Competitive Dominoes: How To Play Like A Champion - Second Edition Free Download 3

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Angie Troia

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Jul 16, 2024, 9:01:40 AM7/16/24

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How do you guys feel of the current state of healing in PF2e as of now? What are your favorite and least favorite healing options. For me i really appreciate the quantity of renewable heals Kineticist can pump out now so it is my favorite healing option. While my least favorite would have to be Investigator(Forensic Medicine), it not having Int based medicine like alchemist makes me not like how MAD it is.

I like that there's a lot of options and they play differently-- There's obviously Heal Clerics of both persuasions (with some neat options in the remaster and no need for Charisma they're more versatile), Life Oracles (and others for a less dedicated healing role), Angelic/Phoenix Sorcerers (ditto), Kineticists of Wood and Water (which manage resources very differently), Medics on a Variety of Classes, Occult/Divine/Primal Witches can all get Life Boost for a healing style I'm having fun with, Bards especially with Hymn of Healing, Druids, Alchemists were looking decent at healing after some recent adjustments, there's even weird little niches for healing Gunslingers via Life Shot.

Competitive Dominoes: How to Play Like a Champion - Second Edition free download 3

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Overall healing feels powerful and important, I consider it prerequisite to some of the harder encounters you can legally create using the encounter guidelines and that a lot of the stuff that garners "don't" advice is perfectly acceptable with dedicated healing. I see this as a good thing because we have players who like healing, and it stops the meta from dismissing it due to the superiority of alpha-striking in PF1e/5e/4e/etc.

Do you have experience with wood kineticist healing? It looks very shiny to me, and Timber Sentinel is great for obvious reasons, but I'm concerned about the bit where Fresh Produce basically requires that the target have a free hand, especially since it seems like front-liners would be the least likely members of the party to be running around with hands free.

2-action Heal (especially with healing hands from a cleric font) is the dominant option, just like it was in 2019. It's an overwhelming amount of spike healing, which serves as reactive action denial to monsters by edit-undoing their last turn. Nothing else comes close to filling that niche.Battle medicine/Doctor's Visitation are useful for ping-pong, when someone's at 0 hp.

Torrent in the Blood is quite decent if you're fighting a wizard, dragon, or other AoE-happy enemy. I generally subscribe to the opinion that AoE healing is overrated, though I'll make an exception for this because it's very long-range and doesn't cost slots.

My least favorite option is 1-action heal (it's hideously inefficient compared to the 2-action version, and ruinously expensive in terms of slots. Just cast the 2-action variant). Likewise, Ocean's balm is too low to serve as anything but a replacement for battle medicine. Fresh Produce doesn't actually save any actions. It takes one from the kineticist and one from the target. This also means that it can't be used on downed targets to get them back up again. It does mean that it's nto eating your two-action slot for the turn, though, which can matter.Ocean's Balm is potentially useful even if you do have Battle Medicine, as Ocean's Balm is effectively limited to once per target per encounter (as all kineticist heals are) and Battle Medicine is generally more limited than that.

I notice that you haven't addressed Chirurgeon-based healing at all. It's my understanding that recent changes have made that option more viable, especially if you're dealing with a large party and extended adventuring days (ie, the situations where "clerics spams two-action heals" is less dominant). Yeah net it's the same, but my point was exactly what you mentioned: it's eating two people's third actions rather than your 2 action slot. Which is a sort of action economy saving even if it strictly costs the same as you say.And yeah Balm is far from useless. It's just a little inefficient. Not bad but not my favorite.

Healing options are very strong in PF 2e, and sometimes border on too strong. Not because of their healing output, but rather simply because compared to other non-damage options, healing well and truly shines above both other skills and other spells when it comes to utility. But yes, healing is in a amazing space, S tier no questions.

Fresh Produce will never not be funny to just make a fruit or vegetable appear in someones hand. My least favorite as of this moment is Lay On Hands because it feels like a must-pick option for any caster via blessed one. The bang for your buck return on a reliable 6 hp per spell rank every 10 minutes is just way too good not to snag, and I wish there were like, 3 different lay on hands style heal focus spells to make a bit of variety to this choice. The thing is that unlike damage, healing has no save and no attack roll. It just works. The same applies to all buffing (heroism and 4th level invisibility are standouts in this regard as well). And because of the speed at which healing scales (especially heal) it's actually possible to outheal incoming damage.

1. Healing is almost always countered heavily by Reactive Strikes. If you get in a position that you require healing, that healing now has an added cost of taking damage for it, as well as risking not even doing the healing in the first place. This means self healing, whether it is potions, spells, or the Medicine skill, is never worth doing against an enemy with such a reaction.

2. Non-magical healing is still very limited in its application/uses, even in optimal circumstances, compared to magical healing: Battle Medicine and Elixirs have far less staying power in a given combat compared to spells. At best they make up for it by being less impactful for the action economy, but it's not something exclusive to non-magical options, since there are still functional 1-action healing magical options.

Not just the chunky Cleric 2-A Heal, but even Oceans Balm is crazy slept on. Being able to slap an ally with a no-miss heal for 1-A in combat is nuts. Anytime the Kinet is at MAP and considering a blast, Ocn Blm really ought to be getting splashed around.

However, even at L9, an enemy that crits on a 13 will do 85-ish damage, pf2e is built *very* swingy. As far as I can tell, it's basically unavoidable that PCs will go down to dying somewhat regularly, at least in Lvl

So you get the current healing. There's the obviously OP stuff like Medic Dedication that's compatible with most parties. And in general it is having a party of PCs that keeps the system mostly functional, so that only 1/4 is knocked dying like that.

On one hand, the severity of this means that there is a degree of excitement when a PC unexpectedly goes down dying, and everyone else has to scramble. I don't want to undersell that feature, it's a very "spicy" ingredient.

However, I think this does more unfun than fun. It leads to overly cautious play, pumping the crap out of defenses, increased "yolo risk-taking" to get that -10 MAP Strike to KO the foe, and all the expected player psychology reactions.

The biggest reason why I would like for the PC HP numbers to get tweaked is what this "he rolled a 13, you're 100% --> 0% & dying 2" system does to player tactics. Right now, a party of 4 or 3 PCs seems to be the norm.

In a system when PCs can drop after 1, at most 2 lucky d20s, it highly discourages nuanced tactics between PCs. The game is super flexible via Delay or Prepare a Reaction, but this over-lethality really discourages spending actions to do anything that is not killing the foes.

When you cannot rely on a PC being conscious the next round, it is super hard to develop strategies that specifically synergize across PCs. Instead, the tactics often could be described as anonymized scrambles, where the cooperative tactics struggle to get beyond flowcharty "give them a flank" or "go for a Trip" kind of universal considerations.