Power Word Heal: Ironic Overkill
Spell Level: 9
School: Evocation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Duration: Instantaneous
Components: V, S
A wave of healing energy washes over a creature you touch. The target regains all its hit points. If the creature is charmed, frightened, paralyzed, or stunned, the condition ends. If the creature is prone, it can use its reaction to stand up. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Clerics have no shortage of healing spells available to them at nearly every level. Your options are Cure Wounds and Healing Word (1st level spells), Prayer of Healing (a 2nd level spell), Aura of Vitality, Life Transference, and Mass Healing Word (3rd level spells), Mass Cure Wounds (a 5th level spell), Heal (a 6th level spell), Regenerate (a 7th level spell), Mass Heal and Power Word Heal (9th level spells).
9th level spells fundamentally need to change the game. They need to do something no other spell can, or otherwise be so much more potent than another spell they warp game balance. Wish, for example, opens up your wildest dreams to be reality at the D&D while simultaneously representing every other spell in the game lower level than it. Meteor Swarm does so much more damage than every other spell it stands out as a worthy contender for your lone 9th level spell slot. Power Word: Heal is doing something a lot of other spells do, and yes, is doing it a bit better than them all, but is majorly party dependent, and probably isn’t worth your slot.
If Power Word: Heal is every restoring less than 100 hit points and doing nothing else, you’d rather be just preparing Heal. Lesser Restoration ends four conditions, and Greater Restoration restores creatures from being petrified and cursed with other upsides as well. Power Word: Heal both heals and removes common conditions, but notably misses some big conditions and effects, namely curses. This isn’t strictly better than any of the prior four, and there will be situations where something like Greater Restoration gets you out of a situation Power Word: Heal doesn’t.
Healing generally isn’t all that worthwhile to do in combat if it's not altering a huge number of actions. Sure, Power Word: Heal can be getting an ally off zero and restoring upwards of two-hundred or more hit points, but that isn’t always going to be the case. Finding yourself specifical in a scenario where your barbarian has already taken upwards of four-hundred damage (mitigated by resistances, of course) likely means you’re in the deepest of shit, and probably don’t want to approach their body right now. If you had intervened with a 9th level spell that had an enormous impact, you could have very likely mitigated the need to restore the barbarian from death to full.
This highlights how healing magic is exclusively reactive. There isn’t a proactive way to heal people with this, and its power is severely gimped for this reason. Some encounters your barbarian is only taking 80 damage, and you just don’t need to use this to help them. If you cast it on a different ally with less health, you’re getting potentially a lot less out of the spell, and more likely in the territory of something a different spell (like Heal) could handle. Heal isn’t even that great of a spell when compared to something like Healing Word for the purposes of action economy, and if you’d used a proactive spell like Banishment or Forcecage instead, you likely could mitigate the damage entirely while moving your side towards victory. You rarely will want to use a 9th level slot out of combat, as hit points can be regained with Heroes’ Feasts, long rests, or just a handful of lower level spells that you have an abundance of.
The range of touch is the final nail in this holy coffin. Needing to touch an ally when you’re dealing in the top CR encounters can be a massive hurdle. As enemies and environments scale into the epic tier, creatures are flying at hundreds of feet per six seconds, teleporting further than that every other round, and venturing into giant areas of magical death with some expectation of returning. You needing to physically touch the target you want to heal means you have to match the game’s movement and figure out the risk and reward of getting there, when something like Healing Word is probably a better option if all you need is to get somebody off zero before their next turn.
For a 9th level healing spell, just a lot of health and a restoration effect isn’t good enough. Healing magic already isn’t great as it often can result in wasted power and actions. This version costs your 9th level slot, is going to require huge amounts of damage on an ally paired with a condition to really get the most out of it, and probably will be outshone more often than not by spells lower level than it that are more efficient. Cleric 9th level options aren’t great anyway, and having Power Word: Heal in your back pocket isn’t going to be the end of the world, but you can probably do better with up-casting more busted things.
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