College of Healing (Bard)
Art Credits: https://www.deviantart.com/dopaprime/art/LotC-Havart-the-Healer-751915094
It’s just a few weeks before the release of The Impermissicon, but that won’t mark the end of D&D Unleashed. After that, we still have one more compendium to finish, called Legends of Prestige & Prowess. This week, we have a preview of the new bard subclass to appear in that compendium, as a consolation for those bard-lovers who were sad to see no new subclasses in the Table of Contents preview for the upcoming compendium.
The College of Healing is designed to provide a healing-focused option to the bard class, just like what the Life Domain and Circle of Dreams subclasses do for the cleric and druid classes, respectively. The Bonus Proficiencies place this subclass in a medical context, which helps to distinguish it from other healing-focused subclasses from a flavor-perspective. The Bedside Manner feature is designed with the awareness that Bardic Inspiration refreshes on a short rest starting at level 5, so any healing feature that worked with Bardic Inspiration would need to be limited to avoid daily-resource-abuse. Because of that, the feature can only heal creatures that are at 0 hit points, preventing it from bringing PC hit points too high in a similar way to the Life Domain’s Channel Divinity, which also refreshes on a short rest.
The level 6 feature, Arcane First Aid, helps ensure that bards of this subclass have access to some basic healing and restoration abilities regardless of the spells that they choose to learn. It also enables the bard to cast their non-healing spells with less worry, since they always have a certain number of free spell casts that can only be used to heal or support. This factors into the level 14 feature, Rhythm of Recovery, which provides a strong boost to the healing provided by the bard’s healing spells and class features as well as allowing their non-healing spells to restore a limited amount of hit points. Because this feature only functions on creatures that can hear the bard, it can’t affect creatures that are unconscious, giving bards of this subclass good reason to avoid letting their allies drop to 0 hit points first — a common tactic for experienced 5e players that want to optimize their healing. The feature is intentionally designed so that it doesn’t provide a constant boost to healing-over-time spells unless the bard keeps expending resources to continue the rhythm. This prevents abuse of certain spells such as healing spirit, goodberry, rejuvenate, or regenerate.
