There are many different roles that players can fill in Dungeons and Dragons. For example, you have classic archetypes like DPS, tank, support, and healer.
However, DnD is not an online MMO, and you don’t need a certain combination of roles to make your game viable. Some new players wonder whether or not you need a dedicated healer. Do DnD parties really need healers?
No, you don’t need someone to play a healer in your DnD 5e party. Healers provide good benefits but aren’t strictly necessary. If you don’t have a healer in your party, you can always make do with medical kits, although the efficacy of that healing won’t be as good as with a dedicated healer. DnD is designed with a philosophy of freedom in mind, and all combinations of classes can work.
There are a lot of nuances to this topic, and I’ll go through it in detail below. Read more to find out all you need to know about healers in DnD!
Do DnD Parties Need Healers?
Whether or not you need a healer in your DnD party depends on a couple of things. First of all, it’s not obligatory. If you want safety, and the ability to take on a lot of encounters a day, then having a dedicated healer is a good idea.
However, you can certainly play the game without having it. There are a lot of skills and features that you can use to compensate for healers, for example, medical kits and abilities such as Cure Wounds (this ability is available to Rangers, Druids, and Bards!)
Furthermore, you can always heal with potions, or short rests using your hit dice. When doing this, you use as many hit dice that are available to you.
Now, short rests, med kits, and abilities such as Cure Wounds are great, but they aren’t as consistent or good as having a dedicated healer. If you consistently are at a higher HP, you can naturally take on more fights and encounters.
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This will in turn boost your XP over time, since you’ll take on 6-8 encounters a day instead of 3-5, for example. For some players, this just makes the game more fun.
If you have effective setups and strategies, you won’t need healing as much as you otherwise would have. Focus-firing down targets and just playing the game better will obviously make you take less damage, and this is something that you’ll have to evaluate yourself.
It’s important to note that fights themselves can be more perilous if you don’t have any healing, especially if you’re unlucky. Without healing, you need to be very careful when approaching combat, and this includes the DM.
DMs need to set up more forgiving fights for players so as to not wipe out an entire party in one fight. The reality is that this is more likely if you don’t have a dedicated healer.
DMing a Party Without Healers
As I mentioned above, DMs need to approach the game a little bit more carefully when DMing parties that are low on healing magic. There are a lot of things that DMs can do to adapt, and I’ll be going through some of them below.
First of all, one thing DMs can do is provide a lot more healing potions than if the party would have a healer. This can include making healing pots drop more often, giving players healing potions at the start of a game, and more.
Moreover, DMs can create NPCs that can act as healers when the party is traveling with them. The reality is that not a lot of players want to be dedicated healers, that’s just not what they play DnD for, and having NPCs do the job for them is a fine solution.
There’s an item called the Wand of Healing which can come in very handy for parties without a healer, as well. DMs have the power to select what loot is dropped, and if you as a DM notice that your party has trouble with healing, you can simply let them loot a Wand of Healing.
The Wand of Healing has charges that players can expend to heal themselves or other party members. When the charges from the wand are gone, you can take a long rest to refill them.
Villages and cities are other great opportunities for DMs to provide healing for players since they oftentimes have temples, hospitals, or churches that can provide these services.
Encourage at least one player to pick a Druid, Fighter, Ranger, or Bard. Chances are that someone is already going to pick one of those, especially since the Fighter is the most popular class in DnD, but you never know.
As I mentioned earlier, Druids, Rangers, and Bards get Cure Wounds, while Fighters have very good self-sustain which kind of works as healing. Of course, multiclassing is a thing in DnD, which means that at least one player can take a level in Cleric to get access to some good healing.
How Important Is Healing in 5e?
Healing can certainly be important in DnD, in fact, healing effects are to some extent completely necessary (if you count rests and so forth).
However, dedicated healers are another question. Are they necessary? Moreover, are they important? Well, first of all, it depends on your party composition and strategy.
A lot of parties get away with no healer because of careful strategy and focus fire. Some players dislike strategy, and for them, healing is more important.
It can be argued that you win more fights with an additional dedicated DPS than a dedicated healer since the DPS will dish out more damage than the healer can heal, but is this really the case? Not always.
If healing an ally can facilitate additional actions or let them play more aggressively, then it can be worth it for sure. If you’re not healing enough to provide them with more effective turns, then heals can be a waste of time.
For example, if you heal an ally from 13 health to their maximum health, say 20, and the incoming damage is 12, the heal could potentially be wasted. Of course, incoming damage can vary wildly even from the same enemy, so it’s hard to calculate beforehand.
So, how important is healing? It depends on 1. your party composition (how much healing are you going to get anyway, do the rest of the party have sufficient self-sustains, etc), 2. your strategy, and 3. the usage of your heals, i.e., how effectively you are using them.