D&D 3.5 Mechanics Deep Dive: Healing vs. Buffing
Why Does Everyone Say Healing Is Bad?
If you do any reading on any forums related to 3.5, or D&D in general, you're likely to hear some sage advice when it comes to direct healing: don't. But why? What's so bad about healing? If I heal an injured ally, they might not die, and if they don't die, they get to help.
That perception seems only natural to beginners, and don't get me wrong, healing can actually be useful in select situations. The trick is to identify when, where, and why to use buffs and healing.
Preventing Damage Is Better Than Recovering It
For starters, when it comes to healing damage, it's simply better not to have taken that damage in the first place. If you can provide elemental resistances, including fire, cold, electricity, acid, or sonic, damage reduction, or even spell resistance, you end up preventing massive amounts of damage, such that you've effectively "healed" significantly more than a healing spell could.
Resist Energy vs. Cure Moderate Wounds
Resist Energy, available to a wide array of casters at level 3, is incredibly powerful when compared to Cure Moderate Wounds, which is of the same spell level. Cure Moderate Wounds, healing 2d8 plus caster level, provides a one-time instance of healing, whereas Resist Energy provides a theoretically infinite amount of damage prevention, assuming the damage is below the resistance threshold. The average healing from Cure Moderate Wounds at level 3 is 12, but rather than heal all 12 damage from a fire-based attack, a savvy spellcaster could have opted for Resist Energy, taken only 2 damage from the attack, and still had potential damage prevention left for minutes on end.
Damage Reduction is Effectively Extra Hit Points
Damage reduction is a bit harder to come by, but the same principles apply. Take the spell Righteous Might, available to Clerics at level 9, which grants a wide array of powerful effects. Among them is damage reduction 5/evil, or damage reduction 5/good if you're evil-aligned.
Damage reduction 5 is genuinely insane. It means that low-level goon-type enemies are functionally unable to hurt you. An assassin armed with a mundane dagger and a +1 to Strength quite literally cannot deal damage to you without critically striking you. It's functionally a doubling or tripling of your effective hit points against mob-style encounters with many smaller or weaker enemies.
Comparing it to a healing spell isn't even really possible, the output is simply too much. If I had to, it would be to Greater Vigor at the same level. Greater Vigor provides fast healing 4, so each round it recovers 4 hit points, which makes the comparison quite bleak. If you took 5 damage from a hit every single round, one of these spells would make your hit points never change, and the other would leave you one hit point lower per round. What's even crazier is that Righteous Might comes with more goodies.
Spell Resistance
Spell resistance is about as hard to come by as damage reduction, but somehow even more insanely powerful. Spell resistance doesn't apply to mundane effects, and unfortunately falls short for some spells here or there, but it has the capacity to completely prevent anything from happening to you, including, but not limited to, damage from blasting spells, death effects, compulsion effects, and save-or-sucks. That's all before you even roll for saves against the spell cast on you.
Saving Throws Are Preventative Healing
Similarly, effects that raise your saves are significantly more powerful than healing, because you can't heal death. A bonus to Fortitude prevents many save-or-die effects from poisons, spells, and worse. A bonus to Reflex prevents many massive area-of-effect blasts that would've sent your character to the Abyss. A bonus to Will prevents many save-or-suck effects or compulsion effects that make your character being alive worse for the party than being dead.
Healing Has Diminishing Returns
Lastly, it's worth noting that, outside of some niche ability that probably exists in a splatbook somewhere, characters come with a maximum hit point threshold. The reason I bring this up is that healing people too much can be wasteful in terms of what the spells actually do, because there's only so much value they can get out of massive healing spells.
So, Should You Never Heal?
Okay, so never heal, got it. Well... that's wrong too. Healing is valuable, it's just typically of lower value than buffing. The trick is balancing the resources you have, in most cases here we're talking about spells, to be most effective.
Healing is at its best when working in tandem with buffs, because, as described above, buffs can effectively allow your character to act as if its hit points are worth more HP than they actually are. Therefore, when you're not topped off, your buffs are less effective than they could be, naturally. So what's the solution? Not never healing, and not only healing.
When Healing Is Best
Ideally, you'll use downtime to heal, and I don't mean resting. Resting will heal you, of course, but what I mean is that if you're out of combat or just got out of a trap in a dungeon, this is a prime opportunity to heal. Ideally, you'll apply buffs before combat when you know it's coming, and you'll save healing for after combat when you can manage. This saves time for offensive actions that will bring the encounter to a close, which is one of the main reasons action economy matters so much. Healing in combat should always be a last resort in response to, "Hey, I'm going to die if you don't heal me."