Getting The Most Out of The Heal Skill (in Pathfinder)

The Heal skill is one of those aspects of Pathfinder that most people just ignore. Aside from using it to tell how injured someone is, or how a particular corpse in a dungeon died, it seems like something that just isn't going to come up. However, like many skills in the book, you can do a lot with the Heal skill if you're willing to invest in it.

And sometimes it can be what saves your party.

Stop squirming, I need to get this thing out before you get a negative level...

The Heal Skill: What Can It Do?

Skills aren't magic, and while the Heal skill can restore hit points to a PC, you can't do it quickly. This makes it a poor choice for combat healing (most of the time, more on that later), but there is a lot of stuff you can use this skill for.

Stuff like:

- Provide First Aid: As a standard action you can make a DC 15 Heal check to stabilize a dying character, or to stop them from bleeding due to a bleed effect.

- Treat Poison: While tending a character who has been poisoned, every time they roll a save against the poison, you roll a Heal check. If your check exceeds the poison's save DC, then the subject gets a +4 competence bonus. Particularly useful for those who don't have other means prepared to neutralize a poison.

- Treat Disease: This works similarly to treating poison, and it can be a life-saver at lower levels when you can't cure disease with a wave of a hand just yet. It also takes 10 minutes as an action, so it's not great for in-combat use.

- Treat Deadly Wounds: This one takes a full hour, and expends 2 uses of a healer's kit. If you succeed, you restore a number of hit points equal to the creature's level, and if you beat the DC 20 by 5 or more then you add a bonus number of hit points equal to your Wisdom modifier. You have to do this within 24 hours of the wounds being delivered, and you can only do this once per day per target.

There are a few other uses of this skill (treating wounds from caltrops, long-term care, etc.) but these are the four most common uses. And chances are that most tables have only ever used the first-aid option. It's easy to think of this skill as one that falls by the wayside as you gain more expedient means of curing hit point damage, neutralizing poisons, and dealing with deadly wounds... but if you really want to invest in it, you can rev this skill up to the next level.

It's All About The Right Feats...

The feat you need to really juice this up is Healer's Hands, and it's found in the book Planar Adventures (the same book that gave us Magic Trick from How To Turn Floating Disk Into a Battlefield Spell). All you need is 1 rank of Heal and 1 rank of Knowledge (Planes), and you can take this feat. In short, it allows you to:

- Treat deadly wounds as a full-round action (instead of taking an hour).

- You don't take a negative for not using a healer's kit.

- You can use this action on a creature more than once per day, and if you beat the DC by 10 or more (it's a check of 30, for those keeping track), then you also get to add your ranks in Knowledge (Planes) to the hit points you heal.

You feeling better there, Jim?

Now, as a caveat, you can only use this feat's benefits a number of times per day equal to your ranks in Knowledge (Planes), and it only works on creatures that could be healed by positive energy. But say you're a level 10 character, you invested all the skill ranks, and you've got a high wisdom. Every time you treat deadly wounds on a fellow party member (without even needing a healer's kit, mind you), that's probably between 23 and 25 hit points you're giving them back (10 for their level, 10 for your ranks in Knowledge (Planes), and 3-5 depending on your Wisdom modifier).

At 10 times per day, that essentially gives you between 230 and 250 hit points you can restore without magic every day. Not a bad ability, eh? Especially if you add things like Healer's Gloves for that +5 competence bonus on your checks to make sure you hit that DC 30 reliably.

Then There's Skill Unlocks...

I'm the first to admit that there are not a lot of DMs who are willing to give players skill unlocks. First debuted in Pathfinder Unchained, they are an optional rule, but if they're in-play at your table then you can crack the Heal skill wide open.

And why is that, you might ask?

What you need to do is, when you get 5 ranks in the Heal skill, you take the feat Signature Skill. This gives you access to the skill unlocks for Heal, which start at 5 ranks. And every 5 ranks beyond that, you unlock another signature ability. Those are:

- Target recovers additional hit points and ability damage as if they'd rested a whole day.

- Target recovers additional hit points as if they'd rested a whole day with long-term care.

- Target recovers hit points and ability damage as if they'd rested for 3 days.

- Target recovers hit points and ability damage as if they'd rested for 3 days with long-term care.

We're going to have to do some math here to work this one out to its full conclusion. Because when you rest for a full day, you recover double your level in hit points, and 2 points of temporary ability damage. When you rest for a full day with long-term care, you recover at twice that rate.

So let's look at that level 5 unlock.

Assuming you make the DC 20 check on your fellow party member, you're automatically going to heal them for 5 hit points (their level). But with this skill unlock, you now heal them double their character level instead (10 points), and 2 points of temporary ability damage, as well. If you made the DC 25 check and you have a Wisdom modifier of +5, then you'll have healed them another 5 points, for a total of 15 hit points as a full-round action. 20 hit points if you manage to hit that DC 30 (unlikely, but possible with the right build).

And you'd be able to do that 5 times per day... putting your healing capacity at between 50 and 100 hit points, as well as 10 temporary ability damage, you could heal per day with no magic and not even a healer's kit!

The numbers just get more gross from there, my friends.

So what about at level 10? Well, the skill by itself heals them for 10 hit points. With the skill unlock, though, they recover 40 instead of 10, because it's treated as if they had a day of rest with long-term care (quadruple the normal healing). They also gain back 4 points of temporary ability point damage. Then if you hit the DC 25 check, you get to add your +5 modifier to bring that up to 45 hit points, and if you hit the DC 30 modifier you could bring that up to 55.

So the total here is between 400 and 550 hit points worth of healing in a day, as well as 40 points of temporary ability score damage.

The math only gets more nuts from there. At level 15 we're looking at more than 900 hit points per day of straight healing, and more than 70 points of temporary ability damage. At level 20, assuming your game goes that far, you could in theory heal over 2k hit points per day, as well as fix more than 200 points of temporary ability score damage.

Who says every party needs a cleric?

Useful, or Broken?

On the one hand, it could be argued that the skill unlocks provide you a meaningful way to make skills a bigger part of the game, and in this case to meaningfully heal fellow party members without the presence of a divine caster or potion spammer. However, when combining the skill unlock rules with this extraplanar knowledge of healing, you may find yourself dealing with a party that is all but immortal if they survive a given fight.

Tis but a flesh wound... have at thee!

Independently, the feat and unlocks are okay, if not great. My two cents, if you intend to use a system like this to replace the need for clerics and divine casters except in instances of permanent ability drain or negative level drain, then limit the number of times the character can use the feat Healer's Hands to their Wisdom modifier times per day (or perhaps double their Wisdom modifier per day, if you're feeling generous). That gives them the ability to meaningfully heal fellow party members with a skill, instead of magic, but doesn't give them the ability to wade through battle after battle for a full day without once casting a healing spell.

Just my two cents on finding a middle ground with this trick!

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No, That Class Isn't "Broken" (You're Just Throwing The Wrong Challenge At Them)

If you scroll through any online RPG group, I guarantee you will come across a thread where someone is complaining about how a certain class, or feat, or ability is so broken. Whether it's the summoner, Vital Strike feats, or just the existence of firearms, there is always someone complaining about how this or that rule, class ability, or feature, breaks the game.

However, 9 times out of 10, this simply isn't true. It's just someone whinging about something they don't like, or which they don't understand.

Goddammit Jeff! I knew I shouldn't have let you bring a shotgun!

It Isn't Broken (You're Facing The Wrong Challenge)

I'd like to share a story with you. I once had a DM who felt he had to throw enemies at us which were at least 5-7 CR above what our party was supposed to face. This became a problem after a while, and I pulled him aside to ask him why he felt the need to jack up the CR so high. We weren't a terribly cracked-out group, with at least a few folks at the table playing straightforward, in-the-box PCs. The DM demanded what I thought he should do, because the paladin and the cleric kept shredding everything he threw at us with minimal effort and resource expenditure.

I asked him if he'd contemplated using enemies besides devils, demons, and undead. You know, things that smite and good-aligned spells wouldn't totally destroy in short order. Lawful neutral mercenaries, perhaps? Maybe a chaotic wizard? Maybe a ranger who fought with animals and traps instead of standing in the middle of an open field where we could take all the pot shots we wanted at him?

That... actually never occurred to me.

The point of this story is that every class, and every ability, is going to have a situation it's considered powerful in. It will also have a situation it isn't suited for. If you only ever see that class, or ability, in an environment where it's powerful, it may look too strong. However, the fault is not with the mechanic; it lies with the DM, who always creates situations which play right into the character's strengths.

As an example, let's take the gunslinger. The class has gotten a lot of heat for being "broken" because it gives a martial class a touch attack. However, it takes several feats, and a lot of class abilities, for guns to be really deadly past low levels. And if you want to get more than one shot per gun, you need to spend colossal amounts of resources on more advanced, or enchanted, firearms. This means those resources aren't going to armor, wondrous items, or other items that could effect the game.

However, gunslingers operate under the same restrictions any other ranged class does. If you had an archer who was turning every encounter into a pincushion, what would you do? Well, the obvious solution is that you give your bad guys cover. Fight in a forest full of trees, use ruins and boulders, or have them carry tower shields. If you really want to be a dick, give your enemies Deflect Arrows, which the book states also applies to bullets. You might also grant the enemies concealment using mist, darkness, or even magical effects like blur or displacement. Now what was a Gatling gun that destroyed encounters will have a tough time actually pinning down a target before pulling the trigger.

No matter what you're dealing with, there's a countermeasure for it. The rogue keeps ambushing targets, create some enemies who can't be caught flat-footed; or worse, can't be flanked for sneak attack purposes. Knockout poison keeps bringing down your bad guys? Give them an antivenom to increase their saves by +5. Your wizard keeps buffing the party? Bring out your spellcaster who specializes in debuffs, along with his bodyguard. Your party moves around the battlefield freely to strike wherever they want? Fight them in a location that has traps in it.

Everything has a countermeasure, and that countermeasure isn't necessarily to just declare "this power doesn't work anymore" with things like absurdly high DR, energy immunity, anti-magic fields, etc.

This Applies to More Than Just Combat

Most of the time when someone claims an ability is broken, they're referring to combat capabilities. Especially since, like it or not, there's always someone who wants to solve a problem with an elbow drop. But what about all those non-combat abilities people complain about? You know, like that one guy with a Perception score so high it's impossible for him to miss the DC, or that other player who has increased their Bluff and Diplomacy to insane levels?

So, let me learn you a thing about skills.

Funny thing, despite how often we make skill checks, most of us don't actually read the fine print. For example, did you know that if someone is falling past you that you can catch them with a successful touch attack, followed by a successful Climb check? Or that, if your Perception check is high enough, that you can identify a potion simply by tasting a drop of it? Well, those are both in the description of those skills.

Something else a lot of players and DMs both overlook is that there are explicit statements for what skills can and can't do. For example, Diplomacy can only move someone two steps along the track, meaning you could make a neutral person friendly, but a hostile person could only be brought to neutral. Not only that, but you can only make that check once every 24 hours. Lastly, "friendly" doesn't mean "will do whatever you say." Even if you're best buddies with the palace guard, he's not going to sneak you into the queen's bedchamber.

As another example, Bluff has modifiers for increasingly unlikely tales, and the skill expressly says you cannot use it to make someone believe something which is obviously false. Such as that their pants are on fire, their gold is actually copper, or the sky is bright green when it is, in fact, both blue and visible. And Perception, often lamented by DMs for how easy it is to increase to an obscene level, has a gigantic chart of negatives. Environmental penalties, light penalties, increases for distance, for distractions, and for a dozen other factors. So while it's possible to hear a sniper drawing a bowstring while standing in the middle of a crowded party, only someone who has focused on that particular skill to the exclusion of nearly anything else will be able to operate on that level.

The Game Has Been Rigorously Tested

If you've bought a copy of Dungeons and Dragons, or Pathfinder, or Vampire, or even Spycraft, a lot of testing went into those games to make sure they functioned. Their engines were tweaked, and then tweaked again every time a beta tester found a way to exploit bad word choice, or to stack abilities that shouldn't function together. They are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but chances are good that if there was a way to actually break the game, someone found it, and fixed it, long before your table got their hands on it.

So, before you decry that X, Y, or Z aspect of your game is broken, follow these simple guidelines. First, actually read the book to be sure the abilities function the way a player says they do. Second, ask what the situational requirements are for an ability to actually go off (melee specialists are no good at ranged, favored enemy restricts when the bonuses work, certain fighting styles require multiple enemies in order to go off, etc.), and how commonly those things happen. Third, ask what the weakness is. Because everything, without fail, has a weakness.

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday post. Hopefully it's helped some people see the bigger picture the next time they ask whether or not a given ability is, in fact, broken. If you'd like to support Improved Initiative, then why not stop by The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page? For as little as $1 a month you get some sweet swag, as well as my everlasting gratitude. Lastly, if you haven't followed me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter yet, then why not start today?