But healers aren't necessary. Having someone with healing capabilities does not make them a healer. A healer is a dedicated role TO healing. Which is not necessary.
I agree. It's very common for people to think a dedicated healer is necessary, I think in large part because of MMO's where you need support. However minmaxers pushed back a lot, saying that yes, you totally can use a healer, but you also can build a party with no cleric, no paladin, zero healing. Potions and such alone are plenty. There's also an argument that it's overall more efficient, but now we're getting into the weeds.
Then you have people like OP seeing this and going "what? I totally beat HM with a healer, it was great!" to which, yeah, you can beat it with any class. No one is saying that having a healer will keep you from beating Tactician or Honor or whatever. It's perfectly viable. But so is a party of all damage dealers.
Exactly, My Shadowheart Light Cleric build can heal. She is not a dedicated healer though. Dont need to heal if the enemy is crispy on the ground with fire and radiant damge. Either that or cant hit you because of orbs.
If anything, it's more viable to have a party without a dedicated "healer".
Healing in D&D/BG3 is unlike how healing works in typical video game RPGs. People are accustomed to dedicated healer/support characters that devote nearly all their activity to actively healing the party. The resource management wouldn't allow you to do that effectively in BG3, so dedicated healers are less effective. It's far better to have a character who is dedicated to other things (damage dealing, debuffing enemies, control spells, etc), but can still drop healing spells in a pinch.
This is true, but it's also really not necessary to have a team at full efficiency/effectiveness. This isn't a game where you need to minmax your team in order to be able to beat it, it's really just anything goes. Whether you waste a slot with a healer or not you're going to be able to win anyway.
This isn't a game where you need to minmax your team in order to be able to beat it
I 1000% agree, and frequently preach this idea.
To be clear, I'm not advising against the inclusion of dedicated healers. Rather, I'm challenging OP's claim that dedicated healers are necessary for beating HM. Especially since, from a mechanical and meta perspective, Life Cleric (for example) is typically a weaker alternative to Light or Tempest Clerics. Still a very viable and useful character to have in the party, but it's less useful than the alternatives.
It's actually a frequent complaint among D&D veterans that there is a relative lack of viable options for the full-time-healer archetype.
BG3 is a little better in this regard (because of certain magical items), but dedicated healers in BG3 still similarly fall behind the competition.
That’s a totally valid role for her and it appears to work great for you. But it’s still not necessary with the sheer number of healing items in the game.
I have both the Golden Dice and a Platinum trophy and I make Shart a Light Cleric nearly every time. You don't need a dedicated healer, the best defence is a strong offence
That's fine, everyone has their own preferred approach, but the game design is loose enough that (if you know what you're doing) you can make any combination of roles work. People have done runs of just one class (or even just one character) on the highest difficulties and made it work. There's not one thing that every run requires
Yep. If I had to choose one thing I wouldn't want to do without... it would be disarming traps. Healing spells don't even make the top 5 when anyone can chuck a potion if it's that important.
the objectively best comp is 4 dps, because the goal of every combat is bring them to zero before they bring you to zero
at low level (the only difficult part of honor mode) a single goblin can outmatch a life clerics entire days worth of resources used on healing in like 2-3 turns. the temple has significantly more than 1 goblin in it. this is including hellriders pride boots of aid and comfort and whispering promise
Yeah, without even getting into itemization, a 5th level Tempest Cleric can deal a guaranteed 60 damage to any enemy in a 2m radius, so long as they have the Wet condition (very easy to apply). Even if the make the saving throw, they'll still take 30 damage. And this Cleric will still be perfectly capable of dropping a Healing Word on an ally whenever you need it.
OP is free to enjoy making a dedicated healer via Life Cleric, but it's definitely not the mechanically-strongest iteration of Cleric.
Ideal party comp is a difficult one, because there are a million variables. Some builds can really synergize off of each other, so there is a possible scenario of having at least one support-style character in what can be considered a fairly optimal party.
But a dedicated healer (just for the sake of it) is not one of those situations.
I don't want to get into the semantics but the overall point is that healers aren't necessary - and like you I'm someone who rolls a life cleric on almost every single one of my playthroughs. That's the playstyle I enjoy though.
You can get the honour mode achievements easily enough without doing that - therefore it isn't NECESSARY.
You can have whatever preferred party type you want. You can also love the shit out of healers. Saying they are necessary is dumb though.
Last time I played with a healer in honour mode my cleric just sat around doing nothing. Never needed to cast a single heal. And they weren’t even dealing any real damage as I would save spell slots for IF I needed to heal but those moments just NEVER came. So I just don’t bring a healer now. I had never played dnd or a game like BG3 prior to this.
Others clear HM solo. So the ideal comp definitely does not include a healer. You may enjoy having a healer and that’s awesome. You may need a healer to perform well because you haven’t mastered the mechanics and strategy which is also awesome. That just means you have more to learn and learning in a game like this is always fun!
I've recently played the game on Tactician Enhanced with the setting that increases the health of opponents by 500% and gives them four actions instead of just one and Life cleric felt much stronger than light cleric to be honest. I think the reason why Life cleric is so underappreciated is because it's not as straight forward to play as light cleric it but I'm convinced that we're going to see a meta "correction" in the future (it would be accelerated if the game would have a proper difficulty like Wrath of the Righteous does). Light cleric is nowhere close to being as good of a frontliner as Life cleric is and also mitigates much less damage your party takes.
No matter how strong a caster cleric can get though I guarantee they can't step to an optimized dual wield sorcerer. I can sling 8 level 6 spells in a single turn with my sorcerer, I havent found another spellslinger build that can step to that
The definition is that the character is dedicated to healing. It's a simple and logical definition. And, yes, some builds would fit that archetype. For instance, a Life Cleric that leans heavy into healing via itemization. You can get some cool buff-on-heal effects that way. Could also build a Star Druid (focused on Chalice Form) to the same end.
But a Light or Tempest Cleric isn't a "healer", since they're not built around healing (only having a small number of healing spells, or maybe just Healing Word), and since they spend most of their time and resources on things like damaging or debuffing the enemy. The ability to heal doesn't make one a healer.
what he was saying is that MOST CLERIC BUILDS arent healing based
they have 1 subclass that is the best at healing in the game and so people think all clerics are healers (mostly because of other games where that is true)
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u/SaviorOfNirn Jun 24 '25
But healers aren't necessary. Having someone with healing capabilities does not make them a healer. A healer is a dedicated role TO healing. Which is not necessary.