Healing Sprirt Spell?

[Lyracian]

Salutations Readers,

I was thinking of adding the content of Xanther's Guide to my game but I saw there was a bit of an outcry about the Healing Spirit Spell. Have people found it a problem in actual play? I assume in AL games people can actually conga-line the party through the healing field?

Has anyone put limited on it? I did see the tweet suggestion the limitation be max heal ability mod x2 times. Has anyone used this?

[Naanomi]

It is the best between combat healing spell, but between combat healing doesn’t break anything. It has been fine at our table

[Danielqueue1]

A druid with a single level of life domain cleric can practically full heal a party out of combat with a 2nd level slot for most of the game. And it can be okay in combat if (and only if) you have a very mobile party and the DM spreads damage around.

Without the life cleric dip it's better than other options but isn't over the top.

Also it can be moved, so if you are traveling you can heal everyone up without slowing the pace. (Walk in straight line, move the spirit repeat)

[stoutstien]

I just put a 5 heal max on it. Then it still a good in or out of combat heal just not necessarily better than prayer of healing or other healing options.

[Keravath]

I've seen it used a few times in an AL setting. Honestly, it hasn't broken anything in my experience. The characters wind up with a few more hit points between encounters. In a hardcover AL setting (more like a campaign than the typical AL module) ... this has usually meant that the party is more prepared to push on for another encounter during the day rather than decide to stop for a long rest because their resources are depleted enough that they are worried about the outcome of a difficult encounter.

In combat, it appears to be a non-issue. Between enemy movement to stand in the location, opportunity attacks against characters trying to move to go through the healing spirit location, and lots of similar counter measures, it never seems to be all that much more effective than other persistant in combat healing.

It IS a good spell and it is probably strictly better than comparable spells available to other classes but it doesn't break the game at least in my experience.

[stoutstien]

I've seen it used a few times in an AL setting. Honestly, it hasn't broken anything in my experience. The characters wind up with a few more hit points between encounters. In a hardcover AL setting (more like a campaign than the typical AL module) ... this has usually meant that the party is more prepared to push on for another encounter during the day rather than decide to stop for a long rest because their resources are depleted enough that they are worried about the outcome of a difficult encounter.

In combat, it appears to be a non-issue. Between enemy movement to stand in the location, opportunity attacks against characters trying to move to go through the healing spirit location, and lots of similar counter measures, it never seems to be all that much more effective than other persistant in combat healing.

It IS a good spell and it is probably strictly better than comparable spells available to other classes but it doesn't break the game at least in my experience.

It's definitely more about balance with other healing opportunities that it is about total power.

I'm glad so far there's only a handful of things that really show any signs of power creep and if healing is it I can live with it.

[guachi]

between combat healing doesn’t break anything.

Yes it does.

[Fordian]

Is it a problem? Depends on your definition. It won't enable your players to win individual combats - its utility as an in-combat spell, even without house-ruling anything, is fine but not amazing. However, at all but the lowest levels, it does rather badly break the resource balance of the game - you'll find grinding down your characters' health over the course of multiple combats to be far more difficult.

Here's why: suppose you have a party of five 4th-level characters, all of whom are badly hurt. If the party doesn't have Healing Spirit, the most efficient way for the party to heal magically is to have a Life Cleric cast Prayer of Healing over the course of 10 minutes, which will restore (let's be generous and assume the Cleric's already got 20 Wisdom) an average of 18 HP per creature, for a total of 90 on average and a maximum of 125 (this also serves as the maximum healing any pre-Xanathar's 2nd-level spell could provide a party of five even if the Life Cleric had already gotten his or her level 17 'Supreme Healing' ability). Now suppose they instead have their druid (no healing specialization required - heck, they could have the Wisdom score of a swarm of rot grubs for all it matters) cast Healing Spirit and do the conga-line for one minute. On average, they'll each heal for 35 HP, for a total of 175 on average and a maximum of 300 - in fact, at level 4, one casting of Healing Spirit is likely to heal literally every character to full HP even if they were previously at death's door. Note the comparison - Healing Spirit has about twice the effectiveness of the next-best spell, even if that spell is cast by a high-Wisdom healing specialist, and in one tenth the time, and with the ability to get at least some in-combat usefulness out of it!

So is it going to break individual combats? Not really. Will it break your sans-Healing-Spirit expectations of how many resources your party will have to expend out of combat to restore their HP? Definitely. Will it all but invalidate the selection of any other spell for out-of-combat healing? Yes. Will it step on the toes of a player who picked a Life Cleric and finds the party's Ranger is healing the party far better than they are? Yes, and that's where I think the spell is really problematic - the DM can adjust to out-of-combat healing being readily available, but the spell's existence just overshadows and (from an optimization standpoint) frankly invalidates the Cleric as a healing class. There are still plenty of good Cleric builds, but I can't imagine wanting to play a Life Cleric with a Druid or Ranger in the party and Healing Spirit being available. In fact, it is arguably so efficient that it could even warp combat behavior - unless the combat is threatening to be deadly, why should a Druid expend a spell slot on, say, a 4th-level Blight when they can just let the party kill the enemy a bit more slowly, take a bit more damage, and fix all of that damage with one extra 2nd-level Healing Spirit?

So what's the best solution? You could just disallow the spell or disallow all Xanathar's content, but that seems un-fun - I'm rarely in favor of restricting player choices in their character builds. You could rule that the spell can't be used out-of-combat or that players can't conga-line, but that's hard to justify - why could the characters not do something out-of-combat that they could do in-combat? The solution my group has settled on, which has worked well for us, is to have the spell's healing effect trigger only once before the start of the caster's next turn (i.e. once per round) instead of once on each turn. With this modification, consider the comparison to Prayer of Healing: Healing Spirit does only 35 points of healing on average instead of 90, but that discrepancy is less in a smaller party, the healing can be distributed more efficiently (if one person's taken 30 damage and no one else has taken any, Prayer of Healing won't get the job done, but our modified Healing Spirit would), it takes a tenth of the out-of-combat time, it doesn't require a healing-specialized subclass or high Wisdom to reach full effectiveness, and it can be used akin to a repeatable-but-delayed Healing Word in combat. In my book, that's a pretty fair set of tradeoffs - it's still a useful spell (and the fact that we find it a useful spell when we're effectively cutting in the area of 80% of its out-of-combat healing potential shows just how absurd the spell is under RAW), but other spells can be better in the right circumstances. In other words, it's pretty much balanced. 2x(casting mod) applications is another viable house-rule, but I think makes the spell too weak if the caster doesn't have at least 18 in their casting stat - I prefer the once-per-round variant, which nerfs it a bit less (unless the caster has a casting stat of 20, in which case they're equivalent).

TLDR: My recommendation, allow Xanathar's spells but institute a house rule that Healing Spirit only triggers once per round instead of once per turn, which renders it from game-warpingly OP into a well-balanced, still-useful spell.

[Tanarii]

I recently allowed it in a T2 one shot, just to see what would happen. It completely breaks resource management aspects of the game.

All three FLGS I run my campaign in, every AL DM complains about this spell, because it breaks the game so badly.

Hands down the most broken thing 5e has released to date.

[Yunru]

I've not seen a single thing wrong with it.
Sure, it lets the party save on hit dice, but then they normally never end up using more than half of them in a day anyway.
My players actually stopped using it, as it's just not worth the spell slot.