Greater Restoration: Well There’s Your Problem

Usable By: Artificer, Bard, Cleric, Druid

Spell Level: 5

School: Abjuration

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V, S, M (diamond dust worth at least 100 gp, which the spell consumes)

You imbue a creature you touch with positive energy to undo a debilitating effect. You can reduce the target’s exhaustion level by one, or end one of the following effects on the target:

One effect that charmed or petrified the target
One curse, including the target's attunement to a cursed magic item
Any reduction to one of the target's ability scores
One effect reducing the target's hit point maximum

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Greater Restoration is a legacy spell when spells had duality and multiple tiers of power. It’s been grandfathered into the game as a means of empowering your character using Lesser Restoration by growing it into Greater Restoration. Unfortunately for Greater Restoration, it's at its best as a somewhat munchkin-y way to reduce exhaustion levels you pay as costs for casting busted stuff like Wish, and not a particularly compelling spell beyond that.

Charms and petrification effects are the most likely “fair” cure this offers. Charms in particular can be long term, mind altering effects fey antagonists use to attack the players and world. When that comes up, having a 5th level spell accessible to 9th level characters to combat this forced malleability is nice to have. On top of that, as long as the cleric or druid isn’t the one petrified from the basilisk, this makes those kinds of petrifiers less permanent.

Curses are often tools DMs play with to offer trade offs to enrich characters or add complications to the game. Greater Restoration often just says “yeah, no” and beats the curse, which is lame. Often the damage done by attuning to a cursed item will be done before the group knows they need to prepare this, meaning you can still get some mileage out of cursing things as a DM, but if the druid or cleric has space on their prepared list and just dedicates it to Greater Restoration forever, it can be incredibly challenging to throw meaningful curses at the players. It’ll instead feel like you’re just taxing the cleric a 5th level slot.

Ability score reductions and max hit point reductions rarely occur, and when they do, almost always go away with a long rest, making it near irrelevant text, leaving you with this silver bullet to some powerful, yet niche, conditions, a solution to all cursed magic items, and a cheesy tool to abuse with exhaustion penalties

Bards really have no room for something that will come up this infrequently as known casters. Clerics and druids both can pick it up as needed: that’s kind of the extent of its usability. It doesn’t cure the same problem as Lesser Restoration, which is wild to me, as Lesser Restoration actually hits a lot of other relevant abilities you’d care to cure for a way cheaper slot, and because this hit different things, you can’t actually progress from Lesser Restoration to Greater Restoration. You have to still prepare both if you’re worried about the Lesser Restoration effects. It's more like Cure Blindness/Deafness/Paralysis/Poison is Lesser, and Cure Charms, Niche Conditions, and Exhaustion is Greater Restoration.

Lesser Restoration is a spell I’m perfectly fine with; it is a cheap solution to annoying conditions that feels good to have in your back pocket. Greater Restoration is something I’m almost never preparing unless we’re aimed at exactly a petrifying charming fey. Its existence and a single cast is often enough to “cure” any and all future cursed items you’d be dealing with, and everything else it does isn’t happening frequently enough for me to ever consider it. Not so much “greater”; more like “Niche and Annoying Restoration”. It's better to just know that this exists and prepare it when you need it (which is almost never).

5e Spells

Greater Restoration: Well There’s Your Problem