the other players from the back lines and hope that he didn't score a critical - the arrows did normal damage, then healed whatever was left. Maybe not the most efficient, but it was the only way we could get him to do his job at all.

[Lappy9000]

Give Warforged twice as many hit points and they can't be healed by magic at all. That way they can survive most initial encounters and be repaired by mundane repairs afterwards and if they have any sense, when they get too low in hit points they'll hit the road because they'll know it'll take days to fix them back up to maximum and if something happens between then and now, they're toast.....OR, instead of forcing people to not be healed whatsoever, you could just encourage the Warforged Juggernaut prestige class (Eberron Campaign Setting). It basically does exactly what you're looking for without any trouble of double hit points and the like.

[Solaris]

Could just give them the ability to self-repair fairly quickly, at least on par with the fleshies.

[Godskook]

Healing options for warforged:
Healing belt - Ask your DM to allow a variant of this that functions as the repair spell, rather than cure.

Eternal wands - iirc, they're Eberron, which means you can force the warforged to buy his own healing source. Since they're eternal and you're always an arcane caster, UMD isn't required. Make sure he realizes that in-combat, you're busy. If that's not good enough, tell him to invest in UMD or arcane casting for himself.

[DueceEsMachine]

Healing belt and eternal wands (via wand bracer) would be excellent as embedded items in the warforged as well, letting him deal with his own problems without depending on another character too much.

[hiryuu]

But they kept the whole "abort your chosen spells for healing spells" and I utterly hate that. It keeps the Cleric forever in the role of healers are needed

Um... wat?

Being able to do this means you can do other things. You wanna go back to the days of seeing awesome spells, getting complaints form the party when you prep them instead, then just saying "screw it" and filling every spell slot you have with heals? No thank you.

That power was added to clerics so they'd be something other than a healbot.