How AD&D Really Was
In AD&D, there were only a couple ways to battle-heal until very high levels: Cure Light Wounds, a 1st-level spell which did 1d8+1, and Cure Serious Wounds, a 4th-level spell that did 2d8+1. At level 10, a cleric could cast CLW four times and CSW thrice, for a grand total of 9d8+8 hit points. A 10th-level fighter has, at minimum, 10d10 hit points, so the cleric's total daily healing amounts to about One Average Fighter.At this point, I should remind you that sleeping healed one hit point. Uno. It never goes up. So let's just say those spells didn't go far.
The reason you remember combat healing as not being garbage in AD&D is you played Baldur's Gate. Early on in Baldur's Gate, you find a magical ring that gives two extra priest spells per level. And you find at least three priests and paladin? Plus your main character gets Cure Wounds as his ~mystical magical plot device~ ability. Now, why do you think that is?
It's because AD&D healing is ~g~a~r~b~a~g~e~.
Okay, maybe that's an overstatement. The real purpose of healing in AD&D is so that you don't have to spend a month healing up after every combat, and to save your bacon if a fight is going badly. As in, "I've taken a couple hits, quick, heal me so we can escape back to town!" You weren't really supposed to stand around, trading blows, like you do in video games. Combat was supposed to be a last resort when you couldn't find a better way to grab the loot (gold was XP back then), you were supposed to hire henchmen, and low-level characters were supposed to die like flies.
But that makes a really awful video game, so Bioware threw in piles of extra healing to make the game play the way modern D&D does.
The Math
So let's dig into the numbers. The big combat healing spells a 10th level cleric has access to are Cure Wounds, Healing Word, Beacon of Hope (we'll get into that), and Mass Cure Wounds. Now, if you aren't a life cleric (we'll get into that), the best you can hope to do is throw down your Beacon of Hope and throw out out Cure Wounds and Mass Cure Wounds all over the place. If you have 4 combats for the day (fairly typical, really), you use all 3 L3 slots and one L4 for Beacon of Hope. This leaves you:4x L1 CW
3x L2 CW
2x L4 CW
2x L5 MCW (assume party of four)
If your WIS is 18, that translates into 388 hit points of healing. At level 10, if you're rolling hit points the way real heroes do, a fighter with 14 CON will have 12 + 10*(d10+2) hp, which is about 87. If you are a little baby who uses rounded-up numbers, he'll have 92.
A 10th level 5e cleric can heal the fighter from 0 to full four and a half times in a day. That's if you do nothing but heal and are a non-Life cleric. If you minmax by putting 20 into WIS and being a Life cleric, you get an additional 85 hp from your spells *plus* at least another 100 hp from Channel Divinity (50 hp, recharges on short rest), plus even more to yourself if you're wounded. On top of that, everyone heals to full on a long rest, and they have hit dice to spend on short rests.
True, you can't stand around like a WoW healer, just cranking out healing spells to cancel out monster damage. They incorrectly assume that's how D&D worked before 5e, when it never did. The closest it ever came was 4e, where clerics had an awful lot of powers that granted healing surges. But even then, healing every round would mitigate, not negate damage.
Real Combat Healing
As with every white-room analysis, so much is simplified out of the discussion as to make the analysis worthless. I've noticed most of the theorycrafters completely ignore Beacon of Hope. You get BoH at level 5...right around the time that Cure Wounds and Healing Word start to feel pretty lame in comparison to player HP and monster damage. And at level 8, every cleric starts getting bonus damage to either cantrips or weapon attacks, depending on domain. It's almost like they planned this out!Contrary to theorycrafting, combat healing isn't about HURR THE MONSTER HIT YOU DURRRR I NEGATE THE HIT. It's about one thing: Increasing your chance of survival. The problem is P(Survive) is really hard to compute and has a unique value for every situation, which is why no theorycrafter ever computes it. But here are some examples when someone going down can make all the difference:
- The barbarian is raging. Healing is twice as useful as long as he maintains rage.
- A wild-shaped druid close to losing shape.
- The wizard is cornered, and low enough on hp that a high damage roll or crit will instakill him, but a little healing ensures that unconsciousness is the worst that can happen.
- A giant hits, then crits the bard in Round 1, bringing him to within a few hp of going down. You can't afford for him to be taken out of the fight this early.
- The oni was waiting for you...he jumped out of the darkness and hit the rear of the party with Cone of Cold! The sorcerer is unconscious, and the rogue is hanging on for dear life.
- You've been assaulted by a horde of undead. And from experience, you know these particular ghoul variants tend to keep munching on whoever goes down first, easily killing them outright.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but there are many situations where a character going down is the worst thing to befall the party.
