Beacon of Hope: Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
Usable By: Cleric
Spell Level: 3
School: Abjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
This spell bestows hope and vitality. Choose any number of creatures within range. For the duration, each target has advantage on Wisdom saving throws and death saving throws, and regains the maximum number of hit points possible from any healing.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Healing in 5th Edition overflows from nearly every option. At minimum, every character gets a pool of hit dice they can spend every short rest to heal up, and every long rest they get all those back while also getting restored to full hit points. Bards, druids, clerics, paladins, and rangers all have ample healing spell opportunities at all tiers, with warlocks, sorcerers, and wizards having niche spells from out of the Player’s Handbook or subclasses that offer healing. That’s before considering the amount of self healing many of the classes have access to; Second Wind is a 1st level fighter feature that heals them a bunch.
Beacon of Hope tries to sell you that it makes all those features so much better its worth a 3rd level slot; in reality, you’re going to feel it's a massive waste of a resource because of just how ample healing is.
Healing magic is at its best when you’re getting some kind of action advantage with it in combat. Healing Word, for example, costs you a bonus action, and gets a creature you can see off 0 easily to give them additional actions. You’re trading a bonus action for another character's ability to take turns. The extra benefits of guaranteeing that d4 be a 4 instead of a 1 is a tiny difference in practical power. If you’re using this alongside another fat healing effect, like a Mass Cure Wounds, you could alternatively just cast Mass Cure Wounds twice; that’s almost always going to be a better option for restoring hit points, and at that point you probably don’t need it, and would usually rather leave open resources to help end encounters faster to reduce the instances of allies going to 0.
Advantage on Wisdom saving throws is way more important than the advantage on death saves, as if you’re ever using this to give an ally advantage on their death saves, you probably should just be casting a spell to stop them from making death saves all together. If you know you’re about to face off against a bunch of Wisdom based save or dies that can decimate your team, you can conceivable prep this to get a boon against them, but often times you’ll get the same effect from a Protection from Evil and Good for a third the spell slot cost.
Beacon of Hope is next to never worth casting. It's dressed up with exciting words like MAXIMUM, but those words don’t mean a whole lot in the context of actually playing the game. Beacon of Hope is something I’d recommend more or less everyone stay away from; it's terrible.
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