Quote:
Originally Posted by tbeard1999
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For me, the main purpose of healing spells is to enable classic dungeon crawls and to make characters more able to survive multiple combats. However, to preserve the flow and fast pace of the TFT combat system, they really shouldn't have that much effect on individual combats.
And Steve’s spell pretty much fails to do that. It isn’t a bad spell, necessarily. But it’s not particularly useful for dungeon crawls either - you have to burn out a high IQ Wizard for a modest benefit. Much better to spend (say) 4 ST on a missile spell against the enemy 99% of the time, I suspect.
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In situations
other than non-small-PC-only-party-D&D-dungeon-quest-imitating, it's not just burning the ST of a high-IQ wizard. With an unlimited healing spell, it becomes a strong tactic to have a squad of as many apprentices with Aid as possible. (Even slaves who aren't wizards but have IQ 9 and you (or your wicked NPC adversaries) have learn the Aid spell). Not only do they add their ST to the amount you can cast healing spells with, each of them recovers 1 fST per fifteen minutes, so they multiply the potential healing over time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
I'm sure there are players out there who had wizards with hundreds of points of ST batteries, but that never came up in a campaign I ran, so magicians tended to harbor their ST expenditures pretty strictly.
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ST batteries are not needed. Did they have wagons and hirelings? If you've got a wagon, you can have one IQ 14 healer wizard and an Aid-casting assistant or two resting off spell fatigue on the wagon while the party travels. (Or if no wagon, they can do it while the party rests.) That's 4 fatigue per hour, times 16 waking hours per day is 64 fST (plus whatever their actual ST is) per IQ 9 apprentice.
Even without any apprentices, the healing wizard himself rests up that much himself, so at SJ's original 1/4 rate, that's potentially 16 or more points of healing per day per wizard or Aid caster.
Clever heroes might want to consider learning the Aid spell themselves, and using it to Aid the healer while they're injured. IQ 9 and 3 points of memory is a fantastic deal to increase your healing rate from 1 per 2 days to more like 32 per 2 days (not to mention the instant results, and no real need to actually ever spend any time in bed). It's so powerful that people would seem to be fools
not to do that.
Oh, and even Drain ST on one person yields something like 7 times the usual healing rate. And since all Drain ST needs is a willing subject, if you've got a bunch of willing civilians or something, you could use them to get a bunch of healing done. It could be a regular military strategy: Occupy a village and make them submit to Drain ST so you can heal your entire company's wounds in an hour or so using even just one caster with a healing spell and (the same, or another with Aid and) Drain ST.