Life Transference: Double and Nothing
Spell Level: 3
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Duration: Instantaneous
Components: V, S
You sacrifice some of your health to mend another creature’s injuries. You take 4d8 necrotic damage, which can’t be reduced in any way, and one creature of your choice that you can see within range regains a number of hit points equal to twice the necrotic damage you take.
At Higher Levels: When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, the damage increases by 1d8 for each slot level above 3rd.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
There is something so off to me about seeing a Wizard spell aimed at healing. Life Transference by all accounts is a healing spell, and both a Wizard and Cleric spell. It heals 8d8 damage for a 3rd level slot, putting it at the top of the charts when it comes to quantity healed per slot. An up-cast Cure Wounds, for example, is only healing 3d8+ mod AND requires touch. This is basically double that. It comes at a pretty absurd cost: 4d8 damage to yourself!
Life Transference, for this reason alone, is basically uncastable on wizards, and pretty bad on clerics. A 5th level wizard with a 10 in their Constitution is hovering around 4d6+6 hit points. 4d8 damage is averaging 18 points of damage; 4d6+6 is averaging around 20 hit points. Out the gate, having the ability to randomly die just to heal somebody else seems atrocious. Even with a positive Constitution modifier, and even within the next few levels, one particularly bad roll on those 4d8 can just drop you.
On top of that, a major element of why I consider healing to largely be ineffective in combat is it doesn’t typically earn you extra actions. Even in the upper tiers, you need to be basically full on hit points to be able to cast Life Transference. You’d typically only want to cast it when you’d be gaining actions out of it; that happens when somebody is already at 0 HP. If your paladin or barbarian, the characters that’d benefit the most from this, have dropped and you haven’t taken ANY damage, THEN this has a use case.
The only redeeming quality of this spell is it's a rare healing spell that can exist on the wizard’s spell sheet. If you have only one other member of the party with access to healing magic and for some reason also don’t have access to healing potions, using Life Transference to stabilize them guaranteed knowing they can immediately bring YOU back up should it knock you unconscious can be useful. I can’t imagine many, if any, games are in that exact situation.
Life Transference is a neat concept; trading your own life over to a buddy a twice the rate seems like a great exchange. Unfortunately, the healing system around this spell, the action economy, and the classes that get access to Life Transference make it basically uncastable at all stages of the game. Don’t waste any time considering Life Transference. It's awful. I’ll take a 1d4+ modifier bonus action heal over this every time.
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