Heh, most of the time the game assumes a balanced party. I remember some talk about how the CR automatically assumes that there's a cleric or healing potions. If there's a barrel of healing water or something, it shouldn't be much of a problem XD
CR actually assumes very little, mostly because it doesn't work. Dragons for example are substantially more powerful than their CR would indicate, while Ogres are substantially less so.
The game does definitely assume there's a source of healing though, unfortunately appropriate CR encounters require substantially more healing than an appropriate CR Cleric can actually put out.
The massive stockpile of healing wands > divine healer trick always struck me as a tad powergamey though
While less important at lower levels, it's actually neccessary in the higher levels. Cleric healing quite simply cannot keep up with monster damage output. The CO boards spent ages trying to make a healer class work, and it
is possible, but it requires multiple splatbooks and a massive character investment, and the class isn't Cleric interestingly enough.
Clerics can spend early levels healing people in combat, mostly because in the early levels they'll be outclassed by the various fighter type classes, as they go higher in level and get access to better and better buffing spells however it becomes less and less useful for the Cleric to spend his actions healing and more useful for him to spend his actions beating the living shit out of things. And at around level 8ish monster damage output surpasses Cleric healing output, rendering in-combat healing nearly useless.
Also the implication that tanks aren't worth having by mid levels. Just because they won't be the strongest character in the party shouldn't be a reason in itself to avoid them.
Not actually what i meant; what i meant is that as you go on you run into more and more magical beasties. By mid levels you're encountering monsters that can, with a wave of their hand, hit the entire party with save or suck spells. If you don't have somone who can counter those magics you're in deep shit. By higher levels the save or suck spells are replaced with save or die spells, and it becomes even more vital to keep magical protection everywhere.
An excellent example being one of the games i watched at RPGA aages ago, party of 5 level 14 characters, all fairly heavily optimised and cleaning house with the module, just wiping everything out. They were slaughtered to a man by a low-CR random encounter because the random encounter was a Demon and using fire magics, and they'd forgotten to put their Protection from Fire buff on. Two spells later the entire party was dead.
I mean...why else would there be Bards?
No-one's really sure why there are Bards
Anyway, it's not something that a first time player should worry about.
Very true. But it is something the DM needs to worry about unless he's planning on ending up with alot of corpses.
And what about Human Wizard/Fighter dual classes? I seem to remember people coming up with some pretty outstanding munchkining with that combo.
That is a
horrible multiclass combo. Sacrificing Wizard caster levels for
Fighter levels? Unless you're talking a 1 or 2 level Fighter dip for extra feats, then that is a very good way to gimp yourself.
Oh, that is something new players should keep in mind; don't multiclass unless you know what you're doing, or you may well end up wondering why you can't hit anything and none of your spells seem to have any effect.
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