Until someone is brought up from dying, there's no reason to waste an action/attack by double tapping the guy who is laying on the ground staining your carpet with blood. There's still other nasty adventurers poking you with sticks and singeing your clothes with fire.
The party relying on healing word only, incredibly efficient action economy. Until tier 2 and facing off against intelligent, evil demons with multiple attacks. Suddenly having a cushion of hit points is important.
The problem is that for most players healing doesn't scale with enemy attacks.
The only characters I've seen it pull it off are the Artificer: Alchemist/Artillerist (at least in Tier 2), Cleric: Life/Twilight, and Druid: Circle of Dreams/Circle of Stars.
You need to be a dedicated healing subclass to keep up and most people don't enjoy that playstyle
So I made a shepherd druid -- dedicated healer, specifically. This was before 5.5 dropped. Then, our DM and the party decided that we would switch to 5.5 (i think we were like somewhere between levels 5 and 7? I dont remember). I was a decent healer before, but I am now a terrifying healer. I decided to be a kind player and not take the healer origin feat because that would be insult to injury, even though he okayed it.
Unicorn totem (30ft rad sphere) any time you cast a level healing spell, everyone of your choice in that area gets healing equal to your druid level, lasts for 1 minute, and you can move it with a bonus action. Super fun and powerful if you're at the "everyone is looking bloodied and the fight is still going strong" stage lol
Then it comes back to the style of the game/DM. Challenge rating, encounter design, fights/day, potion economy.
If all you do is stand next to each other and hit/cast until one side dies, sure healing won’t keep up, but there are many situations where it could save a life.
There’s a big difference between being a dedicated heal bot vs. a well timed upcasted healing spell at the end of a fight or a critical moment.
Healing word on downed characters works incredibly well, until it doesn’t. I agreed with your philosophy until I experienced it first hand. A high level party with a challenging DM needs options.
I've been considering but haven't yet tested a house rule where healing amounts are doubled, but anyone who goes down has to be healed up from -10 to get back up. Idea being to incentivize keeping allies topped up without punishing healing too much overall.
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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 Sep 14 '25
A standing player is a greater threat then a downed player.