You spend a 2nd level spell healing everyone. Nothing Else. No slots back, no Ki or special features, no bonus from a Bard's Song of Rest.
Rather, even if it's very good at healing, did you stop to think that it might be that the Mass Heal is underpowered, instead of Healing Spirit being overpowered?
Bard's Song of Rest provides a single die of extra hit points IF you using hit dice to heal during the short rest. This is laughable to even bring up.
Also, consider the pressure taken off of all other resources once healing becomes virtually infinite. No need to waste spell slots unless you're at risk of being killed. Instead of balancing health, consumables, spell slots, ki points, etc. - all you have to do is get out of the fight alive and watch your health bars rocket to full like a video game.
It is stupidly overpowered.
Consider this - You can with a single 3rd level spell slot and a minute of free time reverse the damage of 4 consecutive fireball hits using 5th level slots where all party members fail all saving throws.
Compare that to all other out-of-combat healing options.
Prayer of Healing gets you (assuming 20 WIS) 14 x 6 = 84 points. Make that 18 x 6 if you're a Life Cleric = 108 points. Using a 3rd level slot gets you all the way up to 24 x 6 for a massive 144 points. That takes 10x longer to complete at 10 minutes.
Aura of Vitality gets you 70 points - 120 points if you've dipped into life cleric.
Healing Spirit gets you 840 points - basically 6x the next best out of combat option. SIX TIMES.
What if the crafty ranger takes a level of Life Cleric as well? The spell ramps up to (20d6 + 5) x 20 for a hot 40d6 + 100: 940 points of healing.
If that doesn't bother you then I'd like to sit at your table and have my fireballs do 64d6 damage per cast.
Healing in combat is already fairly useless unless you're dying, and as I've now said above about 4 times, you're not going to be able to cast it after every fight. It depends on spell slots, of which rangers have a limited supply. It also doesn't restore short rest abilities or ki points or warlock spells, and it doesn't matter how much it heals beyond a character's max health.
There's going to be a lot of times when you'd RATHER short test than healing spirit. There's plenty of reason not to. All HS does is save you an hour. If you have an hour to spare and you still cast it, all you've done is wasted a spell slot.
Neither of which are available to Rangers at all. Both require a full action or bonus action to reproduce the effect on subsequent turns. Healing Spirit requires noaction to continue the effect on subsequent turns. Keep trying.
The spells I cited require bonus actions on classes that don't have a ton of demands on their bonus action, so it may as well be action less. As for the Ranger, we were speaking hypothetically about clerics, so for that example, rangers aren't pertinent.
Thank you for showing that you do not understand the magnitude of the problem.
The Ranger is absolutely pertinent. The Ranger is a martialhalf-caster with access to a spell which allows them to outperform a non-martial full-caster devoted to healing. There is no trade-off for the Ranger to accomplish this. They all have access to the spell no matter what their actual class specialization is. It is 100% superior to the actually-exclusive devoted healing spell Prayer of Healing in every possible way. **** that.
This doesn't happen anywhere else. There are no instances of a non-martial base class having a feature that lets them completely--in every conceivable manner--outperform a Fighter in melee combat. Let's give all Rogues Extra Attack (5). That's what Healing Spirit is to everyone else.
But that's still only out of combat. It only lets you skip the occasional short rest, if you didn't use all your spell slots during the fight, or if you don't wanna hang onto them for the next fight, or if you don't need to recover short rest abilities.
I still don't see the big deal and nobody will address those points I am making.
Jaysburn, that brings me back to my above point. When I said this about out of combat healing, the person who responded made the point that they thought it was broken because of in combat healing, which got that whole train rolling again...
Jay, as Charles says, I am definitely saying this spell is broken in combat. However, the magnitude of its "brokenness" is vastly different in & out of combat. The spell is only "broken" in combat in the context of comparable capabilities.
In combat, it is hands-down the best possible healing spell to use in nearly every conceivable situation. Concentration is not a negative point either. I don't know a single Cleric that, were it available to them, wouldn't eagerly use their concentration on maintaining it. It's better than everything in their toolkit; why wouldn't they? A full-caster class, with a subclass entirely devoted to healing, being envious of a healing spell from a (primarily) damage-oriented half-caster core class... That really should tell you all that you need to know about why this spell is a problem.
And to be clear, I do not have a problem with how the spell itself actually functions in combat (movement shenanigans aside). I have a problem with Cleric (particularly Life) not having anything at least as good in their own toolkit. To me, this invalidates the very existence of the spell. It is not a balanced spell.
Out of combat, Healing Spirit is just plain broken AF, regardless of which classes can or cannot access it. Full stop.
[edit] Oh, and Charles thank you for your earlier post about Sneak Attack. That was totally not off-topic, and very much pertinent. 👍
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
No problem! As I'm still unconvinced of its brokenness (which is what brought me here in the first place) , and I haven't seen anything to convince me that the points I've made are wrong, I'm gonna duck out.
Thanks for helping me pass by a slow, boring day at work! :)
I concede that triggering an action on another character's turn counts as a different turn. There's even errata that spells it out.
All I have left to say is that because of how OR works, by RAW, if a character starts their turn in the healing spirit, they can't benefit from healing later in the round by stepping into the spirit on a other character's turn. Because OR is a fork that eliminates the other option(s).
Which tells me that was not the intention of the spell. As a DM, if I had an obstinate player that insisted on exploiting the spell this way, and the other players insisted as well, I would roll initiative and make them all move, declare ready actions and if they trigger their readied action, move again. For every player for 10 rounds. Make them waste precious play time for trying to break the game.
I concede that triggering an action on another character's turn counts as a different turn. There's even errata that spells it out.
All I have left to say is that because of how OR works, by RAW, if a character starts their turn in the healing spirit, they can't benefit from healing later in the round by stepping into the spirit on a other character's turn. Because OR is a fork that eliminates the other option(s).
Which tells me that was not the intention of the spell. As a DM, if I had an obstinate player that insisted on exploiting the spell this way, and the other players insisted as well, I would roll initiative and make them all move, declare ready actions and if they trigger their readied action, move again. For every player for 10 rounds. Make them waste precious play time for trying to break the game.
OR doesn't eliminate the other option. That's why we have XOR as a separate operator. Outside of formal logic, some languages actually have different words for inclusive and exclusive or, but English doesn't, and the default assumption is always inclusive.
I also doubt that the designers were actually thinking of the possibility of pushing friends through healing spirit when it's not their turn, and if any of my players were to try that, I would express my disappointment in them (they're very understanding, and if I asked them nicely not to do it, they would listen to me).
Actually, it doesn't matter how you interpret OR, because the spell includes the word 'whenever', so the condition is triggered every time someone interacts with the spirit.
It truly is worded to be exploitable in the way it is described in this thread.
Did Healing Spirit receive unannounced errata? Newer printings of Xanathar's include a use limiter of 1+casting mod (min twice). See image/video below. This new language does not appear on D&D Beyond. https://youtu.be/cEaTulq4ayg?t=66
Healing spirit has been altered, and a new errata document is on the way. We time the release of our errata docs to coincide with the arrival of corrected books in peoples' hands—which is now!
Heal 1d6 hp, generally 4 times over the course of the fight with a third level druid. That's 4d6, average 14hp, spread out over people; as a lvl 5 druid (WIS++), casting healing spirit as a 3rd level spell, that's 5*2d6 = 10d6 = avg 70hp Compare Mass Healing Word, which restores 1d4+mod as a lvl 3 spell. It heals up to 6 people, then its 6d4+6*mod = 6*2.5 + 24 = avg 39hp.
Now, I'm assuming that the 1d6 per higher spell level remains on healing spirit. If it does, then Healing Spirit is still a very powerful spell here, just shy of doubling Mass Healing Word's effectiveness with 6 people, and far surpassing it for a party of 3-5, a more reasonable assumption for party size.
Compare Aura of Vitality next, I guess. 2d6 as a bonus action once per turn, 10 rounds worth. That's 20d6, which is double what Healing Spirit can do, but AoV is generally a paladin spell (which is cranked up given the class level they get the spell at), though I think some subclasses and Lore Bards can snag it at earlier levels.
Some good news at last. This sounds like a good balance. Places this spell above the total healing power of most any other combat healing spell at similar levels (balanced by the fact it takes time and mobility), and below the total healing power of Prayer of Healing (though it is more flexible to assign the healing as needed rather than equally to all).
On your characters turn you pass through the Healing Spirit for 1d6 and then use the Ready action to hold your movement. Then on the start of the next person's turn you use your Reaction to move through the Healing Spirit again. Everyone except the caster can cheese this for 20d6 each. If there's a strong person in the group they can simply carry the caster with them to keep it at 20d6 for the caster as well.
This thing blows all other non-combat healing out of the water - by miles - and scales better.
The fact that you can get 20d6 per character quite easily and the intention as stated by Jeremy Crawford was 6d6 to 10d6 total healing (not per character) it is clear this is obliterating expected performance by grotesque amounts.
Errata: Praise the Gods, old and new, for this update. Finally!
So it went from way over the top to completely useless. Why couldn't they just say it was max once per round and the cheese would be gone while the spell would remain relevant. Wellwell, now it will never be seen in our games anymore.
So it went from way over the top to completely useless. Why couldn't they just say it was max once per round and the cheese would be gone while the spell would remain relevant. Wellwell, now it will never be seen in our games anymore.
Healing Spirit (before errata)
2nd-level conjuration Casting Time: 1 bonus action Range: 60 feet Components: V, S Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute You call forth a nature spirit to soothe the wounded. The intangible spirit appears in a space that is a 5-foot cube you can see within range. The spirit looks like a transparent beast or fey (your choice). Until the spell ends, whenever you or a creature you can see moves into the spirit’s space for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, you can cause the spirit to restore 1d6 hit points to that creature (no action required). The spirit can’t heal constructs or undead. As a bonus action on your turn, you can move the spirit up to 30 feet to a space you can see. At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, the healing increases by 1d6 for each slot level above 2nd.
It pretty much already was once per round outside of scenarios where a creature was pushed in and then out or carried through. There are other edge cases that could have allowed for more like the bonus action on the casters turn, and abilities that allow a character to move as a reaction or swap places with someone else.
Healing Spirit is still reasonable for characters who max their spellcasting stat, but significantly weaker for Rangers that took it and avoided boosting their Wisdom.
The wording is: first time on a turn or starts its turn there
Turn <> Round. Everyone gets their own turn during a round.
Because they used that wording it was possible for everyone in range to pass through and grab their own 1d6. With a little action economy cheese you can get to 2d6 per person per round.
There's a sizable difference between the expectation that players would get 6d6 to 10d6 total healing out of this vs. 20d6 per person.
Initially I thought the nerf was too harsh, but if you compare it to a 2nd level Cure Wounds or 2nd level Healing word and you can see that this is still more powerful. Plus if your primary tank is in a tank & spank situation you can drop this on them and ensure they're going to get healed back from 0 hp several times before it ends. The fact that it doles out 1d6 per round can be an advantage in the right situations.
The wording is: first time on a turn or starts its turn there
Turn <> Round. Everyone gets their own turn during a round.
Because they used that wording it was possible for everyone in range to pass through and grab their own 1d6. With a little action economy cheese you can get to 2d6 per person per round.
There's a sizable difference between the expectation that players would get 6d6 to 10d6 total healing out of this vs. 20d6 per person.
Initially I thought the nerf was too harsh, but if you compare it to a 2nd level Cure Wounds or 2nd level Healing word and you can see that this is still more powerful. Plus if your primary tank is in a tank & spank situation you can drop this on them and ensure they're going to get healed back from 0 hp several times before it ends. The fact that it doles out 1d6 per round can be an advantage in the right situations.
But the hardcap of "heals X number of times" doesn't care about turns, so you are still capped at 5d6 over time (with a wisdom of 20), or fast if people congoline. For rangers it is likely 2d6. The only redeeming part of the spell is the casting time.
Cure light wounds is 2d8+5 as a lv 2 spell (and a really weak one that is), as an action but heals right away. I think they seem rather balanced toward each other, but then again Cure light woulds is super-weak. At least in our games none use in-combat heals except healing word and big heals. Healing spirit was the rare middleground, cast in combat to slowly heal a little.
As a DM, do none of the bad guys your parties face know dispel magic, counter-spell, or chill touch. Hell for all I care Healing Spirit could have a 10 foot radius and heal 2d6...it is only as good as the DM lets it be..Also it won't work in an anti-magic field. Lastly 1d6+modifier, even in a beacon of hope, won't undo lair actions or legendary actions. My suggestion is to build a better bad guy. It's more satisfying to let the party feel overpowered before you crush their hopes and dreams. My party had a Life cleric, war cleric, revised ranger, hexblade, samurai, and abjuration wizard. They nearly died to a black pudding in Undermountain. Then almost died again to a flesh golem and a mage with dispel magic. Every time they would try the Beacon of Hope combo with mass healing word and healing spirit it lasted one round then got dispelled.
I agree with this right up to the "every time" part.
Forcing your party to go to Plan B relatively frequently is a good thing, but actively foiling major swaths of their abilities whenever they try to use them is a great way to kill your campaign. Anti-magic fields are basically "you don't get to play your class" for half your party. If you don't like a combo it's probably better to just communicate that rather than passive-agressively killing it every time it comes up.
Poppycock. If you aren't making it a challenge on a BBEG then it isn't a BBEG. The mage and Golem is classic D&D... Anitmagic fields occur in a lot of underdark campaigns at random, I don't have to inflict them upon the players if the module already does.. And I am never passive aggressive. I am always directly aggressive. That said, I was commenting on the use of healing magic and how to counter it effectively in game. I am glad you took time to respond on how I run my games rather than the topic at hand. It shows the spirit of a true college of bureaucracy bard. Just for that i'm gonna go put my party in a room full of Kobold archers with grease traps. Excellent.
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Healing in combat is already fairly useless unless you're dying, and as I've now said above about 4 times, you're not going to be able to cast it after every fight. It depends on spell slots, of which rangers have a limited supply. It also doesn't restore short rest abilities or ki points or warlock spells, and it doesn't matter how much it heals beyond a character's max health.
There's going to be a lot of times when you'd RATHER short test than healing spirit. There's plenty of reason not to. All HS does is save you an hour. If you have an hour to spare and you still cast it, all you've done is wasted a spell slot.
Jay, as Charles says, I am definitely saying this spell is broken in combat. However, the magnitude of its "brokenness" is vastly different in & out of combat. The spell is only "broken" in combat in the context of comparable capabilities.
In combat, it is hands-down the best possible healing spell to use in nearly every conceivable situation. Concentration is not a negative point either. I don't know a single Cleric that, were it available to them, wouldn't eagerly use their concentration on maintaining it. It's better than everything in their toolkit; why wouldn't they? A full-caster class, with a subclass entirely devoted to healing, being envious of a healing spell from a (primarily) damage-oriented half-caster core class... That really should tell you all that you need to know about why this spell is a problem.
And to be clear, I do not have a problem with how the spell itself actually functions in combat (movement shenanigans aside). I have a problem with Cleric (particularly Life) not having anything at least as good in their own toolkit. To me, this invalidates the very existence of the spell. It is not a balanced spell.
Out of combat, Healing Spirit is just plain broken AF, regardless of which classes can or cannot access it. Full stop.
[edit] Oh, and Charles thank you for your earlier post about Sneak Attack. That was totally not off-topic, and very much pertinent. 👍
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
No problem! As I'm still unconvinced of its brokenness (which is what brought me here in the first place) , and I haven't seen anything to convince me that the points I've made are wrong, I'm gonna duck out.
Thanks for helping me pass by a slow, boring day at work! :)
I concede that triggering an action on another character's turn counts as a different turn. There's even errata that spells it out.
All I have left to say is that because of how OR works, by RAW, if a character starts their turn in the healing spirit, they can't benefit from healing later in the round by stepping into the spirit on a other character's turn. Because OR is a fork that eliminates the other option(s).
Which tells me that was not the intention of the spell. As a DM, if I had an obstinate player that insisted on exploiting the spell this way, and the other players insisted as well, I would roll initiative and make them all move, declare ready actions and if they trigger their readied action, move again. For every player for 10 rounds. Make them waste precious play time for trying to break the game.
OR doesn't eliminate the other option. That's why we have XOR as a separate operator. Outside of formal logic, some languages actually have different words for inclusive and exclusive or, but English doesn't, and the default assumption is always inclusive.
I also doubt that the designers were actually thinking of the possibility of pushing friends through healing spirit when it's not their turn, and if any of my players were to try that, I would express my disappointment in them (they're very understanding, and if I asked them nicely not to do it, they would listen to me).
Actually, it doesn't matter how you interpret OR, because the spell includes the word 'whenever', so the condition is triggered every time someone interacts with the spirit.
It truly is worded to be exploitable in the way it is described in this thread.
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ModeratorThe wording of healing spirit recently (finally) got updated: https://twitter.com/ThinkingDM/status/1245362582644494336
Crawford confirmed that an errata PDF would be coming soon (I assume DDB will update the wording then): https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1245363675025694720
Heal 1d6 hp, generally 4 times over the course of the fight with a third level druid. That's 4d6, average 14hp, spread out over people; as a lvl 5 druid (WIS++), casting healing spirit as a 3rd level spell, that's 5*2d6 = 10d6 = avg 70hp Compare Mass Healing Word, which restores 1d4+mod as a lvl 3 spell. It heals up to 6 people, then its 6d4+6*mod = 6*2.5 + 24 = avg 39hp.
Now, I'm assuming that the 1d6 per higher spell level remains on healing spirit. If it does, then Healing Spirit is still a very powerful spell here, just shy of doubling Mass Healing Word's effectiveness with 6 people, and far surpassing it for a party of 3-5, a more reasonable assumption for party size.
Compare Aura of Vitality next, I guess. 2d6 as a bonus action once per turn, 10 rounds worth. That's 20d6, which is double what Healing Spirit can do, but AoV is generally a paladin spell (which is cranked up given the class level they get the spell at), though I think some subclasses and Lore Bards can snag it at earlier levels.
The average of 10d6 is 35, and the MAX is 60. Not sure where you’re getting 70 from.
Doh, braindead is where
Some good news at last. This sounds like a good balance. Places this spell above the total healing power of most any other combat healing spell at similar levels (balanced by the fact it takes time and mobility), and below the total healing power of Prayer of Healing (though it is more flexible to assign the healing as needed rather than equally to all).
On your characters turn you pass through the Healing Spirit for 1d6 and then use the Ready action to hold your movement. Then on the start of the next person's turn you use your Reaction to move through the Healing Spirit again. Everyone except the caster can cheese this for 20d6 each. If there's a strong person in the group they can simply carry the caster with them to keep it at 20d6 for the caster as well.
This thing blows all other non-combat healing out of the water - by miles - and scales better.
The fact that you can get 20d6 per character quite easily and the intention as stated by Jeremy Crawford was 6d6 to 10d6 total healing (not per character) it is clear this is obliterating expected performance by grotesque amounts.
Errata: Praise the Gods, old and new, for this update. Finally!
Just skipped a step. Minimum is 10, maximum is 60. Added together you've got 70 and that divided by 2 gives you your average of 35.
So it went from way over the top to completely useless. Why couldn't they just say it was max once per round and the cheese would be gone while the spell would remain relevant. Wellwell, now it will never be seen in our games anymore.
Healing Spirit (before errata)
2nd-level conjuration Casting Time: 1 bonus action Range: 60 feet Components: V, S Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute You call forth a nature spirit to soothe the wounded. The intangible spirit appears in a space that is a 5-foot cube you can see within range. The spirit looks like a transparent beast or fey (your choice). Until the spell ends, whenever you or a creature you can see moves into the spirit’s space for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, you can cause the spirit to restore 1d6 hit points to that creature (no action required). The spirit can’t heal constructs or undead. As a bonus action on your turn, you can move the spirit up to 30 feet to a space you can see. At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, the healing increases by 1d6 for each slot level above 2nd.
It pretty much already was once per round outside of scenarios where a creature was pushed in and then out or carried through. There are other edge cases that could have allowed for more like the bonus action on the casters turn, and abilities that allow a character to move as a reaction or swap places with someone else.
Healing Spirit is still reasonable for characters who max their spellcasting stat, but significantly weaker for Rangers that took it and avoided boosting their Wisdom.
The wording is: first time on a turn or starts its turn there
Turn <> Round. Everyone gets their own turn during a round.
Because they used that wording it was possible for everyone in range to pass through and grab their own 1d6. With a little action economy cheese you can get to 2d6 per person per round.
There's a sizable difference between the expectation that players would get 6d6 to 10d6 total healing out of this vs. 20d6 per person.
Initially I thought the nerf was too harsh, but if you compare it to a 2nd level Cure Wounds or 2nd level Healing word and you can see that this is still more powerful. Plus if your primary tank is in a tank & spank situation you can drop this on them and ensure they're going to get healed back from 0 hp several times before it ends. The fact that it doles out 1d6 per round can be an advantage in the right situations.
But the hardcap of "heals X number of times" doesn't care about turns, so you are still capped at 5d6 over time (with a wisdom of 20), or fast if people congoline. For rangers it is likely 2d6. The only redeeming part of the spell is the casting time.
Cure light wounds is 2d8+5 as a lv 2 spell (and a really weak one that is), as an action but heals right away. I think they seem rather balanced toward each other, but then again Cure light woulds is super-weak. At least in our games none use in-combat heals except healing word and big heals. Healing spirit was the rare middleground, cast in combat to slowly heal a little.
As a DM, do none of the bad guys your parties face know dispel magic, counter-spell, or chill touch. Hell for all I care Healing Spirit could have a 10 foot radius and heal 2d6...it is only as good as the DM lets it be..Also it won't work in an anti-magic field. Lastly 1d6+modifier, even in a beacon of hope, won't undo lair actions or legendary actions. My suggestion is to build a better bad guy. It's more satisfying to let the party feel overpowered before you crush their hopes and dreams. My party had a Life cleric, war cleric, revised ranger, hexblade, samurai, and abjuration wizard. They nearly died to a black pudding in Undermountain. Then almost died again to a flesh golem and a mage with dispel magic. Every time they would try the Beacon of Hope combo with mass healing word and healing spirit it lasted one round then got dispelled.
I agree with this right up to the "every time" part.
Forcing your party to go to Plan B relatively frequently is a good thing, but actively foiling major swaths of their abilities whenever they try to use them is a great way to kill your campaign. Anti-magic fields are basically "you don't get to play your class" for half your party. If you don't like a combo it's probably better to just communicate that rather than passive-agressively killing it every time it comes up.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Poppycock. If you aren't making it a challenge on a BBEG then it isn't a BBEG. The mage and Golem is classic D&D... Anitmagic fields occur in a lot of underdark campaigns at random, I don't have to inflict them upon the players if the module already does.. And I am never passive aggressive. I am always directly aggressive. That said, I was commenting on the use of healing magic and how to counter it effectively in game. I am glad you took time to respond on how I run my games rather than the topic at hand. It shows the spirit of a true college of bureaucracy bard. Just for that i'm gonna go put my party in a room full of Kobold archers with grease traps. Excellent.