Encounters are balanced on the assumption that players are at full health, according to the Crawford tweet about the spell. Certainly players being at full health through burning some level two spell slots versus players being at full health through burning many spell slots isn’t something that’s caused me an issue as a DM (if anything I’ve had more characters die than I’d ideally like).
Certainly if the game constantly uses pace and attrition to provide challenges and difficult choices I can see why Healing Spirit changes the balance significantly, but I would expect that to be a minority of games.
1. Out of combat, it obsoletes every other healing spell in terms of pure healing power (so, not considering regeneration of lost body parts). This is most obvious with prayer of healing, but due to the scaling of this spell, it compares very, very favorably with every other healing spell, up to and including mass heal, effectively rendering them redundant for out of combat use. I believe this makes the game poorer.
I know this is a metric upon which mileage is certain to vary, but I've not seen many times that my players were damaged following an encounter to a degree greater than would be restored by use of prayer of healing, but weren't also so depleted in resources (whether just hp or also other things like spell slots and class feature uses) enough to instead be attempting to take a long rest. As a result, I don't see there being many, if any, occasions where the party would change the way they are behaving as a result of having access to healing spirit.
2. Fairly soon in the game, it obsoletes a whole game mechanic: hit dice become irrelevant once you get healing spirit and sufficient level 2+ spell slots.
Similarly, my mileage seems to vary here as well, as the only time I've seen a party at my table use their hit dice in some way that I wouldn't describe as "entirely sporadically, or specifically just to enable the song of rest feature" is when there isn't any character with healing spells more effective than healing word in the party.
I would hypothesize that the difference in mileage is the direct result of attitude toward combat challenge difficulty, as I choose to provide the feeling of combat challenge through a higher number of lower-difficulty encounters, so any singular encounter is not set up to cause significant enough loss of hit points that methods other than healing spirit wouldn't also cover it - so the situation, for me and mine, is that it doesn't matter in practical application that some spells heal x and one spell heals 5x because the party isn't missing more than x hit points until/unless it is time for a long rest anyways, baring the rare occasions on which the dice so thoroughly abandon the players and their characters that a single goblin would seem capable of slaying even a deity on the luck of the rolls being made.
dungeon crawls, where resource management is important and rests can be tricky; or,
quests where time is of the essence and you cannot afford to rest.
I would want to argue that these are not so special scenarios (in fact, they apply for quite some hardcover adventures).
Excellent counter examples (thank you). These situations seem fairly new to 5e.
In 4e, everyone was all good with a 5 minute rest.
In 3e, my players treated wands of Cure Light Wounds as if they were batteries
From my recollection of running these 5e hardcover scenarios:
Forcing the players to continue despite being low on spell slots (and other daily abilities) was cool. Healing spirit actually increases the likelihood of this option.
Forcing the players to continue despite being low on HP was not cool. Players either came back the next day (possibly hosing the scenario or even the campaign) or forged ahead without HP (likely resulting in a TPK and ending the campaign).
Let's say, we want to buff the other healing spells, to make them worthwhile and reduce spell and class envy. Thus: Cure Wounds upcasting need to be significantly brought up; .
So far I've yet to derive any benefit from Healing Spirit, but I still constantly use Healing Word (ranged healing in combat is pretty handy). But yeah, Cure Wounds is pretty lame.
From my recollection of running these 5e hardcover scenarios:
Forcing the players to continue despite being low on spell slots (and other daily abilities) was cool. Healing spirit increases this likelihood.
Forcing the players to continue despite being low on HP was not cool. Players either came back the next day (possibly hosing the scenario or even the campaign) or forged ahead without HP (likely resulting in a TPK and ending the campaign).
Excellent point - I've not had a TPK result from this, but certainly players get cagey about continuing on low health. I have had several occasions when the characters have decided that they won't take the risk, the princess can rot, the vizier can get control etc just because they did not rate their chances of success. Partly because my games do have a lot of character deaths when risks go awry, and partly roleplaying from less heroic characters. Either way Healing Spirit is a good way of getting people back to full.
Without Healing Spirit, the party is simply reliant on Goodberries. A couple of characters with this spell, let alone the Cleric of Life/Goodberry combo, will see a hundred hit points worth of Goodberry healing trivially available by using up spell slots to cast it just before sleeping. I can and do punish this with the odd midnight attack ... but not often, because that's illogical and it's simply the optimum use of the spell.
Therefore in my game at least, Healing Spirit is still not a game changer at all ... and I do have time-bounded scenarios, hasty scenarios, and resource drains. But typically these are hard on features and short/long rest abilities, rather than hit points.
People are comparing Healing Spirit to spells possessed by other classes, but I don't think this is an entirely straightforward comparison. Healing Spirit is only available to druids and rangers. It's true that Prayer of Healing is completely outpaced by Healing Spirit, especially at higher levels. However, LIfe Clerics have many healing abilities that druids don't have, such as Diciple of Life, Blessed Healer, and Supreme Healing. Especially at higher levels. Druids have none of these features. If Healing Spirit now means that there is finally an alternative viable class for healing, then I don't think that's such a terrible thing.
Along the same lines, I don't think it's a coincidence that this spell shows up in the same guide as the Circle of Dreams for a druid - a druid subclass specifically dedicated to healing. However, having played a Dream Druid alongside a Life Cleric, the Circle of Dreams without Healing Spirit seems decidedly underwhelming, since Balm of the Summer Court just can't keep up with even Diciple of Life when it comes to effective healing (at least in my experience)
Of course, you will have people who attempt to abuse this by multiclassing into druid in order to get this spell, or using magical secrets to get it onto a bard.
My suggested solution to all of these problems is to make Healing Spirit exclusive to Circle of Dreams Druids (and maybe rangers, since they have so few spell slots, and therefore would have to give up more to cast it). This would mean that a) there are now two truly viable healing classes - Life Cleric and Dream Druid, giving people interested in healing more options for customisation while remaining viable b) it's not a huge buff to, say, moon druid, who could easily cast this spell around themselves at a high level, wild shape into something reasonably tanky, and then become effectively invincible (using bonus actions to keep the spell on themselves c) multiclassers trying to dip into druid for this spell would have to take at least two levels of druid to do so, and the other class features would likely be relatively useless to them (since most Dream Druid features only become useful with a few levels under your belt). Sacrificing 2 levels for a spell, even a great one, seems steep.
There are still some problems with this spell, admittedly. My group ran into one of them already. I used Healing Spirit in combat, but when the combat finished I still had 7 rounds of Healing Spirit to go. I suggested that the entire group stand in the spririt until they were at full health (the Life Cleric had Beacon of Hope active at the time, so it wouldn't have taken long to accomplish this, since our party consisted mostly of squishy casters). The DM did not like this idea much, and I can see why. While the spell might be argued to be balanced when cast outside of combat (or not), it does seem a little ridiculous that you essentially get a free Prayer of Healing if you happen to have been using this spell in combat, and keep it up until the end.
Also, on optimizing - I do tend to optimise a bit on my healers, but that's because that seems to be the only viable way to heal. When I first started playing D&D and took an interest in healing, I found that the general consensus was that healing was often a waste, and it was better to deal some damage, or cast some buffs. As such, optimising on a healer seems to me more like trying to keep pace with the rest of your group. Especially if you don't feel like roleplaying a Life Cleric - which personaly I rarely do.
RAW, this looks broken, if you can survive a combat you can easily top off the party. Because people haven't been abusing it or are house-ruling how it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken. Its just that people aren't abusing its obvious potential.
You have to ask yourself, what would you have to do to top off the party if you couldn't just use a single 2nd level slot while singing the Hokey Pokey? Multiple Prayer's of Healing? Potions, Hit Dice?
If the party has some decent resources, but is just low on hps....do you barricade yourself somewhere in a dungeon for an hour (or more) or use 1 min to top off and continue? Party got hit with a Flame-Strike/breath weapon/whatever. Mobs were killed handily but got off a good AoE or 4. One 2nd-level spell shouldn't be able to undo massive amounts of damage.
You have to ask yourself, what would you have to do to top off the party if you couldn't just use a single 2nd level slot while singing the Hokey Pokey? Multiple Prayer's of Healing? Potions, Hit Dice?
Goodberries cast the night before, taking 0 spell slots from the current day.
The problem is that this one spell invalidates the abilities of multiple other players and trivializes resource drain to such a degree that only encounters that outright kill the party are any threat at all. This steals a thematic aspect from long sieges and campaigns that the heros are winning, but becoming fatigued and have to worry about what condition they'll be in for the final encounter. Healing Spirit removes this aspect of game play almost completely.
You do NOT want classes having abilities that are so far out of balance that they make multiple other classes feel completely useless. The idea that a 5th level ranger can out heal the party's healer by 3x over makes the party's healer feel like their character is pointless. Part of the collaborative story telling experience is feeling that your hero is an important part of the team and Healing Spirit steals that from many.
Also, in terms of game mechanics it makes you wonder if anyone on the WoTC team even ran this through basic play testing. It is immediately and obviously abusable to such a degree that it is concerning that the game design team didn't recognize it as such.
I had a ranger drop this during an Adventurer's League epic this weekend and not only did it make both of the clerics present feel like their healing was feeble by comparison, but it allowed the ranger to get (35 hp X 7 people) healing in with a single spell cast. Because it is adventurer's league and they haven't released an official Sage Advice or errata on it there was nothing I could do as DM but watch it happen and marvel that this overpowered garbage spell was allowed into Xanathar's as written.
A key aspect of the epic is resource drain across several encounters while under severe time pressure (1 short rest allowed, no long rests, numerous fights). This single spell prevented the clerics from needing to heal outside of combat - at all. Broken AF.
A key aspect of the epic is resource drain across several encounters while under severe time pressure
Excellent example! Even I though personally like my players not have to rest constantly in dungeons anymore, I agree that Healing Spirit can absolutely take the sting out of many Epics (which are designed to be brutal resource drainers).
Still, having run these... I'm not sure I'd mind that much if the Paradigm was changed for Epics. At low levels those battles are brutal, long and painful to run in 5e (higher level PC's at least have an easier time if they are well made). Conversely: Epics were pretty darn fun in 4e (where healing to max HP was easy, same as in 3.5e).
I still find this concern bemusing. Rangers and Druids doing out-of-combat healing so Clerics have more options for their spell slots because they don’t have to spend them on out-of-combat healing: every Cleric I have played with, even Life Domain ones, have loved this. Out-of-combat healing is not mechanically interesting at all, and they still shine at healing during combat.
I still find this concern bemusing. Rangers and Druids doing out-of-combat healing so Clerics have more options for their spell slots because they don’t have to spend them on out-of-combat healing: every Cleric I have played with, even Life Domain ones, have loved this. Out-of-combat healing is not mechanically interesting at all, and they still shine at healing during combat.
This varies from player to player. There's lots of reasons to play a cleric, but if someone chose Life Domain, odds are they want to shine as a healer. To be outshined by a class that doesn't have an emphasis on healing is unsatisfying to them, in the same way that it'd be unsatisfying for a fighter player if a bard could hit harder and take more hits than them.
Ah...then the 5th level Ranger asks said Life Cleric to cast Beacon of Hope, so every party member gets healed 60hps each! Cleric uses up his/her 3rd level spell slots, doesn't get to do the healing. Shouldn't the Life Cleric's primary focus be better at healing (by far!) than the off healing of a DPS?
Let's say it's a Druid casting Healing Spirit. They get 2nd level spells at 3rd. Druid then takes 3 levels of Warlock, for 2nd level spell slots. Druid can now cast 4 2nd level spells & after a short rest, is ready to do it twice again.
Next thing that happens is the Cleric says, "I thought you guys needed a Life Cleric for healing. Can't even use my 3rd or higher slots...might need to assist the Druid/Warlock. Can't even use any concentration spells in combat, now I'm keeping BoH up during combat as well? Why couldn't I make a War or Tempest Cleric instead so at least I have better offensive spells?"
Shouldn't the Life Cleric's primary focus be better at healing (by far!) than the off healing of a DPS?
Once you get beyond the comparison of a single spell at a particular level and on to the overall ability to provide healing, the Life Cleric is leaps and bounds ahead of all other potential sources of healing. Especially since "a DPS" can't bring anyone back from the dead or pull off a single-action full-heal - the kind of things people expect from Clerics focused on healing.
There’s a conceptual difference between the games we are involved in. The metagame (not the precise word, but I’m not sure what the precise word would be) here is that out of combat healing isn’t healing - it’s just resource management in downtime. A cleric doubling the time and heal efficiency of Healing Spirit via Beacon of Hope in downtime seems fine to me as well (particularly if Healing Spirit has been upcast). In that instance I can see no reason why the Cleric wouldn’t take credit for the extra healing: D&D isn’t an MMO where there’s some kind of contribution counter that determines loot box drops. At least they get some contribution instead of just watching Goodberries made with yesterday’s spare spell slots get consumed.
And even with Beacon of Hope, Healing Spirit is poor action economy in most encounters simply because using it efficiently provokes Attacks of Opportunity (and if it doesn’t, that’s the DM’s choice to run encounters where positioning doesn’t matter in which case obviously a spell that is limited by positioning has its limits removed). Most groups will be better off with other Concentration spells up - usually Bless from the Cleric.
In my experience, even at the highest levels, in combat healing has a king: Healing Word. It’s a bonus action so good for action economy, and it’s doing the most important thing: resetting death saves and (initiative order permitting) allowing someone to take a turn before they get knocked over again. Mass Healing Word is good when more than two people are making death saves, then you’re looking at Heal for the big impact on an individual. Healing Spirit does not come close to the in-combat value of these abilities. The Cleric of Life abilities are all solid as well. The critical point here is action economy and time efficiency: Healing Spirit can be moved once a turn as a bonus action (good) but requires Concentration (very bad). At best you’re resetting one death save based on it, if you can maintain Concentration. Both Rangers (Hunter’s Mark) and Druids (summons, etc) have a lot of stuff they need to Concentrate on.
There is a really easy fix for those who think Healing Spirit eclipses Life Clerics, though: add it as a Domain spell. Prayer of Healing is weaker than Goodberry and not well balanced with the other level 2 spells: replacing it with Healing Spirit won’t change the balance unless you really want to run grind adventures (note: not designer’s intent, as highlighted previously the encounter CR assumes parties healing to full between encounters) and you’ve already removed Goodberry.
There’s a conceptual difference between the games we are involved in. The metagame (not the precise word, but I’m not sure what the precise word would be) here is that out of combat healing isn’t healing - it’s just resource management in downtime...
This is really the key to this whole thread. The combat effectiveness of this spell is not really being debated - the fact that positioning is involved is the inherent limit on its utility. The situation is that outside combat the spell can be used in a counter-intuitive way to heal light-years beyond other spells; even higher level spells designed specifically and only for out of combat healing. The people here arguing that this is not an issue are all of the opinion that out of combat healing is just not very important, and the truth of that depends on the structure of the game being played at an individual table. In a game where resting is not an easy choice, where time is of the essence, where repeated small combats drain hp slowly, or any number of other game style choices are in effect, this spell can remove the impact of those elements at a very cheap cost.
Personally, I will home-rule to limit the healing to 10d6 outside an actual combat (including if anyone tries to keep a single rat alive just to drag the combat out for the healing). The healing spirit is a sentient being, a wild force of nature, and it will not stand for being abused. As the DM it is my job to play on behalf of the universe, and that's how I feel it would react to shenanigans.
What high level spells are designed only for out-of-combat healing? And what interventions do you make to stop people eating Goodberries?
I have had plenty of scenarios where I’ve had players unwilling to rest because of time pressure - rescues and chases. But the resources that they manage are abilities and spells rather than hit points. Being low on hot points often makes for swingy combats and players being hesitant. Then again I’m also reluctant to do a lot of small combats, simply because even small combats take a long time past level 11 or so.
Anyhow we have reached an impasse. I’m thankful for Healing Spirit because it streamlines the game and helps Clerics have more fun by removing a skill-less task (even if out-of-combat healing is important for a scenario, it doesn’t involve decision making of any sort). I can see why people who want to be “the best out-of-combat healer who is a Cleric” feel overshadowed by it, and why DMs find hit point drain over multiple fights a useful tool for their group find it reduces their avenues. However I think that calls for remediation at the table rather than an official nerf, since neither of those are universal balance issues.
There are low level out of combat healing spells ..
2nd level prayer of healing .. 10 minute cast .. 2d8 + spellcasting ability mod for ... up to 6 characters ... up cast for an extra d8/level over 2
Average assuming 18 spell casting stat = 9 + 4 = 13 hit points/character
This is compared to
2nd level Healing Spirit ... bonus action cast .. d6/rd for up to 10 rounds ... unlimited number of characters ... up cast for an extra d6/level over 2 ... bonus action to move it up to 30'
Average = 10d6 = 35 hit points/character ... assuming folks don't mind the dancing around required to use it.
On the other hand with characters like my Gloom Stalker ranger/life cleric multiclass ... Healing Spirit goes up to 75hp/character when you add the life cleric 2+spell level bonus to each healing action of the spell. (My ranger/cleric is based on a first edition AD&D character I played years ago ... the character was initially built before Xanathars was released but since it is for Adventurers league it was rebuilt before level 4 to use the new ranger class ... the whole Healing Spirit aspect to it didn't come up until months later). However, I did use Healing Spirit between encounters of an epic since the party had suffered significant damage. In that case, the AL DM involved simply refused to allow the life cleric bonus :) ... I think he thought it was cheesy :)
Anyway, in my opinion, between hit dice that are available to every character and the variety of other healing capabilities available, although Healing Spirit is far more efficient at out of combat healing that other options ... I haven't found it breaks anything in actual play. Very few of the games I have played relied on the reduction of the average player hit points between encounters to make the game challenging ... and as a DM, I would prefer that the characters have more rather than less hit points for each encounter since it can help prevent a TPK when the DM rolls a few crits or the characters fail a few saves. (Personally, when DMing, I don't view my goal as trying to kill the party but rather to provide a fun, enjoyable, challenging story line which preferably has a heroic conclusion where most of the party typically survives if only just.
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Encounters are balanced on the assumption that players are at full health, according to the Crawford tweet about the spell. Certainly players being at full health through burning some level two spell slots versus players being at full health through burning many spell slots isn’t something that’s caused me an issue as a DM (if anything I’ve had more characters die than I’d ideally like).
Certainly if the game constantly uses pace and attrition to provide challenges and difficult choices I can see why Healing Spirit changes the balance significantly, but I would expect that to be a minority of games.
I know this is a metric upon which mileage is certain to vary, but I've not seen many times that my players were damaged following an encounter to a degree greater than would be restored by use of prayer of healing, but weren't also so depleted in resources (whether just hp or also other things like spell slots and class feature uses) enough to instead be attempting to take a long rest. As a result, I don't see there being many, if any, occasions where the party would change the way they are behaving as a result of having access to healing spirit.
Similarly, my mileage seems to vary here as well, as the only time I've seen a party at my table use their hit dice in some way that I wouldn't describe as "entirely sporadically, or specifically just to enable the song of rest feature" is when there isn't any character with healing spells more effective than healing word in the party.I would hypothesize that the difference in mileage is the direct result of attitude toward combat challenge difficulty, as I choose to provide the feeling of combat challenge through a higher number of lower-difficulty encounters, so any singular encounter is not set up to cause significant enough loss of hit points that methods other than healing spirit wouldn't also cover it - so the situation, for me and mine, is that it doesn't matter in practical application that some spells heal x and one spell heals 5x because the party isn't missing more than x hit points until/unless it is time for a long rest anyways, baring the rare occasions on which the dice so thoroughly abandon the players and their characters that a single goblin would seem capable of slaying even a deity on the luck of the rolls being made.
Excellent point - I've not had a TPK result from this, but certainly players get cagey about continuing on low health. I have had several occasions when the characters have decided that they won't take the risk, the princess can rot, the vizier can get control etc just because they did not rate their chances of success. Partly because my games do have a lot of character deaths when risks go awry, and partly roleplaying from less heroic characters. Either way Healing Spirit is a good way of getting people back to full.
Without Healing Spirit, the party is simply reliant on Goodberries. A couple of characters with this spell, let alone the Cleric of Life/Goodberry combo, will see a hundred hit points worth of Goodberry healing trivially available by using up spell slots to cast it just before sleeping. I can and do punish this with the odd midnight attack ... but not often, because that's illogical and it's simply the optimum use of the spell.
Therefore in my game at least, Healing Spirit is still not a game changer at all ... and I do have time-bounded scenarios, hasty scenarios, and resource drains. But typically these are hard on features and short/long rest abilities, rather than hit points.
My two cents, having used this in game:
People are comparing Healing Spirit to spells possessed by other classes, but I don't think this is an entirely straightforward comparison. Healing Spirit is only available to druids and rangers. It's true that Prayer of Healing is completely outpaced by Healing Spirit, especially at higher levels. However, LIfe Clerics have many healing abilities that druids don't have, such as Diciple of Life, Blessed Healer, and Supreme Healing. Especially at higher levels. Druids have none of these features. If Healing Spirit now means that there is finally an alternative viable class for healing, then I don't think that's such a terrible thing.
Along the same lines, I don't think it's a coincidence that this spell shows up in the same guide as the Circle of Dreams for a druid - a druid subclass specifically dedicated to healing. However, having played a Dream Druid alongside a Life Cleric, the Circle of Dreams without Healing Spirit seems decidedly underwhelming, since Balm of the Summer Court just can't keep up with even Diciple of Life when it comes to effective healing (at least in my experience)
Of course, you will have people who attempt to abuse this by multiclassing into druid in order to get this spell, or using magical secrets to get it onto a bard.
My suggested solution to all of these problems is to make Healing Spirit exclusive to Circle of Dreams Druids (and maybe rangers, since they have so few spell slots, and therefore would have to give up more to cast it). This would mean that a) there are now two truly viable healing classes - Life Cleric and Dream Druid, giving people interested in healing more options for customisation while remaining viable b) it's not a huge buff to, say, moon druid, who could easily cast this spell around themselves at a high level, wild shape into something reasonably tanky, and then become effectively invincible (using bonus actions to keep the spell on themselves c) multiclassers trying to dip into druid for this spell would have to take at least two levels of druid to do so, and the other class features would likely be relatively useless to them (since most Dream Druid features only become useful with a few levels under your belt). Sacrificing 2 levels for a spell, even a great one, seems steep.
There are still some problems with this spell, admittedly. My group ran into one of them already. I used Healing Spirit in combat, but when the combat finished I still had 7 rounds of Healing Spirit to go. I suggested that the entire group stand in the spririt until they were at full health (the Life Cleric had Beacon of Hope active at the time, so it wouldn't have taken long to accomplish this, since our party consisted mostly of squishy casters). The DM did not like this idea much, and I can see why. While the spell might be argued to be balanced when cast outside of combat (or not), it does seem a little ridiculous that you essentially get a free Prayer of Healing if you happen to have been using this spell in combat, and keep it up until the end.
Also, on optimizing - I do tend to optimise a bit on my healers, but that's because that seems to be the only viable way to heal. When I first started playing D&D and took an interest in healing, I found that the general consensus was that healing was often a waste, and it was better to deal some damage, or cast some buffs. As such, optimising on a healer seems to me more like trying to keep pace with the rest of your group. Especially if you don't feel like roleplaying a Life Cleric - which personaly I rarely do.
RAW, this looks broken, if you can survive a combat you can easily top off the party. Because people haven't been abusing it or are house-ruling how it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken. Its just that people aren't abusing its obvious potential.
You have to ask yourself, what would you have to do to top off the party if you couldn't just use a single 2nd level slot while singing the Hokey Pokey? Multiple Prayer's of Healing? Potions, Hit Dice?
If the party has some decent resources, but is just low on hps....do you barricade yourself somewhere in a dungeon for an hour (or more) or use 1 min to top off and continue? Party got hit with a Flame-Strike/breath weapon/whatever. Mobs were killed handily but got off a good AoE or 4. One 2nd-level spell shouldn't be able to undo massive amounts of damage.
Goodberries cast the night before, taking 0 spell slots from the current day.
The problem is that this one spell invalidates the abilities of multiple other players and trivializes resource drain to such a degree that only encounters that outright kill the party are any threat at all. This steals a thematic aspect from long sieges and campaigns that the heros are winning, but becoming fatigued and have to worry about what condition they'll be in for the final encounter. Healing Spirit removes this aspect of game play almost completely.
You do NOT want classes having abilities that are so far out of balance that they make multiple other classes feel completely useless. The idea that a 5th level ranger can out heal the party's healer by 3x over makes the party's healer feel like their character is pointless. Part of the collaborative story telling experience is feeling that your hero is an important part of the team and Healing Spirit steals that from many.
Also, in terms of game mechanics it makes you wonder if anyone on the WoTC team even ran this through basic play testing. It is immediately and obviously abusable to such a degree that it is concerning that the game design team didn't recognize it as such.
I had a ranger drop this during an Adventurer's League epic this weekend and not only did it make both of the clerics present feel like their healing was feeble by comparison, but it allowed the ranger to get (35 hp X 7 people) healing in with a single spell cast. Because it is adventurer's league and they haven't released an official Sage Advice or errata on it there was nothing I could do as DM but watch it happen and marvel that this overpowered garbage spell was allowed into Xanathar's as written.
A key aspect of the epic is resource drain across several encounters while under severe time pressure (1 short rest allowed, no long rests, numerous fights). This single spell prevented the clerics from needing to heal outside of combat - at all. Broken AF.
I still find this concern bemusing. Rangers and Druids doing out-of-combat healing so Clerics have more options for their spell slots because they don’t have to spend them on out-of-combat healing: every Cleric I have played with, even Life Domain ones, have loved this. Out-of-combat healing is not mechanically interesting at all, and they still shine at healing during combat.
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Ah...then the 5th level Ranger asks said Life Cleric to cast Beacon of Hope, so every party member gets healed 60hps each! Cleric uses up his/her 3rd level spell slots, doesn't get to do the healing. Shouldn't the Life Cleric's primary focus be better at healing (by far!) than the off healing of a DPS?
Let's say it's a Druid casting Healing Spirit. They get 2nd level spells at 3rd. Druid then takes 3 levels of Warlock, for 2nd level spell slots. Druid can now cast 4 2nd level spells & after a short rest, is ready to do it twice again.
Next thing that happens is the Cleric says, "I thought you guys needed a Life Cleric for healing. Can't even use my 3rd or higher slots...might need to assist the Druid/Warlock. Can't even use any concentration spells in combat, now I'm keeping BoH up during combat as well? Why couldn't I make a War or Tempest Cleric instead so at least I have better offensive spells?"
To InquisitiveCoder and RenFaireMan:
There’s a conceptual difference between the games we are involved in. The metagame (not the precise word, but I’m not sure what the precise word would be) here is that out of combat healing isn’t healing - it’s just resource management in downtime. A cleric doubling the time and heal efficiency of Healing Spirit via Beacon of Hope in downtime seems fine to me as well (particularly if Healing Spirit has been upcast). In that instance I can see no reason why the Cleric wouldn’t take credit for the extra healing: D&D isn’t an MMO where there’s some kind of contribution counter that determines loot box drops. At least they get some contribution instead of just watching Goodberries made with yesterday’s spare spell slots get consumed.
And even with Beacon of Hope, Healing Spirit is poor action economy in most encounters simply because using it efficiently provokes Attacks of Opportunity (and if it doesn’t, that’s the DM’s choice to run encounters where positioning doesn’t matter in which case obviously a spell that is limited by positioning has its limits removed). Most groups will be better off with other Concentration spells up - usually Bless from the Cleric.
In my experience, even at the highest levels, in combat healing has a king: Healing Word. It’s a bonus action so good for action economy, and it’s doing the most important thing: resetting death saves and (initiative order permitting) allowing someone to take a turn before they get knocked over again. Mass Healing Word is good when more than two people are making death saves, then you’re looking at Heal for the big impact on an individual. Healing Spirit does not come close to the in-combat value of these abilities. The Cleric of Life abilities are all solid as well. The critical point here is action economy and time efficiency: Healing Spirit can be moved once a turn as a bonus action (good) but requires Concentration (very bad). At best you’re resetting one death save based on it, if you can maintain Concentration. Both Rangers (Hunter’s Mark) and Druids (summons, etc) have a lot of stuff they need to Concentrate on.
There is a really easy fix for those who think Healing Spirit eclipses Life Clerics, though: add it as a Domain spell. Prayer of Healing is weaker than Goodberry and not well balanced with the other level 2 spells: replacing it with Healing Spirit won’t change the balance unless you really want to run grind adventures (note: not designer’s intent, as highlighted previously the encounter CR assumes parties healing to full between encounters) and you’ve already removed Goodberry.
What high level spells are designed only for out-of-combat healing? And what interventions do you make to stop people eating Goodberries?
I have had plenty of scenarios where I’ve had players unwilling to rest because of time pressure - rescues and chases. But the resources that they manage are abilities and spells rather than hit points. Being low on hot points often makes for swingy combats and players being hesitant. Then again I’m also reluctant to do a lot of small combats, simply because even small combats take a long time past level 11 or so.
Anyhow we have reached an impasse. I’m thankful for Healing Spirit because it streamlines the game and helps Clerics have more fun by removing a skill-less task (even if out-of-combat healing is important for a scenario, it doesn’t involve decision making of any sort). I can see why people who want to be “the best out-of-combat healer who is a Cleric” feel overshadowed by it, and why DMs find hit point drain over multiple fights a useful tool for their group find it reduces their avenues. However I think that calls for remediation at the table rather than an official nerf, since neither of those are universal balance issues.
There are low level out of combat healing spells ..
2nd level prayer of healing .. 10 minute cast .. 2d8 + spellcasting ability mod for ... up to 6 characters ... up cast for an extra d8/level over 2
Average assuming 18 spell casting stat = 9 + 4 = 13 hit points/character
This is compared to
2nd level Healing Spirit ... bonus action cast .. d6/rd for up to 10 rounds ... unlimited number of characters ... up cast for an extra d6/level over 2 ... bonus action to move it up to 30'
Average = 10d6 = 35 hit points/character ... assuming folks don't mind the dancing around required to use it.
On the other hand with characters like my Gloom Stalker ranger/life cleric multiclass ... Healing Spirit goes up to 75hp/character when you add the life cleric 2+spell level bonus to each healing action of the spell. (My ranger/cleric is based on a first edition AD&D character I played years ago ... the character was initially built before Xanathars was released but since it is for Adventurers league it was rebuilt before level 4 to use the new ranger class ... the whole Healing Spirit aspect to it didn't come up until months later). However, I did use Healing Spirit between encounters of an epic since the party had suffered significant damage. In that case, the AL DM involved simply refused to allow the life cleric bonus :) ... I think he thought it was cheesy :)
Anyway, in my opinion, between hit dice that are available to every character and the variety of other healing capabilities available, although Healing Spirit is far more efficient at out of combat healing that other options ... I haven't found it breaks anything in actual play. Very few of the games I have played relied on the reduction of the average player hit points between encounters to make the game challenging ... and as a DM, I would prefer that the characters have more rather than less hit points for each encounter since it can help prevent a TPK when the DM rolls a few crits or the characters fail a few saves. (Personally, when DMing, I don't view my goal as trying to kill the party but rather to provide a fun, enjoyable, challenging story line which preferably has a heroic conclusion where most of the party typically survives if only just.