What would it take to make in-combat healing worth while?

[PhoenixPhyre]

It's widely[1] believed that in-combat healing is a waste of time in 5e, except to pop someone up from 0 HP. This, in my opinion, is a bad thing. It leads to the whack-a-mole situation, it devalues a core piece of game-play that many players (judging from my players) enjoy, and it provides a near-trap option. It also feels very weird--players letting themselves go full out, get knocked out, then pop back up again without trying to keep their health up.

Ok, so if healing in combat is mostly useless and that's bad, what would be required to make it worth the spell slots/actions?

Suggestions?

[1] on forums at least

[JackPhoenix]

Simply add some sort of penalty to dropping to 0 hp. Exhaustion is popular.

[The_Jette]

I'm not entirely sure what groups you're playing with, but my groups are very heavily in the "healing is useful" camp. It helps that we almost got wiped the one time that our healer wasn't available. In combat healing only sucks because the person who is healing could be dealing damage, which would get the group out of the danger that is threatening to take away hit points. I'd much rather have a cleric keeping my meat shield from reaching me, since I'm still a low level wizard.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Simply add some sort of penalty to dropping to 0 hp. Exhaustion is popular.

No. That's exactly what I want to avoid. That doesn't promote healing in combat, it promotes alpha strikes and rocket-tag game-play (death is the best crowd control). I'd rather be able to have longer, more tactical fights. There are also players who enjoy playing the healer role.

I'm not entirely sure what groups you're playing with, but my groups are very heavily in the "healing is useful" camp. It helps that we almost got wiped the one time that our healer wasn't available. In combat healing only sucks because the person who is healing could be dealing damage, which would get the group out of the danger that is threatening to take away hit points. I'd much rather have a cleric keeping my meat shield from reaching me, since I'm still a low level wizard.

I'll admit that my players also heal a lot. I'm trying to work through the forum consensus--see the "are you spending any slots to heal in combat?" thread from a while ago. An idea would be to give a class feature (or feat?) that adds a healing or THP rider onto certain damage done by the player. Or makes healing leave a buff that strengthens the healed person (a single bless die?). Something that makes people want to heal/be healed instead of simply trying to muscle down the enemy as fast as possible.

[Tanarii]

No. That's exactly what I want to avoid. That doesn't promote healing in combat, it promotes alpha strikes and rocket-tag game-play (death is the best crowd control). I'd rather be able to have longer, more tactical fights. There are also players who enjoy playing the healer role.

If the players perceive there's no significant downside to waiting to heal before 0 hps, then the only way to make healing in combat more attractive is to make it a better option than dealing damage. Which has its own downsides. It sets a floor for the ability to do damage, must be able to do damage faster than enemies healing or need not apply.

Of course, I don't see that players perceive no disadvantage to 0 hps, but it's certainly less than when 0 hps meant death. This edition's way of handling it does seem to be widely considered the least dangerous/risky for being at 0 hp.

[Meta]

I'm not a big fan of the exhaustion solution.

How about including more effects like catching fire or being drained that end when the character is healed (could be 1 point or a higher value). The upfront damage is low, but could add up. That asks for better and quicker in combat healing.

[No brains]

I think the major reason that healing is (perceived as) weak in 5e is because the designers wanted to encourage proactive tactics. Making healing too good would cause fights to drag on for longer with less exciting things happening. If healing were super-good, battles might turn into a kind of trench warfare, where healing just gets dumped and dumped until one side makes a mistake or bad roll. A quick and decisive battle can be fun in itself and also allows more fun down the line. It makes sense for a game about a lot of battles.

[Slipperychicken]

No. That's exactly what I want to avoid. That doesn't promote healing in combat, it promotes alpha strikes and rocket-tag game-play (death is the best crowd control).

I dunno about your players, but if I saw a PC getting low under the 'exhaustion at 0hp' rule, they'd be getting a big heal on my next action.

[stoutstien]

I don't use exhaustion but I do use a lingering injury mechanic. I actually think the main reason is action economy that players do not heal more in combat they don't want to feel like they wasted their turn doing something that didn't move the fight forward to a resolution. New Dwarven racial feat is a cool idea that was horribly implemented. It should have been something more along the lines of a reaction to use the Dodge action and use an HD die to heal.

[PeteNutButter]

I dunno about your players, but if I saw a PC getting low under the 'exhaustion at 0hp' rule, they'd be getting a big heal on my next action.

This^

I use the exhaustion rule at my table to great success. Players would much rather get healed to stay above 0 than ever hit 0. I’ve seen a marked improvement in the desire for big healing and the intensity of combat.

[Pex]

Increase the amount of healing the spell provides at its base level. Healing spells heal a paltry amount of damage compared to the damage spells of their level do. Cure Wounds is 1d8 + spellcasting modifier, so 1d8 + 3 until at least 4th level where it goes to a whopping 1d8 + 4. Meanwhile, Inflict Wounds is 3d10 damage, Burning Hands is 3d6, even Cantrips out damage the healing starting at 5th character level. Monster attacks also outdamage the healing.

It's not necessary and even impractical to match up the healing to every amount of damage based on spell level and CR of foes, but it still needs to be higher than what we have now. Have Cure Wounds start at 2d8 + modifier, Healing Word is 2d4 + modifier. Alternative or in addition add character level to the amount of healing.

[Sigreid]

Change some of the healing spells to wards so you aren't healing but preventing damage.

[Finger6842]

It's widely[1] believed that in-combat healing is a waste of time in 5e, except to pop someone up from 0 HP. This, in my opinion, is a bad thing. It leads to the whack-a-mole situation, it devalues a core piece of game-play that many players (judging from my players) enjoy, and it provides a near-trap option. It also feels very weird--players letting themselves go full out, get knocked out, then pop back up again without trying to keep their health up.

Ok, so if healing in combat is mostly useless and that's bad, what would be required to make it worth the spell slots/actions?

Suggestions?

[1] on forums at least

I agree that extra healing will indeed lead to trench warfare. I also feel expending the extra spells will reduce the /encounters per day/ target most DM's seem to have. Negative solutions like a penalty for falling unconcious are not typically good for players, forcing them to choose between the obvious answer "Heal now" and the correct answer "remove the mob from the encounter NOW before he can do another big hit/crit". Everyone knows that monsters can hit way harder than most heals can compensate for at every level. It's this second philosophy, combined with the truly poor crowd control spells in the game that appear to drive my fellow players to ignore healing in combat.

To me the best option is to give a side affect to the healing spell like increased chance to dodge/save while under the influence of a healing spell. Each healing spell could have a different effect (chance to cure poision, quench flames, cure status, etc) Now the base healing spell does 1d8+x healing AND has some chance (think 1d4 like bardic inspiration) of avoiding another hit that immediately takes away the gain or additionally has some other function. Functionally you can make it work in different ways. For example the healing spell "lights up" the target so bright it's difficult to see them clearly in a "holy" instance or "shrouds the target in shadows" for a necromantic heal. Maybe "surrounds the target in musical notes" for a Bard, obscuring LOS. I've seen something similar to this in use and it has the desired affect, encounters are a bit longer and more tactical in nature.

I have also seen suggestions that give exp bonuses to players that heal but personally think this will unbalance the party. Though to be honest I don't mind at all when other players level before I do since it still makes the party stronger, I do recognize how much harder encounters get to plan when the PC's are different levels. Having taken a stab or two in the DM chair I would personally avoid it, though I doubt senior DM's would be inconvenienced in any meaningful way.

[krugaan]

No. That's exactly what I want to avoid. That doesn't promote healing in combat, it promotes alpha strikes and rocket-tag game-play (death is the best crowd control). I'd rather be able to have longer, more tactical fights. There are also players who enjoy playing the healer role.

For longer more tactical fights you may actually want to look at encounters in MMORPGS, as much as that idea may be derided. The boss fights in WoW are certainly more tailored to high healing / long fights rather than alpha strikes. BBEGs with timers, mooks that should (SHOULD) be taken down in certain orders, phases where you might be forced to run for cover or die, etc.

That being said, as long as whack-a-mole dominates, there's little incentive to heal past barely alive. Exhaustion on 0hp is a decent start.

Or number of rounds of incapacitated equal to the amount of death saves you've failed.

[Kane0]

Some ideas:

Healing also provides a buff (resistance, THP, advantage vs certain conditons, etc)
Link healing with condition removal (eg add a check to also remove sickened condition)
Utilize damage over time effects (poison, bleeding, creeping necrosis, etc) that can be stopped with healing

You need to find some way to make the actions and resources spent on healing be equally as or more efficient than other potential uses (such as preventing damage ocurring in the first place via kiling foes faster or providing BFC).
Basically make the pound of cure match the ounce of prevention.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Increase the amount of healing the spell provides at its base level.

This. Very much this. In a sense, in-combat healing can be boiled down to an action economy thing: you're using your action (and a resource) to cancel out some amount of enemy actions. If your heal restores 10 health, and your enemies are doing 5 damage each, that's not a bad trade-off*-- your turn is essentially worth two of theirs, so your team pulls ahead. On the other hand, if your heal restores 10 health and your enemies are doing 10 damage each... not so much. You're doing a 1:1 tradeoff; no real advantage is being gained. Couple this with the lack of penalty for being at low health, and there's very little incentive to heal.

Basically, the amount you heal for needs to be greater than the incoming damage. You shouldn't have a case where one Cure Wounds spell is about equal to one Attack action.


*Ignoring the resource cost, at least

I think the major reason that healing is (perceived as) weak in 5e is because the designers wanted to encourage proactive tactics. Making healing too good would cause fights to drag on for longer with less exciting things happening. If healing were super-good, battles might turn into a kind of trench warfare, where healing just gets dumped and dumped until one side makes a mistake or bad roll. A quick and decisive battle can be fun in itself and also allows more fun down the line. It makes sense for a game about a lot of battles.

This... won't happen that often, because you're not facing adventuring parties all the time. Most fights won't have a spellcasting enemy at all, and even then, not all casting enemies will have healing spells.

[ImproperJustice]

To answer the original question:

Play a Life Cleric

To better answer the question:
You could add the system strain mechanic from Kevin Crawford’s books ( SWN and other Dust).

It’s like a built in limit on how much your body can be healed or revived until it can’t be restored any more.
It slowly recovers on it’s own (say over long rests), and you could make it to where being revived consumes more strain than healing.
It’s a decent way to balance over-indulgance on certain buffs like Haste as an example.

[coyote_sly]

The simple answer: heal more HP with the spells. If you don't heal more HP than the enemy is going to do in a round you end up one round later in the exact same spot minus a resource. It's a God damn waste, so nobody does it.

It would be FAR better to have access to healing action far less frequently in combat, but have them actually restore a significant portion of HP.

[Ritorix]

It's just the nature of D&D that combatants are equally useful at 1HP as they are at 100HP. If the game had a wound system or similar mechanic, there would be an incentive to stay topped off in combat. Some games add penalty dice as your HPs decrease or you pass certain health thresholds; you literally get worse at fighting as you get injured. But that that isn't the case here in a more heroic-themed game so action denial remains top dog and HP healing is only relevant to keep someone in the fight.

There's a lot of healing variants in other games that D&D could (and has, over the years) borrow. 4e had abilities like Sacred Flames and Healing Strike, which did damage and also granted an ally temp HP or a full heal on a hit, so you could heal via combat. Heal-over-times are another good option, I remember some in 3e. I love playing healers in MMOs, but a D&D healer focuses on the action economy - damage prevention via crowd control, healing to get someone up and no farther. It's a shame crowd control spells like hold person, banishment, etc are saving-throw based. Imagine if they only worked on low-HP opponents, so there was an incentive to keep allies topped off and immune to the nasty spells.

If you wanted to change the game around a lot, I would do something like this to all monsters and PCs:
Over half HP? Advantage on all saves. You resist things easier when fresh. Rocket-tag of round 1 fireballs and banishment has less effect.
Under half HP? Disadvantage on all rolls including saves, checks and attacks. Resistances are breaking down. You'll die faster now. Run away or get a heal.

[Talamare]

Add a penalty to death
"It encourages alpha strikes"
If your party can alpha strike kill the entire encounter without taking significant damage, then the encounter wasn't a challenge to begin with

Add a penalty to low health
Use the Bloodied System from 4e. Once you're at half health you lose some of your power

From that this is what I suggest

Once per battle when you're reduced to half health, you suffer 1 level of exhaustion.

If your character is reduced to 0, he must immediately make a death saving throw. This death saving throw is repeated at the start of each of his turns. A character may fail 3 death saving throws before he dies. Each failed attempt is recorded, and 1 is removed after each long rest.

If your character is ever revived from death, one of his attributes scores is permanently reduced by 1.

[Slipperychicken]

It's just the nature of D&D that combatants are equally useful at 1HP as they are at 100HP. If the game had a wound system or similar mechanic, there would be an incentive to stay topped off in combat. Some games add penalty dice as your HPs decrease or you pass certain health thresholds; you literally get worse at fighting as you get injured. But that that isn't the case here in a more heroic-themed game so action denial remains top dog and HP healing is only relevant to keep someone in the fight.

I agree with this. I think people just have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of death-spiral mechanics.

If you wanted to change the game around a lot, I would do something like this to all monsters and PCs:
Over half HP? Advantage on all saves. You resist things easier when fresh. Rocket-tag of round 1 fireballs and banishment has less effect.
Under half HP? Disadvantage on all rolls including saves, checks and attacks. Resistances are breaking down. You'll die faster now. Run away or get a heal.

I'd consider this without the "over half" modifiers. Being healthy just means you do things normally -no modifier. Being injured means you do things worse. Maybe instead of flat disadvantage on everything, you could have a kind of 'temporary exhaustion level' to indicate great injury.

[Pex]

While spellcasters do get damaged giving penalties for less than optimum health hurts warriors more because they're getting pounded more. It's why they have the hit points and AC. In the general case you also spiral the party down to a quicker death. The more hurt they get the more penalties they get. The more penalties they get the less they can hurt the bad guys. The less they can hurt the bad guys the more hurt they get. Time and resources spent on healing only return to the status quo but do nothing to give the party advantage and doesn't address they're still healing less than they're taking damage. It doesn't pay to heal the fighter so he doesn't have penalties only for the fighter to get damaged again to go back into penalties. Combat becomes a series of frustrations.

[Hyde]

Unfortunately, the game is math.
It will always either be more efficient to murder the other team as fast as possible, or to spend all of your resources on healing (and then murder).

If healing is less efficient than damage, then in-combat healing in generally a bad plan.
If healing is more efficient than damage, you all but require pigeon-holing someone into a healer role. (If that's what someone wants to do, then great, but "stuck being the healer" is a thing, and something this edition actively avoids).
If healing is as efficient as damage, you may as well have the casters discuss how many spell slots to cross of each side, and then start the fight. (Probably not really, but I wanted to make the joke.)

I really would want to dig into this by asking exactly what we're trying to accomplish. It sounds like we're wanting to specifically prevent the whack-a-mole aspect, which isn't exactly the same as "promoting spending ones actions to heal". Which is to say, incentivizing healing isn't the same as disincentivizing dying.

Of the solutions presented, buffing heal spells falls into the former- make heals more attractive, therefore making players more willing to use them. Conversely, the exhaustion rule falls under the latter- you better not die, or else!

We need a solution that addresses the bad math that healing represents (why do it ever when murder is better?) and that does so in a way that's actually interesting (because healing might not be boring for everyone, but oh boy). Literally the only time I was excited about healing was in 4th edition, when my party's cleric turned an ongoing 90 bleed damage into an ongoing 90 heal.

Without changing the rules, I would encourage encounters with waves- a short break where they don't have time to take a short rest- maybe they could retreat, but they're not going to do well next round if they don't try to patch up even a little (I'll admit that this is both complex and difficult).

Monsters with abilities that amplify against weakened targets- if the target of the attack is less than half, he gets a free swing, for example, to incentivize more tactical healing.

Mobile monsters where spending half movement to get up from prone every round is unfeasible.

Monsters that start recognizing that the PCs are just going to get popped back up, and start making an effort to execute downed PCs after the first couple of times it happens. That'll wake them up real fast.

In short- if you want your players to behave with more tactical complexity than rocket-tag beatdown, you'll have to set it up so that success requires it of them.

Wound systems would help- especially if natural healing didn't fix the wounds. You have to spend magical healing to heal that broken leg, buddy, or wait for it to heal.

I'm sorry that this is a bit rambling. It's an interesting topic, and not one easily addressed, I think.

[Lombra]

We're playing without a cleric. It's hard.

[Wilko]

Throw in a few low level minions, have them go after PC's who drop to 0hp, remember any melee hit is a crit and costs two death saving throws. Going unconscious is a slap on the wrist - dying sucks...

[Jethro]

Increase the amount of healing the spell provides at its base level. Healing spells heal a paltry amount of damage compared to the damage spells of their level do. Cure Wounds is 1d8 + spellcasting modifier, so 1d8 + 3 until at least 4th level where it goes to a whopping 1d8 + 4. Meanwhile, Inflict Wounds is 3d10 damage, Burning Hands is 3d6, even Cantrips out damage the healing starting at 5th character level. Monster attacks also outdamage the healing.

It's not necessary and even impractical to match up the healing to every amount of damage based on spell level and CR of foes, but it still needs to be higher than what we have now. Have Cure Wounds start at 2d8 + modifier, Healing Word is 2d4 + modifier. Alternative or in addition add character level to the amount of healing.

I'm pretty sure it's this simple. Sure cure wounds is pretty good at level one, but it sucks from then on. Make it at range instead of touch, make it 2d8+mod and up cast at 1d8 per level. Use that as the base for ALL the healing spells. Mass Cure wounds for 3d8+mod, Mass Healing Word for 3d4+mod. I mean thats a 5th and 3rd level spell, respectively. It should be on par with Banishment and Spirit Guardians, no? Also, let players drink a health potion as a bonus action.

[Battlebooze]

Change some of the healing spells to wards so you aren't healing but preventing damage.

Pretty close to what I was thinking.

Change Cure wounds to something like: Heals 1d8 + wisdom modifier and gives 5 temporary hit points. These both scale with up casting. These temporary hit points fade in one hour.

So a 5th level slot will heal 5d8+wis and grant 25 temporary hit points for an hour.

[Talamare]

Change some of the healing spells to wards so you aren't healing but preventing damage.

I would leave the current healing spells alone, and introduce wards.

Wards would provide higher amounts of prevention, while perhaps as well provide some form of bonus

A level 1 Ward could be, Prevent the next 3d8+Mod damage, if this damage came from an attack the attacker suffers d6 damage

[Cespenar]

Wards would be awesome. Rule that only one ward can be active on one creature, and introduce wards against different situations. Pretty tactical.

Example of different wards than hit point wards:

Ward of Body, lv 3: Prevent the next Stun, Blind or Paralysis condition that comes from an enemy spell or attack. Target receives the effect of Haste for 1 round.

Ward of Mind, lv 5: Prevent the next Charmed or Frightened condition that comes from an enemy spell or attack. Target receives instead advantage on all of its rolls for 1 round.

[Easy_Lee]

Make the heals better and more interesting. Heals should be equal to nukes in damage. There should be more AoE and persistent healing effects, such as the popular Aura of Vitality.

It's funny to me that Xanathar's has done exactly this, and some people are complaining that those heals are too powerful. They aren't too powerful. Most of the existing heals are just too weak.