[RPG] Is this homebrew feat, Overheal, balanced with regard to other feats

balancednd-5efeatshomebrew-review

Is this homebrew feat, Overheal, balanced with regard to other feats?

You have learned to use the healing arts for more than simple recovery post-injury. Now, whenever you use magic to restore one or more hit points to a creature, any healing that would exceed the target's max hp is instead gained as temporary hit points.

The intent is now any excess healing is not wasted but instead turned into temp HP for damage mitigation. For example, say we have a cleric with this feat and a friendly rogue. The rogue is missing 6 HP so the cleric casts Cure Wounds and rolls a lucky 8. This cleric also has a +3 to Wisdom so now normally the rogue would be healed to full and that's it. But with this feat the rogue now also gains 5 temp HP.

Is this significantly more powerful than other feats and/or is it potentially gamebreaking with higher level spells such as Heal being used on a target at full health to give them 70 temp HP?

Best Answer

If I punch my friend in the arm for 1 damage, the feat is easily abused.

This breaks the game with a casting of Mass Heal.

Mass heal:

A flood of healing energy flows from you into injured creatures around you. You restore up to 700 hit points, divided as you choose among any number of creatures that you can see within range.

Cast it, heal myself to 699 temp hp. Balancing Tier 4 encounters is hard enough, but is now impossible when you have a character with 900+ hp, or four characters with 400+ hp.

This feat also turns the spell heal into “Tenser’s tranformation lite” for your friends. Even 70 temporary hp is significant, especially for your high AC tank.

So that covers tiers 3 and 4, where the feat is pretty much broken when used in conjunction with those spells.

Finally, this feat used in conjunction with beacon of hope and cure wounds produces similarly broken effects in tier 1 and 2 play.

Beacon of hope ensures maximum healing, and a 2nd-level cure wounds would be 18-19 temp hp, and just gets better as those spell slots get higher.

I can suggest a solution: cap the temp hp to twice your character level. This scales with your level, and seems more appropriately balanced at each tier of play.