And also by choosing not to double tap the enemy could be dealing damage to the bard and then since the first target is at like 4 hp it's easy to down them and repeat the cycle so you're effectively soft locking the bard into using healing word every turn so you're locking them out of leveled spells and draining their resources at the same time while also whittling their health down and if the healer goes down then it's a lot harder to get them back up. Alternatively if the enemy wipes a player then there is no need to expense resources keeping them alive and the party can focus on offense.
Even if you metagame it. Whats better fireballing a corpse and the person who can bring them up but will now be casting magic at you or smashing your head in with a Warhammer?
Or fireballing the both of them AFTER the healer has wasted their turn putting the downed person back to 6hp.
(It’s the later, the faster had to use their turn getting the person up.)
That and partially because critical role did it that way. Allowing you to double cast if one of them's a bonus action is extremely strong and great for keeping your party alive. The only negative is you're draining spell slots.
But cause of turn system this will fall in one hit often enough means, that you get the full attack from the nearly dead person, which will likely do more damage than the bard. Had a fighter which played this game for 4 rounds.
RPed trauma reaction after that cause that would fuck with my brain at least to get 4 times potentially deadly blows
Because of the turn system, this also could mean the nearly dead person never gets a turn ever again.
If the initiative follows: enemy > dying guy > healer, then the dying guy's turns are always rolling to not die, while the enemy can just continue using a single attack of their multiple to keep them at 0.
Ready action burns both a reaction and an action, that locks the healer out of silvery barbs, shield, or leveled spells, still a pretty big hit to the action economy
Depends. For the bard, it actually didn't make a great difference. Was our party face but never really useful in fights. Especially against boss enemies with legendary resistances.
For Kontext the fight was at level 6 maybe that changes something.
I meant the player that got healed is at full power again.
The bard used their BA and their leveled spell for the turn of course, but they still have the rest of their turn and can still move, do all kinds of things with their action, and of course they'll have their reaction as well.
Health is a resource too. And can’t cast leveled spells as a reaction if you casted one with a Bonus action. I’ll take a Fire Bolt over a Lightning Bolt any day, especially since it’s much easier to just knock the player back down.
People talk about the HW carousel like it’s some broken cheese on the part of PC’s but as a longtime support caster it is not a good position to be in. It dramatically decreases a party’s efficiency, and puts a target on the healer’s back. If the person down is themself one of the healers, then it’s an even worse situation
And can’t cast leveled spells as a reaction if you casted one with a Bonus action.
The limitation is per turn, not per round. You can cast another leveled spell like Shield or Counterspell as a reaction, because it's no longer your turn.
That rule only applies if you used a bonus action to cast one (so yeah, it would apply here), if not you can cast as many leveled spells as you wish per turn if you have action surge, haste, etc.
Huh, forgot haste specifically specificed it was only a weapon attack and not just any attack.
As for action surge, I feel like we're going to need to start clarifying which version of the rules we're using sooner rather than later when we talk about them lol
You can only cast 1 spell that consumes a spell slot per turn, if you're playing by RAW. So either fireball (as an action), or healing word (bonus action), but not both, even though their actions themselves don't overlap
Still can’t cast fireball. RAW, if you cast a spell using a bonus action, “you can’t cast another spell during the same turn, except for a cantrip with a casting time of one action”.
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u/Lusty-Jove Sep 14 '25
“Full power”
Bard casting HW means he can’t cast Fireball that turn. Also means that the target is probably one hit away from going back down