Durable: I Get Knocked Down and I Get Up Again

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Oh, short rests. You wacky little mechanic you. Instead of using the “gamist” language of 4e that allowed for mechanics usable once per encounter, we get a wonky, inconsistent rest system to pile onto the already wildly varying long rests of old. Hit dice are a novel concept, offering a tool to heal a little bit as you go. Some tables with lots of encounters per long rest can find they are an invaluable resource should they also lack one or more characters with ample healing magic. Roughly half the classes have ample access to healing magic, though, so we’re talking about tables that lack any member of their party representing one of half the core class roster that ALSO presses through a myriad of encounters per long rest to then even want to take short rests and spend hit dice. Then, at this tiny percentage of tables, should you find you’re regularly running dry on HP and need more consistent healing, there’s Durable.

If you’ve got an odd Con mod, Durable at least can feel free. It's only competing with Chef for the +1 Con feats, but also fills the same role as Tough. Comparing it to Chef reveals how horrendous this is; you could either have a tool to grant bonus hit points to yourself and your friends when short resting AND get a tool granting them bonus temporary hit points, or have a way higher average healing per spent hit die. The higher level you get the smaller this disparity gets, but early on (which is when you’d probably lean towards taking a feat to flip your Con score to even) you will routinely find Chef will just function better.

In the upper tiers, when you’d get the most out of Durable, Tough steps in and offers you twice your level hit points, a HUGE bump up that rewards you every time you long rest with more HP to burn. Having more max HP isn’t strictly better than getting higher average healing on short rest, but will certainly be more reliably useful. For Durable to be better, you need to be spending all of your hit dice and healing back to close to, but not past, your maximum hit points. If you ever overheal, you’re wasting dice. If you ever start a long rest with hit dice to spare, you’re not getting what you need out of Durable to make it better than Tough. The cases where you’re consistently dropping to within inches of your life multiple times per long rest just seems laughably rare to me that even in games reliably hitting two to three short rests per long rest, I have a hard time imagining one character out of the party is taking so much more damage, yet not going under, to justify the benefits of Durable. Even with a floor of 6 or 8, you just won’t need THAT many hit points, or at least, not need that many hit points you can recover per fight.

Durable feels like it belongs in a completely different game, like it fits for a one to two player campaign built around no magical healing, sparse long rests, and consistent waves of middling damage enemies. As it stands, even at tables playing with frequent short rests, you will almost always have better options to improve your long term hit point pool. Don’t mess with Durable.

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