Pathfinder Second Edition's In- and Out-of-Combat Healing
An in-depth look at some of community's assumptions and what the numbers suggest.
RPGDESIGNPF2
Ali Kutlu Durşen
7/29/202611 min read
Disclaimer: this post contains a large amount of numbers, and at least one instance of least squares linear estimate. Not recommended for mathematically-incurious. Also, it benefits from an above-beginner level of familiarity with Pathfinder Second Edition (PF2e).
A Cursory Reading
I've been playing and running Pathfinder Second Edition for years, at this point. When I was first learning the system I noted that characters don't need bags full of healing wands, healing was easy to come by, concluded that characters will be at full hit points at all times and moved on to other sections.
I was wrong then, which happens from time to time. What's more interesting to me is some players are still stuck in this wrong vision of the game, even with years under game's belt. (Of course, there are new players coming in each day so they may be repeating our old mistakes, who knows.)
So, let's try to examine why cheap healing is not as impactful as one might initially assume, backed both by mechanical and narrative reasons.
What I Learned From "Old-School"
While I do not always see eye-to-eye with OSR community, there are some principles (mostly narrative) that I appreciate, such as:
violence is not the only problem-solving tool,
combat is not the only struggle,
it is fun to discover a dangerous place,
randomness moves the game in unexpected ways.
All this to say: I like random encounters, time constraints, and watching weaker characters struggle with mundane stuff like supplies, poverty and darkness.
This brings us to narrative reasons why I can accept easily available healing: healing is accessible but either not immediate or not unlimited. This means that characters always need to choose between spending the limited healing or their (limited) time.
Note how that "limited" was in parentheses? If your adventure has no time constraint, that part goes out of the window and we're back at the "characters are always at full HP" realm. This is an adventure/narrative issue, not mechanical. This is also not new. Discussions of "15-minute adventuring days" go back decades and stem from the same lack of (temporal) tension. Let's just say this is not what I enjoy in role-playing games and move on.
What I Learned From Spreadsheets
Remember the disclaimer up top? You've been warned, now let's get to number crunching. In this analysis, I will focus on a number of healing sources, along with reliable ways to obtain them:
Heal spell: Clerics gain 4 extra slots, increasing to 6 at higher levels.
Lay on Hands focus spell: Champions get it through their Devotion Spells or accessible through Blessed One archetype.
Elixirs of Life: accessible through Herbalist archetype, starting at 4/day and can increase up to 8/day. Alchemists can also craft them through their Quick Alchemy feature, in a manner similar to focus spells.
Healing Potions: a Witch can craft those through Cauldron feat, but in very small amounts. Apparently designers value flexibility of "all potions" way higher than access to Elixirs of Life.
and of course, star of the show(!) Treat Wounds: skill action, requires Trained with increased benefits from higher proficiency levels.
I will also focus on 3 "targets" of healing:
a durable martial: 12HP/level, CON starting at +3, reaching +5 at level 15. Called Barbarian.
a support character: 8HP/level, CON starting at +2, reaching +5 at level 20. Called Rogue.
a "squishy" caster: 6HP/level, CON starting at +0, reaching +4 at level 20. Called Wizard.
Lastly, while not my only metric, I will focus mainly on averages. Luckily, higher level healing effects roll more dice and this means that there's smaller chance of deviating from said averages (which you already knew since you've read our previous post).
Potions and Elixirs
I first started this analysis because I felt extra Heal slots granted to clerics were too much healing, especially compared to other alternatives. Of those alternatives, let's look at drinkable health first.
Min/Max
To the left, you see our first graph for the day. Here, I examined how unlucky one can get when drinking a potion/elixir. If we call the maximum HP you can restore (from the highest level drink available at your level) 100, what is the minimum you can obtain? You can see that this ratio very quickly converges to around 40%.
Conclusion? Even if you're very unlucky and roll only 1s and 2s, you still get about half (40%) the amount you expect (70%).
Second conclusion? Healing potions and elixirs of life behave remarkably similar.
Speaking of similarity
If you were to plot average HP recovered as higher level drinks became available, you'd get a pair of staircases. See their dance, how they zig and zag around one and other?
However, I'm interested in overall trends so let's smooth that data out by a linear estimation. Now, red and blue lines tell the story more clearly: 1) potions are usually the better options for pure HP recovery, which makes sense because elixirs have additional benefits. 2) these lines have almost the same slope. Indeed, actual values of this estimation, where level is given by L, are:
POT = 3.270L - 0.74
ELX = 3.264L - 4.12
No wonder they look parallel! Also, noting how close 3.27 and 3.5 are, we can approximate potions as Ld6 and elixirs as (L-1)d6. Then again, it's probably better not to.
Lay All Your Hands On Me
Thanks to Abba for title of this section.
I love simplicity of Lay On Hands: no dice for healing, just plain 6HP per spell rank. Since it's a focus spell, rank also automatically increases every other level, giving us 3HP recovery per level. But wait a second, didn't we just earlier conclude potions and elixirs recover around 3.25HP per level?!
[Note: LLS estimation of Lay On Hands do not give 3L+1.5 one might expect, don't let it bother you.]
And that's the crux of it: Lay On Hands heals about the same as (average of) drinkable health of potions and elixirs. It's just more reliable due to removal of random element. You decide if you feel like gambling or not. For prosperity, I'm adding a graph showing averages versus Lay On Hands. My instinct is to look at this and say that they are the same picture.
Saving Best For The Last: Heal
Divine spells are usually focused on buffing and restoration, with third focus being "preemptive healing," i.e. debuffs. In that list, Heal shines like a gem and the Cleric class, by virtue of having 4 to 6 extra slots at the highest rank possible, shines among other divine spellcasters.
[Sorry, my Oracle player, but you've made the wrong choice and now the whole party must pay the price!]
In my analysis, I'm focused on 1d8+8HP/rank version of the spell. Clearly, minimum healing is 9/rank and maximum is 16/rank. Normalizing these numbers around the average, we get minimum:0.72, average:1, maximum: 1.28. In other words maximum/minimum are 28% above/below the average healing you can expect. If you want to consider 3-action, just note that its average is about the half of the regular version's minimum (so, 0.36) and you need at least 3 healing targets to justify its use.
Some notes before we get to the graph:
First, note how minimum/maximum ratio here is a bit above 56%. Comparing this to 40% ratio of drinkables, we see that luck is a very small component of Heal. I mean, of course that's the case: the flat amount we're adding is equal to the maximum of the roll, not half of it like it is with drinkables.
Second, since Heal is so strong, I will compare its minimum value with maximum values of previous healing options.
What do we see here? First, poor Lay On Hands is left behind because of its lack of random element. Second, Potion of Healing('s maximum) is ahead of Heal('s minimum) in 9 out of 20 levels! Not bad at all, considering how Elixir of Life is behind without exception.
In light of this, we can actually reduce our consideration space to just two elements: average of Heal (keeping the 72-100-128 ratios in mind for minimum-average-maximum) and Lay On Hands (which is roughly equivalent to elixirs' average, which is roughly equivalent to potions' average, which has a rough ratio of 57-100-143 for minimum-average-maximum). Now let's see how these values compare against our 3 sample characters.
("What about Treat Wounds?" Don't worry, its time will come.)
What Good Is Recovering A Lot Of HP
When You Have Even More Of It?
We spoke of Heal restoring this many HP/rank, Lay On Hands restoring that many HP/level but we didn't pay attention to the initial assumption we laid out in the beginning: durable characters start with 15HP/level, increasing up to 17/HP. Even "squishy" characters start with 6HP/level and (ideally) end up with 10HP/level. Yet, even the mighty Heal spell –which rubs me the wrong way with its strength compared to its availability– increases by 6.25/level. Do you see where I'm going?
Healing options do not overcome overall HP gain.
Before going further, let's look at average Heal amount a cleric offers over the course of a day (that is, multiplied by Divine Font amount) compared to total HP of a party of four adventurers (composed of one Barbarian, two Rogues and one Wizard from our sample).
Here, if blue line is at .75, this means that at that level a cleric can heal only 75% of party's total HP. Red line is deviation from the average of this ratio, which is about two-thirds. Let me repeat that: on average, a cleric can (freely) heal 66% of their party, including themselves, in a day.
Some observations based on this deviation:
Early levels are on the lower side, which gets remedied once clerics get their 5th free Heal slot.
While levels 5-15 are around average, there's a visible dip at level 10. This is due to CON increase giving us a larger denominator.
We have another visible bump at level 15 due to clerics getting their 6th free slot and it hovers around .75 from then on. At level 20, another CON increase results in another bigger-than-usual dip.
Of course "the party" is not an unified blob of HP, character HPs are also relevant. Below, a single casting of 2-action Heal is compared against each sample build's HP. You can also look at that graph in reverse: if a Heal restores 60% HP, then if you cast it when the target is above 40% you're likely to have some waste. With this perspective, a lower number shows a good Heal candidate who won't risk overflow.
Besides the wild early levels, we can see some trends:
Barbarian: levels 4-14: avg 39%, 15-20: avg 37%
Rogue: levels 4-9: avg 55.5%, 10-19: avg 51.5%
Wizard: level 4-9: 82.5%, 10-14: 74.5%, 15-19: 68.5%
This means that Barbarians will get back to full with 2.5-3 Heals, Rogues with 2 and Wizards with 1-1.5. It is up to personal preference if Heal, when viewed from this perspective, is too strong or not. Personally, I don't think a resource that fulfills 35-40% of the goal is too strong.
The Forgotten Option: Lay On Hands
Earlier I said there are two HP recovery methods and those were Heal and Lay On Hands. However, when looking at averages we see Lay On Hands is just a weaker Heal (48%) so any analysis I made or graph I drew would be the same but halved. For example, we can say "Lay On Hands restores 19.5% HP to level 4-14 Barbarians, 18.5% at levels 15-20." You can do the remaining math if you're a completionist.
Connecting the Two
First, our analysis showed that mighty heal-bots of Clerics with their free slots and immediate healing can only restore two-thirds of a party's HP pool. This means that a party that plays fast and loose, takes unnecessary risks and constantly pushes their luck where HP is on the line will run out of immediate solutions and be forced to slow down. With this mechanical backing, let's look at narrative again: how long does it take to utilize slow-but-unlimited healing options?
Connecting our previous analysis, we see it takes 5-6 Lay on Hands to fully heal a Barbarian, 4 for Rogues and 2-3 for a Wizard. You can replace Lay on Hands with your choice of drinkables, of course. In the end, we're looking at 15-17 castings to fully restore a party. Given that each takes 10 minutes in-game, we're talking about 2.5-3 hours of doing nothing but recovering. One might even call this a short-long-rest.
I'll repeat: I'm of the opinion that if your characters have that much free time, it sounds like they are tourists in a fantasy theme-park rather than greedy or heroic or just driven adventurers.
Multipliers
One might note that there are ways to improve slow-healing methods. However, we must realize that they are investments and there is no harm in rewarding that. If a champion is taking 2 other Devotion spells, as well as Devoted Focus, that's a 3 feat (out of just 11!) investment to triple their heal rate. If a herbalist is taking Advanced Herbalism to increase their elixirs from 4 to 8, that's another 3 feat investment (including the dedication) for the option to have 8 half-as-strong-Heals. If a player is playing an alchemist with the intention of being a healer, I don't even know how to respond to this idea. "Respect", I guess. And of course same goes for Medicine and Treat Wounds. A character can specialize in 3 skills (or 6 in case of rogues and investigators) and choosing Medicine to be one of them may be a relatively small investment, but it's not nothing. Or are you really asking rogues to prioritize Medicine over the usual suspects like Acrobatics, Stealth and Thievery?
The actual multiplier is a bit simpler: multiple characters can take care of different methods. We can have a party with champions and herbalist druids, for example. However, the argument stands: these are not universally accessible things and require an investment from the player. Unless your party –for some reason– has 4 Blessed Ones going on quests, these investments are no less valid than an old-school cleric preparing only cure spells in a day.
In Conclusion
A basic PF2e party (that is, fighter, rogue, cleric and wizard) has no access to out-of-combat healing. By some investment, this is overcome. By further investment, options improve. And just like "15-minute adventuring days," this is not new. As long as you had a price tag on healing potions, "you can heal with some investment" was a true statement. However, as time went on and "character builds" became part of the equation just as much as XP and GP are, that investment also changed shape. To me, this is a better solution than asking for a linear investment ("cost to restore 1d8 remains the same and your maximum HP increases by 1d8 at each level…") out of an exponentially growing resource ("…but your net worth grows 30% at each level.") since, after a certain point, required investment loses its meaning. Instead, PF2e has a clear message here: healing to full will take time, initially up to 3 hours, which can be shortened but not negated.
And I don't want to belabour the point about "narrative, risk, stakes" and so on, so if you're still not sold on the idea of hardship creating fun moments at the table, I'll just encourage you to check some OSR games for inspiration.
About The "Treat Wounds" Bamboozle
I'm aware I first called Treat Wounds "star of the show," then drew attention to how its time would come, and then completely neglected to mention it. Here's the thing: this is already the longest post on the blog and I don't want to lengthen it further. As an apology, and thanks for your time, let me give you a quick peek at the main thesis of my next post:
Treat Wounds: It's not even that good.
See you next time (with hopefully a shorter post)!