Cure Wounds is a 1st level evocation spell that restores hit points to the target creature.

Cure Wounds: It’s a Trap!

Usable By: Artificer, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger

Spell Level: 1

School: Evocation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V, S

A creature you touch regains a number of hit points equal to 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the healing increases by 1d8 for each slot level above 1st.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Imagine it's your first time playing D&D. You’ve played some World of Warcraft or some other RPG games, and know the value a healer can bring to a fight. Looking over your options, you see Cure Wounds, a 1st level spell that heals 1d8 + your modifier. That number is bigger than Healing Word’s 1d4, you might think. I should take it!

Ha! In classic bad game design tradition, you’ve fallen into a trap! You’ve just taken a spell that is strategically awful to use, and feels terrible to spend your turn on! Worst yet, you might think you should cast it on a CONSCIOUS ally! What a fool!

Truthfully Cure Wounds drags the life out of 5th edition combat. Waiting a full ten minutes to get a turn, only to spend it moving and healing your fighter… that is demoralizing. What makes it even worse is if there are some monsters in between your initiative and the fighters, who knows, maybe the fighter gets pounded and goes down. You now have successfully wasted 15 minutes of everyone’s time!

5th edition combat is predominately about resources, and those resources typically are actions per round. You can take away enemy resources by killing them or inflicting conditions, or improve your resources with buffs and conditional effects. Hit points only come into this equation when somebody has no hit points remaining. A character at 1 hit point is nearly as useful as they are at 500 on their turn. With this in mind, the goal of keeping your teammates healthy doesn’t actually contribute to an encounter; it wastes your resources. Healing can get you resources, but only when getting an ally from 0 to 1 or more hit points.

If it's looking like you’re going to win a fight anyway, spending an action in the fight to restore hit points to a character that might not go down at all is just wasting an action. Spending the action to heal them may in fact be more likely to LEAD to their death than prevent it, as that resource would be better spent removing the threats to their health.

In the rare case where a creature is dealing less than 1d8+3 damage with a single attack, cure wounds might eat an extra attack. In essence, you’ve traded a 1st level spell and your action for between 1-2 enemy hits. Player actions are far more valuable than a couple enemy attack rolls; they can remove enemies from the fight entirely, remove harm through mobility or defensive buffs, or otherwise shape a fight to circumnavigate those hits in creative ways.

Don’t take Cure Wounds. Having the ability to get somebody off of 0 is important, but if you’re a paladin, you’ve got lay on hands, and everyone else is better off with Goodberry (functionally 10 instances of Cure Wounds for the same slot) or Healing Word (which equates to action advantage as opposed to action parity). Cure Wounds is a trap the game developers included in their game to make people who want to help their friends bored and sad. Don’t take it. Don’t do it. Kill your enemies instead. It's more fun that way.

5e Spells

Cure Wounds: It’s a Trap!