If playing a healer in RPGs appeals to you, you might come to D&D and roll up a Cleric, eager to be the person slapping Cure Wounds on your allies on your turns, keeping your Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard at top form while they're the ones killing the monsters.
But anyone who has actually played 5E D&D will know that this isn't really how it goes: Healing is not action-efficient.
In most situations, a Cleric or other healing-capable character is going to tend to be more useful helping get rid of the dangerous monsters than healing up every scratch that falls upon the party.
The main reason this is the case is that healing spells, historically, have been pretty weak.
And that's kind of understandable in terms of broader game design.
D&D is an attrition-based game. Player characters have resources that they spend over the course of an adventuring day, and the challenge is, in part, managing those resources in the most efficient way you can to ensure that you've got enough to survive until your next long rest.
The universal resource in that design is HP. A party of Fighters, Rogues, and Warlocks can remain pretty near full effectiveness after many battles, but eventually, if they don't rest, they're going to be unable to survive the damage the monsters can do to them.
In practical terms, a healing spell can play two roles: one is to extend that resource at the expense of the healer's spell slots. The other, and what I think is more common in 5E's design, is to respond to emergencies and either get an unconscious ally back in the fight and prevent them from dying, or to stave off an ally from going unconscious.
This is part of the reason why I've seen a number of Paladin players use their Lay on Hands only one point at a time - if you pump five points into a friend instead of one, it doesn't really make a difference if they're about to be hit for ten damage. But if they're at two failed death saves, going from zero to one HP makes all the difference in the world.
But spells like Cure Wounds can't really keep up with monster damage - they're great in getting saving someone from death, but each fight is still probably going to be a drain on HP overall, and now you've gone and expended a spell slot to boot!
Now, there are some exceptions. At high levels, Clerics (and in some cases Druids) get access to some genuinely powerful healing spells. Heal is a 6th level spell that restores a flat 70 HP, which will tend to out-heal the damage any one monster is doing to the target unless they're a really beefy foe. Mass Cure Wounds, a 5th level spell, and Mass Healing Word, a 3rd level spell, work a little better because of their multiplicative bonuses - 3d8+Wisdom isn't very much on a single character, but if it's hitting every member of the party, you could potentially have 18d8+six times your Wisdom modifier, which is a lot of healing overall.
But what about those basic heals?
Well, in Playtest 8, we saw buffs to a number of core healing spells. And potentially most impactfully, we saw Healing Word and Cure Wounds get a significant buff.
Each spell currently heals for 1d4 and 1d8 (respectively) plus your spellcasting modifier. Each spell level beyond 1st adds another of its die type to the total.
Now, you can see how this might not be much in the middle of a fight - 1d8 plus your main ability score is the same as the damage a typical monster will do with something like a single longsword attack.
The new version doubles the dice. Not only do the 1st level versions of each spell heal for 2d4 and 2d8, respectively, plus your ability modifier, but they also add 2 dice for each upcast level. Effectively, it's like getting the 2nd level version of the spell when casting it at 1st level, the 4th level version when casting it at 2nd level, etc., to the point that a 9th level Cure Wounds would be like the current version cast at "18th" level.
Does this make them worth casting in combat?
I'll also note that both "mass" variants have also gotten buffs - they have higher base healing, adding two dice to the base version, but the scaling is still a single die.
So, if Mass Cure Wounds is generally worth a 5th level spell slot, how does Cure Wounds cast at that level compare?
The new version of Mass Cure Wounds heals up to 6 targets for 5d8+Wisdom (I realize it doesn't have to be Wisdom, but we're just going to use this as shorthand). If I'm 9th level, we'll assume I've got a +5 to Wisdom by now (though with the new feats it might be more reasonable to expect +4) so we're healing up to 6 creatures for an average of 27.5 HP. A 5th level Cure Wounds will heal a single target for 10d8+5, or an average of 50.
In other words, we're getting a little over half the healing but to six targets, or if you look at it the other way, a little under twice the healing but on a single target.
That might seem unbalanced, but consider that sometimes healing up one person is more important than healing up the group - if you have your one Ancestral Guardian Barbarian or Armorer Artificer who has successfully gotten the monsters to really focus its attacks on them (particularly likely in a single-monster boss fight) it's possible that the rest of the party has barely taken any damage while the tank has gotten the crap beaten out of them.
If we go down to low levels, let's consider 1st level characters. If we assume people are starting with somewhere between a +2 and a +3 to Constitution, that means the lowest starting HP could be a Wizard or Sorcerer with 8 HP, and the highest could be a Barbarian with 15 HP. A Cure Wounds at this level, with a +3 to Wisdom, is going to heal on average for 12 HP - enough to get most characters from 0 to full HP. In other words, it's just as good as someone casting Power Word Heal on them.
Still, that might not be a great point of comparison: 1st level characters are like wet tissue paper, and even a tanky Fighter's going to be looking rough after a single successful hit against them.
It is worth noting that both of the "Mass" healing spells are also getting buffed. Mass Cure Wounds is going, at baseline, from 3d8 to 5d8 - a difference of nine points on average, but potentially up to 54 points. With a +5 to Wisdom, that means 18.5 average healing per target to 27.5 per target, or a bump of about 49%.
Mass Cure Wounds I think already saw some play - but it's more valuable when you're getting the benefits of the "AoE" multiplier while your foes are not in terms of raw healing versus damage. That being said, that scenario is more likely in the case that a single player character is taking most of the damage.
Mass Healing Word is also getting buffed, its baseline becoming 2d4 plus your spellcasting ability. So, at level 5, if you have a +4 to Wisdom, you'd do an average of 9 HP versus the old version's 6.5. This is a 38% bump.
So, what's the upshot of all of this?
I suspect that this will make healing feel more effective - so often, I've seen Clerics complain that they cast Cure Wounds on a target only for the entire heal to be undone by a single attack. This will cut down on the chance for that to happen.
Still, I think on a fundamental level, D&D is built to reward damage prevention more than healing, and the most effective means of preventing damage is to kill the monsters before they can hit you any more.
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