Goodberry: Eat Like the Jetsons
Spell Level: 1
School: Transmutation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Duration: Instantaneous
Components: V, S, M (a sprig of mistletoe)
Up to ten berries appear in your hand and are infused with magic for the duration. A creature can use its action to eat one berry. Eating a berry restores 1 hit point, and the berry provides enough nourishment to sustain a creature for one day.
The berries lose their potency if they have not been consumed within 24 hours of the casting of this spell.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Oh, Goodberry. If Healing Word didn’t exist, you’d certainly be the best healing spell in the game. Even with it, Goodberry is a solid option to some character types, especially in larger groups with lethal fights.
The best element of Goodberry is how cheap it is. Have some spell slots lying around before a long rest? Turn them all into yummy berries! Divide them evenly among the party; now functionally everyone has a bunch of free healing potions to get people off of zero and fighting again.
This spell shines particularly brightly if you’ve got a companion with a familiar or a summoned ally yourself. It isn’t explicitly stated that you’re able to administer goodberries as an action, but Jeremy Crawford on twitter that it is intended to work this way. This makes any creature that can act independently of you that doesn’t need actions to get commanded an easy way to get people up. In the case of a familiar, it costs you just your familiar's action, which can be consider less valuable than even a bonus action. Plus, none of these actions use spell slots. If you’re administering goodberrys, you’re free to cast bonus action spells the same round so long as you’ve had them at the ready beforehand.
If you’re a druid or ranger, it is really easy to keep Goodberry on your spell list and get mileage out of it. You can consider it closer to a feature than a spell; it's something you spend your extra slots on to get a bunch of day-long duration potions that everyone can grab. If you’ve got enough spare slots to spend, this can even patch up thirty or forty hit points at a time when you really want to get some people to take more than a hit or two. Goodberry is cheap, flexible, and useful so long as its run rules are as intended. Rules as written, it's still so cheap I’d say it can earn a spot on your characters.
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